Tom Altman’s Wedia Conversation

It’s a love/hate relationship. These top (insert random number here) sites list can get out of control. Sometimes it looks like these websites are saying “Hey, look at me, we know what is cool. Let us prove it by tell you the coolest sites we know about.” Sometimes you want to say, if you know about it - it’s probably not cool anymore.

So - then there is the love part, I’m not sure if I’m trying to validate that I know what I’m talking about - or what. But this is an article from MSN/PC World that shows us the top 25. Highlights:
Yahoo Pipes
Like Popfly, Yahoo Pipes lets you create your own mashups or “pipes.” As with Popfly, you drag and drop prebuilt modules, and then create connections between them. But Yahoo Pipes is much harder to use than Popfly, and the way to go about building your own mashup isn’t always obvious. But if you’re willing to do some digging and learning, you can build very useful stuff, such as a mashup that uses Yahoo maps to show the locations of all apartments for rent in a certain neighborhood.

Pageflakes
The Web is just as chaotic as the world–but Pageflakes can organize both of them for you. This super-customizable version of a home page enables you to pick the news and information feeds you want to read, and to specify the “flakes,” or applets, you want to include. Flakes let you add all sorts of cool stuff to your page–movie times, to-do lists, a notepad, e-mail, a horoscope–even sudoku or a personal blog. If you’re looking for one-stop browsing, this is it.

PopURLs
If you’re an information hound, you probably spend lots of time jumping from Digg to Del.icio.us to YouTube to Fark to Google News to anything-dot-com. With PopURLs, you no longer need to waste time hopping around the Internet. An aggregator of all things informative, PopURLs features massive lists of headlines, videos, blogs, and content from all of those sites, as well as plenty of others. One nice bonus is that you can search some of the sites–Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia, among others–straight from PopURLs. It’s also easy to tweak the way PopURLs looks and works, too, including customizing the layout of the feeds so you can put the ones you view most regularly on top. The scrapbook is a particularly useful feature; just click the ‘Add to Scrapbook’ button next to any headline, and PopURLs will save it (and up to 19 other favorite items).

This is interesting, because when you think of online advertising - Microsoft is not usually the top of mind answer. For me, Google would be number one. But Digg (as the article states) has 17 million unique visitors a month…WOW!

Digg Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced an agreement in which the two companies will collaborate to bring relevant advertising to the more than 17 million unique monthly visitors to Digg, an innovative Web site that harnesses the collective wisdom of the world’s online audience to prioritize the overwhelming amount of content available on the Web. Microsoft’s advanced advertising technology and sales force combined with Digg’s unique and growing user community make possible the three-year collaboration, grounded in the companies’ commitment to technological innovation and user experience.”

OK, this could be very interesting - and is so relevant for us because of KCRG and the move to HD.

The speculation is over about whether Google is interested in directly participating in the wireless world. On Friday, the Mountain View, California-based company said it would participate as a bidder in the upcoming federal auction of wireless spectrum in the 700-MHz band — to the tune of at least $4.6 billion.

Basically - this could mean Google could offer up free internet for all on the 700 MHz band and this could open up a whole new world…literally.

OK - we have to have a Web 2.0 site. “Now What Do We Do?!”

Enter enter boagworld.com - advice on managing and building websites.

This is an interesting site and seems to have a good bit of information on it. I like the idea that there is a podcast and the text on the site. It seems sometimes people do one of many different options - but doing two of many (text and podcast) seems like an interesting model.

I really like the links at the bottom of the page. Without hearing the podcast yet - I assume it is links from the show. Good Stuff!

So - I need a new cordless telephone…and let me tell you - I am a cheapskate when it comes to consumer electronics. My old unit got a bit too much of last week’s lightning.

So I head off and find a model I like - the Uniden TRU9280-4 (the “-4″ stands for 4 handsets; “-3″ is three and so on.) So I put the search into eBay and find 3 main “auctions” and 20+ hits in the eBay stores section.

But instantly I’m a little miffed - because all 3 of these so called auctions are “Buy it Now” - OK, I love the concept of buy it now…but it was not meant to be used as a fix price auction - that is what the eBay stores are for. So I decide to look over at Amazon - and boom, for almost the same money I can get a brand new model with free shipping.

It just compliments what I have been saying for a while about eBay - the deals are getting harder and harder to find. I still think you can find some stuff there, but it takes more work and more work is not what the consumer is looking for.

This could be a major thing that drives traffic back to the local retailers. With innovations like we saw at the Web 2.0 conference - where intuit is teaming up with and acquiring companies who can take the inventory people are entering into Quickbooks and displaying it online…hyper local is becoming more of a reality. If I can log onto a local retailer’s site and see exactly what they have, now that is information I can use.

UPDATE: I found this article: 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally - I’m not sure I totally agree with using Facebook professionally, but some of the same things apply to LinkedIn.

Published: 7/23/2007 6:57 AM
Wow - when Facebook opened up its API’s (special channels into their system which allows others to leverage their software) to the world, they took it up a notch.

I was listening to a podcast last week where a college student said many of his classmates do not even like to use email anymore - they log onto Facebook and send messages to each other from within the system. WOW - that is powerful.

Some have went as far to say “The Facebook Platform reminds many of us of Windows; and people are calling it “the social operating system” on which you can develop your Internet apps.” If this is true - we may have reached a new bar for social applications.

This one is a little scary for me, some people (cough-Lyman-cough) have called me a Microsoft fanboy…and I have been know for carrying the blue & white flag from time to time, but if you look at this guy’s research, it is pretty hard to dispute that open source IS web 2.0 at this point.

The only 2.0 site I can think of which is not here is LinkedIn, but they have “Powered by Sun” at the bottom…so that is definetly not Bill and the gang.

If you can think of any other sites…I’ll check them out and see if we can figure out what they are using.

Yup, it’s true. I have an addiction to LinkedIn. (LinkedIn is a social networking/Web 2.0 application that keeps you link, networked and connected to people you have been around in the past. Mostly work - but some college, but this is not the party site…that is Facebook.)

I had signed up for LinkedIn a while back…but never took the time to fill it out. Then, I kept seeing it bubble to the top of del.icio.us (the social bookmarking site) and so I finally broke down a put all my stuff (past jobs and schools) in - and I was hooked.

I am up to 17 connections. I want more - I spend time each day thinking of more people I can connect.

One of my favorite parts is the ability to reconnect with colleges you have lost touch with, like my friend Julie. I hadn’t spoken to her for three years…she had gotten a new job and email - and I had no clue. We connected on LinkedIn and we had a one hour email ping-pong match the other night.

So check it out, let me know - and by all means, send me an invitation to “link”.

This is so cool…as many of you know, I love volkswagens, motorcycles and computers; but I also have a secret affection for renewable energy.

I have heard about this, but this is a great article explaining how these dudes from the New Jersey Institute of Technology have basically embedded teeny, tiny solar panels into paint. We could paint cars, homes and businesses with “regular” paint - and BAM, it would be producing electricity.

Now that is cool…check it out at Science Daily.

I found a great article on radio called “When Will Radio Die?”. It address a bunch of issues with radio, but kind of reminds me of a lot of the discussion we are having about news paper - here are a few of my favorite parts.

Where and how we consume radio content is well researched…Suffice it to say that a well-run radio station is still a very cash flow positive business and I don’t know any poor radio broadcasters…However, the radio business is changing fast. And, since the evolving financial structure of the radio business has often foreshadowed similar evolution in the television business.

As I look at this article it is good - but where it falls down is the same place the newspaper and TV critics fall down. They are trying to compare future technologies with our current models. We plan to keep on innovating and transitioning - so please, compare current technologies with our current newspaper - but just wait to see what we have up our sleeves, we may be down for this round…but the game is not over yet!