SOMEWHAT FRANK

Aggregated Weblogs For the Topics You Love.com

What do you love? I love breakfast. I love beaches. I love guitar. I love the Chicago Cubs and I am a fan of Dave Matthews. Love.com launched recently, somewhat under the radar, as a lightly branded AOL product, to help connect you with the topics you love. Love.com is not a dating site but a search engine with aggregated result pages looking to get you a snap-shot about any given topic.

Grant Cerny, VP, MediaGlow Entertainment Products with AOL's MediaGlow, had this to say about Love.com:

"Love.com topic blogs celebrate the diverse passions of all people with hundreds of thousands of profiled blogs and the capability to create new blog topics on the fly.  It organizes topics based on topical heat or velocity so that love.com can provide a central view into what the world is loving now."

Looking to create the perfect page for whatever you love, Love.com aggregates items from a few different sources. In performing a search for Chicago Cubs and love.com pulled in basic news stories, YouTube videos, images, relates websites, Twitter messages and related items for sale. The news stories are pulled real-time via Relegence, a company that AOL acquired in November 2006. Love.com is built on top of the blogging platform Blogsmith, the same platform that powers a number of popular weblogs, with the ability to spin off infinite sub-domains based on the popularity of a topic. Since MediaGlow has a number of popular content properties, Love.com can help recirculate their content through these infinite topical blog pages via search engines.

Love.com also offered recommendations for related topics things I might like which included baseball, Cincinnati Reds and New York Yankees. This makes sense since the Chicago Cubs are a baseball team. I assume it pulled in the Cincinnati Reds because the Cubs are currently playing the Reds and there are news stories that relate them. I am not sure why New York Yankees was also offered as a recommendation other than that they are another the baseball team.

Social Media & My Somewhat Obsession With The Shiny Objects of the Web @ SIPA in Las Vegas

Yesterday I kicked off the Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA) in Vegas conference with a keynote discussing social media and my somewhat obsession with the shiny new objects of the Web. I shared my thoughts, antidotes and social media stories in hopes to help both explain and motivate the crowd into taking action. I also mentioned a number of products that I like to use and refer to as "shiny objects of the Web."

After barely sleeping at all last night due to the Vegas oxygen rich air and just sheer excitement about the speaking event I was pretty pumped up and tried to wake up the crowd with a number of little ditties including singing Wheels on the Bus go round and round, sharing some fun stories and having everyone scream OPRAH at the top of their lungs! It was a BLAST! Below is some instant feedback I got via Twitter from one of the attendees.

Be sure to check out the video (below) for clips from the address. Finally, you might find the extensive list of "shiny objects" in the lower portion of this post to be extremely useful. Bookmark it, share it or print it out and put it on the refrigerator or make it into a paper airplane but most importantly have fun while doing it. Social media is life.

Social Media & My Somewhat Obsession With Shiny Objects from Frank Gruber on Vimeo.

Read Books In Small Doses On Twitter

DailyLit, a creative daily book delivery offering, has just added another means for users to consume book contents in small digestible increments by enabling a Twitter groups with daily updates. If you are interested in reading your books in short, serialized installments via Twitter, DailyLit is offering the following three titles available for free:

• TwitterID: DailyLitMagicK
  Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
  128 readers (followers)
  
• TwitterID: DailyLitPride
  Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
  68 readers (followers)
  
• TwitterID: DailyLitSucceed
  Tom Peters's 100 Ways to Success/Make Money
  60 readers (followers)

Twitter users will be able to follow the selected title each day with Twitter updates providing a link to that day's installment. This release further shows DailyLit's devotion to making book reading more manageable in our everyday busy lives.

Vector Magic: An Online Vector Image Creator

Vector graphics are something you may encounter at some point if you ever do any logo design or print work. Vector images uses mathematical equations to render thus can be resized without the pixelation concerns of non-vector images. Unless you have Adobe Illustrator you might find it difficult to create a vector image. Of course you could check out Aviary when it launches all its products. In the meantime, I found Vector Magic.

Forvo: An Online Pronunciations Dictionary

I am terrible at pronunciations. Forvo is an online resource that might be able to help by leveraging the wisdom of the crowds to collect and offer audio pronunciations of words. Currently, they offer 14,653 words 13,131 pronunciations in 182 languages.

Kirix Strata: Web Browse Your Data

At the heart of just about every web application is a database. Getting at and manipulating that data is often done through SQL statements which involve a level of database understanding. Kirix, a Chicago-based startup, is looking to help change that by exposing your data in a Web browser experience with the launch tomorrow of Strata. Strata is a powerful set of tools that enables anyone to access, browse and manipulate data from a Web browser.

Evernote Helps Remember Everything, Anywhere

There are so many things to remember these days that it can be somewhat difficult to keep track of everything. While notes in a moleskin, sticky notes, emails to yourself and photos of things you want to remember might be a few ways to remember things - all these methods seem to scatter reminders all over the place. Evernote, a Sunnyvale, California based startup, looks to offer a place to send, store and retrieve all of the things you need to remember.

Diigo v3: Improves Social Bookmarking

Diigo, a Reno, Nevada based startup I previously covered when it launched Web Slides, just launched version 3.0 which offers an integration of a number of social bookmarking and research services that create a powerful set of community tools.

What is new with Diigo v3? The Diigo v3 launch includes a completely new user interface and code base, hundreds of new features and most notably a tightly integrated social networking with knowledge-sharing. This improvement puts Diigo in direct competition with delicious and other web 2.0 social bookmarking products.

Has Your Blog Been Blogged?

Looking to explore and find a few new blogs on the Web? Blogged is blog directory launched earlier this week to aid discovery and exploration of the blogosphere. Blogged is self-funded by founders Kenneth Yeh and Gladys Kong and is powered by readers and also employs a full-time editorial staff to maintain the integrity of the directory.

BricaBox Social Content Platform Launches

BricaBox, the NY-based structured content platform I previously reviewed, publicly launched today to enable anyone to create access and create these rich content experiences with ease. Funded sole by its founders BricaBox has been refered to a "wiki" on steroids (don't tell MLB or Congress) or "WordPress for structured content" as it offers a way for publishers tools to better display listings and such. It should also be noted that BricaBox offers social capabilities to enable community and sharing features which are sometimes confused with those of Ning or other social networking platform options.

SOMEWHAT FRANK Featured As 'Must Know' Blog

I got word this morning that TheMarker, Israel’s prominent business magazine and Haaretz, one of Israel’s largest newspapers, featured SOMEWHAT FRANK in a spread titled "The Blogs That Every Israeli Startup Should Know." 

GenieTown Service Marketplace Launches

Looking for a little help on your next home project? If you live in the San Francisco area you might be in luck as GenieTown, a Palo Alto-based startup founded by a group of Stanford entrepreneurs, officially opened to the world today. GenieTown offers a platform for anyone looking for local services to either browse through a broad range of specific service providers or post a job request and invite qualified responses. GenieTown creates an eBay-like marketplace for services.

EveryBlock: A Hyper-Local News Aggegator

Map mashups have become almost a dime a dozen these days as the release of open APIs by just about every major online mapping site and and development tools has lowered the barriers of entry. That was not always the case though and as recently as 2005 trailblazing mashup like HousingMaps.com (a cross between Google Maps and Craigslist housing listings) and ChicagoCrime.org (used Google Maps and Chicago Crime data to display crimes on a map) developers actually had to reverse engineer JavaScript code to create  mashup. This all changed with the release of Google Maps API and most of the major mapping sites on the Web have since followed suit.

It was recently announced that due to some server issues and overlaps with another new mashup the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism award winning early mashup ChicagoCrime.org will be redirect to - EveryBlock. EveryBlock, launched recently, is also mashup of sorts created by Chicago-based Adrian Holovaty the developer that produced ChicagoCrime.org. EveryBlock is a news aggregator site for Chicago, New York and San Francisco that looks to help you answer the question:

“What’s happening in my neighborhood?”

The site compiles all the openly available public records and then slices and dices them so that they are easily accessible by zip code, address or neighborhood.

Welcome to Flickr Library of Congress

The Library of Congress just informed me of a new project they have undertaken with, Web 2.0 photo community, Flickr. In addition to posting photos on its own the Library of Congress website they have decided to also start putting historic photo sets on Flickr for all the world to see. The Library of Congress is looking to show off its photos to a larger photo centric community. With some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on Flickr. Wow!

AboutUs A Wiki For Organizations

AboutUs, a Portland, Oregon based startup, which launched in 2006 is focused on creating "about pages" for every domain name and organization. AboutUs offers a community approach to finding out information about an organization or website as it is built on MediaWiki which is the same collaborative wiki platform as Wikipedia which celebrated its seventh birthday this week. AboutUs was critized for building a business around companies about information without their knowledge as they partnered with domain registers to pre-populate website information. For example, check out the Somewhat Frank AboutUs page. AboutUs has come a long way since their initial launch and recently announced some updates which point to a more clear business model.