Spliced feed for Social Media |
| 25 Resources for Learning How to Customize Your Browser [Mashable!] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 01:22 PM CDT
We’ve put together a list of some of the best instructional resources for the most popular browsers today, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera and even the still wet behind the ears rookie, Google Chrome. Internet Explorerie Tips - Shares a ton of quick tips for customizing Internet Explorer. Official Browser Settings - Overview provides plenty of useful information on all of the settings for IE that most users never touch. Learn what they do and perhaps fix some problems you’ve been experiencing. Official IE Developers Blog - Shares new tips and tricks all the time on their official blog for Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer Toolbar - Tutorial covers what you need to know about IE’s toolbar. Top 11 ie Add-ons - Covers a list of cool tools you can add to the IE experience. Firefox
Customize Firefox themes - Provides a large collection of new themes for changing your Firefox look and feel. Mozilla’s Official Way to Customize Firefox - shows undocumented features and ways to customize their browser. How to Use GreaseMonkey - A must-read if you truly want to take your browsing to the next level. Office Firefox Add-on Library - Contains an amazing amount of add-ons that you can install with a simple click. Mashable’s List of 30+ Firefox Extensions - Extensions that enhance your browsing experience. Safari
How to Customize Safari Beyond All Reason - Offers up a bunch of solutions to common annoyances with Safari as well as other cool tips. Funny title too. How to customize the Safari Toolbar - Covers everything you need to know about the toolbar. SafariStand - Adds dozens of extra features to the Safari browser. eHow’s How to Customize Safari covers the basics of Safari preferences here. YouTube video - Shows you how to customize the Safari Toolbar. Opera
Opera Mini - How to install and configure Opera Mini for your mobile device Official Opera Tutorials - Tutorials on how to customize the Opera browser. Opera Widgets - Shows the best ways to customize Opera Widgets. Extending Opera - Demonstrates several ways to get the most out of Opera. Opera Mail Tutorial - A nice visual tutorial on the Opera Mail system. Chrome
Google Chrome Forums - Has a tremendous amount of ways to trick out your Chrome browser Digital Streets - Shares some cool tips for customizing your Chrome experience. Custom Search Engines - Covers how to change the search engines in Chrome Customized Chrome Themes - Gives you ideas on how to change Chrome’s skin. GreaseMetal - The Chrome equivalent to Firefox’s popular GreaseMonkey.
Whether it’s just to save time or make your browser more visually appealing, there’s an amazing amount of options for any browser that you choose to use. What are some of your favorite ways to trick out your browser? Are there any unusual things you do that others might like to try? Share your secrets in the comments area. --- 30+ Skins For Opera |
| Mixx Turns One - Sees Rapid Growth [ReadWriteWeb] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 12:57 PM CDT
These numbers are even more impressive if you consider that Mixx only had about 1 million unique in May. Sponsor This June, we criticized Mixx for apparently not being able to convert its partnerships with large sites like CNN, the New York Times, NPR, Slate, Reuters, and USAToday into real usage numbers. Since then, Mixx has added a number of new features, including Mixx Communities, but most importantly, it seems the size of the Mixx community itself has reached a tipping point. In its anniversary blog post, Mixx diplomatically attributes its growth to all the "fabulous, intelligent and wonderful Mixxers," but it is also clear that Mixx's strategy of partnering with large content providers is finally starting to pay dividends for the company.
Our initial impression of Mixx was very positive and the new features the company has added since then have only solidified our opinion of Mixx as a very useful social news site for mainstream users. At the same time, though, it is also worth pointing out that Digg now gets about 30 million unique visitors a month. Digg's Kevin Rose has admitted, however, that the site needs to become more relevant to mainstream users if it wants to keep growing. As Mixx is already geared towards mainstream users, we think that is should be able to continue its rapid growth for the foreseeable future.
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| Edelman Webinar: All Social Media is Local [Micro Persuasion] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 12:42 PM CDT On Tuesday, October 7 a group of Edelman digital experts from around the world participated in a free webinar called All Social Media is Local. The event, which lasts about an hour and is now archived, can be found on our web site as well as on Slideshare. I have also embedded it below. My colleagues cover social media from their unique perspectives via Asia Pacific, the EU, Russia and Washington DC. I talk about five trends to watch near the end just before the Q&A. All Social Media Is Local 2008 View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. |
| WTF? Google Has a Sense of Humor: Adds Audio Previews to YouTube Comments [ReadWriteWeb] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 11:47 AM CDT
Sponsor The audio previews are actually quite impressive and can handle even relatively complex words well (think 'autohagiography' or 'schadenfreude'). You can try it out for yourself on any YouTube video. This is clearly a project that Google had been working on before it released this fun, but relatively useless feature on YouTube. Right now, audio previews are restricted to the first 150 characters of a comment, but we envision that Google was working on this text-to-speech project to provide screen reader functionality for tools like Google Reader or Blogger. It's also noteworthy that Google can move this fast when it wants to add a feature just to be funny, while tools like GrandCentral and other acquisitions often lingering somewhere on a server in Mountain View for years. Here is the comic that inspired this new 'feature.' |
| Make VoIP Phone Calls Over Email with Momail and Jajah [Mashable!] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 11:24 AM CDT
All it takes for Momail users to implement this new option is to register with JAJAH under Momail's "On Demand" feature page, located within a user's member page. Once complete, you simply send an email to JAJAH with a phone number you intend to call. JAJAH will subsequently initiate a call to your handset, followed by a call to the intended party. Momail alone is an interesting invention. Along with popular third-party webmail recognition and push mail for phones - which support the technology - Momail claims to compress data received by users by up to 99 percent its original size. For those operating on metered data plans or simply for phones that cannot consume large file sizes (or whose owners simply don't have to patience for such transfers), this is handy indeed. Now with JAJAH's VoIP feature on board, Momail is able to provide extra power with little or no extra investment on the user side. Note: Momail is still in beta in some countries, including the United States. You'll have to request a password in order to gain entry. --- Jajah Launches Free Phone Calls Globally |
| Game Sales or Ads: Developers Need to Choose [Mashable!] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 11:17 AM CDT
With the software we use on a daily basis, it has been a common practice for some developers to offer up ad-supported versions of their software so users could use the programs without having to pay for them. The idea being that if you wanted to get rid of the ads, you could buy a registered version that didn’t display any advertising. For the longest time web forums have carried advertising, but you could often buy a subscription that would serve you up an adless version. My own set of community forums over on my personal site operates this way. Along with that, we have since the advent of AdSense become use to seeing text ads being displayed on our search result pages. The majority of Web 2.0 businesses are all based around an ad supported revenue model so we have gotten use to our web apps or services displaying ads of some sort. A great many of these web services also offer up what is commonly called the “freemium” option to their services, which means that the basic part of their service will display the ads, but you can buy a subscription that will remove the ads and some cases provide additional options. In all this constant bombardment of advertising though, there has always been one place we could retreat to for a little while to escape this slicing and dicing of our activities used to serve up ads. Actually I should say that there use to be because even that last bastion of privacy is now opening its doors to advertising. The place I am talking about is of course our games. Whether it is online, console or computer we could immerse ourselves in those make believe worlds without the irritation of facing ads. This changed in a very big way back in 2007 when Microsoft bought Massive and shortly after that inked a deal with Electronic Arts to supply ads within their games. Now today we have Google announcing the launch of their AdSense platform for game developers. While some folks will probably see nothing wrong with this move to force even more ads in front of our eyeballs, I do have a problem with it. Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins makes a valid point about the idea’s possible success when he says in his post on Mashable
However, I don’t care if the ads are successful or not. What is bothering me is that they are doing it in the first place. My objection isn’t so much that they are doing it but more of the fact that it all smacks more of greed and the fact, that in most cases the gamers are going to be paying twice for something. When it comes to Google’s entry into the marketplace they are primarily targeting online games and the problem here is that the vast majority of these game sites are already heavily monetized. Everywhere you look on these sites you will see ads. The sidebar, the header, the footer and now they will be within the game itself. When is enough really enough? With Mircosoft’s play into in game advertising being centered around the Xbox platform and computer games this is even more irritating. After all haven’t we already paid for these games and now they want to force us to see advertising as well? When is enough really enough? In this case of the consoles and stand alone games the game developers are asking to be paid twice for the same game. First by ripping off your wallet and now by cramming ads down our throats. At what point do we as consumers say enough is enough? --- Google To Launch AdSense for Games |
| Greenbox Keeps a Constant Eye on Home Energy Use (The Startup Review) [Mashable!] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 10:31 AM CDT
Company Name:20-word Description:Greenbox Technology is creating an interactive energy management platform that enables households to save money and reduce their carbon footprint. CEO’s Pitch:Greenbox founders tackle the challenge of global warming by designing an intuitive, information-rich, interactive Web-based platform that homeowners can use to track energy use in real time. Even small reductions in energy consumption can collectively amount to billions of dollars in savings. The Greenbox platform will also feature community interaction tools, making energy use reduction a neighborhood challenge. Mashable’s Take:Based out of San Bruno, California, and launched as a limited trial in the first half of 2008, Greenbox is premised on the simple idea that the ability to monitor one's energy usage in the home, matched with per-client solutions on how to cut down on the proverbial carbon footprint, will help to propagate green living in a substantive way.
As many homeowners now recognize, the cost of energy is quite high. To the point that it’s financially beneficial to adjust consumption. Greenbox's role as an Web-based energy monitor is to put a stream of data in the hands of its users in order that they keep informed of activity, rather than, say, having to consult with efficiency specialists as to their particular situation. Yes, the popular lightbulb swap to less hungry and more long-lasting lamps helps matters, but Greenbox's place as consistent watchdog, so to speak. "We remove the guesswork," is how the company phrases it. Indeed, this is not a referral service, pointing you in the direction of products and services that will help you to quickly satisfy your eco-conscious mind. Greenbox is really akin to having a personal pedometer for the roof over your head, telling you how far you've gone with energy usage at any given moment. You can watch it any time you please, or register for email and/or SMS alerts relaying information regarding "high or unusual usage or changes in electricity prices" Greenbox is still developing a very limited trial rollout to select registrants. VP of marketing Matt Smith said to The New York Times earlier this week that just two dozen households have reported lower energy bills as a result Greenbox's implementation. But it invites people to sign up to be notified as to developments in their particular area or residence. It expects to be "regionally available" in the months ahead. Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials |
| Says Amazon: S3 Is So Popular, We're Lowering Prices [ReadWriteWeb] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 10:05 AM CDT
Sponsor Because of the increases in usage, Amazon has decided to lower the costs for storage. The new model features 4 pricing tiers, as follows:
Amazon will continue to offer the pricing under the "pay what you use" model where there is no minimum fee or long term equipment required. According to Alyssa Henry, general manager of the Amazon Simple Storage Service, ""The growth of Amazon Web Services has allowed us to become even more efficient and further lower our operating expenses. AWS remains committed to passing savings along to our customers. Just six months ago, we announced a reduction in data transfer costs, and today we're pleased to pass new storage savings along to our customers." But it's clear that this pricing change is more than a simple "pass the savings on to you" move by the company. Since the company formerly had a flat pricing plan, the new tiered pricing and volume discounts makes it clear that Amazon is looking to edge out their competition. The service now also looks more appealing to the enterprise who may have felt that, before, there was not enough of a savings to use cloud storage as opposed to host-your-own storage behind the firewall. The new pricing goes into effect November 1st, 2008. Discuss |
| Posted: 09 Oct 2008 09:27 AM CDT Nintendo has outsmarted the rest of the video game world. Microsoft's XBox and Sony's Playstation 3 appeal to the 18-35 male market, but Nintendo has tapped into a much wider audience with games that boost your mental and physical strength. According to Forbes, Brain Age has sold 4.46 million copies in the U.S. and it was the best-selling game in Europe in 2007. Some 25% of Ubisoft's revenues last year were attributed to titles like My Spanish Coach. (Just imagine how valuable this game is in bilingual cities such as Houston and Miami.) In Burlington, Ma, physical therapists have utilized the Wii as creative portion their patients' workout regimen. The Wii's remote, which uses motion-sensing devices known as "accelerometers" and infrared detection, offering the closest virtual-reality experience for gamers of every age and skill level. A story by the Boston Globe provided the perfect example of Nintendo's expanding fanbase. Deborah Thompson is a 62-year-old mother who despised everything about video games. prior to her first experience with the Wii, she described video games as a waste of time. Her entire perspective was radically changed once she used the Wii to re cooperate from her knee injury
Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo's executive vice president of sales and marketing , told Forbes how Nintendo's special line of self-improvement games have widened the potential market.
Due to high demand for the Wii, Nintendo may have inside angle for the upcoming holiday season, but with high prices for each game, the video game industry as a whole could face a cold winter in this economic slump. |
| Who Really Uses Mint.com (And Other Banking 2.0) Services Anyway? [ReadWriteWeb] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 09:19 AM CDT
The proliferation of these types of apps would have you believe there's a big demand for web-based financial tools. But is there really? We would hope so, considering how their advanced technology can provide detailed analysis about your money (or lack thereof). However, we secretly wondered if the only people logging in to sites like Mint.com and the like are the young kids of Gen Y. Do adults with mortgages, credit card debt, and 401Ks even know how to use these tools? Sponsor Are Banking 2.0 Users Really That Young?To find out who's using the banking 2.0 tools and why, we started with Mint.com, who recently gave us a peek into their company's data. As VentureBeat noted, Mint.com's nearly 500,000 users are cutting down on expenses - they've spent an average of $300 less per month in August than in January this year, a 6% drop. However, they believed that early users of this site and those like it were sure to be younger and more tech-savvy. We believe they are tech-savvy, too, since it does require the use of computer and browser, and we know that not everyone can handle such complications. But we wondered: how young are the users really? Mint.com Is Slowly AgingAlthough Mint.com doesn't require you to fill out anything more than a zip code and email address in order to sign up, they've conducted multiple user surveys in order to get a grasp on their company's demographic data. The end result of those surveys has given them a good idea of who uses the site. Mint.com admits that they, as a web company, did indeed "launch young." In the beginning, their audience was primarily Generation Y. However, over the past year, their user base has been gradually aging. At launch, the average age of the user on the site was 27, the same as their CEO at the time, Aaron Patzer. Today, the average age is 28, only a year higher, a year later. So are they really growing up? Maybe they're not aging overall as a site, but when you look at the breakdowns by age range, you can see that some of the older age groups are trending upwards. Look at the 40-year-olds and up, for example - there is some growth to be seen there. Below, you can see a chart that tracks changes between September, 2007 and July, 2008:
Another trend that points to the aging of Mint users is the fact that more users now report owning their primary residence. In December 2007, that number was 39%. Today, 43% report that they own their own home. Why It Works: You Can Actually Save Money
But that's not to say that Mint is only a tool for the wealthy tech elite - anyone can save money with the service. According to a company representative, 1 out of every 10 Mint.com users changes accounts after signing up for the service. This means that those users are tapping into Mint.com's feature where the service recommends them a better offer. For example, a person with a credit card who charges a lot of airline tickets might be offered a different card with travel points. Another person might be recommended to switch from their Bank of America savings account to ING where they would get a better rate, perhaps. And yet another person might be recommended a credit card with a lower rate. And don't be mistaken - those recommendations aren't simply taking into account the introductory period where the credit card company slashes the rate to entice you, but looks at the credit card rate over the course of an entire year before determining whether it would really save the user money. What About The Other Startups In This Space?Given Mint.com's user base of around 500,000 and their traffic numbers, they are one of the biggest, if not the biggest, personal finance/money management web service. They achieved this growth through smart advertising campaigns that reached out to the mainstream, especially women, in magazines like SELF, Real Simple, and Reader's Digest. That appeared to have worked - today, 40% of new users on the site are women - that's a much higher number than back in 2007, when only 15% of the users were female. So, what about the others? We reached out to some of the other banking 2.0 sites to see what sort of data they had, too. Out of the ten apps we previously featured, only Wesabe, Rudder, Geezeo, Xero, and Expensr had data on hand. iThryv is still preparing to launch and the rest did not respond to our request. Here's how those sites compared:
Great Tools, Now If Only Banks Would Tell People They Existed...Overall, we can tell there are some general trends here - banking 2.0 sites are still young, but are starting to gain traction among older users. More women are starting to use these applications which makes sense, give that they are typically the ones holding the household purse strings. However, we think that there should be more of a push by financial institutions to recommend these types of tools to their customers, instead of sticking with the old stand-bys that include desktop software applications like Quicken. As Alistair Newton, Research VP and Industry Services Director at Gartner noted earlier this year, "with banks coming under increasing pressure to deliver a range of short-term cost savings, the ways that banks interact with their customers will become increasingly important in managing costs downwards. There are a variety of ways in which banks can help customers save money and better manage their exposure to debt while saving the bank money by encouraging greater use of self-service applications." Gartner also maintains that communities such as Mint.com, Wesabe, and Geezeo can be of long-term benefit to banks, especially as they help the more debt-exposed clients to manage their funds more effectively. We couldn't agree more. Our hope is that in light of the country's economic meltdown, these apps will get the push they deserve. Image credit: Cash, courtesy of: spcbrass Discuss |
| Amuso: Viral + Monetizable Magic? [ReadWriteWeb] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 06:00 AM CDT
While I still know nothing about game shows (I don't even have a TV at home), there is something intriguing about Amuso at a business model level. Amuso may be a good example of that rare breed of startup that is both viral and monetizable. Sponsor How Does The Game Show Quadrant Look?The rule of thumb is: "The more viral it is, the harder it is to monetize". For example, Communication services such as Twitter and Hotmail are perfect for viral adoption but hard (not impossible, but hard) to monetize. They maybe great businesses, scale first and monetize later can be a great game plan if you have plenty of funding. But they are certainly hard to monetize. What about Entertainment? YouTube is perfect for viral, but has monetization issues. Traditional entertainment is simple to monetize - you create something that people want and charge them for it - but is only viral as a bye-product of occasionally creating a great hit that everybody talks about. Amuso says they are in the magic quadrant at the top right hand corner that is both viral and monetizable. Let's look at that a bit closer, poke around in the magic numbers. How Amuso WorksIn this case a picture says it all...
Parsing The Amuso ModelHere is the basic deal: user generated game shows. COMPETE Contestants want to get famous and make money from prizes. Who are they: Next Top Models, Pop Idols, Comedy Kings and more. The "community" breaks down as follows: 10% Contestant Amuso takes a share of the prize money. It Looks Like It Might Be WorkingAfter only two months, Amuso has already attracted 100,000 monthly visitors, 20,000 registered contestants and paid out over $10,000 in cash prizes. That is good traction by most start-up standards. Investors Who Funded SkypeThe founders are two ex-Yahoo!-ers, Jordi Bartomeu, CEO and Barak Rabinowitz. They told me that their investors had been investors in Skype. Which means that the investors have done well and understand how to get viral growth. For more on Skype investors see this old blog post from 2005. Discuss |
| Iterend vs. Technorati vs. Google Blog Search (Blog Search Fight) [Mashable!] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 05:14 AM CDT
Technorati has been king of the hill for a long time when it comes to blog search but as happens with all monarchies, they’ve grown complacent and stopped innovating which has opened the door for other potential heirs to the throne.Enter iterend and Google Blog Search which recently hit the streets. The initial reviews of Google’s foray into the blog search arena has been mostly positive.
Before checking the results of the showdown, here’s a little bit about iterend which presents a busy home page with a flood of recent phrases as tags along with the top stories in the past twenty four hours. At the top of the page is their search bar which you can adjust to search for a different time frame such as the last hour, last week, anytime, etc. Here are some other features of note. - All articles are linked to structured wikipedia information, which makes it possible to search by categories. - Search results are clustered and you can search on sentence level, post level or blog level. - Next to the search results, relevant phrases and categories are displayed, so you are able to restrict your search or get an overview over the information you are looking for. - You can search for related posts to a given topic, url or cluster The Test Results MP4 / Subscribe for Free! As you’ll see in the screencast, the old dog Technorati still seemed to provide the best and fastest results when searching for the same exact keywords. We used a post from Mashable for this video just to show how different the search results were for all three search engines. In most cases, Technorati provided the most recent blog posts. While Google’s Blog Search impressed with its sheer extensiveness, Technorati seemed to include far less unseemly characters in its search results. Both Google Blog Search and Iterend appeared to include far more spammers, sploggers and other things you usually find hiding under a rock. Over all, Technorati is still the top dog for blog search while Google’s Blog Search and Iterend are worthy challengers that will surely improve with time. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Google Maps: Now Officially Gorgeous [Mashable!] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 03:49 AM CDT
Google, however, will receive imagery in 50-centimeter resolution because of a government restriction and the fact that it’s not the only customer who benefits from GeoEye-1. They’re sharing it with National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; which collects and analyses geospatial data in support of national security. Translated, that means they get the really good stuff. Real spies probably have their own, even more advanced satellites, though. Speaking to Wired, Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications and marketing, said that GeoEye-1 is
The important fact is that GeoEye-1 is up and running, collecting imagery for Google Maps which will soon start looking like the image below. Time for a new round of mapspotting!
--- Bumpy Map Mashups with Google Terrain |
| No More Squinting: Google Maps' First High-Res Satellite Images [ReadWriteWeb] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 12:21 AM CDT
Still, for all the beauty of Google's directions, "street view," and "search nearby," the top-down views of our world have always been a bit fuzzy and squint-inducing. Until now. Thanks to Google hitching a ride on GeoEye-1, that's all about to change. And today, we saw the first example of what's to come. Sponsor With access to the GeoEye-1 imagery, Google can now begin providing images for Google Maps and Google Earth that will boast a resolution of 50 cm. (That's just shy of two feet for you non-metric types.) Wired has posted the first photo from GeoEye, and it's amazingly crisp. Here's a comparison between the new satellite image and the current resolution (GeoEye-1 image, top):  Looking for more resolution than that? You're going to need to get security clearance. The US Federal Government restricts distribution of higher-resolution imagery, even though the image the satellite is capturing has a more detailed resolution (43 cm). Currently, there is no specific date for when the imagery will be added to Google Maps and Google Earth. One thing is for sure: When this new high-resolution imagery becomes available, Google Maps sightseeing will get a great deal more interesting. Discuss |
| Will Algorithms Make Human Editors Obselete? Not If Journalists Collaborate [Publishing 2.0] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 12:19 AM CDT Will algorithms replace human editors on the web? It’s a bogeyman question on one level, but ask any news site about the percentage of traffic they get from search engines — and what the trend looks like — and you’ll realize that algorithms are increasingly deciding what we pay attention to, what is important, what is relevant. It’s part of how journalists and news orgs have abdicated their traditional roles on the web. And it’s not just Google — news sites are increasingly filled with links generated by algorithms that suggest to readers what else they ought to read. And that’s because most news site still see original content creation as their sole purpose — they don’t see the tremendous need, and the tremendous value in filtering the content that already exists. They don’t see that every link on their site is an important editorial judgment, not an afterthought, not an algorithmic process to set and forget (which often leads to algorithms making bad recommendations, as many news sites who use them will tell you). Giving over the function of choosing links, of filtering the web, to an algorithm is an implicit devaluation of the quality of human judgment, of what makes an individual editor’s perspective so interesting. That’s why link bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall, and Matt Drudge have become such a powerful force on the web. They understood, even where traditional news orgs did not, the value of bringing their unique perspectives to filtering the web, of having a “linking voice.” They understood the editorial power of the link. Handing over the editorial selection of links to an algorithm is also an implicit concession that human news judgment isn’t up to the task. It’s too overwhelming, too much work, so just let the machines take over. And there are obviously times when you want a machine to take over — searching the billions of pages on the web for some obscure piece of information, and doing so comprehensively, is where algorithms are a godsend. But while algorithms may excel at processing vast amounts of data by brute force, they are only as smart as the rules we give them. Algorithms can simulate human intelligence — but algorithms have no judgment — and certainly no news judgment. Algorithms can’t do link journalism. That’s the brilliance of Google — it’s actually driven by human judgment, by the judgment that someone producing a website makes every time they link to something. Rather than replacing human judgment, Google is actually co-opting it. But Google isn’t co-opting the judgment of most journalists and news orgs — because so many of them still don’t link to anything. (Notable exceptions notwithstanding.) Still, the obvious question is how can human editors compete with the brute force of an algorithm, which never tires, never has a busy day, never gets distracted? (Cue Terminator music.) Well, human editors aren’t going to compete very well with the old go it alone model of journalism. But they can compete through COLLABORATION. Digg has proven that collaborative human editorial effort can cover a massive amount of territory on the web. Imagine if journalists and news orgs brought together their combined editorial intelligence, their combined news judgment. Suddenly the advantage of an algorithm’s scale in filtering the web doesn’t seem so insurmountable. It may be overwhelming for one editor to fact check what Google CEO Eric Schmidt called the “cesspool” of false information on the web. But imagine journalists collaborating to verify what they link to. Even within a newsroom — and even for the many newsrooms grappling with shrinking resources — collaboration could yield a powerful editorial filter. In fact, the more that resources shrink, the more essential collaboration becomes. Yeah, I know, collaboration isn’t in the traditional journalism playbook. But insert here the almost cliched reference to swiftly declining business models, now aided by economic decline, and, well… do we really need to be having that conversation anymore? Just look at where the most innovative, entrepreneurial minds in journalism have focused their efforts — it’s all about collaboration: Ryan Sholin just launched ReportingOn, a site where journalists share in short Twitter-like messages what they are reporting on — with the aim of actually HELPING each other. With fewer journalists in newsrooms doing original reporting, doesn’t it make perfect sense that more and better reporting could get done collaboratively? Why should a beat be a solo effort? That’s is also the idea behind Beat Blogging, the brainchild of Jay Rosen, with journalism iconoclast Patrick Thornton now leading the charge. The idea is for journalists to develop social networks to improve their beat reporting — by collaborating with people involved with and interested in the topics they cover, journalists can do better reporting. (Beat Blogging is even collaborating to find great examples of beat blogging.) Speaking of collaborating with communities, Mark Briggs, of Journalism 2.0 fame, co-founded a company called Serra Media, whose first product Newsgarden is a map-based local news platform that allows news orgs to collaborate with their communities to publish hyperlocal news. And their bet is that journalists and community members all posting hyperlocal news as they come across it can do a better job than algorithm-based local sites in judging what news is important to the community. And then there’s David Cohn, who will soon be launching Spot.us, where a community can collaborate to actually pay for the journalism that the community needs. A community brings money and interest in issues, journalists bring their reporting skills, and, collaboratively, journalism happens. See the pattern here? It’s about how a group of people, empowered by technology to collaborate, can accomplish much more than one person can by themselves. And the idea that news orgs can accomplish more together than they can by themselves isn’t so foreign to journalism — it’s the basis of the newswire. So it’s not that hard to imagine a collaborative newswire based on links, where journalists help each other filter the web. It’s not that hard to imagine journalists, collaborating with each other and the communities they serve, becoming most powerful editorial intelligence on the web. |
| Links for 2008-10-08 [del.icio.us] [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] Posted: 09 Oct 2008 12:00 AM CDT
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| Best Buy's "Enterprise Twitter" [ReadWriteWeb] Posted: 08 Oct 2008 11:43 PM CDT
Enter Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, Best Buy’s Senior Managers for Social Technology, and better known as the guys who built Blue Shirt Nation. Drupal-based Blue Shirt Nation went on to become the prime internal enterprise 2.0 case study in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell. Now they’re about to launch Mix, an enterprise microsharing application. Sponsor The goal with Mix is to better network, problem-solve and share ideas among Best Buy’s 160,000 employees. Around 24,000 employees are already active on Blue Shirt Nation, so the conditions are ripe for Mix to become widespread.
Gary and Steve took time recently to tell me more about Mix, HeadMix (the application it’s built with) and their plans for a “mobile Blue Shirt Nation.” LF: Until a few weeks ago, there weren’t many publicly announced applications that could do something like this. When did you start looking for a provider to build an internal “Twitter” for Best Buy? BB: We started talking to Headmix in March or April of 2008. LF: You’d personally just started on Twitter then, so how did you know what you were seeking? BB: We’re both social bookmarking junkies because sharing links is such a fast, easy way to share ideas. You just smack somebody with a URL. So we wanted something like that for Blue Shirt Nation. Something that combined mobile access with simple link sharing. We also knew that for Blue Shirt Nation, the adoption rate drops off fast as you climb the hierarchy. Executives just don’t spend a lot of time using their browsers. Mostly, they’re attached to smartphones and Outlook, with some General Managers texting. So other than the short formats, the idea of a device agnostic network was appealing. The other group of employees we want to reach better are General Managers in the stores. They don’t have a lot of time, but they might be able to fire off an update while they’re walking from the front of the store to the back. Again, looking at Blue Shirt Nation, the majority of use (by retail staff) is during breaks and before or after work. So for this group also, we wanted something with mobile access. LF: How closely will Mix integrate with Blue Shirt Nation? BB: We looked at a deeper integration and ended up with something simpler. It will look like BSN, and the applications will keep each other informed, but Mix will function like the mobile arm of BSN. LF: What’s the time frame for rollout? BB: It’s coming very soon. One big hurdle has been waiting for carriers to give us the short codes. That was long wait. There’s also been a lot of technical work on integration and authentication. By mid-to-end October we’ll have it live within one territory (out of 8). LF: How do you plan to manage the rollout? BB: Within that territory, we’ll focus General Managers, store GMs, territory managers, district managers — about 200 people. Really, we’re still wrestling with the rollout plan. Some mix of internal communications, Blue Shirt Nation, territory meetings, enterprise events and email. LF: Do you think it will be easier or harder than rolling out Blue Shirt Nation? BB: Harder actually, because there are more choices now of where (employees) can go to communicate online in general. LF: What do you think of Yammer? BB: We’ve seen some activity on it. A lot of excitement and conversation at the beginning, but then it tapered off. People didn’t want to maintain their Twitter and their Yammer accounts. Also, we see a problem with Yammer. There are what, 160,000 employees at Best Buy? It’s like a few of you are thrown into a dark room together. You don’t really know who anyone is or who to trust. You’re told it’s okay, they’re all employees, go ahead, talk. But trust is an issue. Who are these people? How do we know them? What can we say? LF: What factored into the decision to build out Mix using Headmix? BB: We liked that it’s simple, but had the extra features when you wanted them. It sounds goofy, but we really liked the Outlook plugin — that’s where our employees live. That will make it easier to use. We really enjoyed getting to know the developer team and we’ve liked how flexible the application has been for moving data around and having different features. We wanted to be able to make changes really fast, and had usually gone with open-source systems for other projects. But in the last 4 months the UI, features and data structure have been very flexible. LF: What’s Headmix itself built on? BB: Ruby on Rails. Ben Moore is a friend-of-a-friend met via a Ruby users meeting. LF: What else can you tell us about Headmix? BB: It’s a different but familiar feature set to Twitter — a few more places that you can click. We don’t have it set up to talk to Twitter but it could be integrated. There will be something like groups - channels, to use Headmix’ term, that act like containers for discussion. It’s behind a lot of security and encryption but it’s still an SaaS model. Location won’t be in the initial rollout, but might be in the future. LF: What has been the corporate perspective on doing this at Best Buy? Was it a hard sell? BB: Headmix has some good demo videos and was cool about explaining basically what it does — “here’s the cool use cases we see, etc.” We were able to talk about use cases and they were willing to adjust. Potentially this is just the advantage of working with a startup. The initial assumption was that it would be hosted within Best Buy. But as is the case with a lot of enterprise systems, we had to look at whether we could really support and host it in-house, more politically than technically. So many companies miss “Just Try It.” Nobody wants to just go ahead. That said, we’re in a unique situation with BSN Labs — we essentially have a license to try pilots and see whats going to take off. So the conversation was, us: “We’re going to have a mobile version of Blue Shirt Nation.” Management: “oh, cool.” People have stopped asking us about metrics, measurement and goals. They see that it’s a cost of doing business. Nobody questions whether you need to have phones anymore, its assumed. LF: Nice position to be in. BB: Whatever happens, it’s going to be cool to try it. We’ll learn something. Sometimes, the bigger things get the more fear it will fail. I expect to see blowback on a lot of this stuff by next March. “I don’t need all this stuff.” People are going to start stepping back some. Enterprises are getting hammered so hard right now to try all this stuff. There will be some cutting back in what they can do, depending on what’s working. LF: Thanks guys. We look forward to hearing more. More about HeadMix from Pistachio Consulting's Enterprise Microsharing Tools survey: HeadMix Inc.’s mission is to help employees collaborate and work more effectively by discovering knowledge that trapped inside their colleagues heads. It’s a lightweight, on-demand, easy-to-use messaging platform that promotes intuitive knowledge-sharing inside the enterprise via the web, email, mobile and SMS. With HeadMix, users subscribe to other employees and/or relevant groups/topics allowing them to stay connected with the content that is most relevant. Questions get answered sooner; key conversations can weave into the workday; and news travels faster. HeadMix connects employees and makes them more valuable to other employees and their customers. Features:
Other notes:
Laura "@Pistachio" Fitton is Founder and Principal of Pistachio Consulting, and one of the first prominent "microbloggers." Her TouchBase Blog is a leading source of information about microsharing for business. You can find the original article there. Discuss |
| How Technology Can Help Aleviate Economic Fears [Mashable!] Posted: 08 Oct 2008 09:48 PM CDT
Earlier today, Aaron Brazell over at Technosailor invoked his fellow technology bloggers to speak up and become leaders through what he sees as “the darkest hour in our recent history.”
He’s right in one sense. I’m not convinced that these are necessarily our darkest hours, but the real crisis may be one of confidence, rather than purely economic in nature. Here’s the problem - and I never thought I’d say this as a former precocious youth myself - the dominant ‘Kids’ like Mark Zuckerberg, running a multi-billion dollar company. Kids’ like Corvida and Alana Taylor, which do bang up jobs blogging with the big boys. ‘Kids’ like my boss, Pete Cashmore. Obviously, with that list of folks in the category of people I’m talking about today, you know I’m not meaning to speak ill of a whole age-group of people (or the incredibly gifted and talented guy who signs my paycheck). But the majority of the pundits, bloggers, and businessmen have no perspective or frame of reference for our current troubled times. None of them have survived an economic downturn before. Most of them were still in high school during the original tech bust. Many of them were toddlers during the the market crashes in the 80’s (if they were yet born). That in and of itself says wonders about the economic times we live in, but it also means that when they see the market take a down-turn like it did this week, they freak out. They say things like
I’ve intentionally left out people’s names on these actual quotes, because you’d recognize the people involved, and this isn’t about calling folks out. The truth is that everything I’ve quoted above lacks ‘historical’ perspective. In 2002, that was bad for not just those of us in technology, but everyone. At the time, I was living in Dallas, and I had been an “independent contractor” for almost a year and half. I put that in quotes because that was the preferred politically correct nomenclature for “unemployed” at the time. Before I and 699 other co-workers were laid off, I had been a coder at Nokia, and was instrumental in writing the standards and specifications for the mobile phone ringtone. Over the next year or so, I scraped by with doing website design and networking gigs
On that day, my roomate and I opened up the Dallas Morning News, and on the front page was a fellow standing in the middle of I-35, the highway most famous for being the opening scene of Office Space, holding up a sign that said “have MCSE, will work for food.” Here was someone who had a Microsoft System’s Engineering certification, probably who made $50-60k before he was laid off. If he was in a position anything like mine, he was facing the real threat of starvation, not to mention the loss of a newly built house through missed mortgage payments, and no real work in site (technical in nature or not). Here we are today, though, with an economy that despite the problems in the real estate and investment banking sectors, still employs about 94% of us. Relative to the total size of the US workforce, the recent layoffs have been very minor. Overall unemployment figures are only very slightly off from where they should be for a healthy economy. Moreover, we live in an age that thanks to the advancements in technology in the last five years or so, allows us to be entrepreneurial much more readily than ever before. Yes, Steven and I love to crankily talk about how useless much of the crap in the Web 2.0 world is, but thanks to tools and concepts like eBay, Google Docs, co-working, social networking, cloud computing and Mechanical Turk - anyone who’s able to afford a laptop has the market capitalisation to open up a whole functioning office.
A while back, I read an account of a single mom who, despite being an employed, skilled and degreed worker had to take her family to a soup kitchen. I found the article via Chris Brogan’s link blog. He shared it because it was a heart-wrenching tale that pulled at struck home for most of the intellectual workers who read his linkblog. The story was introduced with the following opening paragraph:
When I re-shared the story, this is what I had to say:
That’s the point I’m driving at, today. Anyone who has the capability to read this has an economic responsibility amidst all this bad news. We have a responsibility to be encouraging to our fellow social media denizens (and our real life compatriots). We all have the tools at our disposal to carry ourselves through whatever economic crisises come our way. In the two years prior to working for Mashable, I had made it a goal of mine to work full time as an independent journalist in the New Media sector. During that time period, I met my then soon-to-be-wife I had to make a lot of sacrifices to make ends meet. During that time period, I wound up selling off my very sizable comic book collection (via eBay), and about three quarters of the computers and video rendering machines I’d built over the years (via Craigslist), as well as eating up almost all of the savings I’d accrued over the previous thr |
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