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Connect with Jeremiah on twitter Just updated the post on the Social CRM report. Notice the translations are coming in: Portuguese, Spanish, German http://bit.ly/bFBBV5 56 mins ago

Archive for June, 2007

Searchnomics Conference: Video Search Optimization and Marketing

Categories: Conference, Search Strategy, VideoPosted on June 27th, 2007

I was invited as media for the Searchnomics conference, a very important program for the modern web strategy. I’m going to be covering many of the Social Search topics. I’m sitting here next to Neil Patel, Chris Pirillo, and Dave McClure. Neil and I were talking to loud loud and Chris is so animated, Dave was showing us Spock, and some funny things happened.

LeAnn Prescott from Hitwise
Her report just went live

-Nearly all the growth in online video happens on YouTube.
-Youtube has twice the traffic as ALL the other video networks combined. says LeeAnn Prescott from HitWise. Videos are showing up more and more from Search engine results.
-20% of a traffic from search is average for YouYTube and other video sites
-5X growthin in number of search ters to video sites
-3X more search engine traffic going to video sites

Mark Yoshitake from Google/YouTube presented.

-Hundreds of millions of viewers a day
-Hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded daily
-Audiences broaden
-6 hours of vidoeo are uploaded
-Google did a deal with Apple iPhone and Apple TV
-How do users find a video? 1) recommendations (email, wom, etc) and then 2) search
-Why is community important to search? because users put in contextual information in the search terms, they also sort by network behavior (top views, top tagged, most recent)
-What is Google Video innovating to? There will be some previews of videos.
-They haven’t started video crawling
-They are crawling metacafes site map and looking at metadata
-YouTube is creating new economic opportunities.
-YouTube is working with Sanyo to find the “UCG” video that will be their main campaign
-Google is working on having paid videos to appear in search results pages
-The future of searching within video is being experimented with, they are looking for closed caption info using OCR
-Being on the homepage of YouTube gets more traffic

Lessons Learned
-Video search is huge
-Content opimzaiotn and community is key
-Content as commercials
-Create video sitesmpas to get indexed to Google Video

Metacafe

-37% of all traffic comes from Google
-They are doing ongoing search optimization

Chris Pirillo got up to the mic, saying that “if your clients have a hard time getting users to watch the content, then you have bigger problem than [video optimization]”

Posted in Conference, Search Strategy, Video | Comments

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List of companies that provide Behavioral Recommendations and Social Recommendations Web Services

Categories: Industry Index, Social Networking, Web Industry, Web ToolsPosted on June 27th, 2007

Do you have an ecommerce site or a site where the website (or users) recommend different items or content to each other? If you’ve been building it out on your own you know how difficult it was. Back in Web 1.0 NetPerceptions was the top dog, but they’re no longer around (Amazon was a big client of theirs)

David Marks the co-founder and CEO of Loomia has been chatting with me and has told me all the people in his space, I really appreciate him being so open to talk about his competitors, true community marketing. I was able to see a demo of Criteo yesterday.

One of the inversions his market has is that after showing an increase in sales, is that it’s a pay-for-performance, whereas in earlier times it was pay in advance.

Here’s a list of companies that provide Behavioral Recommendations and Social Recommendations Web Services

Loomia
“Loomia is an emerging leader in the recommendations and personalization space, a rapidly growing area within Internet search. Loomia Recommendations is a hosted web service that provides all sizes of retail and media sites with easy-to-use recommendations solutions to help site visitors find things they like, increase site activity, and improve merchandising. Loomia’s service can be used for all retail goods including shoes, wine, fashion, and electronics and any type of media item including audio, video, books, music, and ringtones.”

Aggregate Knowledge
“Aggregate Knowledge introduces its Discovery Services for Retail and Media. Discovery moves beyond Internet search by harnessing the collective power of web users to guide one another toward the items they will find both relevant and compelling.”

Criteo
“Presenting the right content to the right user. We provide 11 million highly targeted real-time personalized recommendations to more than 3,000 websites every day”

Baynote.com
“Baynote Content Guidance is an on-demand Web 2.0 service that dynamically displays Product and Content Recommendations on business websites, while improving the effectiveness of on-site search through Social Search.”

Baynote.org
“Baynote.org promotes the use of business-ready open source search. There are three Open Source Search offerings to choose from. Pick the package that’s right for you.”

Choice Stream
“ChoiceStream gives you the power to deliver uniquely personal experiences to every consumer. With ChoiceStream, you create the ’service that knows me’ to build loyalty, drive sales, and get the results you need to stay ahead.”

me.dium
“Me.dium reveals the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser. Without having to do anything differently than you normally do, Me.dium shows you your online world and allows you to communicate with friends and others in a natural, contextual manner. It lets you see what else is around you and relevant based on what you’re doing – all in REAL TIME. Just like the way you interact in the real world.”

Collarity
“Collarity quickly and easily integrates with your website to provide automated search and content suggestions, based on the natural communities-of-interest of your audience.”

Sourcelight
“Sourcelight’s Discovery Guide for Movies provides true, one-to-one personalization and has been very well received by our customers. The Sourcelight technology is easy to implement and the implementation team is a pleasure to work with. We continue to be impressed with Sourcelight’s understanding of our business and their contribution to our success.”

Clicksurge by MediaRiver
“The ClickSurge Platform enables Web publishers to guide Internet users to the publishers’ online content in a discovery-based contextual model; allowing content of any type, including video, music, pictures or text, to be linked onto any web page dynamically based on the unique properties of that web page. Widgets built on the platform quickly scan the contents of a web page, and search for related content, placing links to that content onto web pages at a publisher’s website, at a partner’s website or on any Internet page, including user-generated content sites such as blogs and social networks.”

Minekey
“Minekey’s content discovery service helps online publishers, marketers and retailers to maximize their revenue and improve user experience by serving the most relevant information to their target audience. The service enables large media companies to distribute content by means of the Minekey Recommendations Widget, directly to customers on potentially unlimited number of blogs, websites and portals. Bloggers and other website hosts use the Widget to present the most relevant content for each online user, based on what they are currently reading or have read before.”

Roll Sense
Recommend articles to your readers, related to what they read in your blog, from the sources YOU trust

Fresh Notes
FreshNotes’ easy to implement patent-pending associative search system identifies entities on your webpages and extracts the relationships of these entities based on your site content. We then use this mapping of relationships to identify the content on your site that most relates to each webpage. The benefits are content recommendations that are much richer and more relevant than simple keyword matches. More important to our customers, it is easy to integrate with any site.

Agent Arts
AgentArts provides recommendation, personalization and community products and services to help consumers navigate large volumes of entertainment choice.

JiJiJa
This Hong Kong website provides networked based recommendations.

MyBuys
“MyBuys builds deep behavioral profiles on each and every consumer. These profiles allow MyBuys to deliver the highest converting recommendations – resulting in revenues 300% greater per interaction than traditional approaches. By reaching consumers on a retailer’s web site, through email, and in RSS feeds, clients realize more repeat visits, increased conversion rates and larger order sizes.”

InSuggest
“inSuggest is a recommendation engine which helps the user to explore content, based on opinions from like-minded people. As an initial step,
the technology is applied on Flickr images. The user select a couple of images and instantly get more of something he/she probably like.”

Posted in Industry Index, Social Networking, Web Industry, Web Tools | Comments

Search meets Web Analytics at Searchnomics Conference

Categories: Conference, Search Strategy, Web AnalyticsPosted on June 27th, 2007

I was invited as media for the Searchnomics conference, a very important program for the modern web strategy. I’m going to be covering many of the Social Search topics.

Eric Peterson: Web Analytics for Search Marketers “The Hybrid Session”
I’m sitting in the back of the room where the bloggers sit, not because we’re second class citizens, but because that’s where the power is. Avinash Kaushik is here too. Beth, who’s not here, has some info if you want to know more about Eric. I video interviewed Eric, you can check it out on my previous post.

Eric gives a great high level primer for anyone that wants to understand analytics, and runs search marketing:

-Many corporations have employee managed stratgies
-Many web analysts found that the process of web analytics was difficult
-Many web analytics practitioners are considering leaving their job
-Web Analytics is not about technology, you have to manage the software, it’s not people, its’ about repeatable process
-Bounce Rate: How many users leave your sight immediately, couple this info with search terms. “Anyone who looks at your homepage and bounces out is poorly qualified”
-Conversion Rate: Ratio of completed activities to visits or visitors
-Example: Conversion by Search Engine (compare which engine is providing the best results)
-Percent New Visits: Percentage of new visitors, please note that 30% of all cookies are deleted which makes repeat users look new.
-Depth of visit: who’s going deeply into the site, who’s spending a lot of time staying engaged in your site. Also compare by depth of visit by Engine
-Time spent on site: Another proxy for user engagement, but there’s a lot of things that don’t add up correctly. It’s not as a useful as a metric.
-Campaign Cost and Value Metrics: Commonly used cost metrics are: Cost per click (CPC), Cost per acquisition (CPA), Return on Ad Spent (RAOS), Average order Value (AOV)
-Advanced Topics: Visitor Engagement: An index created from: depth of visit and session duration, recently of visit and conversion rate, lifetime visitation history, brand awareness, blog subscriptions and readership, social media interaction.
-Eric publicly teased me for making him disagree with Charlene Li on my video interview, ha.
-Searcher Behavior: Site Navigation
-Closing points: Web analytics and search analytics are not about people, they are about an ongoing process.

Posted in Conference, Search Strategy, Web Analytics | Comments

Compete.com expands to Keyword Analysis

Categories: Search StrategyPosted on June 27th, 2007

I’m sitting next to David Cancel here at Searchnomics in Santa Clara, he told me that his company Compete.com has just released a new tool called Compete Search Analytics. As you know, I’ve been interviewing some of the top Search Analytics guys, so this would be yet one more tool to add to the tool chest of site measurement.

Although he says it has standard search analytics features, it will have a few other new features that will help users find which search keywords lead to your site, also see where the keywords lead to, and help search marketers buy the right keywords and make your search strategy effective.

They’re going to throw me a beta of the tool, which I’ll strap on to this blog to see which keywords are leading here, I know that Google Webmaster tools can do this so it will be an interesting comparison.

If you want to know more about compete, we have the interviews.

Posted in Search Strategy | Comments

Let go, let your Community create with you, and grow together

Categories: Community MarketingPosted on June 27th, 2007

I often use the term Community Marketing. To me this is how corporations should consider changing from ‘pitching their product’ to being a customer advocate and community resource. I did this at my previous role at Hitachi.

While in Singapore, my new friend Bill Claxton took me and some bloggers from The Digital Movement to this wonderful ice cream shop. What’s really intersting is that they encouraged the guests to take pictures (often with their own cameras) print it out and post on the wall.

While this shop could have painted the walls in a monotone color, they choose to let the customers (community) brand it. This is an example of the community being empowered to create their own story, be part of the business, and just be human and interesting.

While at first, it may look like a jumbled mess, upon peering closer, there’s a unique personal story told by every single image.

How many corporations encourage their customers to come take part and be part of the company communications and ‘paint the walls’? The future of websites should be a combination of community and corporate employees, let’s all join in and create something together.

Thanks to a Brian in the comments, the place is called:

Island Creamery found in the Serene Centre shopping complex

Address: 10 Jln Serene #01-03 Serene Centre Singapore 258748

Tel : +65 6468 8859

Print your Photo, and leave a copy for our wall

Customers encouraged to participate

Detail of the wall

Customers are part of the business

and it becomes an attraction, bringing customers back and together!

Posted in Community Marketing | Comments

Are you going to Community Next Viral Conference? Get a free ticket!

Categories: Community Marketing, ConferencePosted on June 27th, 2007

Community Next is a conference focused on the growth and development of online websites,its on Saturday July 14th at Palo Alto. You may remember the last one, Guy Kawasaki was a speaker and a host of others.

Noah Kagan and Adam have generously invited me and a guest to attend. That guest could be you, at no charge.

To get the free ticket, simply answer the following in my comments, the best answer wins:

Here’s what you’ve got to do to get a free ticket, leave a comment below, but give me one insightful tip to answer the following:

What’s the best way to get a community kick started? As you know, building a website is easy, but getting users to visit and stay (and then tell their friends) is often a challenge. Give me your best tip!

Posted in Community Marketing, Conference | Comments

Fire in Palo Alto Hills near PodTech

Categories: Citizen JournalismPosted on June 27th, 2007

Video Above: Rocky captured and posted some video of the Palo Alto Fire near our office (well right across the street) there’s no audio, but you’re welcome to make your own helicopter sound effects, I did.

On Monday, during a meeting with Frank Gruber and Jen from AOL we started to smell smoke. At first I thought it was incense but then one of our colleagues came into the room declaring “The Stanford dish hill is on fire!”. It’s warm right now in California, in fact a few hundred homes had burnt down in Tahoe this last week.

The Palo Alto hills were on fire, which are just across the street from PodTech offices. I saw Rocky and Scoble scramble out the door with a video camera (Although the natural reaction is to go the opposite way, video guys, go figure) and Rocky has put together some of the footage in the above player. If you want to know more details about the fire, Topix has some details has the details.

I took some pictures too, but Rocky’s got the real action. Citizen Media. What’s intersting is that Rocky’s video has more depth and detail than Fox News.

Here’s a picture I took of the fire. Here’s a google map of the hill, obviously it’s unburnt.

Posted in Citizen Journalism | Comments

Web Strategy Reading, A Roundup, June 26, 2007

Categories: Reading SamplerPosted on June 26th, 2007

Here’s some interesting reads over the last week, you can also subscribe to my shared feed.

Recruiting on Facebook? be transparent
Here’s some great best practices

Facebook downsides, who gets the revenues?
Great counterpoint to all the Facebook buzz

You think you know HTML?
This guy can “draw” using HTML.

What businesses need to do in the changed environment in Singapore
Great article by my new friend Melvin in Singapore.

Identity Woman has a great quote
“Imagine if all LinkedIn did was let me see my entire network’s latest blog posts.” Yup, that would be useful.

Evolution of Search Browsers
It’s pretty clear that there are more flavors emerging, (@ 17 according to this chart) but how many do we really need or want?

How to use social media to engage employees (PDF)
My friends at Melcrum research recently completed a study on ‘How to use social media to engage employees’. You can check out the first chapter for free

Posted in Reading Sampler | Comments

Live Capturing The Startup Epicenter

Categories: EventsPosted on June 26th, 2007

Scott Lane of Bay Ventures, is running this Startup Epicenter event here at Fenwick and West in downtown Mountain View, I’m one of the panelists that gets to ask some of the startups questions. They’re pitching to a group of entrepreneurs and VCs, it’s a community building event as well as a great way to learn about new startups.

They’re giving some great pointers on pitching from Robert Goldberg and Troy Boyd have you read my points on how to pitch? I’ve heard a lot of startups pitch, (not as many as a VC) but notice a lot of founders don’t do a good job communicating the value proposition.

They gave a few key goals, such as 1) focus on the first 30 seconds 2) Identify your specific goals right up front and do so succinctly. A few other goals: Always start with the end in mind, know your audience (whats in it for them) assume short buildings, set yourself up for victory in advance, bring backups of everything, preparation preparation. preparation.

I’m not going to be reviewing the companies, but really just pointing to them. Here’s some of the companies that are presenting:

DataMash:
“Datamash sends instant data messages between different documents and applications automatically keeping shared data fresh and accurate”. Appears to be a SaS model, marketing will be key for user adoption. Premium fees charged for revenue.

CollegeWikis
“We’ve developed a school-wide message board — like a “Great Wall” – that allows you to stay in-the-loop with new topics and events your friends are posting. We call it “iKnow, iShare,” and it’s synched with the topics your friends have posted to your school’s Wiki.” They have a facebook app as well. They will generate revenue from job advertisements of normal advertising.

Criteo
“Presenting the right content to the right user”. Also a SaS type of tool that will have revenue sharing from recommendations. Any website can deploy a recommendation engine for their site. They analyze user behavior of a website and then find patterns, and group with users with similar patterns. There’s a use case scenario available here.

Remapper
Real Estate application “REMap™ – the fast, easy way to make profitable real estate decisions. REMap’s mapping and reporting tools let you zoom in on a geographic area and easily forecast its future property values!”

There’s some other companies that presented, but I had to head back to the office, check out the list here.

I’m having hardware issues with my camera, I’m not getting a good stream, Ill be providing a few notes about the event and the different startups:

Fenwick and West

Posted in Events | Comments

Live Streaming changes Communication: Financial Times and Ustream CEO

Categories: Live VideoPosted on June 26th, 2007

I had a nice conversation with Chris Nutall, who’s reporting from the Financial Times on Live Video Streaming: “Website founder gets everything but the girl“, he asked me for an Analyst Perspective of the budding industry, an area that I’m watching very carefully. Actually, I wouldn’t mind doing some detailed analysis on this industry, I just don’t have the time at the moment.

He quoted me in the article, I see three things happening:

1) The web is moving from asynchronous to real-time
2) Content is being created everywhere and consumed everywhere –it’s ubiqutous
3) Content is being mashed into new formats, it’s constantly changing as it’s amorphous

Why are finance communities paying attention to what’s happening on the web? Everyone wants to invest in the next Google or the company that will be acquired by them. It’s really a crab shoot right now, there are so many players in each space, how to choose? I recommend staying close to the bloggers, who are early indicators of trends, and influence usage.

By the way, I started a media and press page that keeps track of my ‘clippings’, for some reason my family are more impressed by that than a link from an A-lister blogger. meh, go figure.

Update: Chris Yeh the Ustream CEO is on Marketing Voices, he talks about how live streaming provides deeper brand engagement, see below. You’ll learn about the Chris Pirillo’s “open source show”, Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign, and how zooomr turned a failure into a success.

Posted in Live Video | Comments

Live Video enhances Video Blogging

Categories: Live Video, VideoPosted on June 26th, 2007

Jason Calacanis made some history last night by creating a video blog by using multiple video streamers in his programmed show. He had one the A list of presenters which included:

“Special guests will include Jay Adelson (Digg CEO),Kent Nichols (AskANinja), Ted Murphy (Payperpost), Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmor, and Loren Feldman (1938 Media) plus a special cameo by Toro the bulldog among others…”

Live video streaming is taking off, in fact I started the master list of companies that are providing these live video streaming free services.

While some video blogging purists believe in the highly edited and produced shows there’s some value in seeing things happen raw and real. So which one is going to matter the most? The answer? both.

I personally think that Toro the dog should get his own show.

Posted in Live Video, Video | Comments

Updated the list of North American Asian Tech Speakers

Categories: ConferencePosted on June 26th, 2007

I was very happy to see that Noah Kagan’s upcoming Community Next “Viral” conference has a very diverse set of speakers. It seems appropriate given the conference topic is “Community”.

I’m not a fan of affirmative action but am glad to see that the speaker set represents the makeup of practitioners in silicon valley. In business school we learned that half of all silicon valley companies are founded by Asians? (oh and Asian includes “Indian” too for those of you who don’t know)

Before I started PodTech, I invited Maryam to a conference held by a large IT company, all the speakers were one demographic, she gave me some real crap about it and asked me “Why don’t you say anything”, she was pretty upset and I called her to apologize on behalf of an event that I had nothing to do with, well here’s me saying something Maryam.

A while back, a conference coordinator urged me to create a list, so here’s the list of North American Technology speakers that are Asian. Every one of them has spoken before, so the quality of the list should be high. Does this mean they are better speakers? No. It’s just a resource to conference attendees that want to round out their agendas. Just trying to help here, don’t take this out of context ok?

Posted in Conference | Comments

Getting started with Google Analytics

Categories: Web Analytics, Web UsagePosted on June 25th, 2007

Beth created this great video of Google Analytics for your non-profit (and any other orginzation) she shows how to determine some of the most basic uses of the tool, and makes it easy and useful for anyone who wants to understand how users are using your site. You’ll notice that part of her video uses my video interview with Avinash Kaushik.

Thanks Beth great video.

By the way, if you’re a non-profit and need a web analyst as a volunteer for 3 months of analysis, let me know, I know someone who’s new to the web analytics industry and wants to get started.

Why is this person wanting to get into this industry? Well, the demand for web analysts is growing, and in fact, at the emetrics conference it was talked about that there is a higher demand for the current analyst community. In fact one of my friends who’s a web analyst at a company in silicon valley gets job offers for $120,000 salary. Hot damn!

Here’s a great resource from Mashable: Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic.

Update: Ian from Portent Interactive has a great demo on how to get started (five in fact)

Posted in Web Analytics, Web Usage | Comments

Vote: Do I look like Kenny Sia?

Categories: RuminationsPosted on June 25th, 2007

A couple of times while in Singapore people told me that I resemble Kenny Sia a popular blogger in Asia. (he’s approaching the 200 mark in Technorati)

You can see his picture as he prepares for his marathon. Or this picture of himself on Flickr. Asian-ness aside (I can already hear the “you all look alike”) comment, but Seriously now, do you see a resemblance?

For comparison sake, my photos are here.

So vote below by leaving a comment:

1) No. You don’t look alike at all
2) Yes. That’s your clone dude
3) Sorta. You look somewhat alike, I see similar facial features
4) I’m clueless. All Asians look similar to me, what’s the difference?

James Seng and Steve Ming Yeow thing I look like him, thanks for bringing this to my attention. (update: and Sparklette too)

Posted in Ruminations | Comments

A tour of MyAOL, a Personalized Aggregator

Categories: Feedback, Personalization, Social MediaPosted on June 25th, 2007

Frank Gruber is here,and hes showing the new MyAOL, here’s some of the features.

I really like Frank, I’ve been criticizing his company, and he decided to come over to PodTech to give me a personal tour. I grabbed Tom Foremski, Scoble, Sam Levin and Montana to see too.

Key Web Strategy
The key concept is that the old AOL homepage was AOL specific content, this new version is agnostic to all types of content. This is AOL’s opportunity to be innovative.

Who’s it for? When I think of AOL, I think of a less sophisticated web user. They’re still building this for non-aol users.

Homepage:

-When you create your experience, you select feeds and applications, much like Facebook.
-If you’re new to the whole homepage concept you can get started real quick.
-The feedreader is impressive, it shows highlights of the post when you roll over it
-Video Search, using Trueveo (spelling) search
-It pulls in Google Gadgets (it doesn’t pull in Google ID data however)

Personalization:

-Rather than choose specific items of preferences, it offers images to use which helps to categorize the content you like. A sort of user anticipated content.
-There’s a voting (like Digg) for which content types you like which builds a personal preference profile.
-Mgnet is a tool to help discover new content, (yup, pronounced magnet). It pulls in a lot of different feeds.

FeedReader:

They have a full feedreader with bookmarks. It appears somewhat similiar to Google reader, and if you save your bookmarks you could then drop them into a folder and share with others (like Google Reader’s Shared feed)

AIM:

Did you know you can “Aim Share” and broadcast a message to everyone in your network, much like Twitter.

Wish List
I wish that MyAOL had network effect, I would want to find out what people in my network were reading and how they were using it. There needs to be network features.

I can also see there an opportunity for applications to be built into it beyond Google Widgets. They say that’s something in the future to build out, yet another developer network.

We gave a bunch of recommendations such as APIs, community effects, Shared feeds, and other ways to aggregate the knowledge of your network.

We all know that AOL groups are pretty active, I’d like to see some integration to how it could be used for these tools.

Posted in Feedback, Personalization, Social Media | Comments

The A-List Blogger Dilemma

Categories: Citizen Journalism, Social MediaPosted on June 25th, 2007

Robert Scoble, who’s on a rant about Techmeme not caring about bloggers just swung over to my cubicle and told me about an upcoming rant/rave about Ustream and Kyte TV. It’s a good thing he talked to me because his rant would have been incorrect, and I gave him some key details that prevented him from looking foolish. As you know he relies on his community to help shape his conversations in the comments, often they correct him. In this case, they probably would have corrected him in comment #2.

Robert Scoble said; “The problem with being bombastic [as a blogger] is that you’re not always right.”

Rocky and I laughed our asses off, Robert too.

Just some food for thought today. I make mistakes in my post, and try to correct them as fast as possible. For those of you who’ve corrected me thanks, but no need to email me about typos or grammar, just facts please.

By the way, I’m not an A-lister, and I don’t care to be (not that there’s a definitive point where everyone agrees you are). I’m not that controversial (except when I say corporate websites are irrelevant), and I don’t pick blog fights or try to smash other people. I don’t embargo news, and I link to anyone I think is valuable, including my competitoirs. While not all A-listers do this, these are strategies they do to get to that upper echelon.

Lastly, when I meet journalists sometimes they shudder when I tell them I’m a blogger; “so you’re one of those guys that doesn’t fact check when reporting”. I often respond to them: “I’m not reporting, I’m having conversations with my friends”.

Frank Gruber is coming over here in a few minutes, he’s going to show us MyAOL, I’ve been ranting that AOL is not innovative, they’re like a stalled bus, Frank may prove me wrong.

Posted in Citizen Journalism, Social Media | Comments

How do you describe Techmeme?

Categories: Feedback, Voice of the Customer, Web ToolsPosted on June 25th, 2007

I often ask my audience at my presentations if they’re familiar with Techmeme. I always bring this tool up when the conversation shifts to “us vs them” regarding mainstream media and bloggers. The tech industry is one of the first for bloggers and mainstream to get along and merge into something new. (In fact you should be checking out Techcrunch’s business model, they’re making 200k in advertising every month)

Techmeme is great, it’s a tab that I have open all the time (since late 2005) to gauge what’s happening in the technology industry. It’s a combination of mainstream articles and bloggers that comment and feed off each other. I know mainstream journalists watch it to see what the buzz is, and bloggers comments off the articles and vice versa. It’s interesting to see the different points of every discussion, and some bloggers are SO predictable (take Nicholas Carr for example). I see some bloggers that copy every article and title and make it a blog post so they become part of the breaking news and also benefit from lots of content in search engines.

Gabe Rivera and I have had discussions on what Techmeme is, he calls it a “News” tool, but I say it’s a “Conversation tracker”. To me I can clearly see different points of views going back and forth on the site. I can see people responding to each other in threaded discussions and cross-linking. Also, the Techmeme isn’t always news in the sense that that we’re used to, sometimes the content can have personal information, or product reviews –it’s not always news. At one point, Gabe and I agreed that it’s a tool that tracks different points of view.

So how do you describe Techmeme to others?
I say it’s a Conversation Tracker.

Posted in Feedback, Voice of the Customer, Web Tools | Comments

What are the most popular websites in Asia? Watch this video to find out

Categories: Asia, Global Web, Web IndustryPosted on June 24th, 2007

If you don’t know the top entertainment and gaming websites in Asia (the largest amount of internet users comes from Asia, and that trend will only continue) then listen to this interview I did of Singapore’s top technology and social media bloggers and influencers.

Who was there?

Mr Brown: mrbrownshow.com or mrbrown.com
James Seng – james.seng.sg
Bill Claxton – itr8.com
Ming Yeow – mingyeow.com
Peter Du – dusenyao.wordpress.com
Wayne Soh
Yong Zhen Hoe

Here’s the websites they mentioned:

Websites, Entertainment and Blogs
Mr Brown is the top blog in Singapore
Sina.com, Chinese
soho.com china (thanks Thomas Han)
mop.com, china
bugs.korea
cyworld, social network (people wanted cyworld dollars)

Gaming
Defense of the Ancients (DOTA)
Maple story
Runescape
Swordsman (china) unsure of URL
Audition (korea, vietman) like DDR

Miniclips says Lucas, you gotta listen to his description, he’s awesome!

See my previous coverage of the online gaming industry.

Have you heard of Entrepreneur27?
I know you’ve heard of The Digital Movement, (my thoughts here). One group that I didn’t get to meet was the Entrepreneur27 group, they’re pretty similar to TDM except that the founders have worked in Silicon Valley for at least a year (just like Mingyeow) and they are trying to bring the best of Silicon Valley back to Singapore. Their main focus? web and enterpreneurship. They’ve even had an unconference. They’ve gotten some support for the National University of Singapore to sponsor an incubator of sorts called Garge3. Royston Tay has given me a warm introduction.

Posted in Asia, Global Web, Web Industry | Comments

Going to have a busy week

Categories: Events, RuminationsPosted on June 24th, 2007

Tomorrow I’ll be combating jet lag and going back into the office. Lots of stuff to do back on the homefront:

I’ve got several blog posts that I’m working on of content from Singapore (and a video or two) so that’ll keep me busy. I’m finishing up my article for Website Magazine on Social Media Measurement.

I’ve uploaded about 600 pictures tagged Singapore, that’s just a percentage, there’s a ton others that never get uploaded. You’ll notice I tend to tag photos, but don’t title them, there’s just too many.

Monday, buddy Frank Guber from AOL will be visiting me at PodTech, I may turn on Ustream as he shows me the new MyAOL that he showed off at Supernova. There’s quite a few business things I need to take care of and meet Montana, our new hire.

Tuesday I’ll be at Startup Epicenter at Fenwick and West, I think I may be one of the judges for some of the startups, I’ll be live blogging my thoughts about the startups, you can purchase a ticket here.

Wednesday is the Searchnomics conference, I’ll be attending as Media and will have a write-up of the current state of SEM and SEO for the Web Strategist.

Thursday I’ll be getting a private tour of KDPaine’s dashboard tool, it’s a web and social media measurement tool, so that should be interesting.

Friday I’ll be going to the SimplyHired Lunch2.0 event as well.

I’m trying real hard not to sleep until 10pm tonight so I can beat jet lag. One thing that’s a real chore is adding people to Facebook, there’s way to many steps to add people that want to be in your network. You can add me as a friend if you want, here’s my Facebook Profile and Twitter Profile.

Posted in Events, Ruminations | Comments

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