Netizen

Friday, June 26, 2009

Michael Jackson's Death And The Internet: A New Way To Mourn

Michael Jackson: A Tribute
Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson

We are no longer faceless fans. We have a voice. We have known to be heard on a presidential campaign trail. And, by God, we are going to mourn. That seems to be the feeling. There has been this immense outpouring of emotion. Michael Jackson touched many hearts over decades. He was a child in an adults' world, sometimes lost, always loved.

Only someone of his stature could have sparked rumors of an internet meltdown. In his death Michael Jackson has written a whole new chapter to this concept called social media.

In The News

Can the Internet handle big breaking news? CNet
HP calculators reborn on iPhone, Windows
Buy-buy Michael Jackson

Image via Wikipedia

Google thought Michael Jackson traffic was attack
Watch what Microsoft's new security app can do
The cathedral plus the bazaar: Open source and Apple (design) envy
CNET News Daily Podcast: Great spots for globetrotting geeks
Sites swamped after Jackson death
Jackson popular on iTunes, YouTube
Apple triples stake in U.K. chip company
ICANN names new CEO
The greening of tech packaging
Will Novell, Dell turn to open-source M&A to grow?
Latest version of Cooliris embraces browser tabs
Apple confirms it banned iPhone porn app
Microsoft sets Windows 7 pricing, upgrade programs
News sites swamped following Michael Jackson's death

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Michael Jackson's death roils Wikipedia
Friday Poll: Which Android app will Google ban first?
Acer's sleek-looking 23-incher coming soon
Couple sues Apple over iTunes gift cards
Week in review: Steve Jobs' secret transplant
In wake of loss, Palm looks to Pre as savior
Thumbing Windows 7 onto Netbooks
Android developers get native-code kit
Beijing adding more curbs to Net access
iPhone syncing app adds voice mail and memo transfers
Indecent Exposure 52: Invalidated expectations

Image via Wikipedia

Cook up a storm without heating up the house
The cathedral plus the bazaar: Open source and Apple (design) envy
Expert: China's Green Dam software is unsafe
Gartner: PC sales to pick up by end of the year
Synthetic 'tree' promises to catch carbon
CNET News Daily Podcast: Great spots for globetrotting geeks
Watch what Microsoft's new security app can do
IEEE awards prizes for tech that benefits humanity

Jackson Death Fires Music Sales BusinessWeek
Settling Jackson's Estate May Be a Thriller

The World's Rich Part with $7.9 Trillion in Assets
Are Smarter Gadgets Good for the Planet?
EU Moots Social Network Privacy Rules
How to Kick Off an Innovation Project
China May Reject GM Hummer Deal on Environmental Concerns
Can Airbus Press Its Advantage Over Boeing
Hedge Funds Face Triple Conundrum
Mohandas Pai Likely to Assume Key Role at Infosys
Recession in the Midwest
Stocks Finish with Strong Gains
Vital Signs: Encouraging News for the Weak Labor Markets
Time Warner, Comcast Plan to Wall Off Online TV
Nortel Liquidation Could Cripple Microsoft Tie
Cash for Clunkers: What Can $1 Billion Buy?
Ads That Break the Mold and Grab Attention
Admissions Chat: Duke

Image via Wikipedia

For Pro Athletes, Business School Is No Game
Vanderbilt: A Small School with Big Ambitions
Wimbledon 2009: Great Tennis, Corporate Excess
A Blushing Beauty From Provence
Credit-Card Companies: Who Qualifies Now?
Cash for Clunkers: What Can $1 Billion Buy?
Ads That Break the Mold and Grab Attention
Changing Your Corporate Culture
The Knowledge Workers' Strike
How Good Is Your Audit Firm?
An Inspiring Leader Is an Optimistic One
Why Less Is More for Startups
What Small Business Owners Want from Obama

How to Moonwalk like Michael Time
Photos: Michael Jackson's Years of Innocence

Top 10 Michael Jackson Songs
Top 10 Michael Jackson Moments

Obama Scoffs at Ahmadinejad Critcism

Image via Wikipedia

Seth Godin poured some water on Twitter saying the reason he does not want to get on Twitter is because he would rather continue being the best business blogger in the world. He can't be the best Tweet, but that he is already the reigning business blogger.

The guy is a great business blogger. He pours out pearls of wisdom. His blog posts read like fables. And the grand claim, if not factually true, is absolutely great marketing. His marketing tips have been more believable to me in the aftermath.

His blog is a nice one to keep up with. It is inspiring. And recently I had an email from the guy. I said how come your trackback thing is not working? Trust me, if I knew how to fix it, I would fix it, he said. Then he got me talking to his techies.

It felt like getting a picture taken with a movie star.

I really like his emphasis on out of the box thinking.

From The Netizen BlogRoll

Learning from Singer More now than ever, success today is no guarantee of success tomorrow. ..... I bet you can list a dozen "critical" industries that will be as relevant to life in 2020 as Singer is to our world today. ...... Hiding isn't working, and neither is whining. The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does.
Circling the big domino They try to launch worldwide and beat Google. They try to get an endorsement from the Prince of Denmark. They try to break out with a feature on a major blog. They try to act like Coca Cola from the first day. And they try and they try and they try until they get so frustrated, they quit. ..... A few brands pick out tiny dominos instead. And topple them. And they do it again.
Spotto!
On the road to mediocrity
Spectacles
Two ways to build trust What works is someone walking the walk while they talk a good game. ..... their lack of spin and hustle hit exactly the right tone
Circles of Convenience convenient approaches rarely break through or generate extraordinary returns
Scalejacking The internet is about who, not how many. The internet lets you take really good care of 100 people instead of harassing 2,000. ..... "Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.)" Ignore everyone else.
What's off the table? Big marketing breakthroughs always come from doing something that everyone else says is off the table.
You matter
Textbook rant assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice. ...... In a world of wikipedia, where every definition is a click away, it's foolish to give me definitions to memorize. ..... I've never seen a single blog post that says, "wait until I explain what I learned from a textbook!" ..... This industry deserves to die.
Ruby slippers
How big is your farm?
Should Hugh swear so much? The irony, as most multimillionaire authors will tell you, is that it's art that creates the commerce, not the other way around.
Direct and useful project feedback I'm not talking about annual reviews (which are stupid) ..... (Not criticism, feedback).
Guy #3
Tough! if you're a little tougher than people who are ready to give up, or you are a little more creative than people who are stuck, you'll break through.
Graduate school for unemployed college students Start, run and grow an online commun

Image via Wikipedia

ity.
"Why am I here?"
Harvesting
You're boring
When smart people are hard to understand
Learning from the MBA program We didn’t do this at all at when I was at Stanford. We spent a lot of time reading irrelevant case studies and even more time building complex financial models. ........ The act of defending your work in writing became a habit, and once it was a habit, the quality of everything improved. ...... There's not much I'm going to tell you that's not in my blog posts or books.
Out of bounds Nike isn't allowed to make a computer ..... once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow.
Thinking about the compromise I know people with $50,000,000 in the bank who still don't believe that they have enough, who still grind away at a job they don't like trying to earn another penny. .... No right answers, but some good questions.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Fred Wilson

Larry Ellison
JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta
JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta (2)

I got excited about Geocities when it came along back in the days. You mean I can have my own homepage? To this day my Geocities homepage is the first page I go to when I go online ea

Image via CrunchBase

ch day. When I jump to Twitter, Facebook, Gmail or Google Search, it is from my Geocities homepage. I was saddened to learn a few weeks back that Yahoo plans to shut down Geocities by the end of the year. I think that is a bad decision on the part of Yahoo.

I have been excited about Twitter most of this year.

Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas

I got taken by Disqus and Zemanta a few months back. They have taken my blogging to a whole different level. There is no blogging without Disqus and Zemanta as far as I am concerned.

Before Disqus came along, blog comments sections were a wasteland. Now it has becom

Image via CrunchBase

e valuable real estate. The blog comments sections are microblogging territory just like Twitter. They are a better way to meet new people who might share your interests than even Twitter. And Disqus is the reigning monarch there. And it is one of those things where having the first mover advantage makes all the difference. Twitter has had that in its turf.

A few months back I came across a blog called AVC.com. A venture capitalist with a blog, and not a ghostwritten blog, or a blog because it was cool to have a blog. This was a guy who was really into blogging. This was no vanity blogger. This was a genuine blogger who also happened to be a venture capitalist. At that point I did not know of what stature.

Recently I started reading that blog regularly and commenting in the comments sectio

Image via CrunchBase

ns. The blogger/VC replied to some of my comments, and even left a comment at my own blog.

I am a Deaniac from 2004. I moved to NYC summer of 2005. Howard Dean got to know me through DFNYC. I have been fast friends with the MeetUp CEO Scott for a few years now. And I am eFriends with Joe Trippi. Today I learned Fred Wilson is also associated with MeetUp.

Scott 2.0, MeetUp.com 2.0
Social Networking: Where The Internet Comes Down From The Clouds
NY Internet Week: NYTM Showcase

Image via CrunchBase

I have been honored to have exchanged a few emails with Fred Wilson this past week.

MeetUp is a Web 5.0 company. I could argue Geocities was a 2.0 company before that term got coined. Twitter needs no introduction, soon Disqus and Zemanta will not either.

NY Tech MeetUp Mailing List Web 5.0 Controversy
Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb
Competing For the Web 3.0 Definition

Mine is a 3.0 company. The semantic web is 2.1 as far as I am concerned.

JyotiConnect Inc.
Damien Mallen In Town

InRev TwitIn Now Does People Search

Image by Eloy Ricárdez Luna via Flickr

InRev TwitIn now does people search. I learned that a few hours ago from the CEO's Facebook stream. I think that is a great addition to an already impressive service. The ability to search through people's brief bio to look for people to follow is an enhancement I have missed from day one. To me Twitter's attraction over Facebook has been that on Twitter you can meet new people. I like the idea greatly. Although I have not enjoyed hitting my daily limits.

Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?
My Twitter Suspension Lifted
Can Tweet Google, Can't Tweet Twitter
Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas
How To Increase Your Following On Twitter
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Eminem: The Relapse: Twitter
Converting To The Mass Follow Formula On Twitter

Data Rich Customer Service

Image via CrunchBase

Businesses collect so much data on individual customers and individual transactions. Social media is becoming so very pervasive. Your social media profile is portable. Soon enough you could take it to Amazon.com and all sorts of vendors big and small.

Just like your Facebook experience is different from mine, your shopping experience at a site ought to be unique to you, unique and rich.

Chris Brogan sounds rather futuristic in his latest blog post.

First One to This Standard Wins Make your website all about me.

From The Netizen BlogRoll

First One to This Standard Wins Make your website all about me.
Wiring a City and the Internet of Place how come there’s no simple news feed for a city? Why can’t we not see immediately (or even with an hour delay) all the various goings on within our city? It’s not like the information isn’t captured..... the bus tells me it’s coming
Dunkin Run- Coffee Lovers Are Served
You Still Need a Frame they build a following on Twitter, but do nothing to reach out to them via email marketing.
I Still Rather Like Blogging

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Dynamic PageRank And Real Time Search

Google beat the old search engines back in the late 1990s with its concept of PageRank. The more sites that linked to you, the more valuable was your site.

If something like real time search were to become possible, the concept of a dynamic pagerank would emerge. It would not be about how many sites linked to your site alone. It would be about do people actually click on those links to get to your site? Google's search algorithms have gone through so much evolution, and since they have been secret about it all for understantable reasons, it is hard to figure out what they have already done.

Google has been smart about constantly finetuning its search algorithms. They try to beat the so-called Search Engine Optimization people. It is a constant tussle.

Another thing would be content itself. After billions of search queries from people, Google should be able to figure out what sites and pages best delivered for what queries, and the number of search terms are for the most part finite. So if you can measure satisfaction, would that affect the way you do PageRank?

What about the content of the page itself? It might be a brand new page, but what if it is the most relevant page to my particular query? I guess search engines are not that good at reading yet.

Content creation and searching content will stick around for a long, long time.

And Bing's recent launch showed presentation is a whole new ballgame altogether. Microsoft decided they can't beat Google at its secret sauce of search, so they decided to take a bite at the other side of the coin: presentation of search results. Calling itself "a decision engine, not a search engine" was also a good marketing move.

They did not beat Google, but they did beat Yahoo, looks like. Now Bing is number two. Shoots for the stars, and you will get the moon.

Microblogging Search: What Took Google So Long?
Square Search
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Wolfram Alpha: An Answer Engine, Not A Search Engine
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Distributed Search
Google Is Working On Search
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream

From The Netizen BlogRoll

So, you want to be a Gmail ninja?
The Link Builder’s Guide To Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities
First One to This Standard Wins
Learning from Singer
All for Good: Bringing search, scale and openness to community service
A new landmark in computer vision
Search by Author on Google News
Blogger is Turning 10
Designing a lounge for the Day in the Cloud

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The Kevin Marks Departure

First Facebook stole the buzz from Google. Well, before that Google stole the buzz from Microsoft. Then Twitter stole the buzz from Facebook. And now Google is back on the bleeding edge with Google Wave. But Google Wave was created by a small team inside Google. That t

Image via CrunchBase

eam acted like a startup. And I think it is marvelous that Google Corporate nurtured that team and incubated Google Wave. But one persistent question will remain. At what point does Google become a Microsoft, an IBM, still big but no longer on the bleeding edge? One way to know Google has become big and old is that people with the newest and boldest ideas start leaving. I don't think that has happened to Google yet, but you can see some early signs.

This Reminds Me Of The Web 3.0 Definition Fight
I Did My Part
Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me
Google Wave Protest
Google Wave API Google Group: Stalinist Mindset

Engineering leader Kevin Marks leaves Google for the social web VentureBeat

A Social Force Departs Google Washington Post

Social networking advocate Marks departs Google Brand Republic

Google social-tech evangelist leaving company CNET News

Google's OpenSocial Evangelist Leaves Google GigaOm Kevin Marks, one of the leading voices on Google-backed OpenSocial and Friend Connect, has left the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine, he announced on his blog. ..... Google might have lost one of its most visible evangelists ...... Kevin, who in the past worked at Technorati, is one of the smartest guys I have met ....... I wonder if it has something to do with Google’s inability to totally grok the social web. ;-) OpenSocial was launched with much fanfare but seems to be lagging behind Facebook and its Facebook Connect effort.
A Social Force Departs Google TechCrunch Marks says he is working on a bunch of things “related to the social Web” and “activity streams” ...... Asked why he is leaving Google, he responds that his work is pretty much completed: “Over the last two years, we have built out the infrastructure for the social Web. Now it is time to build things on that infrastructure.” ..... is ready to work in a smaller company ..... The action, anyway, is moving to real time activity streams and Marks now seems to be pointed in that direction.
Farewell to Google My first taste of Google was to work on orkut, before starting the project now known as Google Profiles ....... Realising that Google had thousands of engineers, but very few comfortable speaking in public, I became a Developer Advocate, working to bridge external and internal developers, explaining the Social web to Google and OpenSocial and more to the wider web community. ......... build social infrastructure to make the web more social. ...... I'll be coding, writing and speaking on the social web via several new projects ..... If you want to get hold of me, I'm kevinmarks on most social networks, domains and of course Twitter. Or just google me.

This Reminds Me Of The Web 3.0 Definition Fight

I Did My Part
Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me
Google Wave Protest
Google Wave API Google Group: Stalinist Mindset

I thought I had done a good job of explaining here: Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me. But I never thought I was indispensable to the group. Although vision is a specialty all its own. And just like every Tom, Dick and Harry feels like he is an expert on politics, people think great coders are by extension also great visionaries. Not true. Some are, but it is not by extension.

I think I have come to my conclusion: I Did My Part. I will have to do in the blogosphere what I was hoping to do through this Google Group.

I have a feeling a lot of glass is going to be broken in the fight on the 3.0 definition down the line. Google Wave is not my baby. But the 3.0 fight will be my own.

NY Tech MeetUp Mailing List Web 5.0 Controversy
Web 5.0 Is Da Bomb
Competing For the Web 3.0 Definition
Conceptually Diligent: Web 5.0 Is Repackaging Hello
Defining Web 4.0

From The Google Wave Developer Blog

TwilioBot: Bringing Phone Conversations into Waves
1 Wave Sandbox, 5 Hours, 17 Awesome Demos

Image by niallkennedy via Flickr

The Making of the Sudoku Gadget
Google Wave API Office Hours
Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?

From The Official Google Blog

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave

I Did My Part

I protested. I did my part. If the protests are not going to work, and the ban on me at the Google Wave API Google Group is not going to be lifted, I move on. I guess I will have to find out other ways to spot trends in Google Wave development. I am sure there will be several good blog options. We are at the early stages of seeing blogs dedicated completely to Google Wave. Maybe some of those bloggers will do the reading for me in those Google Groups.

A great way to follow an open source project is in the very open perhaps.

Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me

Pages

Friday, June 26, 2009

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Tuesday, June 23, 2009