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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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