The Social Software Weblog

Social software coverage now on Download Squad

Barb Dybwad — 2006-07-20T17:42:00+00:00

Yes folks, it is the end of an era -- or at least, the end of this blog as we know it. Our Social Software coverage has been subsumed by a larger entity, although without the usual acquisition rumours, inebriated launch party (complete with Flickr RSS feed) or sudden influx of VC money. Our own Download Squad will be proudly taking over coverage of news in the social software space, so tune in over there for your daily fix; set your new bookmarks to the Social Software category or the main Download Squad site, and reorient your voracious newsreaders to the Social Software RSS feed and/or the Download Squad main RSS feed.

Thank you, and good night.

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Imagination Cubed online whiteboard

Dan Lurie — 2006-07-10T17:00:00+00:00

Filed under: AJAX, collaboration

From the same nice people who brought us that dishwasher churning away in the next room comes an exiting new way to visually brainstorm and collaborate with your friends! Ok, so it might not be all that "new," and some of you might not find it particularly "exciting," but dammit, I thought it was cool. Developed by General Electric, Imagination Cubed (hence-force to be known as I^3, for the self-serving purpose of me not having to type it out each time) is another one of them multi-user online whiteboards. As I said, nothing particularly special about that. The cool thing about I^3 that sets it apart from other similar tools is the fact that there are no accounts, and therefore, you never have to go out of your way to make sure your friends and co-workers are registered. Simply visit the site and invite up to 2 other people to simultaneously use your white board. When you're done, you can print your final product, see a replay of what happened, or save the white board for later. I can see this being really useful for those times when you are trying to explain to their mother-in-law how to use tivo to record "Today in Cats," and that she needs to "push the green button, not that one, the other one, I mean the big green button shaped like a rhinoceros, here let me draw it for you!" You can also add text to your drawing, change the background color, and display a grid to help you draw more geometrically.

Wrap all this up in a delicious ~~nougat~~ AJAX interface and you've got yourself a winning web 2.0 application. Now, if only they could find a way to monetize it...

Via Lifehacker

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Patent on social networking granted - to Friendster

David Chartier — 2006-07-07T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: social networking, social software, social news

"Friend-what?" you might be asking, but it's true: Red Herring is reporting that Friendster, the ill-fated social networking that (I think) started it all, has been granted a patent on social networks. Following a great tradition of painstakingly clear patent language, Friendster owns the patent for a "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks".

Whether Friendster will use the time-tested 'if you can't beat 'em, take em to court' strategy is yet to be seen, but to their credit: they apparently applied for the patent (issued June 27 of 2006) way back in the day, before they fell from their perch.

[via Slashdot]

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Jookster

Dan Lurie — 2006-06-23T08:00:00+00:00

Filed under: search engines, social networking, reputation

Jookster mashes up web archiving, social networking, and ranked searching to provide a new service that I think has some interesting things going with it. After signing up for a Jookster profile and installing the Firefox tool-bar, users have access to personalized searches and instant web archiving. Clicking on the Jook This button in the tool-bar instantly archives a copy of the page you are visiting and indexes it for search. You can go back at your convenience and search through all the pages you have jooked. The cool thing about Jookster however is not the fact that it can archive and index content, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 has been doing this for ages. The cool aspect of Jookster is the social aspect. Adding buddies with similar interests expands your search results to include things jooked by them, and their buddies, and their buddies buddies, etc. You can specify how many degrees of separation you want to search. The search results are ranked by how many degrees the person who jooked a page is away from you. This feature brings in a concept that has been much talked about at the Supernova conference this week; the fact that outside of the web, we use trusted contacts so look for information, and judge the quality information based on the what you think of your friends. Jookster brings this idea to the web, and I think it could be the start of something big. Imaging searching for information on the ecosystem of the amazon rain forest and being able to see that a biologist you know had jooked a result; wouldn't that immediately reassure you that the information there would be good stuff?

I think Jookster is a great idea, and even if it turns out that it is one of the many startups that will go belly up in this boom, I'm confident that the underlying ideas it embraces will be something that we are using for years to come.

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Billy Bragg to MySpace: You'll get nothing and like it!

Tommy Perkins — 2006-06-09T12:29:00+00:00

Rupert Murdoch and Billy Bragg: you have to wonder how these guys got in bed in the first place. It's a notion that'll induce Scanners-esque head explosions and I wouldn't spend much more time it, as the avowed socialist Bragg has taken his toothbrush and, we presume, did not let the door hit him on the way out of avowed capitalist Murdoch's crib.
Irked by terms of service that apparently gave MySpace "a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute" his music, British songwriter Billy Bragg pulled his music from the social networking site.
Bragg's MySpace.com page offers this explanation: "SORRY THERE'S NO MUSIC," because "once an artist posts up any content (including songs), it then belongs to My Space (AKA Rupert Murdoch) and they can do what they want with it, throughout the world without paying the artist."
As Publishing 2.0 notes, the falling out is a harsh reminder of the lengths MySpace will go to compensate for not owning any of the content (read: the underlying value upon which much of the enterprise depends) posted on its sites and of MySpace's still-showing Web 1.0 roots.
Naturally, MySpace chalks this all up to a bit of sloppy lawyering.
"Because the legalese has caused some confusion, we are at work revising it to make it very clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist's work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends," Berman says. "Obviously, we don't own their music or do anything with it that they don't want."
Whew. Well, I'm relieved; how about you? As we all know, when someone dismisses the tiny print in a contract as "legalese," that part is immediately invalidated, right?

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Heat mapping your transportation decisions

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-06-03T15:23:00+00:00

Filed under: mapping, mashups

MySociety.org, a British tech nonprofit project that builds and showcases new tools for civic good, has released a beautiful series of maps illustrating various transportation data sets around England. See, for example, this sample map showing whether public transport (bus, light rail best is in red) or a private automobile (blue) will get you faster from the Cambridge station to any other part of the country. (Cambridge is in the bottom right hand corner, nearish London.) The project has created many other maps as well, illustrating a variety of data.

This is interesting, of course, primarily as a proof of concept. I'm sure it was time consuming and expensive to create, but that won't always be the case. If organizations like public transportation agencies expose their data via APIs then I can imagine that displays like this will only be a matter of processing power, which is only a matter of time. Wouldn't it be great to be able to see a map like this for any trip you were planning? "I'm at 44th and Killingsworth in Portland, and I'd like to go to 15th and Belmont. If I'm willing to be dropped off within a few blocks, would it be faster to go by light rail or car? How long is it likely to take me to get to a particular spot? That particular place I'm headed isn't a public transportation dead zone, is it?" Oh the questions you could answer! This is just one of many maps MySociety has published, which is a good thing in light of Margaret Thatcher's famous (attributed) quote - "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

Found via WorldChanging

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Social-Mail, Byoms and more: This week's eHub round up

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-06-02T19:24:00+00:00

Filed under: companies, web 2.0

"I like your roundups of eHub!" says Emily Chang in an email. All the more reason to keep doing the darned things. Emily Chang's eHub is a great resource for learning about new or newly highlighted Web 2.0 services and products, but it can be overwhelming. In the spirit of helpfulness, I've now done a number of weekly summaries of my favorite items on eHub. The following is the most recent in the series. No substitute for reading eHub itself, of course, these summaries are just my favorites on the weeks I find time to do a write up.

Listed in order of my excitement this time instead of chronologically:

Social-Mail
Happy day! Send emails to an RSS feed. I feel far more comfortable using this tool, a Big in Japan offering, than I do using my previous stand by, mail2rss.org. Mail2rss.org has worked well for me so far, but the fact that it's remained in "extreme alpha" mode since I found it makes me very glad to find an alternative. I use these tools all the time to create feeds for organizations that don't offer them (many in the nonprofit sector, for example.)

Byoms (build your own mobile search)
Not highlighted directly on eHub, but the product of a company that was (Kozuro). Custom search via IM with support for natural language queries, search sharing and RSS feeds. Not sure how all of these will work together yet, but those are some of my favorite features for anything - so I'll be watching closely for the June 5th public beta release. The company says you'll preselect certain sources you want to be able to search, then you can use IM to query those sources on your computer or mobile device. Sounds pretty cool to me.

Netvibes ecosystem
Makes ajax homepage modules easy to share. Netvibes is one of the most popular Ajax homepages, which are themselves very poor ways to read anything more than a few RSS feeds with few items in each one (in my opinion). But it may be one of the most realistic ways to hope for further RSS adoption, and the ecosystem's sharing does help make tangible the portability of feeds. There's an API that's being used to develop new modules, a Word Press plug-in - the announcement of the ecosystem got a lot of coverage throughout the blogosphere.

Farecast
In private beta, this system will use historical data to allow users to predict future airfare offerings. Have to wonder if another larger vendor will buy this one out, I'm sure that's the idea. Probably one of the best examples, in fact, of a technology built to flip. Landing page visual design at least looks totally hip.

Big Blue Saw
You may have read some of the articles around lately about low cost rapid fabrication from CAD files. Big Blue Saw is an Atlanta based service that offers just such an affordable service. I've read about this type of thing being the future of manufacturing in the developing world, for now this service is getting press in Make Magazine at least.

Spinvox
Turns voice mail into text messages or email. Sounds great, presuming that it works well. Discussion at MobileCrunch points to two likely problems: long voicemail messages and the difficulty of trusting a translation to text of the important subtleties in spoken language (like the world "not"). Not having tested this myself, I don't know whether the text messages I get are going to tell me what the names of the callers are as well as my phone's recognition of contacts. That would be very important.

That's this week's highlights from eHub according to yours truly. Don't forget to check out the whole site for hours of fun.

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eBay to include blogs, wikis - will people use them?

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-06-02T15:45:00+00:00

Filed under: companies, e-commerce

Steve Rubel discovers coverage and then goes in depth on eBay plans to incorporate blogs and wikis in their service offerings. It looks like an impressive implementation, but I have a few questions about it.

First, if people wanted more in depth discussion - wouldn't the product descriptions and the buyer/seller feedback be less mass produced than they are now? "Great customer! Would sell to again for sure!" over and over again. What percentage of the auction pages are mass produced by huge eBay store owners?
Given that this will be a pure commercial space it seems like the promised land for comment spammers. Will eBay be able to fight spam in a way that doesn't shut down discussion but works for users?
Not sure that these mediums are the best suited for this context. It seems like kind of an awkward application of two very hip, exciting tools.
Tag support makes sense if implemented in conjunction with pre-selected categories and full text search. Given the nature of this particular market, though, I wonder if this will be the space where we really see tag spam emerge in a big way for the first time.
Internationalization of discourse will be an interesting mess to watch, I'm guessing. Most businesses large enough to do a lot of international business mitigate language and cultural differences by hiring specialists to help with these issues. Micro-businesses will not have these resources and I'll be curious to see how many miscommunications, previously silent prejudices and other communication issues emerge.
Business blogging often helps build relationships between companies and their customers. How much loyalty do you feel to any particular eBay store? I'm guessing not very much. Thumbs up, thumbs down on reputation may be enough reputation/communication system for the vast majority of eBay users.

I'm not sure how much adoption these tools are going to see. Blogging takes time and energy. I'm not sure that people will find that investment worthwhile when sprucing up product pages and optimizing for search is already doable. Does conversation drive commerce, as Rubel says? Or in this case are we dealing with an intention economy - where people come to eBay intending to purchase something and only need help finding the best option at the best price? I've never been too clear on how great an option it was to be able to call a seller on Skype, so I'm not sure how great an idea this is. I've only been ripped of on eBay once, though, so perhaps I don't understand other peoples' need for communication.

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IHT, OhMyNews partner

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-30T14:45:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, MSM

I just watched Hong Eun-taek, Editor-In-Chief of the of South Korea based citizen journalism project OhMyNews speak at the NetSquared conference (disclosure: I work for Net Squared). Amongst the interesting details of Eun-taek's talk was a statement that the organization aims to become a global news wire similar to the AP and Reuters. One of the most recent steps towards that end is a partnership begun in recent weeks to swap headlines between the prestigious International Herald Tribune.

I think there is an important difference between the recent high-profile partnerships between the AP and Technorati and between Sphere and Time Magazine and this partnership. Specifically, while it is meaningful for a mainstream media organization to include links indicating "what the blogosphere is saying about this topic" - I would contend that it is meaningful in a different way for prominent parties in the citizen journalism camp and in the traditional media camp to permanently display each others' headlines in a box on their sites. It's an interesting form of mutual recognition that goes beyond the relatively casual link list to the medium in general.

The IHT/OhMyNews partnership is also clearly important because it involves two parties that are not based in the United States. Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online is speaking now about the huge explosion of content producers from China, Africa, Brazil and the Middle East/North Africa that is on its way. This partnership is liable to be remembered as a key development in the relationship between old media and new media on the global stage.

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Four memediggers compared: Digg, Reddit, Meneame and Hugg

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-30T10:15:00+00:00

Filed under: aggregators

Call them memediggers, community moderated news sites, or digg clones. User submitted news moderated up or down by other users and available for comments. Call them whatever you wish, this new class of social media warrants close examination in order to make the most of the potential it presents. Which of these sites get the most use, see the most conversation and are most useful to their readers? How should people looking to launch new digg-style sites organize things in order to maximize adoption and impact?

One first step could be to examine a variety of leading sites of this type and that is what I've done below. It's arbitrary, it's unscientific and I think it's interesting. Last Friday evening I looked at the front page of 4 interesting memedigger sites and wrote down some numbers. Digg is clearly the standard, but also examined below are Reddit, the Spanish-language site Meneame and Hugg.com, a project of the hugely popular environmental blog Treehugger. I would have liked to include Newsvine, but was unable to find numbers to compare.

An overview of some observations:

Front page items are more commented on in Reddit than Digg, relative to the number of points those items have recieved.
Meneame seems to be successful in terms of votes but receives fewer comments.
Hugg isn't being used very much. I am curious why.

For each site I counted:

the total number of points listed for all items on the front page of the site
the number of items listed
the age of the oldest and second oldest items on the front page
the total number of comments listed on the front page
the estimated number of registered users in the system

Based on those numbers I then:

divided the average number of points held by each item on the front page of each service by the estimated number of registered users. This could be called the chance that any single item on the front page was given a point by any single registered users. This may serve to roughly estimate the breadth of participation in the system - a system where the items on the front page have received a relatively large number of votes relative to a relatively small number of users is one where there is greater agreement amongst users about what is important. This number may be more precise if it were calculated with the number of recently active users than total registered users.
I did the same division as above with the number of comments listed. This may provide some insight into the amount of conversation that occurs on the various sites, at least regarding the items that are on the front page.

Obviously this is very unscientific, just a starting point to look at and talk about the differences in memedigger services and communities. I hope you find it interesting.

Four memediggers compared

Digg

6923 points on 15 items = 461 points per item on the front page

Oldest item listed is from 1 day 3 hours ago, 2nd oldest 21 hours ago.

832 comments = 55 comments per item on the front page.

There appears to be 178,625 total registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users equals 0.04. That could mean that one out of roughly every 20 registered users has given a point to an item that is now on the front page.

Total comments divided by registered users equals 0.005. That could mean that one out of roughly every 200 registered users has left a comment on an item that is now on the front page.

Notes on Digg:

There are 5955 pages of users. Users Thuglife and Diggitydank both appear after the 1000th page of most active users, in case you were wondering.
The nearly 180,000 registered digg users is a far larger number than the 60,000 subscribers to Tech Crunch, lest you use the latter number to measure the impact of Web 2.0.
Google search for site:http://digg.com/users has aprox 4 to 5 million results.

3179 points on 25 items front page = 211 points per item

There are several items listed as from 1 day ago.

777 comments = 51 comments per item

Registered users appears to be undisclosed. Reddit representative has said that the site gets tens of thousands of users every day. Google search for site:http://reddit.com/user gets 209,000 results.

Note: Reddit has many additional features beyond news moderation.

Meneame, Spanish-language digg clone on tech

1882 points on 20 items = 94 points per item

Oldest post is 1 day and 10 hours, second oldest 1 day 5 hours.

192 comments on 20 items = 10 comments per item

There appears to be 4940 registered users.

Total points divided by total users = 0.38 That could mean that there is a roughly 40% chance that any single user has given a point to any item that is now on the front page. This could also mean that a high percentage of registered users continue to engage in ongoing use.

Total comments divided by total users = 0.04 That could mean that approximately 1 out of every 20 users have commented on a front page item.

Notes on Meneame:

Google site:http://meneame.net/user.php gets 22,000 results.

There were items with zero and 1 comment on the front page, both with more than 80 votes.

The site also includes a wiki for discussion of the service.

Hugg

92 points on 15 items = 6 comments per post on front page

Oldest item is from 1 day 3 hrs ago, 16 hrs is second oldest.

8 comments on front page.

There are 93 registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users = .99 That could mean that every user has given a point to an item on the front page. The fact that this is unlikely demonstrates the inadequacy of this formula. I believe it indicates instead that the many of the relatively few active users find almost every item they give a point to appearing on the front page. Clearly the front page is of far less use to these readers than in other systems.

Total front page comments divided by total users = 0.09 That could mean that 1 in ten users have left a comment on an item on the front page. It is likely one or a few users have left more than one of the 8 comments.

Notes on Hugg:

Hugg is a project of the environmental blog Treehugger, for which Technorati has found 9,298 links from 2,943 sites. This indicates that the large Treehugger community is not into Hugg.

Of the 15 items on the front page, all were contributed by a total of 5 users.

One of the items on the front page when I visited was titled Jesus 'healed using cannabis'. I found that funny.

There are loads of big ads on Hugg, including from some of the biggest environmental organizations in the US.

Other memedigger or community moderated news sites that may be of interest:

Muti "Muti is a site inspired by Digg and reddit but dedicated to content of interest to Southern Africans or those interested in Southern Africa." See also the site's cool mashup of Google Maps and Yahoo News on Africa and elsewhere.

Crispynews Crispynews is hosted digg-clone software used by a wide variety of communities of interest. American Idol fans, Mormons, Brazillian hip-hop fans, etc.

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Actortracker is an impressive topic-specific affiliate link mashup

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-29T12:36:00+00:00

Filed under: mashups

ActorTracker.com is a very impressive mashup of feeds from TV talk shows, movies and more mixed with affiliate links for videos and other memorabilia concerning your favorite actors. Most commercially oriented mashups seem a step away from cheesy splogs, but this one is very nice. Many features and a nice aesthetic let you know that the people behind ActorTracker spent a lot of time on it. Unfortunately, there appears to be some problem with the MyTracker feature, as I'm not able to log in to accounts I create.

The site has been around for awhile, but it may take some time before mass media loving consumer audiences are comfortable dealing with data like persistent search results and the like. If and when that day comes, the right marketing (and a log in proccess that works) could put this site in a good place to get many users. The service has an unintimidating interface, including e-mail subscription for new results. It's a good example of the way that RSS could end up being implemented by small players for mass audiences without waving the acronym around too much.

Given the huge amount of consumer goods available online around various celebrities and pop culture, matching affiliate links and listings shouldn't be too hard. Not always perfect, though, as the 700 Club's listing ends up next to an affiliate link to buy the movie Fight Club. I suppose millenarians do have to stick together!

Found via Programmable Web.

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MySpace, Inconvenient Truth partner up

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-28T12:02:00+00:00

Filed under: nptech, social networking

Being bought by the owner of the Fox empire hasn't scared MySpace away from partnering with Al Gore's high profile film about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." Announced last week but receiving little play in the blogosphere to date, the partnership appears to be more low-key online than the previous X-Men promotion but set to leverage the online community for real-world public events. The movie's main site doesn't appear to make any reference to the partnership, as it is described on MediaPost, but MySpace friend to all Tom does have a Truth badge and link to the film's MySpace profile.

According to MediaPost, "the campaign will culminate in a 10-city MySpace theater buyout on June 16, with free tickets going to select members of the film's MySpace community. MediaPost also reports that MySpace is contributing a significant amount of ad space to raise climate change awareness. The MySpace music channel is reported to be planning an artist-on-artist interview between the former vice president and a to-be-announced rock star who is also happens to be part of the MySpace community. The MySpace movies channel will spotlight an interview with the film's director, Davis Guggenheim.

The partnership between the film and the high profile online social network appears to be remarkably low-profile. No press releases appear on PR Web, few bloggers outside of MySpace have written about it and a Google News search brings back surprisingly few results. The MySpace community itself appears to be responding well, however, as almost 45,000 users have added the films as a friend to their profile in just less than a week.

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EarthLink approved to provide wifi in New Orleans

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-26T10:24:00+00:00

Filed under: wireless media

EarthLink announced today that they have been approved to provide wifi service to New Orleans. According to the company's blog:
"The network will have two tiers -- a free (and ad-free) service at up to 300kbps during the city's rebuilding efforts, and a paid service at 1mbps up/down. EarthLink will also allow other providers to offer their services over the network, allowing for open access and competition."

There was some seriously strange legal wranglings about whether the city would be allowed to contract with anyone to provide this service and apparently it was the local state of emergency that allowed it. Given that, and the incredible reliance on the wireless network there during the rebuilding - why doesn't the federal government just subsidize the top-tier service for everyone? That's a silly question, such a policy would obviously interfere with the market's ability to monetize human suffering. I can't imagine that Earthlink would mind. At least permission has now been granted for the market to partner with local government so that some service at all is available.

I'll be watching Esme Vos's Muniwireless.com for analysis of this deal. See also New Orleans Voices for Peace, a liberal grass roots group "providing Internet access, website hostng, media development and training for partnering organizations and communities effected by the Hurricanes Rita and Katrina."

Update: There's an email excerpt just added to the Earthlink blog from the New Orleans CIO about he's having people hug him on the street about the fact that free wifi is on its way. It's an interesting account, nearly a tear jerker.

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RSS feeds from surprising nonhuman sources: what examples are there?

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-26T01:53:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS

Working on a presentation for a conference where I'm going to talk about RSS and am wondering - what are the coolest examples of nonhuman generation of RSS feeds? I know that technically every search feed, stock report feeds and things like that are generated without the immediate involvement of humans. But some time ago Lisa Williams told me about a buoy at sea that publishes a feed of hourly updates to all kinds of weather conditions. That's from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS). She told me she would like to be able to subscribe to a feed that would tell her when her home's heating oil was running low.

There's got to be more examples out there - anyone care to point to ones you know of? I know there are systems to track package delivery (like FedEx). There have to be some RFID systems that utilize RSS. I know there are quite a number of innovative examples of RSS feeds generated in libraries. Limited traffic reports for particular cities from Yahoo and Traffic.com. Incidentlog.com is a cool use of police reports, mashing up feeds and Google Maps.

Really far out examples of RSS feeds being generated for a useful purpose without substantial human input is what I'm looking for. I really believe there will be a lot of this in the future, but the sooner we can find examples the sooner we can prepare ourselves and others for the idea. Please do post examples in comments if you can think of or find any that I haven't.

To be honest I'd be curious to see peoples' favorite applications of RSS in any context. Anything already listed by Tim Yang or Basement.org excluded.

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Edelman acquires PR firm of Mozilla, many other tech companies

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-25T18:35:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging

Steve Rubel just wrote that his employer Edelman has acquired the Silicon Valley PR company A&R Partners. Rubel says that many of the company's clients are already blogging. Edelman leadership appears focused on bringing corporate communications into the new world of social media in some very cool ways, albeit learning from mistakes like the Walmart bloggers situation. Here's a client list for A&R, you might notice that Mozilla is on there. Interesting. There are a number of people using these new social media to remake PR and save it from it's unsavory past. Those efforts are said to be based in honesty - and that's a radical concept.

Valleywag has a more Valley-centric take on this.
Nicholas Carr has a hilarious response to Rubel style cheerleading of honest conversation as being of central importance. Fair enough, and don't miss the comments.

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CA AG candidate launches RSS to IM notification system

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-25T17:23:00+00:00

Filed under: IM, nptech, RSS

California Attorney General candidate Rocky Delgadillo doesn't just have a long list of endorsements on his side - he's got new web tools going for him as well. Delgadillo's campaign just launched a new service offering for supporters wanting to keep up with the campaign - RSS to IM notification from immedi.at.

The letters RSS don't appear anywhere on the site, in fact there's not a link to subscribe to news from the campaign in a feed reader - but there is a link that allows you to plug in your IM username and get instant notification of new developments that can be passed on to others. Timely updates have an excitement that may be more likely to spread by word of mouth.

Delgadillo's "vision" page begins with the sentence: "As I look around our state today, it's not just crime and violence that threaten our families. It's also the greed and arrogance of corporate power run amok." Sounds interesting enough to me. I wonder how extensively the campaign is using RSS to IM internally.

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Global Voices Online begins compilation podcast

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-25T15:37:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, podcasting, aggregators

The international blog aggregation community Global Voices Online has released its first edition of the Global Voices Podcast, a compilation of clips from podcasts around the world. The first episode manages to fit in satire from South Africa about the visibility of queer people, coverage of bloggers' take on an upcoming election in Mexico (in Spanish) and clips from Jamaica, Israel/Palestine, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Set to music from Creative Commons label Magnatune, the whole thing fits in 17 fast paced minutes! It's hosted by the very charming Georgia Popplewell, from the Carribian Free Radio podcast (an Adam Curry favorite).

The show reminds me in of a more grass-roots, web 2.0 version of the Global Shortwave Report, a fantastic, long running weekly 30 minute compilation of international shortwave news in English.

Global Voices recently received funding from Reuters. Its primary function is to aggregate content from bloggers all around the world. The project has long published interesting interviews with people from around the world, but this newest foray into the news and culture serialized audio space wil be interesting to watch. Many Global Voices participants are aspiring mass audience journalists as well, so whether new mainstream media stars emerge from this space or whether it thrives as a niche media project will help make the history of Web 2.0's impact on media.

Found via David Weinberger.

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boyd, Jenkins MIT interview on MySpace and DOPA

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-25T15:12:00+00:00

Filed under: social networking

MySpace and youth social software expert danah boyd has released the full text of an email interview she and Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, recently did with the MIT News Office on MySpace and the proposed Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). Lots of good detail and analysis here, a great example of the usefulness of email interviews. Helpful in understanding the proposed legislation, MySpace and youth social software in general and the public work of two prominent voices on these issues. Both boyd and Jenkins are funded by the MacArthur Foundation to do academic work on these topics currently.

Here's how boyd explains her work:

"For my doctoral dissertation, I am investigating why and how youth are engaging in digital publics like MySpace, how this affects identity development and how youth socialization has changed over the last century. This work is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation to help understand the nature of informal learning. Understanding why moral panics emerge when youth socialize is central to my research."

Jenkins says about his work:
"[My work] seeks to identify the core social skills and cultural competencies young people need in order to become full participants in the cultural, political, economic, and social life of the 21st century. In doing this research, we are reviewing the current state of educational research surrounding participatory culture and examining how teachers are currently deploying these technologies through schools. We want in the long term to develop new curricular materials which help parents and teachers build a more constructive relationship with new media."

Both provide some useful thinking and talking points in regards to the much maligned sector of youth-oriented social software.

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Yahoo, eBay partner

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-25T10:36:00+00:00

Filed under: Yahoo

A multi-year agreement has been made between Yahoo and eBay to bundle many of the two company's services together. Here's the Seattle PI in case you haven't seen the story yet. Watch the discussion unfold over the day at Techmeme.

Update: Mick Weinstein of Seeking Alpha precedes his summary of blogosphere reactions with this noe. "Note that JP Morgan Securities had a report (.pdf) out just two days ago predicting such a eBay-Yahoo alliance as the most likely deal of its kind among the big internet players."

Thoughts: I think this is liable to be seen as a less obtrusive partnership than some other search engine/other vendor deals. As far as I know, nobody's computer or even browser comes with Yahoo or eBay baked-in top-level (Firefox Yahoo inclusion is substantially more low key than that of Google) so I think this is going to be received as an extension of voluntary use.

Second, I'm not sure how limited the possibilities are here. Will people start using Flickr to upload their photos for eBay? Will future auctions be promoted on Upcoming.org? Maybe I'm being silly here, but the point is that Yahoo's recent torrent of feature-add-by-acquisition offers a lot of creative potential for a partnership with a huge player like eBay/PayPal/Skype.

Some people have said this is just a trial balloon, that these two companies are really competitors, etc. But in the face of Google's success and Microsoft's largess I can't imagine that Yahoo and eBay wouldn't be able to work out some really powerful collaboration. The fact that Yahoo gets more page views than any other site online, has acquired so much hippness and yet is the dark horse in this space is amazing.

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FON to split private, public environs in routers

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-24T21:22:00+00:00

Filed under: wireless media

FON, the experiment in shared wireless internet access that allows members to use each others' connections and nonmembers to pay for access, has announced a key software adaptation that responds to users' concerns about security. The company just announced on its blog that its next release will include two different environments using the same router, one public and one private. By using two separate SSIDs, or service set identifiers, FON appears to be making a technical response to widespread member concerns about sharing internet access with strangers. I can imagine this will make the system much easier to promote to prospective new members. Apparently non-anonymity of FON community members and assurances that hosts wouldn't be held liable for activities through their connection weren't assurance enough. I'm not surprised.

Though funded by some heavy hitters like Google and eBay/Skype, FON seems to be acting like a good Web 2.0 company should - agile, responsive and with frequent updates to its service. The hardware end of the social web acting just like the software sector Web 2.0 evangelists say should be the modus operandi. Yet this development demonstrates that it's not all a happy picnic of sharing and love. Some technical means of user control are still needed at the same time all this sharing is going on. That's what this looks like to me.

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