CNet's Webware recently announced the 2007 Webware 100 which highlights 10 applications in each of 10 categories, determined by Webware readers and the fans of the sites. Some of my favorite products are listed (i.e. AIM, Facebook, FeedBurner, Flickr, LinkedIn, PhotoBucket, YouTube, yourminis, and many more). Check out the full list of winners.
Rafe Needleman offers analysis on the winners - congrats to all!
Wine Library TV, a popular wine video blog that shares the wine expertise of founder and host Gary Vaynerchuk, has announced it has acquired the wine social network Cork'd. In simple terms, Cork'd is site for a wine lover to share and rate wine. It seems like a great fit as Gary highlights wines that Cork'd enables users a way to suggest and keep track of the wine you would like to try - they have excellent crossover. I briefly highlighted Cork'd while showcasing wine and web 2.0.
In chatting with Gary today over email, he offered this explanation for acquiring Cork'd:
"From the day I saw Corkd.com I knew they nailed it... to have the honor to take Cork'd to the next level and most importantly to give "THE PEOPLE" what they deserve is not only exciting but an honor!"
Gary also mentioned that there are plans to integrate OpenID and SMS functionality into Cork'd.
Wine Library TV is a sponsor and exhibitor at the upcoming TECH cocktail DC. We are extremely happy to have Gary showcasing Wine Library TV and Cork'd at our event. Cheers.
It has been awhile since I was looking for the right college experience. However, I do recall it being a rather daunting task as there are so many schools to examine in such a short period of time. A Chicago-based startup, Cappex aims to try give students some relief by helping students connect with colleges and universities that are interested in recruiting them. The site aims to help students, guidance counselors and school administrators by connecting them all via the web.
Students simply fill out a profile and schools can look for students through Cappex based on profile criteria. Similar to LinkedIn, Cappex enables schools to attempt to connect with students but students can chose which schools they are interested in connecting with. School administrators can leverage Cappex as a recruiting tool to search for prospective students. Guidance counselors can also get involved with Cappex by registering to assist student throughout the school selection process. Guidance counselors receive tips and tools that are highlighted in this tour.
Bottom-line: Cappex aims to connect students with schools that are interested in recruiting them.
Search engines are often the first place we start when trying to determine "how to" do something we don't know much about. Searching the web does not always return the best results as there are often a number of steps involved in learning "how to" do something. We then have to figure out the proper "how to" steps and piece them together. Koonji, a community-driven site, is on a mission to change this by providing users with easy to follow, step-by-step guides to the most common activities. The Koonji community helps generate these guides by contributing the appropriate steps, recommended links and tips. Koonji is like Cliff Notes on the web.
Like Topix, Digg and many other web 2.0 sites, Koonji appears to be
positioning itself to generate revenue from contextual advertising on
its niche landing pages and help some people find just
what they are looking for along the way. Whether you are looking to Make Money from Blogs or Make a Turkish Coffee, Koonji could become a valuable resource if the community continues to grow and contribute to bulk up the number of rich wiki-like pages.
We all have questions at one time or another and there are number of question and answer sites like Yedda, Yahoo Answers and Askville that facilitate a simple transaction between a user, who asks a question, and the web community, who attempts to provide an answer. Jabbits offers this same transaction but answers are provided by the web community in video format thus adding a rich experience to answers.
Some of Jabbits video answers could draw comparisons to those provided by VideoJug, a site that offers solely "how to" videos, but Jabbits question options are more open-ended thus offers a wider array of video options. Jabbits takes a question and answer site to the next level by providing rich media answers but Jabbits video sharing options were a little disappointing. For example, I could not find a way to embed an video into this article so you have to go back to the site to view video questions and answers. Unfortunately, video response also do not offer permanent links to enable linking directly to specific question and answers either. So without these two options it is very difficult to share any of the content. To the disadvantage of the product, Jabbits in not leveraging the viral benefits of video on the web.
Bottom-line: Jabbits is a user-driven question and answer site that offers answers in video format.
Attention data is the information users give to web sites based on their interests and interactions and is a key personalization component. It is a valuable resource that reflects user interests, activities
and values, and it serves as a proxy for their attention. APML or Attention Profiling Markup Language was created by Touchstone Live an attention-based company and was highlighted previously on Somewhat Frank. According to the APML website:
"APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers. The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests."
The APML Workgroup was recently formed which includes:
The APML Workgroup is tasked with converting the current specification into an agreed standard and the group has already created a revised spec. The adoption of APML as a standard would empower users to take control of managing there attention data. APML could help create a more unified personalized experience as users jump from site to site. More information can be found on the APML website: www.apml.org. If you are interested in helping sculpt the attention economy standard be sure to contact the group.
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.
FeedBurner released a feed market analysis report yesterday (February 22, 2007) which offers an unprecedented look into the syndication industry. This is the most comprehensive feed report of its kind to date. According to the report, Google, MyYahoo and Bloglines currently offer the most popular web-based feed aggregator products. It appears Google has the most feed reading users. A number of publications have already dissected the report but here are the highlights:
I found the web-based aggregator reporting information to be the most interesting as it shows the differentiation between reporting methods of top web-based feed aggregators (see diagram below). It brings to light the fact that not all products are reporting metrics in the same fashion which could affect the metrics FeedBurner is able to report. For example, Google reports item views on visible items while Bloglines reports all items on a page when it loads. If both Google and Bloglines load the Somewhat Frank feed, Google will report views only on items that are visible to a user via the scroll bar while Bloglines will report views on a page when it is loaded. Scrolling down to make two items visible in the Google Reader two views will be reported to FeedBurner while making two items visible in Bloglines will report still on all items on the page when it was loaded as viewed. In the same respect, there also could still be products that are missing from FeedBurners metrics as Google did not report subscriber information until just last week and there could be other companies still excluded.
For additional perspectives on FeedBurner's latest report check out articles on Olson's Observations, TechCrunch and /Message.
Who would have thought that a history buff and a techie would EVER have anything in common? Turns out, they do – and it’s on the techie’s turf.
A historian’s dream, Footnote brings the Smithsonian’s National Archives – thanks to a partnership with the museum – and much more right to your screen. The perk: no more traveling to research primary documents. You no longer have to hit the road to see the Declaration of Independence… you can view it – in excellent detail – on Footnote.
Harnessing the web’s power to unite all sorts of people, Footnote.com is also a fantastic example of web 2.0’s accessibility. True to the social media movement, Footnote.com connects historians and fosters group collaboration on document analysis – hence the name. Users can contribute comments, annotate historical documents, upload images and even create new pages within Footnote. For more details on how Footnote works check out the screen-cast below.
The negative: not all documents you encounter in Footnote are free to view. However, with time that could change and if you really want to see something up close, then I’m pretty sure it’s still cheaper than a plane ticket.
Do you obsess about data? If so, Swivel might be able to help feed your obsession as it lets you explore, compare, share and upload data and graphs about politics, economics, weather, sports, business and beyond.
Swivel offers a free social-based reposistory and charting tool for interesting graphs and data sets. Users can register to upload data and create graphs. Users can also contribute ratings and comments which are used as a popularity metrics for organizational filter purposes. Graphs and data sets are organized by popularity, date and tags. If you are looking for a specific graph you can register and upload your own graph or chart. All the public data in Swivel is under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
In my explorations I found an interesting chart displaying trends in iPod sales and decided to share it by embedding it below.
Swivel launched in early December 2006 and already has over a half a million graphs created. Data-lover or not, Swivel could prove to be a handy tool for
spicing up a blog post with an interesting chart of graph.
For additional perspectives on Swivel check out these articles on PRPulp and IT Redux.
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.
It has been a great 2006, as Somewhat Frank has offered up over 400 articles which attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. I thought it might be interesting to reflect on some of the best of 2006 as we look forward to 2007. Here are some of the most popular articles:
Most of the traffic to Somewhat Frank came from:
The top web 2.0 keywords which brought visitors to Somewhat Frank were:
Some of the top overall keywords that brought visitors to Somewhat Frank were:
Finally, let's take a snapshot look at where Somewhat Frank readers came from (click the map to see a larger view):
Alas, Somewhat Frank is a global destination. Thank you all for reading and interacting with Somewhat Frank in 2006 and be sure to tune in for more in 2007.
Happy New Year from Somewhat Frank!
There are a number of Q & A web sites, like Yahoo Answers, Yedda and Grupthink among others, that have recently emerged to embrace a large number of users looking to get their questions answered. VideoJug takes a slightly different approach to helping people to find answers online. VideoJug is a video web site with International, UK and US versions, focused on helping to explain life in 'how to' videos. VideoJug helps to answer questions like:
How to tie a full windsor knot?
How to perform the perfect golf swing?
How to conceal bags under your eyes?
VideoJug produces several of the videos itself but also offers users the ability to upload their own 'how to' videos. VideoJug 'how to' videos are accompanied by a transcribed version of the instructions which can be uploaded to an iPod 0r printed in text version. Videos are categorized into a number of different categories which all offer RSS feeds of the content. Registered users are offered the ability to save their favorite videos. VideoJug viral hooks include the ability to share videos via email and embed videos into other sites (as shown below in the How to Make a Mojito video).
Bottom-line: If you are trying to figure out 'how to' do something new you might want to search VideoJug for some visual directions.
The way that people read their content has been evolving as online syndication has spawned a number of different content reading approaches. Firefox introduced live browser bookmarks and IE7 recently added the feature to integrate feed reading into the web browser. A number of online and desktop-based feed readers round have been duking it out. While personal homepages have also grown very popular as users can customize a page with widgets to fit their routine interests and needs.
I recently encountered an article by Stuart Brown that examines a snapshot of current feed reader habits by taking a look at the FeedBurner feed subscription metrics of his site Modern Life Is Rubbish. Stuart gives his opinion on the various reader options that are used by his subscribers. A similar report was done by FeedBurner a few months back as they analyzed TechCrunch's feed subscription metrics. In comparing my own feed subscription method metrics to both of these reports I think it is worth noting that Somewhat Frank offers similar trends in readership (see pie chart below) but also has subscribers using additional other unmentioned services which further amplifies the segmentation in the feed reader marketplace.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
