Technically Speaking

SplashCast who I highly support here, is going live today with what they are calling MyPodcastNetwork. This is going to be a new and highly visible addition to the SplashCast media player.

Many of you are sitting there shaking your heads and saying, “Well this is nothing new.” WAIT, don’t click off, and I will tell you how this is “new“. Before SplashCast only had limited RSS capability; YouTube, Flicker. This now changes as of this morning as anything distributed media wise via RSS, can be included in the player.

Not only that, SplashCast has a catalog of over 200 shows currently. You can pick from that list to load up your personal SplashCast MyPodcastNetwork player. You can then embed the player on your web site, or just use for your own personal viewing pleasure. With as many shows available today, RSS is the way to go. The player I created – “Rex Dixon – MyPodcastNetwork” – player is below embedded below Marshall’s.

Click on this thumbnail to see the shows available; or a snapshot of what they have so far in their growing catalog:

How does all this make SplashCast a stronger brand? This will allow RSS to be empowered even further as a distribution media standard. This will make every web page a distribution avenue, and no longer will you have to wait on services such as iTunes to catch up to your media content.

Confused? Here are some main points that will hopefully “click“, turn the “ah-ha!” factor on, making this more compelling for you to try out:

* Select podcast feeds from the new feed directory in our console or add your own feeds.
* Put all your favorite podcast series into your personal channel
* Display your channel on your website – all the files inside can be played in one place, with very little load time.
* New podcast episodes will be added automatically and when you add a new show to your channel, it will appear in every place your channel is embedded arround the web.

This is Marshall Kirkpatrick’s MyPodcastNetwork player. He does a nice introduction to MyPodcastNetwork and goes over some of his favorite shows. By hovering over the player after you hit play, in the upper left corner is “Channel Guide” – click that and you will see the shows he talks about.

Below is my MyPodcastNetwork channel. Hit play, and then hover over the SplashCast player; upper left corner click on “Channel Guide“. Yes, my show list is quite diverse. I will probably change this up, but I have a wide variety of interests. I could have actually gone on for hours picking shows. This only took me a few minutes to create:

I love companies like SplashCast, as they are cutting edge. In addition to this launch they have put up a page where you can see all the shows available so far. They also have provided a Podcaster FAQ.

Also, this morning during this launch day, the SplashCast team will have an open group chat available for you to join if you have any questions. This will be located right on their main page.

SplashCast is a Portland, Oregon company, CEO is Michael Berkely. Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast, and Alex Williams is Director of Community Development (as well as the founder of Podcast Hotel).

Not a lot of time this morning, please check the Link Blog for the full run down.

Yahoo buys RightMedia, this will be the talk of the day. I already have four links to the story right here. I think this is an obvious move to counter Google, which is what the other 4 places are already stating. Since I’m short on time this morning, I’m glad they covered it well, and then some!

AT&T’s new Boss – I love when people question someone’s ability before they have day 1 on the job. They call that what? A Monday Morning QB! Actually that is after the fact, so this would be I guess a Saturday Afternoon QB? Speaking of the NFL, I hope your favorite NFL team drafted well over the weekend.

Charlie’s Angel’s – 5 minute Angel’s! Yes, television is going bye-bye soon. In one way it is sad, but in other ways, with 5 minute shows – I may have time to actually watch and get into series again!

Technically Speaking, I have to roll, but look for a great story in approximately 3 1/2 hours right here! Be sure to get in on the fun to the right (upper right corner) – Jambaz. It’s a game, don’t worry, it’s legit - for fun, and if you are good – well you can make a little bit of money.

Jambaz, wants you to play a game. The game is pretty simple. You can see the widget directly to the right, or the top right corner of this blog.

Basically you need to guess the price at close each day of the stocks I picked on the widget. There are 5 stocks in this week’s game. Apple, Amazon, Exxon, Juniper, Nordstrom’s are the stocks I picked to play with.

The game runs the entire week. Points are tallied daily, so if you miss a day, you could lose ground in beating me.

Why play? Very simple answer: It is FUN! But the better answer is YOU could win real MONEY! Yes, Jambaz is a cool new company that I feel honored to be picked to debut their game on this blog.

Do you need to be an expert stock picker? Of course not. That is the fun of the game. You can be the average person, such as myself, a simple small time blogger.

Technically Speaking, play the game, this is going to be fun. First week here on this site, so jump on and play!

Collarity, who as many of you know, is a main sponsor on this site, is gaining traction. I just received an e-mail late last week from Collarity Chief Executive Levy Cohen who sent over some new updated information.

Some of the new sites where they have now been established are MyFox Los Angeles, InfoPlease, and WebSite Magazine. They also had a great story written by Jessica E. Vascellaro and Kevin J. Delaney of the WSJ back on April 25th, 2007; Page D1.

Here are some of the more interesting things they had to say. Since I don’t have a WSJ subscription, I can’t link the article.

Search service Collarity Inc., which licenses its personalization technology to third-party Web sites, also offers a personalized search on its own site, Collarity.com. Users who register with an email address can have their search weighted towards things they have searched for by moving a slider bar toward a “personal” setting, as opposed to a “community” or “global” setting. iLOR LLC’s PreFound.com recently launched a new version of its search site that allows searchers to create profiles describing their interests and to specify the degree to which they want their search results to reflect those interests.

On privacy –

Companies stress that they take users’ privacy seriously. “We know we need to maintain user privacy and make the privacy tradeoffs very clear to the user,” says Google’s Ms. Mayer.

Collarity doesn’t even collect IP addresses. “We are young,” says Levy Cohen, chief executive of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Collarity.com. “We know we have to establish as much trust as possible.”

Technically Speaking, if you haven’t checked out my sponsor, Collarity, you probably should venture over there now to see what the buzz is all about.

It is quite amusing to me to see the number of social networks on the scene today. First up is one of the newer niche social networking startups, fabfemme, who I talked about a bit the other day. Now even though it is a lesbian and bi-sexual woman’s network, I figured I’d tool around to see what it was all about.

I will have to be honest, I don’t see any user base yet. I did a global search on the social network. I only found less then 30 users. Now the distressing thought here is, even though one of the main complaints about MySpace these days is the only “5 tracks on myspace” music thing, they still have numbers.

This is in direct reference of course to MySpace being FREE, and fabfemme wanting to make it a pay social network. I am starting to think that FabFemme may need to rethink their business model, as they do not seem to be gaining any traction so far. I actually hope this post helps them gain some traffic, as you will see below.

Another social networking startup I recently talked about is Vertagio. They are free, and the last time I talked to the founder there, he told me that network traffic was up 2000%! That is a huge leap, and I am glad to have (I hope!) helped. Every time I log on, I see new users signing up there; new profiles listed.

When it comes to social networking, I believe the free is always going to win out. Allen of CenterNetworks even nicely enough syndicated that article.

Case in point. Look at the mass growth that MySpace China (MySpace.cn) has going on; talked about here/with screenshots. I read somewhere that one user already had 1500 plus friends on his friends list!

I guess that is like a few hundred in America, when you consider that China is 1 billion strong population wise! With regards to this, I have not heard any statistics about MySpace Espanol. Nor have I heard anything about MySpace LatinoAmerica, both which I talked about here. The other launch this past week.

I almost forgot one. There of course is the other new twist on social networking which is that place called – inpowr. The social network about yourself! Woo Hoo!

Their motto should be “When you get tired of looking in the mirror, jump on inpowr!” Please understand, I haven’t had a moment of sarcasm in a few days. Seriously, it does sound like a cool place, but I wouldn’t really classify it as a “social network”. Socializing with yourself is kind of, well, “weird“.

Technically Speaking, social networking is on the rise still, and to try to make money by charging is still not the way to go online; especially when everyone else is still running the free business model. Always stick with what works. When you are in beta, don’t charge; at least those are my thoughts on this.