SOMEWHAT FRANK

Are You A Shareaholic?

Shareaholic makes it easy to submit the web page you are currently viewing in a Firefox browser to Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Google bookmarks, Magnolia, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Twitter.

Google Sued, Microsoft Buys TellMe, AOL Local, Last.fm Video, Attention Economy Overload & TECH cocktail 4 Coming Soon

Photo of the Week: This is a photo I took in my old neighborhood in Lincoln Park in Chicago prior to moving on to AOL in Virginia. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.18.07

Viacom Drops a $1 Billion Nuke on Google
Remember when Napster was a lawsuit target for helping to foster pirated music? When Google acquired YouTube everyone wondered who would be the first company to try and collect on video copyright infringement in a similar fashion. We now know, as Viacom was the first to step to the plate with a one billion dollar lawsuit against Google. Complete.com offers some interesting analysis on the situation.

AOL moves AOL Local Search into Beta - it's very slick
CenterNetworks reviewed the latest beta to come out of AOL. AOL Local refreshes the local options as a user moves around a map. So start in 10036 (Times Square) and move to 11235 (Brooklyn) and the options move.

Microsoft to Acquire Tellme Networks
Tellme Networks, Inc., a leading provider of voice services for everyday life, including nationwide directory assistance, enterprise customer service and voice-enabled mobile search. Microsoft and Tellme share a vision around the potential of speech as a way to enable access to information, locate other people and enhance business processes, any time and from any device.

Last.fm Adds Video Tracking
The Register reported earlier this week that social music play, Last.fm has added the ability to not only track the music you play on iTunes and other services but now is going to start doing the same with video.

Report: New Bloggers Flatlined in 2005, Reading Climbs
Steve Rubel reports that according to the latest State of the News Media report, the share of the online population that tried blogging peaked back in January 2005 at 10% and has hovered since at 8%. Blog readership, on the other hand is climbing.

The Attention Economy is Killing My Attention
Nick O'Neill explains how the attention economy may be producing information overload. He wonders how product like twitter along with blogs will be able to co-exisit as people piling on attention commitments.

Del.icio.us Adds Tag Descriptions
Del.icio.us, the popular social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo, has added a new feature which enables users to for the first time not only tag items but also add meta-data to title and describe each tag.

Goplan launches!
Webreakstuff has launched a new product called Goplan which offers a suite of online project management and collaboration tools that could draw comparisons to 37signals' product line.

TECH cocktail 4: Going, Going, Gone
TECH cocktail 4, the forth event in the event series I co-founded with Eric Olson back in July 2006, is now on its fourth event and we filled a 500 person guest list in 23 hours. Wowsers! TECH cocktail 4 will be on April 12, 2007 at John Barleycorn Wrigleyville in Chicago but due to the overwhelming response we have started a TECH cocktail 4 wait-list for anyone still interested in going. I hope to see you there.
 

Riffs: Rant, Rave & Recommend

Have something witty to say about a particular item? Riffs, an ATTAP Technologies company, offers a feature-rich, social bookmarking, recommendation site for information-sharing details about movies, music, fashion and other sorts of interests. With Riffs you can recommend different items by starting a riff, registering and posting a witty comment about a particular item. Alternatively, you can just rant or rave about an existing item by leaving a comment or simply giving an item a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Users can also create and link to webpages associated with specific riffs.

Riffs launched with more than four million items to riff on, including albums, movies, restaurants, events, consumer electronics, games and books. You can add practically anything to Riffs and then you and the rest of the community can riff on it. The most popular riffs are presented on the homepage as well as within its corresponding category. Riffs offers loads of different features, which include RSS feeds for each individual riff and riff profile. Unfortunately, Riffs does not offer category level or popular riff RSS feeds.  Riffs also offers users to tag items as a way to organize items. A screen-shot of the “web 2.0” tag is shown below.

Riffs flexes its social networking muscles by enabling profile creation and the collection of contacts or friends therein. Friends can offer up recommended content to other Riff buddies. Additionally, Riff has implemented a music recommendation engine called iSuggest, which offers up automated music recommendations based on your recorded musical taste. iSuggest is a downloadable application that connects your Apple iTunes library to Riffs. It allows you to get music recommendations right where you listen to music and at the same time helps you keep your Riffs music preferences updated. Qloud and Mog are a couple of other services that sync with iTunes in a similar fashion.

Another interesting feature that caught my attention was the ability to import del.icio.us bookmarks into Riffs so that you and the community can further comment on them. I struggle to see how bookmarks play into the granular item riffs that are already in the system, but I guess Riffs is looking to offer content about just anything; so it makes sense. It is a good way to get people to adopt the system and start to use Riffs as a social bookmarking system.

Check out this online Riff demo about setting up your page. Riff has also provided a demo on how to perform the del.icio.us import.

Bottom-line: Riffs offers a simple repository for information about just about anything you can think of and in true web 2.0 fashion it’s powered by user created riffs or content items, recommendations, comments, rants, raves and other item details.

A Del.icio.us 3rd Birthday

Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site, has turned three years old this past weekend.  Del.icio.us was one of the first web 2.0 social bookmarking sites to catch on with the masses and was purchased by Yahoo back in December 2005. I have referred to del.icio.us previously on SwF.

Happy birthday del.icio.us!

Real-Time Resources Aggregated

ResourceShelf Real-Time is a new ResourceShelf feature which provide links to web, software, mobile and other application that "offer real-time or near real-time" data and information. ResourceShelf, a site powered by librarians including search engine legend Gary Price, has been aggregating at least one piece of information a day for over five years. This is a pretty amazing show of persistence. ResourceShelf is powered by DocuTicker another site which provides:

"...a daily update of news reports from government agencies, ngo's, think tanks, and other groups."

This is again the work of librarians and was highlighted by Pluck awhile back as the feed of the day. The new ResourceShelf Real-Time feature could help provide solutions and services to help quench the thirst of the real-time information hungry.

WordPress.com Improves With Widgets

WordPress.com continues to improve the free blogging platform as they have recently rolled out new widget features. These widgets are sidebar or rail elements which allow for additional customization to your blog. I first noticed the widget features while blogging on Ballpark Frank a few days ago. I stumbled upon the latest WordPress.com update which explains some the new widgets. Some of the widgets allow you to include:

• RSS or Atom feeds
• recent blog posts
• recent comments
• text
  
• del.icio.us bookmarks

Lorelle on WordPress has created an easy to follow tutorial post if you are interested in using the new sidebar widgets on a WordPress.com blog.

I think this a great move by WordPress.com as they continue to improve the free blog platform and allow for additional customization strengthen its offerings. It is improves such as sidebar widgets which will continue to close the gap between WordPress and pay blog platforms like Six Apart's Typepad.

Yahoo Gallery: Applications On Exhibit

Applications that use a Yahoo API have a new trophy case as Yahoo has created a new site called Yahoo Gallery. Through the site you create a developer profile and submit your Yahoo application for others to see, rate, download and tag. The site also showcases some of the more popular Yahoo based applications. These applications could be mashups like the maps and video mashup called Sampling Life in SF via Random Videos (screen-shot below) or applications like Rollyo which allows you to roll your own search using the Yahoo Search API.

I think this is a great project to draw attention to the Yahoo Developers Network which at the eTech Conference announced the opening of additional APIs (Yahoo Photos, Calendar, MyWeb, and Shopping) to developers by highlighting the available Yahoo API’s and showcase creative developers for their novel creations.

Yahoo Search: A New Goal In Mind?

I was surprised to see the report in the Seattle Post Intelligencer that quoted Yahoo, Chief Financial Officer, Susan Decker saying:

"It's not our goal to be No. 1  in Internet search."

Some may take this quote out of context and think Yahoo is no longer focusing on beating Google at search relevance. I would agree it does look that way at first glance however, maybe there is another search market Yahoo is planning to tap into therefore they have another goal in mind. If you take into account the recent acquisitions by Yahoo which include:

• Flickr
• del.icio.us
• upcoming.org

There is a definite community or social theme residing in these acquisitions. Not to mention last week there was a buzz of speculation that Yahoo could acquire blog search engine Technorati among others based on a report in Red Herring. So in reading Decker's remarks I am not going to abandon ship on Yahoo Search as some, like Steve Rubel, are so inclined. Instead Yahoo might have another direction planned for its search offering that incorporates a social or community angle to search the opinions of the masses and the blogosphere. I do not believe a company like Yahoo would just lay down and let Google win in search without some sort of backup plan or alternate direction.

For other perspectives on Yahoo's search goal check out these posts on Blogspotting, The Unofficial Yahoo Blog, Weblogsky, Niall Kennedy's Weblog and Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim.

Yahoo Should Acquire Technorati

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has a conversation sparking post today (January 12, 2006) about the fate of Technorati the blog search engine. It was sparked by a print article in Red Herring* by Liz Gannes. Technorati after some technical shakiness in the early summer of 2005, has emerged as the search leader in blogosphere.

The Red Herring article also mentions 37 Signals, MeasureMap, Digg and YouTube as other possible options for Yahoo. Mike has proposed that Yahoo should buy Technorati. I agree with him, someone should buy Technorati, if not Yahoo then someone else should, this is the best blog search on the web. However, Yahoo's previous acquisitions of del.icio.us and Flickr which are heavily used by the blogging community and rely heavily on tagging functionality make them the best suitor for Technorati. It would be wonderful to integrate these sites systems resulting in a unified tagging system and a super blogosphere search engine with lots of bell and whistles.

One other speculative thought that has crossed my mind deals with harnessing the power of syndication. The front-runner in the field of syndication management is FeedBurner . They handle just over 115,000 publishers syndication feeds. The general population have yet to totally adopt syndication but as the masses continue to become more aware of the technology I feel syndication rights are going to be powerful as an advertising tool and de facto distribution standard. For example, imagine receiving your television, video, music and text content on demand via syndication feed. I could see the control of FeedBurner's technology as an attractive feature to one of the web superpowers. It will be interesting see if Yahoo, Google, AOL or Microsoft agree. It is enjoyable to speculate but it will be even more amusing to live the reality. So we will see what happens.

*A side note, for what it’s worth, I think Red Herring is hurting themselves by not having the article “Hungry Hungry Yahoo!” by Liz Gannes which sparked Michael’s post on TechCrunch and my retort on Somewhat Frank available on the web.

del.icio.us Suffers Outage

It appears del.icio.us which was recently purchased by Yahoo is having some technical difficulties. I went to the site yesterday evening and it was down for maintenance. I visited the site early this morning (December 19, 2005)  and it is still down. However, the site was displaying this message:

"Due to the power outage earlier in the week, we appear a number of  continued hiccups. We've taken everything offline to properly rebuild  and restore everything. I apologize and hope to have this resolved as  soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience.

Updates will be posted on our blog as we have them."

This is the second blog related online application that has had an outage in the last week (Six Apart was the other) which makes you start to question the reliability of these online Web 2.0 resources.  Not to mention, I wonder if some of the extended del.icio.us downtime could be a result of changes or integrations with Yahoo?

*Powerlines at Sunset image thanks to www.tonyboon.co.uk

Keys To Flipping A Start-up

Dare Obansanjo wrote a compelling post recently in regard to flipping a start-up company. Aside from the fact that building a start-up just to flip it may be difficult as mentioned in these posts by Paul Kedrosky and Jason Wood it appears to be the Web 2.0 trend these days. Dare highlighted three things that are necessary when planning to sell a start-up to the big four, AMYG (or AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google). These three factors are as follows: 

1.) Technology
2.) Users
3.) Human Resources (a.k.a. a super development team)

I agree with Dare that all three separately could add value to a Google or Yahoo. However, I feel Dare discounted having a user base 0r brand awareness. I feel that a brand coupled with excellent technology has value. Let's take Flickr who was purchased by Yahoo this year as a example. Flickr had a brand that people knew and liked for photo sharing thus had value not only in the technology but also in the brand. In fact, I have read many blog posts expressing displeasure at the changes Yahoo had made or will make to Flickr which shows me that Flickr as an online photo application has a loyal following. Could Yahoo put out something similar to Flickr on its own and gain such a following?

Dare also highlighted the trend of buying companies for the people that work for the company. For example, Flickr and del.icio.us in Dare's mind were bought by Yahoo to recruit the developers that created them. Is this true? I think it is and the human resource aspect is important.  However, is a Google or a Yahoo going to pay $1o0 or $200 million dollars for a few developers?

I truly believe that while technology and brand are both important. I think that a balance of all three factors is necessary to help flip your start-up to the big four:

"The strength of any company is in your people and the way that they leverage technology and not just the technology itself."

You can use people to build technology solutions and you can use technology to grow a user base and brand loyalty but it takes a lot more to develop good solid people that know how to leverage technology to create solid products. So maybe Dare is right in that people are the most valuable of the start-up flipping factors. What do you think?

Somewhat Frank Bookmarks (12.17.05)

aka Frank Gruber

Google to launch PCs

Google PCs are to launch soon in India...I wonder if they will be launching as a Beta?

Google Music Search Live : SEO Consultant Esoos Bobnar

Google Music search unveiled earlier this week and Esoos Bobnar weighs in on it.

WSJ/NYT say Google HEARTS AOL - The Jason Calacanis Weblog

Google acquire 5 percent of AOL and Jason Calacanis has no problem with that.

King Kong Week : 800-CEO-READ Blog

King Kong will most likely take over the box office this weekend with its technology driven special effects. I am going to try and see it tonight and will find out if it lives up to all the hype!

Small Biz 101: No one starts with a masterpiece : 37signals

37Signals offers some small biz/start-up advice.

Structured Blogging Will Flop : The RSS Blog

I do not agree. I think structured blogging has excellent utility to allow blogs to do things they have not been able to do easily.

Top Ten Web 2.0 Moments of 2005 : Web 2.0 Explorer

Do you agree with these top 2005 Web 2.0 moments?

GoFish Nets Deal With Tribune

Tribune has already used this technology on the first two new Metromix sites in Baltimore and Orlando. GoFish offered the most viable options for integration into Tribune's current content management platform since they offer their own API.

*King Kong image by orkreitz via Flickr.

Somewhat Frank Bookmarks (12.11.05)

aka Frank Gruber

iPod Nano knockoff - Engadget

iPod nano knockoff anyone?

MAKEbot Launched : O'Reilly Radar

MAKE Magazine launched a bot that hooks into AIM to send articles to friends, etc.

SES Chicago and Week Wrap Up

Here is Lee Odden's breakdown on the SEO conference in Chicago last week. They definitely interesting and worth a read.

Best of the Year : PC Magazine

Best products for 2005 by PC Magazine.

Blogging and MBAs :WebSolvers

Most MBA students are unfamilar with the blogosphere or even know what Technorati is. Where have these students been living? These are supposed to be future business leaders and they appear clueless on the most recent trends. This is amazing and sickening at the same time.

Gmail Gets RSS : Slashdot

Following Yahoo's lead Google adds RSS to GMail.

Ajax 99% Bad : OK/Cancel

Is Ajax used incorrectly most of the time?

Simple means launching something : Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

I am with you. Take action. Just throw it out there. This thinking falls in line with the Web 2.0 thinking of launching everything as a Beta.

List of free blog hosts : The Blog Herald

This may come in handy if you are looking for a free blogging platform.

The changing Chicago experience : Good Experience

Chicago is changing!

Yahoo Is Looking del.icio.us!

Yahoo’s acquisition of del.icio.us today (December 9, 2005) further emphasizes that that Yahoo is serious about moving forward with offering Web 2.0 applications and services. The move to acquire the popular social bookmarking and tagging service coupled with the previous acquisition of Flickr the popular public photo sharing application further solidifies a strategy that should offer Yahoo several options going forward.

So what does Yahoo plan to do now that they have both of these tagging services on board? It is my estimation that there are three possible options:

1.) Create a new product – Yahoo could use the del.icio.us and Flickr acquisitions to create a user generated search engine similar to Pluck’s Shadows product. Or they could create some other product that uses the tagging and bookmarking components.

2.) Integrate into an existing product – Yahoo could integrate these new tagging components into their current search offerings similar to the way that they have blended blog search into the news search results.

3.) Keep the products separate – Of course this is the path of least resistance but I find it hard to imagine that Yahoo would acquire these products without a bigger strategy in mind.

I just wonder how a company like Yahoo can continue to fly somewhat “under the radar” while a company like Google, who is probably its fiercest rival, is making similar moves and Google's stock continues to hang around $400 a share. Is Google overvalued?

Check out the del.icio.us blog for more details on the acquisition. Additionally, the blogosphere is buzzing for the del.icio.us acquisition on posts from Newsome.org, Scattered, Joho the Blog and Zoli's Blog.   

Somewhat Frank Bookmarks (12.05.05)

aka Frank Gruber

Stanford earns $336 million from Google stock : googlecrumbs

So you could say Stanford has Google right where they want them?

Killer Bosses that Create Stress

Mine isn't killing me at all, but maybe yours is.

Personal Splogs : Russell Beattie Notebook

Create a splog of your own content? Hmm...interesting idea Russell. Would it really be a splog or just another blog with your content? There are several key characteristics that a splog carries. We could always run it through Splog Reporter and get a Splog Rating to find out for sure.

How Long Will Blogging Be Good For Business? : RelevantNoise.com

Is there a tipping point when blogging for business causes readers to not respond as did before? Could users become overloaded with blogs that are advertisements for a company? That is what this post is all about and you can decide if you agree.

In Search of Better Search : eWeek

A column on the search engine wars and their future.

Caricature Generator

Online application to create your own caricature.

Informatics Study Fuels Debate about Search Engine Bias : IU Informatics

Indiana University has performed a study on search engine bias that is worth a read. Threadwatch pointed me to it, but I wanted to go right to the source.

Blog-gregation: Standing Out in the Blogosphere

Mark Cuban gives us some tidbits on blog search and IceRocket.com and links to a Somewhat Frank post. Thanks for the linkage Mark. Also to further drive your point about searching on "what people are saying or thinking" in this Q&A, I was wondering, is there any truth to the rumors about you purchasing the Chicago Cubs?

Add Post to Del.icio.us or Furl It links in Blogger posts : Digital Inspiration

Here are some nice code examples for how to allow readers to easily add your articles to del.icio.us, furl or even email an article to a friend. This should help get your content more circulation. You might notice I just added these features to Somewhat Frank over the weekend.

Web 2.0 Bingo!

Bingo anyone? No I am not talking about the famous dog named Bingo either.

"Don't Trust, Just Verify" : 800-CEO-READ Blog

Business 2.0 recently did an article on the Golden Rules of several high profile business people. This post highlights a few as well as points you to the article.