Fragmenting Attention

Excellent quote from Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us: “Aggregation is often a focus of attention (latest, most active, etc.) As the population gets larger, the bias drifts; del.icio.us/popular becomes less interesting to the original community members. Work out ways to let the system fragment in to different areas of attention.” This sums up why 2006 is … Read more

Read/WriteWeb Filter

– The Evolution of Information Grazing (more cow metaphors) – James plays the field (“Grazing, on the other hand, is feed promiscuity. No commitment.”) – Ross Levinsohn on Fox’s Digital Charge (how the News Corp. media giant is working to build a broad online base) – Dave Winer on professional media (“The pros are lazy, … Read more

The Communist Web

I’ve read some absurd things in my time, but this one really takes the cake. It’s by a ‘big media’ guy at CBS News, who has written an astonishing spiel about what he regards as ‘Web 2.0’. It’s actually the first compelling thing I’ve read about Web 2.0 all year, but it was compelling because … Read more

Personalized Clustering: It’s too hard, say developers

After my post about Personalized Megite, I got taken to task by both Gabe Rivera from Memeorandum and Nik Cubrilovic from OmniDrive – two developers who have had a lot of experience trying to develop such systems. As Gabe wrote in Scoble’s comments: “I agree with Nik that there’s a huge technical chasm to cross … Read more

Read/WriteWeb Filter

– The Trendiest Web2.0 Page on the Net! (it’s funny cause it’s true… apologies to Fred, who for all I know may’ve invented the ‘big red jagged circle’ effect) – ‘Future of Web Apps’ slides… (beautifully designed presentation from Tom Coates, with brilliant content to match. A ‘must read’ if you’re into Design for Data … Read more

ZDNet: Is Firefox dropping the ball, like Netscape in 97?

Lately I’ve been noticing a number of people criticising the performance of the latest versions of Firefox, since 1.5. With IE7 coming very soon, with many of the features that Firefox has (tabs, RSS integration, etc), now is not a good time for Firefox to lose developer support. I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but … Read more

Megite Testing Personalized Meme Tracker

One of Memeorandum‘s new competitors, Megite, is testing out a Personalized version of their product. You will be able to upload your OPML file and a personalized news cluster will be created for you, based on the RSS feeds you already track. Here’s the demo page for my Personalized Megite. In many ways, this is … Read more

Media 2.0 Workgroup

I’ve joined the Media 2.0 Workgroup, which isn’t associated with the Web 2.0 Workgroup which I co-founded – but was I believe inspired by it. I see the two workgroups as very complementary and so I’m trying to get the two groups to connect. On a personal level, the intersection of Web technologies and Media … Read more

New Web Development and Design Techniques

Came across two great articles today that nicely summarize recent web development and design trends. Marc Hedlund from O’Reilly wrote a post entitled Web Development 2.0. Despite the YA2.0N title (Yet Another 2.0 Name, pronounced “YAWN”), the article is a useful overview of software development practices that Marc has been seeing in the current era … Read more

Read/WriteWeb Filter

– Edgeio Edges Toward Launch (Keith, Mike and team are just about ready to eat eBay’s lunch…) – Fox getting set to monetize MySpace (another excellent analysis by Umair…”you’re about to see a very expensive attempt at building edge competencies unfold (or implode) in real time.”) – Bill Grosso: “Microsoft is focused on changing the … Read more

On Sensationalism and New Media

Martijn van Osch did an experiment with digg, in which he submitted a story about a company that made a girl undress in the shopping window of its store in Copenhagen. In his post he linked to a short movie available of the girl undressing and the people gathering to get a glimpse of her. … Read more

Windows Live Ideas

Windows Live Ideas is a good place to bookmark (you know, that thing you used to do in the 90’s with web pages when you wanted to regularly check for updates…). It outlines all of Microsoft’s products on the Live platform, most of which are in beta currently. Given the brand confusion about MSN and … Read more

SONR – A podcast listener tracking tool

I get a lot of product pitches by email every day, but few of them are really compelling enough to grab my attention. But this one did, perhaps because it is a product that promises a much-needed media tracking solution. In this case, podcasting statistics (and later video-blogging). From the SONR homepage: “SONR (Sonar) is … Read more

Feedburner releases API into the wild

Feedburner, inaugural winner of the R/WW Best Web LittleCo award in 2004 (current holder is 37Signals) has just released the final stage of their FeedFlare rollout. FeedFlare is a set of web services plug-ins. I wrote about it in December when they released stage 1 and at the time I called it “interactive RSS”. In … Read more

Guide to Startups – and a note about Feedster

Ex-Feedster Scott Johnson has an interesting podcast entitled The Young Engineer’s Guide to Startups. It gives a nice overview of the startup life, especially things like equity and the ‘risk to reward ratio’. The latter can be summarized as: the earlier you join a startup, the higher the risk… but also potential reward. Other tips: … Read more