Event: Vertical Leap Date: Tuesday, June 28 2005, 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM What was it? Vertical Leap was an exceptional one-day conference held in the heart of Silicon Valley earlier this week, hosted by Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure. In their own words, “A whole new crop of venture-funded startups focused on vertical search are beginning to enter the field and draw attention. Search is going Vertical — vertical search engines are available for local businesses, product & shopping search, travel search, weblog & news search, and search for classified & jobs listings, with more domain-specific search engines debuting every month.” The event focused on search, obviously, and web 2.0 themes were prevalent throughout. The event was very well blogged and we’ve linked to many of the posts below. All of the segments were interesting and well organized. A key focus was on investments in this space, of course, and the technology and customer approaches needed to dominate in niche search areas. The most interesting segment from our perspective was on news/blog search. The panel was moderated by Om Malik (with Steve Gillmor stepping in at the beginning because Om was late). In our opinion the seating of the panelists was symbolic when thinking about their companies from a web 2.0 perspective. Left to right, you had Chris Tolles (Topix.net), Jim Pitkow (moreover), Scott Rafer (feedster), Tantek Celik (technorati), and Om Malik. From the discussion it was very clear who “got” web 2.0 and who didn’t. As you went from left to right, the panelists were more focused on web 2.0, peaking with Om (I overheard a comment after the panel from an audience member that said “they spent more time on Om’s blog than on all of the others’ sites combined”). Om kept asking questions that the others just couldn’t answer about user interfaces, search relevance and tagging. Chris, at the web 1.0 end of the table, wasn’t keen on RSS and tagging, and stated repeatedly that Topix.net went for the “wow” factor in deciding where to place content. “People want to hear about murders and bankruptcies, not companies making their numbers”, said Chris when asked about search relevance. Scott and Tantik just shook their heads, as did most of the audience. Om looked away towards the audience and chuckled. That being said, topix.net is an awesome site and after sifting through their 250 RSS feeds I found → Read More
Company: FeedNation What is it? FeedNation is a web-based RSS aggregator that just opened up for business. It has some cool features, like RSS2Email that are very interesting. It looks like it supports tagging as well. Full Profile later. Tags: feednation, RSS, web2.0, techcrunch, RSS Readers → Read More
Service: Yahoo My Web 2.0 Launched: June 29, 2005 What is it? MyWeb2.0 is a social search engine “that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web.” We’ve used and abused it for a day, and in our opinion it’s good – a bit like regular yahoo plus furl (profile). It was launched today as an early beta version “for a limited number of users.” There could be a cutoff, so it’s a good idea to sign up soon if you want an early look (what a great marketing idea). Once you sign up (you can use an existing yahoo account), you can do a number of things. If you want to bookmark web pages, we recommend downloading the yahoo toolbar, which will allow you to bookmark pages you are browsing. Otherwise, you can only bookmark pages found on normal Yahoo search. We don’t like toolbars very much because nearly half our screen is taken up with them, but if you want to use MyWeb2.0 it’s going to have to be a part of your life (and hey, maybe you already use the Yahoo toolbar). When you bookmark a page a popup appears that allows you to enter meta-data on the site, including title, notes, tags, access controls and a “save page” option (again, all of this looks and feels very much like furl: You can also invite friends (feel free to add us – archimedesventures@yahoo.com) (techcrunch was taken ), and see their bookmarked pages. The whole idea is that stuff that is relevant to your friends, could very well be relevant to you, too. This is user tagging in action (see our profiles on Celebrity Flicker and Feedster for a discussion of the perils of this), but here you have real incentives (like delicious and furl) to do it properly – both to find stuff later and to share with your friends. Yes, it is yet another service to add friends and go to the trouble of bookmarking sites, but it does have in inport option (including RSS feeds) (yeah!) to decrease the burden. I imported my personal delicious page RSS feed and it seemed to work reasonably well. There’s a ton thats been written about this (see links below), so our recommendation is try read the reviews and try it out for yourself. Thanks, → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is about Rainy Daze, but it’s also about the evolution of web 1.0 to web 2.0 and Rainy Daze is a useful conduit for this discussion. Company: Rainy Daze Why is Rainy Daze being Profiled on Techcrunch? Rainy Daze is NOT web 2.0. It screams web 1.0. But there is a reason why its here. I read an article today (referred from What’s Web 2.0?) that was written by Troy Angrinon called “Shifting paradigms: The mental evolutionary process of moving from web 1.0 to web 2.0 in 17 steps” (Link) (and who, I note, writes with Qumana (profile). The article was originally an email to a friend, and Troy decided to post it to his blog. TechCrunch exists, partially, for similar reasons. We were being asked by friends about web 2.0 and the companies and products that define it, constantly, and so we decided to blog about them instead. Blogging about interesting stuff is just so much easier than having lots and lots of one-on-one conversations. Troy’s article reminded me of a post from last year by Fred Wilson called Blogging 1.0. It is a must read for any friends that ask you why blogging is different from geocities. I wrote about the article in my personal blog, adding a few things that I thought were important (how blogging is possible because of better software (Troy talks about this) and how they leverage the network effect). So why Rainy Daze? Last week Keith Teare and I were at Gnomedex, and staying up in town called Anacortes on an island north of Seattle. One evening at dinner we met a local couple (Keri and Jonathan) who were very nice and listened to us discuss the significance of that day’s Microsoft announcement of their support for RSS and how it was important, really important, to the evolution of the web. They were interested (really!?) and seemed to wanted to understand how all the new technology would affect them. And then they told us about Rainy Daze, a website they run from their home and where they sell hand made soaps and other bath stuff. I believe that someday soon, sites like Rainy Daze will incorporate web 2.0 features, probably from companies we’ve profiled or will profile here at Techcrunch. I also believe that it’s important to think about sites like these, because ultimately the stuff we are doing today → Read More
Company: Feedster Founded: March 2003 Status: Founded by Scott Johnson in March 2003. Merged with RSS-Search founded by François Schiettecatte in June 2003. Announced Series A funding on June 2, 2005 led by Selby Venture Partners. Other investors include Omidyar Network, members of the New York Angels, Kevin Hartz, co-founder of Xoom, Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite and Jotspot, Josh Kopelman, founder of Half.com, Scott Kurnit, founder of About.com, Mark Pincus, founder of Tribe.net and Support.com, and Narendra Rocherolle, founder of Webshots. Link Location: Feedster, Inc. 116 New Montgomery Street Suite 605 San Francisco, CA 94105 Voice: 415-348-9119 Email: info@feedster.com What is it? Feedster is one of the original real-time search engines, and has added interesting new services along the way to further evolve the web 2.0. The services we will profile are search, link search and their new user tagging feature. They also have a nascent RSS reader and other services (like “feedpaper” (which we just can’t figure out), job search, and feed search for sites. Most of these other features are available under advanced search and My Feedster. In their own words, “Feedster is first and foremost a search engine, however unlike a general web search engine like Google, Feedster includes only a certain type of content, called feeds, which provide many advantages.�? “Feedster is a rapidly growing Internet search engine and advertising network that provides timely and meaningful information to consumers and large Internet sites in need of targeted media. Feedster provides a fresh index across over 8 million feeds several times per hour, adding millions of new documents daily. Feedster benefits from the ways that blogging is changing the Internet’s basic building blocks – from unstructured web pages to structured documents.�? A slight tangent starts here…. While attending the vertical leap conference on search yesterday (we will post about this event separately), a lot of questions came up regarding “old search” v. “new search”. Old search (the gold standard is Google) prioritizes results based on “relevance”, which is largely determined based on links into the content. Lots of links = high relevance (this is simplified of course). With real-time search (blogging, news, etc.), link analysis breaks because there is not sufficient time for links to materialize and become indexed. Real-Time search engines like Feedster and Technorati (Profiles here) generally use “freshness” as the determining factor of relevance. The most recent post including your searched keyword or → Read More
Service: Google Video Previous Posts: June 27, 2005. #1, #2 What’s new? Norwegian hacker cracks Google software A Norwegian guy took one day to crack Google’s new video viewer so that it plays video from any server, which is what VLC originally did. This is what Google should have done in the first place anyway. “The Norwegian who became a hacker hero for developing software to unlock copy-protection codes on DVD movies said he needed only one day to crack Google Inc.’s new video viewer. Jon Lech Johansen, also known as DVD Jon, posted software on his “So Sue Me” Web site that he says modifies the viewer so that it plays videos hosted on any server. The company’s Google Video Viewer, in turn, was modified from the free VLC media player to restrict it to playing video hosted on Google’s own servers. Google officials did not immediately return e-mail and phone messages left early Wednesday at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.” Links: GMSV on this John Battelle Tags: googlevideo, vlc, web2.0, techcrunch, google → Read More
Service: iTunes 4.9 with Podcasts Launched: June 28, 2005 What is it? As was widely anticipated, iTunes 4.9 launched today (22 mb download) for both windows and mac platforms. It includes significant new and enhanced features, including, most notably, support for podcasts. Michael Gartenberg writes a wonderful post on iTunes 4.9: “I can download one, subscribe to a feed, keep a set number on my device and have them automatically deleted after I’ve listened. In short Apple’s done for podcasting the same thing they did with RSS in Tiger. They made it usable by the mass markets and at the same time, they have the what is going to be the most widely used podcasting client on both Macintosh and Windows and that will make their directory the one to be listed in. But there’s more. Apple also tweaked the firmware in all the iPod so there’s no a separate podcasting category, which means podcasts won’t get shuffled with my music and will support bookmarks so I can listen to podcasts and resume where I left off. So it’s not just the premier podcast PC client, the iPod itself is now first among devices with integrated podcast support. Combine this news and the new pricing and the integration of iPod photo into the core white iPod line and you see why Apple remains the player to beat in this space.” The software is excellent and includes notable features: – all podcasts are currently free – downloaded podcasts show up in a single iTunes folder called “podcasts” – easy search/find – one click subscription to a new podcast – option to have all future podcasts download automatically – Tools for submitting publisher podcasts on iTunes – stays separate in iPod, so not shuffled with music – autodelete after listening (awesome!) Screen shots: Links: Fred Wilson JKontheRun GMSV Michael Gartenberg 43 Folders Dave Winer Om Malik Technical specifications for publishing podcasts on itunes Barnako.com Barnako.com #2 RSS Compendium Blog Steve Gillmor Chris Pirillo Charlene Li/Ted Schadler fusion94.org Tags: itunes, itunes4.9, web2.0, techcrunch, podcasts, podcasting → Read More
Company: Celebrity Flicker Launched: May 2005 What is it? Celebrity Flicker is a website that posts pictures of celebrities and related images (movie art, etc.). The site isn’t very deep and appears to focus on less-than-fully-dressed women, so it isn’t exactly an imdb.com replacement. However, it has a single interesting feature that makes it web 2.0 relevant – anonymous tagging by users. When you view a particular picture, tags that users have added appear next to the picture, along with an “Add Tag!” button: Link This is meaningful because it is one of the first experiments in anonymous user tagging of content on a site in order to relate one piece of content to other pieces. In the above screen shots, the user-generated tags next to the Trainspotting picture are: * heroin * life * choose * actress * macdonald * kelly * trainspotting Each of these tags link to other pictures that have been tagged identically by other users. This means that the site is using its users to make its content more easily findable. For instance, if you click on the “trainspotting” link, you get this page: Link Most results aren’t as relevant as this one though. A big issue with user tagging is generating real v. useless results. We’ll write more on this later in a post we are writing about the recently released Feedster anonymous tagging feature. With Delicious, users have a real incentive to tag properly – so that they can find the content again later via searching or browsing of their tags. With celebrity flicker that incentive is significantly less powerful and so the results are significantly less significant. What does this prove? It means that if a web 2.0 service is going to add user tagging, especially anonymous user tagging, they better provide one heck of a good incentive for users to do it (see Delicious, Furl, etc.) or else they will get bad data. What about publisher tagging? Publisher tagging is a different animal. As an example of publisher tagging, see the tags we’ve added to this post at the very end. This helps real-time search engines like technorati, pubub, feedster and others quickly index posts in a contextual way and relate it to similar content (which publishers want and so they have an incentive to do it and do it properly). Further, the links below allow readers of this post to → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is an update from an earlier post we made today. The service is now live. Service: Google Video Previous Profile: June 27, 2005. Link What is it? The service is now live. To use it, you must download their VLC client (about 1 mb) here. Once it is installed, you can search for videos (link), and videos that have an arrow icon next to them (see screen shots below) can be viewed by clicking on the icon. Non-free videos will eventually be integrated with the Google Payment Service (see profile here). A sample search with videos is here. It works well, with little download time and few stops/starts with standard broadband. Uploading videos is a separate process. Link Screen Shots: Links: Upload video FAQ Instructions Whats new John Battelle (broke story) JointheDigirati SiliconBeat PaidContent Scoble Seth Godin Techdirt Slashdot Business 2.0 Om Malik Boing Boing GMSV Tags: googlevideo, vlc, web2.0, techcrunch, google → Read More
Service: Google Video What is it? The net is ablaze with stories that Google will release its video viewer today (uploads have been available since April 2005). The viewer will be based on the open-source VLC media viewer. We will profile this as soon as it becomes available. There is a download now available at Google Video for the viewer, but an install on our Windows machine did not work properly. More on this as it develops. From the FAQ: Links: John Battelle (broke story) JointheDigirati SiliconBeat PaidContent Scoble Seth Godin Techdirt Slashdot Business 2.0 Om Malik Boing Boing GMSV Tags: googlevideo, vlc, web2.0, techcrunch, google → Read More
Company: Weblogs, Inc. Previous Profile: June 20, 2005 (Link) What’s new? Weblogs, Inc. has launched Spanish, Chinese and Japanese versions of it’s popular blog engadget. Screen Shots: Relevant Links: Jason Calcanis on Chinese engadget BlogHerald on Chinese site BlogHerald on Spanish and Japanese sites WeblogsSL on this Tags: weblogs, engadget, web2.0, techcrunch, jasoncalcanis, calcanis → Read More
Service: Del.icio.us Direc.tor Launched: June 22, 2005 What is it? del.icio.us direc.tor is an Ajax client-side bookmarklet application that, in the words of LifeHacker, “turns the Del.icio.us bookmark service into a gorgeous, lively, dynamic application that just about popped the eyeballs right out of my head.” From the site: “It leverages the XML and XSL services of modern browsers to deliver a responsive interface for managing user accounts with a large number of records. The main features are: * In-browser handling of del.icio.us bookmarks (tested up to 12,000 records) * Find-as-you-type searching of all your bookmarks, with basic search operators * Sort by description, tags, or timestamp * Ad-hoc tag browser” Link It is easy to install and is a wonderful interface for Delicious. Screen shot of application: Creator: Johnvey Hwang Relevant Links: Static Demo Blog entry announcing Lifehacker on this Marshall’s Web Tool on this Jeremy Zawodny Tags: delicious, del.icio.us, deliciousdirector, web2.0, techcrunch, direc.tor → Read More
Company: PodShow Location: Miami & New York Founded: 2004 (PodShow site launched March 2005) What is it? PodShow.com is part of a family of companies/shows under Boku Communications, which was founded in 2004 by Adam Curry and Ron Bloom. Boku Communications: PodShow.com iPodder.org Daily Source Code PodShow on Sirius Radio These companies each do different things: PodShow.com: PodShow.com looks to be the main brand for the network of companies. It is currently mostly an information site, with additional features to be launched in the summer 2005. It has different sections for podcasters and for listeners: For Podcasters: This area of the site gives information on how to produce and promote a show, as well as getting it featured in the Sirius and/or PodShow network. I imagine future releases will have additional tools and features, but for now links include iPodder.org and Podcast Alley. For Listeners: This area of the site gives listeners basic information on podcasts and how to find and listen to shows. On the home page there is also a nice flash tool to listen to PodShow’s featured shows directly (no downloading from here though): iPodder: iPodder.org is a site that gives good basic information on podcasting and also has a nice podcast directory and tool for downloading podcasts and getting them on portable music players. This is a functional site and I imagine it will become part of the overall PodShow architecture and brand. Daily Source Code: DailySourceCode.com is Adam Curry’s daily audio blog. Here you can download and/or listen to Adam’s daily thoughts on…everything. For instance, today’s show can be heard here. Check it out. It’s awesome and always a fun listen. It’s currently the most popular podcast show with Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes a close second. Link Sirius Radio Show: Adam also has a weekday radio show on Sirius Radio. “Adam Curry’s PodShow can be heard weekdays from 6 pm to 10 pm ET on SIRIUS Talk Central // Ch. 148. The four-hour, weekday show covers every aspect of the podcasting revolution — from talk to comedy to music — and introduce listeners to undiscovered artists from around the world…Along with podcasting’s best talk, comedy and music, Adam Curry’s PodShow lets listeners provide feedback, helping to shape the show’s format on an ongoing basis.” How will all of this come together? We have no idea, but we look forward to future releases! “Stay tuned → Read More
Company: Twingine Location: Norway What is it? Twingine was created by Asgeir Nilsen. It was previously, infamously, known as “YaGoohoo!gle”, but after discussions with Yahoo and Google Trademark lawyers, Asgeir changed the name to “Twingine”. It’s a fun tool. A search yields a two pane results screen with Yahoo and Google results side-by-side. Screen Shots: Creator: Asgeir Nilsen Relevant Links: tools blog Asgeir Nilsen Blog John Battelle on this Tags: twingine, YaGoohoo!gle, web2.0, techcrunch, search, yahoo, google → Read More
Company: BuzzNet Founded: March 2003 Location: Buzznet, Inc. 2404 Wilshire Blvd. #11b Los Angeles, CA 90057 (213) 252-8999 phone (213) 252-8955 fax What is it? BuzzNet is a photo-sharing community. It’s hard to talk about BuzzNet without comparing and contrasting it to Flickr. It shares most or all of Flickr’s strengths, and has a few additional features as well. It’s these additional features that make it better, in my opinion, both for casual and/or “mobile” users as well as serious photographers looking for a way to share their work. I’ll explain why below. First, the basics. You can check out a quick tour here that shows how it all works. Sign up for a free BuzzNet account and you can upload photos directly to their website, or email photos with a unique email address that contains a keyword you choose. This allows for easy mobile photoblogging – just snap a picture with your phone and have it up on your photoblog in seconds. Pictures can be tagged (they call it “buzzwords”) by you and anyone else (Flickr only allows tagging by you and your friends). Users can search/browse by these tags, and they are indexed at Technorati as well and thumbnails are shown for technorati searches for those tags. See, for instance, a technorati tag search on “Seattle” and check out the BuzzNet and Flickr photos on the right. Every user has a unique URL for their pictures, comments and profile information. You can see the Techcrunch photoblog at techcrunch.buzznet.com. For infinitely cooler photoblogs, check out some of the featured ones on the home page. For example, a guy named Adam Richman, who recorded an album in his parents’ basement in Pennsylvania, is photoblogging while on tour. Link Uploading pictures is easy, and here’s the part that I like better than Flickr: Instead of limiting the amount of upload capacity (20 megs per month at Flickr), BuzzNet only limits the number of total photos you can upload per month (just increased from 60 to 120 on the free account). Why is this important? Here’s why – With Flickr I have to take time to resize photos so that I don’t immediately use up my monthly allotment with just ten 2 mb pictures. At BuzzNet, I just send in the big file and they resize for me. And a little known fact (told to me by Marc Brown, the co-founder and → Read More
Editor’s Note: We apologize if the following profile lacks our usual excitement and enthusiasm. Odeo is great and works really well. We just have a funny feeling that iTunes 4.9 is going to have a somewhat substantial impact on the podcasting portal market. One thing to note, though, is that iTunes is only most of the online music market, not all of it. Odeo and others can help fill in the gaps. Company: Odeo Previous Profile: June 13, 2005 Link What’s New? Lots of Odeo beta invites went out today, and TechCrunch received one. We signed up. We did things. Everything worked, except the “create podcast”, which they told us up front wouldn’t work. In their own words, “Odeo consists of three major parts: A catalog of audio content, of all types, which is constantly being added to. The Odeo Syncr, which let’s you download anything in the catalog (and, optionally, put it on your MP3 player). And creation tools, including the Odeo Studio, which let you publish your own audio content, which will then show up in the catalog. (The creation tools aren’t already for public use yet, though.)” Key additional information: – 6.3 meg syncr download (allows easy syncing with mp3 players, auto adding, etc.) – very hokey welcome message from Biz Stone – nice tools for finding/searching for podcast “channels” and adding them to your subscription – “create podcast” features remain unlaunched. – syncer works great My wish list – auto delete option after listening to a show (from the mp3 player) Screen Shots: Relevant Links: See previous profile Import podcast Odeo blog Top 40 channels Tags: odeo, podcasting, web2.0, techcrunch, podcast → Read More
Company: Sxip Founded: October 2003 Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada What is it? The Sxip Network (“sxip” is pronounced “skip”) is an identity management registry for both users and websites/services/ASPs. They have presented at SuperNova conference and have generated lots of discussion. This is a single-sign-on solution. Think Passport, but decentralized and you don’t have to trust Microsoft to store and distribute your data. Think of this as the Verisign (domain names) of identity. As a user, if you see a sxip button on a website, you can click it and give permission for sxip to transmit some of your personal data to the website instead of re-filling out those endless forms. You can create different identities with Sxip – say personal and work – and decide who gets what information. If you aren’t yet part of Sxip, you will be presented with the option of joining when you click the Sxip button. What this means – if websites adopt this you will not need to fill out registration forms or have different credentials (usernames and passwords) for each of these sites. Sxip is going about this the right way. The platform is based “on a network architecture similar to DNS”, and includes the following participants: Users: Registered Sxip Network users who communicate with the Network via their browser. Homesites: Websites that store user data and release it (with the user’s consent) to other websites via a browser. Membersites: Websites that request user data from Homesites via a browser. The Sxip Network Rootsite: The central identity registry that manages Homesite and Membersite membership in the Sxip Network and issues and stores the data that identifies users as members of the Sxip Network (for example, a user’s Globally Unique Persona Identifiers (GUPIs) are stored at the Sxip Rootsite). Link. More detail Link. This is a decentralized, secure solution that can scale. If websites adopt it, the network effect will kick in massively and this will better the internet. In their own words, “The Sxip Network is a simple, secure, and open digital identity network. By joining, Internet users are able to create, share and protect the privacy of their online personal information. Websites and portals can establish deeper relationships with their users and comply with privacy legislation, while facilitating single sign-on and easy data release for their users. Sxip believes the Network has the potential to be a key platform for Identity → Read More
Company: ufeed Launched: June 2005 What is it? ufeed aggregates posts from your blog, posts to delicious and pictures posted to flickr into a single web page that they host, with an RSS feed. The service is associated with SemSym. It’s pretty raw right now, but functional, and new features are promised. You can use their service without registering, although registration allows a number of additional benefits: The service is easy to set up and both the registered and unregistered versions are free. I’ve created a techcrunch account and have aggregated the posts/feeds – you can see it at ufeed.semsym.com/feeds/techcrunch/. This is coolish, but needs some UI work and added features to become really useful. Screen Shots: Relevant Links: RSS Compendium Blog on ufeed Techcrunch ufeed Semsym Tags: ufeed, semsym, web2.0, techcrunch, tags → Read More
Company: Bloglines Location: Oakland, CA Founded: July 1, 2003 (Link) Status: Acquired by Ask Jeeves on February 8, 2005 (Link) What is it? Bloglines is a free, web based RSS reader. It’s the most popular, with NewsGator/Feeddemon a close second by number of users. If you are new to RSS, Bloglines is a very good place to start (for a complete list of web-based RSS readers, see here). Bloglines has a “two pane” format, with folders and feeds listed on the left (bolded if there are new unread entries), and content from the selected feed shown at the right. If you read content from a lot of sites, this is an excellent way to organize information. It’s also very similar to the interface for most email applications, so its familiar to most people right from the start: Signing up at Bloglines is very easy. All they ask for is an email address and password: Once you are a member, you have a variety of great tools. Key Features: – add feeds of your favorite websites (cut and paste, or add a button to your browser toolbar to auto-add any site you are on that has a feed) – easy import and export of feeds via opml file – create folders to organize content – see the number of total subscribers for any feed, and see usernames of public subscribers – add in feeds from any other subscriber (if you like their content) There is also a very neat feature that isn’t discussed very often. You can create a bloglines email address. Any email sent to this address appears within your feeds. This is a great way to move newsletters and other interesting content from your inbox to bloglines. Clearly bloglines is adding tools and features to make it useful as a portal/inbox. They’re adding things like “weather” to further this goal. Overall, we like bloglines over other current web-based RSS readers, although we’d love to see a tagging tool like Rojo (Rojo profile here). You can see public feeds for any user at bloglines.com/public/[username]. For instance, my public feeds are viewable at bloglines.com/public/michaelarrington. Additional Screen Shots: Founder: Mark Fletcher Relevant Links: about faq press ask jeeves acquires February 8, 2005 media services Weblog for Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines search engine watch best blog/feed search engine (March 31, 2005) wsj article zerokspot.com bloglines v. rojo unbecominglevity bloglines review (2004) PodTech → Read More
Company: PodTech Founded: May 23, 2005 (Link) What is it? PodTech is a wonderful set of podcast interviews that is updated very frequently and features top tech celebrities (recent podcasts include interviews with Robert Scoble, Dave Hornick, John Markoff, Chris Anderson, and others). What got our attention is the sheer quality (not to mention quality) of people John is interviewing, and how quickly his new venture took off. After just two weeks, PodTech saw over 66,000 visitors, over 21,000 audio plays and 9,000 MP3 downloads (Link). Not bad for a site with no marketing other than word of mouth. In their own words, “I’m putting up my podcasting site called PodTech.net – it’s a podcasting InfoTalk series dedicated to being a timeshifted radio program about Silicon Valley in the new syndicated world of timeshifted media. Some people say that Silicon Valley is losing its influence. My take is that Silicon Valley is just changing. My show is designed to produce Information about Silicon Valley via podcasting and blogs and push it to the world and then recycle a community back to Silicon Valley. Yes Silicon Valley is changing …but it’s increasing its’ influence because it’s now virtual and syndicated!” It’s one of our top-10 podcasts and we understand from John that his list of upcoming shows will blow us away. Stay tuned… Audio Links: Robert Scoble Dave Hornick John Markoff Screen Shots: Founder: John Furrier Relevant Links: John Furrier Blog (Founder) Furrier’s pre-launch announcement Furrier’s Official Announcement Technorati Tag: Podtech.net Furl Search on Podtech.net Tags: podtech, podtech.net, web2.0, techcrunch, podcasting, podcast, furrier → Read More
