Jeff Clavier's Software Only

How to play bloggers egos: 43Best Blogs

Alex Muse had a very amusing idea: mix the Top XXX blog list meme and the self (serving) editing of a wiki, hence offering all bloggers the ability to be in said Top XXX list. The result: 43Best Blogs, a wiki’ed list in which anyone can claim a spot. The rule: there can be only 43.

Let me tell you: who is actually on the list does not matter, what is actually hilarious is to read through the history page since all edits are logged.

As a blogger who wants in, you have to make a conscious decision of which of the 43 names you are going to “nuke”, and which spot you are going to claim. I had an easy task: a Polish dude had claimed three spots so I took one for myself and one for Hornik (as sign of deference to the grand father of VC blogging). But I really LOL’ed when I saw that David Weinberger nuked TechCrunch (not that I mean single out David, who I respect) and a few other interesting “replacements”.

A very interesting social experiment indeed Alex.

Whoops, sorry FactoryJoe, you just got nuked my friend.

SDForum Search SIG: The Search for Attention - March 16th 6:30pm @ AOL - Featuring FeedBurner, Memeorandum, Root Markets & Technorati

Information overload has become the typical issue of anyone using the web to access or search for nuggets of information. Both the search and the subscription paradigms lead to countless results, posts, articles that one needs to sift through to extract relevant facts. Using Attention metadata (blog subscriptions, document hyperlinks, URLs and keywords entered by a web user,…) is one of the mechanisms infrastructure providers will use to elevate relevant pieces of information – as demonstrated today by the first generation of meme trackers (like Memeorandum, TailRank,…).

Our host for the March session of the Search SIG is one of the pioneers of the Attention movement: Steve Gillmor, as the co-founder of the AttentionTrust and co-creator of the original Attention.xml specification with Technorati’s Dave Sifry, has evangelized the growing importance of Attention metadata over the past two years. He is also the host of the famous podcasting series: Gillmor Gang, Gillmor Daily and AttentionTech.

Steve will be joined by a group of startup founders who have developed key pieces of infrastructure of the nascent Attention economy:

• Gabe Rivera, Memeorandum
• Dick Costolo, FeedBurner
• David Sifry, Technorati
• Seth Goldstein, Root Markets

The session will take place on March 16th, at AOL’s Silicon Valley Campus in the Shasta Conference Room (Building 12), 401 Ellis Street, Mountain View, CA – map event. We are very grateful to AOL for hosting us for the first time. 

The now well established Search SIG Agenda format will be used:

6:30-7:00pm - Registration / Food & Drink
7:00–7:05pm - A few words about the Search SIG
7:05-8:15pm - Act I: the Search for Attention, a panel discussion with the Attention Gang
8:15-8:30pm - Intermission: Search Networking & Geeking Out
8:30-9:00pm - Act II: Product Demos from GestureBank, Root Markets, FeedBurner, Memeorandum & Technorati – and Q&A with the audience
9:00-9:15pm - Open Mike Geek: Announcements (30 seconds of fame & fortune)
9:16pm - You Don’t Have To Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here

Do get in touch with us (searchsig [at] gmail [dot] com) if you want to use a demo slot to launch a new search startup (one, and maybe two companies can take advantage of that).

Please pre-register on the SDForum site to speed up the sign-up at AOL, and allow us to plan pizza and beverages. Attendance is free for SDForum members, and charge is $15 for non-members.

And remember, there is a distribution list for Search SIG announcements – if you want to join, send an email to [email protected].

Directions to the AOL Campus:

• Take the Ellis St. on 101
• Turn Right on Ellis if you are driving down from San Francisco, or Left if you driving up from San Jose
• AOL is located about 3 blocks down on the left hand side.  It is a 3 story mirrored glass building. 

Note:  If you get to the light at Middlefield you have gone to far and need to come back a block. 

Tags: listing,events,searchsig,94043, Mountain View California, USA

Edgeio just opened its doors and announced its Angel financing

One of the most exciting and scary moments for a startup is the moment it ships its product/service for the very first time “for real” – without any password, limitation, etc. It is often the result of months of effort by a dedicated team, and gets you to deal with a new constituency: users. Tonight is Edgeio’s turn, and this is indeed an exciting moment.

As Om Malik wrote, Edgeio has received a lot of coverage already and therefore I won’t get too much into a lot of detail of the functionality: Edgeio extracts listings (classifieds, jobs, etc.) made available via RSS feeds, and tagged “listing”. Once a listing has been taken into account, the publisher can add metadata such as the main category under which the item should appear, its price and additional tags. Users can search the marketplace, or use tags and location as filters. There is quite a detailed FAQ here. Here is the item I just posted on my blog listed in Edgeio, and check the Edgeio widget on the right side of my blog.

I became aware of Edgeio months ago upon reconnecting with Keith Teare (who I had met years ago), and meeting Mike Arrington as he started TechCrunch. The concept of edge aggregation of semi-structured data was clearly the next logical step in pushing RSS beyond text syndication, hence the appeal of the Edgeio solution.

Disclosure: I was lucky (and grateful) that Keith and Mike asked me to get involved in the company as a (paid) advisor about six months ago. More recently, I also invested in the $1.5M angel round that was just announced.

A lot has been said about Edgeio, and a number of questions and suggestions will be addressed by the team in the coming weeks – and there are still a lot of interesting features coming up. In the meantime, take a look at the service and send us your feedback.

A bonus: here is the end of the IM chat we had with the team just after opening the site. Congratulations again to you guys.

More:

• Keith Teare announces the launch
• Fred Oliviera, who designed the Edgeio UI, chimes in
• If you are interesting in keeping track of Edgeio’s development, the blog is here
• The TechCrunch review is here, written independently by Nik Cubrilovic

Tags: edgeio

Candle: 7 wicks ambiance light - for sale $49

This candle is double sided and makes a nice center piece on a table. It is an original design, imported from Argentina.

Dimension: 11" x 13" x 2"

Price: $49

PS: This is a listing that will be aggregated by Edgeio – and this candle is really for sale :-)

Tags: listing

MashupCamp was more than another Camp, it was the first institutional unconference

The concept of unconference has been around for some time (as stated here), and I have attended quite a few to this date. However I found that last week’s MashupCamp brought the concept to a new level: the institutional one. Why ? Because the venue, the size of the attendance, the companies represented, the logistics, the food, the party,… were close to a “professional” conference. The level of sponsoring was also notable as David Berlind and Doug Gold even managed to donate $5K to the Computer History Museum, were the conference took place. Also of note was the large number of vendors represented, and happily chatting about their APIs and applications without tripping into commercial pitches (or if there were, they were informative and not overboard). Still, there was this buzz and openness of the unconference in which everyone can be heard, drive the discussion, etc. – which made it much more interesting.

As Dave McClure and I are planning the second edition of VerticalLeap, the one-day conference sister to the Search SIG, I wonder what a SearchCamp would look like in our context. More on that soon.

For more on the organization of an unconference, I suggest reading David Berlind’s post, and/or listen to the latest Dan & David show (which has become a must listen of mine).

And yes, it was true that we signed up for the camp way before we knew when, where and what - but we knew the why: an interesting topic that would attract a bunch of cool people.

Tags: mashupcamp, unconference

How European startups can present at Innovate Europe 2006

I had the opportunity last year to speak at the first edition of Innovate Europe, the European innovation conference put together by the Guidewire Group – which is also organizing DEMO.

The planning of Innovate Europe 2006 is under way, and the selection of startups that will have the opportunity to present at the conference is taking place soon. Chris Shipley will do a tour of Paris, London, Dublin, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Madrid and Zaragoza between March 7th and March 17th.

The deadline for registering was (hum – my bad) yesterday, so go check this post that explains it all, and fill in this form if you are interested in participating.

Tag: innovateeurope06

Cool hack of the day: WhatsUp

I am a sucker for data vizualization projects, especially when it comes to news and stock prices (my roots I guess, as this is what I was building as a young C developer). I particularly like this one: What’s Up, a news map display developed by Jeroen Wijering, a UI designer recently graduated from the Eidhoven Design Academy. It basically displays headlines from a bunch of news (geolocated) RSS feeds on a planisphere. Jeroen says that he plans to make this available as a screen saver at some point.

You can launch it full screen here. Very cool.

TechDirt announces its first un-workshop - March 11, 2006 - Sunnyvale, CA

After the “everything 2.0” meme, I see the “un-“ something meme developing. What does it mean ? An event based on a two-way, open, discussion.

One of my favorite tech blog, TechDirt, is putting together the first edition of its Idea Workshop. The concept is very appealing:

A group of pre-selected companies and individuals will present ideas in quick, five minute presentations. Unlike a standard product showcase, this is not the "final word." After a group of presentations, the attendees are split up into breakout groups, and given a specific issue from one of the presentations to "workshop." For a company with a new product, this could be anything from "what new features should be added" to "what target market should they focus on" to "is there a business model here?" Other presentations may not be about products, but ideas, and the workshops will be related to those ideas.

 After a short period of time, everyone will reconvene and discuss some of the findings and takeaways for the presenters (and the attendees) to consider.

I particularly like that quote:

Leave the Powerpoint and the sales pitches at home. Here's a chance to interact with some of the smartest folks around, while helping to solve real and interesting challenges facing the technology business today.

TechDirt’s CEO Mike Masnick was kind enough to invite me to participate the event, and I look forward to discussing and debating with the companies they will have selected.

The registration is here, the cost is $95.

Erratum - The PowerBook G4: a lean mean fragile blogging machine

A month ago, I posted in enthusiasm and sheer happiness about my favorite toy of the moment, my PowerBook G4. After 3 months of moderate use (I don’t blog that much after all and my X41 is my main computer), it melted. About 2 weeks ago, the unit started randomly freezing – having no other recourse than clic-clac (power off/power on). Pretty extreme, but the only solution. Over the past week, it might happen 3 times in an hour, rendering the laptop unusable.

I tried to run hardware tests. Fine. Disk tests. Fine. OS re-install. The machine freezes 10 minutes into the install. FUBAR.

Called in Apple support (very nice) to get an incident ID. I now need to go the Apple Store to give the fried machine to an Apple Genius (doh), who will send it in for repair.

I have had 5 IBM ThinkPads and one Dell Latitude over the past 12 years. They never failed me that quickly. I sure am happy to type this post on the laptop of the year.

PS: I got to test a MacBook Pro at the Palo Alto Apple Store (since I was there). Besides the integrated iSight, I did not see much of a difference with my (now defunct) G4, especially on speed. I was told that most applications were still running in binary compatibility mode.

Moderating an un-panel (or un-moderating a panel ?)

Last week, I had the privilege of leading a very interesting panel on “Web 2.0 and the Enterprise”. As the moderator, I was keen to get 150-people strong audience to participate, and told them upfront that after a short intro (of 15/20 minutes) from my panelists, we would ask for their input on the topics and questions to be addressed. As I mentioned in my summary post, this audience jumped right in and for almost 90 minutes, we covered a lot of ground about social computing and the contribution of Web 2.0 technology and best practices to enterprise architecture. There was one issue though: as I had decided to moderate the session as an “un-panel” (or un-moderate the panel - your choice), and let go the control of the flow of topics being covered, and who could actually comment/speak/ask questions, we ended up in a bit of a chaos, with up to 5 people trying to speak at the same time, and a lot of context switching going on. Even with this, the event was deemed successful, and my panelists (who have had their fair share of participating or moderating panels) provided positive feedback. But there was still a bit of frustration in me about the fact that we did not cover as much as I wanted, especially on enterprise transaction and integration processes.

I was then invited to lead the venture capital discussion at the first MashupCamp (which totally rocked, thanks to the efforts and the stewardship of David Berlind and Doug Gold). With the previous experience fresh in mind, I decided to do the “un-panel” style again, with one difference: at the very beginning of the session I asked the audience to list their questions/topics and expectations, and wrote these on large sheets of paper that we stuck on the walls. Having all the topics displayed allowed me to structure this un-panel in a way that made it flexible and very interactive, and at the same time remain “on-topic” long enough. I was also lucky to be joined by two VC bloggers: Peter Rip and Rick Segal, who did a great job sharing their candid views with these 40-ish entrepreneurs interested in chatting about angel and VC financing (thanks guys). I heard equal positive feedback for the content and the interactivity, and this time, had a feeling that all topics and key questions of the audience had been covered.

Un-panels are so much more interesting that it is worth trying, especially with this upfront inventory of ideas that provides just enough of control on the content and the flow.

Tags: mashupcamp, unpanel