Digg revamps its site

Metanews site Digg revamped its interface on Monday, focusing more around podcasts and video than ever before. Some coverage:

CNET News.com: Digg goes deep and wide.

Journalism.co.uk: Digg added a Top 10 feature to its news and videos, as well as relocating its navigation bar to the top of the site. Digg extends its reach beyond news. 

Wired Blogs:  Digg  revamped its design and added some new features earlier today.   The biggest new feature is the ability to  digg podcasts.

ABCNews.com:  Digg Revamps Site to Feature Video, Podcasts.

Get on the Netscape/Digg home page every day

Jason Calacanis: 5 steps to get on the Netscape/Digg home page every single day!

Social media giving big media a headache

New York Press: Social media, user-generated content, digital egalitarianism … big media has a big problem.

Independent social-media Web sites like Digg and Wikipedia need sites like the New York Times for reference material. But this will not always be the case, writes Adario Strange. "What will happen when they stop linking to old media and start creating their own media?" Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Fox and MySpace dethrone Yahoo

Red Herring: Fox and MySpace dethrone Yahoo in page views.

What's next for MySpace

BusinessWeek Online: What's next for MySpace.

Four rules of organizing on MySpace

Joshua Levy at Personal Democracy Forum: Rules for using MySpace in Politics

'Social network' for newspapers to launch next month

A 'social network' for newspapers, from former SFGate GM Bob Cauthorn, will launch next month. It's called CityTools. Britain's Journalism.co.uk has the story.

Squirl: a social cataloging tool

I don't have time to look deeply into all the social media sites that cross my desk, but this one looks interesting:

Squirl (love the name!) is a social cataloging tool that helps you catalog practically anything. It lets you organize your stuff into collections and meet others with similar interests.

From the website:

The idea for the site sprang from co-founder John McGrath's frustration at the lack of online cataloging options for his collection of 45rpm records. He joined forces with old friend Steve de Brun in January 2006 to build a solution, and Squirl launched that August.

From a Squirl rep:

Squirl is somewhat like LibraryThing and Listal, but whereas these sites only let you catalog books and media, respectively, Squirl can be used to catalog anything. The collections our members have posted so far range from the common (books, music, movies) to the extraordinary (rare autographs, original art, antique bookplates). As one blogger said about us, "It's like following an eBay power buyer home." In addition to its powerful cataloging capabilities, Squirl has many of the social networking components common to Web 2.0 sites -- groups, RSS feeds, messaging, etc. -- which gives our members a chance to meet folks with similar interests.

We launched Squirl about two months ago and it has been growing quickly ever since. We have a strong base of loyal, enthusiastic members and are rolling out new features rapidly.

Tracking friends and family with a cellphone

NY Times: Cellphone as Tracker: X Marks Your Doubts. Excerpt:

Two wireless providers recently made separate announcements about new positioning services, betting that the time has arrived. Two weeks ago, Helio — a wireless service owned jointly by SK Telecom, a South Korean cellphone company, and EarthLink, the American Internet service provider — introduced the Buddy Beacon in its new phone, the Drift, which costs $225. With the press of a button, the Drift shows on a map the location of up to 25 friends — if each is also carrying a $225 Drift.

Last week, Boost Mobile, a unit of Sprint, and its technology partner, Loopt, unveiled Boost Loopt, a similar offering described as a “social mapping service.” ...

Dodgeball.com, which has been operating since 2004, should be credited as a predecessor: a Dodgeball member uses a cellphone to send in a text message about his or her whereabouts, and notifications are then sent automatically to the member’s circle of friends. ( Google acquired the company last year.)

But Dodgeball can’t update a change of location automatically. With G.P.S.-equipped handsets, the Beacon Buddy could remedy this shortcoming, but Helio elected not to enable automatic updates: a user must push a button to refresh the phone’s location. “We didn’t want a situation where someone left their Buddy Beacon on and didn’t know it,” Mr. Dayton said. When the marketplace is more familiar with the service, he added, it may introduce an auto-updating option. ...

A social network for tracking your friends

The San Jose Mercury News has a look at the new social networking start-up loopt and its plans to launch a new service today that will let people track the whereabouts of their friends.

"Historically, that MySpace generation has been connected to the personal computer and the personal computer only,'' said James Brehm, wireless analyst with Frost & Sullivan. "This is the next step and it's a giant leap -- it allows you to do it on the move.''

Jason Calacanis on social news

At the Web 2.0 Summit this week, I interviewed Jason Calacanis, CEO of AOL's Weblogs, Inc. and general manager of Netscape (and a friend). In this 21-minute video, he discusses social news, social media and the rules of the road on social networks.    (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Social networks aren't just for young

San Francisco Chronicle: YouTube, MySpace, computer gaming -- a big chunk of users approach middle age.

MySpace is so last year

Sunday Washington Post:  In Teens' Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year. Social Sites Find Fickle Audience.

Video, social networks to surge in 2007

Bambi Francisco at AlwaysOn: Video, social networks to surge in '07.

15 seconds of fame

The Sunday NY Times on the not-so-friendly side of the social-networking phenomenon.

HotSoup debuts political social networking site

Yahoo! Finance: HotSoup.com Debuts Political Social Networking Site

HotSoup.com, an online community founded by a bipartisan group of political strategists said on Thursday that it has launched its social networking site. Plans for the site, geared toward people with thoughts about how to improve the country, were first announced in July. The site allows users to create profiles, publish messages, and post images. Its homepage features five panelists sharing their viewpoints on a single issue. HotSoup.com's founders include former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart, and Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the 2004 Bush presidential campaign. Former Associated Press senior political writer Ron Fournier serves as editor-in-chief.

More to social networking than MySpace

Chicago Tribune via San Jose Merc: Social networking extends beyond MySpace, Facebook.

Next social trend: Face to face, not MySpace?

Associated Press: Face-to-face, not MySpace, becoming next social trend. Wired but wary, youths use gadgets selectively.

Gabe Henderson is finding freedom in a recent decision: He canceled his MySpace account.

No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he accumulated were really just acquaintances. He's also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and share photos -- all with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends.

``The superficial emptiness clouded the excitement I had once felt,'' Henderson wrote in a column in the student newspaper at Iowa State University, where he studies history. ``It seems we have lost, to some degree, that special depth that true friendship entails.'' ...

Where social networking may go next

Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch.com: Where social networking may go next.

Big media cozies up to social networking sites

Britain's Economist: Big Media Cozying Up to Social-Networking Sites

Rival social networks may have difficulty catching up to News Corp.'s MySpace, which is "the most advanced" in offering traditional media content. Also: A new screening series will offer movies exclusively for MySpace members. Plus: MySpace's success is inspiring new start-ups. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

A guide to social networks

Business Week Online has a multipart package on the CEO's guide to social networks.

Six Apart buys Rojo

The blogging service Six Apart has bought Rojo.

Digg fights top users for control

Wired News: Digg Fights Top Users For Control.

The next step in social networking

AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins has a Q&A with Fox Interactive president Ross Levinsohn about MySpace.

Social networking sites: Use your head

Brad Stone in the current Newsweek: Web of Risks. Students adore social-networking sites like Facebook, but indiscreet postings can mean really big trouble.

Or, you've got to be pretty frickin' dumb to attend a Baptist College and announce on your MySpace page that you're gay.

Tripmates launches

Interesting: Tripmates, an interactive Web 2.0 ommunity that connects people from all over the world through a social network with a travel twist, launched earlier this month.

The upside of social media

Terry Heaton on social media networks: One man's waste is another's plenty.

Dabble launches

Mary Hodder's company, Dabble.com, launched Monday. It's a way to search, collect and organize your favorite Web videos. Check it out.

Prodigem becomes MoveDigital

Gary Lerhaupt, a code-savvy friend who sold his Prodigem file-sharing service a few months back, writes:

The web service formerly known as Prodigem is now known as MoveDigital.

The focus of the service is centered on moving your digital data (hence the name). So beyond just publishing BitTorrents, the service also does direct download publishing as well as mobile phone video and audio publishing (just like our publishing of torrents, we convert your video and audio to mobile phone format for you, and then also take care of the streaming to your 3G cell phone).

We're pleased also to announce that Senator John Edwards is our first official customer, not only using MoveDigital to distribute his videos for the mobile phone, but also to be distributed for the first time via BitTorrent.

There's a lot more too. We've created this very cool web widget that makes it very simple to reblog your MoveDigital links. And included with this web widget, via its 'Share' button, is a notion we're calling 'social bandwidth sharing' which allows other users to directly add bandwidth into your account from wherever you may have placed your widget.

Sounds cool. I'll be a customer.

Identity Mash-up at Harvard

The Identity Mash-up conference being held at Harvard's Berkman Center looks like a thoroughly worthwhile event next week. Can't be there, but I'll be following the proceedings online.

Watch what you post in Facebook

Catching up on a week's worth of media items.

Fascinating article in Sunday's NY Times: For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé.

Or, watch what you post in Facebook and MySpace, y'all.

Politicans jump on MySpace bandwagon

Business Week: Even as some politicians rail against MySpace and networks like it, proposing laws designed to protect underage users from what they consider harmful material, other politicans are embracing social networks and climbing aboard the MySpace bandwagon.

Social network sites: When a member dies

NY Times: Web Sites Set Up to Celebrate Life Recall Lives Lost. Excerpt:

Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning. ...

Inevitably, some of these young people have died — prematurely, in accidents, suicides, murders and from medical problems — and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night's parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time. ...

Giving people a home on the Web

Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher: Home, Home on the Web: Giving the Audience Some 'Space' of Their Own. Millions of people -- yes, more of them young than old -- are creating their own personal spaces online at these huge websites, sharing their lives, often in intimate detail, with the world. Yet with rare exceptions, the newspaper industry is avoiding this personal-page and social-networking trend.

MySpace's challenge: Making money

Saul Hansell in Sunday's New York Times: For MySpace, Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher. (Above, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson of MySpace.com / NYTimes photo)

More than 70 million members have signed up — more than twice as many as MySpace had when Mr. Murdoch agreed to buy it — drawn by a simple format that lets users build their own profile pages and link to the pages of their friends. It has tapped into three passions of young people: expressing themselves, interacting with friends and consuming popular culture.

MySpace now displays more pages each month than any other Web site except Yahoo. More pages, of course, means more room for ads. And, in theory, those ads can be narrowly focused on each member's personal passions, which they conveniently display on their profiles. As an added bonus for advertisers, the music, photos and video clips that members place on their profiles constitutes a real-time barometer of what is hot.

For now, MySpace is charging bargain-basement rates to attract enough advertisers for the nearly one billion pages it displays each day. The company will have revenue of about $200 million this year ...

Facebook raises $25 million

San Jose Mercury News: Facebook raises $25 million in venture capital.

College student Kelley Finkelstein explains Facebook's popularity (short video).

Social networking sites on upswing

Leslie Walker in the Washington Post: New Trends In Online Traffic. Visits to Sites for Blogging, Local Information and Social Networks Drive Web Growth.

Forum on Digital Transitions

On Monday I'll be one of 100 people attending the Santa Barbara Forum on Digital Transitions: Social collaboration and dynamic communities in the digital age. A lot of smart people will be on hand, including keynoter Howard Rheingold, Bruce Bimber, Dave Toole, Robert Kaye, Zack Rosen and many more. A group of six of us will be videoblogging the event and posting interviews by Monday evening, so stay tuned for that.

Mashup Camp

I couldn't attend Day 1 of Mashup Camp (at which Lawrence Lessig spoke), because I was out of town, but Day 2 was a doozy. Here are 5 photos I took today.

Mashup Camp could well have been named Web 2.0 Camp -- it was a celebration and display of some of the astounding new startups and applications that are redefining what the Internet is all about. It's becoming a place where users take charge of data, using tools that let us slice and dice information in useful and interesting ways.

Among the people I spotted or chatted up in the crowd of 300 (it's late, so don't expect links): Doc Searls, Mary Hodder, Dave Winer, David Berlind, Doug Gold, Tantek Celik, Robin Sloan, Marc Canter, Peter Kaminski, Adrian Holovaty, Mike Rowehl, Steve Gillmor, Dan Farber, Dan Gillmor, and many others. Alas, women were woefully underrepresented (not the organizers' fault): In two sessions I attended, the count was 45 men to 3 women, and 15 men to zero women.

Every demo I caught during the "speed geeking" session was fascinating. Some links to check out:

• Mozes, which connects you to information on the move through your mobile device.

• Ning, which offers a slew of free cool developer tools. Check out these screencasts.

• TagCloud, a folksonomy tool that lets you find stuff through tagging.

• Podbop, which not only alerts you to upcoming events, such as concerts, but also scours the Web for free legal mp3s of bands you find articles associated with keywords, among other things.

• Flyspy, a site still in alpha that will let you find the cheapest airline flights at different times of the day, among other things. I'll be using it a lot when it debuts in a few months.

• ChicagoCrime, which I've lauded months ago. By mashing up Google Maps with Chicago Police Department maps, Adrian Holovaty has created a first-class community resource that other communities would do well to emulate. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed of crime news from your surrounding neighborhood -- very cool, very useful.

Bonus link:

blogs.washingtonpost.com/post_remix, which lets the audience post mashups of interest to the Post's audience.

For more, see the mashupcamp tag on Technorati and on Flickr.

Tags: Mashup Camp, mashups, Web 2.0, citizen journalism

Stowe Boyd's /Message

Stowe Boyd's new blog, /Message, went live today. Looks good!

Joined the Society for New Communications Research

Yesterday I had coffee with Jennifer McClure, founder and executive director of the Society for New Communications Research, along with Steven King from the Institute for the Future. The Society's blogzine is here.

Their vision is: "To be the leading think tank for the advanced study of new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, i.e. blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, collaborative tools and the growing phenomena of participatory communications and their effect on traditional media, marketing, public relations and advertising, as well as their broader impact on business, politics, entertainment, culture, education, religion and society."

More later, but suffice to say that I accepted a position as honorary fellow and will speak on a panel on citizens media at the Society's first conference on March 1-3 in Palo Alto.

23: a new photo-sharing site

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has the skinny on 23, a new photo-sharing site in Europe that resembles Flickr in many ways.

Mashing up the personal media revolution

I've been under the gun so didn't get a chance to blog about a groundbreaking experiment I participated in on Friday afternoon at Ex'pression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, east of San Francisco.

Videoblogger Schlomo Rabinowitz, Outhink CEO Dave Toole, Creative Commons general counsel Mia Garlick and I spent a couple of hours on stage before a group of students and educators talking about the personal media revolution.

Before our talks, however, Alex Woodard, a talented singer-songwriter from San Diego, performed some songs from his album Mile High (iTunes link).

Three vloggers and I recorded his performance of the song "Wonderful" and incorporated the footage into some remixed videos -- complete with other shareable footage -- that was shown at the end of the two-hour session. Folks like Marcus Sandy, Enric Teller and Tim Tagami were busy scurrying back and forth between the auditorium and the editing bays.

I'll try to post the photo montage I put together, with Alex's music, by the end of this week.

Social Architecture Symposium wrapup

I got home very late last night, after hitting both LA and Boston in the past four days, and then spent the afternoon having a fascinating lunch with Bill Ryan, Lane Becker and Jennifer Myronuk in San Francisco (and have more meetings tomorrow and Friday), so I can't post at length about Tuesday's Symposium on Social Architecture put on by Corante at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which will soon be expanding from the Law School to the greater Harvard University community.

Highlights including finally meeting Zephyr Teachout, Liz Lawler, Amanda Congdon (of "Rocketboom" fame) and Tina Sharkey (Senior Vice President of Network & Community Programming for America Online, co-founder of iVillage) and seeing Charles Nesson (and meeting his gracious wife Fern), Chris Nolan, Marc Canter, Tony Kahn, Lisa Stone, Chris Carfi, Phil Wolff, Steve Garfield, Mary Hodder, Kevin Marks, Stowe Boyd, Hylton Jolliffe and David Weinberger.

You can read bloggers' coverage of the symposium chiefly from David Weinberger and Liz Lawley.

Here's a small photo set of pictures I took at the conference. I'll post video interviews with Amanda Congdon (pictured above) and Lisa Stone at a later date.

Technorati tags: Corante SSA, social media, berkman

At the Symposium on Social Architecture

I'm sitting at the Symposium on Social Architecture put on by Corante at Harvard Law's Berkman Center. (See their blog.) I'm leading the session on the future of media later this afternoon, joined by Lisa Stone, Tony Kahn and Amanda Congdon of "Rocketboom."

I'll post just a few nuggets throughout the day:

Seth Goldstein: "Data is increasingly open, opened up through APIs."

Seth: “We all work for Google, to the extent that we use it, we improve its algorithm."

Someone quoted Joshua Schachter, founder of Del.icio.us, thusly:

"Tagging is about memory, not categorization" or organization.

"No rules. You take the folks out of folksonomy when you add rules." Corporations are trying to do just that.

Technorati tags: Corante Symposium on Social Architecture, Social Architecture

H2O playlists

I'll be leading a session next Tuesday at the Symposium on Social Architecture at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center. Which was a good motivation to finally publish the video I conducted when I last visited earlier this summer.

Molly Krause, leader of the H2O project, explained the benefits of playlists in academic and other learning settings. I hope to make much more extensive use of these lists in the future. Anyone interested in collective intelligence, structured data and academic curricula should check this out. The 11-minute video is 31MB in MPEG-4. (See Ourmedia page | watch video)

Technorati tags: berkman, playlists

Symposium on Social Architecture

I just agreed to Stowe Bowd's request to moderate a session at the Symposium on Social Architecture next month, being put on by Corante in partnership with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Details:

When: November 14 & 15, 2005

Where: Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA

Subject: Corante and Berkman Center are bringing the leading lights of the social software and media space together for a day of interactive discussions on the overarching themes and technologies driving this market.

Topics to be explored include: The Landscape of the Social Web; The Economics and Ethics of Social Infrastructure; Tagsonomy and Sense Making; Open versus Closed Models; Privacy and Identity; Better Social Indicators; Public versus Personal Top 100 Lists; and more.

You can register here.

How popular is tagging?

How popular has tagging become?

Check out this 60-second video on Technorati tags that we just uploaded to Ourmedia.org:

11.5 MB version
20.5 MB version

Rip, remix and burn it as you please.

The next-gen social network

Big news: Here is what a next-generation social network looks like.

The Mercury News' Silicon Beat today carries a story about the new site that Marc Canter (my partner at Ourmedia.org) has built for Tony Perkins. It's called GoingOn. Version 1.0 will be unveiled soon at his AlwaysOn site.

Marc has been talking for years about his vision for a "digital lifestyle aggregator," a trip-over-your-tongue term that I wish he'd revise. Usually, he got blank looks as he explained the concept. So hats off to Perkins for letting Marc go to town and show people what social networking can be. Here's his post outlining the basics of this "meta-network." Congrats, Marc.

Now, all GoingOn needs are the people. I'll be one of the first to sign up.

Top 25 quirkiest people onlin

Tribe.net members nominated 713 people for the quirkiest people online. The site's editorial committee then whittled down the list -- ranging from an AFLAC broker to a Medieval Community Developer to a 2nd generation belly dance instructor appearing on PBS -- to arrive at the Tribe 25.

Ourmedia looks to bring video to social networking

TechWeb at Yahoo News: Ourmedia Looks To Bring Video To Social Networking.

"Our mission is to advance the personal-media revolution," Lasica said. "We're not going to put big media out of business, but there's a real wellspring of creativity at the grassroots level that we've seen over the last several years."

Photo sharing sites

The NY Times' Circuits section today has a special section on digital photography, including this story on photoblogs and services such as Flickr, Fotolog.net and the somewhat astonishing Wordphoto.org. Photo above by Hilldweller at Wordphoto.

Rojo's nex-gen news reader

I really wanted to get out to San Francisco on Friday for the public unveiling of the new and improved next-generation news reader Rojo -- Chris Alden, Mark Graham and Kevin Burton are among the principals -- but I came down with a pretty bad head cold on Thursday night.

Susan Mernit has some quick takeaways:

Well, Rojo offers users a relationship-oriented, multi-view newsreader/aggregator tool that discovers, shares, and classifies information in ways that Bloglines does not.

Some of the feature of note:

* A set up wizard that makes it easy to add feeds by topic or from people you know.
* A tagsonomy--you tag, they add--that organizes feeds by tag rather than in folders.
* Integrated profile, network, and shared stories pages.
* An ability to sort items by most read feeds.

Sounds great. I'll be getting more serious about Rojo starting next month when I predict my life will completely return to normal.

del.icio.us gets VC funding

Catching up on events of the past week. Here's one:

Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, announced that his social media/social bookmarks startup had just received VC funding.

If you haven't checked out del.icio.us, you should. I first heard about it from Howard Rheingold in mid-2004, and there's nothing else quite like it.

Yahoo 360: a social media site

I just accepted an invitation to Yahoo 360. Looking forward to checking it out in detail. It's a combination social networking/blogging platform that's still in beta. From what I hear, it's going to be a very big deal.

Like Om Malik says, Yahoo has got its back. And the blogosphere seems to agree.

Cross-posted to Social Media blog.

Yahoo buys Flickr

There's other way-interesting news happening today besides the launch of Ourmedia.

For instance, Yahoo! has acquired the Flickr photo-sharing service, which Flickr discloses in their own inimicable fashion (despite Caterina Fake's threat the other day to take apart anyone who mentions the Yahoo takeover rumor).

While some will bemoan the sale, I think it's another step forward for bringing social media (including folksonomies) to the masses, which only a Yahoo, Google, AOL or the like can do. (Also important: The Flickr API will remain open.)

Also, Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp bought AskJeeves today.

Here's Australia's ABCNews on the sales.

Social networks underused by news sites

New in OJR: Social networks: All around the Net, but underused by news sites.

In 2003, social networking sites Friendster, tribe.net and LinkedIn started business. Now there are up to 200 social networking sites covering everything from business contacts to dating. In New York and Boston mobile service Dodgeball informs users when a friend of a friend (FOAF) is within 10 blocks. FOAF is now also the name of web-based software protocol that describes people and their friends. ...

We'll be heavily incorporating aspects of social networking into Ourmedia.org. At a Media Center conference recently, I suggested to the group that this is one of the most underutilitized opportunities online news sites have to convert their readers into a true community of committed members.

Tagging as social behavior

Salon: Steal this bookmark! Tagging, the Web's newest game, lets you see what other people are reading and thinking. Welcome to the key-worded universe!

Tagging as it is used at some of the Web's most interesting and lively new sites is launching a revolution of self-organization on the Internet. You could call it the latest twist in the ongoing evolution of social networking software. Except there's a difference: On social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster, people join, and then declare their alliances to each other explicitly. On sites that employ tagging, the networks emerge, implicitly, out of the shared interests of users. Order isn't proclaimed, it just happens.

What 43 Things does for personal goals, the bookmark-sharing site del.icio.us does for everything its users are interested in on the Net. Here, what people are looking at and saving from the Web becomes the basis for learning new things, and making connections with each other. "It's like Friendster for knowledge as far as I'm concerned," says Howard Rheingold. "I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they've tagged... And isn't that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful -- and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you."

You'll be hearing a lot more about tagging when Ourmedia.org launches. We'll be requiring at least one tag on every media item published.

Online Social Networks begins tomorrow

Today is the final day for early bird pricing ($35) to participate in the Online Social Networks online conference, starting tomorrow and running through Feb. 23.

RSS feeds as news metaphor

Thought I had mentioned this, which Robert Scoble highlighted during BloggerCon on Saturday. But I didn't, so here goes. Check out 10x10, a new site offers a pictorial metaphor of the latest news. Stever Rubel explains:

10x10 ... every hour scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. The result is a conclusion about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from  the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record is formed, based on prominent world events, all without any human input.

Bots, blogs and news aggregators

The brilliant Marcus P. Zillman has compiled a free 20-page whitepaper on Bots, Blogs and News Aggregators (PDF). Good stuff. I'm working on a similar effort for a new Social Media blog I'm about to announce.

Who's behind Multiply?

I've been getting several invitations to join Multiply -- another social networking service -- in the past week. So has Christian, who wonders why the site hasn't been more transparent about who's behind it.

Now comes Rayne, who did a little digging and came up with this.

Online social networks go to work

Xeni Jardin on MSNBC.com: Online social networks go to work -- where personal connections lead to professional allies.

Zoto wants beta testers

One of the companies that poked up at the BlogOn conference last week was Zoto. Bloggers, techies, media folks and anyone else interested in exploring the next wave of blogging and social networking technology is invited to beta test Zoto. The site launched July 19 and will be gathering feedback through the end of August or later.

Zoto lets users store, organize, and search digital images, then seamlessly publish those images into their blogs or social networking posts right from their Zoto user page.

The corporate blog boomlet

Wired News reports on the BlogOn conference with this: The Empire Blogs Back, including a short interview with the originator of Microsoft's interesting Channel9 blog service.

Pointers to BlogOn coverage

Before we all move on to other things, thought it might be helpful to round up some of the roundups of Thursday-Friday's BlogOn conference:

Heath Row at Fast Company blogged several of the sessions.

Jeff Nolan

CNET News.com: Blog's the word in big business.

eWeek: Blogging Catches Business Interest

Ross Mayfield: Social software and how we got here

Susan Mernit: Blogging Off on BlogOn and other snippets.

Shel Israel: The changing face of Microsoft

The Social Software Weblog

Technorati has lots more here, Feedster's feeds are here, and PubSub points to 32 sources.

BlogOn: Influence moves to the edges

On Friday I appeared on the BlogOn panel "Metrics of Influence" with moderator David L. Sifry, CEO of Technorati; Shripriya Mahesh of eBay; Mark Finnern of SAP; and Chris DiBona of Damage Studios (who left Slashdot two years ago).

Here are some quick notes on some of what I said (and I'll be writing a story on a related subject soon for the Online Journalism Review):

Influence is moving from big media to the edges. Users are becoming as influential as big media in certain areas, especially in specialized niches. What are the metrics of influence on the Internet? Start with usefulness and trustworthiness (call it reputation filters or circles of trust). Christopher Allen suggested a third: attention. But it needs to be underscored that you don't need to be an A-list blogger to have influence on the Internet.

Here are some of the primary and secondary circles of trust I briefly mentioned:

1. News organizations are still a source of trusted, reliable reportage for tens of millions of Americans.

2. Blogs -- either individual efforts, group blogs, or blogs affiliated with a blog network like WeblogsInc, Corante or Gawker Media -- are becoming indispensible sources of trusted information for millions of people. Many are small blogs read by only a select group of people.

3. Trust mechanisms like Snopes, Hoaxbusters, Urbanlegends, rely on editors who vet rumors.

4. Reputation aggregators, including Google, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster, and the other search engines all offer insight into what people are saying about someone -- and what people are saying about the people who are making the comments.

5. Ecommerce sites that offer a community component -- eBay, Amazon, BabyCenter -- give added authority to posters who comment on products and services.

6. Independent islands of commentary like Epinions, BizRate, ThemeParkInsider, The Car Place, the Better Business Bureau Online, and other sites elevate users and amateur publishers to the status of consumer advocate.

7. Social networks. LinkedIn, Spoke, Tribe, MySpace, Orkut and other social networks offer varying degrees of influence based on the friend-of-a-friend paradigm.

Others?

7 Things RSS Is Good For

During the