How many networks? Explode

Curverider is a company I’ve stumbled across quite independently a couple of times this week.

The first time I was looking for a social networking platform for a small project I’m working on and was impressed with their approach on ELGG “The leading open source social networking platform.” according to their site.

And now they are turning up all over the place as an implementation of ELGG called Explode is doing the blog rounds. It’s a direct competitor for mybloglog, taking a simplified approach to the social browsing space. I assume this is phase one of an ongoing development which will be community driven.

As they say on the main Curverider site “We believe people come first – technology should always fit your requirements.”

I’ve been trying out mybloglog for a couple of weeks now, and while it’s an interestng service, it has a few strange habits. I think I’ll run both in parallel and see how they do.

So that explains the addition to the right hand column.

LinkedIn

I’ve been meaning to write an article on LinkedIn for a couple of weeks now, and someone has saved me the bother. The link love. (via)

“I recently posted a question on LinkedIn, to get some feedback on my
blog. I asked people what I should write about on my blog, and for
general advice.

I got a number of answers back quite quickly, many of which were
quite good!”

technorati tags:startup, linkedin

Web2.0 tougher than we expected? Odeo up for sale

Is the web2.0 landscape tougher to survive in than we all expected a year ago? I’m pretty sure the answer is yes. With news that Obvious corp are selling Odeo is up for sale I asked 3 ‘web savvy yet not web obsessed’ friends if they had:

• heard of odeo
• used odeo
• thought odeo was any good
• thought odeo was profitable

I got a pretty consistent set of answers

• yep, yep, yep
• yep, yep, nope it killed my flash instal on firefox whiccaused me untold….
• pretty good, yep, apart from killing my peecee the stupid….
• probably, oh yeah, i don’t care they killed my firefox

Now I expect the firefox demise was down to some other more specialist site in actual fact, but that aside, he Odeo public perception is strong, the numbers seem strong too:

“Williams reports the site saw 684,951 visitors last month, 3,012,921
pageviews and perhaps most importantly these days 1,523,963 Flash play” from Techcrunch coverage.

Those are pretty strong numbers, and with AdSense covering the hosting costs I’d expect someone to buy this pretty quickly, possibly to integrate with some other service which has a gap in the speaker interface.

Personally, I just don’t get Twitter, the other obvious product. But hey

technorati tags:twitter, odeo, music, web2.0

Techquila Shots Idea Flow

The flow of ideas over at Techquila Shots is still healthy. If you haven’t made your way over there yet then DO SO. An interesting mix of references to existing services and the interesting holes in a given space lead to some thought, and arguement, provoking reading. It’s like TechCrunch for ideas, not businesses.

An example proposition from a few days ago:

“Ever run into that problem of trying to recall a website — and
remembering what it looked like, but having no clue the name of it?
Maybe you were lucky enough to bookmark it, but even then, that may not
help you.” (link to the rest)

I recall a site from WAY back called ShouldExist.org which tried this, but the quality of the content let it down badly. Way too many submissions along the lines of “Apple should release an even SMALLER iPod the size of a coin” or “TV shouldn’t have ads”.

The range of topics, and the quality of the posts make Techquila Shots a standout in the tech speculation sphere. Not surprising with Steve Poland running the show. I also quite like the idea that someone working on a dark Beta innocently fires up the site and reads his ‘big unique idea’ being given away by Steve to allcomers, showing that while it may be big, it sure ain’t unique.

Link

Yahoo pipes follow up for Marketers

“How Marketers Can Use Yahoo! Pipes to Increase Their Online Sales” is an interesting read over at http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com covering how to make use of RSS via Yahoo pipes to deliver additional value in the particular niche of online marketing.

The basic flow of the article is that by combining and filtering feeds from multiple sources you can create a number of items of value in this market:

1. High quality, flitered, sticky content
2. Applications to allow your visitors to do further refine this, becoming their chosen first point of contact

The subtext to the article seems to me that feeding ads, and other messaged directly INTO the pipe will be the secret of success for marketers at one end of the scale.

My experience with Yahoo Pipes has been mixed, even a simple attempt to combine 3 blog RSS feeds into cchronological order took a looooong time because of differing datestamps on Blogger and WordPress. And I play with SQL all day! It worked eventually, but it wasn’t as simple as it promised.

technorati tags:yahoo, pipes, rss, marketing

Tuneglue music mapping toy

Tools to link bands, artists and musical style have been around for a while. But audiomap from Tuneglue is giving me a degree of joy this evening as I trot around the blues men in a bouncy, flashy, interactivey way. Charley Patton here I come.

Questionable linking there, sure to drive a good arguement among blues geeks. One feature I’d love, but can’t find, would be a permalink option for a map you’ve drawn through a search and a few clicks. I can see myself emailing those around like mad - I’ve already emailed a screengrab to a friend.

Link (via)

Ubiquilink - Yahoo pipes

3 minutes and 20 seconds. That’s how long it just took me to build my first feed using Yahoo Pipes. I’m pretty impressed.

You can view it here. A trivial feed in many ways, Search yahoo for “thoughtpath” strip out any results where the body contains “ignorance” or “stupidity” (these CAN appear in the title, or elsewhere) and re-order the 20 results by the URL. I can see this becoming a very useful tool for side bar RSS feeds, as it would be just as simple to include multiple sources for the initial results, so collating the 20 other blogs that relate to this one and present any single topic with only one link from the blog to have posted first, or last, or indeed both to reward the earliest poster and the most up to date information.

Keep watching.

Link (via)

mepath.com

I’ve been playing with mepath for a couple of days and, while a bit rough at the edges, I love it. Lifestyle linking, helping you to connect actions and outcomes - eating cheese and getting fat - really seems to work for me. Give it a try.

web2.0 pyramid scheme - AT LAST!!!!

Agloco seems to be the strangest of names to me. And also the strangest but most straightforward of concepts. Get paid to surf, and get paid to have friends. Basically, if any of you click on this link: http://www.agloco.com/r/BBBB0194 :and sign up for the service I get paid for YOUR surfing. If you subsequently ’sign up’ more people, you get paid for THEM surfing, but so do I.

Thats right - so do I.

Very social and web 2.0. Very pyramid scheme. Very Pyramid2.0. I think I like.

Instacalc - publishing calculations and working as easily as data

Now this is my idea of the future. Instead of showing you my result, instead even of showing you my calculation, I can publish my calculator and let you play with it. What better way to let you test my assumptions, challenge my ideas, and generally robustly query my work.

The calculator above shows how my daily cups of coffee are only costing me 22.5p if you factor out the cost of boiling a kettle. If you want to do the same calculation, but you buy coffee at £4 instead of £4.50 just switch the value on the screen. [Or should I say the calc that would be there is wordpress hadn't eaten it. Ho hum.]
http://instacalc.com to create your own.
We’ve all been data sharing for so long I think we forget we do it. This blog is an example, I find something interesting and I share it with you. But PROCESS sharing, now thats interesting. Even the trivial example above is much more interesting than a simple statement that I figured out the cost of a cuppa. Big deal! Now extend this to election blogs calculating margins based on predicted swings - you no longer need a huge team to come up with this stuff - it’s all getting to be plug and play.

I’ve long thought that online news releases from government regarding budgets should show the workings. Let’s say the base rate goes up next month. Publish a calculator that shows the total change in my spending that will cause - just make it clear which number I change (my mortgage repayment say) and right there in the article I have my answer. This is empowering stuff.