Archives for 2006

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I Got Megite-d!

Posted on February 14, 2006 ·

Here’s my personalized Megite page.  It’s definitely narrower than the Scobleized version … and now, brrreeeport  

Update (2/15):  brrrrrrrrreeeepppport is now the #1 search term on Technorati..wow.  OK, let’s share some link love with some other brrreeeporters … hopefully some will love me back

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Filed Under: Blogging, Misc ·
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And You Thought YOUR Property Tax Was High …

Posted on February 12, 2006 ·

Story.misvalued.house… Especially if you are in California.  But whatever you pay, it’s nothing compared to the $8 Million tax bill the owner of this not-exactly-luxurious home received.  The house was valued at $121,900 until a computer (or user) error bumped it just a bit… to a whopping $400 Million.

The owner was not the only one with an unpleasant surprise: so were the schools in the district.  Apparently the county already budgeted the increases tax revenue, and schools had to return some $3M of the extra money.   (full story on CNN)

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Filed Under: Misc ·
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3Bubbles – a Bubble 2.0 Indicator?

Posted on February 11, 2006 ·

3bubbleslogo(Updated)

I’m not trying to be funny with the title.  I think a pretty good indicator of being in Bubble 2.0 is when we see cute new applications that everyone likes yet very few use.  3Bubbles, announced by Stowe Boyd, featured at TechCrunch is a really neat idea: adding real time chat to blogs. 

But how many blogs are there to support a lively chat?   My guess is less than (the Technorati Top)  100.

When I wake up early morning (PST) the little flags on my MapStats view are all over Europe, Asia and Australia.  Later the day as we wake up here most of my visitors are from the American continent. Blogs do for conversation what wikis do for collaboration: enable a dialogue between people who are far apart not just  in terms of geography but in time, often in different time zones. Only hugely popular blogs will have the critical mass of readers coming together for a real time chat.  My feeling is that even with enough participants around, chat is  not an easy way to convey a coherent message.  I’ll be happy to be proven wrong though.

That said, I’m sure it will work on TechCrunch – and  a few others.  Is the business model than to deliver ads to a handful (a few dozens?) of blogs?  

Update (2/12):

Update 2. (2/13).  TechCrunch reports 3Bubbles is (are?) open for a limited beta.  Right now there are 16 chat participants… I’m sure some of them expressed their opinion, but I can’t see that, since they all are in the chat session instead of leaving comments.  It looks to me that 3bubbles’ instant “achievement” is to reduce the conversation that used to span over days and different timezones to only the people that are present at the same time.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, Social Networking, Software ·
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VoipStunt – Free Landline Calls – Better than Skype (?)

Posted on February 10, 2006 ·

Logo_voipstuntVoipStunt is a Germany-based service that allows  free phone calls from your computer to landlines in a number of countries.  After downloading the application and creating a user account, you can make 1 minute test calls – I did, and the sound quality is excellent.

There is a one-time “upgrade” of 10 euros which does not expire, so as you make more and more calls, they really become close to free.  Almost too good to be true, and definitely beats the already low Skype-out calls, or the announced but not-yet-available Yahoo IM calls.  Here’the link to the list of free countries, as well as rates to other destinations.

Update (5/15):  Skype announced free calls to landlines within the US and Canada.

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Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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How to (Zil)Blow your Launch

Posted on February 8, 2006 ·

We’ve just seen the coCoRush, a masterpiece of viral launch by coComment.  Don Dodge elaborates on the “The new way to launch your product or company”.

Zillow almost had a spectacular launch today. They really had it all:  Presenting at Demo today, featured by the  NY Times,  CNET, Techdirt, SiliconValley.com, SiliconBeat, BuzzMachine,   Stowe Boyd,  Paul Kedrosky,  Bubble 2.0 … just about the whole world.

All this hoopla to what end? 

Zillowsighs

I simply don’t get it.  When you generate that much hype, wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect huge traffic? Especially when the Founder is not a newbie, he went through this with Expedia.

I tried to access the site 5 times.  I’ve given up, couldn’t care less.  How many other users lost interest the same way?   Of course with a $32M warchest this is not devastating to Zillow, they will come back, but for a smaller unfunded startup this mistake could be fatal. 

 After all, you only get to launch once.  Don’t (Zil)blow it.

 

 


Update (2/8):  I guess this pic from the Zillow blog explains it all: they electrocuted themselves…

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Filed Under: Business, Marketing / PR, Startups ·
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coComment or myComments?

Posted on February 8, 2006 ·

After repeatedly crying out for a solution, I was really happy to become a beta user for coComment.  Little did I know that there were actually TWO comment tracking solutions announced almost the simultaneously.  

The coComment launch was a masterpiece of viral marketing: all it took was a couple of A-list bloggers  (Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Richard MacManus,  Stowe Boyd, and others) and a wildfire started.  Of course it did not hurt that coComment addressed a real burning need.  Or was it the 109–yr-old Cognac the Raclette and the jacuzzi?   More on the launch by Don Dodge.

The other announcement, that of myComments, although it happened a few days earlier,  went almost unnoticed.  No wonder, Diego, the author announced it on his own not-so-widely read blog.  A lesson to learn in marketing.

I have not had a chance to try myComments, so my initial comparison is based on what I read on his site, and some email information from Diego.

Both products essentially do the same:  if I leave a comment on someone’s blog, I can receive an RSS feed of all subsequent comments – the full conversation.  They have a fundamentally different approach getting there though:

CoComment requires a bookmarklet or a FireFox extension, and I have to click once to activate coCo before posting my message.

MyComments on the other hand requires a plug-in to be installed in the blog where I go to comment.  If the plug-in is present, I don’t have to click anymore.  At first glance this appears to be more convenient, since no extra step is required before posting the comment.  There is a problem, however – this is a great concept once it is widely used, but how do we get to that scale?  I want the results, but I can’t do anything about it, I am dependent on the host blog having the plug-in.  We’ll have to see if this solution can take off – until then, it’s coCo-time.

Related posts:

 Update (2/6):  Here’s a comparison of the two services, and a comprehensive review of blog commenting in general.

Update 2 (2/16):  Apparently there is a better solution, see here.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Software ·
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Zap the Game, Fast Forward to the Commercials

Posted on February 6, 2006 ·

Tivo_logo_thumbAdvertisers spend spend $2.5 million for 30-second ads on the Superbowl, only to get them zapped, observes Stephen Baker at Blogspotting.  Oh, well, that’s the power of the Tivo remote.    

Not everything’s lost for the advertisers though … others, like Rick Segal, watch the game in 20 minutes … “The part that matters, anyway: The commercials. Google Video has them all on one page, with one click to watch in a twenty minute stream. “

While I’m typing this, the TV is on in the background – guess what they’re talking about: not the game… the commercials!

We’ve come full circle.

Update (2/6):  Related posts (about the ads, not the game ) 

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Filed Under: Business ·
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coComment – Prelude to Virtual Blogs? The Genie is Out of the Bottle

Posted on February 5, 2006 ·

Despite some initial glitches (hey, it’s pre-beta ) I enjoy using coComment. It is HOT.  Scoble announced it yesterday, then it quickly got profiled on TecCrunch, and people (including yours truly) were begging for invitattion codes to the closed beta, and now it’s all over Memeorandum, Megite, Tailrank .. you name it. (See more ref’s at the bottom).

Of course it did not hurt to have  “brand names” like Scoble and TechCrunh  jumpstart it, but coComment could not have possibly spread like this had it not met a very-very basic need.  Until now, we’ve been missing half the conversation in the Blogosphere.

The missing half is comments left by bloggers (or non-bloggers) on other people’s blogs. As Stowe Boyd’s new Conversational Index sharply shows,  the real vibrant blogs have far more comments than original posts by the blog author.   From the commenters’ pint of view, assuming they are not all A-listers (they can’t be… with 26 million blogs around), well, many of them participate in the conversation mostly this way, not on their lesser-known blogs.  In fact, there are hyper-active commenters who don’t even write their own blog. 

Michael Parekh has proposed that these blogless bloggers should have their Virtual Blog:

“There are possibly several times more folks who COMMENT on blogs as those who MAINTAIN their own blogs.  These are the “Lurkers” of old (remember the good old days of message boards?) who occasionally come out and say something when they really feel strongly about.

Imagine if every person who comments had a PRE-SET user name that worked on all blogs in the system.  Then imagine is that user-name could be used, with the user’s permission of course, to construct a “virtual blog” for that user on the fly, listing their comments across various blogs, WITH the under-lying context.  Voila…we’d have millions of new bloggers overnight with their own virtual blogs, WITHOUT them having to go through the EFFORT OF MAINTAINING A REGULAR BLOG AT ALL.”

Responding to Michael I pointed out that the the foundation for the preset username he proposes largely exists, in the form of Typekey by Typepad, Reader Accounts by Blogware… and whatever other authentication schemes the major platforms use.

Today there is another proposal on coComment’s forum about creating Virtual Blogs:

“Now, that’s interesting! Think about it. Czheng is an active “commenter” participating in conversations. Now, the Next Big Thing would be for coComment to have “virtual blogs” which are automatically created from the conversations they monitor. The more control they give the commenter, the more seamless the transition would be between commenting on other people’s blogs, and having those comments begin to populate your own blog automatically. Of course, you could then “tailor and edit” the content you’ve already (via commenting) put on your virtual blog….”

coComment-ers seem to have embraced the idea.  They are probably overwhelmed with feedback / ideas for a while.  Other contribute a lot more than ideas:  Brian Benzinger not only provided  a detailed review, but overnight he created a Greasemonkey script to automate the process.

The Genie is out of the bottle … there is no stopping now.   This is a good day for bloggers.

Related post (just a sampling from the deluge):

I give up, the list if far from complete, check out Megite, it’s dominated by coCo
It’s a real CoCorush


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Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Social Networking, Software, Startups ·
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Blogspot Down – Yawn

Posted on February 4, 2006 ·

Blogspot appears to have been down for most of the day – yet I’m not hearing cries all over the Blogosphere.  This is in sharp contrast to the recent major  Typepad outage , where the world seemed to have come to an end    Is it the “you get what you pay for” effect, i.e. a free service can go down anytime, or is it the fact that Power-bloggers who can generate a lot of noise are all on Typepad?

 

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Filed Under: Blogging, SaaS, Software ·
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Tracking the COMPLETE CONVERSATION – Part 3

Posted on February 3, 2006 ·

(Updates at the bottom)

Stowe Boyd introduces the concept of the Conversational Index:

“…successful blogs — ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start — shared a common characteristic: The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks (posts/comments+trackbacks) was less than one. Meaning that there was more conversation — as indicated by the number of comments and track backs offered by readers — than posting articles. I will call this the Conversation Index, just to put a handle on it.

Here’s the current picture for /Message, a CI of 80/102 = 0.784. “

Conversational_index

I’m fully with him on this, the CI would be a really useful indicator of the interest level a blog enjoys – but we need to step further than just having another nice badge to be displayed on our blogs.  

The underlying issue that myself and other, more esteemed bloggers pointed out numerous times (see links below) is that currently we really are losing track of half the conversation in the Blogosphere.

As Stowe points out, for truly vibrant blogs the CI will be <1, which means there are far more comments than blog posts (I am cheating a little, ignoring trackbacks).  This will likely be the case for all the Technorati top 100 or even 500 bloggers – from their viewpoint most of the conversation happens on / around their own blog.  However, for the the rest of us, the other 26 million (?) bloggers chances are the conversation really takes place outside our own blog, and I for one certainly can’t keep track of all comments I left on other blogs.

The current crop of tracking / linking services all have a top-down publisher-centric view, where everything revolves around a blog and   its related posts, totally missing this other, “bottom-up” half of the conversation.  So please, somebody give Stowe his badge , but  we also badly  need a way to show by subject matter an integrated view of all conversations where we are participating whether we started the thread or someone else.

References:

 Update (1/3): TechCrunch just profiled another “conversation tracker”, Megite, which also got some praise at the Read/WriteWeb. OM is not too happy though…

Megite is Memeorandum-style, but covering more topics.  Nice, but still top-down, blog-focused, i.e. “conversations” consist of linked blog-posts, excluding the world of comments.  

     Update to the Update (gee..)  Megite apparently has special editions, there’ snow a Scobleized Megite …

Update 2 (1/3):  Wow, this article got Megite-d

Update 3 (1/4): Wo-ho-ho, what a timing!  Robert Scoble announced and TechCrunch just profiled CoComment, the first attempt at tracking blog comments.   I’m looking forward to trying it … just need an invitation code.. ahhhh.  Here’s CoComment’s blog.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Social Networking, Software ·
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