Twitter Townhall?
May 30, 2008 — 03:01 PM PDT — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — — 8 Comments
Matt Schlicht, a UStreamer and avid Twitter user, advanced a proposed solution to the PR issues the Twitter-folks are currently facing - do a live townhall. The live townhall concept is something that Digg started after they narrowly avoided a top user revolt following the deployment of some new features that weren’t recieved as well as they had hoped.
The obvious idea here is that Twitter and Digg are both services that are enormously popular amongst a particularly vocal subset of the tech user community. Any time either of these companies falters, even a little bit, because of the nature of their business those foibles are amplified far afield of the appropriate proportions (even if they are technically in the right, the negative press will still often outweigh the positive).
That’s why the townhall is such a great method to utilize. It’s free but for a little bit of your company’s time, and it allows you to connect with your users in a meaningful way, utilizing all aspects of verbal and non-verbal communication. It puts your company out in front of the potential troublespots, acts as a megaphone for not just the rough patches but the bright spots that you’d actually want to highlight. Most of all, it offers a means for explaining in depth all the intricacies of what’s going on behind the scenes that make us scratch our heads and go “Why is Twitter doing that?”
Matt has offered UStream as the platform of choice to broadcast this townhall, and I’d like to join in on his petition and offer Mashable as the official (or even unofficial) home of the liveblog coverage, much like what we do for Digg’s townhalls. We understand that managing a chatroom with that many interested users can be unruly, but when the hordes of Digg fans came for their townhall, we were able to provide a stable and slightly moderated communications arena for them to exist in for the duration.
So Twitter - my suggestion is you accept Matt’s proposal. He’s told me that he’s standing by, and that UStream will put their full efforts into supporting this endeavor and making it an effortless and effective means of communicating with your users on a mass scale.
Ping This!AdSense for RSS Feeds Set to Launch Next Week
May 30, 2008 — 12:09 PM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — — 7 Comments
Google-owned FeedBurner is set to launch AdSense for RSS next week according to a post on the company’s blog. Much like the AdSense for Web sites, AdSense for RSS will show contextual text advertising in publisher’s RSS feeds. In other words, if you’re reading a blog post about mobile phones in Google Reader, you might see ads for AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.
How will AdSense for RSS work in conjunction with the ads Feedburner already sells and displays? The company explains:
“Publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content, with the added revenue that full back-fill coverage provides.”
This is huge news for content publishers. As we know first-hand, monetization on RSS feeds to-date has been mediocre at best compared to Web-based advertising, and with an increasing amount of reading and conversation taking place off-site, that’s a brewing problem in the world of content publishing. It also means that the few remaining hold outs who only publish partial feeds (I’m looking at you CNET and The New York Times) may finally offer full feeds, since they can now be effectively monetized. On the other hand, for RSS consumers, it probably means the free ride is over.
While Feedburner has seemingly been neglected by Google since it was acquired, the strategy behind the deal is now coming full circle, as Google has effectively cornered the market on RSS monetization. They own the #1 (or #2 depending on who you ask) feed reader in Google Reader, the dominant feed management tool, and now what sounds like the most comprehensive way to monetize RSS, with Google’s huge base of advertisers already signed up (via AdWords) to participate.
Expect the full details of the AdSense for RSS program to be announced next week.
LostZombies Aims to Create First Ever User-Generated Zombie Documentary
May 30, 2008 — 12:00 PM PDT — by Alana Taylor — — Add a Comment
Zombies are effing real. Or at least at LostZombies.com they are.
The new site is focused on creating the first ever community generated zombie documentary/mockumentary. Lost Zombies asks its members to upload proof of zombie existence through short video clips, audio, and photo submissions. Users can have profile pages, interact in the forum or chatroom, stay updated on “Most Active Outbreaks” and watch ZombieTV.
Lost Zombies hopes to compile all the proof of zombie existence that people submit from around the world, create a feature length documentary film, and ultimately “…educate the world’s population of the reality of zombies and the potential, if not imminent, zombie apocalypse.”
Although we don’t expect Mashable readers to ever spend time at LostZombies.com, in the case of a zombie apocalypse, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Ask Celebrities, Politicians and Athletes Questions with ZotFish
May 30, 2008 — 11:59 AM PDT — by Alana Taylor — — 6 Comments
Will Steve Jobs ever write a book? It’s an interesting question that you can ask your friends, but what if you had the chance to ask the man himself?
ZotFish, a free site that just launched this month, allows anyone to ask a question to over 400 celebrities, politicians, artists, athletes, authors, and more. In other words, it’s a virtual press conference where everybody can participate.
The forum-style setup lets the general public communicate with public figures by submitting questions and then voting on the questions they want answered most. The clever folks at ZotFish also took into consideration the fact that a conversation works both ways and added the option of letting public figures ask questions and get their own feedback from the public.
Questions are sorted by name, category and votes, and ZotFish provides users with profile pages that track their activities.
In many ways the submission, voting, and commenting style of ZotFish strikingly resembles Digg. The number of votes pushes popular questions to the front page, and once a public figure answers the question, everything is cleared and reset so that users can submit fresh votes and comments on how useful the answer was.
There are sites like Avanoo and 10Questions that attempt to provide the same service as ZotFish, but none of the question-and-answer sites that exist seek the participation of celebrities, politicians, and other famous people so actively.
It has never been easy for the public to communicate with people who are important in society and have high social status. And unless you are Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk or hyper-active tech blogger, Robert Scoble, it’s even less likely for busy public figures to be able to respond to inquiries.
Sure, there will be too many questions for these public figures to answer and their lives aren’t going to be any less hectic, but through the voting system they will be able to jump right in and answer the top 3 most popular questions. Not only does it sound fast and easy, but as long as there’s participation, like Digg, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work.
And, of course, if Steve Jobs ever wants to ask the public what they think of his new black turtleneck, ZotFish will be waiting.
TrainHero: Diet & Exercise 2.0 [The Startup Review]
May 30, 2008 — 09:13 AM PDT — by Alana Taylor — — 6 Comments
Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.
STARTUP DETAILS:
Company Name: TrainHero
20-word Description: Track your workouts in a social gathering that promotes and motivates.
CEO’s 100-word Pitch: TrainHero is a one of a kind site whose purpose it to help those looking to improve their health. Accurately track your fitness and nutrition intakes in a social community that helps motivate you towards your goals. Included is a complete workout journal, gym locater, fitness videos, diet database, community forum, and tons more!
Mashable’s Take: From the get-go, TrainHero grabs our attention because it tackles the problem that most everyone has — remembering to exercise and eat healthy. TrainHero makes it easy to record daily workouts, join fitness groups, and search through a long list of diets. The site offers to help anyone lose weight, gain weight, or maintain their current state of fitness by creating a social network of users who are attempting to achieve the same goals.
Some of the notable features that the TrainHero site has include a gym search tab that locates gyms in your area, a recipe search that finds hundreds of different meals, and a list of videos about cooking and exercising.
TrainHero works for those who are looking to get in shape. In other words, everyone can use it. However, on a larger scale, it’s hard to see what TrainHero offers that hundreds of other health and fitness sites don’t. PEERtrainer, eDiets, and MyFitBuddy all aim to connect users in a social networking community of exercisers, nutritionists and trainers.
The layout of the TrainHero site is slightly amateur with most of its videos, like this cheesy 80s aerobics video, coming straight from YouTube. There aren’t many users on the site yet which makes the group feature less helpful, and the limited capabilities in terms of connecting with other users is reminiscent of the early Hi5 blueprint.
On the whole, TrainHero looks promising in terms of social media innovation but has yet to prove that it can compete with the overwhelming amount of well-known and established rivals.
Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials
Lieberman and bin Laden Get It; Why Doesn’t YouTube?
May 30, 2008 — 02:57 AM PDT — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — — 32 Comments
Last Monday, I wrote an editorial piece supporting Senator Joe Lieberman in his plea to Google to show some restraint and start voluntarily censoring and pulling down videos by those known to post terrorist content and terrorist propaganda. Many of you in the comments left on the editorial piece were in agreement with me, as I had demonstrated with a list of contradictory policy moves by the YouTube team, that Google’s YouTube team has no discernible guiding ethics when they enforce censorship or their own terms of service. Moreover, YouTube and Google remain clueless as to the difference between free expression, and evil and criminal behavior being effectively marketed using Silicon Valley’s own social media methodologies.
Some of you in the comments, however, took the side of a number of blogs and news organizations in defending the terrorists, saying that they had a right to free speech. I’ve been taking names, doing some deep thinking, and doing some first hand research of my own. I’ve been pondering the best way to present all this information to you, the readers, in a way that shows you exactly what’s going on and why this isn’t one of those issues you should write off. So bear with me, as I walk you through this whole debacle in laborious detail.
The Hypocrisy List
I published last week a list of things that Google’s YouTube has let slide, and things that they choose to censor. Here’s the same list, updated (items with updated status bolded):
Michelle Malkin: Censored for promoting hate speech, when she created a music montage showing victims of Muslim terrorist attacks in response to the Muhammed riots.
BumFights: Uncensored. Videos of actual homeless folks paid in sandwiches for beating the crap out of one another.
Handsome Hong Kong Guy Censored for showing videos of clothed local females with derogatory towards women music in the background.
This Pornography Advertisement Uncensored. It doesn’t show actual full nudity or sex acts, but you definitely get the idea.
A Breast-Feeding Mother Censored over obscenity claims.
This Strip Tease Censored. A small area over the genitals remains covered for the duration of the minute and a half long strip tease. This video was removed the day after our editorial went live on the site. There are still hundreds more like it on the site, however.
An Egyptian Fellow Censored (then uncensored) for showing video evidence of local police brutality.
This GTA IV Ad Uncensored, despite depicting a police officer firing a gun into a crowd of civilians.
Not much has changed. YouTube still plays host to all sorts of depraved depictions of sex and violence, while still having a record for censoring important journalism, innocent nudity, free speech responses to terrorists and just plain silly videos with sillier music playing.
Thanks to Our Sponsors
May 30, 2008 — 02:38 AM PDT — by Tamar Weinberg — — Add a Comment
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Twitter Closes $15 Million Funding Round
May 30, 2008 — 12:00 AM PDT — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — — 4 Comments
Twitter, apparently, has closed it’s much rumored $15 million funding round. That’s the news being reported by PaidContent today (a bit of news that seems to have been lost in the shuffle today). The news came out this morning, and is some positive news that couldn’t come at a better time for the somewhat beleaguered (at least in the blogosphere) status microblogging company.
Twitter hasn’t had a solid week in which all the features were functional or the service itself had consistent uptime in recent memory. Add onto that the PR faux pax with Pownce’s community director being called the C-Word (not to mention the very public separation with LastPodcast blogger Frederic), and it’s just not been a good few weeks.
Who is making it all seem worthwhile for the Twitterpeople? Spark Capital with Union Square are the two PaidContent is confirming through their unnamed sources.
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Shel vs. Shel: A Throwaway Joke Comes of Age
May 29, 2008 — 09:32 PM PDT — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — — 3 Comments
If you’ve been following the work of ‘Shel Israel’ (the one at ShelIsrael.com), you no doubt have been suitably entertained, as each episode is filled with tons of Web 2.0 inside jokes, primarily at the expense of Global Neighborhood’s Shel Israel, but also at the expense of any number of Web 2.0 personalities that happen to spring to Loren Feldman’s mind at the time of the interview.
Generally the tone of a Shel Israel puppet video exaggerates all the qualities of the actual Shel Israel and goes straight for the laughs. As Loren continues to produce them, to prevent the gag from wearing thin I imagine, he’s starting to introduce actual meat to the program and asking questions provoking serious and informative answers. It’s interesting to see what’s considered to be actual valuable content (by the standards of us geeks who are the target market for the actual Global Neighborhoods program by FastCompany) start to emerge from this unusual interview style.
It’s with that preface I bring to you an interesting and entertaining interview by ‘Shel Israel’ of Jason Calacanis, with the subject matter being Mahalo.com.
A Bit on Mahalo
In the video, Jason talks a bit about the origins of where the name Mahalo comes from (of course, it’s Hawaiian, but it’s geared towards the general public, as opposed to 20.com, the original title for the service which ended up sounding too techy).
Generally, though, Mahalo strategy is shaping up to be a mash-up of Google and Wikipedia, and as Jason says in the video, is essentially what most folks use in their day to day life when they come to the internet for information. Most folks don’t go past the first couple pages of results. Since Wikipedia is the first entry on most searches, they end up there and typically only read the first part of the article and scan for facts.
Rather than end up trying to duplicate all that information or functionality, the strategy, as Jason comes around to saying, is to take the most used parts of both sources and package it within the Mahalo experience, making Mahalo what he calls a research engine (essentially what I was driving at last year when I came to the realization that Mahalo was deserving of a second look):
To clarify (and extrapolate a bit) on what I think that goal is: to be an evolving directory ala DMOZ or Wikipedia; one that’s less rife with corruption and a bit more friendly to commercial interests. It certainly can never replace Google, but for me, when certain types of deeper niche-specific research is required, it is an excellent jumping off point. It certainly has exceeded my expectations.
The Meta Discussion Here
Aside from the interesting points Mahalo, a point being made clear not just by Jason’s elucidations, but by how the general usage of Mahalo is shaping up to be for folks that I talk to, there’s another interesting point being made by Loren Feldman with the continued production of the Shel Israel puppet shows.
Interviews are a hard thing to do in an innovative way. The most innovative approach in the last ten years or so has been the rise in the raw or naked conversation (probably talked about the most by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble), but performed avidly by folks like Rob Walch with his Podcast411 show, or even in Old Media shows like Inside the Actors Studio. Even the Mashable Conversations show takes on this format. There are certain advantages and appeals to the format like lowered production time and the ability to really explore the meat of the subject matter in a way that the most hardcore of fans for that subject can enjoy.
The problem is, as Loren has talked about again and again, is that folks not passionately interested in the subject will get bored very quickly. He’s been very vocally opposed for sometime to the style, but before inspiration struck, hadn’t put his money where his mouth is in coming up with a viable alternative.
This method of interview is interesting, entertaining and informative. It’s something to keep your eye on, particularly if you’re a rich media content producer, as an emerging style and trend in digital video. What started out as a joke is turning out to beat the original at his own game.
BizAg: Multi-Site Business-for-Sale Search [The Startup Review]
May 29, 2008 — 02:09 PM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 4 Comments
Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.
STARTUP DETAILS:
Company Name: BizAg
20-word Description: Search businesses for sale from multiple websites
CEO’s 100-word Pitch: BizAg aggregates business for sale listings from multiple classifieds sites into a single comprehensive search solution. We are a vertical search engine of businesses for sale. Searching businesses for sale is inefficient and difficult. Listings are everywhere, making it hard to compare listings and make informed decisions. BizAg improves that experience by offering the largest database of business for sale listings. Advanced search tools and market information enables buyers to find their perfect business.
Mashable’s Take: Until this week, BizAg was kept under a private beta lock, which presumably kept its user numbers very low, but now that it is publicly accessible, it may not be too much to imagine it as a relatively popular front end for its market.
There are of course numerous business-for-sale listing services on the Web. BizBuySell is a biggie. BizQuest is another prominent option. Yet most individuals who browse those sites are likely to use one engine to great degree, and others with significantly less regularity. (One might draw an analogy to such habits as one does the usage patterns for broader search tools like Google Search or Yahoo Search or Microsoft Live Search.)
Therefore, BizAg works to help seekers of business for sale to expand their options. It’s job is to search multiple sources for listings of businesses advertised for sale. As it finds them, it presents them; with results that can be organized by age (of advert), asking price, location, and of course, business name. BizAg also presents users with a data grid atop main section of the page to display business trends and statistics. Things like average asking price, average cashflow, average revenue, and cashflow and revenue multipliers are shown within the box, as are popular states for businesses are displayed, though that selection appears to be a static one and not amenable to keyword specification.
There’s no question that BizAg is an eminently simple service. It seems as lightweight as a search engine can be. And that’s fine by us. After all, what more do you need? You want something to get you from A to B (or in business search, “A to Z”) as quickly as possible. In that capacity, BizAg appears to deliver. Perhaps it could expand its reach to more listing sources. Variety and thoroughness are key in the search arena. For a startup nearly fresh out the gate, however, BizAg has logically covered the largest bases first. It should now work to delve deeper - into harder-to-reach places, so to speak. That is where it will prove its true mettle.
Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials
Revision3 CEO Speaks DoS, Media Defender, And The FBI
May 29, 2008 — 12:47 PM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 4 Comments
As many Web video fans may have recognized, Revision3, the production company responsible for shows like Diggnation, PixelPerfect, Systm, Tekzilla, and popSiren, wasn’t itself this past Memorial Day weekend. It hit a rough patch. Or, to be more precise, the rough patch hit Revision3. And not so much a rough “patch” per se, but rather whopper of an attack.
And in case you’re curious as to what terrible spell caused the downfall of numerous in-house access, including the public-facing site, RSS server, and even the corporate email system, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback today offered a very detailed, well-rounded explanation. The gist of his voluminous blog post: It’s all Media Defender’s fault.
Indeed, the group oft referred by critics to be naught but an abusive purveyor of digital waste - it’s speciality is Denial of Service attacks, or DoS for short - and which is reported to have been under the occasionally employ of both the RIAA and MPAA, as well as individual media companies among the likes of Sony and Universal Music, was discovered as the sole producer of a torrent of SYN packets sent the way of Revision3.
Evidently, some tech folks at Revision3 recognized that there was “some unauthorized use of (its) tracking server” (one culprit of such unsavory activity just so happened to be Media Defender), took steps to stop the unwarranted activity, and subsequently triggered Media Defender’s personal botnet to initiate a massive stream of SYN packets in an attempt to reconnect to Revision3’s servers. So, an unfortunately brutal DoS onslaught with non-malevolent intentions.
Naturally, Louderback maintains a measure of reserved anger in his public response to Media Defender’s attack. As the CEO of a venture funded video production outfit, Louderback wouldn’t be doing his company any favors by speaking in entirely explicit fashion. Even so, one can clearly grasp that Media Defender was in the wrong last weekend and in the wrong some time before then, when it pilfered server power from Revision3 to suit its purposes as the action man behind the record and movie industries’ copyright protection efforts. Louderback of course doesn’t do what many might wish him to, which is to speak of the potential for a lawsuit to claim financial restitution for 3-4 days of lost business.
But in time, any details to that effect will likely surface sometime in the near future. As with all things controversial and Web-related, an issue of this sort and this high of a profile sits upon a porous foundation, through which leaks are bound to occur. Perhaps a courtroom session is called for? Perhaps a settlement may emerge from this ill-begotten encounter. At the moment, all that the public is being told is the FBI is “looking into the matter.” Whatever the end result, this looks like another big hit (or miss, depending on how one prefers to see it) for Media Defender and its parent company, Artists Direct, that went very badly for the sender. And justly so, I say.
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