DISQUS

Its funny: Ning always lacked the spark that would light a fire in my mind - it never seemed to have a focus that would provide a call to action to drive usage. Of course, its an infrastructure provider, but to me anyway, the concept of social network infrastructure is a little to "big" for mainstream adoption.

Wordpress, however, provides a simple-to-understand focal point (blogging) around which the social networking component can revolve. Wordpress blogs provide a gateway into the wider social networking offering - just the kind of conceptual bridge to enable it to take off. So -- good luck to them!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the semantic web depends upon the meta data needed to connect disparate bits of information. What you're saying is true - the infrastructure to share and store that meta data may well be ready to go - but where does the data itself come from?

Unfortunately, the answer is "people" - people being notoriously inconsistent in naming, tagging, storing, and sharing their digital assets. FWIW, I don't think we'll have a truly semantic web app until there's good enough AI to understand digital assets and add consistent metadata.

Dear LocalHero: you'll find *not* slagging your competitors to be much more effective at spreading the word about your service.

Mathew: thanks for mentioning my thoughts. One example of such a phenomenon was the EveryBlock tribeca page, which had some articles about a museum being threatened or some such thing. I'd say that the interest group for such a news item draws from a much larger catchment area than tribeca, and that given its niche nature probably has few people in any given district of the city, but a reasonably sized population overall. Point being: hyper-localization has yet to prove itself.

You know what would be a worthy experiment? How about nyc.digg.com or sf.digg.com? You'd need the built in population of a popular social news site like digg to kickstart it, but then rock & roll.

Making attribution more visible sounds like a pretty simple task to me. Your writers should be able to figure out how to wrap a link around some decent keywords without too much in the way of "guidlines" I would think. Good judgment and a community focus should be core attributes of a good blogger, not rules that need to be enforced.

And here I was thinking that blogging was about the conversation (which sites like Techmeme and my own TechWatching facilitate), instead of ivory tower, deep thinking proclamations. Certainly one needs to strike a balance between writing your own mind and providing commentary on the daily gestalt, but I don't see any problem inherent in both coexisting.

Check out this post:

http://blog.persai.com/2007/12/6/what-is-persai...

Then check out a site that's fuelled by the persai engine:
http://www.eyeonfacebook.com/

Seems like a pretty mundane news scanner so far, but I understand that its supposed to be packaged in a habit-learning reader.

If you'd like an alternative to TechMeme, take a look at http://techwatching.com/

(disclaimer: its mine)

TechWatching is an algorithmic curator in the style of TechMeme, but with a few tweaks. TW places less emphasis on newswires and msm publications, for instance, and adds an element of randomization as to which story in a topical cluster is the "lead" - meaning that its not always going to be TechCrunch on top - the goal was to offer an alternative that was more likely to surface smaller blogs while not missing the important topics of the moment.

At the moment, TW is still in shakedown mode, refreshing only hourly, and with regular tweaks to the algorithm - so please be patient if it breaks or seems to get stuck in a rut for a time.

Interestingly enough, the process of stitching together the front page creates a great keyword index of blog posts - I'm thinking about opening up that data set as a standalone vertical blog search engine as well. I'm not an architect, however, so I'm a little daunted by the scale of the data repository required compared to the relatively minor needs of the rolling 7 day snapshot that TW uses.

I've also deployed an instance of the TW system at http://wheelscore.com - which targets the automotive industry.

Anyway - thanks for sharing your thoughts on TechMeme - groupthink is an interesting social phenomenon to observe.

Regards,
-R

I don't know... 7M users is 14% of Facebook's userbase - not exactly a drop in the bucket. More than the userbase, I think they'd be trying to acquire the team - i.e.: the on-the-ground, culturally plugged in expertise that makes entering the CN market a challenge for N/A firms.

So what - google wanted to pay for technology and team, not users. What's the big deal? Google's got the reach; if they wanted to blow away twitter's numbers with Jaiku, they could do so in a week.

The real question in all of this is why dodgeball was allowed to wither on the vine, and whether Jaiku will get any better treatment.

Yay, another property for Yahoo to not integrate. Prepare to watch Buzztracker do more or less the same thing it always has for the next three years!

To answer your question: yes, they are doomed to never get it. The music industry was formed on the basis of economics (cost of production, distribution) that have changed under them. To admit that change is to forgo the stupendous profits they've enjoyed, so they'd rather go down in flames.

Add Winnipeg to the list... har har har. There are many wonderful creatives and designers here (see: http://elementalmotionmedia.com/) - but relatively limited webdev/business model exploration.

Problem: The most vocal/participatory members of society don't always/usually represent the mainstream. Its not the numbskulls that will take over, but anyone with a specific policy agenda.

Good idea - it would be great to be an attendee. I'd hope to get to MashupCamp, but it overlapped chronologically and budgetarily with my honeymoon. Northervoices sounds cool, but IMHO "Web2" is a better scope than just blogging - I'd personally be more interested in discussing business models and the implications of democratizing content and functionality. Anyway, I'd love to attend, and let me know if I can help out with organizing from Winnipeg.

LOL - pretty funny. I find myself thinking "Edit > Undo" when I make a RW mistake - like dropping too many yolks in an omlete or something innocuous...

Google really seems to be floundering without any strategic focus. Too many diversified agendas in a period of extreme growth with ready access to lots of cash seems like a recipe for debilitating "strategic drift." I mean, come on, instead of rebranding freeware, use some resources to take gmail out of beta.

then again, maybe this is all smokescreen, and google will wow us again.