Party Like It's 1999

Just when the buzz from the last exclusive blogoparty party finally faded out, we get to read about another insiders party that precious few of us are likely to be invited to.

The blogospats didn’t do it. The gatekeeper business didn’t do it. But if I have to read story after story about another exclusive party where invitations are handed out from the very in-crowd to the semi-in crowd, I just might have to follow Scoble‘s lead and take a Memeorandum hiatus.

While I think the idea of Web 2.0 awards is generally a good one, the true point of this party will be known when the voting panel and invitation criteria are known.

I hope this is more about awarding the companies than awarding the invitees.

Technorati Tags:
web 2.0, blogging

My Internet Journey & a Memeorandum Even My Wife Will Love

Phase I: the 80’s

My wife missed my first computer phase, back in the mid-eighties, when I had an IBM clone (that’s the exact computer I had), wrote shareware computer games and pulled many all-nighters playing Starflight. When we got married in 1993, I didn’t even have a computer at home. I started fooling around with her 386 and got the bug again.

Phase II: the 90’s

When I first started developing web sites back in the mid-nineties, my wife thought I had lost my mind. She thought the early version of Newsome.Org was mildly interesting because it had a lot of family photos and related content, but she thought all the sports and gadget related sites I was doing were just a way for me to spend more geek time on the computer. I can’t count on all my hands and feet the times we’d be at dinner with friends and someone would say “did you know Kent has a web page?” People would chuckle and I’d feel the compelled to change the subject by talking about some duck I killed or some dove I shot. Birds sacrificial to my manliness.

Then my web sites started making a little money. I took every opportunity to remind her and our friends that “Kent’s little web page” actually made $50 last month. That was a meal out, with change. So over time she sort of accepted that there was an element of business to my internet endeavors.

Then Bubble 1.0 started, and that $50 turned into $500 and then $5,000 and then $10,000. All of the sudden those little web pages were, in the eyes of some, a business. People came out of the woodwork wanting to buy them. I sold some, almost sold the crown jewel (Bubble 1.0 burst before I got the lion’s share of the purchase price) and generally felt vindicated as far as my web development activities went.

I kept a low profile after Bubble 1.0 burst, licking my wounds and trying not to look at my bombed out stock portfolio.

Phase III: the 00’s

Then came the blogging revolution. At first, I was merely an observer. Then I moved Newsome.Org to a blogging platform because it made it easier to manage content. Shortly thereafter, I jumped in and began to participate. It’s a long, uphill climb, but over time I have made progress in building Newsome.Org.

Like everyone else, when my wife found out I had turned Newsome.Org into a blog, she thought I was keeping an online diary. More dinner conversation and chuckles soon followed.

Over time, however, she began to realize what a blog in general and this blog in particular encompasses. When I began to participate in the conversations between some of the more well known bloggers, she was a little impressed.

And she was very excited when she heard Steve Rubel speak favorably about Newsome.Org in a podcast. Thanks again, Steve. That one statement validated everything I’m trying to do here, at least in my wife’s very important eyes. You need friends in the blogosphere, just like you do in the real world.

So I keep doing my thing while my wife watches out of the corner of her eye.

I have showed her some of the web sites I find so compelling. Wikipedia, Flickr, Tailrank, Megite, and my New York Times, Memeorandum. When I first started showing up on Memeorandum, I called her into my study to show her. I explained to her the way it gathers and displays tech-related topics from all over. She gave me the requisite encouragement and went about her business. Because she, like most of the people I know, just doesn’t care about tech. If it makes her life easier, she’ll use it, but that’s about as far as it goes.

This is Not Your Father’s Memeorandum

But now Gabe has done something brilliant.

We knew he was going to do another Memeorandum at some point. He mentioned food on a podcast one time, I was hoping for music and/or movies, others had their wishlist. But he did something much smarter.

He did WeSmirch, a Memeorandum for celebrity gossip. A self perpetuating People Magazine. Something that will capture an entirely different market.

This is brilliant for two reasons.

First, he didn’t cannibalize his current tech and politics user base. Sure, there will be lots of people who’ll read more than one of his memetrackers, but not as many as there would have been had he done something closer to tech, gadgets, etc.

Second, he will attract a ton of new users, like my wife, who are bored with politics and don’t care about tech. In this Web 2.0 world, eyeballs are the currency, and Gabe has a knack for making eyeballs.

My wife could care less if Amazon enters the online storage business. But she’ll be interested in some of the stuff that will show up on WeSmirch.

I can’t wait to tell her about it.

Bubble 2.0 Watch: Big Bucks for Newroo

It seems Fox Interactive has acquired Newroo, a Web 2.0 application for “less than $10 million.” That’s million, not thousand. I’d tell you more about Newroo, except, well, the thing is it hasn’t even launched yet.

While $0 is technically “less than $10 million,” unless someone is being intentionally deceptive, you have to assume the number is reasonably close to $10 million. At a minimum, in the several million dollar range.

Mike Arrington says it’s a “small acquisition” for Fox.

One Commenter describes Newroo as “Memeorandum for the masses,” which is similar to the way Mike described it earlier. So users can pull content from a lot of other sites into a custom content aggregation page. That’s pretty neat, but a lot of other sites do this right now- My Yahoo, Google and Tailrank to name a few.

Maybe Newroo does it better, but $10 million dollars better?

The revenue model is, of course, ad-based, with the presentation of Amazon affiliate links for items related to the news that displays on the user’s page. The plan is to “eventually” share this revenue with the users who create the pages.

When big companies start buying unreleased technology with no meaningful revenue sources for multiple millions of dollars and referring to it as a small purchase, you can be sure the bubble is rising.

As long as these mega-companies are spending their own money, no worries. Condition red will occur when we start hearing words like IPO and spin-off.

Stay tuned.

10 Applications I Can't Live Without (Part 1)

I named this post like an Isely Brothers song. I don’t know why I noticed and feel compelled to point that out, but there you go.

My original love of computers back in the 80’s arose via gaming. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent swapping out big floppies while playing Starflight. The first one is always special, and this still may be my favorite game of all time.

Now I love my computer because it makes me more efficient. At working, writing, communicating. There are so many things the computer helps me do better and faster.

Here is the first half of the 10 applications that help me the most.

1) Nero

Between my backup needs, my songwriting needs and my desire to take stuff with me when I go places, I use CD and DVD burning software all the time. Many years ago, I dumped that often pre-installed bloatware Easy CD Creator and started using Nero Burning Rom. Even Nero has gotten a little bloaty by adding in a bunch of ancillary stuff no one ever uses, but Nero is still the best at doing what counts. Burning CDs and DVDs.

2) J. River Media Center

I have been way into music since the late 60’s. I have over 26,000 songs (all legal; none shared) on my music server. I have tried every music library manager and player in the book. Winamp (killed by AOL), MusicMatch (killed by Yahoo), Windows Media Player (actually not a bad choice), jetAudio, Real Player (bloatware) and teens of others.

And the best one by far is J. River’s Media Center. It’s the best for large libraries, and for network use, and for playing. I love this program and cannot understand why it doesn’t get more run in the music space.

3) ACDSee

I love digital photography, and as a result I have a ton of digital photos. And the best photo organization and management program I have found is ACD System’s ACDSee. The batch renaming works great, and its lossless rotating is great. I like Paint Shop Pro (in the process of being ruined by Corel) better for pure editing, but for one stop shopping, ACDSee is the answer.

4) UltraMon

The only power users who don’t use two monitors on their computers are the ones who have never tried it. Nothing else, and I mean nothing, has ever increased my productivity as much as a second monitor. And UltraMon makes it even better. It allows you to move windows and maximize windows across the desktop, manage more applications with a second taskbar, use different wallpapers and screen savers and much more.

If you have multiple monitors, it’s a must have.

5) PaperPort

I went to a paperless document filing system for my personal statements and data years ago. I tried all kinds of scanning programs, but the one I settled on back then and the one I still use every day is PaperPort.

It makes scanning and filing a breeze. Combine it with a scanner with an automatic document feeder and the scanning job becomes much easier. It lets you easily scan 2 sided statements and is very reliable.

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

Stay tuned for Part 2 in the next day or two.

In Praise of the Left Column

Dave and Scoble have been chatting up a storm about all of the things wrong with Memeorandum.

In last week’s episode Scoble takes a hiatus and Dave says stupid newbies have ruined the Memeorandum club.

Now Dave says he has figured out how to save Memeorandum. He wants to get rid of the left column, where all the topics and discussion clusters are located, and make the right column, where the new primary story links are, the focus. He wants the new links to flow by like a river. Like a river, hmmm.

Then he says a couple of things that I find interesting and contradictory. The first:

Today I want my meme-tracker to get less discriminating. I don’t want to only see the stories that most people are interested in, I want interesting stories. More offbeat stuff. And I want much more than what I’m getting.

Immediately followed by:

I want the right column to move into the middle, and get rid of what’s in the left column. Once a day is enough to know what the top stories are. That’s why newspapers evolved that way because when you get a newspaper everything in it is new.

Here’s the problem with that. The right column that Dave likes only shows the primary story links, and none of the discussion links. The alternate viewpoints and offbeat stuff show up in the discussion links.

Under Dave’s plan, you’d have to make a choice from two bad options. Maybe you take away the discussion links and you have nothing more than a rotating list of links to the same stories that currently appear in the right column- like an automated Delicious links list. That would certainly look more like a river. A boring river that has no fish in it or boats floating by. Just some links you can click on as they scroll by.

What it would also do, of course, is get rid of those pesky newbies who show up first in the discussion links.

Or perhaps all of those discussion links go into the river too and we have one huge list of links flowing by in a random and chaotic fashion. I would never read such a page, but maybe others would dig(g) it.

What makes Memeorandum work is the very thing Dave and Scoble want to get rid of- the clustered, conversational organization that allows you to find and follow many perspectives at a central, intelligently filtered location. If there are a hundred links about Origami, that’s because a ton of people are talking about it.

So what’s really going on here?

First off, I see very little of all the flaming Dave keeps talking about. I’m starting to think flaming might be a secret word for the rising voices of the unwashed masses who don’t know enough to sit back and let the gurus run the show.

There seems to be a hidden conversation inside of the conversation. Manifest and latent. Like a dream. A dream of the good old days before the newbies started showing up.

Note to Gabe. If you want to destroy Memeorandum quickly and irreparably, Dave gives you the roadmap:

Flatten it out, get less picky, turn the ladder into a river, and I bet some of the magic comes back. I’m not sure it’s right, but the only way to find out is to try it.

I defended Scoble when he got flamed. I defended Dave when he says people are mean to him because he is a celebrity (his word, but I don’t quarrel with it).

But I’m starting to think a lot of this is because the voices that used to have the microphone all to themselves don’t like sharing it with the rest of us.

Web 2.0: Why the Buy Me Exit Strategy is Flawed

Phil Sim, one of my favorite bloggers, has a great and accurate article today about the Web 2.0 madness. His post ought to be read as a companion piece by anyone who remotely agrees with my Play Dough theory on Web 2.0.

Among Phil’s points is that Google Calendar will simultaneously take away a preferred exit strategy and strike a deadly blow to many of the hundred thousand or so Web 2.0 online calendars (many of which have been contestants in my Web 2.0 Wars series). Moreso, but similar, to how GDrive will strike a blow to any unestablished online storage service (Box.Net being one that may have enough legs to outrun the bullet).

We ran into some of this back in the day with ACCBoards.Com as we sought out big media partners. We’d get asked “why should I pay you to run an interactive site when we can do the same thing you’re doing and pay you nothing?” My answer, of course, was that we had all the traffic. We partnered up with Cox Cable and Jefferson Pilot Sports for years.

These Web 2.0 companies don’t have the traffic to trade for a purchase price.

That’s the biggest flaw in the sell yourself to Google as an exit strategy.

We are getting closer and closer to a Web 2.0 shake up. It’s coming.

Microsoft Onfolio!

Scoble reports that Microsoft has bought Onfolio.

Assuming they didn’t pay nutty money, this is a great acquisition by Microsoft. I am a long time user of Onfolio and have sung its praises here before.

Scoble, please tell your guys to figure out a way to use Onfolio with FolderShare to allow us to synch our Onfolio content across computers, including (and this is important) what RSS feeds have already been read. Stop whatever you’re doing and go tell them that.

My Duke loving pal Buzz Bruggeman is another fan of Onfolio. And while he doesn’t know how to pick a college, he certainly knows good software when he sees it.

I wonder if Onfolio will become a part of One Note or remain a separate program.

JK (my mobile technology guru), want to venture a guess?

Half Stepping the Big Stairs: the Irrelevance of IM

Fred Wilson is excited about AOL opening up AIM (sort of) to third party developers for incorporation into their products. He challenges AOL to take the only step that matters by allowing interoperability with the other IM applications. Jason Calacanis, who now works for AOL, agrees.

Letting developers build on top of AOL is fine. Steve Rubel points out the potential benefits to marketers via add-ons like AIM bots and feed alerts.

But this is a half step up a giant staircase. Rather than a parade and confetti, we need to be looking and AOL and saying “And……what else???”

Until IM applications are like phones, IM will never, ever be adopted by the masses. Text messaging has already passed IM in race for the instant communication mindshare primarily because you don’t need 5 cell phones in your pocket to make it work. Text messaging works cross-provider.

The IM race is still being run by closed, proprietary horses because they are competing based on user base and not on features and reliability. AIM has most of the AOL users (though you do not have to be an AOL customer to use it) and a large base of other users. Yahoo (the only company that can compete head to head with Google based on anything other than a large war chest of dollars) has a big user base. Microsoft has a program that is embedded into Windows, a large user base and a war chest of billions it can use to remain in the game. Google launched Google Talk, which promptly faded only to suffer relentless CPR at the hands of Gmail.

Each of these companies wants to win the user base war. Sharing protocols and allowing interconnectivity would turn IM programs into a commodity. These companies who are competing to become the one-stop internet shop for the masses do not want IM programs to become a commodity. Certainly AOL, trying unsuccessfully to stem the flow from behind the walls of its newbie castle, doesn’t want to give those newbies one more reason to cross the moat into the real internet.

Unless and until the day anyone can IM anyone else, all of this talk about IM applications is much ado about nothing.

In August of last year I wrote about the IM situation. I can’t sum it up any better today than I did then:

Until IM programs become like telephones, where the provider and the manufacturer of the telephone have nothing to do with who you can and can’t call, IM will simply not be adopted by grown-ups and businesses.

And that’s really too bad. IM could have been a contender.

Bloglines, Dwight & the Email Support Blues

After trying many online feed readers and after a rough start, I settled on Bloglines as my primary feed reader. I want an online reader, because I want things read here to show as read there.

In general, I think Bloglines does a lot right. It’s faster than the other online readers I have tried, including some that you have to- gasp- pay for.

But it could be so much better.

Why, for example, are there some feeds that just will not work in Bloglines? I read Dwight Silverman every day, but not via Bloglines. It simply will not pull his feed (and I have the new RSS feed address).

And why aren’t there more options when you subscribe to a feed? I organize my reading list by the name of the blogger, as opposed to the blog name. So I have to sign up and then go back in and edit the name. Not the end of the world, but there’s no reason this can’t be handled on the front end.

Finally, has anyone ever had a problem resolved by emailing Bloglines? For some frustrating reason Bloglines shows my main page as “index.html,” which is both unnecessary (you don’t need to page address; just use http://www.newsome.org/) and wrong (it’s index.shtml). This means that people who try to click over to the main page from within bloglines get an error message (fortunately, the post pages have the correct URLs so clicking to a post page works properly). I’ve emailed tech support three times about this and no one has replied, other than via a canned response that they received my email and will look into it. Blah, blah, blah.

Dwight has a very timely article today on email tech support. Someone at Bloglines needs to read it. Put it on the bulletin board. Memorize it.

Here’s the thing.

No one has a secret formula where feed reading is concerned. So all of the feed readers do the same thing, as far as the big stuff goes. The war for market share will be won on the battleground of the little things.

And Bloglines isn’t doing the little things right.

I’m not ready to switch yet, but I’m starting to think about it. And that’s not the way to keep customers.

Explaining My Play Dough Theory

playdough In yesterday’s edition of the RanchoCast podcast, I talked a little bit about Bubble 2.0 and explained why I think Web 2.0 is less that meets the eye.

For anyone who’s curious to hear my thoughts, but doesn’t want to sit through some good music to get there, here’s an excerpt from that portion of the podcast.