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December 2006

Sunday, December 31, 2006

links for 2007-01-01

Posted at 11:18 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Saturday, December 30, 2006

links for 2006-12-31

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Tagging Site Raw Sugar Tanks, Put Assets Up for Sale

RawSugar, a social bookmark site, has let all of its employees go and has put its core assets up for sale, Haaretz reports. The Israeli startup, which is similar to del.icio.us, digg and other link sharing sites, ran out of resources. The startup was completely self-funded. The RawSugar site remains operational for now. However, according to Haaretz, the founders say it will close in a matter of months.

As history has shown us, the Web is a very transient place. Today's hot site sometimes becomes tomorrow's ghost town. It's hard to maintain leadership. Given today's news and history, it's not that far-fetched for Wired to declare that digg will become the new Friendster. Digg's challenge is to continue to innovate and keep its community in tact. They will have to face the Innovator's Dilemma.

(Special thanks to Rafael Sidi for the link. He's one of my new voices.)

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Posted at 02:50 PM in Tagging, Web 2.0 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (3)

My New Year's Resolution is to Highlight New Voices

My blogging New Year's resolution is to highlight new blogging voices. If you study the Technorati 100 list in 2003 and today you will notice lots of new names pop up. Still, I'm not satisfied.

More than ever I feel the need to expand my RSS reading horizons beyond the Techmeme crowd and in the process highlight some new blogs. I will link to these throughout 2007 via my del.icio.us database with the tag "newvoices." If you have a blog you think I should look at, please upload it to me on del.icio.us with the following tags - for:steverubel and newvoices. Please don't email it, just use del.icio.us and I will spot it in my RSS reader. The del.icio.us links I file away daily are published in my blog every night. I can't link to them all, but will share the gems.

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Posted at 07:22 AM in Tagging, Weblogs | | Comments (10) | TrackBack (4)

"Start Your Own Blogging Business" Book

You know it's a trend when folks like Entrepreneur magazine start selling books like Start Your Own Blogging Business.

Posted at 07:06 AM in Weblogs | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Friday, December 29, 2006

links for 2006-12-30

Posted at 11:18 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Last Silly Blog Meme of 2006

With any luck, What Super Hero Are You should be the last big blog meme of the year. Jason Calacanis is the Green Lantern,  Dave Winer is Iron Man and I am suuupa ....

You are Superman

Superman
95%
Spider-Man
85%
Green Lantern
70%
Supergirl
65%
Iron Man
65%
Robin
60%
The Flash
60%
Wonder Woman
45%
Batman
40%
Hulk
30%
Catwoman
20%
You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

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Posted at 07:26 PM in Weblogs | | Comments (5) | TrackBack (6)

Reuters Schools Us on RSS

Reuters has a good overview article on RSS. It quotes Charlene Li and Jeff Jarvis and throws out this stat: only two percent of online consumers use RSS, according to Forrester, and more than half of that group is 40 years old or younger. The article cites that part of the challenge is the geekiness of it all.

Posted at 02:14 PM in Handy Resources, RSS | | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati, Edelman Work Completed

Edelman and Technorati have concluded our work on global blog search. This was  reported on Gigaom. and elsewhere. However, I want to clarify what Om has written.

The European sites developed in French, German and Italian are operational and being used by our teams. They will be in use through the end of January.

Work on the Asian language sites - Korean and Chinese - has ceased. In China there are access issues and Korea data quality is less than desirable because most blog platforms don't ping. That's the nature of the culture.

Therefore, Edelman and Technorati reached a decision to de-emphasize Asia and focus on Europe. The partnership was never set to renew.

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Posted at 12:47 PM in Search, Shameless Promotion, Weblogs | | Comments (10) | TrackBack (3)

Flickr Adds Search Privacy Feature

Flickr has added a clever feature that lets you hide any image from public searches. Simply look for the link next to the other metadata for your image. You can't do this in batch editing mode yet, just on an image by image basis.

It's unclear if this means the image will be hidden from Web search engines as well as Flickr network queries. Still, it's nice to have an image that you want to keep public just not searchable.

This is an option all of the social networks, media sharing and blog publishing platforms should all have. Flickr's corporate cousin, del.icio.us, has a similar private bookmarking feature. Vox gives you the option to decide who sees your blog posts. But I haven't seen anyone add search opt-out.

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Posted at 11:41 AM in Search, Tagging, Web 2.0 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Review: Lifehacker the Book

The end of the year is when many of us turn our focus to becoming better organized. Lifehacker is the single best resource for identifying new tools and processes that make your life better. Gina Trapani, a virtual friend of mine and its author, has just published her first book and it rocks. I highly recommend it. I keep a copy of it handy alongside a few of my favorite things, pictured above on a quiet December night at home.

Lifehacker:88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day is divided into several chapters that address a specific topic, such as freeing mental RAM, firewalling your attention, taking your data to go and more. Each chapter features a series of hacks.

Some of Gina's hacks - like using a command to track your to-do's in a text file - are above what most people will need. However, others, like working with virtual desktops (Windows and Mac) are outstanding and game changers. The book is cross platform, covering hacks for Windows and Mac. I run both operating systems so I loved how the hacks addresses everyone. It's really handy for anyone who uses a computer to enhance their work or personal lives.

Believe it or not, I also found it handy to have Lifehacker in book form, even though pretty much the entire content of the tome can be accessed online for nada. Pick up a copy today. Your life will thank you.

Posted at 10:48 AM in Gear, Handy Resources | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Yahoo News Takes Message Boards Offline

Yahoo! News has quietly taken its message boards on individual stories offline - at least temporarily. It's unclear when this occured, but it appears to be very recent.

In a letter to readers, General Manager Neil Budde wrote that the message boards "allowed a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion." This is prompting the company to retool the boards so they don't focs on individual stories, but borader topics. The new boards, Budde says, will incorporate the latest features to foster a better discussion for all of our readers. Some on Yahoo Answers are already grumbling.

One would hope that Yahoo News will integrate all of its assets here, including del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers and its recently unveiled citizen journalism effort - You Witness News.

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Posted at 07:04 AM in Journalism | | Comments (11) | TrackBack (1)

Thursday, December 28, 2006

links for 2006-12-29

Posted at 11:17 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Social Media is No Mo

As we conclude 2006 and head into the new year it is my conviction that the phrase "social media" is moot.

Social media, according to Wikipedia, includes "the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other." This includes blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, vlogs and so on. For the last few years this was all considered related to, but separate from mainstream media. That point of differentiation is now gone.

In 2006 all media went social. Pretty much every newspaper, TV network and publication has wholeheartedly embraced these technologies. Newspapers have comments, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and other forms of two-way communications. TV networks have a presence in Second Life and more. The lines have blurred. Even some of the marketers themselves are producing content that could be called "media."

The changes in communications go deeper, however. The media formerly called mainstream also communicates in a far more conversational tone that it did before -- one we use.

Meanwhile, the barriers to becoming a member of the fourth estate have been obliterated by these very same technologies. Look at Robert Scoble's writing this week as he tags along with John Edwards on the campaign trail.

So as we roll into 2007, it's fair to say that "social media" as a separate entity is dead. This will only accelerate as individual publishers add employees and build networks of sites that compete with the big boys. Need proof? Look at what Om Malik and Michael Arrington accomplished this year.

There's no point in differentiating any more. The story that Dan Gillmor chronicled in his landmark 2004 book We the Media has only accelerated. We are all one and it's silly to classify us into two different species.

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Posted at 04:56 PM in Journalism, Marketing, Television, Web 2.0, Weblogs | | Comments (24) | TrackBack (13)

Interview with Folksonomy.org

Folksonomy.org, one of my new favorite blogs, interviewed me via email this week. Their questions:

What is your background, and how did your interests in business, blogging, and marketing develop?

How can a startup company use blogging effectively?

From your personal experience as a blogger, what advice do you have for people looking to start a blog?

What is the most useful piece of advice someone has given you?

What are some mistakes you've made that others could learn and benefit from?

If you could go back ten or fifteen years, is there anything you would do differently, knowing what you know now?

Posted at 04:23 PM in Advertising, Marketing, PR, Shameless Promotion, Web 2.0, Weblogs | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

links for 2006-12-28

Posted at 11:18 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

New Ways to Track Viral Videos

NewTeeVee notes tat both Megite and Tailrank have added video sections. The sites cluster conversations around the most talked about videos.

Posted at 09:02 AM in Search, Video, Weblogs | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

links for 2006-12-27

Posted at 11:18 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Google Reader a Stealth Digg Killer?

Steve Mermelstein wisely states that Google Reader could be a digg killer. The catch is a) people need to be using Google's sharing features and b) they would need to add a feature that displays how many people have shared each post. It occurs to me the same could be said for Google displacing del.icio.us.

I don't see this happening anytime soon, but as Google becomes more integrated in our lives the possibility looks more real. By the way if you want to search your Google Reader feeds you can do so easily using Google Co-op. Handy hack.

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Posted at 05:02 PM in RSS, Tagging | | Comments (15) | TrackBack (6)

Comscore Clings to a Page View World

I have no reason to pick on the fine folks at comScore Media Metrix. However, despite some recent indications that they want to change, it seems as though they are clinging to the days of yore when hits were all that ruled.

Consider this analysis published yesterday by Ars Technica. The piece reports: "comScore has said that they are working on new metrics that will also take into account the trappings of Web 2.0, including interactive AJAX-driven web pages which do not necessarily generate page views." That doesn't sound like bad news, right? Wrong.

Further down in the piece Dr. Magid Abraham, President and CEO of comScore Networks, added: "While page views will not altogether cease to be a relevant measure of a site's value, it's clear that there is an increasing need to consider page views alongside newer, more relevant measures." Abraham, however, doesn't say what that solution is. The reason could be such metrics could have severe ramifications for comScore's business model, which feeds off a hit-driven economy that's dying.

Comscore needs to wake up and realize that we're in a Long Tail world where top 10 lists matter less. Marketers want to know about the influence circles within the niches that matter to them - and those niches are often tiny. The time is now for comScore to open up to the little guy.

Quantcast is going to eat comScore's lunch. They recognize that partnering with the crowd is essential to measuring it. Comscore seems to slow to adopt to this model and it's highly possible they will become irrelevant in this world if they don't change fast.

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Posted at 11:21 AM in Advertising, Marketing, Research, Web 2.0 | | Comments (14) | TrackBack (2)

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