Service: ElfURL Created: July 20, 2005 What is it? ElfURL went from idea to launch in 4 days. I was reading Alexander Muse’s blog this morning and saw his post on ElfURL: “Last Monday I posted an entry with an idea for a new little Web 2.0 application to replace Tinyurl. Basically I suggested that it would be helpful to have a tool to make long URLs shorter, while at the same time providing a way to apply delicious tags, while at the same time adding statistics on the number of times the URL was accessed, and while having those stats delivered via RSS. I decided that the elves at Weblogs Work should be able to create such a tool and assigned them the task. We decided to call the Web 2.0 application elfURL. The tool is almost complete (the tagging function is not complete and the RSS feed might not be working perfectly). This is what is new about the Web 2.0 – idea to application within four days.” I have been a user of TinyURL for a long time. It’s a neat tool to shorten long URLs into short ones. Alexander’s thought was to take that basic idea behind TinyURL and add some web 2.0 flavor – tagging, stats and RSS. Now, you can (or soon will be able to – the functionality isn’t working yet) add tags to your short URLs, see the number of times the URL was used, and subscribe to the stats via RSS. Cool. As an example of how the stats work, click here to see how many visitors we’ve sent to the site from this post (we converted their URL into an ElfURL) They’ve also provided a snippet that you can add to a website and include the ElfURL functionality: Enter giant URL: Screen Shots: Relevant Links: Site, Tools, Stats, WeblogsWork, Texas Venture Capital Blog, LikeItMatters (awesome blog with a great name), surferssurf. Tags: elfurl, tinyurl, DNS, RSS, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
Company: Zazzle Launched: 1999 (zazzle.com launched 2003) Status: Announced $16m Series A on July 18, 2005 What is it? Zazzle let’s customers create customized products, ranging from tshirts to stamps, and sell them on the zazzle website. In their own words, “Zazzle is the leading customized products marketplace for consumer enthusiasts to share and celebrate their interests by creating apparel, posters, cards, stamps and more. We combine on-demand manufacturing, a robust community, the largest online collection of customizable digital images and unmatched personalization tools to empower you to create your own products. In addition, you can choose to become a contributor by sharing your unique creations in Zazzle’s public galleries. Within these galleries, you can browse, comment and connect with others who share your interests. Contributors also earn royalties every time their creations are purchased by others. For anyone who wishes to create, wear, display, sell or celebrate their interests, Zazzle provides a compelling interactive marketplace to a worldwide audience.” Link Creating Products: Creating products is a relatively straightforward process of choosing prodcuts (apparel, posters, stamps, etc.), uploading images, and pricing the items. Zazzle claims that they have “over 500,000 totally unique, user-created products, available in billions of variations”. Link Zazzle Stamps: Zazzle Stamps is really interesting. Within certain parameters, users can upload their own images, or use stock zazzle images (like disney images), and create actual postage stamps. A sheet of 20 first-class stamps will sell for $16.99, 130% more than “normal” stamps. Zazzle Stamps is possible via a partnership with Pitney Bowes. FYI, Stamps.com has a similar program and will be partnering with cafepress, a zazzle competitor. Relevant Links: About, News, Blog, B2Day, New Persuasion Blog, Alarm:Clock, New Media Musings, Somewhat Frank, RSSWay, Traders Trade, CNET, Ben Barren, Alarm:Clock Tags: zazzle, , zazzle.com, pitneybowes, cafepress, stamps.com, stamps, ecommerce, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
Event: AlwaysOn Previous Post: July 19, 2005 What’s Happening? Great start to the conference. Cocktail hour(s) followed by a number of panels and discussions. This is clearly going to be a great event – a live webcast is available here, with over 900 reported participants. The chat is lively and interesting. Welcome Remarks: Tom Byers, Stanford Professor, talks about the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. The Giant Brain is Us: Interesting Presentation by Peter Hirshberg and Michael Markman discussing the fear of technology in the mid-last century, followed by more hopefullness, and eventually coming full circle to people’s concerns about today’s “global villiage” and how everyone is involved in everyone else’s life. Best quote is the shoeshine guy – “blogging is a gunpowder trail”. Wonderful segment. Totally awesome. AO100 Top Innovators Awards: Announced by Packy Kelly and Susan Ayers-Walker Looking for a link of the winners. Bill Draper accepted Skype award for overall top innovator and top consumer technology company. Featured Keynote: Sandy Berger, Michael Medved and Jerry Brown Not much to say here (there is no way I’m getting into politics on this blog), although I enjoyed hearing Jerry being introduced as the Mayor of California. It was also fun to watch the live chat up on screen next to the participants. Relevant Links: New Media Musings More tomorrow. Tags: alwayson, ao2005, ao100, web2.0, techcrunch, stanford → Read More
Event: AlwaysOn We’ll be attending the AlwaysOn Conference this week. The buzz is incredible and we look forward to seeing and writing about new technologies all week. Updates to come. There’s a profile of AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins in today’s San Jose Mercury News (via Morgan McLintic). Tags: alwayson, AO2005, goingon, web2.0, techcrunch, stanford → Read More
Editor’s Note: Today is Social Bookmarking day, with profiles of Simpy and now Shadows. Simpy went out on TechCrunch today because they’ve been releasing new functionality that we really like. Shadows has only been out for a couple of weeks, and will make a public appearance at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford this week (say hello to me if you are there), and so we thought it was the right time to profile them as well. Service: Shadows Launched: Two weeks ago Located: Austin, TX (this is a Pluck company) What is it? Pluck is up to something, and we like it. Last week they released version 2.0 of their Firefox extension (see our profile), which we are still drooling over (it’s fast). Two weeks ago they very quietly launched Shadows, which is a social bookmarking site. Our understanding from Dave Panos, their CEO, and Andrew Busey, the co-founder, is that they will be publicly announcing Shadows this week at AlwaysOn in Stanford. As we mentioned with Simpy, Shadows should be compared to other social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Furl, Yahoo My Web 2.0, and others. Shadows has a single drawback: they absolutely require an IE or firefox toolbar installation in order to bookmark pages on the fly. This takes up valuable screen real estate and is generally annoying. However, the functionality more than makes up for the real estate loss – this is a toolbar we are going to keep, and there’s a good reason. Not only does the toolbar allow saving and tagging of pages, but it also allows you to view a “shadow page” of the current URI. The shadow page shows tags added by users, comments and other meta-data, which is very useful. Here is content from the shadow page for Techcrunch (which is somewhat biased since as of now we are the only user to have added meta-data for Techcrunch:-)): Link Shadows seems to have all of the high end functionality of the other social bookmarking services (with the exception of a server cache of the site?). One thing we haven’t figured out – there is an ability to add friends but we don’t know what functionality comes with adding friends since users set bookmars as either public or private. We like the delicious and furl-like popup up when bookmarking a page: They also have shadow pages, as mentioned above, and a nifty feature called → Read More
Company: Simpy Launched: May 4, 2004 What is it? Simpy is a social bookmarking service that can be compared to del.icio.us, Furl Yahoo My Web 2.0 and others. In their own words, “Simpy is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links and tags. You can be open and share your links with others, or keep them private. Simpy also helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interesting sites, publish your bookmarks, detect and eliminate link-rot, etc.” Link Simpy has an excellent user interface and interesting features that the competitors haven’t added. Cool features include full text search of pages (Furl has this as well) and also the ability to find broken links and fix them. We also like the ability to have private, searchable, taggable free text notes on any page. Any bookmark can also be made private. Finally, the ability to add a simpy search box on your blog or other web page (to search your tags) is great. Core Features: – Save and Tag pages with a single click using the Simpy Bookmarklet – Full-text Search bookmarked pages’ content, not just meta-data – Attach searchable notes to bookmarks – Choose between private or public bookmarks – Find people like you and subscribe to their bookmarks – Share your bookmarks with others – Detect broken, forgotten and even redirected bookmarks – Upload your existing bookmarks (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Galeon and Konqueror supported) – Export your bookmarks – Access your bookmarks from any browser and multiple computers – Save private, taggable, and searchable free-text Notes – For hackers: Simpy has an open REST API – use it! – For bloggers: Publish your bookmarks in your blog using RSS or ATOM We’ve spoken with Otis Gospodnetić by email over the last couple of weeks and have been told that Simpy will be releasing new features sometime this week. We look forward to seeing what’s coming! In general, we find Simpy’s user interface and search capabilities superior to del.icio.us and Furl. We like the interface for adding bookmarks, and ask only that pages can be bookmarked via a popup like del.icio.us (as an option). The optional additional metadata fields are really useful. Founder: Otis Gospodnetić Relevant Links: Tools, Search Tools, Blog, FAQ, User Group, About, Steve Mallet, bedeviled mojo shop. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Writing this from Luxembourg airport. Free and strong wifi. Awesome. Company: Doostang Location: Doostang, Inc. 160 Brannan St. Suite 306 San Francisco, CA 94107 E-mail: contact@doostang.com Launched: Recently What is it? Doostang is a trust network and employment service. Once you have joined, you can post a profile, upload a resume, post and search for jobs, write testimonials and invite other people. You can join by invitation only. If you would like an invitation, email us (see our about section) and we will be happy to send you one. In their own words, “Doostang is the trusted professional network. The network grows by invitation only which ensures that all contacts that enter the system are trusted by at least one or more members in the network. The value of the network grows with time as the number of contacts increases. The initial goal of Doostang is to fix the quality vs. quantity gap in online recruiting and job searching. Over 50% of recruiting today is done through the personal network of contacts and a large portion of which is done by email communication. Using your personal network is the most effective way to find the right candidate for a position and to find the perfect job. It eliminates the need to either post a job to an irrelevant audience or to search through the multitude of jobs available on the Internet or newspapers that would be of no interest to you. Doostang provides the infrastructure to connect personal networks together and to create a natural quality filter for recruiting and job searching. Doostang hails from two Farsi words, “doost” which means friend, and “tang” a word used to symbolize the trust between a close group of people. Farsi, one of the world’s oldest languages dating back to 600BC, was spoken from the borders of India in the far east and Russia and China in the north, to southern shores of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean in the west. The word Doostang fittingly describes our company’s long term goal to be the trusted professional network.” Link The site works in similar ways to LinkedIn, in that you choose your trust network (friends), can interact with them, post testimonials, etc. There are two important differences. The first difference is that you can only become a member via an invitation. That does create an atmosphere of exclusivity. The second difference → Read More
Company: Pluck (For Firefox) Launch Date: June 13, 2005 (2.0 Beta for Firefox) What is it? Pluck has a number of excellent products, including a web based RSS reader that competes with Bloglines, NewsGator and others (see our Bloglines v. Newsgator post) as well as an IE plugin that is very popular. They’ve also quietly launched a social bookmarking site called Shadows that will have increased functionality added next week. Pluck has been testing a plugin for Firefox for a couple of months, and released the 2.0 Beta on Wednesday. It has been very well received (over 3,000 downloads so far). It’s this product, the Firefox 2.0 beta, that is being profiled here. Quick Summary: Its awesome because it is feature rich and faster than any aggregator I’ve seen. It also seems to update feeds quite fast. I will switch to permanently this from Bloglines as soon as the updated features are launched. This is a Firefox extension, so the download is quick and, unlike their IE plugin, most of the work is done at the server level. The product is therefore much more like their “web edition” than “Pluck for IE”. Importing feeds via OPML was a snap. I was able to quickly organize them into folders and generally get set up. I spoke with Matthew Bookspan at Pluck about the product yesterday (Pluck was also nice enough to offer for us to be a beta tester a month ago but we failed miserably in following up). See Matt’s blog post on the release of the product here. Matt assures us that those few features that we found lacking are on the bug/feature list to be added soon. Features: – Syncronizes feeds automatically accross all Pluck Products – easy feed import via OPML – works well with tabbed browsing (open feeds in tabs) – publish/share folders – bolds feeds with new content – choices on RSS feed updates – seems to run very, very fast – easy to save posts/clippings – notification of feed updates – a little toast window above the pluck icon in the status bar: Upcoming Features: – show number of subscribers per feed – show number of unread items within a feed – check all as “read” – syncing of read/unread accross Pluck Products (one of the biggest problems in the industry right now) Additional Screen Shots: Management: Dave Panos – Chief Executive Officer (co-founder) → Read More
The main Web 2.0 news this week focused on Technorati (is it dyin or is it rockin?) and the release of Atom 1.0. Lots of other random and interesting stuff as well, including important chia-pet news. Weekly Summary: 1. Technorati is Dead! Long Live Technorati! Technorati has dominated web 2.0 news this week. Posts come at it from three different but related angles: – Technorati’s traffic has lately been dominating the competition, and they are getting a lot of press as well . See no. 5 from last week’s wrapup. Richard MacManus again noted Technorati’s ascension in a post this week called “Technorati for President“, and cited a recent Wired Magazine article on them that barely mentioned that they have any competition. Richard writes “You’ve got to hand it to Technorati, they sure know how to get media and blog attention. A recent Wired article makes the extraordinary claim that Technorati is “a public utility on a global scale”. With no mention whatsoever of other blog search engines, Wired compares Technorati to Google…” – Jason Calcanis launches his “Off with their Head” campaign against Technorati (and other blog search engines) . See Jason’s cry for Google and Yahoo to launch blog search engines here and follow up here. See Blog Herald’s counter-point here. – Discussion over the overall demise of Technorati, its index and its interface. Doc Searls gives a massive overview here. More Points of View: Dave Sifry, Syntagma, Frank Gruber, BusinessWeek, Blog Herald, ChrisWere.com, WeBreakStuff, Jeremy Wright, Jeremy Wright #2, Newest Industry, Hans on Experience, Scoble, David Berlind, David Berlind #2 2. RSS v. Atom – Tim Bray posts a comparative chart From Alex Bosworth, “The differences are posed in such a way as to show how Atom is superior, and as Don Park has pointed out some points might be half-truths or misleading, but generally I think it details the differences between Atom and RSS. The problem is that Atom has serious failings which all stem from the same cause – Atom is made for consumers, not producers.” See also: Rogers Cadenhead, Tris Hussey and John Udell. 3. Steve Gillmor – Once you go RSS, you never go back. “How many people, once they switched to AOL on Live8 Day, went back? The same number who switched back from RSS. My friend still hasn’t fired up Bloglines, or Rojo, or iTunes for that matter. But he will. → Read More
Company: Judy’s Book Launched: July 2005 Location: Seattle, WA What is it? Judy’s Book is a site that allows people to write reviews of local businesses. It also has social networking features (adding friends, groups, etc.) to share reviews with a trust network. The idea is that people trust what their friends think more than advertising. The reviews are easy to write, with lots of structure (rating, cost, pros/cons) and free text areas that will make searching easier (no tags though – they’ll add that soon enough). It is somewhat like DinnerBuzz, without the tagging and with more social networking. They don’t discuss in on the site, but they clearly use the yahoo mapping api or some other datebase for business search. In their own words, “Judy’s Book was started in 2004 by Andy Sack and Chris DeVore. When Andy and his wife Alexa moved to Seattle, Alexa’s mom — Judy -– gave them her ‘little green book’, her personal take on the best service providers in Seattle. Andy and Alexa relied on Judy’s book for help and advice as they settled into their new city. When Chris and his wife Emily needed a handyman, Andy passed along a recommendation from Judy’s book and an idea was born: why not create a ‘little green book’ for busy parents everywhere? Judy’s Book is the result – offering local answers by parents, for parents. Join today and see for yourself!” Link Here is a visual of a review: To get the content rolling, Judy’s book is offering bribes. Five reviews gets you $5 at Starbucks, and 50 reviews + 10 friend invites gets you an iPod shuffle. Good idea. Great site. But its another social networking tool to keep updated…and therefore will have some traction issues. The site does not provide RSS feeds for searches or tagging…They’ll realize the usefullness of that soon enough and add it. (Andy and Chris, if you read this, check out Dinnerbuzz and see the things they are doing correctly – it will be easy for you to add this functionality) Founders: Andy Sack Chris DeVore Relvant Links: About Search Engine Watch Surfers Surf, Greg Yardley Tags: judysbook, yellowpages, localsearch, search, reviews, profiles, techcrunch, web2.0, socialnetworks → Read More
Company: FeedBurner (BuzzBoost) Location: Chicago Previous Profiles: June 14, 2005, July 4, 2005 What’s New? FeedBurner has been launching a ton of new features lately, and BuzzBoost, announed on July 11, is worth noting. In their own words, “Enter BuzzBoost. It’s the latest publicity and awareness offering for FeedBurner publishers, and it’s free. BuzzBoost’s job is to redisplay your feed content anywhere you can copy and paste a short snippet of HTML code — in a Blogger or TypePad page template, on a corporate website, or even in a “signature” block on a message board. BuzzBoost code is just a short line of JavaScript that displays content items and information from a FeedBurner feed according to settings you provide. You get to control how BuzzBoost displays the following elements: * Feed Title * Item publication date * Individual item headlines, headlines and plain text, or headlines and original HTML * Plain text item excerpt length * Link to download podcast enclosures (if available) We know that publishers who are familiar with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) would also want to precisely control the styling of whatever BuzzBoost generates. Therefore, BuzzBoost has the right hooks in the generated HTML to make sure you can style each of BuzzBoost’s elements, which we have documented (see the links at the bottom of this post.)” Link Tris Hussey at Qumana posted about this a few days ago and saw the power of it immediately – you can cross promote blogs, and use any RSS feed in new ways. For instance, Tris is thinking about taking RSS feeds of prospective search queries and promoting them through buzzboost – very creative! This isn’t new technology, it’s just a very easy and cool implementation. Feedburner will create an html script for you based on your parameters, or you can take the source html and entirely customize it. To use it, if you already have burned feeds at Feedburner, click on “publicize” from the control panel area, and choose “buzzboost”. You can then select certain parameters, and choose a standard snippet or take the html and edit it directly: snippet: full Code: Here’s how it looks in action: Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: TechCrunchPowered by FeedBurner Relevant Links: Tris Hussey line of site Brad Feld java girl Blog Sites Net Tech Based Marketing quick online tips Tags: feedburner, buzzboost, rss, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
Company: Browster Launch Date: Beta in February 2005, Version 1.0 launched today, July 13, 2005 What is it? Browster is a tool, available only for IE (damn, I just lost half of my readers right there) that pre-fetches content from links on a web page, and makes that content available by mousing-over the link. Too see it visually click here. So we dusted off IE (used only for FTP these days), downloaded 334k of stuff and had at it. Browster allows you to browse search results more quickly and with fewer clicks. Browster will also pre-fetch content from non-search sites if you tell it to (there are a couple of easy ways to do this). There is a nice feature to basically scroll through search results quickly by clicking on an arrow. It’s hard to explain but works very well. Browster has CPC advertisements on the top of its window. I don’t mind the ads, but the copyright holders of the content they are showing may. I also wish they would have focused on Firefox before IE…Even though IE still has a very large market share, it seems like most of the cutting edge users are on firefox, or macs. Not having support for those browsers is a serious mistake because your most important customers (bloggers, for instance) won’t use it. Tom Foremski wrote about Browster a few hours ago and pointed out a number of very serious flaws (we agree with some, disagree with others). At the end of the day, our only real concerns are those mentioned above (browser support and copyright infringement issues). From a business model perspective, there’s very little that’s viral or sticky about the product. That means ultimately their liquidity event valuation may be based on their technology rather than their network. It’s a great tool and as soon as they support firefox I’ll use it regularly. Additional Screen Shots: Management Team: Scott Milener, CEO and co-Founder Jim Kelly, Vice President, Engineering Steven Lurie, Vice President, Business Development Wendell Brown, Chairman and co-Founder John Zeisler,Member, Board of Directors Link Investors: First Round Capital Wendell Brown, co-Founder and Member, Board of Directors John Zeisler, Venture Partner, Gabriel Ventures Ken Sawyer, Managing Director, Saints Ventures Rick Magnuson, former General Partner, Menlo Ventures Robert Simon, General Partner, Alta Partners Links Relevant Links: How it works Faq Press About Investors Management Scott Milener (founder) blog Tags: browster, search, → Read More
Company: Gataga Previous Profiles: June 11, 2005 and June 21, 2005 What Happened? Just as background, Gataga was a wonderful tool for searching multiple tagging services in one go. enter a tag on the command line, and see results from delicious, furl, flickr, etc… See our profiles above more more information. We just received an email from Vic at Gataga: Hi Mike… Just to let you know that we’ve had to take Gataga down for various reasons which I can’t get into now. Thanks for all the help, comments and write ups. We really appreciate it. Vic There’s no additional explanation on their blog. They went right from “We’ve improved the accuracy for bookmark searches” to “We’ve been summoned back to our home planet” Since sites are generally not taken down unless there is legal pressure to do so, our assumption is that Gataga got into some sort of trouble for its service. We do note, however, that Technorati and others have very similar tag searches that show results from other sites. What happened to Gataga? Tags: gataga, search, tags, tagging, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
Service: Wikipedia Created: January 15, 2001 Summary: Wikipedia has been around for over 5 years, is the largest wiki (by far) and serves over 400 million page views per month (to compare, USA Today has about 300 million). Wikipedia is a free, online, user-written encyclopedia in wiki format that was created in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. It has grown at an astonishing rate and now includes 1.6 million articles. More than 600,000 of these are in English, more than 250,000 in German, and more than 100,000 each in Japanese and French (wikipedia has editions in 205 languages, 92 of which are active). Many people don’t realize how easy it is for anyone to add content to wikipedia (I’ve done it several times). Each month, thousands of individuals add content to the project. We are writing about it today because it became the most comprehensive and most reliable center of knowledge as information became available about the London bombings on July 7. We posted about the attacks here, and noted in last weeks Web 2.0 wrapup that while the BBC and other news sites couldn’t keep up, wikipedia marched along without a hiccup and kept the world informed. Clay Shirky spoke about it, and Jim Phelps picked it up here: “Whenever there is a really major disaster but no immediate news, the people on cable are often vamping because they have to keep repeating the basic story on the chance that someone has just tuned in even in the absence of any new information. Wikipedia solves that problem while, at the same time, having a symbiotic relationship with those news outlets because it points people to the written form of stories” See also David Weinberger’s post on this here. For many of us, we started to fully understand the tremendous power of wikipedia as a cultural/knowledge aggregator on July 7, 2005. What are Wikis? A Wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. The first wiki was the Portland Pattern Repository, created on March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham. A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Wikis generally practice the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult → Read More
Service: Planet Web 2.0 Launched: about two weeks ago What is it? Planet Web 2.0 is a website (and more importantly an RSS feed) that aggregates content from web 2.0 publishers around the web. It’s a must add feed for anyone tracking web 2.0. The sources of the content are linked on the sidebar, and include TechCrunch. We first discovered the site while reading Richard MacManus’ excellent and much discussed post “On Bots and Content Creation / Aggregation” last week. We have lots of thoughts on Richard’s post (and generally, entirely agree with him). Our feeling is Planet Web 2.0, which goes out of its way to attribute content, is going about this inevitable evolution in the right way, and we support them. The debate on the issue of re-publishing content goes back as far as the web itself. RSS makes it even easier, of course. In fact, the entire purpose of RSS is the republishing of content. The debate centers on whether it should be republished only in RSS readers, or if it can be republished anywhere. In reality, though, what is the difference between an online RSS reader and a website? Not much, particuarly when you think about how bloglines and other readers allow sharing of feeds… Editor’s Note: To track the “old” debate on RSS and copyright, see Jason Calcanis, Robert Scoble, and Makeyougohmm to start. So here’s TechCrunch’s position: We like Planet Web 2.0 and think what is doing is a responsible way to promote content, while giving proper attribution to those who wrote it. In forming our position, we noted Ian Davis’s (the creator of Planet Web 2.0) comments on Richard’s post: “I think you’re uncovering some essential quality of content remixing that perhaps hasn’t been appreciated before. Aggregating and remixing content needs to be done with respect. We should respect the original author’s intent and also the time and effort they put into creating the content. Repurposing, passing off, non-attribution – these are all disrespectful ways to treat content and people. Hopefully I’m treating the writers with respect on Planet Web 2.0 (and other similar sites I host). Perhaps a little bit more traffic will flow to them or perhaps it’ll help people discover related writers to those they already know. Either way I appreciate the work that goes into the writing and only wish I could write half as well as those I → Read More
Company: Digg Previous Profile: June 18, 2005 Digg 2.0 Launched: 5 hours ago (July 10, 2005) What is it? See our previous profile on Digg for a description of its functionality. Its a very useful news site that leverages user submissions and “diggs” of stories to promote content higher in various categories and the home page. Digg released version 2.0 a few hours ago. New look and feel and expanded functionality. In their own words, “Tons of new features, and a few bugs too Please submit any bugs you find by clicking on “report a website bug” in the lower right hand corner. We will do our best to get them fixed as soon as possible. Thanks and enjoy! (note: minimalist design coming in v2.1)�” Link One nice feature we’ve noticed is the ability to add Digg stories to your own homepage – cool widget. Link Links: Digg Welcome to Digg 2.0 Xtremdav45′s Blog Grevs Dev Blog Jaredm Krenken.com Eric’s blog Phoenixrealm Jake Jarvis (great post) (note Jake’s bio) Tags: digg, digg2.0, slashdot, web2.0, news, tags, tagging, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
Company: Deli.cio.us (new feature) Previous Profile: June 16, 2005 What’s new? Josh Schachter (the creator of del.icio.us) announced new “tags for two” functionality yesterday. It allows direct bookmarket notification to a person, to suggest they see specific content. We first noticed a trend towards people using del.icio.us as a recommendation engine about a month ago. Fred Wilson, in addition to being THE web2.0 venture capitalist, loves music and posts regularly on music he is listening to. On June 4, 2005 he posted a request to his readers to recommend new music to him via del.icio.us: “If you find an mp3 file with its own URL, like my MP3 of the Week, simply tag it in delicious with a tag that is clearly your own. For example, I use “fred’spodcast” as my tag. Feel free to tag mp3s with that tag if you want me to listen to them. Then you take the RSS feed for that delicious tag, in my case http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/fred’spodcast, and burn that as a Feedburner feed.” We noticed it, and sort of put it in the back of our mind filed under “another cool del.icio.us tool”. Fred also set up a del.icio.us tag for his wife, Joanne. Whenever he wants her to see something on the web, he tags it “for:gothamgal”. Brad Feld noticed this, and liked it, and posted here that he set up something similar for himself – “If you run across something on the web you want me to see, just tag it.” All of this got Josh Schachter’s attention and so he created a more structured, and private, way of doing this: “tags for two We’ve just begun rolling out support for tagging items for others. To do so, use “for:username” where username is the name of the user you want to send the item to. You can see items tagged for you at http://del.icio.us/for/ (it’ll redirect to your own page, which other users will not be able to see.)” Link Brad Feld then posted an update to his original request here. So, bottom line, any delicious user can now have a private recommendation tag. To recommend stuff to me, tag it “for:marrington” and I will be able to view it at ” http://del.icio.us/for/marrington” (although this will not be public). It’s a nice feature, although I would like an option to make it public. I think it would be interesting to share these → Read More
Service: Gigablast Blog Search Launched: Recently What is it? Gigablast just launched a beta blog search engine at blogs.gigablast.com. Results can be viewed by “revelvance” or date. There are other advance search options as well. However, there is no “tag” search. Screen Shots: Creator: Matt Wells, CEO (bio) Links: Blog Search Site Press About About.com Tags: gigablast, search, blogsearch, blogs, blogging, mattwells, techcrunch, web2.0, profiles, reviews → Read More
Company: RocketBoom Launched: Located: New York, NY What is it? RocketBoom is a very popular Monday through Friday videoblog, or vblog. The segments are short – around 3 -5 minutes (or less) and released weekdays at 9 am EST. RocketBoom is extremely low-budget – “Instead of costing millions of dollars to produce, Rocketboom is created with a consumer-level video camera, a laptop, two lights and a map with no additional overhead or costs” (Link). In their own words, “Rocketboom is a three minute daily videoblog based in New York City. We cover and create a wide range of information and commentary from top news stories to quirky internet culture. Agenda includes releasing each new clip at 9am EST, Monday through Friday. With a heavy emphasis on international arts, technology and weblog drama, Rocketboom is presented via online video and widely distributed through RSS.” Link RocketBoom anchorwoman Amanda Congdon is the star of the show. She’s an aspiring actress who the Associated Press says first appeared on NBC’s The Restaurant as a disgruntled coat-check girl. For an example of one of the “posts”, see here (Topics: nasa tempe1 smashes into comet, rocketboom fireworks, itunes rss video tutorial, akimbo, akimbo review, karl rove leaks c.i.a. names, google video hacked on first day, google distributes pirated videos, skater trainer, music: [1, 2], apple itunes). Another one, on Tom Cruise (“I’m not gay/scientology tour”) The site has multiple RSS feeds and currently has approximately 25,000 daily downloads. Check it out. It’s one of our regular RSS feeds now. Additional Screen Shots: Link Team: Andrew Baron, creator Amanda Congdon, anchorwoman Joshua Kinberg, regular advisor Frank Lesser, Video editor Field Correspondents Link Links: RocketBoom About Archives Stats Bloggers Blog AP Tags: rocketboom, vblogs, videoblogs, podcasting, review, profile, techcrunch, web2.0, amandacongdon, RSS → Read More
This week we saw a number of interesting web 2.0 developments. Far outstripping everything else, however, was the terrorist attack on London on July 7. Blogs and the Internet played a big role in getting information out to people, as television lagged way behind and the cell networks were jammed. Weekly Summary: 1. Terrorist Attack in London I was flying to Europe for a conference, enjoying my first-ever wifi experience on a plane, when the IMs from friends in London started coming in. “There was an exposion in the tube, they think it was a power converter” one friend said. Then, a few minutes later, “Oh my God, there are reports of explosions everywhere – it may be bus bombs.” Soon I had flight attendants and other flyers coming up to me for updates. The pilot sent a flight attendant back to hear what was happening because she couldn’t get news via radio. I was the only news source on the flight, it seemed. BBC’s website went down from the traffic, and people turned to blogs for the news. Wikipedia was cited as the most up to date source of information. Others blogged about their experiences. From a big media v. blog angle, Fred Wilson summed it up perfectly when he said “This is what its all about and why CNN with its 24×7 news channel is hopelessly out of date.” (linking to Jeff Jarvis). Our heart continues to go out to everyone affected. I was in Manhattan on 9/11. It takes a few days for reality to set in. 2. BlogHerald: Blogs credited for role in promoting record Internet growth Blogherald cited the Netcraft report , which showed the largest-ever month-over-month growth in June 2005 domain names. One of the reasons included “The explosive growth of weblogs, a growing number of which are purchasing domains for branding purposes.” 3. Om Malik on the Power of RSS and the emergence of RSS spam “RSS is to the written word, what TiVo is to television. RSS, has been a ruthlessly efficient and rather simple way to keep in touch with the breaking developments in areas that interest.” However, “Will RSS spam become as much a part of life as say email spam or spyware?”. Also See BusinessWeek for an interesting article on the growth of trackback spam. 4. Ian Davis – “Web 2.0 is an attitude not a Technology” Ian writes → Read More
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