If you are one of the Twitter-lovers out there (Steve, Robert, Tara, etc.), now there is a place to find out if you are King or Queen Twitter! Twitter is the hot stuff these days and Alex Hillman and Alex Rudloff created a site to help you figure out where you are on the leaderboard.

Called Twitterholic, the site shows you stats about how many friends, followers, updates and favorites you have. Right now the site is sorted by friends, I would like to see the ability to sort by the other fields as well.

Here are some staggering stats:

• Scoble leads with 1,588 followers and over 1,000 friends (damn, that must be one big black book!)
• Biz Stone has the most updates (outside of BBC News) with 1,300
• Other notable names in the Top 15 include: Tara Hunt, Nick Douglas, Chris Pirillo and Steve Rubel

In speaking with Alex Hillman, he notes that their goal is to update the site every few hours, right now its once per day. When I asked him why he created Twitterholic, his reply was, "Find out if you should be looking into therapy: either physical therapy for your thumbs, or a support group for your addiction. See how bad your symptoms are compared to your twitter-peers."

Now see if you can get your name on the leaderboard and become the ultimate Twitterholic!

MediaPost is reporting that Brightcove will announce a partnership this week with video analytics firm, Visible Measures. So this is a callout to all companies doing video sharing…. get analytical. We already know the page view is dead, actually its ultra dead for video sharing.

Clearly stats about how many plays you have are meaningless and dead as well. Where, who, when, how are the questions we need answered. Where was the video played, who watched it, when did they view it and how must be shared with us – especially those of us who are in this for business.

Eric Elia, Brightcove's vice president of programming and design said, "One of the key pieces that's broken in traditional TV is the reporting and analytics."

Brian Shin, CEO of Visible Measures, said the analytics product allows publishers to track not only videos on their own site, but when their videos are embedded and streamed elsewhere.

"What we're trying to do is create an objective set of metrics that apply in terms of audience engagement, video virality, the distribution of video as it's embedded throughout the Web–if it's watched on a blog or on Facebook, we want to be able to track all of these things," he said.

I love analytics and will be watching this closely.

Looks like the big players are making the moves today! Mashable has announced that they have invaded France! Oui Oui! Je voudrais Mashable avec Francais S'il vous plaît.

Since Pete is up there nord UK, this moves makes sense. Brings him onto the continent and from the interviews I have completed with people in France, the scene there is hot.

Congrats to Pete and the new French Mashable writers. He has also noted that Mashable might become a franchise. I wonder if he will require that french fries be served in non-fatten… oh wait that's a different type of franchise!

Here are the upcoming conferences we plan to cover. As always, please let me know if you run a conference and want us to cover it. There is no charge or fee (though if you could help with hotel that would be very much appreciated!).

• Search Engine Strategies – NYC – April 10-13
• Web2Expo – San Francisco – April 15-18
• Streaming Media East NYC – May 2007
• Future of Online Advertising NYC – June 2007
• all past, present and future coverage here

Alrighty… so we are live for 6 months this weekend! I am still shocked and amazed and can't thank you all so much for reading what I (and he other writers) produce. It means a lot to me and I look forward to many more months of serving you. So here is what I am asking for… FEEDBACK! What do you like? What do you hate? What do you want to see? Spill your guts, come sit on my couch and tell me your thoughts.

In return, I can offer two things. Include your physical mailing address (anywhere in the world) and I will mail you some spiffy CN goods. And I will also give away two $50 amazon gift certificates. I will award the certificates a week from today (March 25). So submit your feedback and don't worry you won't hurt my feelings :)

This afternoon while packing up for the big move, I took a look at a new site called Absolutely Parents. It is a community-based site for new and expectant parents. The site has your standard content sections plus a section from the experts.

So what makes this site different than the sites like iVillage? Well, first they have a creative commons license. They have tagging and lots of other Web 2.0 style features. They seem to be pulling in some content from other news sources along with user-generated submissions.

Lastly, they have digg-style voting. Of course now I must call them a digg clone. All joking aside, they call their votes "smiles" and I think it will be interesting to see if they can make voting in the mainstream work. My guess is that the average non-Internet geek won't get the voting, but perhaps it can work. I will check back later to see how things are going.

They do have some votes so far and hundreds of posted stories which is a good thing. My biggest suggestion for them is to hire an english speaking copywriter/reviewer. There are a lot of grammatical issues throughout the copy for the overall site. This will help the site appear more professional as well. 

Some early morning news here on the east coast, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has hired a CEO. No word on the package but Keith Teare, TC shareholder, indicates she is now a significant shareholder in TC.

From Om Malik, "Heather Harde, senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media is all set to join as the new chief executive officer at TechCrunch, a technology blog edited and published by Michael Arrington. Harde’s presence will help Arrington focus most of his energies on editorial."

From Arrington, "There is a lot for her to do. She will run every aspect of our business other than editorial, which I’ll be focusing on for now. TechCrunch has grown faster than I could manage over the last couple of years. Heather’s job will be to leverage the opportunities that we have sometimes let slip by, and to manage our organic and acquisition growth going forward."

I wish Heather and Mike much success and luck and we will all be watching where the TC ship goes now. My bet is that TC starts to look at buying small startups and becoming a force in overall online media and in the VC arena.

Update: Ben Metcalfe has a good writeup about the prospects of TC becoming a VC firm.

Today I had a chance to look at Freebase. Freebase is a new web app which launched sometime last week. I finally managed to get an invite today and figured I'd write something up for everybody and spread the word.

Freebase is a more of a community than a web app. They define themselves as a "Shared database of the worlds knowledge." At first when I heard this immediately I thought about wikipedia. Though after a few minutes of exploring and watching their intro video I found that Freebase really isn't anything like wikipedia other than the fact that they rely on their users to improve the content of the site.

So basically Freebase is a web app which allows you to search through large amounts of items pretty quickly, and allows you to search for more complex items than google or really any other search engine.

Freebase is built on top of two fairly simple principles called types and domains. A domain is just a huge category which governs and categorizes types. A type, simply put is a topic. Each item in Freebase is categorized by one or more types, which allows for easier searching and better user experience while searching.

Freebase is pretty cool, it allows you to search a lot of what you normally couldn't search, and it allows you to do it quickly. But there are a few downsides to Freebase. While most people will not get into creating their own domains and types, it tends to be pretty complicated. Beyond just plain searching and adding content Freebase is hard to use and there are some pretty complicated aspects to creating things which I really haven't begun to grasp.

On top of plain ol' searching for stuff on their website, Freebase has a developer API which allows you to query anything within its databases from your own web app. Hopefully this will allow for some cool innovation as far as cool new web apps come out. They even have a list of cool web apps listed in the sidebar of Freebase.

So yeah, I really liked freebase, I'm sure it will help with a few research papers and hopefully it will get better and better as people keep adding content. I'd really like it if everyone could just go and sign up for it. But it is invite only.

So I have 6 invites, if you would like one just email me at Jake@ and I will send you out an invite. Remember it's first come first serve so the first six people get an invite. Invites are gone! Grab the feed and we will post when we have more to give away.