Category Archives: Websites

Yoo-hoo, YHOO?

Posted on by
2

Hopefully you did not take my ealier “advice” and buy YHOO. I remain bullish on their prospects as well as IACI and MSFT as Google’s huge share of total PPC based search revenue dematerializes over the coming years, but hey, I also traded my Apple for WCOM so don’t listen to me.

Reuters says things will likely get worse for Yahoo as delays in their “project panama” contextual advertising routine continue to hurt their prospects of nabbing more of the PPC cash buffet.

Google is still going strong according to CEO Eric Schmidt, which is good because now they can afford the big party they’ll throw in a couple weeks – Google Dance 2006. See you there?

Gadgets – the desktop revolution begins

Posted on by
1

One of the best sessions at Mashup Camp 2  was Adam Sah’s “Google Gadgets” which outlined how rapidly gadgets are sweeping onto the desktop.   These were formerly called Google Widgets but Adam told me they have been renamed to avoid confusion.  Yahoo “confabulator” concept has a nice ring….but….perhaps some term standardization is called for here.    Apple can keep the widget idea because… they are Apple.
Gadgets are sweeping onto the desktop.    At MIX06 the MS Live team was also very bullish on the concept and has been developing a desktop and OS environment that will rely heavily on people populating their desktop with gadgets.     Although many of these are “whimsical” in nature, the number of functional gadgets is growing very fast.  I think this is the coming “battleground” – or at least a coming very fertile ground – for those vying for eyeballs.    In the meantime it’s a great way to customize the desktop easily.

Mashup Camp 2 – and THE WINNER IS …. WeatherBonk!

Posted on by
4

The wooden nickels are getting counted and the top number will determine the winner of the 5000 top prize here at Mashup Camp. I voted for WeatherBonk this time which is a very good mashup of NOAA, traffic, and many other feeds over Google maps. David Schorr had a good stack of nickels last time I passed that table. But I have a hunch Frucall may win – it’s a very usable and clever mashup as well.

The format here is such that the “simple to grasp” mashups may have an advantage over the more complex ones. PodBop, the last winner, carried this simplicity advantage.

David Berlind is keeping us in suspense … thanking the great sponsors of this event.

….now final ungiven nickels are getting distributed to the mashup people …

Here are some counts:

LoveCrunch 7+2?
Frucall 8
Jeff’s picture captcha 24 – this could be the winner?
Yobie Goodstorm
Bart with TrainCheck 8+1?
David WeatherBonk 21+1
Jeff with Elephant Drive 20
Cameron Jones, Public Radio Travel Planner – 2
Kurt? music/pix mash…. 2
Foto Tiger 5
Mark with SecretPrices – 13+1
Kung Gao, Frappr – 2
Chad MileGuru – 13
Tom TIKI mash 3?
Mindjet 3
411Synch 2 (surprising – this was GREAT!)
Dave StrikeIron – was not soliciting nickels -1

PubWalk -13
Eric Small Town Guides – ?
RealestateFu – Greg from FrozenBear.com 0 (!) This was a superb mash…what’s going on?

Wait – we may have a TIE! ?? Redistribution is happening….

It’s a tie between WeatherBonk and Mecommerce…(who also had the picture captcha )

The tie has been broken by voting by people moving across the room and it’s David Schorr’s WeatherBonk.

Mashup Camp 2 – Google Gadgets

Posted on by
4

Adam’s talking about Google Gadgets and how powerful they are as a mini content distributor. They are easy to create and are attaining huge usage worldwide. Adam and his team have done a super job of making this fast, easy, and fun. Good google! This is dynamite stuff, and in typical Google fashion they have made it easy, fun, and open.

The Gadget directory is algorithmically generated so the most popular gadgets tend to rise to the top as they are selected by users. Don’t be evil helps define decisions virtuously rather than GoogleOptimizably. Engineering constraints trump marketing ones.

GoogleModules.com and hotmodules.com (these are NOT Google sites) are good sources of inspiration and gadgets.

Translation is easy by having a few lines translated, the upload as a country specific gadget.

Top author? 16 year old Caleb from Arkansas. Countdown gadget is his top and he has several.

Design: Minimize brand unless you are really big where it’s a value adding feature.

Hyperlink at bottom for more info

Hyperlink in title

Promote gadget on your own site (add-to-google button)

Why Wikis? We need a blog post to public wiki mashup?

Posted on by
Reply

Am I wrong to be skeptical that Wikis are the right answer to “loose” forms of collaboration such as those found at conferences or within non-corporate interest groups with many different types of folks?

Yet Wikipedia works fanastically?  Is this because it’s a big, long term project?

I’m noticing challenges with the Wiki here at MashupCamp. I cleared spam last night only to find the *same spam* had been returned this morning. Hardins “Tragedy of the Commons” comes to mind in the sense that it’s hard to manage public spaces due to incentive issues.

But more important than spam is the challenge of updating. In a world where so many conference participants have blogs and websites isn’t there a way to collaborate where people update their blogs (high incentive to update, clear spam, etc) and then this content flows into the collective space?

A blicki system? Barriers to participation in Wikis must be reduced and it seems fundamental that successful collaborative systems don’t ask people to do things they won’t naturally “just do”.

Wikis certainly work very well as envisioned by my fellow Oregonian Ward Cunningham who coined the term “Wiki” from, I think, a Hawaiian Bus stop sign. I wonder if his original notion was for more structured and incentified forms of collaboration such as in a company?

Mashup Camp 2 – Day 1 – wait, there’s more!

Posted on by
Reply

The excellent unconference format makes the entire conference something of a networking session.  Still,  it’s great to have a few beers with folks who make the internet … so darn interesting.

I always enjoy talking with the brilliant Adam Sah who brings plenty of Google gadget enthusiasm to the mashup mix and I’m sure will have some great stuff to show us tomorrow during the last session. Also really enjoyed meeting mashup and housingmaps.com  legend Paul Rademacher  (whoa – not to be confused with this Paul Rademacher, who is dead).

Paul’s early mashup of Craigslist and Google maps (before there was a maps API no less!)  helped usher in the notion that mashups are a very useful, great way to mix data in innovative ways.   Had a great chance to talk about some travel mashing ideas with Adam and Paul.   There’s a hurricane of real time road data at the transportation departments but it’s non-trivial to pull even a fraction of that in effectively.   Mashups to the rescue?  Maybe.

Also got to meet the famous ex-googler blogger Mark Jen who was fired by Google for … blogging!    He works over at Plaxo now where he won’t get fired because … he wrote the blogging policy!  Very nice and sharp guy.

Mashup Camp 2 – Brain Pain, but the good kind

Posted on by
Reply

Mashup Camp 2, day 1 wraps up with  here at the Computer Science Museum.

Despite some good presentations, I think the Speed Geeking Session was the best part as in Mashup Camp 1, but it seemed the mashups in the competition are not quite as strong though there are several good ones and I only saw about 15 today.  David Schorr’s   WeatherBonk, which almost won Mashup Camp 1, is back and better than ever.   He’s got GolfBonk as well which is very clever.   The best viral marketing idea was a mash of maps and myspace called Frappr.com

Frucall‘s callback with shopping data was neat and Intel’s up to some great stuff with their shopping mashup that takes a *picture* of the UPC and fetches shopping data.     Also strong in this space SecretPrices.com

Some of these are too complex to digest, especially on the tiny screens some people were using to show off their applications (Marc, dude – you call that a screen?!) But his PeopleAggregator roll your own social network looked really promising in many ways.  Yobie’s online mega shop GoodStorm.com also needs a lot more than 5 minutes and has very powerful features.

Mashup Camp 2 – search session

Posted on by
Reply

Dorai Thodla of IMorph led an excellent search discussion this morning about the challenges of bringing more context into the search results.   He’ll post at the WIKI this afternoon.  Google noted that their new API is allowing a lot more integration and flexibility than it used to, and I think Yahoo is moving in this direction as well where the commercial use distinctions are breaking down in favor of … innovation!  Hey, innovation is a good thing.

But in my opinion the most interesting development in all in search is the Amazon Web Search platform which Jeff will be talking about this afternoon.     From my perspective Amazon is basically going to aggressively enable modest potential search competitors with big time search infrastructure.

Even if this fails to bring any great innovation to the table, I think it’s already helping to suggest that Google and Yahoo should continue to bring good APIs to the table and encourage search mashing.