September 2010
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Streams In Business: Yammer and Bantam Live...
I have been head down on a project this summer, and I am very excited about what will soon coming to light. The Streams In Business Study And Report (formerly Microstreams In Business) has had me focused pretty exclusively all summer on a very innovative group of products, all sharing common characteristics and planned userbase: streaming applications applied in the context of business.
Just to...
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Windows Live Spaces already dead, WordPress.com... →
Microsoft expects only about 1 percent of Windows Live Spaces bloggers to move to WordPress.com. If not there then where? In the e-mail exchange, one Microsoft executive asserts about the 30 million active Windows Live Spaces blogs: “Most are dead.”
my two cents
Did anyone believe for a second that Microsoft would hand over something that was an active community? Of course...
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Entrepreneurial Journalism?
CUNY to Offer Master’s in Entrepreneurial Journalism
The Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York wants to capitalize on some of the shifts that have rocked traditional journalism — and traditional journalists — with the creation of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism and a new master of arts degree in entrepreneurial journalism, which the school will...
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“I don’t need business intelligence, I need my business to be intelligent.”
–
Stowe Boyd
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“We’re doing this massive renovation of a very old website, it started under 1996...”
– Katharine Zaleski, Executive Producer and Head of Digital News Products at the Washington Post at a Web 2.0 Expo panel. [Follow along at Capital.]
jaketbrooks: I have a feeling Zaleski is only being partially honest here. The biggest challenge she faced was probably convincing the establishment to...
“The Social Network is the revenge on the revenge of the nerds.”
–
Jeff Jarvis
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What Happens At Y Combinator →
Paul Graham tries to spell out the mystery of Y combinator.
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News Desk: Jason Schwartzman Introduces The New... →
The app looks quite good.
I wonder when the innovation will start to converge? When will we start to rebel against having a specialized app for every pub, with different metaphors, controls, and bookmarks? Isn’t there a place for the killer iPad magazine application, that publisher will push their pubs into?
Maybe I am dead wrong, here. Perhaps the experience is where the value is, and...
10 tags
Storify: Another Take On Stream Media
A few mentions by Scoble and I have taken a look at Storify. It is a cool tool for aggregating snippets of material into a mixin sort of post, which is delivered as a bit of embedded javascript.
Here’s a ‘story’ created using Storify:
I used the ‘Storify This’ bookmarklet to pop up an editor with bits of info for the story:
The UX of the tool is...
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Calacanis On The AOL/Techcrunch Rumors
Calacanis really hates Arrington, ever since the Techcrunch 50 meltdown and the eventual collapse of their partnership. On one hand, he seems to favor the AOL acquisition deal of Techcrunch, but every other tweet is about being screwed over by an unstable and abusive Mike Arrington.
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To Advertisers, Twitter's a Fledgling - Emily... →
Twitter offers “Promoted Tweets,” where marketers pay to have their messages listed as the first result when a user conducts a search on Twitter.com; the site handled about 130 million searches in August, according to comScore Inc. The company soon will experiment with ads that target users based on the content in their tweets, or messages.
Marketers who tried out Twitter’s...
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The Promise Of Hyperlocal Social Networks
I am a great believer in the premises of hyperlocal social media and hyperlocal social tools, as well.
The issue in both niches is to figure out what it is that people naturally want to do on a hyperlocal scale, and we have had a number of experiments that have demonstrated this invariant, which I will dub as the Law of The Excluded Hyperlocal:
Whatever it is that people will naturally do in...
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MSN Spaces Closing, Becomes WordPress.com →
cameronmoll:
Matt Mullenweg:
As just announced on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, Windows Live (formerly MSN) Spaces is shutting down and migrating their 30m+ users to WordPress.com. Four years ago I was fairly worried as every internet giant (Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Google) had a hosted blogging service. Now only Blogger remains, and is firmly in our sights.
Blogger, no doubt, has the lion’s...
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“Great design is the right combination of aesthetics, ergonomics, and economics.”
–
John Maeda
“Do meaningful stuff that matters the most.”
–
Umair Haque
Where Buys LocalGinger To Gain Location-Based... →
I have to take a closer look at both these companies: now one company, I guess.
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Apple granted patent for handheld that recognizes... →
Not expected to be in iPad soon, though.
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How Shazam Works To Identify (Nearly) Every Song... →
Great piece that explains the science behind Shazam: spectrogram ‘fingerprints’ of music.
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Social Bulimia
Joshua Allen, Social Bulimia
“I get a sinking feeling when I launch Twitter,” says one. “It’s as if there is this huge plate of tasteless food in front of me and I have to force myself to consume it.” Another tells me, “Every day I feel a compulsion to process the list, do my retweets, share on Facebook. There is no joy in it; I just get twitchy if I...
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Nokia's Dilemma
Buried in a long, long piece about Stephen Elop’s challenges at Nokia, is the following characterization of the balancing act that might undo his efforts:
Georgina Prodhan and Tarmo Virki, Welcome to Nokia, Mr. Elop
Nokia has an enormous number of older, more basic phones in circulation, and it likes to make new features back-compatible for the mass market, taking up valuable research...
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“The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.”
–
Winston Churchill
(via underpaidgenius)
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Iran confirms massive Stuxnet infection of... →
Is the US creating malware targeting Iran’s Atomic Energy Commission? Or perhaps Israel?
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Ping In Your Library
Apple released a new version of Ping in iTunes 10.0.1. Don’t let the .0.1 fool you, this is a big step forward.
Cosmetically, the biggest change is the provision of a sidebar that stream of updates from those you follow on Ping, but the biggest advance is that you can post and like music in your own library.
Federico Viticci, iTunes 10.0.1 Goes Live with Ping Sidebar
The most important...
LinkedIn Acquires ChoiceVendor
LinkedIn continues its acquisition streak, buying ChoiceVendor:
Tomeo Geren, Newly Acquisitive LinkedIn Buys second company, ChoiceVendor
LinkedIn Corp. has acquired online business-services review company ChoiceVendor Inc. as its new corporate development team looks for areas to grow the company. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. ChoiceVendor had raised $4.5 million in Series A...
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Ron Conway Bitchslaps The 'Super Angels'
Ron Conway, who I think very highly of, bitchslaps in email the so-called ‘super angels’ who apparently are involved in activities that might be construed as collusion or acting as a cartel.
Some excerpts from the Conway email that MG Siegler got his hands on:
I want to clarify once and for all my total disagreement with your values and motives for being investors.
I have stated...
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From The Archives
I am going to start pulling up old posts, one or two every few days, and reposting them just to highlight ideas and trends that go back years in my blogging. They will be around in the current stream for a few days or a week, and then I will send them back to their original date.
Suggestions?
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Using Varnish So News Doesn't Break Your Server -... →
This is exactly what I meant when I said that all successful media companies of the future will act like software companies.
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Human Scale, Neighborhoods, and MySpaceaphobia
[from the archives: 27 October 2006]
Vauhini Vara’s piece in the Wall Street Journal about people defecting from MySpace and Facebook struck a real chord with me:
Neither MySpace nor Facebook will disclose the number of people who have deleted their pages, but a MySpace spokeswoman offers that there has been “absolutely no increase in the rate of deletions.”
There’s no question, however,...
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“It’s not just about the amateurs anymore.”
–
SAY Media
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Six Apart Acquired By VideoEgg: Old School...
Six Apart has had a strange history. Started by the starry-eyed Ben and Mena Trott, the early Six Apart (named after the number of days between the two founders’ birthdays) was like an earlier version of the WordPress story. The Movable Type publishing platform was the premier blogging platform of the mid ’00s, but the company divided its energies, building Typepad as a hosted blogging...
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Back To Disqus Comments
Okay. I give.
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Marco.org - Job transition →
Job transition
After four years of my serving as Tumblr’s lead developer, Tumblr’s technical management needs have evolved to require types of experience that I don’t have, and my independent career has offered a lot of opportunities that I haven’t had the time to take full advantage of.
Marco Arment, the lead developer at Tumblr, is heading off to do other things. It sounds amicable,...
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Are The West Coast 'Super Angels' A Cartel?
Mike Arrington of Techcrunch accuses an unnamed group of leading angel investors of acting as an illegal cartel, colluding to block competition around promising deals, to collectively act in concert to get better valuations, and to structure deals in ways that benefit early investors and not founders or later VCs.
Apparently, Arrington was tipped off to a not-so-secret meeting at Bin 38 in San...
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Facebook Building Sociality Into A Phone OS?
Arrington reports rumors about Facebook’s plans to build a mobile phone, in which the social features of their platform are lowered into the operating system for the device:
Facebook Is Secretly Building A Phone
Specifically, Facebook wants to integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone. It can only do that if it controls the operating system.
...
“The big-hit technology companies from the past 10 years tend to have pathetic...”
– How Hard Could It Be? By Joel Spolsky: Let’s Take This Offline
(via steph)
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Finally just unfollowed Mashable on Tumblr.
soupsoup:
virtualephemera:
I should have done it a long time ago. Their auto-link-dump contributes nothing to the community. They’re supposed to be the big tech experts. Why don’t they get that Tumblr is not just an RSS feed?
The only reason I was still following them was laziness. So glad I finally removed them from my dashboard. I feel like a two-ton weight has been lifted from my...
James Governor's Monkchips » Front Ends & Portal... →
Interesting analysis of the impact of the user experience lessons of the open web on enterprise systems that were completely systems-centric, and the opportunities for Adobe and others.
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Foundry Group Adopts Twitpitch Approach To VC...
[Update 17 September 2010: Brad Feld twittered me to let me know this story is about the Foundry Group’s April Fools Day post, so they have not switched over to Twitter for candidate pitches, it seems.]
If an entrepreneur cannot explain their opportunity in 140 characters or less, how focused can they be? I was recently visiting the Foundry Group website and noticed this post from March,...
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Social = Me First
I caused some consternation when I started to describe social tools — a decade ago — with the expression “social = me first.” It sounds selfish, or maybe even narcissistic, but but it is based on the observation that we all are at the center of our own social network, our own world.
Before we do anything else we have to define ourselves — create an account, chose a...
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The Defection Of RSS Reader Readers
Everyone is stressing the wrong part of the dynamic about Bloglines being shut down. It’s not that RSS is dead, or that RSS readers are dead, it’s the defection of RSS Reader readers — we, the edglings — from those tools to other ones:
The Death Of The RSS Reader
[…] people no longer seem to be abandoning certain readers for others—or for other ways to access...
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Bloglines Will Shut Down October 1 →
The popular web-based RSS reader and news aggregator Bloglines will discontinue service on Friday, October 1. The Ask.com team that operates the site has essentially said that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook killed it.
RSS “pushes” website updates to readers around the world so they don’t have to find them through search or refreshing the site. It was a game changer when it evolved...
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Surrender To The Stream, And Be Happy
Streaming apps — based on the open follower model, or variants of it — will be the dominant motif of the web for the foreseeable future. And this is having an impact on everything that touches it, including our sense of time.
A great deal of research has shown that that our perception of time is quite malleable. For example, we have all experienced boredom as making the clock slow,...
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Social Tools: Shallow Versus Deep
I was asked recently about what I meant by social tools: aren’t all things sharable on the web, she asked? Isn’t even email social?
The outcomes for all are increased by the actions of everyone: I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
I made the case of deep versus shallow sociality, stating that while you can take almost any functional tool and...
Cognitive Science Upends Conventional Wisdom About...
Studying is something all of us do: not just student in schools. All professionals are confronted with the need to gain understanding of new concepts or practices, even if we aren’t rote-memorizing dates of historical events, or valences of chemical compounds. So we are all better off if we can apply insights from modern cognitive science to learn more efficiently.
I find it totally...