November 2008
links for 2008-11-30
Double down? Spin in? New questions for a new economy » VentureBeat Spin-in = company founded by a parent, which is ‘spun in’ (reabsorbed) is things go well. (tags: spin-in investment vc)
Halley Suitt And Mary Hodder Smack Down Glenn...
I have commented recently on the newly-commonplace coldbloodedness that all the gung ho entrepreneurs and investors are spouting, where an eagerness to cut the throats of employees is now seen as a mandate from heaven and a civic virtue. As I twittered a few weeks ago:
[from 11:45 AM November 18, 2008 from web in reply to khartline]
@khartline I am sick of the macho ‘shoot the...
OneRiot: Me.dium Goes Las Vegas
Me.dium, the social search plugin (see Social Search: Google And Me.dium), has relaunched its technology and branding as OneRiot. They have dropped the plugin part, and are using the base technology to support a search page, with results based on the actions of all the folks who are using their new browser search bar. Basically, they are now scouring the web for the most sensationalist...
Deadpool: Chirp Desktop
I was wandering through my applications folder, trying to take out the trash. I couldn’t even remember what Chirp was. I clicked and it opened up, and started by displaying a spinning arrow. Nothing happened.
A quick search led me to discover that Chrip was a social networking based app, a screensaver that would display Flickr pictures and Facebook posts from friends. It is dead now,...
Dopplr: Building A Social Atlas
Marko Ahtisaari pinged me the other day, letting me know that the public tips in Dopplr are now being displayed as a sort of social atlas:
DOPPLR: San Francisco, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Here’s what they say at the Dopplr blog:
A few weeks ago we mailed everyone who had contributed a tip to Dopplr and asked if they would prefer to keep what they had posted private to only...
Edmodo: Educational Microstreaming... And More?
I recently stumbled upon Edmodo, which is a clever and lean microstreaming application designed for education. The basic premise is that teachers can signup, and invite students to ‘groups’ (which should be called ‘classes’, I guess).
One of the things that is attractive about Edmodo is that there is not very much you can do. Teachers can create groups (presumably...
Unintended Consequences, Thanks To Delicious
The ripples from my recent stolen Mac episode continuing to spread. I changed a number of passwords, including to Typepad, just in case. And it was only today, when I noticed that Delicious didn’t seem to be posting my bookmarks to Typepad, that I remembered that I had to update the password in the Delicious settings. Of course, Delicious didn’t alert me to the fact that posts...
Remote Security
I wish my stolen Mac had a program like this on it:
[from Notebook Security]
[…]
Known as the Lenovo Constant Secure Remote Disable, it was a joint effort with Phoenix Technologies, and sending the text message “lockdown PC now” or “PC shut off” to the PC’s onboard mobile broadband service will automatically prevent unauthorized access to the...
Deadpool: MyQuire
The project management site, MyQuire, is being acquired and shut down, I was informed today by email from “David, Michael, and the MyQuire Team”.
Deadpool: 7tasks
Looks like 7tasks, a ‘free lightweight simple to use to do list application’ (eHub) has joined the deadpool.
Yahoo And AOL: A Marriage Of Convenience Or A...
Apparently, the now ancient discussions between Yahoo and Time Warner about the possible acquisition of AOL by Yahoo are still moving along, glacially. Kara Swisher reports that the deal is stalled by a gap of a billion in price:
[from Update on the AOL-Yahoo Deal: “Like Trying to Catch a Falling Knife”]
Yahoo wants to pay about $3 billion to $4 billion dollars, while Time Warner wants $5...
MicroPR: A Way To Connect Journalists, Analysts,...
Brian Solis is announcing our MicroPR project, which is intended to make things easier — and more concise — for bloggers, analysts, and journalists who are trying to collaborate and coordinate. We are harnessing Twitter as the premier microstreaming platform.
As Brian explains it:
[from Introducing MicroPR, A PR Resource for Journalists, Analysts and Bloggers on Twitter]
...
Slow Money: A Modest Proposal At Change.org
Ben Rattray, the CEO of Change.org, asked me to submit a proposal for the Ideas For Change In America that will be delivered to President-elect Obama is some fashion. My proposal is an outgrowth of something I wrote the other day at /Ground, the sister blog to /Message, about Slow Money (see The Slow Money Movement: Demassifying Retail). Here’s the proposal:
Slow Money
Many ...
Apple's Black Friday
The word is that Apple is planning a big discount on Apple product this Black Friday, starting at midnight Thursday. I am in the market for a replacement for my new Macbook unibody, since the last one was nabbed in Paris two weeks ago.
Apple’s Black Friday, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I wonder though: what are the deals going to be like after Christmas, if the economy...
2 tags
Fred Wilson on Making Twitter Smarter, And More...
Fred Wilson mentioned a real breakthrough in the use of Twitter — and by extension, other microstreaming applications. The guys at Stocktwits (see Twitter Is The New Bloomberg) have created a Firefox extension that makes ‘tickers’ — the acronyms associated with stocks — active links pointing to the corresponding pages at Stocktwits.
As Fred puts it, this makes...
Social Parenting: From Cradle To College
modify remove organize post follow up
I have recently been bumping into all sorts of new parenting tools, and not because I am a parent myself. My sons, Keenan and Conrad, are pretty far along: Keenan is in college in Chicago, and Conrad is in his senior year of high school. While I have indulged in a moderate among of parental frenzy over the years — six...
Twitter Acquires Rael Dornfest
I am glad I didn’t continue in my attempts to make Rael Dornfest’s Stikkit personal organizer work, because he’s joining Twitter, and Ev Williams and company are retiring Stikkit and Ask Sandy, an email tool, that Rael’s Values of N company had developed.
Rael has a strange genius about the tinkery edges of personal productivity, so I bet he’ll be cooking up...
Lars Hinrich Stepping Down At Xing, Stefan...
Lars Hinrich, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Some of you may recall my ‘experiential marketing’ project with Xing a few years ago, where i tried — week after week, for two months — to use Xing as a social networking tool. I was stymied by both the bureaucratic mindset of the company and the poor design of the site. Check out a few of my posts about the...
Regulation And Financial Innovation
I hope that Obama’s financial advisors can carve out some time to think about the future — once they tackle the enormous slag heap that the financial markets are today — and invite forward looking brainiacs like Fred Wilson to sit at the table. He recently suggested that the regulations that block individual investors from investing in innovative startups are the same ones...
Typepad Still Stuck In Second Gear
I am baffled with all the Six Apart restructuring — launching an ad network, building Blogs.com — that basic stupidities in the Typepad UI never seem to get fixed.
Consider the Typelists, so-called, that are provided so users can ‘easily’ add information to their sidebars. I have one called Events, and I would like to be able to update events that I will be attending....
New Drop.io UI
New Drop.io UI, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Drop.io has announced a new, much more attractive UI (above). However, many of the concerns I had after using the product extensively a few months back remain (see A Deep Dive Into Drop.io). For example, the identity model is weird, and as a result it’s impossible to know who has posted, uploaded, or commented in...
Fleck: More Social Sprawl
Fleck.com - Users, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I think that Fleck is too sprawling — overlaps too many areas with other well-established tools — for me to use it. It is a URL shortener, and so I think of it as an alternative for Bit.ly. But then I logged in, and see that it is a bookmark tool — collides with Delicious — and has a social network built in!...
Twitter To Go It Alone, Leaves Facebook Deal On...
I have stopped using Facebook, basically. And while my personal preferences in social tools shouldn’t really be taken as some reflection of where the population of users are headed, my instincts are that I am a bellwether, an indication of things to come.
Facebook’s model of interaction and the user experience has a very established model, one in which Facebook intrudes too...
My6Sense
Despite the famous movie, balance is generally considered to be the sixth sense, not talking to dead people. (Some argue for ESP or proprioception.)
Balance is a great metaphor for what My6Sense is designed to do. It is a mobile filtering application — running on iPhone in the current beta — that takes all sorts of streams, and over time learns your preferences, filtering the...
Microfying /Message
Since I have had my DNA washed in the spirit of microstreaming — through Twitter and Tumblr — I am carrying the trend back to the mainstream of my life /Message (and /Ground, too, I bet).
It’s going to be a very different experience in the future.
It won’t be 140 character microblurbs, but I will be trying to coopt some of the immediacy that makes twitter and tumblr...
Futuresonic 13-16 May 2009 Manchester UK
Futuresonic | Home, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Looks like I will be involved with the Futuresonic festival next year, in the UK. I don’t know exactly what I will be doing, but my hunch is that I will be talking about how the web is changing us. Something more enigmatic than the usual analytic sort of talk I have been doing. Something with a soundtrack.
“We invented the...
Why I Am Obsessed With Tumblr, And Why That...
I have been grooving on Tumblr a lot recently (examples are based on my /ambivalence blog, now called Underpaid Genius). I think the combination of following a bunch of extremely visually oriented Tumblr blogs, along with the experience of posting a lot of images — in my case, things I have found on the web, screenshots of movies, or others Tumblr postings — has an almost hypnotic...
Multiscreen Mad Men: The End Of Flow
The words just jumped on the page this morning: The End Of Flow. “The end of flow?” I though, “But there is more and more flow. More people moving into a flow experience of the wold through new media.” And then I read on, and saw that what the various participants were saying was exactly that: They are leaving the flow that advertisers want to lay down, and into their...
Teenagers Are Not Being Driven Crazy By The Web
It’s nice to see some levelheaded research into what really goes on with teenagers and the web, instead of the usual Sunday supplement nonsense about predators, IM giving you the attention span of a flea, and how everything you put in your Facebook page will be there forever and lead to you not getting the big job after school.
The MacArthur Foundation has sponsored a serious...
Springpad: A Personal Information Manager
Springpad is a new web-based personal organizer, sharing vague similarities with my current favorite, Backpack (that I reviewed at length recently, Backpack: A Digital Version Of A Miscellaneous Drawer). Even though Springpad incorporates some cool ideas, several requirements are just missing that make it impossible to shift over, as much as I might like to. (Note: I also experimented with...
The Hills Backchannel: More Social TV
Someone (I forget who) pointed out the MTV show, the Hills, which is running a twitter backchannel as a game called ‘Backchannel’ while episodes are aired on the website.
The Hills Backchannel Version (Season 4) | Ep. 12 | ‘I Want You To Be With Me’ | MTV, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
The best comments are selected and added to The Hills User Comment edition, ...
Version 1.0 Blog: My First Post
I will be writing over at the GlobalLogic Version 1.0 blog starting this week. I have been advising GlobalLogic, a leader in global software development services, on the company’s Version 1.0 initiative which targets startups and new product development. I plan to discuss product development and enterprise 2.0 issues there, but obviously will continue to blog actively here, as well.
My...
Bethany Klein on Pop Music, Advertising, Labels,...
Matt Palmquist of Miller-McCune interviews Bethany Klein of the University of Leeds regarding the interplay of pop music and advertising. (via Snarkmarket, who says about Miller-McCune, “Miller-McCune is also just an intriguing journalistic model: a foundation+subscription-supported magazine about the intersection between academic research and current social issues/problems, like a...
Kevin Marks on Blogging's Not Dead
Last week, Kevin Marks responded to the recent stream of invective about the death of blogging (Wired, Economist), and said this:
[from Epeus’ epigone: Blogging’s not dead, it’s becoming like air]
What has happened since [the widestream adoptiong of blogging] is that the practices of blogging have become reified into mainstream usage. Through social networks and Twitter...
Social Media PR Playbook: Thoughts
guest post by Adrian Chan
I’ve been gestating ideas for the past several days around ways to use social media for PR purposes that would exceed the normal use of social media tools to print and distribute PR messaging. It strikes me that PR agencies are well positioned to understand client needs and interests, brand and message, and also how best to craft and roll out story lines....
Patti Anklam's Dream
@panklam twittered she had a dream:
[from Twitter / panklam]
dreamed I was back at college, taking a class from Stowe Boyd, who had a shape shifting animal. class definitely in the flow
I guess the flow meme is getting rooted in people’s deepest consciousness.
links for 2008-11-11
Spot.us - Read A Story Neat idea: allow people to pledge money towards stories they would like to see reported. We’ll see. The lag time might be a serious problem. (tags: spot.us local+journalism)
The Economist Gets It Dead Wrong On Social Media - FAIL Karl Long batters the Economist for their ‘Oh Grow Up’ piece about blogging. Kevin Marks is cited. (tags: karl+long...
links for 2008-11-10
PR 2.0: Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals Brian Solis compiled a long, long list of twitter tools. (tags: twitter)
Scott Karp on Networked Newspapers
After a tremendous analysis of the superfluity of newspapers in the Web economy — stating that despite journalists’ and publishers’ sense of entitlement newspapers don’t have a workable business model — Scott Karp goes on to stub his toe:
[from The market and the internet don’t care if you make money]
So what does the market care about?
Networks.
The web...
links for 2008-11-09
Did Kevin Rose Take Some of Digg’s New Cash? - GigaOM Google apparently has walked away from acquisition of Digg. Maybe they don’t like the fact that 1% of the users are generating 32% of the visits: the black market of paid Digglers. Also seems that Kevin Rose has taken out some cash in the recent $30M round. Smart. Might never see that valuation again. (tags: digg google...
Reflections on Social Media's Next Phase
guest post by Adrian Chan
While it may be tough times for many social media startups, there could be a silver lining in the industry’s future. Interest in social media doesn’t appear to be waning, and in fact this week there’s been a growing realization in the mainstream media that social media played a significant role in Barack Obama’s campaign success. If the...
Albert Maruggi on Social Media
[from Marketing Edge]
[…] I believe social media is more a movement than a market because this exchange of ideas, information and the relationships it creates, regardless of how superficial, is emotionally and intellectually rewarding. It is both instantly gratifying and has potential for long-term benefits.
The movement is about pursuit of information to find either the truth or...
links for 2008-11-08
Top 150 Social Marketing Blogs « eCairn’s Blog /Message identified as #43 in “Top 150 Social Marketing Blogs”. Yay! (tags: marketing blogging social+media social+marketing /message)
Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 “Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the...
Get Satisfaction Announces Socialized Ad Policy
Get Satisfaction is going to start displaying (and making money from) ads on the popular social gripe site, but in a very clever way:
[from Demand Satisfaction! » We Now Have Ads (Although You May Never See Them) by Eric Suesz]
Here’s the way our new ads work: If you’re logged in to Get Satisfaction, you won’t see them. If you’re curious, they are text ads, of the familiar...
links for 2008-11-07
Dex: The business ‘poke’ | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET Rafe seems to like Dex, a new take on analyzing the implicit relationships in your contact list, to help you keep relationships green, and sell. (tags: dex implicit+social+networks contact+management)
CrunchGear » Archive » Ballmer says Android “financially unsound” I love Arrington’s...
Battle Of The Twitterologists: Microsharing,...
Yesterday I received a review copy of O’Reilly’s new report on Twitter, called Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time by written by Sarah Milstein (@sarahm), (with Abdur Chowdhury, Gregor Hochmuth, Ben Lorica, and Roger Magoulas, and foreword by Tim O’Reilly). I hope to read it over the weekend.
A ...
Twitter Is The New Bloomberg
Today I stumbled on a twitter account [via @howardlindzon] called @stocktwits. Among other things going on there, they are using the dollar sign (‘$’) preceding corporate ‘tickers’ (stock market acronyms) to set up an index of tweets on each referenced company’s history. Very cool. Example:
RT @s_m_i: Final result of $LEH CDS auction - 8.625 cents on the dollar ...
Rumor Mill: Yang To Leave Today
The rumor is running around that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang might be stepping down:
[from Rumor: Internal Yahoo memo suggests CEO Jerry Yang may be out by Matt Marshall]
Here’s the big caveat. On the one hand, this rumor is entirely consistent with the latest developments: Jerry Yang has failed entirely in his effort to give direction to Yahoo, and is under increasing pressure from shareholders...
links for 2008-11-05
In a Twitter Age, Even Bad News Like Layoffs Is on the Company Blog - NYTimes.com Various kerfuffles in the tech scene as the econolypse pushes start-ups and established companies into full transparency or the anti-pattern of opaqueness. (tags: social+media transparency twitter jive+software seesmic sam+lawrence loic+lemeur gannett)
U.S. News Will Become a Monthly Magazine - NYTimes.com...
Yammer Adds Departments, Teams
Yammer, the workstreaming startup, today announced that they have added support for departments or teams:
[via email]
Yammer is pleased to announce the release of Groups, our most requested feature since launching two months ago.
You can use Groups to:
Form company teams
Join your department
Post updates to a specific group of people
Have private discussions with your team
Reduce...