Category Archives: Web/Internet

I’m a big LinkedIn fan.  I’ve used it to hire people.  I’ve used it to get work.  I’ve used it to reconnect with people.  I’ve used it to help make introductions.  With the small exception of some privacy concerns, it’s one of my favorite Web applications.  And based on their growth rate, I’m not the only one (Mark Evans agrees, Robert Scoble doesn’t).  I like Plaxo too, although I use it very differently (Plaxo is ideal as a contact manager, especially if you move to a new PC every year or so like me).

LinkedIn tends to start as one of those annoying emails you see from recruiters and headhunters, as well as people who you meet once at a party but they save your card and ping you a few months later.  Over time you get a request from an actual friend or two, then a coworker and colleague.  Eventually, you start getting the emails multiple times per week or per day, then you tend to either blacklist it or succumb to the overwhelming pressure.

I saw Guy Kawasaki’s recent post on his LinkedIn profile refresh, and last night I decided it was time to spam people update my network, so I decided to try something a little different.  Rather than the standard LinkedIn greeting:

I’ve started using LinkedIn to keep up with my professional contacts and help them get introduced to people they need to contact. Since we’ve worked together and know each other well, I’d like to invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn.

I’d be glad to recommend you and put you in touch with anyone in my network. In fact, I’ve found quite a few people we both know on LinkedIn.

Basic membership is free, and signing up takes less than a minute.

Double-Yawn! Here’s what I sent out (with the subject line: “Standard LinkedIn invite”):

This is your official invitation to the worlds biggest party. Please RSVP now. It’ll be a lot of fun, I promise!

– Jeremy

ps – there appears to be a typo above, when I wrote “worlds biggest party” I meant to write “my network on LinkedIn.” Sorry for any confusion.

pps – and then, naturally, the whole RSVP thing really doesn’t make sense when taken out of context, does it? just go ahead and ignore that part. (blog note: I fixed a typo)

ppps – strike the last sentence too.

Here’s my LinkedIn page – it could probably use a little more work, but I know it represents me pretty well.  I recommend reviewing the seemingly defunct LinkedIn Notes blog for more thoughts on maximizing the use of the site.

John Markoff stirred up the pot this weekend by launching Web 3.0, even while good ol’ Web 2.0 is still in beta (or alpha).  And I didn’t even get to go to the launch party, although I did get to spend some time in the halls of the Web 2.0 conference.  And the halls were the place to be for the conference – that’s where all the cool kids were hanging out (although I did cheer on Sling Media’s Blake Krikorian as he spoke with Beth Comstock from NBC – unfortunately John’s moderation of that session left a little something to be desired in my opinion).Nick Carr is applauding the 3.0 upgrade with his own personal style:

Personally, I’m overjoyed that Web 3.0 is coming. When dogcrap 2.0 sites like PayPerPost and ReviewMe start getting a lot of attention, you know you’re seeing the butt end of a movement. (There’s a horrible metaphor trying to get out of that last sentence, but please ignore it.) Besides, the arrival of 3.0 kind of justifies the whole 2.0 ethos. After all, 2.0 was about escaping the old, slow upgrade cycle and moving into an age of quick, seamless rollouts of new feature sets. If we can speed up software generations, why not speed up entire web generations? It doesn’t matter if 3.0 is still in beta – that makes it all the better, in fact.

Now the whole blogosphere is abuzz debating 2.0 v 3.0 v ???  Nick Bradbury states: “This weekend much of the geekosphere was buzzing about the “Web 3.0” article in the NY Times, but from where I stand, Web 3.0 does not validate.”  Tim O’Reilly, Mr. Web 2.0 himself, isn’t on board, and Robert Scoble wrote a fun piece referring to it as Web 2007.  Dan Farber seems to sit on the fence a little bit, but then Nick at Valleywag (nice redesign) goes straight for the jugular:

In short, the Times wants to announce a trend just in case that trend actually materializes in the next few months. But don’t bet on it — Google smelled a dud and didn’t touch this story, and neither should anyone looking for the real next big thing.

Here’s a summary of what I think, in easy to digest bullet form:

• The term “Web 3.0” will not gain general acceptance.  Web 2.0 is too nebulous on its own, and since it’s more like an “era” than it is a “version number” it makes more sense that it’ll be identified further into the future as we look back on the era past Web 2.0.
• Agents are coming.  If Web 2.0 is (roughly) all about AJAX, XML, and open APIs, then the logical evolution of implementing these technologies are intelligent agents.  Agents don’t just tell me when a stock hits a price, agents tell me that I should buy some GOOG because my peers and my portfolio reflect that I’d be interested in it.  Agents figure out that this weekend I am most interested in restaurants X, Y, and Z, and should hit a club where the DJ I like (because he spins the same music I have in my collection) has a set.  Agents use the open datasets and figure things out for me.
• Data mining technologies are important.  Anyone can collect data.  Anyone can present data.  Anyone can sort alphabetically.  Building intelligence requires much deeper data analysis where datasets are viewed as a matrix of data, where seemingly unrelated information finally comes together to make sense.  These technologies become the building blocks for the next generation of web services (agents, remember?).
• Buzzwords are getting more obnoxious.  Even if there is a new era right around the corner (which seems doubtful), do we really need to label it???

I still miss the days when you had to design your Web site to ask users whether or not their browser could support tables.  Sigh.

When I first registered with Technorati (the de-facto standard service for tracking the so-called blogosphere), I had about 1 incoming link, and my ranking was about 1 millionth.  David Sifry, Technorati’s CEO, gave his “state of the Blogosphere” report today, in which he claimed the site is now tracking roughly 57 million blogs, and revealed the following statistics:

• The blogosphere doubles roughly every 230 days
• As of October 2006, about 100,000 new weblogs were created each day
• The total posting volume of the blogosphere is showing about 1.3 million postings per day

My first reaction: holy freaking crap!  Where are all these blogs?  Does this count every new entry into Vox, MSN Spaces, MySpace pages, and all the other “quick havens” where people get their feet wet blogging?  What are they writing about? 

I also noticed another stat in the report: About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months. Which means, if I do my math, that my blog (with a Technorati ranking of ~22K at the time of writing) is in the top 1% of all tracked, active blogs. 

Here’s where it gets crazy: my traffic and links don’t even come close to 1% of the Top 100 ranked blogs.  Maybe I don’t post enough (thoughts on post frequency here and here)?  More thoughts on Sifry’s post over at IP Democracy.

My second reaction: Really now, where are they?  According to Sifry’s stats, about 40% of blogging is in English (more on language here), which means I should have the ability to discover about 40,000 new blogs every day.  But I don’t see em anywhere.  Sure, every now and then a new blog appears to gain some momentum and link traction, but at the end of the day, the discovery process for new blogs is pretty bad.

Maybe Technorati (or someone else) should introduce new services to get new blogs “on the radar?”  It’d be nice if there was a way to gain some attention, other than hoping/praying that Robert Scoble reads (and links to) one of your posts. Sifry does make a variety of points on the notion of a blogger’s “authority” but, other than by writing some Top 10 list, it ain’t easy to get noticed these days.

Back in the late 90s, workplace boredom often led to Web surfing.  The only thing is, the “discovery” element was pretty tricky, and you pretty much had to rely on word-of-mouth or links from Yahoo!.  Well, with the fun of Web 2.0, we have a bunch of new services that let people help each other find new and interesting stuff online.  Well, maybe not interesting, but at least new.

The top of these social bookmarking (as the term is called) services are Digg, Delicious (now owned by Yahoo), and Reddit (now owned by Conde Nast/Wired). I’ve recently started using both Digg (here’s my Digg profile) and Delicious (more on that in a few days), and find they really can help cure the “I’m bored and I want to surf for 10 minutes” syndrome. With each of them you can track your friends’ favorites and there are a variety of methods to see what’s new or what’s popular.  Only thing is “what’s popular” isn’t necessarily what the term typically implies.

If you want to to know the most popular movies, you can read the box office reports.

Most popular TV shows, Nielsen (which nobody really trusts, but nothing else is out there just yet).

Web sites?  Well, now you have a variety of unreliable services.

But for “Links of the day” you have things like the Digg home page.  Which is built dynamically based on some mysterious algorithm.  In the first era of Digg, the home page was pretty much dictated by the “Top 100” users.  The specifics of how to become a Top 100 weren’t exactly clear, but it basically was a self-rewarding process.  Once in, it’s nearly impossible to get out, and a new user has about 0 odds of getting in.  And the Top 100 were happy. 

Then team Digg decided to change their algorithms, to try to make it a bit more “fair and balanced.”  Sounds good, right?  Well, to everybody not in the Top 100, it’s quite good, as the “What’s Popular” list no longer reflects what they think is interesting, but what the entire Digg community thinks is interesting.  Which leaves the Top 100 feeling a little left out.

I do understand their feeling this way, as they spent countless hours contributing to the site.  Maybe they should have their own special section, or be an automatic filter of the home page or something.  They should get a little kudos and “thank-you” (and not just a T-shirt).  But the site has evolved, and its for the better.  It ain’t exactly a democracy just yet, but we’ll call it a Diggocracy and move on.

Hopefully they’ll work on fixing the “disappearing cookie” problem now…

About a year and a half ago the blogosphere was, shall we say, all-a-twitter, about a new startup called Odeo.  They were founded as a “podcasting company” and that was pretty much the last we ever heard from them (which could be because they seem to have annoyed Mike Arrington, which is apparently a curse worse than death in the Web 2.0 world).  Although if you’d ever had the chance to run into someone who worked there, you’d generally get lectured on end about how amazing they were and how much they were going to change the world.  I even recall a Stanford intern who visited my office and was choosing between working for them or for Google (my hunch is that he chose… poorly).

While doing a little research, I found a great article on GigaOm where the founder of the company, Evan Williams, espoused on some mistakes they made.  Notably absent from the list are things like “generating revenue” and “have a sales and marketing plan.”  That said, I do applaud anyone who takes the time to reflect as such, especially in a public forum.

Today Evan announced that he is now founding a new company, called Obvious Corp, and they have purchased Odeo’s assets (which is marketing-speak for “bought the chairs, desks, servers, logos, a little software, and the foosball table”).  So the question that comes to mind for me is: what is going to change?

From Evan’s blog:

The Obvious model goes something like this:

Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized.

Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they’re focused and easy to understand)

Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independentlyAs services mature, the goal is to get them to profitability with advertising and/or subscriptions, so they can add to the network (and fund more building). 

As Fred Wilson stated, this is, in fact, fairly obvious.  It’s the classic Idealab model, and it’s definitely a fun way to run a company.  But it’s also an extremely expensive model.  Roughly 9 in 10 startups completely fail, and then roughly 9 in 10 of the ones that “make it” have minor acquisitions that make a few people a nice chunk of change, but leave the majority of the teams involved unsatiated.  This leaves us with about 1% of companies that can “pull a Youtube” (although Idealab did start the company which eventually became Overture, which Yahoo bought, so that’s probably a pretty good win in the long term). UPDATE: I originally posted that Google acquired Overture, but Ryan pointed out it was Yahoo – thanks for the comment Ryan!

So the question at hand is (it’s a 2-parter): how much money does Obvious have to run (and where is it coming from) and how big is the team they are building to create all these new services.  Hopefully they can spin something out fast enough to generate enough revenue to pay for the development of the rest of the services – I do like the model of aggregating all these types of resources together.  Maintaining Google Labs is a lot easier when you have an Adsense to pay the hosting fees.

The other day I put up a fairly innocuous post on seeing a prop of the Batmobile from Batman Begins when I was down in LA a few weeks ago. If you read the post all the way through the very end, you’ll notice the final line is “No scoop for JT.”

Well, in a moment of near-perfect irony, a few people out there thought I did see something new!  I think it started here, because the next thing I knew, I was on the front page of Digg with this post.

Here’s the results of my site traffic logs:

And since I do my photo hosting and sharing with flickr, here’s my updated “most popular photos” page (note that before this week, the #1 photo was viewed roughly 400 times):

So there you have it – a non-rumor becomes a rumor, and it’s all because of my Internets.  For more good reading on the impact of “getting dugg”, read this article by Ed Kohler.

I have taken the liberty of creating a chat room for LIVEdigitally. Lingr is a slick Web 2.0 site which, rather than having you download a client to use to create rooms, allows you to make, manage, tag, favorite, and of course hang out in your chats completely online. Instead of wandering aimlessly and putting up an actual review-type blurb, I figured it would be more fun to just make a chat for us and then we can all see how we feel, hash it out together, and maybe, uh…jam around ;D