ben barren - rss'ing down under

YouTube - TWITTER WHORE part 2 [del.icio.us]

2008-07-20T17:29:48-05:00

twitter vs friendfeed tweetho!

Hugh Martin: Blogging Future of Media 2008 [del.icio.us]

2008-07-20T06:22:59-05:00

Maybe one day we can all move past the schoolyard syndrome and just get on with the job of making, distributing and selling great material ... in whatever format.

Web 3.0: Chicken Farms on the Semantic Web [del.icio.us]

2008-07-19T21:14:30-05:00

Development of the Resource Description Framework was under way at the World Wide Web Consortium, which produced a first specification in 1999. However, the W3C metadata activity that had spawned it was inactive, and some original RDF supporters were shif

Pressflip Is A Belly Flop [del.icio.us]

2008-07-19T17:33:36-05:00

Pressflip/Uncov is a perfect illustration of The Man In The Arena quote from a 1910 Theodore Roosevelt speech given in Paris. It’s awfully easy to criticize the work of others but incredibly difficult to build something unique yourself. The Uncov guys a

Information Arbitrage: Monitor110: A Post Mortem [del.icio.us]

2008-07-19T08:27:01-05:00

By mid-2005 the system worked, but spam was becoming more prevalent and caused the matching results to deteriorate, e.g., too much junk clogging the output. Around the same time we started to dig into natural language processing and the statistical proces

Gnip API v1.2 [del.icio.us]

2008-07-19T05:35:36-05:00

There are two primary roles that API users fall into; Publishers and Subscribers. You may be one, the other, or both depending on your situation. Publishers push data into the system; here's a Publisher example. Subscribers consume data from the system; h

Six Apart Update Stream [del.icio.us]

2008-07-19T05:23:16-05:00

Six Apart's Update Stream provides a simple interface to clients who wish to subscribe to a persistent stream of entries made in the Six Apart universe, and is an excellent alternative to writing a spider to crawl LiveJournal, TypePad, and Vox weblogs.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Gnip: FeedBurner + Ping Server for Web APIs [del.icio.us]

2008-07-19T05:18:05-05:00

Gnip doesn’t actually store the user data from the social networking site. It simply stores a record that indicates that “user X on site Y made an update of type Z at time T”. The thinking is that web sites will publish a notification to Gnip whenev

TechCrunchIT » Blog Archive » Android Not Open: No XMPP, No Source, No SDK For Some [del.icio.us]

2008-07-19T04:50:39-05:00

The initial XMPP implementation was provided via the Smack library, an XMPP implementation developed by Jive Software. Developers started complaining back in January of this year that the implementation had been changed, and that it wasn’t adequate for

Welcome To Waz-Warez :: Index page [del.icio.us]

2008-07-19T03:01:23-05:00

Another one of those free webvideo links streaming sites to bookmark! Watching Smart People 2nite.. still looking for copy of The Wackness!

IRL the batman has heat.

2008-07-19T01:27:00.001+10:00

heath joker amazing.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

112am and just got in from a great nite where i scored a perfect middle centre back imax 550pm session with about 15 other @minm-mtub-twitter folk to see the batman dark knight. with the last bit of charge i got the attached pic of heath ledger the joker in a nurses outfit. thats as much as a spoiler as i'll give. that and the movie (first half) most reminded me of was heat, but rather than deniro v pacino, it was ledger v bale - equally talented genx rather than babyboomer adversaries. christopher nolan is a great director and just watching how quarter billion dollar film is made, along with such great actors of a generation, on the imax screen with some great folk, who up to that point minus the odd face didnt even know. so thx to @coliwilso for tix, @andrewsayer for reserving seat and leavn tick4pickup.. and all the other kewl IRL (in real life) folk where it's always good to 'cross-over'. u r kewl @candybug @girlbug @yonderboy @thommo @praxxis @bethanie @jackienopants + all the other awesome peeps, i believe there was an @cornetto with an m yank or similar. prob lucky my blackberry didnt have any charge or i prob wouldnt have been able to stop myself liveblog, but sometimes u have to live in the present, suspend motion, and just let it happen2u, the movie, life, and the next slice of pizza. as the joker said to the batman on a friday night "you complete me." now bed i guess, even if the adrenalin is running a bit, not used to this IRL thang :D

Bruce Wayne: I knew the mob wouldn't go down without a fight. But this is different. They crossed the line.
Alfred Pennyworth: You crossed the line first, sir. You hammered them. And in their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully understand. Some men aren't looking for anything logical. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

@minm mtub darkknight@imax sold out. duh.

2008-07-18T07:42:00.006+10:00

cant wait4 darkknight.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

lots of docs done this week, so ive achieved my goal of substituting travel to meetings with actual document production. now i'm back to square, which i seem to spend my life chasing. how long will the equilibrium last ? so i'm off to melbourne, and my whole day was based around seeing darkknight@imax with the @minm/mtub crew. (u have to like it when twitter/social media groups resemble the graffiti krews in melbourne we grew up with)

unfortunately because im not 'attached to the australian network' on facebook 'they' tell me, whatever that means, my rsvp for darkknight didnt happen - i thought no worries book a ticket from the imax site or go there during day friday and buy a ticket. (i also didnt want to rvsp if i wasnt in melbs) anyway totally sold out, as perez is saying it is in 700 US cinemas, really going to be one of biggest films ever if u look at twitter buzz. hopefully one of the @minm's pullsout. come on @thommo do u really want to go ?:)

Perez : "MovieTickets.com says The Dark Knight has sold out 700 performances in North America and is outselling 3 of MovieTickets.com’s Top 10 Performing Films of All-Time. To date, the newest Batman has more than 3-times as many advance tickets as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, more than 2-times as many as Spider-Man 3 and almost 2-times as many as Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at the same point in the sales cycle."

So Enterprise or Blog CMS ? While Podtech sold for less than $500K after $7m, another lesson why VC' shouldnt make media/content production investments (esp in one based on a NPR/ABC serious boring public radio). But Fred already knows that, Oui! Although as nik says watch out for being bought by google if u actually want your integration to happen quickly - 3 year no thx. OK I'm off to Melbourne, twitter dm me if u want to catchup firstly if u have a blackknight ticket (ok u dont:) or wanna catchup... l8r, h8r.. or read a 2003 google product development process by marissa mayer which is still farely accurate and ignored by 99% of Australia :)

McInblog: Sharp's Dull Service / My eCommerce Nightmare [del.icio.us]

2008-07-17T05:52:19-05:00

It also seems apparent that Sharp supplies their warranty service partners with B-grade or refurbished parts to repair their TVs. The fact that my TV's original motherboard and two of the replacement motherboards were defective and a second LCD controller

Seedcamp [del.icio.us]

2008-07-17T04:14:43-05:00

Australia has Future of Media Summit and Pubcamp but Europe has seedcamp. "From securing funding to developing the right network, young entrepreneurs in Europe face challenges in building globally competitive technology businesses. Through the provision o

Understanding Israeli Startups: An Interview with LightSpeed Venture Partners [Israel Media Tour] [del.icio.us]

2008-07-16T19:46:20-05:00

Two years ago Lightspeed partnered with Gemini to create the Internet Lab, a venture designed to give seed funding to early-stage Israeli startups. They have invested in six companies so far as part of the Lab. The first of these companies was Outbrain, c

there aint no opensocial shindig goin on downunder.

2008-07-17T09:53:00.004+10:00

go cadel#1 #tourdefrance.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

did i mention how crap the broadband is here on mornington peninsula using iprimus (not my beloved internode) 24 minutes on a useless convo with IT support after waking up and cant even stream hughesykate@ nova100.com.au or load googlereader. lucky twhirl was chugging away. as part of my unseries on what australia doesnt have which america does, todays post comes from the linkedin blog and is about google's open -social and the opensource shindig project, in which i explore the long term damage to our psyche of receiving our movies months later than America while we were growing up, and television series sometimes not at all. (i still need to see sixfeetunder finale)

so how many australian startups or large web publishers are probably using, deploying, building a business around widgets ? im trying to raise a finger, but its looking like an inverted peace sign. Linkedin show the benefit of geographic proximity in mountain view where paperbag sessions involve geeks from different companies, using open source as a way of showing kewl things, that individuals at night and ultimately companies during the day, can use to their advantage.

The Linkedin Blog : "In September 2007, Google started thinking about Social APIs. Google Gadgets would be better with access to Social Data ... but that's just Google. It was recognized that this is something that many others would like access to.. In November, many Googlers started working on a Google Code project based on Java and iGoogle. However, there was too much proprietary code. In December, Brian McCallister of Ning created an ASF Proposal for Shindig. It was a rough port of iGoogle but with Ning's PHP code. This turned out to be a great starting point. It immediately got interest from Google, Hi5, MySpace and others. While most committers are still from Google, there are 12 developers that work on it full time and they're adding 2 committers each month. Shindig is a Java/PHP implementation of OpenSocial."

so 12 people fulltime working on opensource widget protocols, with a range of socnet companies/divisions from google opensocial, myspace, linkedin, ning, etc going to benefit. is any1 surprised that no aussie co's are involved ? i'd love to hear of 12 people working fulltime in australia on widgets ? :)

this is the point where i come back to finance : speaking to those with dotcom experience they think its farely easy to get engineers because they remember offering them stock options + salary. thats because 1997-2002 there were alot more companies funded, and the fundings were $5m-$50m. that created alot of jobs for engineers, who then got experience in building the widgets of the day. without the money funding the new widget businesses locally, how would a knowledge bank be built up of suitably skilled engineers? (who are able to better define a business technical roadmap and execute against it), which then becomes attractive to an investor.

it's a chickennegg problem which in australia means a straights sets loss. 'no goddamn widget business ere. i thought u said they were the new plastics.' ok rant over, im 7 documents done this week, with 3 to go, and some melbourne travel tomorrow.. if i can manage/afford /coordinate it, i really want to go to dark knight. they said on movie show last nite that heaths role has a touch of brando and cagney, i guess they like the old metaphors there, thats australia4u; old. All that said maybe there are some covert aussies currently working on or looking to get involved in the shindig project ?

Also : Check Mashable on Lightspeed Ventures, for how much better they do it in Israel : "Two years ago Lightspeed partnered with Gemini to create the Internet Lab, a venture designed to give seed funding to early-stage Israeli startups. They have invested in six companies so far as part of the Lab. The first of these companies was Outbrain, creator of a content rating and recommendations widget. Through the Lab they have also backed StyleShake, a do-it-yourself fashion company headquartered in the UK that allows users to design their own clothing and have it sent to them; Vestopia, a resource for investors; and Bahu, a social network for people under 25."

$15 for 20 minutes

2008-07-16T20:32:00.003+10:00

09-17-05_1355.jpg
Originally uploaded by anaeel

Technation is follown the umair to the future argument rather than invoking nationalism in our innovation arguments, so Tilda may have a sample of where we are going to end up : Sleeping Spas, hehe. From Fk a Love Story : "I could have a 20 minute nap for $15 and it was just a short walk from the office. Fuck, yeah. The place was a soothing pallet of deep pinks and oranges and, to my relief, there was no Enya or mating whale noises on the speakers.. I was escorted into a small, oval shaped room, its walls upholstered in crisp white.. My host slowly eased me back until my legs were just slightly above the level of my head. She draped a blanket over me and asked if I wanted the lights dimmed or total darkness (total darkness). After adjusting the volume of the thunderstorm, she reminded me that they can not guarantee that I would sleep, and left me to my "powernap."" If you cant get to a local sleep spa, but need a nap, do what Salavador Dali did...

TechCrunchIT » Blog Archive » Why Google Slows Down Acquired Companies [del.icio.us]

2008-07-16T19:17:24-05:00

YouTube managed to pull it off, but it is a rare case inside Google. One of the first main challenges for a company that has been acquired by Google is adopting the proprietary technology stack used within the company. Google do use Linux and open source,

Mike Davidson - Enterprise CMSes vs. Blog CMSes [del.icio.us]

2008-07-16T19:09:42-05:00

True or false: Most major news organizations (e.g. The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, ESPN, etc) would be better off running their entire online publishing operations through a modified blogging platform (e.g. WordPress, Movable Type, Newsvine, or a

What are Australians Doing Online [del.icio.us]

2008-07-16T05:13:34-05:00

# # Social Networking & Forums - now represent 8% of visits to All Categories. MySpace and Facebook are the leading players, ranking 4th and 7th respectively amongst all websites. Visits to Social Networking & Forums websites was ahead of UK usage (7.69%)

Stilgherrian · Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu! [del.icio.us]

2008-07-16T04:42:28-05:00

Some funny comments : "Fuck the facts — just make it up and call it participation. Christ what a boring fart you are. Old before your time and as stupid as the aussie press pack. Seriously just because a bunch of lazy old journalists cannot be bothered

A VC: Making Sense Of Dichotomy [del.icio.us]

2008-07-16T03:41:49-05:00

I am confident that many of these 'newfangled web businesses' will deliver on their promise of revenues and cash flows. But many will not. We haven't seen a huge number of doors closing in web startup land and I think we are going to see more soon The fac

Widgets drive Web readers - DMNews [del.icio.us]

2008-07-15T19:26:32-05:00

If you look at the pure conversion rate — 400,000 Seventeen views to 65,000 clicks on our site — that's a conversion rate that is much better than you are going to get on anything other than a super-sexy dedicated e-mail. What we learn from these wi

what australia can summize about teh #fom08.

2008-07-16T09:34:00.004+10:00

summize.com redirect
Originally uploaded by redbarren

so yday the aussie media vs bloggers 2d world had a bit of a watershed where their leader the hyperconnected @mpesce twitterd something along the lines of the backchannel is the conference. once u've lived on technology for quite awhile u get used to, so for us the whole summize-ustream side of a conference is nuthn new. but the broader aussies are getting it. #fom08.

so sitting up at 2am and watching US come online with official confirmation of twitter buying summize, with summize redirecting and rebranded, shows how quickly things can move in 24 hours. 2 posts and points i found vinteresting to prod my current thinking of where i am with my business and what it takes to succeed ($15m exit, primarily in twitter shares i assume, think they had raised $750K-ish so the maths are nice)

the first lesson is summize to start with had a great team and the right space but didnt solve exactly the right problem, it was too broad. from one of their backers john borthwick (is betaworks building everything out of nyc?) : "The history of most startup’s is made up of iterations, learning and restarts — Summize was no exception. The Summize team worked hard for a little over a year developing sentiment based algorithms aimed at crawling the review and blogosphere. Late last year they formally launched a web product that let you search reviews for books, movies and music. It worked well — offering summaries of all the reviews for a particular book, structured programmatically so they could be organized and swiftly digested by users or publishers. Yet it was complicated — not in theory or in its presentation — but in practice it was a complicated problem that most end users didnt know they needed. As an old friend would put it Summize v1. didn’t address a discernible need or pain point. "

the 2nd lesson is the quality of the summize geeks. if u sell your company, this is exactly the blogpost u (well i anyway) want to read (reminds me of the way the feedburner way had their own unique voice) from summize leader Jay Virdy : "At Summize, we assembled a small, quirky, but highly efficient and experienced team to build a powerful platform to extract user opinions from blogs and review sites. Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases (e.g., when someone says “nice” it isn’t necessarily in a positive sense). Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine. In 2008, we discovered Twitter as a source of the most timely and relevant opinions on trending topics. We immediately embarked on a plan to develop the best Twitter search and discovery application to serve the Twitter community and burgeoning Twitter ecosystem."

so summize were able to refine quite substantially their initial vision, and rather than it be a radical change, were able to narrow in and find a hook for their overall structured indexing and sentiment analysis of the blogosphere, which became #hashtag + @username persistent searches. and they had the engineers to do it. I've extracted the technical elevator pitch on the summize ppl mentioned on their blog :

"Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases.."

"Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine"

"Matt Sanford, a web crawling wizard, ops extraordinaire, measurement zealot, and foreign language nut, to shift his attention from blogs to microblogs, and to Twitter in particular."

"Mike, a C++ and Java guru so he churned out fancy beautified code to parse tweets, thread disparate conversations, and pluck out highly accurate and meaningful trending topics from the Twitter public timeline."

"Nutty professor Adbur Abdir Abdur aka “El Hefe.”

"Eric’s also a self-acclaimed IR wunderkid who can speak in SQL and can invert, convert, revert, subvert, and even evert relational databases and inverted indices to do exactly what he wants."

"Greg, our CTO, the “Pixelator”, wanted to rename Summize “tweird”, so that tells you a lot about him.. he’s pretty good at UI design.. assembled all the pieces and served up an elegant user experience for the Twitterati to marvel at."

My point in highlighting the above, is point out the difference between Australia and the US. In Australia yday there was a conference where ppl were learning about what twitter and the backchannel was. Above u have a team of Dr's, Professors, ex-AOL'ers, entrepreneurs that have sold companies before, that are highly technical, were able to shift or narrow their initial strategy, got large uptake, nailed a product, then got acquired by an IT thing that itself had had problems scaling, and had disabled their persistent search product which summize do. They didnt spend the last 2 years going to conferences talking about print vs online media models. They built and refocused a 2008 search product which was obviously going to be bought. Didnt they just fly past tweetscan ?

In Australia, not only are we too late to get twitter (which is just a metaphor) but being on the entrepreneurial side, recruiting a team of equivalent to above, is near impossible locally. Recruiting a team (as a startup) at 50% of the above talent is near impossible. The pool just isnt deep enough. You could probably get 1, maybe 2 of the above standard people here to one venture. So i'd rate at about 25% max what we could achieve here peoplewise. And given summize barely made it, having to do a major redirection midstream, 25% leaves u dead in the water.

Dead in the water maybe, but also with pretty good guidelines about what is needed for success. In Australia, I agree with @bronwen that business development folk, and non engineering boys networks still control dollars. its all comfortable oligopolies + low standards.
It was said yday by one of the Future of Media Summit #fom08 backchanneler's that the future of media may be participation, and by that it was meant participation in the backchannel. What would be better if like broadband, we were able to build out our own piece of the backchannel, connecting in to other's pieces and api's as needed, but building and owning our own backchannel, rather than having a short term redirected, rebranded one owned by someone else. If somehow we were able to achieve some building blocks, get some domain experience into our engineers, rather than talk talk talk, we might be able to participate not just in the watching of the new teevee, but the making of it.

* Extra bonus point, some good points in blogosphere about twitters business model acquired via summize such as expoused by konterkariert found via betaworks : " Twitter + Summize is like ICQ + Nielsen//NetRatings ;-) Or Twitter could hyper target their ads to Twitter Messages with positive feelings about products, protecting marketeers to advertise their goods near negative sentiments related to their company. Peer39 is just starting this technology." Also reminds me of what Brad Feld said about Newsgator and people's impatience for companies to have business models obvious, sorted, clear, communicated etc

Feld.com : "I've been really pleased with the way NewsGator's widget business has taken off. Two years ago I regularly got questions from people about "how would NewsGator monetize the consumer web reader business." The answer to that is "they won't - but they'll use the infrastructure they've build - which is rock solid, scalable, and unique - to build a really interesting widget and data business based on RSS content."

THINK / Musings :: Summize acquired by Twitter [del.icio.us]

2008-07-15T18:03:08-05:00

The history of most startup’s is made up of iterations, learning and restarts — Summize was no exception. The Summize team worked hard for a little over a year developing sentiment based algorithms aimed at crawling the review and blogosphere. Late la

ill take five by five lesbidaring with pretty dumb things than carrie 2.0 w/ nonsociety.com

2008-07-15T21:57:00.005+10:00

bubble burstn
Originally uploaded by redbarren

so there's the new geeks can be grrls post Carrie aspirants that take their Macbook Airs to the Hamptons and dine with 1938 + the post blogging LA poker kru. And hey i won't say their new "network" - nonsociety.com : 'see whats up with our crazy lives' (tv show must be close now! check hulu anyday) is not in my rss, as it is, just as perez tizzles. but when it comes to gender analysis, i'll much prefer to be schooled from pretty dumb things : 'more sesquipedalian than fuck, a big bunch of writing'. u had me at your blog title. i'll take my media non-mediated every time pls. big words just a bonus.

i'm not even a buffy fan, but i know enough intelligent postmodernists that do, to make me think i should rewatch and episode and mine the subtext. from chelseagirl's latest post : "There’s the constant play in language, for one thing. The way that adjectives become nouns, as in “It gives me a happy.” The way that the characters invent new slang, as in “That’s the kick!” for saying something’s cool, or “Five-by-five” to say A-OK. The way that the show employs neologisms like “vampification” and “lesbidar.” The way that the show pokes fun at cultural idiom, as when Buffy refers to vampires as “undead Americans.” All of that flavor of lexicographical jump-roping makes me get a good-down low tingle."

virtual #fom08'n : lookn4 hyperconnectedness in all places.

2008-07-15T09:27:00.003+10:00

so the syd 2.0 suit brigade r doing the hyperconnected across 2 continents thing @ future media summit, or more specifically #fom08 which is all u need to search and subscribe on summize, and its like u r there. the pollenizer peeps have been streaming audio so far ere, but seems a bit tanglnd ? Here is (videonall closer2front, more stable people in it room via) Stilgherrian uStream. Look at all those lovely suits taking notes, looking for hyperconnectedness in all the wrong places, so they can go back to their workplace and run lunchtime paperbag presentations; create grass roots web2 innovation training sessions, and be invited by the CEO to run a collaboration, wiki, blog social network, hyperconnectedness project. before long u r at newscorp, and ghost writing a twitter account for the follow no1 pope downunder.

ma' 60th + some sunday night back of moleskine 'me own hawtness' product sketchn.

2008-07-13T22:28:00.012+10:00

demons footy.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

so it's been a farely busy day, with my mums 60th bday party that incl a layer upon layer of cheesecake with blue, brie, camembert and other tasty cheeses! had a beautiful point leo dusk run in prep for a week where I'm not going to drive anywhere near the 22+ hours, 5 days straight, I did last week. im going2get detailed spec work done, props like hughs i'm behind on, vc questionnaires, get settled into new port melbourne office, and other action points u commit to in a meeting. focus, productivity, resolution, and hardball where/if needed. by friday, ill be bases loaded. locknload.

i've been sketching alot of product features in my moleskine @ coffee shop time, which my left brain/right brain categorises under creative/art. as it may get developed, or not. some of it goes into client projects, others into our own properties/plan. for quite awhile it's been the former, but i'm aiming to get some of my own technical resource. why give up your technical resource if u get nothing back for it?

as soon as i started using delicious alot (up to 3700 items now!), the area of tagging and annotating made alot of sense to me, and more so, created value. if i ever forget something i've published, i go to delicious/benbarren/whatever _tag_i_used.

similarly, when google reader launched "share" items that was a feature that was really useful to me. initially i didnt use it for much, but as soon I realised I could feedburn my shared items, and then publish to my blog sidebar, it was becoming pretty valuable. your 'shared' / favourited / liked items whether it be google reader or friendfeed are very high signal, vs thousands or in my case tens of thousands of blog posts that go past me every month.

from my google reader trends for last 30 days : "From your 1,836 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 45,738 items, starred 1 items, shared 1,678 items." - So the key there is 1 in 25 of the posts, from blogs I have subscribed to, I share. those are the items I want to do more with, that currently i go only do a very limited amount with, anyway....

recently i've also started using friendfeed's 'share on friendfeed' bookmarklet (my shares 'ere), and that is great for the benefit that u can clip/highlight images on pages, as well as cutnpaste text. the item then goes into your friendfeed stream, which others can like/comment on, but it doesnt seem to have it's own obvious rss feed, which could then be published on blog sidebar. (u can blogbadge your whole friendfeed stream tho)

so delicious + feedburner, google reader shared + feedburner, and my friendfeed page, along with other blogbadges such as flickr, are great ways of sharing non-blogged items on your blog and lifestreaming services. however what i'm missing is ability to manipulate the shared items further.

my google reader shared items outputs to a public page above header, that is very dumb/vanilla. there are some cheesy design templates, with about 3-4 to choose from. unlike blogspot where I can say i want 70 blog posts published on benbarren.blogspot.com home page; i can insert html, css etc; on google reader shared items page there is no blog theme or customisation of the page. similarly it outputs as one rss feed. there is no ability to tag items such as delicious. no way of grouping the videos, podcasts, hot auto pics, recently funded startups, sneakers, watches, and all the nichepassions i/we all have.

a simple solution is for google reader to allow me delicious like tagging of my shared items, and then create feeds for each of my tags. it would also be really kewl given they've bought feedburner and own blogger, that if i didnt want to just take the rss feeds and fburn onto wordpress, etc if i could turn each of these tags into widgets, whose layout/css/fonts/colours/size I could customise. And then put onto my (existing) blog sidebar, or wait for it.... setup a different page with a domain (+/or subdomain) of my choosing. use a non blog layout if i so desired.

then each of my tags could become a widgetable element of the page, and meta-tags could be created; for example i might use a meta-tag for video, podcasts, or big buckets like auto (porsche, ferrari, lambo tags), fashion (models, sneakers, watches tags), money (vc, startups, web2 tags) etc

using such an approach, instead of google just allowing me to choose between 4 headers (Ninja, already wtf?) - I could actually choose between different page layouts - blog format, sure no worries, 1 column rss reader format ? 2 or 3 column ? what about a fashion magazine layout ? or maybe u want a wall street journal look ? or that great new fashion mag architecture consumeristy post wallpapermag that all the designer r raving about!

my east-westcoast pitch is (the roll'yer'own magazine layout of) magcloud meets (high signal:noise of) google reader shared items meets feedly (excepts it about your public not private persona + all about customisation not reformatting googlereader), with the beauty + reblogging of tumblr. it's also prob solving the same one fred wilson has been blogging about (and using) zemanta - but coming at the solution from a more extending reblogging functionality from rss reader, than as a blogging platform plugin.

this customised realtime reflection of my best of liveweb at any one point of time, would have a range of CMS type features where I'd select (and hide) the items which I thought were best of what I'd selected from my feeds, tweets and lifestreams. I'd setup sections/headings/positions like :

ME OWN HAWTNESS (TODAY).

ABOVE FOLD
- Me Hawtness Image of the Day ala front page of newspaper
- My Latest Blog Posts... as I'd want people to read
- Ma Tweets, and anything else very recent ie last 4 hours.
- Videos Ive watched + rated, inline player
- Audio Im listening, inline of course, friendfeed doin this well
- Hawtness Objekts of the Day : porsches, sneakers, designy stuff
- Of Interest, people on friendfeed, on google reader, flickr that i tend to take an unhealthy interest in and i want to tell the world how good they r, and their avatar looks good on me'page.

BELOW FOLD
- Favourite Posts I've shared, viewable by recency or tag, needs to have that google reader, ajaxy scroll down the page, ideally some type of streaming ere, and or heck lets give em an AIR app option here. that would be good. And unlike google reader's shared items page, can there be more than 10 items per page, 10 is crazy, like google reader it needs to be infinite, until the isp has no more bandwith to push down the page or u run out of items....

Yeah so basically I want to turbo charge my google reader shared items, you can see the experiment i am running on the right hand side of my blog sidebar, where i've published 2 google reader shared items accounts (with same opml) and shared 2 sets of items to publish there.

I'd like to be able to take my shared items and then enable tools to do some tagging, feed splicing, and then widgety, page layout type tools. Or to be more ninja about it, a folksonomy based browser plugin to google reader, or some technical way that allows me to tag my google reader shared items at the time I share them. so i can then have individual feeds for each of the tags of shared items!

See below how feedly (worth tracking their blog to see their evolution, as they r very end user focused) reformat your google reader opml into another perspective on how to represent your feeds, what they dont do is provide a customisable re-aggregation of your favourite annotations : but they are well positioned to do so due to their advanced annotations/g-shared features!

alternately u bypass google reader alltogether and get fave hyperlinks from mining opml elsewhere, or index outbound links from twitter ? hehe but at moment the feedreader (followed by blog platform-browser plugin) seems to make sense as it's where people are in sharing (or alternatively blogging) mode.. just at moment goog reader sharing is dumb : its not going anywhere other than onto a reader's shared items public page/feed, people's blog sidebar, lifestreams like friendfeed, and aggregators such as readburner. (which i think could be a really kewl business, esp if it could get past tech/web2 etc)

so thats my sunday night back of moleskine sketching - google reader shared items 'me own hawtness' - as i listen to safran and father bob on their sunday JJJ show.

Inglorious Bastards - From the rumoured QT script.
My name is Lt. Aldo Raine, and I’m putting together a special team. And I need me eight soldiers. Eight – Jewish – American – Soldiers. Now y’all might have heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we’ll be leavin a little earlier. We’re gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin’ guerilla army, we’re gonna be doin one thing, and thing only, Killin Nazi’s. The members of the Nationalist Socialist Party, have conquered Europe through murder, torture, intimidation, and terror. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do to them. Now I don’t know about y’all. But I sure as hell, didn’t come down from the goddamn smoky mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half Sicily, and then jump out of a fuckin air-o-plane, to teach the Nazi’s lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got no humanity. There the foot soldiers of a Jew hatin, mass murderin manic, and they need to be destroyed. That’s why any and every son-of-a-bitch we find wearin a Nazi uniform, there gonna die. We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty, they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty, in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the German will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heals, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans, will be sickened by us. And the Germans, will talk about us. And the Germans, will fear us. And when the Germans close their eyes at night, and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us, that it tortures them with. But I got a word of warning to all would be warriors. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me, personally. Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And all y’all will git me, one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred Nazi’s or you will die trying.

keeping 70% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

2008-07-12T10:55:00.002+10:00

Originally uploaded by miso,

Today it's the big battle, traditional rivalry of Rye vs Sorrento. The Mornington Peninsula equivalent of Carlton vs Collingwood. Being neighbouring suburbs, u can have people that live within 100 metres use the football scream to yell abuse at each other. What could be better ?

Mashable make a good point about how on the web free is standard, so the itunes name the price keep 70% of revenue, is the adsense of the app world : ".. we can’t discount the fact that online apps are missing a key component: revenue models. Unlike the Web, Apple’s App store provides developers with the opportunity to sell applications at any price and effectively help them turn a profit on something that was making nothing online."

$30m / 3G

2008-07-12T01:58:00.004+10:00

Originally uploaded by miso,

@m0nty called the iphone jumpn the shark, and yes its about the 500 apps, and yes its about the freemium app upsell, but i just wish they'd invent a qwerty keyboard. Damn i luv that @miso stencil streetart. 20 hours into the 3.0 device being sold the twittersphere has been pulverised. Oh well, nice to see the Guardian prop up blog valuations with the PaidContent purchase - 10 times revenue ?

Gigaom with a good writeup : "While at first blush it doesn’t make sense that a newspaper company is buying paidContent, many overlook the fact that GMG also has a division called Guardian Professional, a multimillion-dollar B2B publisher. With its thriving conference and research business, not to mention a highly influential and targeted audience, paidContent is an ideal Trade 2.0 publisher. It’s no surprise they got acquired."

Speaking of acquisitions, the Facebook app sector doesnt want to get left behind - via InsideFacebook : "RockYou has confirmed that it has acquired two major independent Facebook applications: Pieces of Flair and Speed Racing. With over 475,000 and 200,000 daily active users respectively, RockYou adds the #11 and #27 most active applications on the Facebook Platform to its portfolio. Although no prices were confirmed, we’re hearing the acquisitions were some of the biggest prices paid for applications yet."

gnoos : RSS U @ Y!SearchBoss ?

2008-07-10T14:39:00.003+10:00

Hartford Concorso 63.jpg
Originally uploaded by VOD Cars

I'm really grokking the sound of the Yahoo BOSS search back end program. I've got to ask The Boss BigKev, as over next quarter we are going to focus very hard on the public developer and commercial publisher wanting to tap into hyperlocal user generated search, intelligence and syndication. But YahooSearchBlog is singing my ditty about what it takes to deliver the back end requirements of the Aussie Social Graph :

"Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure -- from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google. We believe the BOSS platform will begin to change that... BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure."

It seems like they've got some quality companies using the solution (hakia, me.dium) so if it isnt just an elaborate Yahoo Ad or rebadge our search offer, if it is more commercial open source : Lucene meets Amazon Web Services for example, that would rock. I'm projecting, but getting excited by focusing on the mile deep, inchwide side of hyperlocal UGC, rather than the horizontal milewide, inch deep of Enterprise 2.0.

Yahoo Search Boss product manager types feel free to contact me as I go check out what u've got on the interwebs and get my internal geek feedback, and any1 that's been checking out for their own perusal/use.. I'd like to take my 150k gnoos.com.au feeds and bolt them into YahooBoss. Feel free (in all $en$e$ of the word) to tell me what u think about it (is it serious enterprise, opensource, customisable, etc not just some widgety plugin thing), what u can actually do past the press release (do i have to use the - whole or designated part - yahoo index, can u use it on your own index) So tweet dm, email etc me. Irrespective of solution (there are lots of APIs/indexes/feeds we will be looking at fetching eg twitter/summize.com API for aussie users, etc), those with interesting stuff to say, and even better do, we'll be looking to hire, contract, as we need to find the search, filtering, hyperlocal, architecty developer gun(s). Location also is flexible, the closer to Melbourne better, but closer to search, UGC, RSS brilliance easily trumps location :)

my coopting of silkcharms social media bandwagon aimia rant.

2008-07-10T13:35:00.003+10:00

advertising is not art.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

Patient : benbarren.blogspot.com
Date/Time : 1:26-1:38pm Thursday 10th July 2008.
Therapy Topic : Social Media Bandwagon Rant coopted to car running out of petrol rant, but happy ending $18 later fixed.

Details : Car1 today at 545am didnt start, but was trying to turn over. I knew there was about um a couple kilometres of fuel left as it sure the needle was on the bottom of empty but it was the start of bottom of empty. Yday I drove the other spare car and as Car1's petrol cap isnt attached (drove off on it one day in rye when taking a pic of a classic stingray corvette) I think the petrol may have evaporated ? or it was just empty. Luckily I picked up a $11.95 can ick, and $6 of petrol and when i got home and tried it, it made a dodgy noise as the petrol folowed thru the engine's veins, but it turned over and kept running normally.

Next week I promise not to rant about this stuff, but this week u my blog readers are cheap therapy. U visit for free content and a 2 minute break in your day; I post for 12 minutes as a free therapy session. But negativity can be catching and I'll be taking a big dose of vitaminc happy pillz. (u get by on too many 4-5 hour sleeps in a row and your outlook can get wacked out... )

Supporting Evidence : After having spent $2600 2 months ago on new reco'd engine, I def didnt want to hear the heart transplant wasnt gelling, and it I was going to be offroad and up for a 4 figure bill. So like alot of this week : drama, interim resolution, live to fight another battle in between updating specs and answering 25 questions from a VC - all of which i wanted done by Tuesday - but meetings seemed to nail first half of week (most of them on said specs and questions, so progress has been made, just need some quality "compueter" you and i time in the next 36 hours before my mums 60th on Sunday, which will be a big event, as they get back from Airlie Beach up north in mid 20c's weather (rather than my folks usually prefer doing an annual explore of Europe arts, churches etc - this time they wanted a holiday, rather than an exploration)

Third Party Triggering Catalyst : Laurel - Australia's #1 Social Network Evangelist and member of most social networks if not most content generated, openID queen - Papworth, is never short of something to say, and her AIMIA rant is a good'un, definite lol facebook status update.

Silkcharm on "AIMIA connects interactive agencies with interactive agencies - a nice niche network." The punchline deals with their old new media treatment of the socialnet marketing channel(s) : '"Social Media Bandwagon? Facebook pages don't cost anything... if you don't mind them sitting empty. Which is why AIMIA Facebook page has 600 odd members, yet other newer ones for Australia have 1500+ . Anyone want to jump on the Mobile SMS Bandwagon? How about the Virtual World bandwagon? How dare you tell my clients this is a bandwagon deal? While some AIMIA events are no doubt worthwhile, calling social media a bandwagon is downright enraging. Get serious - or get out. *grumpy face*"'

Session Up : Feel free to leave rants about your day in the comments, or just rant out loud, i like the minimalism of no/low comments. And as every1 says the micro-conversation is on friendfeed, seesmic or at best for blogs disqus these days. OK back to specs and questions.... 12 minutes up.

4c outside + in the bank.

2008-07-09T09:13:00.007+10:00

hamishnandy gravy_chips
Originally uploaded by redbarren

Some ppl say hitting rock bottom - Could it be any worse ? - is where they get their greatest moment of clarity, for others its the picket fence and a happy home life; Does it get any better than this ? For me, clarity is about neither of those, but one microcosm of clarity is when the atm wont give u any money. Say it's a Wednesday and u get paid Thursday. (well once u badger your business partner in charge of accounts to transfer it in time, who farely enough has other things to do too) In a previous life, no money might have made my breathing tight, frantic phone calls, and a commitment to get a higher paid (secure) job. And its never fun lets be honest, and most people dont experience it. At least who read this. Alot of ppl experience it, just not in this white, high income, educated tech space.

But now, well for at least 12 hours (until the milk runs out / the time it takes to have a transfer clear etc) having no cash, thats when i think very hard about what I'm doing. Not that any1 wants to base their happiness on funding, but in a bigger picture (company, rather than personal) sense, the ability to have my own developers again is key (90% of my 5 fulltime developers for last 9 months have worked on client projects not my own. so double wammy is not enough codebase improvements, lots of booked revenue but too LARGE account receivables.)

The one good thing u learn from 3 years of doing this (that u need to remind yourself and where Americans are so good), is where the opportunities are and arent : and the timing of when to make a move. Aussies we admit defeat then go back and get a 9-5 job for 20 years and be bitter. The US quit quickly, jump back on quickly, and some anyway, get a quick exit on their next venture which is more market attuned. Dave Sifry for example does Offbeat Guides after Technorati. Scott Rafer MyBlogLog after Feedster, then Lookery around Facebook ads. People have to move fast in fast moving markets etc.

For us its in the local side of enterprise delivery of user generated content syndication + intelligence. With community tools a supporting feature. We probably have 2 of the base building blocks needed (and others locally dont have, that would take time/$ to build) But I need to build out alot more backend and filtering algorithms. For that I need topend, hardworking geeks, architects, data, search peeps. Anyway I digress the point of this <4c degrees outside> post, that as a recent commenter said 'this needs copy editing' (hey it takes work to make it appear to need copyediting : "ben, it doesn't appear to need copy-editing, it does." I'm sure someone will say - so i'll save u the comment coz u dont comment anyway, but if u got this far u may have imagined it... well maybe u prob only spent 7 secs here looking at pics and not reading past first para)..... finally got to the short point of this post, is that (clap, clap, u r getting there finally, doesnt need copyediting it needs bloody paragraphs deleted.) BuzzFeed.com did a $3.5m round via Webware :

"Sure, the company sounds like another Digg clone. What's different about BuzzFeed is that it doesn't rely on votes to determine the popularity of a video, blog, or photo. The company blends click tracking with its own algorithm and human editors to figure out which piece of content is about to go viral." - Maybe an investor will read that Buzzfeed got funded and think gees I really should fund those guys down in Melbourne.... I josh, it does remind me I have to finish off that 25 questionnaire from the VCs.. obviously the 8k word info mem and 10 slide powerpoint wasnt summary enough... have u ever noticed if u r the document writer, u always end up being the one that creates the document..

OK, i'm goin go check got enough petrol to get to Melbourne and back, hang in till tomorrow when i get in the black once i ensure the accounting is enacted (sometimes i really hate this bootstrap enforced savings plan that is a startup esp 3.5 years in), get caffeine, look at schedule, get paid, and get us paid. Oh account receivables can kill a business eh ? And focus on mining the clarity. When u cut, cut hard. When u bet, bet big, dont they say. Focus etc. And getting development resource onto projects that pay or generate valuable code. You can bootstrap if u end up amazing code.. but bootstrapping and not having the code at the end u believe in... luckily i do believe in the opportunity tho :) rant over. work to do. (dont think i will suffer fools today, which in australia is not a good frame of mind, u end up like barry hall on the football field.. luckily i have an advisor this afternoon who has been successful at this...)