iPioneer: Mark Johnson's Blog

Typepad Launches Widgets. . . including Kosmix!

Typepad, the blogging platform for iPioneer and many others, today released a bunch of Widgets you can add to your sidebar.  They're calling it "Bling for your Blog." Of course, I'm pretty excited that Kosmix has its own widgets included in the mix.  Now, you can add either Health, Travel, or Politics searches to your blog.  Neat stuff!

As a non-technical user of TypePad, I've always had the gripe that adding anything outside of the normal TypePad template is impossibly difficult.  There's a way to add template modules, but God knows I don't have the time to adjust them.  And, once you've created a custom template, you can no longer make configuration tweaks through the TypePad interface.  Now, I can add a Feedburner Chicklet, a couple of my Squidoo Lenses, and who knows what else.  Kudos to TypePad for making it easy on Dumb Marketing Guys like me!   I hope that companies continue to add widgets, since TypePad has released an integration API.  I'd love an easy way to add my Flicker Photos to the sidebar.

Note: I can't figure out how the heck to add my Feedburner Chicklet.  Am I just dumb or is FeedBurner punting?

Star Wars or Web 2.0?

Just to show how crazy Web 2.0 names have gotten, someone created a quiz to test your Web 2.0 and Star Wars knowledge.  I'm just bummed that Kosmix didn't make the list!  I scored a 29, which puts me in respectable territory.

SFWIN March Event

Last night, I attended an SFWIN (Web Innovators Network) event and took lots of pictures.  There were lots of interesting folks there, like Jeff Clavier and the Dogster people.  I also met people from lots of companies I didn't know:

• CrowdFactory -- I met their CEO, Alex Mouldovan, formerly a director of product management at Tribe.
• Zooomr -- another photo sharing with some cool features, like GeoTagging photos and stickin' them on a Google Maps mashup.  What's so amazing is that the founder/lead developer, Kristopher Tate, is only 17 years old!  Wow!
• GoGhetto -- I didn't sit through their demo, but this site is similar to PostSecret.  I don't get it, but I'm probably not in the right demographic.  I'm sure they'll make millions. 
• Zvents -- SF Bay Area events.  I haven't gotten a change to try it out, but I'm looking for some wine tasting this weekend.  Hmmm.
• Microsoft -- there's this little company that makes operating systems.  This is one to watch!

Anyway, cool event.  If you've never been to one, check out the next one.  Registration is already open on the Wiki page.

SimplyHired Office Warming Party

SimplyHired hosted an Office Warming party last night (pics).  What a great idea!  They had great food.  I met some interesting people.  And I even got to see some old friends from SideStep. They also threw a t-shirt contest.  From the invite:

"You know you've got 'em. Shirt-loads of them. Every one-hit dot-com wonder in the valley has put out a crappy t-shirt at one time or another.

So if you haven't given it to Goodwill by now, why not trade it in for a Simply Awesome t-shirt instead?

In addition to plenty of food, drinks, and fun, we'll have prizes for the following t-shirt categories:
        1) Worst dot-com flameout t-shirt [note: a Webvan t-shirt won]
        2) Oldest geek company t-shirt [note: Microsoft 1995 won]
        3) Most over-hyped Web 2.0 t-shirt -- except Simply Hired, of course [the 'crowd favorite' was an 'I survived the Carly Fiorina years' t-shirt."

Fun times!  They inspired me to throw a Kosmix Office Warming party.  I hope we'll have a big contingent from SimplyHire.  Thanks for a great party, guys & gals!

Tagspam

When you're around comical friends, odd situations arise naturally.  And when you're armed with a digital camera, pictures are taken and end up on Flickr.  One night in Portland, my friends had fun with their complimentary kimonos and some Ambien.  Peter pretended he was Donatella Versace and Malcolm handed him some Ambien (he was begging in a guttural Italian accent).  Naturally, I tagged all of those photos as donatellaversace.  If you go to Flickr and do a search for donatellaversace tags, you'll notice that none of the picture are of Donatella Versace. Precisely the problem with tags is they have no context.  The object to which the tags refer is only useful sometimes. In the case of photos, there's not much extra data to pull context from (save Riya). Web pages have a bit more information, but I don't know of any service the reconciles tags with pages.

So, the problem of tagspam is more difficult than just pulling out companies who "SEO" optimize their tags or people who tag things with something wrong.  The hardest problem will be discerning the context with which something was tagged.  Is the tag about the entire picture?  About the location of the picture (city, state, country)?  About something in the picture?  About something that was happening in the picture?  All of that context is hard enough for a human to figure out.  Maybe there needs to be a hierarchy of tags from which users could select--but who would use these?

It seems to me that tags will evolve into some kind of language.  We speak really simple words to the computer right now; maybe someday they'll be able to ask the right questions that will help them truly understand what we're trying to say to them.

NBC Falls off the Cluetrain

Lazy Sunday: The Chronicles of Narnia (warning: broken link) has been pulled off YouTube, at the request of NBC.  Now, y'all know that I don't own a TV, but I chanced to see this skit when it debuted.  I loved it!  I thought: "Jeez, maybe SNL is comin' back!"  Now, don't get me wrong NBC execs, but doesn't Saturday Night Live, by most modern measures, suck?  Isn't it loosing market share to more better late-night TV and more innovative content from sources like MTV and Comedy Central?

Finally, SNL releases a really good skit that gained popularity because the internet enabled underground marketing and distribution.  Lazy Sunday showed up on blogs, was sent around in e-mail, and profited from the existence of free services like YouTube, who give free bandwidth to the world.  Immediately, the video gets a cult following.  People make t-shirts.  It gets covered in major papers.   Instead of using the free guerrilla marketing, the NBC execs decide to pull it down, weeks after the debut and at the height of its popularity.  SNL hasn't gotten such good marketing since Wayne's World.  What the Hell are they so afraid of?  I can only imagine the misinformed board room scene:

Bob: Hey!  My son told me that this skit from Saturday Night Live is showing up on the Internet.  What does that mean?
Jerry: I don't know about this "Internet" thing.  You know music companies are loosing a lot of money!
Bob: Yeah, Tower is filing for bankruptcy.  Maybe TV is next?
Jerry: We've got to stop this!
Bob: My analyst, Cynthia, provided this report.  It says that the skit, "Lazy Sunday," was downloaded over 2 million times!
Jerry: Egads! 2 million?  How much have we lost?
Bob: Well, we could have sold for somewhere between $2-$5 a show, so we've already lost up to $10 million!
Jerry: Get that down immediately!!
Bob: Man, we're going to be out of a job soon if we don't watch it!

Wake up, people!  You are going to be out of a job soon, and it's not because people are "stealing" your content.  That video was worth tens of millions in advertising, if not more.  Now, in addition to loosing the free SNL marketing, they're pissing off a lot of consumers (like me).  When God hands you free marketing like this, you should eat it up.  Start a series of these videos!  Start an SNL humor blog!  Release one SNL skit a week on YouTube!  There are so many possibilities: if NBC and the other networks don't have the vision to grab hold of the future or the sagacity to build long-term value for their network, they're going to go the way of Tower.  Power to the people!

Oh, on top of it all, the BBC is reporting that the Institute for Policy Research advocates longer copyrights to encourage creativity. I love watching industries dig their own graves.

Technorati tags: Lazy Sunday

ExtraTasty: Webtender 2.0

I was going to write a big post bragging about my extensive collection of booze, but you can just look at my profile at ExtraTasty!  Finally, a site where I can list all of my booze, find drinks based on my bar, create my own drink recipes, and, most importantly, connect with other Drunkards 2.0.  I've just begun experimenting, but I'm sure I'll have more info on this one in the future.

I wish everyone could think of such useful ideas!

Tagging is fun!

So, I posted about Wink last week, but I still hadn't tagged much at that point.  I decided to devote myself to tagging every URL I came across, just to see what all the hype was.  If I spend more than 30 seconds on a page, I tag it.  Searching through my limited corpus of tags is surely easier than trying to remember an arcane combination of keywords in Yahoo.  Also, I feel like I'm contributing another Web signal (even if no one has figured out a useful way to use it yet).  If you're curious, check out my Wink tags and my del.icio.us tags.

A Review of Wink.com

When Wink.com launched just before Christmas, I decided that I wouldn't write anything until I had actually used Wink as my primary search engine for a week.  Well, a couple of weeks have gone by and here's my conclusion.

The tagosphere is a new signal on the Web that no one has figured out how to extract.  Searches for Technorati tags are OK, but not all bloggers tag things.  del.icio.us searches find me interesting pages sometimes, but are never consistent.  Wink seems to be hybridizing search with tag search, but keeps the tag content separate from the Web content.  I've found that I like having both side-by-side--the tag search tends to give me interesting results for a search in which I am doing general research, but the Google results are good when I'm looking for something specific.  I have to admit though, I can't get into this tagging thing myself.  I've never been a big bookmarker, especially since Google trained me to find the site I'm looking for by remembering a set of keywords.  Maybe my next step is to force myself to tag all of the Web sites I find next week.  Hmmm.  In any case, Wink makes it super easy to tag something, which is why I even have a few sites in there.  Great feature!

I'll continue to use Wink search now and then when I'm researching an odd topic, but they haven't given me enough to wean me from my obsession with Yahoo! Search yet.  On that note, Wink is far superior to Yahoo MyWeb, in that it's very easy to use and presents the results in a logical way. . . maybe Wink is a good acquisition target for Yahoo's MyWeb effort?

Technorati tags: Wink.com, Wink, tagosphere, tag search

Squidoo: The New About.com?

I signed up for the beta of Squidoo (and was accepted) and couldn't figure out what in God's green earth they were doing.  Another social bookmarking site? *yawn*  After their launch on December 7, I finally figured it out, thanks to Seth Godin's brilliant eBook, Everyone is an Expert. I encourage you to read the entire book (it's a worthwhile 15-30 minutes), but I quote the most important sections below from his thesis:

I BELIEVE THAT WHEN YOU GO ONLINE, you don’t search. You don’t even find. Instead, you are usually on a quest to make sense. That’s the goal of most visits to Google or Yahoo! or blogs or the Wikipedia. How do you make sense of the noise that’s coming at you from all directions? You won’t take action—you won’t buy something, book something, hire someone, or take a position on a political issue—until you’ve made sense of your options.

And even better:

The mistake: The engineers who built the Web believed that if they presented the “right” answer, intelligent humans would be pleased. In fact, before you get it, before you discover the meaning, there is no right answer.

This is the key really.  Seth is saying that the "I'm feeling lucky" model doesn't work!  That is, when a user puts in a search query into Yahoo Search, there isn't necessarily a single result that will answer their query.  Yikes!