Month: March 2006

Plaxo to Throttle Back the Emails

According to Techdirt, the email loving folks at Plaxo may finally be bending to the collective will and reassessing their email policies.

I regularly get emails via Plaxo telling me that people I know and sometimes people I don’t are updating their address book and encouraging me to update my information via Plaxo. It’s an example of an idea that sounds good in theory (let’s enable users to easily obtain current contact information and add it to their Outlook contacts list) that goes horribly wrong when put into action.

It goes wrong simply because the updating process is based on unsolicited emails to contacts asking them to update their information via Plaxo. I think it’s great if someone wants to add my information to their address book, but not if I have to get emails I don’t want and/or sign up or give information to some service.

After apparently waiting to enact any changes until enough people signed up for their service, Plaxo has indicated that it will throttle back the emails. Here’s a quote from one of Plaxo’s founders that tells you a lot about Plaxo’s commitment to being a good net citizen:

[W]e’ve always known that the update requests were a means to an end — our goal has always been to get as many members as possible so that these e-mails were unnecessary. And it looks like we’re finally getting to that end.

Anyone who takes even a second to think about that statement will realize that it’s like a litterbug who just dumped all his trash on the side of the road saying that littering is bad. Or the guy who just made a ton of money selling email addresses deciding to become an anti-spam advocate.

It’s easy to diet when you’re full and it’s easy to act right after you’ve gotten the spoils of acting wrong.

According to some of the Comments to the Techdirt post, Plaxo is now bundled with AOL Instant Messenger. There’s nothing that will get a program deleted from my computer any faster than trying to stuff a bunch of unwanted programs onto my hard drive.

I find product bundling to be just as distasteful as spam. That’s just my opinion and perhaps others disagree.

But while less Plaxo email is a welcome thing, let’s not start handing out citizenship awards to Plaxo just yet.

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Web 2.0 Wars: Round 18

It’s time for Round 18 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 18:

Lexxe
Lookster
PXN8
Measuremap
Facebook
Netvibes
Goowy
MyVideoKaraoke
Gmail
Backpack
Platial

Lexxe is a search engine. One thing I like about it is that web searches and blog searches are combined.

Lookster is not yet live and has no information at all on its web page.

PXN8 is an online photo editing application. You can also buy a copy and install it on your computer.

Measuremap, recently bought by Google is a stats tracking application.

Facebook is a social networking site limited to college students.

Netvibes is an Ajax-based personal portal page. It probably has the greatest mindshare of the new portal players.

Goowy is a very nice looking personal portal page, that adds some extra features like online file storage.

MyVideoKaraoke is a site where users can upload videos of people singing karaoke songs. There aren’t all that many songs up yet, but this is a really interesting idea.

Gmail is Google free, web based mail. I wrote about it here.

Backpack is an online information collection and storage application. Sort of like a turbo-charged on-line Onfolio or One Note.

Platial is a collaborative atlas. You can add tags for locations of places that you are others may be interested in. Neat idea.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

7 out of 11.

And the Winner of Round 18 is:

Backpack, in a hotly contested heat. Backpack has a lot of potential as a one-stop shop for online storage and information organization.

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In Defense of Blogging

OmegaMom posts the best defense I have read yet to Andrew Keen’s continuing tirade against our scribblings.

Among her many good points is the following:

Nobody is claiming that all those blogs out there are, de facto, gems of literature that will gleam forever. What is claimed is that the froth will generate some value, that some people whose eloquent or expert or funny voices would never have been heard before will gain some well-earned followings. Even people who start out with the attitude that “blogs are stupid” can discover, to their amazement, that there are folks out there with voices that appeal to them, and experiences that resonate with them.

I’ll put that writing up against any self-aggrandizing drivel spouted off by Andrew’s “elite talent” any day.

Great stuff.

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10 Applications I Can’t Live Without (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of my 10 applications post. Part 1 is here.

Here are applications 6-10

6) Ulead Video Studio

I’ve made movies with all sorts of hardware and software and Ulead Video Studio is the best bang for the buck I have found. I use it all the time and while no application is perfect, this one comes pretty close.

7) Behind Asterisks

I forget my passwords fairly often and this little decryption utility has saved me more times than I can count.

8) Atlas Find and Replace

I posted a glowing endorsement of this excellent find and replace utility last year, after it helped me change hundreds of web pages in less than 2 hours. This is a must have application for anyone who develops any sort of internet content.

9) FinePrint

I print all of my documents via FinePrint, which allows you to print multiple pages on a single sheet, to print double sided, to add watermarks, headers and footers and much more.

10) Microsoft Photo Story

The older I get, the more I find that the movies I enjoy making the most are just photos set to music. There are a lot of programs to do this, but the best one is both easy to use and free. All of the photo-videos I have posted on Newsome.Org were made with Photo Story 3.

These are some of my most valued applications. Tell me about yours in the Comments.

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Google Finance: Stumbling Out of the Gate

I didn’t have a chance earlier today to test the newly released Google Finance service. Om, whose judgment I trust (even if I do have to beg him for the link love smallicon-793225), says it’s disappointing.

First a word about the finance sites I currently use and then let’s dive into Google Finance.

A Little Background

I am not really an active stock trader these days, but I was back in the mid to late nineties. I told the quick version of my story in an excerpt from my podcast the other day. The bottom line is that I have made a lot of money and lost a lot of money in the stock market. Along the way, I have tried a lot of different financial sites. Some were free, some were made available to me by media companies I provided content for and some I paid for.

Presently, I use two and only two (not counting the brokerage sites where I do my trading, but which I use only lightly for research). My Yahoo, where I track the market and my stocks in my left column, and Morningstar, where I do a lot of my research (Disclosure: I have owned Morningstar stock since the IPO).

So lets take a look, in real time, at Google Finance.

Initial Impressions

The front page looks desolate. What is appealing about Google’s search page doesn’t work here. I see a link to add stocks to your portfolio, but unless it’s well hidden I see no way to add stocks other than one at a time.

Some sort of import feature is a must in future releases.

I added a few stocks, all but one (Google) of which I actually own. The Ajaxy entry screen is fast, but there needs to be a way to import portfolios. Once more- there has to be an easier way to add your portfolio.

Oddly enough, your portfolio doesn’t show up on the front page. There is a list of recent quotes you have looked up, but I see no way to personalize the front page. Surely I’m missing something?

What About the Quotes?

OK, so let’s look up a quote. I own AT&T and have been thinking about selling it for a while.

Here’s where Google Finance gets a little more impressive.

The quote info and chart are pretty neat. I love the way the times of the news stories are reflected on the chart. The news story links are logically placed and easy to access. I like the blog post links at the bottom, but I don’t read blogs for stock buying ideas.

Message Board into Chaos

There are message boards (called discussions) that you can join or start, and I can imagine a horde of pumpers and dumpers lining up outside the walls. There do seem to be some safeguards in place and one of the current pump and dump favorites did not have a link to join or create a discussion.

But I can tell you from vast experience that these message boards will rapidly descend into chaos and will become useless in short order. I predict they’ll kill them all off within a year.

At first I didn’t see links to major holders, insider sales and SEC filings, all of which are available at Yahoo, but there they are at the bottom left of the screen. I wish there was a Morningstar link down there.

Conclusions

My initial conclusion is that Google Finance is underwhelming as far as customization goes, but that the data returned when you lookup a quote is reasonably impressive.

Om’s right, however, when he says “[I]t will be a long time, and I mean long time in Internet years that is, before Google Finance really catches up to Yahoo Finance, which in fact is the gold standard.”

This might be a good service one day, but Google has a long way to go and a lot of catching up to do.More concerning to me is Google’s recent tendency to toss up “me-too” services that replicate, often poorly, what others are already doing. I expect innovation from Google, not imitation and mediocrity.Tags:

Web 2.0 Wars: Round 17

It’s time for Round 17 in Newsome.Org’s Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Other Rounds:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Here are the contestants for Round 17:

Truveo
NewsVine
egoSurf
Clipfire
Mozy
Quimble
Basecamp
Pegasus News
Remember The Milk
Squidoo
PictureCloud

Truveo is a video search engine. It seems pretty fast.

NewsVine is a social bookmarking site that combines features of a number of other services, such as Digg and Google News. I talked about it here.

egoSurf is a program that searches your name and web site and tells you where you stack up on the web. I got a 9346. I hope that’s good. I think this is a cool idea.

Clipfire is is a shopping search engine and community. I want to buy a Dell 1900FP monitor, but when I searched for it I got links to all sorts of Dell stuff. Same result for Thinkpad X41. Unless I’m missing something, there results are not focused enough.

Mozy is a free remote backup service. You get 1G of space (2 if you fill out a survey) in return for accepting some ads via email.

Quimble lets you create and share polls. I’ve noticed some nice looking Quimble polls on various blogs.

Basecamp is a web-based tool that lets you manage and track projects. Prices range from free to expensive. I like the fact that I haven’t seen a million of these and they actually charge for the service, thereby at least giving a nod to a legitimate business plan.

Pegasus News is a “local media venture” (whatever that might be) to be launched in Dallas, Texas in “early 2006.” OK.

Remember The Milk is an online method to manage to-do lists. Nobody tell my wife about this site, please. Cool looking site.

Squidoo is a site where people post content on topics they care about. They say it’s a combination of Friendster and Wikipedia.

PictureCloud is a service that lets you create 360 degree photo representations of stuff. Unfortuntately all the samples were cut in half when I viewed them via Firefox. Not good. They worked in Internet Explorer.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

4 out of 11.

And the Winner of Round 17 is:

Basecamp nudges out Remember the Milk, just because it has a business plan that doesn’t rely solely on ads.

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A Perfect Storm: Andrew Keen at the Berkeley CyberSalon

If there was any hope that Andrew Keen was only kidding a few weeks ago when he laid this nugget on us:

If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural ‘flattening.’,

such hope was crushed by Keen’s statements at the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.

Christopher Carfi posts a report from that gathering that makes it clear that Keen is still preaching that blogging allows idiots too much of the soapbox that should be reserved for the old media elite.

If I’d been there and managed not to hurl all over my laptop, I would have raised my hand and asked him two questions:

(a) Who decides who is elite? Is merely a press pass from a newspaper evidence of elite status or is there more to it?

(b) Are you one of the elite? If so, who anointed you such? And if not, aren’t you adding to the problem by having a blog?

The first thing I ask myself when someone tries to create a line of demarcation (elite, non-elite, etc.) is “who decides where the line goes” and “who decides who decides where the line goes.” Those two questions will help you cut through more bullshit than any other questions you could ask.

Scott Rosenberg has a report on the CyberSalon as well, which contains some past and present Keen quotes:

The purpose of our media and culture industries is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.

What is the value in sharing experiences? I grow weary of your scribblings.

Clearly this guy is either the most arrogant person to ever poke at a keyboard or he’s found an angle and is going to ride it as far as it will take him. I don’t know him, but he certainly seems to have come upon a recipe of arrogance, big fancy words and outlandish statements that gets him a lot of attention.

My grandmother used to tell me that arrogance was a distraction to mask insecurity, but she wasn’t part of the elite media, so what did she know.

Scott sums up the recent non-conversation very well:

To Keen, that sort of talk is part of a “cult of creative self-realization.” “The purpose of our media and culture industries,” he writes, “is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent”; blogging opens the door to too many mediocre voices. When he tried to apply this critique tonight, Des Jardins shot it down with a single line that exposed its irrelevance to the conversation: “The cream also rises in the blogosphere.”

In the interest of cooking the whole pancake, let me say that I agree with some of what Andrew says on his blog, particularly the Web 2.0 stuff. He has this need to make sure you know how smart he thinks he is, but once you filter out the extra noise, a lot of what he says is spot on. And, perhaps intentionally and perhaps not, he can be very funny (as in his MySpace take).

But he’s completely off base on the whole elite media business.

Oddly enough, my hunch is that he knows it.

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Doc Cooks a Pancake

Doc Searls posted today a much clearer, first hand version of what I tried to say the other night about those brave souls (be they A-Listers or not) who stood up for Dave Winer in the face of his unpopular (be they justified or not) actions and the blogonslaught that followed.

I’m sure Doc will take even more abuse than I did (via Comments and particularly email), but Doc’s post is example number 1 of someone looking beyond a person’s faults (which Doc admits Dave has) and at the bigger picture.

catboxingI don’t know who’s right or who’s wrong in the OPML mess. I don’t know Rogers Cadenhead, though from reading his blog he seems like a pretty nice fellow. Few would accuse Dave of being a nice fellow. But whatever the story is, it goes way beyond one letter from some lawyer and a couple of blog posts.

The fact that I’d rather hang out with Rogers (and, for the record, I would) does not make him 100% right and Dave 100% wrong. The truth is almost always somewhere in between. That’s for someone with more interest and access than me to determine. But we can’t and shouldn’t digg Rogers to victory just because some of us like him better.

Most of us will never know all the facts. Some of us (myself included) don’t care enough about the matter to try to figure them out.

But let me point out again that there are two sides to every story and to act without considering the other side of the pancake is to act too hastily.

Once the discussion becomes politicalized (and this one was from the first minute) right and wrong too often gets lost in the rush to posture and discredit.

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Mark Cuban's Crack and Back Approach to DRM

Mark Cuban posts today about the DRM Evolution, that may lead hardware producers to keep changing the playback devices to match the evolving DRM requirements. Down the road, content you legally own may not play back on hardware you legally own because of incompatibilities with the then current DRM protocols.

The record label cartel’s answer, of course, would be to go buy another copy of the same song you have already bought on LP, 8-track, cassette, CD and MP3.

Mark’s answer is to crack stuff you own and keep a DRM-free back up copy.

It’s hard for a guy from Houston to give too much love to a dude from Dallas, but damn I love that guy.

I’ve said many times that I have not and will not buy music that is infested with DRM. If I accidentally did, I would absolutely crack it and and make a back-up copy.

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