Company: Talk Digger Launched: July 29, 2005 What is it? TalkDigger queries major blog (and other) search engines on a given URL and returns total number of links in to the site as well as other data. Clicking on the total link number takes you to the selected search engine results. “There are 3 specifics things that will appear when you dig for a link: 1. Result. This is the number of links to that URL. If you click on that blue number, you will be redirected to the result page of the search engine and be able to know who links to you 2. Trend. This is an arrow that will shows you if the number of results for that search is higher, lower or the same as the previous one. This is really effective when you wake up the morning and that you need to instantly see if someone as talked about your blog during the night 3. 7 last digs trend graph. This is a graph that shows you the evolution of the results returned by the search engines in the last 7 search requests” Link It’s a useful tool for doing ego searches as well as for generally comparing the search sites on total number of links in their respective indexes for any given query. Nice tool. (via Scoble, Steve Rubel and Blog Herald) Additional Links: Frédérick Giasson, Frédérick Giasson #2 (bookmarklet), Hugo E. Martin, Somewhat Frank, jotsheet, Technoogle, Tim Yang, Matthew Hurst, Library Clips, Library Stuff, License to Roam Tags: Links, Search, AJAX, , Popularity, Bloglines, Technorati, IceRocket, Feedster, PubSub, , BlogPulse, Scoble, techcrunch, web2.0, talkdigger, rsssearch, blogsearch, google, msn, blogdigger → Read More
Company: IceRocket Previous Profile: July 29, 2005 What’s New? We wrote in our previous profile on IceRocket that they were changing their name to BlogScour (based on something Mark Cuban said at AlwaysOn). Blake Rhodes, IceRocket’s CEO, called to tell me that our facts were not quite right (he also thanked us for the post). They are not going to change their name to BlogScour, but they are going to launch a site called BlogScour that will contain all of their blog search capabilities. I saw this at Blogherald a few minutes ago (I cannot locate the mentioned SEW article), and emailed Blake to confirm the facts. He confirmed what he told me on Friday – “Mike- We WILL launch a site called Blogscour.com. I dont have a date for that. Basically it will be our blog search we currently have minus all the web and image search features we have on IceRocket currently. It is going to be blogs only. Have a great evening. Blake” So there you have it. Personally, I don’t give a damn, I just love their search engine. They could call it searchcrap.com and we’d still use it twenty times a day to research companies. Tags: icerocket, search, blogscour, techcrunch, web2.0, blogsearch, rsssearch, rss → Read More
Update: I really like the way Microcontent Musings breaks down web services into core web 2.0 functions. While it can be a little harsh, it’s also a nice “to do” list for new companies. BlinkList is only a month old…my bet is that in another month or so they will do significantly better than 1/10. Company: BlinkList (a MindValley company) Launched: June 2005. Major feature release July 25, 2005 Location: Office in San Jose, CA: Mike Reining (Director) MindValley LC 236 W. Rincon Ave #B Campbell, California, 95008 USA Tel: (650) 387 0920 Office in Kuala Lumpur: Vishen Lakhiani (Director) MindValley LC Fabrikus Building No.1, Jln 8-91, Taman Shamelin Perkasa, Cheras, 56100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Tel: (+603) 9283 6054 What is it? BlinkList is a social bookmarking service built on ajax. It is very buttoned up and has some excellent features. It also has an all-star team with deep experience, led by their PR star (see team below) . We’ve profiled a number of competing services lately – see Shadows, del.icio.us, Simpy, Furl, Yahoo My Web 2.0 and others. Blinklist includes most of the features from those sites, and adds a couple of others. Key Features: – easy bookmarking, including a bookmarklet if you want to have one-click bookmarks – adding “stars” to tags and bookmarks to easily find them in the future – Blinklist will take any highlighted text on the screen and auto fill a description field with the text (this is the only service I know of that does this, and it’s incredibly useful) – bookmarks can be private or public. You can email bookmarks to friends at the time of making them, which is also a very useful feature. TechCrunch bookmarks are here. – permanent tag pages – see for example www.blinklist.com/tag/web2.0/ (a nested/filtered search function on general tag search would be an awesome addition – Shadows has a “narrow results” option that is very useful) – a tag cloud for each user, as well as the entire blinklist community – “related tags” for currently viewed tags – “auto-complete” suggestions when tagging a bookmark – RSS for all pages – easy signup see the demo here to see some of these features being used. Overall, BlinkList is a worthy addition to the ranks of social bookmarking services, and one of our favorites. It doesn’t have the user base of del.cio.us, or all of the functionality of → Read More
Service: Gmail Drive Launched: v. 1.0.6 was released on July 27, 2005 What is it? Gmail drive is a service that creates a virtual hard drive folder on your Windows system, accessible through “My Computer”, that allows you to store files in your Gmail email account. The current Gmail storage limitation is 2 gigs. In their own words, “GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Gmail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium. GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google Gmail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your Gmail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n’drop files to. Ever since Google started to offer users a Gmail e-mail account, which includes storage space of 2000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your Gmail account and retrieve them again. When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the Gmail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer. You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag’n’drop like you’re used to with the normal Explorer folders.” Link The service works as promised. After a quick download and installation, it installs a virtual gmail hard drive on your system, accessible through “My Computer”. You can then drag and drop files into the drive. I tested out dragging and dropping files, and it worked well (if understandably a little slow – a 1.5 mb file took about 20 seconds to fully copy over. Individual files cannot be bigger than 10 mb or have file names longer than 40 characters (gmail limitations). We’ll also be profiling xmail hard drive, a similar service that is web-based, and so platform independent. (via downloadsquad) Creator: bjarke Additional Links: LifeHacker, Technoogle, Digg, Richard Jones → Read More
It’s been a fun-filled Web 2.0 week, capped off with BlogHerCon today. Good stuff below. 1. BlogHer Conference on Saturday, July 30, 2005 The BlogHer Conference ’05 is today, at Techmart in Santa Clara. “This flagship event is open to all bloggers—including men and beginners—interested in enhancing their online exposure, learning the latest best practices in blogging, networking with other bloggers, and specifically cultivating the female blogging community. BlogHer Conference ’05 will provide an open, inclusive forum to: 1. Discuss the role of women within the larger blog community 2. Examine the developing (and debatable) code of blogging ethics 3. Discover how blogging is shrinking the world and amplifying the voices of women worldwide” We fully support the goals of BlogHer and are very excited about the buzz the conference is creating. Blogging conferences tend to have lots of blogging coverage, and there are some excellent posts coming out of today’s event. There’s literally a ton of important stuff to read and think about. And unlike BeautifulPeople (see no. 10 below), we as men are actually welcome at this event. And all kidding aside, if you only read one link, read Julie Leung’s “A woman’s place is in the HTML” I had the opportunity to see Julie speak at Gnomedex last month and was captivated by her ability to tell a story that contains a meaningful message. Additional Links: Lisa Stone, Charlene Li, Jan Kabili, Marc Canter, Lisa, JD Lasica, Halley Suitt, SocalMom, Tris Hussey, Scoble, FullCircle, Dave Winer, Jeff Clavier, Blogaholics, Blogherald 2. Pheedo reveals RSS Aggregator Usage Pheedo (soon to be profiled) released very interesting stats on RSS usage this week. Key stats and information: “Tuesday is the most active day in RSS; Saturday least active.” (hmm, maybe I should move these weekly wrapups to Tuesday…) “The “morning scanners” view most content; late night readers click through more.” “Consistent with other RSS aggregator market share reports on the Internet, Pheedo is seeing Bloglines atop our feed reader statistics, followed by Firefox, Thunderbird, NewsGator and Sharpreader. In aggregate, these readers are used by almost 70 percent of people subscribing to Pheedo managed RSS content.” Additional Links: Tris Hussey, BigPicture, BackboneMedia, Richard MacManus 3. Mary Hodder Compares Blog Aggregation and RSS Tools The first in a six-part series. Worth the read. Additional Links: Tim Yang, NewMediaHack, BennelliBrothers, Matt Hurst, Thousandfacedmoon, Wondiring, onebyonemedia, RamblingComments, ChangingWay, Blogspotting, BlogonSoftware, Telagon Sichelputzer, LicensedtoRoam, John → Read More
Company: IceRocket (Soon to be renamed BlogScour) Location: Dallas, Texas What is it? IceRocket is a blog search engine, and a damn good one, owned by Mark Cuban. In our opinion they aren’t quite ready to take on the king of blog search yet, but they are feature rich and doing some things very, very well. There are two ways that people are comparing blog search engines today: total links for a given keyword or tag, and total links shown for a given blog. On both tests, IceRocket seems to be doing well (but not always). On the links into TechCrunch, IceRocket seems to be far and away the most up-to-date, this week (things change rapidly in the real-time-web). IceRocket has a ton of great search and other tools, including search by keywords, tags (see their tag cloud here) and URLs. They also have a trends service (see pre-defined trend competitions here), and hell, they even have email (when I was COO of GNR in London I sold one of our companies, NamePlanet, to NetIdentity, another Mark Cuban company which powers this). Finally, they also have a toolbar, which is awesome if you aren’t like me and still have enough browser real estate left to actually view web pages. Basically, IceRocket is awesome. One area where they really shine is in search results. A result includes tons of useful links. In addition to a link to the source, there are also links to tags for the result, the blog itself, tools to refine the search to include or exclude that blog, number of links to the blog (for relevance and ego), and they even link to the RSS feed for the blog. All search results pages have RSS feeds. Another fun tool is IceSpy, which shows a rolling list of incoming search terms (all linked). This reminds me of the flat screen in Google’s offices that shows incoming searches (although Google appears to filter out adult terms while IceRocket happily does not ). They are changing their blog search engine name to BlogScour sometime in the near future. We’ve also seen an increasing trend by bloggers to tag their posts with IceRocket tags in addition to Technorati Tags. Additional Screen Shots: Team: Blake Rhodes, CEO Additional Links: SomewhatFrank, Mark Cuban, Blogebrity, Tris Hussey, Tris Hussey #2, Mark Cuban #2, PostMoneyValue, Mark Evans, BennelliBrothers, I, Peculiar, Somewhat Frank #2, RSSBlog, pogenwurst, → Read More
Company: CommonTimes Launched: July 13, 2005 What is it? CommonTimes is a social bookmarking site for news. Stories are bookmarked by users from around the web, and tagged. The level of prominence is determined by the number of users who have tagged the news source. In their own words, “CommonTimes is a social bookmarking site for news readers. Or, in simpler terms, CommonTimes is a news site that publishes stories based on how frequently you choose to bookmark them. The more widely our readers collect certain stories, the more prominently they will appear on our Web site. If you imagine the mainstream media exists at one extreme of top-down content control where a small group of editors determine what appears in the News, CommonTimes is exactly the opposite – a bottom up news site at which grassroots Web readers determine the top stories by bookmarking them as they browse. Comparatively, CommonTimes is to news what Del.icio.us and Yahoo’s MyWeb are to Internet bookmarks. Contrary to Google News, a closed, automated system limited to mainstream media stories, CommonTimes is an open community system that accepts content from any news site or blog – and is entirely driven by our readers. For example, while Slashdot and Grist Magazine provide a tightly controlled top-down filter of technology and environmental news that only rarely makes the mainstream media, our sections provide a bottom-up view of stories our readers feel are important from any source which may well integrate stories from the latter. News it what our community decides is news.” Link There are web 2.0 elements: social bookmarking, publisher and user tagging, comments to bookmarked stories, and RSS feeds for everything. It’s an interesting experiment and we look forward to participating. There are also easy-to-use tools for bookmarking sites, including tips on how to bookmark directly from bloglines. For an in depth overview, see Brian Del Vecchio, who writes a fantastic blog (and who tipped us off to the service). Additional Screen Shots: Team: Jeff Reifman Garrett Moon Kristine Washburn Boe Miller Brian Del Vecchio Link Links: Blog, About Tags: commontimes, news, tags, tagging, web2.0, topix, techcrunch, socialbookmarking, rss → Read More
Company: Simpy Previous Profiles: July 18, 2005 What’s New? Simpy is a social bookmarking service that can be compared to Shadows, del.icio.us, Furl, Yahoo My Web 2.0 and others. Simpy released new features today, including – full text search of bookmarked sites – a tag cloud of your bookmarks – remove, rename, split, and merge tags From Otis on the Simpy Blog: “The Release Log has the details, but in short, I am happy to announce that the new Simpy release is out! The most notable features concern searching and tagging. The full-text search is back! Not only can you full-text search your own bookmarks, but you can also full-text search any other Simpy user’s public bookmarks. In my opinion, this is big and useful. Browsing by tags is nice, but is also limiting. Full-text search can do more, and since Simpy supports fielded search, you can always emulate tag search with queries like tags:foo (more info is in the FAQ). You can see your Tag Cloud now (just use the “tags” link in the nav bar at the top of Simpy pages). A Tag Cloud is a more visual representation of your tags and their usage distribution. Along with the Tag Cloud come the 4 new Tag functions: remove, rename, split, and merge. These 4 functions will let you mess with your tags to your heart’s content. If they are not enough, I’m all ears.” Release Notes are here. These are useful additional features. I really like seeing data in a tag cloud format for some reason – I’d love it if the RSS aggregators showed new unread content in this format – it would make it much easier to quickly get to the content I want to read. I also have to say that I was blown away by the Shadows “Shadow Page” idea – simple yet very, very useful, and I would like to see simpy and others consider this idea. Tags: simpy, delicious, del.icio.us, furl, shadows, socialbookmarking, tags, tagging, folksonomy, techcrunch, web2.0, tagcloud → Read More
Company: BlogPulse Launched: Version 2.0 launched March 28, 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH What is it? BlogPulse is an exemplary real-time search engine, with additional features like trends, conversation tracker and blog profiles. It’s parent company is Intelliseek. In their own words, “BlogPulse is a window into the blogosphere…open it daily to discover the people, issues, blogs, posts, commentaries, tidbits and news that bloggers are discussing.” Link The BlogPulse site offers four main services that we profile here: Search, Conversation Tracker, Trends and Profiles. Search: BlogPulse search allows search by keyword or URI (but not tags/categories, something that absolutely must be added). Advanced search features are here. Sample searches yielded excellent results compared to Technorati, Feedster and others, although this is a quickly evolving space. In general, the index looks very up to date and complete, and searches are very fast. Conversation Tracker: The Conversation Tracker service is really cool. As the blogosphere has evolved, “conversations” are taking place in a decentralized and distributed manner over literally millions of blogs and other websites (whereas in web 1.0 conversations were generally centralized on a site, such as a newsgroup). “BlogPulse Trend Search allows you to create graphs that visually track “buzz” over time for certain key words, phrases or links. Compare search terms/links in isolation, or use all three fields to compare search terms/links against others. Type your search terms in the boxes on the left. Type descriptive labels for each search into the boxes on the right. Then choose your time frame: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months.�? Blogpulse has collected the full text of blog posts and analyzes citations to create a visual conversation tracker on a keyword or URI. It’s rough, but extremely useful for tracking discussions. See the videos here and here for further explanation. A key value of Conversation Tracker is to track viral diffusion associated with an individual post. Trends: The Trends service gives a visual graph of postings associated with keywords or URIs. You can also compare multiple items on a single graph. They also have featured trends for high profile news and other discussions. Below are two trend graphs. The first is for the keyword “TechCrunch”, the second compares postings of Harry Potter to Willy Wonka. Profiles: The Profiles service has fairly deep information about specific blogs, including overview, posts, citations, trends, sources, neighborhood. Check it out. Blogpulse also has lots of other cool → Read More
Company: Loomia Launched: June, 2005 Location: San Francisco What is it? Loomia provides search, recommendations, and personalization for podcasts, videocasts, and other syndicated media. In a nutshell, their goal is to help you find content that you will enjoy based on how you rate content you’ve already absorbed. The idea is awesome, and their approach is perfect (centralized website, plus distributed services to content providers) . As with most successful web 2.0 companies, they are leveraging their users to create their core value. Users rate content. Loomia compares a user’s ratings and recommends other content that they should also enjoy. For instance, if I like Podtech (which I do), and if other people who like Podtech also like Earningscast (an Archimedes Ventures company), Loomia will recommend that I also check out Earningscast. Netflix takes a similar approach to recommending movies. My experience as the CEO of Zip.ca (a movie renting company in Canada) with similar recommendation features proved to me how powerful these recommendations can be. It is a hugely powerful way of connecting like minded people to like minded content. Loomia isn’t planning on keeping all of this data to themselves. A core part of their business model will be working with other companies (think odeo as well as podtech) to allow those services to add ratings, recommendations and other features. If Loomia gets in the middle of this data stream, they could have a very bright future ahead of them. Loomia is just getting started and the site reflects this. However, they have an awesome team (see below) and the core feature set is there. I recommend you give it a try. Mark, Loomia’s CEO, has promised to let me know when new features are added, and we will update their profile here at TechCrunch. Additional Screen Shots: Team: David Marks, Co-Founder and CEO Francis Kelly, Co-Founder and Director of Technology Ken Fromm, Co-Founder, CFO and Director of Business Services Links: PodcastNYC.net, Mike Rowehl, About Loomia, Pokkari Blog Tags: loomia, podcasts, podcasting, videocasts, techcrunch, web2.0, odeo, → Read More
Company: SpringDoo Launched: Today in the US (previsously New Zealand only) What is it? Springdoo is an easy to use service where you call a toll free phone number, record a message, and then can have the message sent via email to your contacts. The email contains a link to the springdoo site, where the message is automatically played – it is not sent as a file attachment. The service is not free, but you get 10 minutes free by signing up. The service charges a minimum of one minute, and in 20 second intervals after the first minute. The charge applies to the length of the message recorded, so if you send a one minute message to 20 people only one minute is charged. It is currently available in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US. Here’s How it works: You call the phone number (your caller id must be on), record a message, select emails to send it to (up to 20) and send. The recipients receive an email, click on the link and listen to the message. A sample message can be heard here. We’ve recorded a test message here. Yes, “Su Su” is much hotter than me and has a cool New Zealand accent. Additional Screen Shots: Team: Jason Kerr, CEO Links: Simple Email, About, Help Tags: springdoo, email, voicemail, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
Service: Google RSS Reader Launched: July 25, 2005 What is it? Google has added RSS and bookmark functionality to its personalized home page. Bookmark functionality is very basic – it adds a link (with an optional title) to your Google home page. It will be more interesting if they add delicious or shadows-like functionality. The RSS functionality works very much like Yahoo’s home page RSS reader, with cool options like setting the number of posts shown (up to 9), and the ability to drag and drop the feeds anywhere on the screen. It’s great for RSS newbies or if you have only a few feeds that you review daily. Links: Steve Rubel, RSS Weblog, Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 2, Error500, LockerGnome, John Battelle, Social Patterns Technorati Tags: google, googlerss, rss, atom, yahoo, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
Update: This is a great tool for directly comparing Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth. You can see the results for a search on both services and really compare them. Via Nathan Torkington Service: MSN Virtual Earth Launched: July 23, 2005 What is it? MSN Virtual Earth is an excellent mapping/satellite imagery application. Much like Google Earth (profile), it is fascinating to look at, and very useful as well. There is no download required (whereas Google Earth has a 10 meg download). In addition to excellent search features, you can autolocate via your IP address (although I am in San Francisco today and it says I am in Seattle based on IP) or via a small download, which works very well. There is also a scratch pad to keep notes (there needs to be a print function added to this though). Mandatory first searches, of course, were of my home in Manhatan Beach and my parents home in Anacortes. The picture quality in MSN Virtual Earth was better than Google Earth, and the picture quality of my parents home in Anacortes was decent, whereas Google had nothing to show for them. Overall, MSN wins in this very limited test: Jeremy Wright posted an excellent review of the service and comparison to Google maps: “First, MSN’s Virtual Earth is 10 times easier to use than Google Maps. Between the little compass in VE that you can drag and it’ll just scroll with you (instead of Google Maps’ “click, drag, click, drag, click, drag”) and the ability to zoom much more easily in VE (you can scroll, you can hit the +/- keys on your keyboard OR you can double click), this is an app that is much more thought out.�? “At the same time, Virtual Earth is much easier to use from an “exploring�? point of view. Hop off a plane, hit “Locate Me”, look for rental cars, then look for hotels, then look for somewhere to eat and then look for somewhere to catch a show. Boom, your whole day is planned and in your Scratch Pad.�? Link Check out BoingBoing, on MSN “nuking” Apple’s headquarters. Links: Makeyougohmm, ThinkLemon, PostMoneyValue, Fusion94.org, sinceretheory, Ben Barren, Chris Pirillo, Jeff Nolan (“actually make that well over 3 years old for the images, I just recognized a car in the street that my neighbor used to drive”), SurfersSurf Tags: msn, virtualearth, msnvirtualearth, maps, mapping, → Read More
Company: FeedShake Launched: July 21, 2005 (estimated) What is it? FeedShake is a website that creates a single RSS feed from multiple RSS feeds. You can also filter out posts that contain specified keywords, and/or filter in posts only if they contain specified keywords. The site is incredibly easy to use (it takes mere moments to create an aggregated feed) and no registration or email address is required. Similar services are listed by libary clips here. According to Library Clips, “Actually this tool is quite unique as it is the first to do both splicing and filtering…there are many blending tools, but ReFilter seems to be the only standalone filtering tool…here are other general filtering tools.” (Link) The feed is auto-named “FeedShake” but can of course be renamed in your reader to whatever you want. It would be nice to be able to auto-rename the feed when it’s created so that other users would have the title you selected. Other current limitations: “This service is beta. Currently it supports RSS 2.0 feeds” We’d be happy to pay for naming and stats on the feed. We tested the service by burning a combined feed of TechCrunch and EarningsCast, another Archimedes blog. The feed is: http://www.feedshake.com/feed.php?code=wc5mjf0wz4. The feed works great. Awesome service. We love it. Screen Shots of “burning” process: Links: EasyBakeWeblogs, BookBlog, Bruto, SolutionWatch, HomeBusinessWebsites, Dave Winer, Roland Tanglao, PodcastingNews, Steve Rubel Tags: feedshake, rss, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
It’s been a helluva week. Myspace got bought for over half a billion dollars. Podcasting died (but not really), and an important development in beer tapping technology was announced. Oh yeah, we spent the week at Always On and learned a lot about social networking in the real world. For a wrapup of AlwaysOn, see our profiles and links here. Marc Canter’s new thing, GoingOn, was announced at the conference and we will profile it separately sometime in the next couple of days. 1. iTunes sells its 500,000,000th song. “TJPile writes “Apple’s iTunes Music Store can now say half a billion served. One look at Apple’s front page says it all. Sunday, at 2:44PM EST, Amy Greer of Lafayette, Indiana bought Faith Hill’s Mississippi Girl to win.”” 2. MySpace sells to News Corp for $580 million From Bill Burnham: “You may have seen the news today that Intermix Media was sold to News Corp. for a cool $580M in cash. Prior to 2004, Intermix’s business consisted of running a collection of largely undistinguished consumer-oriented websites. Intermix (then known as EUniverse) didn’t do a particularly good job of running these sites and was basically a broken stock suffering from earnings restatements, a NASDAQ delisting and executive turnover. However in 2003/2004, one of the websites, MySpace.com started to take-off thanks to the social networking craze. As I outlined earlier, unlike Friendster and its clones, MySpace took a unique approach to the Social Networking space and concentrated heavily on building a community first (centered around music and bands), and a social network second. The strategy worked and by the beginning of 2005 MySpace was the clear #1 player in the social networking space.” See Also: Jeff Clavier, Chew Shop, Many2Many, Paul Kedrosky, Blog Herald, Hitchhiker’s guide to 650, Marc Canter, Scoble 3. Podcasting died last week (not really though) Frank Barnako writes a controversial essay last week titled “Podcasting’s ‘indies’ are losing ground” in which he states “Podcasters, your 15 minutes of fame is up”: “As podcasts have become available to a mass market, the media giants are moving in. ABC, ESPN, the BBC, CNN and Air America account for 16 of the most popular shows. Public radio programs took another 16 slots. Only four of the top 20 were created by “amateurs.” Two were devoted to news about the Macintosh; a third was Chris Pirillo’s tech show, which ranked 16th; and 19th → Read More
Update: For an excellent writeup of Attention Trust, see Seth Goldstein’s essay here. Company: AttentionTrust Launched: Today (I believe) What is it? Attention Trust is a project led by Steve Gillmor and others that is the next evolution of his Attention idea. It is a “A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners”. From a post by Steve Gillmor on March 28, 2005: “What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content. Vendors can build on top of that cloud of data with their own special sauce–the newbie crowd of MyYahoo, the pacesetter early adopters of Diller/Ask/Bloglines, the social attention farm of RoJo, and Google’s emerging Office service components orchestrated by the core GMail inforouter. And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine for leveraging the fat middle of the long tail.” Link So what is AttentionTrust? It’s light on content for now, but it proposes a basic set of user rights to their attention data: The idea of attention is hugely debated and polarized. It’s useful and needed, but will it work in the real world? The debate will continue as Steve pushes this idea forward. We’ve joined AttentionTrust, and look forward to developments. Additional Links/Research: AttentionTrust, Steve Gillmor, Danny Ayers, Read/Write Web, O’Reilly Radar, Ted Leung, John Hagel, Jeff Clavier, Rough Type, New Persuasion, Corante, Got Ads?, Fiver Stone, pc4media, Ed Batista, Elizabeth Albrycht Tags: attention, attention.xml, attentiontrust, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
Editor’s Note: As the Always On event comes to a close, we want to take this opportunity to thank Tony Perkins. Tony, you put on a wonderful, interesting, enlightening conference and we are very proud to have been a part of it. Thank you very much Event: AlwaysOn Previous Posts: July 19, 2005, July 20, 2005, July 21, 2005 What’s Happening? Day Three at Always On for us was a busy mishmash of hallway meetings, quick (and not so quick) trips over to Sand Hill Road, and jumping in and out of the final panels. Schedule link is here. Links to other’s thoughts: Ross Mayfield: “By the third day, the content really kicked into gear.” Dan Farber: On Bill Joy’s fear of the power an individual has to use technology to harm us “whether via a virus that runs through the Net causing economic damage or a manufactured or engineeered biological agent with the potential to kill millions”, and counter-points by George Gilder: “Free societies are safer when technology moves faster” Dan Farber also wrote an excellent day two essay on Skype: “Skype: A new, friendly communications monopoly?“ See also: Infoworld, Paul Kedrosky, Jeff Nolan, Doc Searls, Ross Mayfield, Daily Motion, IPCentral, Social Customer, Media Guerrilla, Junto Boyz, Viewpoint West Partners, More. Tags: alwayson, ao2005, ao100, web2.0, techcrunch, stanford → Read More
Pluck made TechCrunch a “featured feed” today (Link). For new subscribers (and there have been a bunch – thanks Pluck), we apologize for the slow review day today. We are still recovering from the AlwaysOn conference. Tomorrow’s weekly wrapup will be a great one, though, and we have a ton of great reviews coming up! For those of you looking for the best RSS aggregator on the market, check out Pluck’s new Firefox extension (our profile). And Shadows (our profile), their brand new bookmarking service with the awesome shadow pages functionality was definitely the buzz at AlwaysOn. Thanks Pluck! → Read More
Event: AlwaysOn Previous Posts: July 19, 2005, July 20, 2005 What’s Happening? Day Two at Always On was hectic. There are two channels here – the main room with panel discussions (see schedule below) and a side room with 5 minute CEO pitches. CEO’s were judged on three areas of their presentations: Opportunity, Go to market strategy and Overall Presentation. Both channels were interesting, and attendees were charging back and forth between rooms all day (us included). CEO Pitches: We saw about half of the CEO pitches. Most interesting/entertaining in our opinion included Pluck (Dave Panos), Rearden Commerce (Patrick Grady), LiveDeal (Rajesh Navar) and Realm (Rick White). We also noticed John Furrier interviewing many CEOs as they finished their pitch. We are looking forward to hearing the podcasts soon. Here’s a picture of John with Dave Panos and Andrew Busey, co-founders of Pluck (TechCrunch profiles): Main Panels: I thought the Mark Cuban (great picture from JD Lasica) fireside chat and follow up panel discussion were the best events of the day. If you are interested in hearing John Furrier’s interview with Mark, see Podtech.net here. My notes from the Mark Cuban fireside chat: IceRocket is being renamed blogscour.com. It looks like they are really focusing on prospective search. Mark discussed the differences in the way people search – some people want relevant information, some people want timely information. Google is good at “relevant”, but not timely. Blogscour will focus on timely. Mark quote: “when is the last time the government did something smart…with technology?�? “The only people with a worse track record is hollywood” Allen Delattre, the moderator, said “blogs are growing virally”. That’s the first time I’ve heard it put that way. It’s certainly true (but see Jeremy Zavodny yesterday – When will blogging peak?) In the next segment, Mark spoke at length about delivering movies via dvd and in cinemas (and eventually online) all on the same day. This is definitely the future. Mark said he’s learned the most about marketing from four people: Bill Gates, Paris Hilton, Dennis Rodman and Michael Dell. Mark is a good guy and an interesting guy and it was cool having him at the event yesterday. Looking forward to Marc Canter’s GoingOn discussion today. Relevant Links: Schedule, New Media Musings, Flickr AlwaysOn, Infectuous Greed Tags: alwayson, ao2005, ao100, web2.0, techcrunch, stanford → Read More
