Category Archives: social media

The Internet’s secret sauce: surfacing coincidence

Posted on December 14, 2007 by

What is it that makes my favorite online services so compelling? I’m talking about the whole family of services that includes Dopplr, Wesabe, Twitter, Flickr, and del.icio.us among others. I find it interesting that people don’t generally refer to any … Continue reading →

Posted in behavior, community, creativity, data, delicious, design, dopplr, edge, flickr, future, ideas, innovation, internet, models, network effects, platform, programmableweb, recommendations, social media, strategy, transparency, trends, twitter, visualization, web services, wesabe | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

The problem with being popular (part 2)

Posted on November 19, 2007 by

One of the more interesting sciences, in my mind, is how information relevance is both determined, surfaced and then evolved. In Fred Wilson’s recent Cautionary Techmeme Tale he argues that making news popular takes away its social context and therefore … Continue reading →

Posted in attention, behavior, community, culture, media, peer production, personalization, recommendations, social media, theory, trends, yahoo | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Building community is hard

Posted on October 15, 2007 by

Jay Rosen has an interesting post on the failure of AssignmentZero, an effort to build a publicly funded crowdsourced news organization. Among the many lessons, he keeps coming back to motivation and incentive. “A well managed project correctly estimates what … Continue reading →

Posted in citizen media, citizenjournalism, collaboration, community, innovation, journalism, media, news, participation, peer production, social media, startup, trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The business of network effects

Posted on August 15, 2007 by

The Internet platform business has some unique challenges. It’s very tempting to adopt known models to make sense of it, like the PC business, for example, and think of the Internet platform like an operating system. The similarities are hard … Continue reading →

Posted in advertising, behavior, dareobasanjo, data, development, future, ideas, identity, innovation, jasonkottke, marketing, media, models, network, network effects, nick carr, participation, peer production, personalization, platform, recommendations, semanticweb, social media, strategy, trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Why Outside.in may have the local solution

Posted on July 24, 2007 by

The recent blog frenzy over hyperlocal media inspired me to have a look at Outside.in again. It’s not just the high profile backers and the intense competitive set that make Outside.in worth a second look. There’s something very compelling in … Continue reading →

Posted in 94107, advertising, aggregation, blogging, citizen media, citizenjournalism, collaboration, community, economics, edge, journalism, local, media, network effects, outside.in, participation, peer production, platform, potrero hill, publishing, san francisco, semanticweb, social media, tagging | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Preview of the del.icio.us publisher api

Posted on December 19, 2006 by

I just posted a short screencast on the YDN blog of the cool new publisher api coming from del.icio.us soon. I’ve also embedded the video below. Lots of interesting possibilities with this new service, for sure. Embed video:

Posted in apis, community, delicious, don loeb, feedburner, how to, innovation, media, screencast, social media, tagging, web services | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Top 5 new business ideas

Posted on December 5, 2006 by

The month of lists has begun, so I decided to rank the business ideas from the last year that could or should be a big deal in the next year. Most of these ideas and companies have actually been around … Continue reading →

Posted in answers, apis, attention, behavior, development, future, ideas, identity, innovation, interestingness, last.fm, leadership, models, social media, startup, strategy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

A human-powered relevance engine for Internet startup news

Posted on November 20, 2006 by

Here’s a fun experiment in crowdsourcing. I’ve been getting overwhelmed by all the startup news coming out of the many sources tracking the interesting ideas and new companies hunting for Internet gold. Many of these companies are really smart. Many … Continue reading →

Posted in aggregation, collaboration, digg, flipbait, innovation, news, open source, participation, peer production, pligg, publishing, recommendations, social media, startup | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Video for education (or Really Simple Video)

Posted on July 14, 2006 by

I had some fun putting together a screencast recently to showcase an internal Yahoo! technology that my team is working on. I downloaded Camtasia, wrote a short script and then produced what turned out to be somewhat high quality video … Continue reading →

Posted in All, education, jon udell, screencast, social media, video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Answering the Answers question

Posted on June 5, 2006 by

It wasn’t until someone much more tapped into pop culture than I am told me that the Yahoo! Answers product was cool that I considered it to be true. I didn’t get it at first. I wondered, “What’s the incentive … Continue reading →

Posted in answers, search, social media, yahoo | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off