SOMEWHAT FRANK

Wattzon: A Personalized Energy Tracker

"It's gettin' hot in herre, so take off all your clothes." from the popular Nelly song, Hot In Herre

Rather than shed all your clothes you might want to first determine why it is getting so hot in here - on the planet Earth. Climate change is definitely something that has take center stage as the Earth is heating up. But we all can help to lessen our individual impact on climate change. Something as simple as unplugging your coffeemaker or toaster after use can help to save energy and reduce your negative impact on climate change. I find it is difficult to measure the various things I am doing to impact climate change. WattzOn recently launched to create tools to help us all determine our energy consumption.

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.

BricaBox A New Kind Of Publishing Platform

Brica what? BricaBox, a New York-based startup, offers a publishing platform for organizing and displaying content in a more structured manner. It's goal is to offer a way to present detailed content or data. Wondering why you might need more structure? Read on to find out how you might be able to use BricaBox.

ArmchairGM Blends In Social Features

ArmchairGM, a wiki platform devoted to sports, which was acquired by Wikia has decided to go totally social by adding a blend of social networking features. ArmchairGM leveraged a wiki format to form a community but felt it was missing something. 

Planypus Group Plans Site Gets Funded

Planypus (planyp.us), a startup co-located in Chicago and Washington, DC, offers friends and family the ability to create collaborative plans. Think of it as a wiki for your social life. Today Planypus announced the closing of its Series-A financing.

Organized by my events, my city and my friends, Planypus makes it easy to keep track of local events. From movie night to simply meeting up to catchup with friends, Planypus makes it easy to plan meetups with groups of friend or family. Planypus also displays events, movies, restaurants, and happenings in your local area.

StreetAdvisor A Street Level Local Guide

StreetAdvisor, an Australia-based startup, publicly launch a few months ago to provide an online real estate community powered by crowd-sourced reviews, photos, and videos. Brothers Adam and Jason Spencer wanted to create a site that provided a good amount of information of what it is like to live on any particular street in the world. With a fresh Ajax interface that leverages an almost wiki-like approach StreetAdvisor makes it easy to contribute content about any street.

In searching for a specific street users can find out a street score and rating for a specific location for the mapped location. Users can join a street and receive email updates as additional information, ratings and reviews become available or just snag the provided RSS feed. Users can learn and contribute details about where they live including noise levels, traffic, neighbors, entertainment, public services and more.

Today StreetAdvisor launched some additional features which should further help the site become an a valuable resource for community information reported from the people on the streets.

First off, StreetAdvisor's Local Experts Program offers incentives for users that contribute solid content StreetAdvisors. Real estate agents and other service providers might be able to leverage the program to further bolster their reputation as solid local resources. Users can gain "Street Cred" the currency of the site which could turn into prizes.

Secondly, based on feedback from its users StreetAdvisor has expanded its platform to take on not only street reviews but also  content for cities, states, and countries. Thirdly, StreetAdvisor now also features upgraded guidebooks that now include four broader categories. Guidebooks also feature full version history, similar to Wiki's, thus enabling the ability to see changes and revert to any previous entries.

Finally, StreetAdvisor now offers the ability to secure exclusive "run-of-street" advertising opportunities on a per city basis which I think of as "Virtual Billboards." Targeting real estate agents and mortgage brokers, local service providers, city/local bloggers and media looking to generate leads in a specific city, StreetAdvisor Billboards could prove to be a great way to reach a local audience.

Bottom-line: StreetAdvisor leverages a wiki-like contributor interface to intake street level community information that could prove to be an valuable resource to real estate companies and web sites that look to offer their visitors community related information.

 

Koonji Guides You Through "How To"

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.

The Unconference Wiki Book Project

The term "unconference" first surfaced in the late 1990's but has recently become more popular among geeks as a result of events like BloggerCon among others. According to Wikipedia an unconference is defined as:

"A conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance."

But what is the impact of the unconference? Unconference The Book was announced this week by Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales at WikiCamp in India. Unconference The Book aims to pick the minds of unconference organizers and attendees from around the world by enabling anyone to contribute via a wiki. Unconference The Book is a six month global project which should be an amazing case study in online collaboration as it is one of the first few books in the world to be authored collaboratively via a wiki. 

Currently, the book is still in the brainstorming mode and you can contribute chapter ideas based on your unconference experiences. You can see a list of authors here. Also you can stay tuned to project updates via the Unconference The Book Blog.

ArmChairGM A $2 Million Sports Wiki?

ArmChairGM, a sports wiki site we profiled about six months ago (June 2006) will reportedly be acquired by Wikia, a Jimmy Wales community wiki site for $2 million. Both Wikia and ArmChairGM leverage the MediaWiki, a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia.

Is a wiki site worth $2 million? This reported acquisition could validate the worth of user generated content. Alternatively, Wikia could be looking to ArmChairGM for the founders' talents to help build up the collection of Wikia communities. Congrats to ArmChairGM co-founder Aaron Wright and company on their success.

Bottom-line: ArmChairGM is a niche wiki site built on a free wiki platform reportedly set to be acquired for $2 million. In the open and free world of web 2.o product developers do not have to reinvent the wheel to be considered valuable.

Cogmap: Wiki For Company Org Charts

Looking for visibility into a company you are working with? Or just curious to see how a company is structured? Cogmap an online organizational chart wiki may be just what you are looking for. With Cogmap you can search for a company org chart, add people to the chart, drag and drop to update the organizational layout or start your own org chart. Cogmap provides a chart, outline and directory view for each organization.

I searched and found the AOL org chart and it appeared to have some inaccuracies due to its community managed wiki format. However, the org chart is close enough to get a general idea company organizational layout. Some other org charts I came across were as follows:

Amazon org chart
Google org chart
Microsoft org chart
Yahoo org chart

I found that though Cogmap offers an easy to use product for visability into organizations it lacks ample ability to zoom out of an organizational chart. Basically, you cannot fit large org charts into one web page or print out.  Adding a "one page view" for easier viewing and printing should be on Cogmap's immediate roadmap.

Power to the People Panel at Supernova

I just observed a wonderful strategic discussion pertaining to the ins and outs of community building and consumer generated content at Supernova 2006. I have highlighted some of the points made by the panel which consisted of the following participants:

Craig Newmark (Founder of Craigslist)
Saul Klein (VP of Marketing at Skype)
Tina Sharkey (Senior VP of Network & Community Programming at AOL)
Mena Trott (Co-founder Six Apart)
Gil Penchina (CEO of Wikia)

Tina Sharkley pointed out that AOL has been doing communities for a very long time and based on her experiences she believes that people want to be a part of a smaller community (i.e. a AIM contact list is an example of a smaller community). She also talked about a new product called AIM Phoneline that will give users another way to communication online but this time with voice. Tina went on to say:

“The user is at the center of everything we (AOL) do.”

She went on highlight how with AIM Pages they are looking to open up the API’s for the open web to help build the product.

Gil Penchina explained how Wikia, the sister site to the popular wiki site Wikipedia, is trying to bring people together. They feel the larger and more inspirational the topic the easier it is to do that. Gil believes that people are generally good but that a few very well organized bad people. So Wikia lets anyone contribute and then monitors the wiki to squash the evil doings of the bad ones.

In a similar fashion to Wikia, Craig Newmark said that Craigslist is letting the community form the community. They have created the site and now they get out of the way. Craig mentioned the Katrina disaster situation as a prime example of that as the New Orleans Craigslist site created a life of its own after the Katrina disaster. Craig said they do not to anything to reach anyone relying on word of mouth.

Mena Trott of Six Apart says that she likes to observe but doesn’t always participate in large communities. She says it is the auditorium vs. the living room fee l and prefers the living room. She also explained that using the product is as important as what you are doing when developing the participatory product. Additionally, Mena explained how she is "not personally a big podcast fan" but believes that audio and video are adding a personal touch to blogging.

Saul Klein of Skype explained that Skype is still in the early stages of understanding how voice plays its part on the web. SkypeCasts are a new way for people to engage in conversations online with 100 people or less. He is excited about the fact that Skype has released an API that is available for people to take and help push the development of the product to new heights. Craig Newmark also showed excitement by sharing a fantasy which included having the ability to add a "click to call" feature to classified advertisement on Craigslist but says that in doing so they do not want to distract the user from their sole function for finding what they are looking for. Interestingly, eBay (which owns Skype) just introduced a similar feature last week.

For additional details on the panel check out this post on the Supernova blog.

ArmChairGM For Sports Your Way

With the MLB baseball season in full swing, World Cup soccer kicking into gear and the NBA Finals heating up I think it is appropriate to shed some light on ArmChairGM, a sport resource site that any sports fan can edit.

ArmChairGM a wiki solution aimed at the sports lover and appears to be built on customized and AJAX enhanced version of MediaWiki, the same wiki software, which powers the popular Wikipedia and it's sister site Wikia. However, ArmChairGM takes interactivity a step further by also incorporated voting similar to Digg and comments which mirror blog comments to each piece of content.

According to co-founder Aaron Wright:

"ArmchairGM is a decentralized bliki - a blog and wiki combined with non-hierarchical editorial control (think Digg).  We give passionate sports fans the ability to write blog entries or news articles, which are given depth by linking to our growing sports wiki, and have the results sorted democratically by other users."

If you are a sports enthusiast or if you just want to find out more about how it works be sure to check out this step-by-step ArmChairGM tutorial - and let the games begin!