mashable Archive

Last night down at the NYC Pourhouse bar was the 2nd MashMeet combined with the Web2.0/Social Networking Meetup. I’ve got to say, I had a good time. The place was packed – probably too packed – but I was able to camp out in a small nook with a bunch of friends and met a whole lot of new people as well. I was able to convert 112 people from loyal Mashable readers to loyal CN readers so I consider it a good night.

Head Masher Pete Cashmore was unable to make it as he was receiving his award from Forbes as a top web celeb. (get well soon Pete!)

The evening’s festivities were chaperoned by Mashable’s Adam Hirsch and Adam Ostrow along with Brett "I need a date" Petersel. In all seriousness, it was a lot of fun and it seemed everyone else had fun as well. For Your Imagination was shooting video as well – looking forward to seeing the results.

I got a chance to meet two of Digg’s power users, a variety of followers of my twitter feed, VentureBeat’s NYC reporter (I forgot her name again and can’t find her on the site!) and even Nicholas Carlson from Valleywag. The weirdest thing is when someone comes up to you and says, "I follow your Twitter" – wtf is this world coming to!

Here are some photos from the evening (view all photos):

Nicholas from Valleywag and Alisa Leonard

Two Top Diggers – identity concealed to protect them

On the calendar this week are the Web2NewYork (New York Web Entrepreneurs) on Tuesday and the Mashable MashMeet meetup also on Tuesday. The MashMeet is also combining with New York Web 2.0 Social Networking Tech Meetup and the NYC Entrepreneur / Small Business Networking. I am guessing there will be a huge turnout for the MashMeet as the other meetups have a large majority of heavy drinkers and  now the drinks will be free.

Goodness we need some new, better names for these meetups, dont’cha think?!?

As for the MashMeet – don’t be afraid to wear CN colors or show your CN pride. I will be there wearing my CN pin and will have some giveaways for other loyal CN readers. We will be entering the enemy camp so watch out for any potential shenanigans. Use Twitter to warn others when needed. I will hand out a code sheet at the event.

Additional NYC meetups this week include:

• WebDesign - Monday
• Photoshop Users Group – Wednesday – at the new Apple Store!

Leave others in the comments!

Reports from PEHub and Mashable indicate a new $4.5 million Series B round of funding for Federated Media. Congrats! Federated Media provides advertising for some of the world's largest blogs including: TechCrunch (TC is in "open warfare" and looking for a replacement), Read/WriteWeb, GigaOm, Mashable, ArsTechnica, TechDirt and about 100 other blogs. We have written several times about Federated Media and their "envelope-pushing" ad campaigns.

But I am left wondering, why do they need so much money and are they having difficulty filling their inventory?

First the "why" question. I have to assume that an ad network makes money (not profit perhaps) from day 1. Each ad view brings in some amount of revenue for FM. And since they are the provider of ads for many large blogs with mega CPMs, wouldn't they be bringing in oodles of cash? Perhaps this new investment round is to create other FM video shows like the Morgan Webb tech news show. And naturally towards hiring more sales execs and/or more ad-serving technology. Anyone else have ideas about where they would use this type of cash influx?

Secondly, Is FM having a difficult time selling ads/filling inventory on the top tech blogs? Over the past couple of weeks, as I browse their network of sites, I see a good number of bottom of the barrel ads running on their sites. It seems like they might not be able to fill the inventory that these sites need. Here are some examples over the past 10 days:

Some kind of download utility – TechCrunch

Supernova from GigaOm – this conference was 3 months ago?

Free iPhone with 1000 offers – Various

Two "we help you break the law speeding" ads – TechDirt and TechCrunch

On the plus side, there are the WebbAlert (shown right)/FM network banners running on many FM sites. These ads makes sense and I like the idea a lot. When you can't fill ads with paying ads, show house publisher ads. I wish all ad networks offered this type of publisher barter. Remove all of the ads listed above and only show the FM network ads. This is a great way for readers of x blog to learn about y blog and vice-versa. These banners also look 1000x better for a site's image than a "punch the donkey, win an iPod" ad. I would recommend they either explain what "SMB" means or change it to something else that people will understand.

Mashable is reporting that social networking site Respectance has taken a Series A round of financing to the tune of $1.5 million. What makes Respectance unique is that pages are built for those who have deceased.

Pete notes, "Certainly, a 'social network for the dead' has the kind of simple premise that the mainstream media can latch onto. Meanwhile, we tested the site a few weeks back and liked it: with a nice, usable design and support for multimedia like photos and videos, it’s very well executed."

Assuming the Internet isn't going away anytime in the next 60 years, this type of site could be very valuable. A young child can learn about their grandparents from family and friends across the world.

It might be also a good place for each of us to live an "Internet Will" online.  Last month, I spoke with SharedBook, who handles the technology for Legacy.com, a site that scrapes gets obituaries from newspapers across the nation and creates printable books from the comments.

I guess when the living is so overwhelmed with social networking, those who have passed on is a good place to market to.

Pete asked the following question on Mashable tonight, "Question: What Should Technorati Do?" He points to an article in Forbes Magazine in which Rachel Rosmarin notes, "Blog search-engine startup Technorati's own technorati, including its chief technologist and vice president of engineering, are leaving. With these heavy-hitters will go some of the site's geek credibility." I agree with Rachel as I believe Tantek was the face to the developer community and he had great respect from most Web conference attendees.

I thought I would share the two ways I use Technorati: checking inbound links and researching articles on sites I follow. I check Technorati for inbound links on the articles I write daily (ok hourly). I try my best to join the discussions on the sites that link to my articles. I enjoy watching how people react to what I write and learning from the posts. Trackbacks used to work but I find that fewer sites send and accept trackbacks these days.

The other way I use Technorati is for research on sites I follow. Let me illustrate an example. Pete authored an article titled, "Backfence Closes, Citizen Journalism a Failure" earlier this week. I read the article and then clicked over to Technorati to see who linked to the article. Currently there are 14 links to his article. From there, I can visit the sites that interest me, join the conversation and also potentially contact the site to see if they have heard of CN. It's a great blog-to-blog networking tool. I can also follow what the reaction is to Pete's post. Is there any feedback I can learn from? I consider this aspect to be a great research and learning tool.

Pete notes, "There are many directions Technorati could move in: towards MyBlogLog, towards Digg, becoming a media portal and so on. But all seem like me-too attempts that are destined to fail. Most likely we’ll see an acquisition at this juncture." I agree that these ideas have the failure stamp on them. My take would be for Technorati to move into "authority ranking and buzz metrics" similar to what BuzzLogic (CN interview) is doing in this space. Technorati already does a great job of tracking links across the Web, now put those links to a better use than just "Authority" rankings. I won't even go into my thoughts about the joke that Authority is here, I will save that for another post.

I would suggest that Technorati leave the search engine piece behind. Focus on helping companies (and bloggers/web sites) track and measure buzz. This is where the real money is. They could sell various plans for cash instead of relying on advertisements as well. Check out our previous Technorati coverage.

Earlier this week I posted a column titled, "Google kills Yelp." The feedback has really been strong on this one! Some saying that, yes, Google will kill Yelp (and the other local review sites) but most saying that Yelp will live on and continue to grow. I love Yelp. I use Yelp for finding information about a local business before I would ever think to Google it.

Mashable followed-up with "Google Maps Local Reviews: 8 Big Losers" where James notes eight local reviews services that might be losers after Google dominates. His eight include: Yelp (cn coverage), welovelocal (cn coverage), Angie’s List, Zipingo, InsiderPages, Touch Local, MojoPages and TrustedPlaces.

One of the posts that stuck out to me was by Stephan Uhrenbacher, Qype CEO. Qype provides local reviews in a bunch of European countries with a large percentage of users in the United Kingdom and Germany. Check out his post titled, "Never compete head to head with Google." on the Qype blog and here are some excerpts:

Will Qype be successful? To answer this question, you have to take a closer look at our business. We are in the business of building a local community of people who have something meaningful to say. We try our best to separate signal and noise. We actively support our community. We solve conflicts. This the expensive part of our business. We invested a lot of our resources to get our community going in Germany and are planning to achieve this in the UK.

We at least find it not easy to convince visitors that it is a rewarding experience to contribute to Qype. The reward comes later from the community, in form of recognition, feedback, etc. And this is what makes us grow. There is no recognition element on Google Maps. So for the moment, I think the review feature on Google Maps will not be a huge threat.

Look, the truth is that anytime you are in a business, offline or online, someone bigger can appear at any minute. It's  your job to continue to differentiate yourself from the others. Competition is a good thing. Qype, Yelp and the others are working their angles and I think we will see even stronger products appearing over the balance of the year. I have always been a fan of review sites and look forward to the next generation of reviews. Who will create the first video reviews site?

So it seems yesterday that Digg lost control over its user community over a story about HD-DVD keys. Since a take-down demand was received, Digg removed the story. Which they should have done. And when this was done, the Digg loyals (not the entire community as Mashable reports) went loony. They started posting hundreds of stories about this key in every way, shape possible. Pete also has a good pbp of the events with screen caps.

Why is removing this story so bad? First, all it was is a link to the story itself. Second, I am guessing that the decryption codes are probably against the terms of the agreement when it comes to the HD dvds. Third, the codes are available everywhere now.

So what does this show? This shows exactly the core users on Digg that I have spoken about so many times. A group of young males who have plenty of time on their hands to do something like this. It is disturbing because I found Digg to be quite useful lately. I hope that the site can get back to some sort of order today. It is critical that this issue is dealt with quickly and correctly. I also bet that if Digg lost everyone who participated in the codes issue, I bet they would still survive and might even be stronger in the long-term.

Of course, Kevin Rose then went too far I believe. He basically "abandoned ship" by saying, "You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying." Did he check with his VC firms before saying this?

And don't forget, there is always Y Combinator News. While this won't provide the same number of users that Digg did/does, I like it better. I hope we might be looking at finding a new yardstick for techblogs in terms of user numbers. Many sites rely 100% on Digg users and that makes others numbers appear small in nature while the smaller number might equate to the better traffic.

Remember what Michael Arrington said back in March, "no, we don’t care that much about digg traffic actually. it’s far less than 10% of our total traffic, and when we aren’t on digg the comments are much more intelligent. digg is good for a quick traffic spike, but it isn’t a useful way to build an audience. I like digg as a business, but don’t really care about the links. most of our revenue comes from our sponsors, who pay a flat fee per month regardless of traffic. they want quality readers, not quantity. And digg basically sends a never ending stream of angry 16 year olds. not something the sponsors are that interested in."