grazeit blog

Spread your wings and fly

2010-01-05T00:35:00.000-08:00

Dear GRAZErs,

One of the greatest joys of this season is the opportunity to say THANK YOU and to wish you the very best for the New Year.

We deeply appreciate your support and cooperation in this exciting journey,
And would like to express our profound gratitude from where it really matters: the bottom of our hearts.

The GRAZEit team

Contextual whereabouts

2009-11-12T14:27:00.000-08:00

Digital content can be just about anywhere, and yet nowhere. What turns the collection of bytes into meaningful content - is a bundle of contexts: syntactical, logical, physical, theoretical, psychological and cultural context.
In the online terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This type of metadata - data over data - helps describe an item and allows it to be easily found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer.
Geo-tags, broadens and focuses the description of information, as being a process of attaching geographical identification to various media, that can help users find a wide variaty of geographical location-specific information. The Geo-tagging is usually based on physical addresses, place names or latitude and longitude coordinates.
GRAZEit enables describing information by attaching metadata that can help users find location-based information on the net: instead of latitude and longitude coordinates or physical address - simply a URL.

The users' whereabouts in a specific location, in our case on a specific webpage, creates contexts that give practical meaning to relevant digital content from other places in the web.
Avi.

Special Agents of Pollination

2009-05-18T00:55:00.000-07:00

Various plants often reproduce through a "gathering" between two different plants from the same kind, with the help of a mobile mediator.
The phase preceding the "fertilization" is the pollination - the action of transferring pollen from flower to flower. Since plants cannot, mostly, travel in space, the pollen is a significant mean of spreading the organism's genes.

Butterflies, bees, flies, bugs and birds - and sometimes, the wind and water, fill a a vital role in the evolution and preservation of the species, whilst their routine movement.
Digital content can "travel" in space in various ways - links, RSS feeds, emails etc... - but in order to create a productive "gathering" between contents of the same kind, there is a need for intelligent mediators, human, those that are not dependent on each other, that will identify the subjective contextual relations between different content, and connect them wisely.

GRAZEit lets Internet users be helpful to all, whilst surfing. Spread valuable baggage they carry with them anyway - the pollen that attached to them whilst consuming nectar - in places where it matters.

Out of all the sophisticated pollenation agents in nature, we've chosen to place in our logo the butterfly; Mosly because what it represents in various cultures: the human soul - and thus the ultimate freedom of the human being.
Richness of colours, shapes and sizes of the butterflies resembles the blessed human variance and the pluralism so curcial to the evolution of the entire society.

GRAZEit is based on the assumption that every Internet user has the potential to be a fascinating butterfly, which its free nature and its ability to move unhindered in the digital space, make him a useful and eminent special agent - for the benefit of all.

Avi.

See us on ad:tech, San Francisco this month

2009-04-18T13:46:00.000-07:00

ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference and exhibition. It is held several times each year in key locations such as - SF, NY, London, Paris, China... and is absolutely the most exciting event in online advertising arena.
The coming ad:tech is held in SF, at 21-23 April, at Moscone Center West.
Google, Yahoo, eBay, MySpace, StumbleUpon and dozens of others are presenting and/or attending ad:tech this round, and so are MediaShakers, our strategic partners.
MediaShakers are presenting on ad:tech and will present GRAZEit as well. There will be lots of green butterflies coming-out flying from Mediashakers booth...:)
So if you're in the neighborhood - don't hesitate to drop us a visit there. Friendly faces are always welcome!
And if you see this postcard flying around @ad:tech -

You'll know the answer...

C U!

And to all you Mediashakers... kick-ass at ad:tech!!!

The word is out!

2009-04-13T00:57:00.000-07:00

Hi all,
A little update on what's been going on in the web arena, after GRAZEit launch on Techonomy.
The GRAZEit word is out, and spreading faster than we thought!
We're getting nice traffic, new early-adopting grazers spreading their stuff, and lots of users downloading GRAZEit into their browser.
Since Orli Yakuel and Eyal Shahar put GRAZEit on Go2Web20 - lots of other directories and blogs have been posting GRAZEit on their platform - and that's great! Thanks guys!
So see us on -
Go2Web20
KillerStartups - and don't forget to vote!!
CrunchBase
StartupMeme
Listio
Ziipa
Kuapp
Startup - the web project
Mypsick
Gabbr
Wowzio
jaimeviniciusbarros
and the latest arrivals today at-feedmyapp and greatsitestovisit and for all you French grazers at blog.aurigance.fr and logiste.be
and others... (apologies if you've been forgotten).

Happy Easter and have a great spring vacation!

Anat.

The new grazefeed is coming!!

2009-04-05T23:44:00.000-07:00

Hey, Have you heard? A new Grazefeed is on his way to your browser! And it's good stuff!
Well, must admit, I'm a little biased, but you can see it for yourself.
This is the new horizontal grazefeed -

And that's the new vertical one -

And lots of additional little treats...
We felt the old grazefeed needed a little touch-up, so we did it - little photoshop here, some javascript there - and you'll be the judge of the outcome.
So, if you don't have GRAZEit's addon installed - now's the time!
If you've already downloaded it - all you need to do is sit back and relax - we're doing all the work for you. No need to update, or re-install, it'll just happen there for you.
Have fun!
Anat.

GRAZEit on Techonomy event

2009-04-05T22:26:00.001-07:00

Hi all,
Last Tuesday, March 30th, GRAZEit participated in Techonomy event in Tel-Aviv.
It was a great excitement for us, since this is the first time we're going public, and it was a real honor to get invited to such an exciting event.

Sun Microsystems and Orli Yakuel teamed up to create an event focused on Israeli innovation.
5 additional Israeli startups were invited to present their products, and we had the pleasure to meet Vetrina's, Tracx, face, sense of fashion and hoody - all promising startups, with great products, terrific people behind them and perfect presentations on Techonomy. Kol hakavod guys!!

Since GRAZEit's public exposure, more and more users keep trying out GRAZEit.com and downloading our addon - and we are ecstatic! Way to go people! Keep those grazes rolling!
We have today nearly 0.5 million grazes spread over almost 1 million pages (y'all invited to the 1-million-pages-party - once we get there!) - and numbers are growing by the minute.
Most grazes are created from fascinating blogs belonging to various categories, e.g.: internet and web2.0, economy, art, culture, sports, politics, etc... don't see something that interests you here? well, just start grazing yourself. It's addictive :)

So, to sum it up - Techonomy was great, but what came after that is even better - YOU...:)
Thank you all,
Anat.

P.S.: This was my first blog post ever! That was fun!! well... off to graze this post.
* Thanks to Yaniv Golan from Yedda for the pics.

@ the right place

2009-02-18T22:22:00.000-08:00

I never really understood who finds real interest in those fancy magazines lying next to the TV cabinet in most of the hotels around the world.
The photos are always spectacular, the information is usually up-t0-date, and still - chances to find something relevant to my visit in this place, are much lower than chances to get a free upgrade to the presidential suite.

I really don't know what are the content guidelines of the publishers of those hard-worked-but-useless magazines. Maybe they want to ensure they stay in the room long after the guests have checked-out. So why do I, and millions of other tourists and business travelers always find themselves paging through these kinds of products? The answer: just because they're there. The right place, and the right context.

Not long ago I traveled to Amsterdam. I stayed at the HN Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. I got a great price, and I knew exactly what to expect from my stay in this place. It's just wonderful, what the Net enables us. Now all I I need is to search for information about interesting stuff to do, excellent but not expensive restaurants, and things not to miss in this lovely city. Nothing that a good web connection, lots of time, a bit of concentration, sorting and filtering can't solve. Too bad I don't have 3 months to get prepared to my weekend trip to Amsterdam.
It's also too bad that the good guys from Trip Advisor, for instance, that gave me such detailed and precise information on the hotel, its services, virtues and down-sides, didn't throw-in some tips on what to do near the hotel. Where and what I should eat, when's the line to Anne Frank's house the shortest, is the Heineken Experience really worth its 15 Euro, what exactly do you see there on the red lights district, that is 1 block away from the hotel, and where is the coolest coffee-shop. Not that I'm really interested in that, but it wouldn't hurt to know, if you're in Amsterman.
When I got back from Amsterdam, it occured to me that if this kind of information was written in the hotel's fancy magazines on the Krasnapolsky Hotel cabinet, I wouldn't think it's so unnecessary anymore.

GRAZEit snippet is providing a usefull link to Gaucho's
Restaurant Reviews @ TripAdvisor, located just around the block

Write, print and publish dozens of copies to the Krasnapolsky cabinets is a little too much for me, but to contribute to the graze list of the hotel's website, is definately possible. In the right place, at the right context, and also a humble contribution to the war against Rainforest extinction. Who knows, maybe a clever user, who already downloaded GRAZEit, will visit the hotel's website before his trip, and thanks to my grazes he won't miss the fabulous Gauchos restaurant located just around the corner, the spectacular french-fries of Vleminckx, 5 minutes walk from the Dam square - where the hotel is located, and not even Dampkring - the best coffee shop in town, in the little street next to Vleminckx.

Bon-Voyage

Location, location, location

2009-01-24T14:42:00.000-08:00

The most famous rule of thumb in real estate determines three basic elements as for the property's worth: location, location and location. Pretty simple, but oh-so-true. And not only in real estate. In every domain that has its center and has its margins - location is always a relevant context. Even if it's cybernetic space, and the distance between a center point and the most distant point is "only" a click away.

The ability of every web surfer to travel by clicking from one point to another, is as an open entry visa to anywhere, with very clear restraints: welcome. Come along, great many of you, it's good for us. But remember always: we are the masters of the domain. We determine your rights and duties - what is allowed, and what not, what you will see, what you can say, and in what manner. In other words, this is a private property, open to the public, but in its owner's terms.

On the homepage of the white house, for example, you can get information on Obama's recovery plan for the US economy in themes that were carefully worded by the president's professional staff. In order to get a less biased and a somewhat wider point of view, you will be required to do quite a lot of clicks there - that will take you from the white house website, through search engines, to other places. White house website is open for anyone interested in reading the messages of the new president's administration. It's also open to who is not, or not only - but in order to consume their desired content - they will have to wander from the white house to other places. And back to real estate: the worth of the new house of Barack Obama on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on DC was estimated last week as over 308 Million Dollars. 132 rooms, 16 guest rooms, underground bunker, 3 kitchens, 3 elevators and much much more. Obviously this property is not for sale, and probably neither the white house domain on the net. Clearly it is not possible to put on the white house lawn a huge screen that will play a message from the Iranians regarding their hopes from the new tenant's foreign policy, and not even expect that a link to that message will be found on the white house website.

Dear GRAZEit users (AKA Grazers): on the white house lawn issue - we cannot really be of service. On the white house website - Yes, we can! Download the plugin and visit the white house website. See? by the way, you can also put here any content that you feel is relevant. All your friends, and internet users around the globe, that have GRAZEit plugin, will enjoy your special contribution to content (content that is limited by its nature). How do you do that? very simple. Try it and have fun.

Avi

grazeit blog is on the air

2007-08-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

Hi ya'all grazers,
This is the official grazeit blog.
We'll post here stuff about grazeit, web and life in general.
Hope to see you around.
Anat (grazeit team)