SOMEWHAT FRANK

LinkedIn Platform Closed, Google Buys Jaiku, MSNBC Snags Newsvine, YouTube In Google Earth & Facebook Talent Vacuum

Photo of the Week: I got a chance View The Rock from Pier 39 while coming in San Francisco, California for the Widget Summit.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 10.14.2007

BuzzFeed: What's Buzzing On The Web

What's buzzing on the web? Wouldn't it be nice to know? Using a combination of techniques which include sophisticated algorithms, click tracking and human editors BuzzFeed, a NY-based startup, discovers and distributes what is buzzing on the Web.

BuzzFeed's simple, elegant blog-like design was influenced by Jason Kottke. The light, clean background and orange accents makes the page pop like shiny candy for your eyes.  Images and large text display categorized buzz from the Web.

iPhone Mania Turns To AT&T Activation Hell, Google Widget Payday, AOL News & CNN Redesign, Web 2.0 Tracking, A Tour of myAOL & French Web 2.0

Photo of the Week: I spotted this sole mushroom while visiting 'the country' in Illinois.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.01.07

iPhone Mania Turns To AT&T Activation Hell
The iPhone caused quite a stir and it appears Apple handled demands very well as it was almost too easy to get the iPhone in several locations. I was able to pick one up with no wait. However, since acquiring the iPhone I have yet to get it activated. It seems I am not the only one. Thus far it has taken over four hours, 2 phone calls to AT&T and one trip to an actual AT&T store. I am hoping tomorrow I will be able to get my iPhone activated but it will take at least one more call to AT&T support to help me transfer my number from my current service provider. Bummer. :-S

The French Web 2.0 Wave
France leads Europe in its enthusiasm for Web 2.0 startups, an industry that has doubled in size across the continent since 2005. Jerome Archambeaud examines the French market on GigaOm.

New CNN.com Goes Live - Google and Yahoo Both Search Providers
CNN re-launched its website as an enhanced multimedia site - packed with web 2.0 features such as recommendations and user generated content. In addition, CNN is using both Google and Yahoo for search.

Wimzi: AOL’s Answer to MeeboMe
AOL is widgetizing AIM with the new Wimzi widget: like other chat widgets, this lets you chat with your website visitors in real time.

Google offers seed funding for widget startups
Google is directly investing in small companies to expand the popularity of its iGoogle product. If this is not validation that widgets have real value then I don't know what is.

When You’ve Got To Go, Go To Mizpee.com
MizPee is a new service focused on delivering pertinent information regarding the location of nearby restrooms - cause when you gotta go you gotta go!

AOL launches new blog-like news site
AOL News launched its new design in a blog-like fashion, with excerpts of all the day's main stories laid out chronologically from top to bottom.

A tour of myAOL, a Personalized Aggregator
Jeremiah Owyang had us into PodTech to share the new myAOL with the PodTech team and live blogged it.

Keeping Tabs on Web 2.0
A great roundup of sites that are tracking Web 2.0 directory-style.

Blogging is Like Songwriting
Kent Newsome explains why blogging is like songwriting.

Robert Scoble & Fast Company magazine
Robert Scoble is now writing a column for Fast Company magazine and offers up his first column.

End of the Web's Free Ride?

End of the web's free ride? Doubtful. As a former Tribune Co. employee it was surprising to see the Washington Post article published today (April 7, 2007) saying that, soon-to-be Tribune Co. owner and real estate billionaire, Samuel Zell was set on trying to make news aggregators pay for newspaper.com content. Though Sam is quick to admit he is new to the newspaper industry, he was quoted saying:

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be? Not very."

In an age of an open, attention economy of syndication and new media, Sam Zell's direction seems so 5 years ago. Don't Google and other news aggregators provide a service to these news sources by sending them relevant traffic so that they can serve up their own ads and generate revenue? Yes. Mathew Ingram offers some additional perspective on this topic by saying:

"On the contrary, newspapers get a tremendous benefit from being indexed by Google News, just as websites get a tremendous benefit from being indexed by Google’s search."

Mathew is right on the money. Though Google has been reported to be paying for some of its Google News content, publishers have the power to restrict the amount of content that is syndicated and most newspapers do this by only syndicating a one sentence news brief thus sending most traffic back to the source site. While I do not know the entire context around Sam Zell's quote to make aggregators pay, I find it rather disturbing as it could land Tribune in some trouble if this philosophy is  applied, especially in a time when micro-publishers and citizen journalists with less overhead thus higher profit margin are out there covering the news.

It will be intriguing to watch what Tribune does with its content, I hope they decide to capitalize on the ad revenues from it rather than the revenue generated from aggregator rights. No disrespect to Sam Zell, he is a billionaire and I am not, but if I could give one bit of advice I would suggest he investigate the recent changes in the media landscape in regard to paid vs. free content strategies before taking the helm at Tribune. I would point to Washington Post Newsweek Interactive a competitor that "gets it" and could serve as a great role model for Tribune. I guess my point is, if Tribune is going to turn the clock back and dive into the old "people should pay for our online content" mindset then Tribune is totally f*cked - I would hate to see that happen.

JibJab Video Includes Bloggers

JibJab, the online video site which came to fame during the 2004 U.S. presidential election with videos like "The Land," has created a new video series called the "The News" and has decided to include some bloggers. Bloggers Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo were featured around the 1:20 mark of the video below. If you squint while watching, you might catch a glimpse of my face in the crowd of people.

Go Green Web 2.0 Style

As scientists recently drafted a report that describes a dire outlook for planet Earth, the effects of global warming on the planet have literally been a hot topic (no pun intended) and even made a recent stop at the 79th Annual Academy Awards. However, there are a number of environmental or "green" web sites focused on improving the situation. This article will showcase some of these movements that I have encountered recently.

18Seconds.org - Devoted to informing the world about the energy savings associated with switching from a normal light bulb to a compact fluorescent lamp. The campaign is based on the idea that is only takes 18 seconds to change a regular light bulb to an energy saving compact fluorescent light bulb.

EcoGeek - A site devoted to monitoring and exploring the current explosion in technology designed to mitigate our impact on the environment.

Greener - A search engine that could come in handy if you are looking for green products, services, organizations and information. Currently the green search engine boasts that it is search over 9 million sites and 50 million links.

greeninternet.org - As you surf the web, energy providers supplying power to your computer are burning fossil fuels and emitting harmful carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere. By pairing web surfers with sponsors, greeninternet.org looks to offset the environmental effects of surfing the web.

Gigoit - With the tagline of "Choose to Reuse" Gigoit offers anyone a place to get rid of unwanted items without having to resort to filling up a landfill. If craigslist doesn't work I would give Gigoit a try.

Hugg - Taking some inspiration for the popular web 2.0 social news site, Digg , Hugg offers users the ability to recommend green news to be rated by the rest of the Hugg community.

TerraPass - Helps counter the carbon dioxide emissions created by your lifestyle… and you don’t even have to leave your computer!  Just plug in your car’s information, your flight plans, your energy bill, etc. and TerraPass crunches your carbon dioxide output.  No it’s not just to make you feel guilty; this site also enables you to donate an amount to alternative energy sources to offset your damage.

TreeHugger - There are number of green blogs but if I had to pick on to stay tuned to for the latest in environmental or "green" news, tips and updates it would be TreeHuggers. TreeHugger recently partnered with Daylife to create The TreeHugger GRNDX which is the first "green index". It works like the stock market index, except that instead of tracking stocks, it tracks mentions of certain key green phrases in the media as a way to gauge how much mind-share certain concepts have week over week. TreeHugger offers number of other resources some of which include a set of how to go green guides which range from how to green your car to how to green you sex life.

Are you doing anything online to help the environmental movement and "Go Green?" I'm sure I left a few organizations or green products, out so please add others you know of in the comments section.

Good: For People That Give A Damn

Good is a media company aimed at creating a platform for the ideas, people, and businesses that are driving change in the world. Good, an L.A.-based company founded by Ben Goldhirsh, offers up a print magazine, feature and documentary films, original multimedia content and local events.

The print publication is a work of art as the photos and compelling articles are extremely well done making is difficult to think there is only a month worth of prep time between issues. Good Magazine makes if feel good to become a subscriber as 100% of your subscription cost goes to help the participating charity of your choice. With a goal set of 50,000 subscribers and $1 million dollars given away by mid 2007, Good is about a quarter of the way to its goal.

On the web, Good covers a number of my favorite topics and makes it easy to filter to specific categories like Technology,  Art & Design, Business & Money and Media. Good employs an "It's Good" Digg-like rating system on each article in addition to offering RSS feeds by topic. In addition, Good has created close to a dozen video shorts on a number of different topics. The first video in the SplashCast below is titled, Paying for Your Attention points out how much advertisers are paying for your attention.

Good will be teaming up with Creative Commons, a Good supported organization, to host a party at South By Southwest Interactive on March 12, 2007. If you are headed to Austin for the event I recommend you check it out - judging by its NYC launch party I am sure it will be a GOOD time.

OpenCongress Aggregates U.S. Politics

OpenCongress, a political information mashup, is a great resource for anyone strongly interested in politics on Capitol Hill.  By cataloging information (and there is a lot information) in an easy to navigate format, users have access to voting records, and statements by Senators and Members, including the always interesting breakdown of who or what is donating to a particular legislators campaigns. 

OpenCongress, a project by Participatory Politics Foundation and The Sunlight Foundation, leverages Google News to obtain news articles about Congress, and Google Blog Search and Technorati to obtain blog posts about Congress. OpenCongress also uses these automated services to search the internet widely for relevant search terms to display on OpenCongress pages for bills and Members of Congress. For example, if you are looking to find out about the latest status on the bill S.574, OpenCongress offers pretty healthy aggregation of blogs and other information and even offers a feed about it.

For those interested more in issues than politicians, the site offers a wide-angle lens look at the big issues such as health care or criminal justice as well as tracking of legislation before the House and Senate.  The site is a must stop after reading any news article to give readers access to all the information the political reporters, operatives, or politicians themselves have. Hopefully OpenCongress expands into polling information.  The community continues to lack a refined and sophisticated website providing detailed and extended polling data, not merely concerning which candidate is polling ahead, but also how certain issues are playing as well.  Overall, OpenCongress is a great resource for serious political junkies.

Yahoo Pipes Offers A Geek-Centric Feed Mashup Tool In Dire Need of Drano

Yahoo Pipes launched in beta yesterday (February 8, 2007) as a dashboard for remixing existing RSS feeds. Pipes provides a very geek-centric yet compelling application, as it empowers any user to create a custom feed. Though this product might seem simple to people within the web 2.0 industry or the blogosphere, I still feel it has a long way to go to make it easy and understandable to a mainstream user, like my mother, bless her heart. Furthermore, Pipes had a troublesome launch day as it experienced major performance issues which were highlighted by RSS-czar David Winer. Personally, I encountered the messaging shown in the screen-shot below several times.

Judging by the flood of blogosphere activity surrounding the beta launch of Pipes, I speculate that several bloggers (minus myself) were given a preview of Pipes prior to launch. O'Reilly Radar had this to say of Pipes:

"It democratizes web programming, making it easier for people to have more control over the internet information services they consume, and providing a general-purpose platform for interacting with sites that is more powerful than the browser or feed-reader alone, but without requiring full programming skills."

While Nik Cubrilovic reported for TechCrunch by saying:

"Pipes can take any feed as input, and combined with the already available list of functions proves to be very powerful - my mind is still buzzing thinking about all that can be done with Pipes."

Anil Dash showcased Pipes and went on to look at other mashup applications. For more perspective on the launch of Yahoo Pipes check out its cluster on techmeme.

Bottom-line: Yahoo Pipes is an interesting new feed mashup application that allows users to create custom feeds. In launching as a beta it is currently a geek toolkit since it probably will not be easy to use or compelling to a mainstream audience.

Daylife A New Way To Explore News

Daylife, a New York-based news aggregator with personalization hooks, launched a few weeks ago to offer users another way to ingest the daily news. It brings a new fresh look to a news site. Daylife is backed by many, including bloggers Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington but they are not in love with the initial cut of the product. Arrington reported his disappointment by saying:

“What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what’s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, even for your bookmarked stuff. Even worse, there’s no ability for users to leave comments on articles, a feature that has been wildly successful at NewsVine and Topix. And the fact that the front page news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.”

The absence of RSS feeds surprised me since Jeff Jarvis a strong supporter of syndication  (i.e. did the keynote at the Syndicate conference in New York last May) was assisting the startup. However, Jeff has "No disagreement" that feeds should have been added by saying:

"Nature of a startup: some things get onto the boat at launch, others hitch the next ride. RSS was one of the last features to get delayed until a later release; it’s coming. I had subscribed to various of the test feeds and got addicted quickly, so I, too, am eager for them to come out."

So it sounds like they are coming soon and I would imagine the average Jane or Joe probably has not even realize RSS is missing. Regardless, Daylife offers some interesting views of the news including the view that Steve Rubel calls his favorite, the magazine cover feature shown below.

Luckily the product is still in beta, since when I searched for "web 2.0" I encountered a cryptic error message. You can see a screen-shot below of a starred “web 2.0” category. In time this category should pull in content related to this to pic. It will be interesting to see Daylife evolve as it has introduced content personalization offerings within the application by allowing users to start content areas of interest. I just wonder if users think Daylife’s offering is compelling enough to add it to their daily online routine. To find out more information take the Daylife tour. Also check out the Daylife blog for future updates.