Archive for the ‘People’ Category
Low-down on Hulu from Daisy Whitney April 4th, 2008
I came across this video which turned out to be a quick video about the popular Internet video site that has a number of mainstream shows in the US called Hulu:
The woman in the video is Daisy Whitney who I found out about in This Week in Media. Actually I listened to an episode and heard her voice and she kept coming back onto the show. She sounded really interesting so I looked her up and found her site.
Technorati Tags:
daisy whitney, hulu, this week in media
Posted in Entertainment, People, Podcasts | Comments (0)
iPod Touch in my future? March 23rd, 2008
I have lustful thoughts about acquiring an iPod Touch when it comes time to upgrade my aging 5th generation iPod. When I first thought about an iPod Touch a while ago my concern was the limited drive space (the current high end model is a 32GB model) where what I really wanted was/is more space. I conducted a little experiment this morning and looked at how much space I would need if I only took the media I actually consume with me on my iPod and a 32GB iPod Touch could probably be enough for me although that wouldn’t include email and other application data.
I know what some of you have iPod Touch’s. What are your thoughts about an iPod touch as an iPod/Internet tablet option? Nokia has its N810 and I have heard mixed reviews about it. My issue is that I would want my music player/podcast device to be my iPod because all my content is in iTunes and I am a rookie Mac fanatic so I don’t see myself shifting to a Nokia device as my media device.
I came across this video by Tom Raftery where he talks about why the iPod Touch is a superior Internet tablet. The size does appeal to me, as does the functionality and interface. I would like to see an iPod Touch with a bigger drive though (64GB or so at a minimum) so I am inclined to wait and see if Steve Jobs unveils a bigger model in the coming months …
Any words from the wise? Is this a silly idea? Should I just go with the iPod Classic with its 160GB drive and leave this touchscreen foolishness behind me?
Posted in Devices, Entertainment, People | Comments (2)
FlockedUp: a social network for thought leaders March 18th, 2008
Here is a pitch for a new social network called “FlockedUp” made by the wise and hysterical Merlin Mann at SXSW recently. It adds an entertaining filter to how we see social networks and the promises they make.
Technorati Tags:
social media, social network, social networking, merlin mann, sxsw
Posted in Fun, People, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
Springleap is sprung … March 13th, 2008
Eric Edelstein asked me to take a look at an exciting new project he is involved in called springleap. I’m a little new to springleap so I got in touch with Eric and his partner, Eran Eyal, to chat about springleap on Skype. Here is the transcript of our chat:
And now for the interview. You will note that it has been edited down a little but just to remove some fluff (largely my own). The interview is pretty long so I have shifted some of the conversation to an extended section (apologies).
2008-03-13
Paul Jacobson:
17:05:41
Ok, baby with mom, let’s chat about Springleap
17:05:53
fantastic
17:06:01
what would you like to know Paul?
Paul Jacobson:
17:06:35
Everything
Paul Jacobson:
17:06:44
what is Springleap, where did the idea come from?
17:07:22
Well - Springleap is an empowerment initiative for South Africa
Paul Jacobson:
17:07:57
ok, sounds broad …
17:08:26
ranging from the cotton manufacturing trade, through the garment manufacturing industry to the retailers and all the amazing talented artists who deserve a platform for exposure
Paul Jacobson:
17:09:08
so basically bringing clothing and local artists together?
17:09:31
Eric and I opened the doors to eSquared Fashion 2 years ago and our business model was to scour the world for amazing artists producing original desings on 100% cotton
17:09:41
specifically with an emphasis on Asia.
Paul Jacobson:
17:10:09
Yeah, Eric mentioned it to me when I met him last year
17:10:19
TO answer your question Paul - yes : in a way that has never been done before.
17:10:26
Basically..
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Design, People, Sharing | Comments (2)
Huddlemind.net: a niche social network March 11th, 2008
You are going to hear a lot about Huddlemind’s new site in the coming days (if not already) and for good reason.
Huddlemind.net runs on Ning, the fabulous and easy to build and customise social networking template/platform. What is great about Ning is that it is basically a social network in a box and what Dave Duarte, Huddlemind’s founder (or at least one of), has done is create a niche social network using a freely available tool. In Dave’s words:
It’s a network for people interested in collaborative learning, new teaching methodologies, and organizational development through Education.
Through it we hope to directly connect members with other leading thinkers and doers in business education.
It is also a space to explore questions and issues of importance around business education, teaching methodologies, and learning technologies.
I think it is fantastic. I have been thinking about Huddlemind as an ideal platform for anyone wanting to establish a community orientated site for a little while now and while I had a couple questions about things like domains and ease of use, Huddlemind pretty much clears those issues up for me.
I played around with Ning a little while ago and discovered how easy it is to add Google Gadgets and all sorts of other customisable bits and pieces. I didn’t spend too much time because I didn’t see the value of having my own social network (do I even have that many fans??) but there is tremendous potential here. Maybe I should play some more …
Oh, did I mention Ning is part of Google’s OpenSocial?!
Either way, Dave has done a great job.
Technorati Tags:
dave duarte, opensocial, social network, ning, huddlemind, niche
Posted in Infrastructure, People, Sharing, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
Carte Blanche and the importance of complete conversations March 3rd, 2008
There is buzz today about last night’s segment on something along the lines of social media which aired on Carte Blanche. If you haven’t seen the segment, here it is:
Most of the complaints about the segment which have been doing the rounds on Twitter and a couple blogs. The segment reflects a small part of the interviews conducted with, among others, Rafiq and Dave, and a particular viewpoint I would expect to be shared by people who don’t understand social media and are quite frankly baffled by this whole Internet thing. While the degree to which the segment accurately portrayed social media’s role and the people who use social media daily, the importance of having an uninterrupted conversation about a topic emerged out of it. The segment was about catchphrases and putting a cynical slant on social media for the folks back home who don’t use it and who are probably likely to dismiss it as some silly geeky thing the kids do.
I watched another interview about social media that was conducted by Jennifer Jones at PodTech’s Marketing Voices. She interviewed Shel Israel, one of the authors of “Naked Conversations” and what struck me was what a difference a normal conversation about a topic makes as opposed to a hacked up interview for the sake of extracting a couple catchphrases and sentences. Here is the interview with Shel Israel both as a comparison with the Carte Blanche style and because the interview was really interesting:
Like Nic, I am not overly impressed with Carte Blanche but at least they dealt with the subject matter, in some form or another. It is important to bear in mind that while most of us have been playing in this pool for a couple years now, we are not representative of the mainstream. There are a lot of people in South Africa who don’t use the Web and wouldn’t know a blog if it jumped out from behind a tree and said “boo”. This shift online will take time and, until then, we can only hope that the people doing the reporting are a little more balanced in their approach to the topic, even if they don’t understand it or appreciate it.
Technorati Tags:
social media, carte blanche, rafiq phillips, dave duarte, web 2.0, interview
Posted in People, Web 2.0 | Comments (5)
Is Pownce emerging as the new Twitter? March 3rd, 2008
There must be something in the air (pun not intended!) or it is that time of year again. SXSW is coming up in two weeks and I wonder if any particular service will emerge from SXSW as the Twitter of 2008? You may remember that Twitter rocketed in popularity during and after the 2007 SXSW and has been cruising since then. Unfortunately Twitter has also been plagued by a series of outages to the point where it is no longer news that Twitter is down anymore. That isn’t great news for Twitter and it must be really frustrating for the Twitter people that the service isn’t coping with the phenomenal demand.
It was probably only a matter of time before talk returns to Twitter alternatives like Pownce (although people who I have read who are talking about Pownce and Twitter are talking about each as having their place in the ecoystem rather than Pownce being a Twitter killer). There is a little buzz at the moment about Dave Winer’s post raving about the updated Pownce API.
Sorry Ev and Biz and Jack, but they got your number over there at Pownce.
I’ve been asking Twitter to support payloads for months now, and now I have what I was asking for, but it came from Pownce, and it’s beautifully implemented, far more than what I was asking Twitter for.
…
Twitter was my first love, but now I’m seriously considering a fling with Pownce.
Leo Laporte chatted to Winer on This Week in Tech 134 (looking forward to that one) and I am sure there will be even more about this in the coming days. What I am wondering is whether Pownce is going to suddenly pick up loads of users in the coming weeks due, in part, to frustration with Twitter going down so often. While Pownce and Twitter are intended for different things, you can use Pownce for status updates and IRC-style chats that people use Twitter for. There is even a mobile client for Pownce in addition to the AIR app. I am not saying Pownce is going to overtake Twitter and become the new black. I just think it will be really interesting to see what happens next.
Technorati Tags:
pownce, twitter, dave winer, twit, leo laporte
Posted in Applications, Blogging, People, Sharing, Tools | Comments (0)
Lifestreaming is all the rage back home March 2nd, 2008
I’ve been on a lifestreaming kick for a couple months now, in fact I’ve been talking about lifestreaming in one form or another since I started using Jaiku about a year ago. The basic idea is that a lifestream is a stream of content from a variety of services in one location so your friends/followers can visit one site and see which photos you uploaded, what your Twitter updates are, your latest blog posts and more. Here are a couple examples of lifestreams, they really explain the whole idea pretty well:
First, my Plaxo Pulse lifestream
Next, my FriendFeed lifestream
There are a couple issues and questions that emerge from what seems to me to be a surge of interest in lifestreaming. The one question I find myself asking is about the value of “traditional” blogging when much of the content people might blog about are fed directly into the lifestream. What I mean here is that before my various lifestreams (I think I have 4 or 5 running concurrently in various locations) I would blog about just about anything that happened that I wanted to talk about. If I took a cute photo of my puppies, I would blog about it on my personal blog. If I found a great link or blog post and wanted to mention it, I’d blog that too.
Of course there are services like Flickr, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon to do those sorts of things too but that also meant that my followers would have to subscribe to or visit each of those services to keep up to date. That isn’t really a big deal in this age of RSS feeds but if someone has more than a couple people to keep tabs on, the process of tracking all those feeds/sites becomes a pretty time consuming one.
Social networks like Facebook can do a pretty decent job of giving people a single point of contact. If most or all of your friends are on Facebook then you only really need to visit one site to keep up to date on what everyone is doing. It is a great idea the immense popularity of these sites is a testament to that. The big thing, for me, is being able to put my stuff out there and have multiple points of contact to enable me to reach out to the most people. Not all of my friends use Facebook. Some use Jaiku, Pulse and, increasingly, FriendFeed … just to name a couple examples. Facebook is great but it doesn’t really allow me to distribute my content freely so I plug my various content streams (such as Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, interesting feed items, bookmarks, Last.fm profile and many others) into my various lifestreams and create multiple (and hopefully consistent) update streams for my friends using those services. If course friends are free to subscribe to the original content streams too. These items are convenient ways to keep up to date of pretty much everything I do online.
So, back to blogging. With all this source content zooming through lifestreams of one sort or another, does blogging become less relevant? Would you blog less if you used a lifestream as your primary content distribution channel. Although this post has the makings of “Blogging is dead” post, I think anyone thinking along those lines is likely getting caught up in some hype and/or drinking too much of the Koolaid. As this post clearly shows, there is still very much a need for longer form blog posts or even blogs that are more customisable than the lifestreaming services permit. The value of a lifestreaming service is its utility and the content stream itself. Blogs can take it a step further and some bloggers create fantastic experiences on their blogs that enhance their posts. Lifestreams really won’t kill blogs, they will, however, help spread blog content further if you plug your blog feeds into your lifestreams. Each of the services we use have their place in our information/content creation activities, the challenge is working out those roles and using them effectively/efficiently.
As I was writing this post John McCrea (VP of Marketing at Plaxo) raised a really interesting issue in a comment on one of my status updates on Pulse:
I think there’s an interesting tension between lifestreaming in public and richly sharing with one’s family and friends. An interesting strategic question for Plaxo as to which is more important for us in the near term.
To me this question begs other, interesting questions about the value of more personal lifestreams to a service provider. There is a lot of focus on business and on people who are tech savvy and who don’t think twice about sharing everything with everyone but what about the majority of people who just want to share their stuff with their small group of friends or their family members and not the rest of the world? I don’t think there is enough attention on this invisible majority. Six Apart focussed specifically on these people when it released Vox which Mena Trott, one of Six Apart’s founders, said was a blogging service her mother could use. A lot of these people who are using the Web use services like Facebook and it works out really well for them. My mother in law uses Facebook to see what we are all up to. Introducing lifestreams to these people is the next step although it may still take a year or two before ordinary (as opposed to us geeks) people start exploring lifestreams more consciously (people who use Facebook are lifestreaming to a degree anyway, they just don’t think about it that way).
Depending on how you present lifestreaming to this massive potential group of users and how you build a sustainable revenue model around that group, this could be a tremendously lucrative model. It sounds a bit cold to talk about it that way but money is what keeps businesses, well, in business. Once the money is taken care of there is more time to focus on making the service appealing to these non-technical users.
These are just a couple thoughts I have had and I am sure there will be more ahead. What are your thoughts? Do you use any lifestreaming services? Are you going to try them out?
Technorati Tags:
blog, facebook, lifestream, plaxo, pulse, vox, mena trott, john mccrea, friendfeed, trends
Posted in Blogging, Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, People, Sharing | Comments (3)
You know the song from the MacBook Air ad? February 9th, 2008
It turns out this is the song from the MacBook Air ad:
The artist is an Israeli singer Yael Naïm whose self-titled album is up there on the iTunes Store. I think I’ll take a look at more of her music …
Technorati Tags:
yael naim, macbook air ad, macbook air, naim, yael
Posted in Entertainment, Media, People | Comments (0)
Nudjit … new gadget blog on the block February 4th, 2008
I just received an email from Nic Haralambous which he sent out to 300 of his closest friends and contacts about a new SA gadget blog he, Justin Hartman and Gregor Rohrig have launched:
The site aims to inform, entertain, and alert South Africans about the gadgets that are available to us. Our gadget reviews don’t just highlight the technical aspects but will also judge how well they work, where one can get them, and if our local technology infrastructure can actually support these electronic toys.
The site offers detailed written reviews, quirky video posts, aggregated gadget news from all across Africa, user ratings, and hot links from popular gadget sites from around the world.
My first thought was “bastards!”. I have been toying with the idea of a gadget blog myself given that there hasn’t been a local gadget/computer online mag worth talking about (no, those are not worth talking about). I clicked on the link and was confronted with this fine piece of design:
Then came my next thought … “bastards!!”
This site has to be one of the best looking gadget sites we have here in SA, if not on the Web generally. Instead of looking yet a blog with a variation of a variation of a common WordPress theme, these guys have put together an online gadget magazine that I can see myself visiting often, if I wasn’t such an RSS junkie lately (which brings me to my one big gripe about the site).
The site pretty much covers the essentials and I can see that the guys have added content going back to last year to flesh it out a bit (always a good thing). I subscribed immediately even while uttering obscenities under my breath because they did this so well while I just thought about doing …
My one big gripe is that the feed is truncated and I am forced to visit the site to read the posts. I understand the desire to drive traffic to the site itself for advertising purposes. This is common when sites rely on advertising but it is not very user friendly. I use NetNewsWire to handle the bulk of my Web consumption. I subscribe to somewhere between 250 and 300 feeds at the moment so I would prefer not to have to actually visit a site unless I really want to view something in my browser instead of in NetNewsWire. This is just a hassle for me and anyone else who works in a similar way. I would much rather see full feeds published and I could even live with ads in my feed.
These days with Feedburner Pro being free, publishers can get quite a bit of information about their subscribers and how they consume the content so I think the argument that users be directed to the site itself isn’t as valid anymore (but then, what do I know?). I actually tend to skip over sites that don’t publish full feeds and only visit the site if something really compelling pops up. I currently have 9 tech blogs I subscribe to (376 unread posts as I write this) so my attention is relatively limited and I tend to prefer the more detailed feeds. But that is just me.
Otherwise this blog is fantastic. It is well designed, has a great focus and I wish the guys well with it. I am really excited to see that the blog is published under a Creative Commons license although the NonCommercial ShareAlike license means I can’t grab content under that license for this blog (I make a whopping 50c a day in ad revenue so this blog is cooking …). Great job guys.
Technorati Tags:
nudjit, gadget blog, gadget, south africa, justin hartman, gregor rohrig, nic haralambous
Posted in Content licensing, Devices, People, Useful stuff | Comments (8)