My fellow Traveling Geeks companion, Robert Scoble (aka the Scobleizer) and Peter Parkes from Skype were interviewed by Renee Blodgett who is the CEO of Magic Sauce Media, Co-founder of The Traveling Geeks and Founder and Producer of We Blog the World. We set up shop on the streets of London directly in front of the hotel we stayed in, the Malmaison, which naturally picked up the sweet sounds of British school children playing in the background. The topic for Renee’s interview today: Corporate blogging through the ages. Park’s role at Skype is essentially to take care of every bit of Skype that touches the social web (blogging, twitter, etc.), so he has personally witnessed the changes of social media in the corporate world. During this chat he delves into the differences of social media’s role during Skype 2006 and Skype now.

In this second video I interview Peter, this time accompanied by Experience Manager for Skype, Neil Dodd. Dodd currently deals with everything user experience related for Skype for Windows. The two discuss specifically how Skype uses social media to receive feedback and also to help blow up their new product launches, such as Skype 4.1 for Windows, which was launched last week. Dodd tells us about the new features in Skype 4.1 for Windows and Peter reveals his Twitter identity!

As you may well have heard, the big winner at The Europas Awards on Thursday night was Spotify, which won four awards (Best We app, Best New Startup, Best Founder Team and the Grand Prix). Here’s Shakil Khan (the video title is mis-spelt), Spotify’s Consigliere, sharing with writer and author Paul Carr and myself how he felt about winning four awards, including The Europas Grand Prix award:

The Traveling Geeks gathered together for a great turnout (despite the torrential downpours) at the Guardian’s Media Talk (live) podcast. Our agenda was to discuss journalism and it’s rapid change in the 21st Century. Listen here.

While more and more newspapers lose their audience and their advertisers, print is quite quickly, becoming obsolete. In the video below you will see Sarah Lacy, JD Lasica and Robert Scoble discuss and confirm this theory.

In the second video, I asked Howard Rheingold to further extend the conversation into a video discussion about the journalism course at Stanford and the method of dragging people into the 21st century:

Robert Scoble, Craig Newmark and Tom Foremski discuss what they have learned so far on the Traveling Geeks tour in London and what differences they see between Silicon Valley and the London tech scene.

This morning we had a breakfast with Tristan Wilkinson, Intel’s Director of Public Sector and other Intel execs. We had an interesting discussion about the use of  technology in the Western world, in developing countries, in the classroom. For example, we talked about how parents and teachers need to be more open to allowing kids to use technology, the internet, their mobile devices and not focus as much on the negative aspects of technology but rather on all the positive aspects. There is a huge problem with parents’ attitudes toward their kids’ involvement with technology and a huge divide in regards to educating parents:

We also had a little debate about whether Twitter is already a mainstream phenomenon or not:

Lastly, we discussed the importance of bringing technology to developing countries and what a difference even one cell phone in a village can make. However, Scoble, part of the TG party, also reiterated the idea which he calls the “Friend Divide” – this is to say that even if you have a computer and are able to get online, you’re still at a major disadvantage to people who have already built a rich network of friends which they can use to get and spread information.

Right now I am writing you from NESTA’s Reboot Britain conference. More postings to come as we continue on our fascinating British journey…

Web applications and services are all the rage right now and Twitter app creations are even hotter. So, not soon after SimilarWeb launched its website, their sister project SimilarSites, which is basically SimilarWeb’s search engine, presented an interesting twitter integration that brings most of their core functionality to twitter.

What is their core functionality exactly? SimilarWeb essentially provides a user-driven site suggestion and rating service, by accepting any website name a user enters, and yielding a list of related sites and data.

The usual protocol is to install SimilarWeb’s tool and to have it docked on the side of the browser. The dock displays suggested sites as thumbnails or as a list, while the user gets to set the display to his liking, submit new sites, and vote a suggested site up or down. Now, with the addition of SimilarWeb’s Twitter integration, a user can get his related (or “similar”) sites to any site in the world, with a simple Tweet. For example, if you wanted to search for all websites that are similar to Youtube, you would simply Tweet “Youtube” with the hashtag: #similarsites. SimilarSites will then send you an @ reply with a link to the search results page on similarsites.com. The service recommends all the sites to you, based on all the users’ votes. Or Offer, CEO of SimilarWeb, says “By offering this service, we hope to allow the user to get more information quickly and efficiently wherever they are; web, desktop client or mobile. This is a prime example of how companies can use Twitter and Social Media sites to expand their reach, increase their user-base and communicate with their users.”

I agree that the idea of the service is pretty cool. In theory. However, is this a feature that you as a twitter user would actually use? Would you want google to allow you to search Google by tweeting to @google?  By tweeting regarding similar sites on your stream, you disclose to everyone what sites you’re looking at (something you may not necessarily want to do) and you get zero value from Twitter’s network effect.  Wouldn’t you just prefer to use the SimilarSites Website for these queries?

SimilarWeb soon hopes to offer other “similar content” to users, such as “similar articles” or “similar products.”  I think all these services can bring users a lot of value but not necessarily as a service integrated with twitter. Even though twitter is all the rage right now, not everything today has to be somehow connected to twitter.

On this trip, we’ll be on the hunt for innovative uses of new technologies in Great Britain, especially by lesser-known companies, and spotlight how those innovations may improve people’s lives. We’ll also compare the thought leadership in Great Britain’s tech industry and compare it with what’s taking place in Silicon Valley. The highlights of our UK agenda include events such as The Traveling Geeks TweetUp in Chelsea, podcast with the Guardian, and The Techcrunch Europa Awards with Mike Butcher. 

This exciting group of jet-setters consists of  myself, JD Lasica (founder of Socialmedia.biz & Socialbrite.org, respected author>Socialbrite.org), Robert Scoble (former blogger for Microsoft, now works for Rackspace’s Building43), Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist),  Sarah Lacy (Editor at Techcrunch, reporter for BusinessWeek and co-host of the Yahoo Tech Ticker show), Tom Foremski (founder of  Siliconvalleywatcher.com), Sky Schuyler (CTO of The Dalai Lama Foundation), Renee Blodgett. (co-founder of TG, founder of We Blog the World www.weblogtheworld.com , marketing consultant and blogger), Jeff Saperstein (co-founder of TG, Author, teacher, consultant).Susan Bratton (co-founder of Personal Life Media), Sarah Austin (founder of Pop17.com), Meghan Asha(co-founder of Nonsociety.com) and Howard Rheingold (teaches at Stanford and UC Berkeley and author of  Tools for Thought, The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs).

Last year the Traveling Geeks came to Israel and I hosted them. This time we are going to be hosted by London locals. Should be very exciting. I’m thrilled to embark on this week long geek fest. I’m sure to meet some very interesting Brits along the way. In fact, if anyone is interested in meeting any of us for interviews, please email me at: press[at]blonde20.com and we’ll try to make it happen!

During the last 2 years the web has become a meaningful place for finding projects that can be done from home. There are hundreds of freelance marketplaces and crowd-sourcing websites which offer different projects that can be done by people from across the world and as more companies outsource instead of hiring in house, the sheer amount of freelance contract work is expanding at a rapid pace.

There’s no second guessing that it’s the perfect time for a freelance job search engine like Donanza to come along. There are of course other sites that provide this service but Donanza is unique in that it strives to aggregate as much information as possible from as many sources as possible into one place. Today freelancers and enthusiasts need to navigate between many sites (Elance, Helium, Crowdspring etc.) in order to find the best project for them. DoNanza’s goal is to expose their users to every project of their field that has been posted on the Web.

Donanza’s other focus is to provide a very user friendly, easy to use platform, which is essentially set up much like Google’s search engine, with filters. Once on the main page, the idea is to simply state your skill or field of interest in the search box and project data is immediately displayed in one single format. There are clever slider filters on the side of the page which allow you to rev your pay requirements up or down and choose by date posted. You’re also able to hone in on which type of project and which exact websites you’d like to search through.

Donanza’s unique focus on the specific niche of online jobs, that can be performed from home, combined with the powerful tools it gives its users, make for a unique and satisfying user experience. And while the economy continues to slide on a decline, Donanza’s relevance in the startup scene only climbs higher.

Screenshot of DoNanza Homepage:

Screenshot of DoNanza Search Results:

Social networks have replaced job boards and companies looking for skilled, savvy employees now have a plethora of options for recruitment online. Recruiting through social networks allows unprecedented reach in terms of potential employees and amount of information available on each candidate, with the added bonus of being one of the most cost-effective recruitment tools around.

Watch the story of Larry the Bird:

For a minute and 49 seconds, Cohen beams endearingly into the camera and tells us all about NY based startup, SpeakLike, a fantastic new language translation Web service which cleverly translates messages, emails, blogs, RSS and Twitter feeds, in real time. Essentially, the product allows you to communicate with others in 30 different languages without having to use clumsy, copy-paste methods. Cohen explains how SpeakLike is really ideal for businesses that need to communicate with international customers, quickly and efficiently or for bloggers who have readers/followers from all over the world. Find out more about SpeakLike in the video below:

Being an investor in Twitter, Fred’s talk touched on what he initially saw in Twitter before investing, what he thinks will happen next with Twitter as far as monetization, and what will eventually happen to Google as social media, like Twitter, Facebook, blogging and blog commenting grow at an imminently fast pace.

He delved specifically into 3 major points on what he thinks will be Twitter’s business model, while writing off immediately the usual ideas of charging people for its use and posting banner ads.

While only a bit of spatter was spent on his other investments such as Boxee and blog comment service, Disqus, he did manage to share with us his general investment thesis as well as enlighten us with his theories on how the “internet disrupts industries” and also entertain us with terms such as “social media ninja.” Hear all about it below:

Applications will be accepted until midnight, Wednesday June 24, 2009. On Tuesday, June 30, 2009, 10 finalists will be chosen then later presented their award at the David Inter-Continental Hotel, Tel Aviv on July 13, 2009 during the event.

To find out more details, visit the TWS2009 website.

Good luck to you all!

Facebook, as we all may know was born in Chris’ early dorm room days at Harvard. But what we may not know are the little details and steps that were taken before its creation. The video I captured at an NYU conference hall unveils all that we may have missed along the Facebook way.

The subject matter moves on to more recent events such as the development of Chris’ online community platform, MyBO (My Barack Obama), which played an essential role in helping connect Obama’s local supporters, and winning the presidential election. Chris explains how the use of technology made it easier and more efficient for campaigners to do the things they have already always done, and how the platform essentially just made it easier for people to give money to the campaign. Check out the video below to get the full picture.

Chris Hughes Speaks at Startup 09 Conference - Part 1

Chris Hughes Speaks at Startup 09 Conference - Part 2

Chris Hughes Speaks at Startup 09 Conference - Part 3

(Chris is now living in NY and spends time visiting students at different Universities to discuss their entrepreneurial ideas and to give them advice. He is said to be on the look out for young, fresh ideas…)

I want to give a great big thanks to Balora and Cnaan Aviv. Balora did all the beautiful UI and design for the site and Cnaan worked his programming magic. They both suffered a lot from me in the last few months due to my obsessiveness for everything to look/feel absolutely perfect so I want to give them both a special thanks for putting up with me and not screening my calls at 2am.

I hope that you guys like it and believe it captures the Blonde 2.0 spirit! All positive feedback write back as comments. All negative feedback please send to Balora and Cnaan. Thanks!