Archive for the 'Web' Category

So, What Does Yahoo Do Now?

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at May 4, 2008 in Web and Web 2.0. 1 Comment

I did not expect Microsoft to withdraw the offer, but that’s what they did. I’m relieved that the first season of this soap opera is at an end, as I was getting bored out of my mind with all the speculations regarding the issue. But, I’m afraid that the story simply cannot end now.

Microsoft gave up, but they have another business (actually, a multitude of them) to run. They will probably try to buy themselves a different big entrance into the online ad business, although their options aren’t that great.

It will be interesting, however, to see what Yahoo does next. Having been drawn into this mess against their will, they were forced to do a lot of decisions they normally wouldn’t have done. They also explored almost all viable merger/acquisition/partnership options they have. Will they just go back to business as usual, or will they act on any of it? For example, what happens with the Google ad deal, which was - according to both companies - going so well in its testing phase? Will they just pretend it never happened?

Oh no, this cannot end now. Microsoft has ruffled too many feathers with this one, and now both companies need to do something about it, unless they want to sit at the same table in two years, negotiating the same deal under even worse circumstances for both of them. Interesting times are ahead.

What Makes A Blog Great?

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Stan Schroeder

at April 28, 2008 in Web. 2 Comments

The answer: this. Marc Andreessen is not in it for the money; he’s not trying to be a journalist, and he certainly doesn’t care about posting frequency too much. But, he knows a lot about certain topics (in this case, he gives a very thorough MSFT-YHOO analysis, a must-read if you’re interested in the subject) and he writes about them with ease and authority that very few journalists can hope to achieve.

What’s the secret? It’s simple: a good blog is a guy/girl writing about a topic he/she knows a lot about. The value of such a blog is in the fact that no general-purpose (or even specialized) journalist can come close to the level of knowledge, depth and passion a blogger can reach. Of course, not all bloggers are that good; in fact, most aren’t. But if you want an example of a really, really good blog, in the purest sense of the word, you’ve got one right here.

In a sense, a good blog relates to a bigger media publication in a similar way as a small, specialized IT magazine relates to a daily - it doesn’t cover everything, but it focuses on a specific audience and goes much more in-depth. Good blogs usually deal with their topics with fanatical attention to detail, and that’s what makes them interesting. Pick a topic - any topic, however narrow - and there’s a blogger out there covering all aspects of it.

There’s also the question of what category a blog should fall into - is it a commercial site which earns money from ad revenue, just like any magazine, or must it stay a non-profit affair, with the blogger offering his/her content freely and forgetting about making any money off it? I say: if the blog is great, who cares? I remember a recent article by Louis Gray who says that most bloggers don’t deserve any ad revenue. I agree with some of his points, but some of his economic logic is flawed. If I were an advertiser with a $10.000 budget, I’d rather have my ad shown on 100 small blogs than once on NYTimes. In this sense, bloggers - good ones - deserve not only respect for going deeper than anyone else, but they also deserve some ad revenue.

What Louis aims at, though, although he’s not quite clear about it, are the blogs written by people who don’t have anything to say. I agree: there’s a lot of those, and they all suck. But keep an eye on the ones that are good; they’re definitely worth your time, if you’re a reader, and money, if you’re an advertiser.

Picnik - Now With Crop, Resize & Scale At The Same Time

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Stan Schroeder

at March 31, 2008 in Tips, Web, Software and Web 2.0. 1 Comment

Back in the day I wrote a review of online photo editors, and my biggest concern with all of them was the lack of some web-oriented options, most notably Photoshop’s brilliant ability to have an image resized and scaled to a certain (exact) size while cropping. It’s an extremely valuable option if you’re working for the web, where you usually need a photo in a certain size (on this site, I usually want photos that are 490 pixel wide).

A friend just told me that one of the best photo editors out there, Picnik, has added a lot of new features. I went to take a look, and lo and behold, Picnik now has the aforementioned option! Now, it definitely gets my recommendation as an online photo editor; if you haven’t, try it out.

Muxtape - Really Simple Way To Create Mixtapes

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Stan Schroeder

at March 25, 2008 in Web and News. 5 Comments

cassette blank

Here’s a new, painfully simple way to create mixtapes - well, not real mixtapes, but lists of MP3s which can be played directly in a web browser. Which is pretty much the next best thing. The service is called Muxtape and it has literally no options, which is sometimes a good thing.

Here’s an example of a Muxtape. I don’t have one near, but I bet it’s optimized for the iPhone.

And for all you kids who never knew cassettes and don’t know what the big deal with mixtapes is, Wikipedia offers a very thorough explanation.

So, Is FriendFeed The Next Big Thing?

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Stan Schroeder

at March 15, 2008 in Reviews, Web, Web 2.0 and News. 4 Comments

There’s a blogger fight going on this weekend, with a little lifestreaming application by the name of FriendFeed at its centre. FriendFeed lets you see your and your friends’ activity across various web services in a simple feed, and it also adds the ability to comment and tag any individual item. For some reason, several prominent bloggers decided that FriendFeed is the next Twitter; while I agree that connecting and organizing all of your web activity in one place might be the next big thing, I don’t see FriendFeed being exceptionally good at it.

You can see the latest batch of (some unnecessarily harsh) blogger comments in the discussion over at Techmeme.

I’ve tried out FriendFeed briefly before, and let’s just say I wasn’t overwhelmed with what it can do (you can see my feed here.) Similar services abound: see Profilactic (my coverage here, my profile here), SocialThing, or Correlate.us as examples.

All of these services do more or less the same thing. Louis Gray seems to think that the big difference between FriendFeed and everything else is the fact that you can comment on items or “love” them, but I don’t see what, exactly, are the benefits of these options. I can barely find time to comment on blog posts; why the hell would I comment on bits and pieces of my (or someone else’s) online activity? The fact that the option is there doesn’t exactly hurt, but at best I consider it a very minor advantage.

To be honest, I’m a little bit biased about the entire concept of lifestreaming. I have on my hard drive the outline of a project that would - in my opinion - do much more with this idea, but I haven’t had the time or the manpower to start it. In brief, I think that all the apps I’ve mentioned above, as well as others like them, don’t really help you organize your online life well enough; they’re just spewing it all out in a long, hard-to-follow string of events which are only interesting as a “what’s this guy up to right now” kind of thing, but quite pointless in the long run. Thus, no, I don’t think that FriendFeed is in any way revolutionary: it’s a nice application and it’s popular because it’s a little bit better than most of its competition, but I don’t see any disruptive capacity in it just yet.

Deadpoolbaiting!

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Stan Schroeder

at December 21, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and Features. 2 Comments

Yeah, many web startups get a lot of attention with initial coverage, and then fall into oblivion after a couple months. But, it ain’t over till it’s over, right?

Still, the folks over at TechCrunch have the habit of taking some random company they don’t particularly like and pronounce it dead, even when there’s no other indication (except an Alexa graph, and we all know how reliable those are) that the company is actually doing bad. Case in point: Pownce.

I’ve invented a new word for this practice: deadpoolbaiting! So, which company should we deadpoolbait next? I’m open to suggestions. Please form an orderly line with your declining Alexa graphs.

On Jorn Barger’s 10 Tips For Bloggers

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Stan Schroeder

at December 16, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 5 Comments

Sometime in 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term weblog, which was a collection of links to various stuff on the web that he somehow found interesting. Now, he gives to Wired 10 tips he thinks all bloggers should know.

Here’s the first one.

“A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)”

Erm, this is 2008. and we’re not doing it like that anymore, Jorn. Not that there’s anything wrong with a linkblog, but blogs are something else. Sometimes, when you coin a term, it takes a meaning of its own over the years.

Needless to say, all his other points are completely irrelevant to bloggers, but are quite cool if you have a linkblog.

Ladies And Gentleman, I Present To You: Facebook Hell

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Stan Schroeder

at December 14, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and Features. 11 Comments

facebook hell I guess I’ve been out of the loop lately, or I’m simply getting old, but I had no idea that the Facebook situation has gotten so bad.

What you see on the left side of this post is taken from my girlfriend’s actual profile. Now, it may not look as ugly as your standard MySpace profile, but content-wise it’s probably much worse. I mean, hot damn, there must be a hundred applications in there (this is just a fraction of it, you should see the full profile)!

Being my old stubborn self I’ve refused most of those zombie/vampire/sandwich/etc useless apps and thus my profile still looks quite clean. But, your average Facebook user will take anything thrown at him/her. Thus, my girlfriend can use her Facebook profile to learn how sexy she is, how sexy Santa Claus is; she can have her name analyzed, she can send and receive gifts, food and other shenanigans, she has a graveyard, she can hug, poke, kick, bump, kiss, greet, twist and snowball fight her friends…and absolutely none of this is in any way useful.

Luckily for us, in Facebook you don’t see most of this unless you yourself are subscribed to it. But still, my hopes that somehow Facebook will be a better, more serious social network than MySpace have vanished the second I saw that profile. You may laugh at MySpace’s ugliness, Facebookers, but your own social network ain’t much better. In fact, my girlfriend has mostly switched to MySpace because “it makes more sense.” Go figure.

The question remains: is there such a thing as a useful social network? I’m looking at you, LinkedIn. If you guys and girls reading this, please don’t let your upcoming API turn LinkedIn into something like this, ok?

All this said, has someone tried subscribing to all possible applications on Facebook just to see what’ll happen? If anyone has such aspirations (and the required patience), I’d like to know.

AGLOCO is Dead, And I’m Glad

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Stan Schroeder

at December 10, 2007 in Web and News. 4 Comments

AGLOCO was a stupid idea. You get paid to surf the web, and you get money for everyone who signs up with you as referral. Sure. Money gets created out of thin air, and everyone gets rich (especially the folks who got there early)? Well, according to John Chow, one of their biggest supporters, now they’re dead, and I won’t shed any tears over it.

In any case, I’m sorry for the people who had spent time pitching AGLOCO to their friends. For future reference, note the difference between affiliate marketing and a pyramid scheme (source: Wikipedia): the first is “a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts” while the latter is ” a non-sustainable business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, usually without any product or service being delivered” The key word here? Product.

Read a solid analysis of AGLOCO here.

Twitter Banned in the United Arab Emirates

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Stan Schroeder

at December 6, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 4 Comments

site blocked Twitter is now banned in the United Arab Emirates because its content is “incosistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates“. I guess the fact that Twitter has no content per se doesn’t play a big part here; they’ve basically banned a tool for communication. Twitter now joins the army of other sites banned by the Emirates, most notably Flickr and Facebook.

WTF Happened To Technorati WTF?

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Stan Schroeder

at December 5, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0, Features and News. 3 Comments

Poor Technorati. They’ve had so many changes of strategy and redesigns in the last year or two that it’s hard to determine what they really want, and - a much bigger problem for the still huge blog tracker - people are likely to stop caring soon.

A clear example of the mess all these changes of focus have created is Technorati WTF, a relatively recent subsection of the site which features a Digg-like voting system on stories submitted by Technorati members. I’ve explained in detail why I think that WTF is flawed (although not necessarily a bad idea) before.

The interesting thing is that now, in the new design, this feature is nowhere to be seen. It still exists, here, it’s just not linked to anywhere on the front page of Technorati. In fact, if you don’t know the address, I don’t think it’s possible to reach it from anywhere on Technorati (correct me if I’m wrong on this one).

Technorati WTF

It’s visible in the content, too, as WTF is quite a sad sight at this moment. Several spammy stories, all over one month old, are all that WTF has to show - even in the “Recent” section. It’s probably just a matter of time before WTF gets shut down.

I still think that WTF is not such a bad idea; however, instead of stories, actual blog articles should automatically show up there, with users being able to vote them up or down. This would create a Digg-like list of recent interesting blog articles which, with a little help of crowd wisdom, might actually be relevant, instead of the seemingly arbitrary mish-mash of stories that the front page currently displays.

Two New Digg Tools: Digg Explorer And Digg Filter

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Stan Schroeder

at December 3, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 0 Comments

Here’s the short scoop on two new interesting Digg-related tools.

One is an unofficial recommendation engine for Digg called Digg Filter. It’s really simple: enter your username and you will get a bunch of stories that are “recommended” for you. I’m not a big fan of automated recommendation engines but this seems to be a much-sought feature, and one that Digg plans to implement soon, so Digg Filter can be seen as a “preview” of this upcoming option. Read Muhammad Saleem’s interview with the author over at RWW.

diggfilter

The other tool I’ve dug up in Digg’s upcoming stories is called Digg Explorer, and it offers a neat visual representation of certain Digg statistics: often used words, popular topics and subtopics, most active dates, etc. It’s all based on the last 500 front paged Digg stories, so don’t expect data from a year ago, but it’s still a great reference, with the added bonus of looking really nice. Read my coverage at Mashable, too.

diggexplorer