Category Archives: mashups

Local Voices Needed – Apply Here… or There….

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Got a blog? Want to start blogging?

Locals know the best things to do, places to eat, and more about their regions. We’re looking for a few … hundred thousand … who want to tell the world about their own town in their own way.

Yes, we want you!

Click here to sign up

Hey, what kind of nut would write a pitch like THAT?  Oh, it’s me.
I’m still not sure if Facebook is the best platform for the local blogger project I’ll soon start in earnest but it seems like a good place to start the search for other local voices.

One great aspect of blogs and the internet is the ability to connect locals to visitors before, during, and after a travel experience.   I’m big on blogging and travel and would love to join with others who share that interest in an effort to eventually “cover the globe” with local voices from every region.

I think the key to success will actually be the *lack* of formal structure for the project, though obviously it’ll be helpful to have a site that will allow easy navigation to the various blogs and will mashup travel information about the regions along these lines.

P.S.  If you are interested in this and don’t want to join facebook or don’t have a blog yet that’s fine – send me an email: jhunkins@gmail.com   I think we can find a good way for  everybody who is interested to participate in the project.

Startups … often suck

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Pete Cashmore has been coming up with very clever titles (and as always great insights on social networking) over at Mashable. A good example is today’s “Web Startups and the Lying Liars That Lie About Them” where he basically makes the case that in general startups suck worse than one would think if one simply took what is written about them in blogs (including his) for granted.

This point hits home hard when you note, as Don Dodge recently did, that it appears startups absorb more money from venture capitalists than they return to the VCs that keep new web companies spinning out of the web, and often (more in the old days than now) keep them spinning out of control even after the startup’s business model has failed.

Interestingly, my own experience with our travel startup Online Highways was something of the opposite of the normal deal. We grew fast, did not get VC money, and started to make enough that we could open new offices in India and a second in Oregon. Initially by many measures we were not a great travel site but we were doing spectacularly well – by July of 2003 we had over 3 million monthly unique visitors. However, after pouring over a million of revenues into developments, maps, and other improvements we actually got nailed by Google for reasons that remain unclear, but as always make the internet a darn interesting place to hang out whether you are a startup that sucks or one that rocks.

Great article by Marc Andreessen about VC

More on this from NYT May 11th

Yahoo: Piping hot content to websites near you. Brilliant.

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Yahoo Pipes (site may be down at the moment – I think they didn’t anticipate the instant global attention) is a perfect example of why I’m so bullish on Yahoo’s prospects as a company. Yahoo Pipes is a premier mashup enabling application coming along at a very opportune time.

Yahoo’s developer team is second to none, and in my opinion has a remarkable understanding of “Web 2.0” sensibilities. Pipes will simplify the process of connecting content, websites, and applications.

In an ideal world, innovation is constrained only by the human imagination, not by the limitations of technology. Yahoo pipes is a profound step in that direction.

More about Yahoo Pipes:

Jeremy Zawodny

Tim O’Reilly (is this guy ever *wrong* about stuff? I don’t think so. )
… enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

Matt Cutts

Anil Dash 

—————–

Disclaimer: I  have some Yahoo stock and as of Monday some short term Yahoo calls.

Google launches customized search

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Wow, Matt notes that unlike offerings by Yahoo and LIVE, Google’s going to allow you to include thousands of URLs in a customized search specialized for your own websites.

This is exactly what I was looking for in travel as it allows you toa create a great regionally targeted search engine using “known and trusted” URLs combined with Google’s monster search power. They’ll also be sharing revenues from the searches though historically that’s been too small amount with the generic customized search (which they’ve had for some time).

Good going Google! Yahoo and MSN – copy this approach NOW!

Yahoo really should have come up with this “including many URLs” approach because it’ll encourage the community to pick trusted URLs to include in their searches, and Yahoo, unlike Google, would be comfortable using that human feedback. It’s spammable, sure, but a great spam fighting tool in that the power of the whole community is unleashed in the selection process.

Hey!  I built one for Oregon Travel and will upgrade California Travel with  more good sites soon.    This has a lot of potential if Google uses the community input to help weed out crappy sites and upgrade unknown sites, though they tend to avoid this type of human (and therefore spammable) input.    Yahoo is more comfortable with that approach so I hope they are taking advantage of it via the Rollyo and Yahoo custom search user inputs.

MORE about this:

Google

TechCrunch

CNET

Blogoscoped

Online News Association to Arrington: Hey, let’s get Mikey!

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Poor Mike Arrington. From his blog it sounds like Mike was the token sacrificial lamb at the recent Online News Association conference where his comments were not taken well by the crowd of what sounds like mostly conventional journalists (or conventional *thinkers*) hoping to get a grip on the sea change going on, and going online, right now. They should listen to Mike carefully, because he’s been good at seeing the future. (ummm except Edgeio, which probably won’t fly).

There’s a lot of news in the news business but journalists are often missing the critical factors which include blogs, user interaction, and emphasis on real time reporting in real time from real people who are making that news themselves or direct witness to that news (e.g. who really wants a journalist in the middle when you have webcams on all the parties in the dispute?)

I remember how intense Mike got at Mix06 in his remarks about the future of offline Yellow pages, telling them “You are DEAD!”, and I can only imagine how the ONA folks reacted to his insights about the future of news and media in the online world.

His real sin was to become an expert early on in the Web 2.0 world and to profit from that expertise. Nothing pisses people off like somebody figuring things out early and profiting from that knowledge.

Good for him, but he better stick to events like Yahoo Hack Day or Mashup Camp if he wants a warm reception from like minded folks….folks who also understand that the changes are only beginning and will rock the news world like it’s never been rocked before.

Google Gadgetry and Yahoo Hackery. Welcome to the new WorldWideWebery

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It’s great to see Adam Sah’s Google Gadgetry project move ahead with today’s announcement that Gadgets can be created to work on any website.    Adam was at both Mashup Camp 1 and Mashup Camp 2 and it was neat to see how a little project had become a big project over a period of only 4 months.    It’s likely now to become a gigantic project as Yahoo, Google, and MSN vie to maximize their online presence on, within, and interacting with other websites.

This announcement suggests to me even more strongly that the browser and desktop are going to move in the direction of becoming a place populated by many different gadgets – basically mini applications – and users will organize their offline and online experience using them.

This bodes significant changes in our typical website model as people slice and dice their sites and gadgets in the coming web 2.0 world where information flows freely and according to the needs, demands, the stupid and the smart whims of the users.

Yahoo Hack Day – you should have been there! I should have been there!

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Yahoo’s Hack Day was so successful I have yet to read anything but positive reports – in fact most are downright glowing with enthusiasm for this mashup fest down at the Yahoo mother ship in Sunnyvale. I wish I could trade my lackluster experience at this year’s Google Party for a back-in-time ticket to Yahoo’s Hack Day.

Gordon over at GetLucky.net, a Yahoo employee, provides what seems to me several key insights about Hack day, but more imporantly about why Yahoo, not Google, is the company to watch.

Of course, until Yahoo Panama gets their *ASS IN GEAR* with a high quality contextual advertising paradigm, Wall street will continue to think that they suck ….

Gordon on Hack Day:
… the stuff that we do better than our competitors may have a chance to shine in the spotlight, in front of the audience that matters most. Much of the mindshare that Google has captured through applications like the GMaps API, etc. has been held because of the nature of convenience. Once a coder builds an application on top of a specific interface, switching to another API requires some real motivation…

emphasis belongs to me, the insights belong to Gordon though I’ve written about this stuff several times as well. Yahoo could wind up “owning” 2.0., which is a cool type of ownership where the big guy facilitates millions of long tail, little guy developments and transactions and publishing enterprises. The big guy shares *most* of the revenue with the little guys but the volume creates huge wealth for the big companies and modest wealth for the smaller ones. Users are rewarded with better content, rich interactive experiences, noninvasive advertising, and encyclopedic information. When 2.0 is done right everybody plays, everybody wins.

Is that blog tag spam in your “Rochesters Big and Tall” pants or are you just happy to see me?

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Technorat’s top tags today are very conspicuous.    Look at all the references to Rochester’s Big and Tall”, a retailer serving…..big and tall guys.   Looks like some form of blog spamming or odd tag SEO going on.   

I’m still getting a lot of milage from my test Cicarelli post of last week even though she’s dropped to 12th place. 

And will somebody PLEASE blog about the winners of the Yahoo Hack Day?!   Wait…here it is at Techcrunch That event was so great…..nobody had time to blog it thoroughly except to link to the very clever Beck Video.     Beck and his band – themselves mashup mavens and sometime hackers – gave a killer concert at the Yahoo event that will probably go down as one of the best gatherings of the year.  

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Yahoo Hack Day is Rocking!

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Yahoo Hack Day is already shaping up to be a fantastic event. I really hate to miss this developer campout down in Sunnyvale that is featuring hands-on developer classes today, a yet-to-be-named big time entertainer tonight, and a hack contest tomorrow.   Folks are camping at the heavily Wi-Fi armed Yahoo campus in rooms and the lawn.   Cool.

Some resources for those of us who missed this are over at Jeremy’s blog.