Interesting juxtaposition of two blogs looking at the trust of corporate blogs. First up, Jeremia Owyan from Forrester. He has 8 metrics he looks at, ranging from customer inclusion to comment moderation to frequency. Overall, it's a good view of what makes an effective corporate blog. On the other end of the spectrum comes Microsoft-Watch, blogging about the blogging of Forrester and continuing its complaint about the way companies, in particular my client Microsoft, thinks about and uses blogs. The main issue seems to be this: It's an important question because journalist-quoting enables Microsoft's PR machine to sidestep impartial channels....
In an effort to remind people that it had a horse in the identity management race, MySpace last night announced MySpace ID – essentially a rename of the MySpace Data Availability project launched earlier this year to allow users to login with their MySpace credentials and import data on third-party sites. The news comes on the heels of last week’s near-simultaneous launches of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, two similar products from MySpace competitors (though the latter, it turns out, is more of an ally) While much has been written about the technical differentiators between these services –...
Following up on the previous post covering Make: Tokyo Meeting 02, here are more photos and info from this event. This time there were over 60 presenters and over 1,200 people in attendance (twice as many makers and guests as the first Make: Tokyo Meeting). This time the meeting featured makers from Tokyo and beyond, showing a growth in the event as well as the DIY community that Make: Japan seeks to bring together. The Make: Tokyo meetings, although in their early stages, are quickly becoming one of the premiere arenas for makers in Japan to display their creations....
"Only connect!" From the announcements that came out today, it seems Facebook and Google are taking the famous advice of Margaret Schlegel, the main character of E.M. Forster's "Howard's End." The phrase seems like an apt marketing maxim for the new superaccount features that big sites are hawking now. Today Facebook formally launched its Facebook Connect feature, which lets the social networks' users log in to a limited but varied array of sites -- including Digg, CNN, CNET and HowCast -- with their Facebook credentials. Once you've done so, a sort of channel is opened between your Facebook account and...
njoyed, a new site where friends can share recommendations, launches today. The site allows friends to make recommendations and request recommendations in categories like books, movies, places, clothing, music, restaurants and services. Except it hasn’t. Quite. That was the opening paragraph of the review I wrote about RecommendBox back in March, the site which today relaunches as njoyed. (I just replaced the site name). The question is, is there much difference? Here’s the old site: And here’s the new: Don’t get me wrong. I respect the guys involved. Robert Loch and Scott Rutherford are part of a particularly hard-core set...
Gary Gipson was inspired by the Magbot Pendulum project in Dave Hrynkiw's wonderful Junkbots, Bugbots & Bots on Wheels. Greg made a few changes. He put the electronics package on a little swinging bot and made the permanent magnet stationary to the base. The bot's LED eyes light up when he first starts out over the magnet. Nifty! Gary has some other really nice BEAMbots on his YouTube channel, including a Photopopper driven by a 1381J voltage trigger-based solar engine. We used the 1381 in the two BEAMbots featured in MAKE, Volume 06 (reprinted in The Best of MAKE)....
This is a guest post by Deanna deBara from Sugarrae.com. Recently, I did my first guest post (ever) over at Remarkablogger. I got such great feedback on “A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter“, I decided to follow up with a guide on a site even more important to those in SEO - Sphinn, the social media site for internet marketers. A Little History Sphinn was launched on July 11, 2007 by Danny Sullivan as a way for people in the search marketing community to connect, network and share news stories about the industry that they thought others would find interesting. The...
by Rene LeMerle The first major micro-blogging casualty has emerged over the past week. Pownce, a Twitter-like lifestreaming service, announced it was closing its doors (figuratively speaking) mid-December. The Pownce team announced the imminent closure of the service via their blog this week: “We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009.” The Pownce founders and technology are moving across to Six Apart, the company behind blogging platforms Vox, Movable Type and TypePad. Leah Culver and Mike Malone will be joining the engineering team at Six Apart, hoping to continue...
Here’s the latest action: The iPhone keeps smart phone sales afloat — “Right now we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year, Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they’ll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace and let’s see…what’s the expression? Let’s see how the competition goes.” That was Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer in January 2007. The iPhone now accounts for 16.6 percent of the smartphone market worldwide. Only Nokia is ahead of it. Digital Daily has more. Digg is not for sale…right now — Digg chief executive...
Digg has sent a cease and desist to the company behind USocial.net, the website pictured above. Should we be surprised? The site is publicly advertising its service that lets you buy votes in mass quantity on Digg, Stumbleupon, and Propeller. The social news site has come under scrutiny for some of its recent bans aimed at preventing manipulation, but you can hardly blame them for trying to stop such blatant attempts to game the system. The letter sent to USocial’s owner is pasted below: Dear ####: My firm represents Digg, Inc. (”Digg”). We have become aware that uSocial.net (”uSocial”)...
The closure of Pownce, which was announced Monday via posts by co-founder Leah Culver and her new employer, blog software company Six Apart, didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s followed Pownce since its launch last year. Despite help from co-founders like Kevin Rose of Digg and usability guru Daniel Burka, the service never really found an audience, or at least not one big enough to make a go of it. In the end, Pownce was just too much like Twitter (and Jaiku and Plurk, for that matter); the added features it had — including the ability...
Digg says it is not for sale anymore. Really? How many times have we heard that one before? With a $29 million round recently, that was all but decided then. But wait until the next time someone floats a trial balloon through Techcrunch. For now, with no one coming forward to buy it at the valuations the company hoped for (that's the reality of it), the four-year-old startup will dial back some of its expansion plans, instead prioritizing projects that generate revenue and profit, says the BW story. Among some of the new "focused" projects: ads in its RSS feeds;...
Jay Adelson, CEO of social news company Digg, has used a BusinessWeek interview to attempt to quash those long-standing acquisition rumors. From what he said, Digg is not for sale. "Now I am pressured to keep costs reasonable and focus more on the top-line revenue, which we really haven't ......
The news that Pownce was closing its doors met the blogosphere with little surprise yesterday. Launched about a year ago, it was a media darling that the New York Times labeled “The Hottest Startup in Silicon Valley“. Many people thought that anything Kevin Rose touched would turn to gold, and certainly if anyone could pull the job off, it would be him with his massive online following and immense resources at his disposal. But in the end, it simply failed to gain any traction. So, on the left we have Kevin Rose, who has made millions off Digg, which...
Cofounders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose are committed to going it alone with Digg. Rumors of the company courting offers from companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google were dimmed when Digg completed a $28.7 million financing round in September. And now the company is officially not for sale, according to the company's CEO, Jay Adelson. Talking to BusinessWeek, Adelson says that the company is now looking to get profitable, on its own, as soon as possible:"Now I am pressured to keep costs reasonable and focus more on the top-line revenue, which we really haven't done ever."Rumors of Digg's soon to...
