blog Archive

Last week we reported on web creation service Jimdo working on a Geocities Lifeboat tool. Today they have announced that the Lifeboat service is live. Jimdo’s U.S. manager Powen Shiah noted, “This isn’t just GeoCities 2.0, and it’s not a static archive of the site: all the pages and content can be edited and managed using Jimdo’s WYSIWYG interface. There’s only one side-effect… the sites might not look exactly the same. Some might even be prettier. Sorry, we did all we could but some things just aren’t transferable!”

Today wiki provider Wetpaint has launched the Geocities Bailout.  From their announcement, “To solve this problem, we announced yesterday our effort to help those in need of new hosting services, in the form of a G.A.R.P., a Geocities Asset Recovery Plan.  The plan is a bailout for all the Geocities users who are seeing their properties being foreclosed by the fierce Yahoo! landlord and need a new place to keep their valuable content.”

Wetpaint has setup a dedicated site for the Geocities Bailout. They will be providing live chat all day to help users convert their sites and they are offering free domains as a bonus.

As I noted in the Jimdo post last week, these offerings are smart. It’s a bit shocking that all of the other webpage creation tools haven’t done the same thing. While it’s never cool to try to poach users, Geocities is closing so it makes sense to offer a replacement service.

Etelos has announced a new partnership this morning which will bring Six Apart’s Movable Type blogging product into a "cloud-hosted" environment using the Etelos platform suite. Basically Etelos sets up a virtual server instance which includes the Movable Type software already installed and configured.

It looks like the new Etelos/Movable Type combination would be considered a competitor to the hosted WordPress.com offering. This is the concept behind the Etelos platform suite – software companies can create hosted versions of their software products which run as instances on the Etelos platform.

Pricing starts at $19.95/month for an single author blog and goes up to $99.95/month for a ten-author blog with more power on the virtual server side as well.

Here are the pricing plans:

Blog comment replacement service JS-Kit has announced a new partnership with Yahoo today that will bring the ability for blog readers to login to comment on a blog using their Yahoo userid. You can see how it works on Guy Kawasaki’s blog and I’ve embedded a screenshot below. The service uses the oAuth protocol (like in 24) so you aren’t sharing your password with JS-Kit unlike say many of the Twitter apps that require you to share your credentials with the local developer for the service to work.

I guess this is supposed to be like Facebook Connect. You can spam your friends all over the place with your updates. Just like when you post a blog comment, your friends on Facebook can see it. Chris Saad is the VP Product and Community Strategy for JS-Kit and also the Data Portability Chief notes that today’s announcement is a step forward for their data portability journey. Not sure that I see how today’s announcement has anything to do with data portability but I think it’s always great to offer readers more options to login because it leads to more conversation and usage.

To make the connection work, JS-Kit is utilizing both Yahoo!’s Profile API and Updates API. According to JS-Kit CEO, Khris Loux, "Eventually, each story a publisher sends to the Yahoo! Updates feed will benefit from referral traffic to Yahoo!’s most popular sites: Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Profiles, and more."

Last summer JS-Kit acquired Haloscan which added 500,000 blogs to their network which they now claim is over 600,000. They are also powering the comment system for event planning service Evite.

In this NYC Spotlight, we are highlighting a blog that says they are at the, "intersection of marketing and technology". The site is Marketing.FM and is edited by Eric Friedman. Marketing.FM has been publishing content since early 2006 and offers content in what looks like about 100 categories.

It appears the advertising content category is the most popular followed closely by Marketing 2.0. Marketing.FM is part of the 9Rules blog network. Eric works at the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures during the day.

Check out our previous NYC blog spotlights: Girls in Tech and the NYC Game Industry website.

Earlier today we posted the “State of the Word” presentation by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. After his presentation, Matt spent some time demonstrating the upcoming 2.7 release of WordPress. I’ve embedded the video below. WordPress 2.7 will be available in November.

Matt begins by explaining that eventually everything in WordPress will have an associated API for extending the service. The new interface looks awesome. The posting functionality of WordPress is one of the things I wish Drupal had. I find that Drupal can be extended further than WordPress but the posting usability is WAY better in WordPress than Drupal. The 2.7 admin interface appears to be even more usable than the current version.

Earlier this week Google Blogsearch relaunched with an aggregator of sorts. Immediately several sites including ReadWriteWeb claimed it was a "Techmeme killer". The truth is that Google Blogsearch won’t kill or injure Techmeme and I’ve created the video embedded below to outline the main reason why.

There are a variety of good posts on the Google Blogsearch/Techmeme killer topic including: Rob Diana, Steven Hodson, Duncan Riley, Josh Catone and Svetlana Gladkova. Sean Percival had a bit of fun with the topic noting that the only reason Techmeme will be killed is because Techcrunch didn’t make their lead payments on time.

Techmeme would be a much stronger asset to the community if there were topic pages (similar to Blogrunner) and the current hierarchy was removed. There would be a higher level of discovery and a nice dose of leveling would take place. I have been researching Techmeme for over six months and will eventually have a lengthy video about the overall news-aggregator topic and additional thoughts for improvement.

NY-based content ratings and recommendations provider Outbrain has announced a new distribution partnership with blog network b5media this morning. Under the terms of the partnership, b5media will install the ratings and recommendations widget on all 300+ blogs in the b5media network. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

The Outbrain widget allows blog readers to rate the quality of the content and receive recommendations for other content based on their ratings. Recommendations can come from the individual site or a whitelist can be setup where sites can partner together and recommendations are shared across the listed network. 

The more sites that Outbrain can partner with, the stronger their recommendations network becomes. From my perspective that’s where the Outbrain value lies. The raw ratings are not worth a lot to me as I am never sure what it is that the person is ranking. It could be spelling, grammar, quality of the content, subject matter, etc.