Three sites I use often are Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular. If you want to find out what’s hot right now on the Internet, those sites will tell you (although Memeorandum usually gets the news even before these sites). I saw a blurb on Programmable Web about DiggDot.us, which launched yesterday. Diggdot.us combines results from all three of those sites into one very clean interface. Stories have been de-duplicated, and they claim to have additional content as well. Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular – this is a constant browsing cycle for us. So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome? We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities. If you are a news junkie, this is for you. Or at least, it will be once they have an RSS feed. Shame. → Read More
I’m a sucker for good looking Flash sites, and Frederic Vavrille’s LivePlasma, based in France, is a great one. He’s mashed up the Amazon recommendation API for music and movies to visually show the relationship between bands/artists/movies. The results are very relevant and there are links to purchase anything you see that you want. Thanks Alarm Clock for pointing to this. → Read More
Riffs, a review site for anything, launched quietly last week. It takes a hybrid wiki/social bookmarking approach. Any user can add a URL to begin a discussion (or just begin a discussion without a URL), and the Riffs community votes on the thing and discusses it in wiki fashion. All pages have RSS and the clean interface has some great Ajax features. Riffs also has tagging, including “common tags”, which I think is interesting. So why don’t I like it? It’s centralized content. All of the content resides on Riff’s servers and they require people to go to the site (in one way or another) to add content to the discussion. And in this case it seems absolutely crazy to architect their service this way. Reviews are everywhere on the web today. And the most exciting place to find reviews in on blogs. Try it – search on “whatever” and “review” and you’ll see thousands upon thousands of high quality reviews on just about anything all over the blogosphere. Riffs approach is to try to get in the middle and generate a centralized discussion by people who want to talk about a subject. They are staying as open as possible by creating RSS feeds for each page, and my understanding is that they may be creating tools to allow people to push the content they create at Riffs out to their blog, like flickr does. And it seems to me this is their core mission – to become the flickr of reviews. Not “flickr” in the joking way that everyone says when something is trying to be the cool new web 2.0 application, but literally, the place people put their review content and then pull it out for their blog if they choose to do so. Fred Wilson writes about the service and addresses points similar to those above that I made on CrunchNotes and Jeff Jarvis made on his blog. Jeff and my point: Blogs are the place to write content. Microformats and tagging will help people do this. My additional point: And they already are doing it, at massive scale. Fred’s retort:: But as a content creator living on the edge, I am not sure we are ready for microformats and tags and social interaction to do all the work for us. We’ll get there, I am sure of that, but we need an interim step and that → Read More
AjaxWhois is similar to a site I wrote about a week ago called Instant Domain Search. Ajaxwhois is similar to Instant Domain Search in that it has a nice Ajax interface. It’s has better functionality, though, because it pulls whois information directly into the results page and allow queries on top level domains beyond .com and .net (it even returned information for .name). While there is no link to register a domain (an easy addition), overall its a better tool for domain professionals. From Steven Cohen. → Read More
We reached a new milestone in our ongoing experiment to see how many people can fit inside my house before the police come and arrest me: over 250 last night (previous record was 200ish) at the Riya Launch Party. The thing I liked best about this party was that Tara Hunt from Riya and Andrea Reinhardt from Just Starting Up took care of everything – Fifty something pizzas, 20 or more cases of beer, wine and champagne, bags and bags of ice, the A/V system for the demo and tons of tshirts and stickers. Tom Conrad from Pandora chipped in with a complete music system. And it was a great crowd. My pictures from the event are here. Here’s everyone’s tagged “TechcrunchMeetup4“. The rumors about a Google acquistion were neither confimed nor denied by anyone in the know…but there sure is a lot of buzz around this company right now. Things I loved about the event: Riya rocks and now even more people know about it My Dad flew in for the party and saw what this web 2.0 stuff is all about (on left in picture) My dog Laguna is still alive As far as I know, Dorrian didn’t park in my yard this time Lots of cool companies besides Riya came and showed their stuff in the demo room Things that weren’t as great about the event: Fifty something empty pizza boxes and 20 something cases of empty beer and wine bottles scattered around my lawn this morning Somebody drank all of my scotch again The Atherton police set up a sobriety checkpoint around the corner from my house Gabe, Richard, Fred and others were out of town and couldn’t make it That’s it for parties this year. The next one should be in January or February. I can’t say what it is yet but I will say that it involves a launch party again…this time for a book. Other mentions of the party (send me an email or trackback to this post): Jack Arrington Shel Israel Robert Scoble Scott Beale Jeff Clavier Joseph di Paolantonio Clarise Z. Doval Santos the egoist Expert Texture Christian Sepulveda UPDATE 11/24/05: Enric has a video of Tara’s Riya demo up on his site. → Read More
Strong rumors are afoot that Skype version 1.5 with video will be launching before Christmas. They are clearly behind the schedule announced in September at VON Boston, which anticipated v 1.5, with video and other features, in October. → Read More
Waxmail is a great productity tool that allows you to attach mp3 audio files to an email. We first wrote about Waxmail late last month when they released their Outlook product. Waxmail just announced that they now have support for Outlook Express. I’m hoping they include other email applications over time – like Mail and Entourage for the Mac. A lot of people overlooked Waxmail as just another audio recording tool. But I’ve found that I use it more and more often. There is just something very cool about recording a quick sound file to accompany certain emails. It’s sometimes easier to say what you think sometimes rather than write it. It’s especially useful when emailing a picture, chart or other visual document that needs commentary. Best of all, it’s completely free. Try it out if you use outlook or outlook express. It’s really easy to use. → Read More
As many of you know, writing TechCrunch is and has been a hobby/obsession of mine for over 5 months now. To this point, TechCrunch has not generated revenue of any kind, other than a couple of thousand dollars paid by sponsors of our third meetup to offset party costs. Revenue generation from advertising isn’t and won’t be the primary goal of this site because the value of TechCrunch isn’t in page views, but in networking (I agree with Dave Winer almost entirely on this). However, I’ve had the opportunity to join John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing along with a number of really great blogs. The main reason I’ve done this is to associate with these other blogs and cross pollinate ideas. Another benefit of the network is that they seek out appropriate advertisers for blogs. As part of my commitment to FM Publishing I’ll be placing some ads on TechCrunch. I’d like to get feedback from TechCrunch readers on how they feel about this. In addition, I’d like to get an understanding of what types of advertisements you may actually find useful. If you have a moment, please also fill out this survey to help FM Publishing better match advertisers to you. So hammer away. Comments are unmoderated and open. → Read More
Rumors are flying this morning that Riya (a killer photo facial recognition startup) has been or is being acquired by Google in the $40 million range. See Om Malik, Niall Kennedy and Paul Kedrosky. Even though everyone is blogging about it, this is nothing more than a rumor at this point. It is a rumor, however, that has been confirmed to me by employees of companies that were also apparently in the hunt for Riya but dropped out after the price became too rich. These rumors will certainly make Riya’s launch party at my house tomorrow night even more interesting. I want to stress that even though I know the Riya folks and even though I am hosting their launch party, I have no direct confirmation of the deal from them (and yes, I’ve tried). They are silent on this, which is understandable whether the rumor is accurate or not. I tested Riya last month and came away very impressed. See my profile here. Riya has solid technology and an impressive team. → Read More
Gawker, a blog network similar to Weblogs, Inc., and Yahoo announced a syndication deal today that brings Gawker content to Yahoo News. Content from the largest Gawker blogs is already included – Wonkette, Gizmodo, Defamer, Lifehacker, and Gawker itself. More may be coming. The financial terms are undisclosed, but here’s what is now on Yahoo: Gawker brands and content are pushed throughout the news home page. Clicking on associated content pulls up a Yahoo page with the Gawker content (example). It does NOT redirect to Gawker. There is a single link to Gawker on the content page (clicking on the brand name). Otherwise, it’s an all-Yahoo experience. If I was doing the deal, I’d expect a revenue split in Yahoo’s favor on ad revenue generated from the page. Gawker gets that revenue, the branding, and some links directly to the blog. This is purely speculation, but my best guess. Is this an important deal? Yes, in that it shows Yahoo embracing blog content. The guy at Yahoo to get to know is clearly Scott Moore, named by Wired in their last print edition as VP Content Operations. Scott is hiring bloggers (such as Kevin Sites) and doing these kinds of deals with Gawker. These are smart deals for Yahoo – they generate page views where they can put lots of ads. If the deals are revenue share, then it’s a no lose proposition for Yahoo. But what Yahoo is noticeably not doing is acquiring Gawker, like AOL did with Weblogs, Inc. That means liquidity events for bloggers are limited – the GYMs (Google-Yahoo-Microsoft) are not yet in content buying moods. So perhaps the networks and very large blogs can cut deals to increase page views on content and generate revenue. Will this model work for the long or medium tail of blog content? My guess is no…the GYMs will want to control quality and that doesn’t scale with more than a small number of blogs. But certainly we’ll see more deals like this, particularly as long as the advertising market is strong and demand for inventory is outstripping supply. The portals need content, and this is a cheap way to get it. A lot of people are focusing on the fact that the deal is incorporating blog content directly into Yahoo news results. While I find this interesting, we’ve already seen Yahoo experiment with this with their blog search product. → Read More
Eurekster’s Swicki search service officially launches later today (November 16, 2005). Eurekster, a twenty person company located in San Francisco and New Zealand, has a profitable business (called Search Publisher) that provides customized search results to a number of large websites. Steven Marder, Eurekster’s CEO, tells me Eurekster’s current products are generating 25+ million monthly searches. With Swickis, they’ve taken the basic technology and added on a “do it yourself” interface to allow a much larger number of sites, particularly blogs, to also integrate search direclty into their content. Swicki’s are “community powered” in a sense and their website focuses on this. What is a swicki? A swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results. This search engine, or swicki, can be published on your site. Your swicki presents search results that you’re interested in, pulls in new relevant information as it is indexed, and organizes everything for you in a neat little customizable widget you can put on your web site or blog, complete with its very own buzz cloud that constantly updates to show you what are hot search terms in your community. And certainly the community has a role in creating more relevant results. But what really interests me about their technology is that the tweaking by the publisher along with community actions combine to create extremely contextual, or hyper-contextual (my words, not theirs), search results. Two somewhat different examples of live Swickis (they’ve been in private beta for a while): see our Web 2.0 Workgroup (scroll down a bit) and Jeff Clavier‘s right sidebar. Swicki’s are based on Yahoo’s search API for base results. The publisher customizes the search engine by adding keywords that are always added to the search results. And, in a similar way to Rollyo, Swickis allow for the publisher to name specific websites that have content relevant to the search. For instance, a gaming site may include other gaming website URLs as important, and Swicki will put results from those sites on the top. A publisher can also block results from certain blogs. For our Workgroup, we selected all participating site URLs as the most relevant content. Swicki’s also have a related “buzzcloud”, which is → Read More
Google Blog officially announces the launch of Google Base. We previously anticipated the launch of Google Base (along with everyone else) in late October. Bottom Line: This is not a very interesting application in its current form. Keith Teare says it’s like a 1985 dBASE file with less functionality. It’s ugly. It’s centralized content with less functionality than ebay or craigslist. The content is not integrated directly into Google search results, but “relevance” can bump it up into main and local search (and froogle). Rob Hof’s at Business Week is also blase about it. He says “eBay and others may not have much to fear just yet” Additional information and FAQs on Google Base in the About section. Features: Cost: Free Item types accepted: All types of online and offline information and images Languages: You can submit your information in many languages; the Google Base interface, however, including the Help Content, is currently available only in English, English UK and German. Reach: Items you submit to Google Base can be found on Google Base and, depending on their relevance, may also appear on Google properties like Google, Froogle and Google Local. How it’s different: Google Base enables you to add attributes that better describe your content so that users can easily find it. The more popular specific attributes become, the more often we’ll suggest them when others post the same items. Similarly, items that become more popular will show up as suggested item types in the Choose an existing item type drop down menu. There are two ways to upload data – a web interface for one item at a time and a bulk uploading option to send content in XML. I’ve tested Google Base out. The general idea is that you pick a category for your post. There are suggested categories – course calendars, events and activities, jobs, reviews, wanted ads, etc. You can also create your own category. Each category has its own fields to ease data input. For instance, the “vehicles” category includes fields for vehicle type, year, make, etc. You fill out any or all of these fields, add additional fields (called “attributes”) if you choose, and add a title, description and keywords (tags). You can also upload a picture or point to a picture on the web. I found a few bugs in this form. For instance, adding “techcrunch” as a tag failed because it → Read More
TechWeb’s Second Annual BLOGX Award is now in the final stage. Vote for your favorite blog here. → Read More
Yahoo Shoposphere launches tonight (well, officially at 6 am EST tomorrow, but I’ve gotten permission to write about it tonight). I met with Rob Solomon, Yahoo’s GM of Shopping, and Sabrina Crider, a Yahoo PR Manager, last week to take it for a test drive. Yahoo is making a major push into search personalization and recommendations – the overall project is called “Shoposphere” and the major feature being released is called “Pick Lists“. Their goal is to move ecommerce towards what they call “me commerce”. Any registered Yahoo user can create a Pick List. Get on the Shoposphere…Make a Pick List Pick Lists let you share the stuff you love and the stuff that matters to you with everyone or your friends… on the Shoposphere, throughout Yahoo! Shopping, by email, and even through RSS feeds. Make a good one and it could even show up as one of the highest rated Pick Lists on the Shoposphere. Yahoo has allowed users to create “uber lists” of bookmarked shopping items for a few weeks now. Items may be saved to a public or private list. Pick Lists are a subset of these uber lists. A user selects any number of items from the 75+ million unique products in the Yahoo Shopping catalog, names the list, adds ratings and comments for each item, and publishes it to a permanent URL. My “Web 2.0 Gadgets” Pick List can be viewed here. Like the list? Say yes or no and vote on it. Want to leave a comment? Add it at the bottom. Really like it? Subscribe to the RSS! The more people that vote for a Pick List, the higher it will appear in the Shoposphere. Tagging and Revenue Sharing There are a couple of features being added in the near future. The first is tagging – all lists will be able to be tagged by users and the list creator for easier search (compare this to Amazon Tags, which I wrote about earlier today). The second upcoming feature is revenue sharing. Yahoo expects many users to promote their Pick Lists and some will generate significant traffic. Yahoo Shopping earns revenue a number of ways from its shopping platform – clicks to vendors, overture ads, etc. They plan to share some of these revenue streams with Pick List publishers, giving publishers a bigger incentive to publicize these on their websites. Yahoo will provide promotion → Read More
Amazon is integrating user tagging into product pages (see image below). Tags are public by default and can be managed under a “your tags” area that I am failing to find. You must first select a “Real Name” (odd choice of names given the old company called RealNames). Once you’ve signed up and started adding tags, you can delete them or make them private in the management area. Amazon tags will make it easier for you and others to find relevant content. I wonder how they are going to handle spam tagging and other bad content, though?. Another, possibly more interesting feature would be to allow publisher tagging. The tags would likely be more relevant (and spam easier to track). See Richard MacManus for more on Amazon Tags. → Read More
Google took the wrapper off Analytics today. It is a rebranding of their Urchin acquisition from earlier this year. It works in much the same way as MeasureMap – using it requires the addition of javascript into a couple of files on your blog. It has deep integration into Adwords as well. Google Analytics is mostly free (up to 5 million page views per month), or completely free if you are an adwords user. Registration for Analytics is currently suspended but I’ll be doing a full side by side review against Measure Map in the next day or two. The screen shot provided by Google (to left) is encouraging. One thing I’d like to understand is whether Google Analytics takes a holistic approach to blog analytics like Measure Map does, or whether it is a more generic application for measuring general website statistics. Measure Map is awesome at monitoring traffic at the post and comment level and has used flash and Ajax integration in a very intelligent way. More on the Meme. UPDATE: The site has been down all day and they have suspended registrations for now. The bigger problem appears to be that Google didn’t notify Urchin’s paid subscribers ($200/month) that the change was going to happen, and those subscribers have no access to their data right now. Ethan Stock tells the story and he is pissed off. Google isn’t acting like a real business, they are acting like an over-enthusiastic Golden Retriever puppy. Oh, they just knocked the vase off the table with their tail, but aren’t they cute? Um, no. Google, grow up. → Read More
I just heard about songbird, which should be launching in December. I have very little information on it currently. Whatever it is (client? Web app?), it looks like a music/podcast player of some sort and it’s certainly visually appealing. More (perhaps) on this later. You can sign up for Songbird announcements here. → Read More
Instant Domain Search is a great, simple Ajax tool for finding available .com and .net domain names. Enter a desired domain, and results appear instantly as you type. There are links to Yahoo and Register.com if a domain is available and you’d like to register it. If the domain is not available there are links to the whois registration information. This is a useful and timesaving tool for people who buy a lot of domains. One thing I’d like to see is a backorder link for domains that are already registered. → Read More
Santa Monica based Tagworld has been quietly beta testing its product for a few months, and officially opened its doors earlier this week. They now have 75,000 members and are growing by thousands per day. The funny thing is that I had never heard of them before last week when I was contacted by Carmen Hughes of ignitepr for a preview. Tagworld is a huge project. At its core it is a blogging platform, and at first glance it appeared to be a sort of advanced Myspace or Tagged – a blogging platform that would ultimately appeal to teens and college students as its core market. But after meeting the founders and getting a first hand look at the deep features, it’s clear that it is more than just the next teen blogging hangout. There are advanced features that will appeal to a much larger audience. The site is still rough and a number of features are buggy. But given their early subscriber growth, it appears that they are on to something interesting. Tagworld was founded by Fred Krueger and Evan Rifkin, two serial entrepreneurs who’ve had a string of successful liquidity events. They’ve self funded Tagworld, which is six months old and has 20 employees. The site is going to try to own just about every web 2.0 experience of its users – blogging, bookmarking, photos and other media files, file storage, and tagging. They say they are going to have open data in and out, meaning if a user is really attached to say, Flickr, they’ll be able to integrate with those photos seemlessly. And they’ll have RSS and APIs to send data out. But their clear goal, as Fred said when we met, is to replace del.icio.us, flickr and blogger (among other services) for its users. All features are free to users (other than extended file storage); Tagworld makes its money from integrated advertising. Blogging Tagworld has a solid blogging platform that is based on user-included widgets (posts, pictures, tags, friends, media player, maps, etc.). Designing the site is done through an Ajax interfact that allows dragging and dropping for quick organization. The platform is based on widget objects. There are a bunch of widgets that have already been included (such as those mentioned in the paragraph above), and there is an API for third parties to create their own and share them on Tagworld. Blogs are → Read More
Tomorrow, November 11, is TechCrunch‘s five month anniversary – my first company profile (Technorati) was on June 11, 2005. I’ve been blogging personally for some time but this was my first attempt to write for an audience larger than my immediate family and friends. It’s been a wonderful experience – and I have countless new friends (bloggers, readers, entrepreneurs, journalists and venture capitalists) that I’ve met directly or indirectly through writing TechCrunch. If you’d like to know why I started TechCrunch and how it’s evolved, please read my post here on the companion blog I started, CrunchNotes (CrunchNotes is where I write about stuff that interests me but that doesn’t strictly belong on TechCrunch). I thought I’d share some TechCrunch stats that I find interesting. Audience Readers have grown at a pretty steady rate. I think this is a reflection of general growth in the blogosphere, and the fact that I am writing about all of the interesting new companies that are popping up on the web. To really understand web 2.0, you have to look at the companies. That’s all I do here. We’ve grown to about 9,000 daily RSS readers. Page views swing wildly from day to day depending on what links are coming in. (from feedburner) Feed Reader Breakdown I really like seeing where the rss readers are reading my feeds. These also change around a bit, but the current breakdown (rounded up or down) is: Bloglines -23% Firefox Live is – 10% NetNewsWire – 9% Rojo – 9% Google IG – 8% Pluck – 7% Remaining – 34% (from feedburner) Browser Share I’ve always found it interesting that Firefox is the most popular browser of TechCrunch readers, even though their total market share is only around 10%. This stuff has to scare Microsoft…blog readers are the early adopters. (from measuremap) Most Popular Posts These are the ten most popular TechCrunch posts: Google Lunch 85% of College Students Use Facebook First Screen Shots of Riya Windows Live – More than an Ajax Desktop Comparing the Flickrs of Video New Yahoo Maps Shows Power of Flash Top 5 Web 2.0 Venture Capitalists Google Targets Del.icio.us First Screen Shots of Sphere Flock Has Launched (from measuremap) I want to thank everyone that reads this blog, has been written about in this blog, and the many people who’ve taken the time to link, comment and give me advice. I’ll keep → Read More
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
