5 things & 5 taps

People are people are people. Just put in place an open-ended platform, the basic means for communication and as few rules as possible, and they quickly turn it into one of the oldest form of human interaction – a game!

You can see this happening all over the place, with Flickr being a prime example. There are so many different "games" taking place on Flickr at any given time, usually involving tagging and groups. These games spread informally, through one person virtually tapping the virtual shoulder of another, usually accompanied with a link that explains what the game is about. The game entry barriers are very low – tag your own stuff or someone else, post a comment with a pre-agreed template, etc.

Now there is a game spreading through the blogosphere, and my shoulder has been tapped by the wonderful Deborah Schultz. And in the spirit of the game, I will now proceed to tell you five things you may not know about me, and then tap the virtual shoulders of five other bloggers:

1. I often forget my own phone number, but I remember the value of PI up to the 8 decimal digit. Go figure.
2. I am not good with backups of my personal stuff. This just cost me $2300 (hard disk recovery fees) last week.
3. I love what I do. But if I couldn't do what I do, I'd want to be an architect.
4. By the time I finish reading the time from an analog watch, it's usually already at least 1 or 2 minutes past the time I started trying to read it.
5. I love good movies - or any movie, no matter how bad it is, that contains anything that can be labeled Sci-Fi or Fantasy.

Tap time:

Tara Hunt, Eszter Hargittai, Derek Anderson, Kaliya Hamlin, Uri Baruchin

Technorati tags: DerekAnderson EszterHargittai KaliyaHamlin TaraHunt UriBaruchin blog-tag

On Widgets and Widths

I really enjoyed reading this fascinating Q&A on the recommended width for blog widgets, which quickly evolved into a broader discussion on widgets:

Blog widget standard width?

I am building a new widget that will be added by users to various blogging systems (blogger, WordPress, TypePad, MySpace, etc), most likely in the sidebar.

I am not sure what's the right way to go with regards to the widget width - should I design it to accomodate different widths, or is there a "standard widget width" I should assume?

Is there a minimal width that I can expect?

Topics: internet, software, development, wordpress, blog, myspace, widgets, widget, typepad

Asked by Jmm on November 27, 2006

View the entire discussion on Yedda

Excellent answers from Derek Anderson, from the Widgets Lab blog:

Blog widget standard width?

Jmm, (this may be long)

You are correct that Bloggers "expect it to work"

Yedda widgets resize to fit in the area they are placed in. This is a cool feature that I don't remember seeing anywhere else. However, I think that some users will want to be able to control this feature. Lets say TechCrunch wants to do an article featuring a Yedda widget. They may not want it to expand to fill the posting area. They want it to look like it would appear in a side bar.

Branding

While deciding what to post i came up with the idea of creating a Grazr widget that pointed to a specific RSS feed. In this case it was The Blogging Times.com

I titled the post "The Blogging Times mashed widget"

My bright idea was to add the code for this widget to the post I was contemplating writing. This way anyone that wanted The Blogging Times content on their blog could easily have it. (I just wanted to mash something other than potatoes)

Grazr.com saw this post and decided to take it one step further by adding the "The Blogging Times" logo to the widget.

This kinda gives the impression that TBT has a widget. (even though they don't)

This is what I meant by branding.

Feedback

I do not recall any widgets that have this feature.

We, as creators, are sometimes blinded by what we create. (does that make sense?)

Feedback isn't just for bug reporting. It's also for ideas. Widget users have great ideas for functions that widget creators didn't even consider. Get enough feedback about a certain feature...You see where this is going.

Enough of the longest answer in the world. If you made it this far...let me ask you a question...How many times did you yawn during this post?

Derek

Topics: internet, software, development, wordpress, blog, myspace, widgets, widget, typepad

Answered by deralaand on November 28, 2006

View the entire discussion on Yedda

Good stuff!

Even more answers on Answers.com

User Generated Flame

Answers.com, the encyclodictionalmancapdia, announced on Monday a new partnership with Yahoo! Answers (also on Mashable).

(Disclosure: Yedda, where I work is a competitor to Yahoo! Answers)

This actually makes perfect sense to me… if done right, it would provide Answers.com with an effective method to keep their users happy even if they don't find what they're looking for right away.

The way YA is integrated into Yahoo! Search is a good example of providing searchers with an end to end scenario, converting a potentially-unhappy search user into a YA user, and eliminating one more reason for the user to leave the Yahoo Walled Garden.

This kind of scenario is not yet surfaced on the Answers.com integration, but the potential is there. In fact, without this scenario the value of the integration is somewhat limited given the questionable value of some of the Yahoo Answers content (e.g. "who here loves dogs like I do" ).

One thing that surprised me though – the Q&A on Answers.com is surfaced with absolutely no attribution to the people who created this content – the users on Yahoo Answers.

Hence, the users who asked the question, and - even more important - the users who have taken the time to answer this question - lose all credit and reputation related to the content they've created. Establishing your online reputation is one of the major reasons people share their knowledge on Q&A services like YA, QnA, Yedda, etc.

Though probably perfectly legal and covered by the YA terms of use, it still is a surprising move, coming from the same folks who've been so active in pushing Creative Commons forward by integrating it directly into their advanced search functionality and weaving it so nicely into Flickr.

Perhaps Brad Garlinghouse was right, and a cohesive vision – in this case, with regards to user generated content (oops!), crowdsourcing and users rights – need to be put in place over at YHQ.

Percentages are obtained from the Universal Mind and Intellect

I've run into this manifest, describing the "Methodology of Spiritual Research" on the Spiritual Research Methodology web site, through Ami's post [Hebrew]. It's a fascinating reading in general, but one paragraph strikes me as exceptionally useful for all of us who have to come up with percentages once in a while:

4. How can you apply percentages to spiritual phenomena/attributes?

The study of the spiritual dimension is just as systematic and logical as that of the physical world. It can thus be quantified in percentages etc. These percentages are obtained in a ready-made format from the Universal Mind and Intellect through the sixth sense in a state of deep meditation. They are not obtained through conventional research methodologies.

So, there you go. Next time you need a percentage, you know now what to do.

Yes, I pay for two Flickr accounts!

Three actually, if you also count the Yedda one.

The question of my multiple Flickr accounts came up several times in the last few weeks, in conversations with Eszter Hargittai, Deb Schultz, Ned Rosen and Lilly1975. I also happened to meet Caterina Fake last week, and when I mentioned to her that I am paying "her" for 3 different Flickr accounts, it seems a bit excessive even to her :)


You see, I really got into amateur photography this past year. I found that I really enjoy it, even just going on my own to shoot urban scenes for a few hours gives me immense pleasure. I also enjoy sharing it and interacting over it, which is what I do through my yanivg Flickr account. I shoot a lot, probably a few hundred pictures every week or two. I pick the ones I really like (usually from a photography point of view) to post to this account. The sets I use on this account are "thematic" – urban, people, reflections, etc.


Me enjoying photography also surfaces when I attend (un)conferences or other social-work-related events. I tend to bring my cam along with me to many of these events, and these photographs usually have a documentary / networking / social value rather then photographic value. I post these pictures to my yghelloworld Flickr account. The sets on this account usually represent specific events.

A lot of the people I know on Flickr actually freely mix the two, posting to their photostream pictures a mixture of their personal life, their professional life, and pics they just happened to like.

It may be somewhat of a vanity issue, but I hate the thought of flooding my carefully-tended yanivg photostream with tens of pictures of *gasp* people. The downside of it is that it creates a sort of a split-personality issue.

For me, my yanivg photostream is as far as I go with regards to displaying my photographic work. Contrast this with Ned for example, who makes his living from photography, and for him, Flickr provides a liberating alternative, where he can share personal stuff and work-in-progress, and document the process evolution as opposed to the final polished customer-ready result.

I guess that in a way this is the beauty of an open-system ended like Flickr. Flickr is a playground with basic building blocks (photos, photostream, tags, groups, sets), and each user is free to put meaning into this, and people from different disciplines and with different goals can still meet on a common ground.

It's interesting to compare that with, say, the newly-launched Six Apart VOX approach, which uses the notion of "neighborhood", hence defining a fixed terminology and meaning. Will "neighborhoods" work better then the generic "groups"?

We were invited to participate in the Israel Web Tour, organized by the California Israel Chamber of Commerce and the Consulate General of Israel’s Economic Mission in San Francisco. This is the 2nd day of the tour, and there hasn't been a dull moment since it begun :)

One the day's highlights was a panel moderated by Michael Arrington, "The Impact of the New Web – Culture, Entertainments & Commerce".

In a room with a few hundred people, Mike asked – how many of the participants live in Silicon Valley? About half the people in the room raised their hands. Then Mike asked – and how many of you were born in Silicon Valley? Only one person raised his hand. I am not sure what the conclusion from this is, as you could draw several different conclusions. But this is clearly interesting.

Mike proceeded to introduce the panel participants – Keith Rabois of LinkedIn, David Tennenhause of Amazon, and Daniel Cohen of the Gemini Israel Funds – as representatives of "the old way of doing things".

Clearly in a provocative mood, Mike posed the first question –

Are we at the end of the beginning of the beginning of the end?

One of the interesting comments on this was from David Tennenhause: He's seeing a good, healthy supply of good people with good ideas. The problem he does see though is with the nature of the exits – because more and more companies get acquired, there are les and less independent companies and hence less companies who are able to acquire the younger ones.

Surprisingly enough, the YouTube topic came up. Mike noted that he didn't think much of YouTube when he first saw them. With no real technology, no funding, high costs and legal copyright issues, how did they end up succeeding? Keith came up with an interesting observation, that the network effect created by the fact that content creators send links to the content they create to their friends was underestimated in YouTube case.

Daniel Cohen noted that he would not invest in any company that bases its strategy on the Amazon S3 storage services, since in his opinion it takes the economics away. This is interesting, it goes against my instinct and what I would recommend to people debating this decision. I'd love to see his math.

Discussing business models and their importance, Keith shared his early PayPal days experience, reminding everyone that initially, PayPal was about beaming "currency" from one palm pda to another. Apparently, at one point they look at the implementation and figured that since they were using unique email addresses as the identifiers in any case, why not allow direct email to email as well. And then, some 50 or so eBay users stumbled upon this capability and added it to their eBay listing. Keith described an executive meeting in which this was discussed, and in which 2 of the executives said "What? Why would they do that? We should block them!". 24 hours later, they understood that they've found their business model.

Check out the Israel Web Tour blog, and more pictures from the event.

Web 2point2, Nov 9-10

I'll be attending the Web 2point2 uncoference (San Francisco, Nov 9-10). The event is organized by the energetic Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club (a project of BrainJams, Inc). Check it out, it's shaping up quite nicely. Will you be there?

Popup menus - Flickr vs. Google

A few weeks ago Google quietly opened up SearchMash.com.

While SearchMash is not branded with the Google brand, the fact that it is being operated by Google was quickly revealed and widely discussed:

• http://blog.outer-
  court.com/archive/2006-10-02-n30.html
• http://ajaxian.com/archives/searchmash-googles-playpen
  
• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061002-192616
  
• http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/10/searchmash-new-google-search-site.html

(The lack of branding was explained by Google as an attempt to gather more objective data about user response to new interfaces).

The most surprising change for me was the behavior of the green link:

Since it looks like a link, and smells like a link, you'd probably expect it to - duh - behave like a link, and take you to the web page it points to.

This is not the case in SearchMash though. When you click on the green link, you get a *gasp* popup menu with options:

It's interesting to compare this to the approach taken by Flickr in their recent user interface revamp.

Looking at the menu toolbar on the top of the Flickr page, you'll notice a list of links, and a small arrow next to each one of them:

Now, it's interesting to note that unlike the Google interface, which sacrifices old habits to provide richer functionality, the Flickr menu manages to provide the richer functionality while retaining the class link semantics and behavior.

When you click the arrow, a drop-down popup menu opens up with a list of options:

Which is great. But, if you didn't notice the arrow, or you don't understand what is it supposed to do, you can simply click the link:

What's really nice though, is that once you click the link, you get the Latest Photos page - but you also get the same list of links which were in the popup menu listed at the top row of this page, so you're still able to navigate to them.

I find the Flickr choice of user interface a much better balance between retaining compatibility with existing habits and known metaphors, and providing new functionality.

Podcast me

I've used Talkr to add an automatically-generated podcast to this blog. Check it out, seems to work pretty well. Not sure how useful it is, but it makes me go "cool!", which is a good enough reason to add it :)
I've also switched to Firefox 2. I just love the built-in spell check. A long-overdue acknowledgment of the fact that so much of the content created today is created using the browser's text input box.

But what if I'm offline?

Sitting in the Office 2.0 conference, after several days on the road, hopping from state to state, from one airport to the next one, from one flaky wireless connection to the next attempt to get connected, the following question posted to Yedda by one of the Office 2.0 attendees stroke a chord:

What happens to office 2.0 functionality when you ...

What happens to office 2.0 functionality when you don't have access to broadband (airplane, cottage, network goes down, etc)

Topics: web 2.0, office 2.0, office20con

Asked by jakerton on October 11, 2006

View the entire discussion on Yedda

The same issue came up in the morning keynote interview, where Dan Farber interviewed Esther Dyson, who confessed she's posting to her blog mainly through email since she's so often traveling and offline and email works so much better in this scenario.

Karen Leavitt pointed out later, in the "Office 2.0, Where Are We" panel, that in the future, there'd be no offline or online, only choosing if I want to be offline or online. Most likely true, but I hate waiting.

We could put together different solutions for different applications - post to a blog through email, keep the Flickr Uploadr window open with new pictures, use an offline bookmarks manager that knows how to sync with delicious, etc. But this doesn't scale. It's not simple enough. It feels like a hack.

Creating a offline client client for each different applications would theoretically work, but is not very practical - it's expensive to build, and I feel that most of us are kinda tired of downloading (and trusting) so many different desktop clients.

Can we do it in a different way?

It'd be great if browsers would be smarter about offline vs. online, allowing the same bookmark to present an offline version when I'm not connected. So, the Yedda Ask page bookmark would still work when I'm offline, but would have reduced capabilities (for example, topics would not be automatically suggested), and would do something slightly different when the Post button is clicked.

It would be great to have the form posted data go into a "offline queue", and be posted to the online URL next time I go online.

But waiting for browsers to support new functionality is not a good idea, since at the current release rate, it means that we'll need to wait a year or two at best before we have this stuff up and running. And I hate waiting.

Can we hack this functionality today? Ideas anyone?

Technorati : browser, office20con, offline, webapplications, yedda
Del.icio.us : browser, office20con, offline, webapplications, yedda

Backto Earth

GeekCon 2006 was packed - people, action, projects, ideas. Loved every moment of it!

See for yourself:

> GeekCon 2006 on Flickr

> GeekCon 2006 on YouTube

> GeekCon 2006 in blogs

Technorati : geekcon, geekcon2006
Del.icio.us : geekcon, geekcon2006

Just because...

Just because I am off to GeekCon, it does not mean I am a geek.
And no, that Zoom 2400 Baud modem (still in the original box) is not sufficient proof either (jumper settings documentation here).

Further documentation to be delivered on Sunday.

Technorati : geekcon, geekcon2006
Del.icio.us : geekcon, geekcon2006

Upgrading an Omelet with Yedda

Just had to try this shiny new "blog this" thingie we added to Yedda. And what's better to blog then one of my favorites questions:

Upgrading an Omelet

Does anyone have interesting ways to upgrade an omelet? I'm bored with the usual cheese/onion/meat options I usually use, and since in most evenings I'm too tired too cook anything more interesting, I'd like to hear your suggestions.

Topics: cooking, omelet

Asked by gypsie on July 13, 2006

View the entire discussion on Yedda

More Yedda coverage

Following the TechCrunch post on Yedda on Aug 14th, we've been covered some great folks around the globe. I wanted to list here some of the Israeli bloggers who covered Yedda (in Hebrew):

• Ilana Tamir wrote a wonderful, thorough review on Yedda and its approach to knowledge sharing on Nana


• the.co.ils, who covered Yedda back in May, announced the public launch and pointed out very accurately the upcoming challenges


• "The Marker", one of the leading business magazines published an article on Yedda on August 16th


• my-paradox reported that she's addicted to Yedda! Should we start a support group?


• Tzafrir wrote a heart-warming review on his Yedda experience on Starter, plus some really interesting ideas...

And while at it, don't miss the older post from Ami Ben Basat on his blog, which also appeared as an article in the Globes (hmm, that would be the other leading business magazine in Israel :))

BTW, the $10,000 (play money) I invested in Yedda on Alexadex about a month ago are now worth $56,942 (hmm... play money too...). Now how cool is that.

And now, after all this wonderful excitement, back to the drawing (key)board - we have so much more work to do in order to make Yedda live up to all these expectations!

Technorati : Alexadex, Nana, Starter, TechCrunch, TheMarker, Tzafrir, my-paradox, thecoils, yedda

Google search results - link tracking costs 90 Gigabytes / day

I spent a few minutes, together with Eran, looking at the method that Google uses to track which links are clicked in the Google search results page. I figured they must be doing this, since it sounds like an essential bit of information, and of course they do that.

The mechanics are simple, and very well implemented - the generated links in the search results have a onmousedown JavaScript function (named clk) attached to them. When a link is clicked this JavaScript bit is run. Essentially what it does is use the JavaScript Image object (one of the oldest tricks in the JavaScript "book") to send a request to the Google web site, with the clicked link information:

function clk(url,oi,cad,ct,cd,sg) {
...
new Image().src="/url?sa=T"+oi_param+cad_param+"&ct="+e(ct)+"&cd="+e(cd)+u+"&ei=jwbkRLWWGYfa2wKN1uRj"+sg;
}

I was surprised though to find in that otherwise-sparkling-clean Google implementation a bunch of additional JavaScript functions which appears to be never used, like:

function ss(w,id){window.status=w;return true;}
function cs(){window.status='';} var bdg = 0;
function sb() {bdg = 1;}
function ga(o,e)
{
...
}
function anbc(id)
{
...
}

A quick count of the bits shows that the unused JavaScript code amounts to about 1K in size, per search results page. Assuming 91 million searches per day, this means unnecessary waste of 80-90 Gigabytes (depending on how you count MB - the right way or the Western Digital way :) ) of bandwidth, every day.

It's a good thing that bandwidth is so cheap. If Google was running on GoDaddy, they'd consumed their entire $10/month 500GB bandwidth limit in 6 days :)

And no, please don't count how much bandwidth we waste on unnecessary JS in the Yedda pages, I can tell you right away it's quite a bit. Functionality first, optimizations later!

Technorati : bandwidth, google, javascript, link, search, tracking
Del.icio.us : bandwidth, google, javascript, link, search, tracking

My profile on Yedda

Check it out:

My profile on Yedda

Questions I asked on Yedda

Questions I answered on Yedda

In case you're wondering, this one was just a test question! I am not sure I understand why it became so popular, but the truth is that she's not spending any time with me because she's so addicted to answering questions on Yedda. Go figure...

Technorati : me, yedda
Del.icio.us : me, yedda

It's been 128 days

Here is the sad truth from Technorati:

Yup... it's true. 128 days since my last post to this blog.

I do have good excuses though. I've been busy coding, designing, specing, supporting, promoting, and not sleeping enough.

Initially I thought it's just a busy week, no biggie, I will post next week. It's not like the world is holding its breath waiting for my posts. But then the busy week became a busy month, and another, and... 128 days.

Creating Yedda.com is exciting. There is so much to do, and every day brings new challenges, making me wish there was away around that 24 hours/day limitation. Only 24 hours a day... this is so Web 1.0, don't you think so?

It's good to be writing code again. I almost forgot how satisfying it is, to write-compile-run-upload - and see how it changes the way people interact with each other. There is magic about it.

In any case. This post is meant to break the silence. I'm back :)

Technorati : yedda
Del.icio.us : yedda

It's been a long week

I got back yesterday from KinnerNet 2006, a long-weekend-long unconference camp organized by Yossi Vardi. Long days, short nights, lots and lots of fascinating people, and tons of intellectual stimulation. Some physical stimulation too, as I was trying to avoid being hit by a water gun, misguided missile or a hostile robot.

I attended so many fascinating discussions during this weekend, both during the sessions and one-on-one. Topics ranged from blogging to online advertising, business models, MMO, culture jamming, standards, SEO, digital photography, swarms, economics, robotics... cool.

The Marker's COM.VENTION conference started immediately following KinnerNet, with many of the KinnerNet participants attending this one as well. I attended only a small part of it (someone gotta code around here!), and was pleasantly surprised to hear that Yedda, the startup I'm involved in, was selected as one of the 10 most promising startups in Israel in 2006!

And now, that we've been selected as "promising", all we need to do is deliver the promise :)

Technorati : Israel, KinnerNet, KinnerNet2006, KinnerNet06, Yossi Vardi, COMVENTION, The Marker, Yedda
Del.icio.us : Israel, KinnerNet, KinnerNet2006, KinnerNet06, Yossi Vardi, COMVENTION, The Marker, Yedda

Bubbles are cool

3D3R, a small software studio in Israel led by Ohad Eder-Pressman and friends, is preaching for "good, simple and straight-to-the-point solutions". And guess what. This is what they actually deliver.

3D3R just released the first beta of Bubbles - a "Simplified, Stripped-Down & Straight-To-The-Point browser window, that is tailor-made for housing those cool Web apps".

I love Bubbles. It's such a simple, good idea.

The desktop we use was designed with the assumption that most of the apps we use are available on the desktop, and therefore, they can be minimized to the task bar, iconized into the system tray, right-clicked to provide a context-sensitive menu, etc.

But guess what. As more and more of the basic services we use are moving online into cool web apps, I find that a lot of my time is spent inside the browser's (tabbed, if lucky) window frame.

Bubbles bridges the gap between Windows desktop apps and web apps. It creates a small hosted-browser frame for a web site, which behaves pretty much like an independent Windows app.

The window is minimal - nothing but the actual web page, no toolbars, sidebars, status bars, etc. This window can be minimized to the task bar or the tray, uses the web site logo as its icon, and can provide its own context sensitive menu when right-clicked.

It's not perfect yet, but what was done, was done right. I'd love to see the option to have Back / Forward / Refresh buttons for sites that rely on them for functionality, a better task bar double-click logic, and a few other bits and bytes, but hey, it's the first beta release.

Small, simple, makes sense.

Technorati : Israel, browser, cool, simple, 3d3r, bubbles
Del.icio.us : Israel, browser, cool, simple, 3d3r, bubbles

Web 2.0, kicking even harder

The local Web 2.0 scene is heating up. Following the Gemini Internet event on January, the informal lunch with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington two weeks ago was another trigger in getting us Israeli web entrepreneurs talking to each other, and trying to form local "support groups". The lunch event was covered in a TechCrunch post (see also Valleywag's slightly different interpretation :), and later by the local Ilana Tamir on the Nana portal (Hebrew. I was interviewed for this one).

Another nice development is the introduction of the.co.ils (Hebrew), by Yaron Orenstein and Yemi Glick, both internet veterans. ("co.il" is Israeli commercial domain name, equivalent to .com). the.co.ils is an independent blog aiming to cover the local 'net-related initiatives - existing and new. It's young (3 days old...) and fresh and looking good!

Plus, Google is opening its first Middle East R&D center in Haifa, Israel. Yes, things are heating up.

By the way, "Valley" in Hebrew is emek, and "Silicon" is tzoran. This knowledge may be useful one day :)

Technorati : Google, Hebrew lessons, Israel, TechCrunch, Yedda, the.co.ils, web2.0
Del.icio.us : Google, Hebrew lessons, Israel, TechCrunch, Yedda, the.co.ils, web2.0

TechLunch

We had lunch yesterday with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and edgeio in Tel Aviv. It was great meeting the person behind TechCrunch, the blog that in the few months it exists has become one of the central discussion hubs for the recent wave of innovations.

Several other interesting folks were there too - Ouriel Ohayon who (in addition to his other activities) is running TechCrunch.fr, Netanel Jacobsson from Make-The-Illuminati-Seem-Like-Exhibitionists Maxthon, Frank Smadja from RawSugar and some additional folks, including Daniel Cohen from Gemini who stopped by.

Both Michael and Frank, who had early exposure to Yedda, had their fun teasing us about Yedda's public launch date. Yup, we had to push it forward a bit - we received so much important feedback on the user experience from the early testers, some of it we would like to incorporate into the build before the next round of testing, and some of it got pushed further down the road into later builds. We did feel somewhat better when Michael shared that he originally thought that edgeio would be out on October '05. I guess that while the Web's revision number was increased, some basic software developments truths still hold even in Web 2.0 :)

Technorati : Israel, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Web2.0, Yedda
Del.icio.us : Israel, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Web2.0, Yedda

edgeio

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch provides early details on edgeio, the aptly-named startup he co-founded with Keith Teare. Actually, due to the conflict of interest, Michael is just providing the links to coverage on edgeio by BussinessWeek Rob Hof. Additional details and manifest are available on the edgeio blog.

From the edgeio blog first post:

We will find edge published listings if they include the category or tag "listing" within the post or content. The listings will be indexed through the blog's RSS or Atom feed and aggregated with other "listings from the edge". Users of the edgeio service will be able to search through listings and communicate directly with the publisher. Edgeio will also make aggregated listings available though a web service to other Internet sites and services that would like to include edge listings.

Turns out Frank Gruber's early guesses were right on spot!

I love the idea, aggregating classified listings from "the edge". Given the unstructured nature of these listings, filtering may prove to be a challenge though. The Structured Blogging effort, spearheaded by PubSub, might prove to be very valuable in overcoming this challenge.

Early (unauthorized?) screenshots are available on Pandorasquared, and look pretty interesting. Clean, focused experience.

The customary register-for-beta is provided at www.edgeio.com.

Technorati : blog, classified, edgeio, listing, microformats, social, web2.0
Del.icio.us : blog, classified, edgeio, listing, microformats, social, web2.0

Web 1.0 logos

Stabilo Boss (?) posted to Flickr an image incorporating the logos on most of the Web 2.0 companies out there (yes, Yedda is there too! with the old logo though, instead of the cool new one).

Complexify responded with a link to his collection of "Web 1.0" logos, straight out of '99.

A quick look at these two images was enough to reach a clear conclusion - at the very least, from a graphic design point of view, Web 2.0 is a lot nicer :)

Technorati : blink, collection, flickr, logo, vintage, yedda, web1.0, web2.0
Del.icio.us : blink, collection, flickr, logo, vintage, yedda, web1.0, web2.0

Yedda - People. Sharing. Knowledge.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted a short piece on Yedda yesterday.

And the reason I mention it is that I've spent the last few months hard at work on Yedda, the company I co-founded with Avichay Nissenbaum and the amazing Yedda team.

Yedda is about people sharing knowledge. It's going to be a great place for people to ask questions, and for people to provide answers. Note the emphasize on people :-)

At this point it's still Yedda.org, but as soon as those DNS servers around the world are done synchronizing their bits, Yedda.com should also be up and running. But, to tell the truth, Yedda is very much an .org thing… Go ahead, visit it, register for the beta if you're interested, or check out the Yedda team blog.

Can you tell I'm pretty excited? :-)

Technorati : answers, knowledge, questions, web2.0, yedda
Del.icio.us : answers, knowledge, questions, web2.0, yedda

Web 2.0 kicking @ Israel

I've attended the Gemini Internet event a few days ago. Bob Rosenschein of Answers.com, a true veteran of the software industry, gave a great presentation full of ever-so-relevant quotes that demonstrate his way of thinking. My favorite:

"What information consumes is rather obvious - it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
(Herbert Simon)

... as demonstrated with each and every wave of aggregation-filtering-discovery technologies...

Daniel Cohen of Gemini followed with an energetic presentation, highlighting the challenges of Israel-based Web 2.0 companies, and reaffirming the commitment of the Israeli VCs in general (and of course, Gemini in particular) to Israeli Internet companies. The track record isn't there yet, but judging from energy radiated by the participants, things might look quite different in a few months.

From among the participants, I was intrigued by Nir Ben-Dor's CoMagz.com, a different take on online content publishing. CoMagz.com attempts to integrate the dynamic nature of blog publishing with the collaborative, polished experience of a magazine. Done right, this could provide an interesting alternative to blogs vs. content sites.

ilcu.com's founders, Iddo & Michale, were surprised by the rapid adoption of their service, a slick implementation of social-event-sharing.

Together with FoxeyTunes, Speedbit, Spearcast, Hotbar, Maxthon, Incredimail, eSnips, Dotomi and many others (Yadda!), it was an impressive demonstration of things to come from off-the-valley.

Technorati : israel, vc, web2.0
Del.icio.us : israel, vc, web2.0

Practicalities and lists

Lots of lets-talk-about-how-it-really-works posts in the last few days. Maybe it's part of cleaning the house for 2006.

Michael Arrington posted "Don't Blow Your Beta" on Techchrunch. This is especially valuable coming from someone who's been exposed to a lot of betas recently. Useful and practical if you're at the point where you're designing your own beta process.

Guy Kawasaki followed up on his "The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists" with "The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs". My favorite is actually #11, the bonus lie:

All we have to do is get 1% of the market.

And to complete the list-of-ten, Guy also posted a list of 9 truths about the art of innovation. Excellent stuff.

It's interesting to note where Guy's list conflicts with Michale's list :)

Hugh Macleod followed up with his Top Ten Blogger Lies. Hey, these ads really were just an experiment :)

Technorati : beta, blog, list, top ten, vc, web2.0
Del.icio.us : beta, blog, list, top ten, vc, web2.0

Delicious Aroma

Library Stuff pointed to Delicious Aroma (a.k.a deli.ckoma), a service provided by Philipp Keller.

The service collects stats about delicious. It seems like a valuable source of information for all tag-o-philes out there.

I found the "tags per bookmark" chart interesting:

Note that the majority of bookmarks have 1-2 tags associated with them. What do you think this number implies? Does it indicate efficient tagging, or does it indicate that the art of tagging has not been mastered yet?

In any case, it's a valuable service. Phillip also provides the raw data if you'd like to perform your own analysis.

Technorati : folksonomy, social bookmarking, statistics, tag, tagging, web2.0
Del.icio.us : folksonomy, social bookmarking, statistics, tag, tagging, web2.0