Author: Kent

Reader, writer, arithmeticer. Proprietor of Newsome.Org, a tech, music and life blog.

Web 2.0 Wars: Round 8

It’s time for Round 8 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 8:

Memeorandum
CalendarHub
Superglu
Pando
Zigtag
Findory
Backfence
Clipmarks
Wayfaring
gOffice
Fleck

Memeorandum is the King of the Meme Trackers. I use it every day.

CalendarHub is yet another web based calendar application. It looks nice, but what is it with a million online calendars.

Superglu is an application that aggregates your information from other services like Delicious, blogger, etc. It gathers your content from popular web services and publishes them in one convenient place.

Pando is an online application that lets you email any size file or folder to anyone, free. It’s not yet live, so I can’t say much more than that.

Zigtag is not yet live. They aren’t saying much about it on the web site.

Findory is a personalized newspaper that evolves, quickly, as you click and read. It creates personalized content as you read. Sounds like a web version of TIVO suggestions. Cool idea.

Backfence is a group of community based citizen media sites. It has sites now for cities in Virginia and Maryland. Where’s Bellare, Texas? Interesting idea in its early stages.

Clipmarks is a people-powered search engine where users rate web content, talk about it and connect with other people who share similar interests. There is a Firefox extension you install that lets you capture pages or parts of pages to Clipmarks.

Wayfaring needs a new logo. It looks like Wayfanng. This site lets you build maps, annotate and share them. You could use this to show all 10 Starbucks within 50 yards of you house, or something. It’s actually a neat application with lots of potential uses.

gOffice is a free online office suite, with word processing, desktop publishing, a presentation maker and a spreadsheet. Alas, no calendar.

Fleck describes itself as a “patent pending, world changing, paradigm shifting and user experience enhancing technology.” I think that’s a joke, since the same description saya “every Web 2.0 hype is covered.” It’s not live yet, so I can’t say much more about it.

Before Today I’d Heard of:

1 out of 11

And the Winner of Round 8 is:

Memeorandum in a landslide. Even with a scoring discount since I already use it, it still wins going away. Findory finishes second.

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This and That

Dave Winer posts a copy of an email he sent to the other side. As I’ve said before, I don’t know who’s right or wrong here, but this seems like a pretty reasoned letter.

Scott Karp has a good read on the sweetspot between old media and new media, which correctly says:

Old Media has the audiences, but doesn’t know what to do with them. New Media knows what to do, but doesn’t have the audiences.

Thomas Hawk demonstrates why he’s my favorite photographer. I absolutely love looking at one of his photos while reflecting on the name he gave it. You have to experience it to understand it, but the way he names his photos makes experiencing them like a little mini-movie. I love the way he names his photos.

Please join me in voting for JK’s excellent blog in the IT Community Choice Awards. JKOnTheRun in on the list as “OnTheRun,” so look in the O’s, not the J’s.

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My Favorite Records:Emmylou Harris – At the Ryman

This is the another installment in my series of favorite records.

I’ve loved Emmylou Harris since the first time I heard her 1977 masterpiece Luxury Liner. And there are any number of her records that are worthy of my Top 50 list. But there’s one of them that’s just a notch above the rest.

That record is her 1992 live album, is At the Ryman.

I remember going to the Ryman to see the Grand Ole Opry when I was a kid, and I sure wish I’d been at the Ryman when Emmylou made this live tour de force. She joined up with the Nash Ramblers, one of the best backing bands in the history of recorded sound, led by Sam Bush and Roy Huskey Jr., and simply made one of the best live records ever. One of the best. Ever

From the opening chords of Steve Earle’s Guitar Town until the last chord of Smoke Along the Track, there’s not a song on this record that I’d rate less than a 9.5 on a 10 scale. The two best songs are covers of Bill Monroe’s Walls of Time and Get Up John (I can’t listen to a second of either one without feeling that beautiful tug of spiritual emotion). I expect Sam Bush’s fingers were in shreds at the end of Walls of Time. What a beautiful song.

This is a great album.

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MPAA: Grabbing for the Cat, But to What End?

Today comes word that the MPAA has filed a new round of lawsuits in a continuing effort to stuff the cat bag into the bag.

I have a few questions.

emptybagDo the MPAA and its even more aggressive cousin the RIAA really think they can curb file sharing by suing a bunch of random people once in a while? Do they also think it’s possible to make water naturally flow up hill?

I don’t think anyone at the RIAA or the MPAA really believes they can curb file sharing. It’s too late and they have to know that. So what is the real goal here? Are they trying to slow down the growth of file sharing while they come up with some technological solution?

Do they understand that the only people they are hurting by mandating DRM-infested product are themselves and the remainder of their once loyal customer base? Surely they know hacker technology will trump copy protection every time.

Is the plan, or part of it, to force us to buy the same thing over and over? Is that how they think they can save their dying business model?

If it’s OK to sue a search engine that allows someone to search for pirated material, where’s the line? Is it OK to sue the companies who make the computers that allow someone to access the search engine that allows someone to search for pirated material?

I want someone of importance at one of these organizations to tell me what the real goal is here? Not the scorched earth campaign to spread fear of litigation, but the realistic one that they must have talked about.

So tell me, exactly, what is the end game in this futile effort to stuff the cat back into the bag.

I really want to know.

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Soundbite or Corporate Policy

That’s the only question that needs to be asked to Yahoo following the statement by Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg that record labels should sell music without copy protection.

Everyone knows that the DRM-infestation that has ruined online music and put the screws to consumers to buy multiple copies of the same thing is horse manure (to put it mildly).

But until one big company who has both skin in the game and enough mindshare to kick-start a movement calls foul and stops pushing this crap on consumers, this is just a soundbite. There’s no need to “prompt industry-wide discussion.” It’s being discussed now, but since the record label cartel has all the bargaining power, we’re not getting anywhere.

The prospect of getting booted off of Yahoo’s music service would create enough bargaining power to at least bring the record labels to the negotiating table.

Yahoo, tell the record label cartel no. Make your music store DRM-free. Don’t toss out some unwanted, non-binding advice.

Take a stand. Make it happen.

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Blogs are Really Just Better Homepages

I think Rex Hammock nailed it the other day when he said:

When you set up a weblog, don’t think of it as launching a “publication” or any other “mass media” and don’t measure success in terms of “size of audience.” Think of it simply as having a place on the web to easily post messages, photos and other digital files. Think of it as having something like email, but you don’t send it out — however, your friends or associates can “subscribe” to it, if they want to. Don’t make this too complicated.

erectorset-745745Many of us, myself included, are inclined to think about blogs as being more revolutionary than they really are. Yes, I write about how a blog is really just an online diary, etc. And most of the time I remember that. But then my erector-set personality fools my brain into thinking that all this blogging stuff is some new creation that is rapidly shifting all of our paradigms.

The fact is that blogs are changing things, primarily by making it easier to do what we’ve been trying to do all along. We wanted to have distributed, archivable conversations with people all over the world back in the nineties. The problem was that we didn’t have today’s blogging platforms to help publish and manage our content.

Blogs are really just a technological advance in the personal web page. They make it easier for us oldtimers to manage our content and they lower the technological barrier to entry, which gives more people a place at the table. Good, yes. World changing, not really.

Look at what Newsome.Org looked like back in 1999 (ignore the date near the top, that’s some code that continues to do its job).

no1999
Click for larger view

See the “Latest News” in the middle column? That’s a primitive Perl based predecessor to a blogging platform. I didn’t call it blogging back then, but that’s what I and countless others were doing. We just didn’t know it.

Note the empty box in the right hand column where the Chat Room used to be? 2006 so far is the year of the blog-based chat room. But we had them back in 1999.

See the classified ads link in the left hand column. Again, primitive and Perl-based, but we had them way back then.

Scott Karp gets it too:

So what is a blog? It’s a content management and publishing platform. All online publishers use a content management and publishing platform. The difference with blogging software is that it doesn’t come with the huge price tag.

Blogs are just a better and easier way to do what we were doing back then.

And we didn’t even know it.

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Steve’s Social Media Tour

Steve Rubel is doing a really neat thing.

He is going to devote an entire day (12 hours, less lunch breaks, etc.) to doing as many podcast and blog interviews as he can fit in. He’s taking all comers (as time allows- but 12 hours is a long time).

Not only that, he’s going to turn the tables a little and ask questions to the people who interview him.

Talk about knocking down the gates. This is like Second Opinion on steroids!

I am very excited about watching, reading and listening to this, and I will cover as much of it as I can here.

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ScobleFeeds A-Z: The R’s

This is part eighteen of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

There are tons of R’s, and here are the best ones:

Ratcliffe Blog (RSS Feed)

Raw (RSS Feed)

Rexblog (RSS Feed)

I am utterly uninterested in politics, but I find Ratcliffe Blog extremely interesting, even though (and perhaps because) I don’t agree with everything Mitch Ratcliffe writes. But he writes well and makes me think.

Raw is Danny Ayers’ blog about various internet and tech stuff. Good mix of topics and good writing.

Rexblog is Rex Hammock’s blog. Good range of topics, with some local Nashville coverage. As an ex-Nashville resident, I enjoy both the marketing, tech, music and local stuff.

Honorable Mention:

None

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