Technically Speaking

It’s late on a Friday afternoon, and while siliconANGLE is a new blogging venture that John Furrier invited me in on, it’s certainly not lacking for content! Currently we are growing, and as we grow we should have even more content for you to read.

Here is a look at what has been happening just over the past couple of days:

It’s Almost Too Late to Save Print Media – Rizzn digs in here with a great post that of course was spurred on by the closing of the newspaper today – The Rocky Mountain News.

MicroPlaza Organizes URL’s That Tweet Past You – Yes as one of our readers pointed out – it’s not a twitter based company, but more like a company that has been created once again based on the twitter API!

iPhoneMania Only in Certain Locations – iPhone seems to be a no go in Japan.

DEMO 09 Class of Demonstrators! – John was given a schedule for DEMO09 last week, and we posted it. Later we did find out that it was under embargo, so while that looks bad on us, we as siliconANGLE the blog was never officially given this item with someone saying to John “Yo, it’s under embargo until such and such time!”

Facebook Decides To Be A Commune – After writing this one, I was sort of thinking, “That’s pretty damn good!” – and when I was linked later, I was quite pleased others had a similar line of thinking. Although as I watched Mark Zuckerberg this morning on Today, I was hoping, “Man, I hope he didn’t see that and make some rude comment about communes and hippies!” And if he did, well – that would have been even cooler!

Yahoo Re-Org Round-Up – Rizzn masterfully sorted out the mess known as the Yahoo re-organization memo(s) or rather, we found out that the new CEO likes to memo out the employees! Another skillful surgery through the massive amounts of Yahoo coverage, Rizzn’fied.

Will Michael Sit Become Web 2.0’s Kevin Mitnick? – Rizzn once again cuts through the noise, and this time pulls something to to the surface that is being buried. Yes, Michael Sit – the media ignores it, but Rizzn rips through the slime of cover up to pull the facts to the surface for the readers.

Twitterfied Yet? – Do we need more twitter coverage? Google coverage? Well maybe not, but we covered it anyways.

DEMO Changing Hands – Kara Swisher Interview with Matt Marshall and Chris Shipley – John has total respect for DEMO and the changes and posted the Kara Swisher interview with Matt and Chris.

Forget InterWebs Think InterClouds – John talks about the InterClouds.

Panther Express and CDNetworks Merger – Making sure we also try to keep up with the infrastructure.

Social Media Lessons Learned – What To Do – John talks about social media and what he has learned. This seemed to be a popular subject this week, and John addressed it well.

Technically Speaking that was just the past two days over at siliconANGLE and hopefully you had a chance to check in and read a few of those posts, and if not, well there is the weekend to catch up on the angles we presented over the past couple of days, and there is more if you want to dig back a little bit.

As we all know, Google is everywhere. There is really no big surprise by this article about Google showing up in news searches now. Not a big deal if you ask me. Soon enough, Google might morph into twitter as many reports are stating. For full disclosure, yes I wrote that.

One thing I did forget to mention in the above SiliconANGLE post is that Google, while just firing up their Google twitter yesterday, has other Google properties already on twitter. So while the “real” Google is now on twitter, Google properties has been around and have already enjoyed the benefit of twitter’s real life conversation search. There was really no need for people to point this out. It is quite obvious that twitter’s benefit’s are now coming to light.

Technically Speaking, since I wrote that above post earlier this morning, the followers of the Google account have jumped another 4,000! I wonder if these people are expecting a really cool announcement or something? Only time will tell, and what I really wonder is when twitter will have to take a piss in the cup – ie. – Twitter is on steroids – follow along and you’ll understand my sense of humor!

DaddySpankGood, sounds like a seriously perverted porno or BDSM site. Of course if it was, do you think I’d really take the time to write about it? It’s not a BDSM or porno site at all. It is however a very easy to promote name for another Hollywood gossip site. While the site looks a bit amateur from the get go, the news stories like the top one this morning are rather insightful (to me at least!) for Hollywood gossip. As you can tell by that statement – I don’t follow a lot of Hollywood Gossip sites!

Why am I devoting any time at all to this DaddySpankGood site? It’s to address some of the necessary evils of twitter. Since some blogs are refusing to talk about twitter (and I’m SO THANKFUL they are doing that!), I figured I may was well twit-out here for awhile. The bad or evil underlying layer of the twitter universe is the fact that blogs or sites such as the one mentioned here have it easy. They understand and grasp twitter quickly. They are actually marketing guru’s of the new media age we live in.

While I won’t follow every Hollywood Gossip blog as I have better things to be doing, this one since they took a chance on me on a day I feel rather open to new sites, I’ll keep them for awhile. I mean, where else can I read about player Brian Austin Green and his hot ex-girlfriend Megan Fox! Gossip like that will keep me reading I guess. Good gossip sites that are not talking about Miley Cyrus 24/7 are worthwhile for a brain break.

Do I feel guilty about the above post about DaddySpankGood? Nah, check out some of the posts I have recently done for SiliconANGLE – Ginx (which I did before this one!), Virgin’s announcement yesterday at FOWA, and my first one about MyLife the new all in one search place.

Technically Speaking, as I search for that next gig, I have been doing some blogging over on SiliconANGLE which is John Furrier’s new venture. I’m over there along with Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, a former Mashable blogger. If nothing else, it does help me to get into a writing groove again!

Twitter has been on steroids over the past few weeks. Interesting enough, it was about 2 years ago right before SXSW that twitter fully took off. I hadn’t even signed up for an account until right about the time before SXSW 2 years ago. Interestingly enough, as seen by the below tweets by @marshallk and locally here in the STL @weatherbird we see the full power of twitter.

The hardest thing now is like it was the days before e-mail went mainstream. That is convincing the non-twitter users to grab their own twitter account soon. Before long, there will be people that will not be able to have the name they want. Trying to get someone to use twitter shouldn’t be hard since ABC News appears to be fully plugged into twitter, and even the Weatherbird from STLToday is plugged in.

It shouldn’t be hard to get people to use twitter, but there are some people that feel it’s still not mainstream enough. If ABC News can use it, I think it is really close being mainstream!

Technically Speaking, I’m not watching the speech, just following along via twitter in tweetdeck is fine by me.

Well the news is officially out about my departing Lookery. The business focus is changing, and just to be clear there are absolutely no hard feelings.

Scott and David are two startup veterans that really know the game and how to play it. David is a top notch CTO, and along with Scott’s experience and connections, there was no way someone could pass up the chance to work with a ground floor startup as a co-founder.

Now that Lookery is sailing on, I’m looking forward to my next project. Whether it’s another startup, which I do like, or a bigger company, I’m ready to use all my skills in the next opportunity out there. If you need to see a resume, please check out my LinkedIn Profile.

Technically Speaking, if you have a cool gig or need my expertise to help ramp your business up so that people know who you are – and building that trusted relationship to be profitable – please ping me!

I decided to do a fun little experiment of sorts over the weekend. I wanted to see if a tumblr site could actually get traffic. Wondering if people actually would read other people’s opinions on snippets of news stories. Now many of you have tumblr sites, and if you do, you probably are wondering if it’s worth clipping some news you saw and leaving your 2 cents.

Here are some results I thought I’d share from statistics that I am pulling straight from MyBlogLog. Now while your results could vary, I think by looking at the stats below, Tumblr can be a traffic driver or rather your tumbl could very well be read by many.

Yes, there was a perfect tie for the #2 spot of read posts yesterday. It seemed that people were equally enthralled Microsoft screwing over their fired employees (TechCrunch post), and MySpace China. Think that one was due to Rupert’s daughter’s picture? Not sure, but the offclick’s indicated that even though it was tech dominating the read, somehow the other bay area house snuck in there at the #3 offclick site.

One of the more interesting things I found was articles that I thought (I guess I shouldn’t think!) would be interesting to people, were not. Such human interest stories as the Iraq Veteran getting a gift pulled due to a marijuana conviction in 2005, even though that was re-tweeted by someone – it never seemed to gain much traction as a read story. In fact, you could almost considered it a buried story.

The sad thing is that this is a real person’s true story of having something taken away that he fully deserves, at least in my opinion – all veterans of the Iraq conflict deserve anything America can give back to them. No matter what past violations they may have committed. Sadly enough, the stories that ranked over this one were only interesting for a minute such as the Food Network star that F-Bombed in front of the King and Queen of Spain, that $700k house in SF from the day before – this must be quite a deal or something – and even George W’s visit to a hardware store where he was offered a greeter job.

Two more stories that started to surge and just went flat were the guy that was working 50 jobs in 50 states all in one year’s time, and the 11 year old kid that killed his step mother with a kiddie shotgun. Both of those stories were surging, and somehow at the end of the day, just fell out of contention for the top spots. Very strange how a story can start to take off, and just die.

Technically Speaking, I guess I do not know what people like to read about, or can only guess what might be popular or interesting. So far today – a story about saying good-bye to former employers I found in the LA Times is #1, while the #3 read story is providing the #2 offclick. Interestingly enough it’s a search site(Kosmix) I wrote about here.

I just so happened to be on twitter search a few hours ago when I saw the #followlist tweet. While I was there checking that out, I decided to see what was up in the #STL. The below was sitting at the top of the list. I just went back on another search for #iab, and it was still sitting at the top of the list.

The question is – who is @thedarz and why is his hate for the STL so big that he has to come out and F-Bomb the whole city? Interesting things you find via hashtags.

Update: One of the cool things about blogging, is sometimes you can get immediate reaction. My apologies to @jjeffryes, at times I can pull the trigger really quick, in this case I was totally wrong about this person.

Another thing that I saw was this guy here, @jjeffryes saying how the STL is 10 years behind in social media. He even went on to say it again via another tweet right here. Yes, I went to his site – saw no way to contact him – so left a comment on the blog post he had there. I even did a ping on his above tweet.

Technically Speaking, the first part of being any type of social media person, is the first part of that over used phrase. If you can’t be social or even respond to pings that you asked for, than you may as well be classified in the first F-bomb person’s group.

Twitter Mosaic states you can make art from your twitter followers or friends – and than buy it! Promote it on coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc… the American sell this spirit is alive and well. I think it shows just how powerful a draw twitter is and just another idea on how Twitter could actually make money. If they wanted to be profitable in the first place. With their latest $35 million VC injection, I think those days of glory are far beyond driven now. It’s more like super infused buy out is what will happen.

Here are my followers in a pretty mosaic that you can get for your twitter followers or friends:

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Technically Speaking, I’d buy that on a t-shirt! eyond

Shutupmeg, which I’m sure has been covered already by some of the bigger tech blogs is nothing more than a cool bot that re-tweets on the phrase shut up.

It found me on a re-tweet of mine that had the phrase shut up, and now I know that @natefanaro happens to be the one running the show.

Technically Speaking, bots are fun and have been around since the early days of IRC and the bot wars there. I wonder how far twitter bots will go? This one for the moment is better than those auto-add bots that are just annoying.

Rex Dixon’s Tumblr, is where I have been putting more of the interesting items I surf across throughout the day. It’s nice to be able to leave a quick remark or thought about something and move on. Everyone should have a tumblr site, as we all scan a variety of sites, some of us scan the same sites, but we all have a niche bunch that some people will never find out about. Tumblr gives you a way to easily share all that.

As an example, this morning I found the Cave House that was for sale on eBay originally here. From there, I found the official Cave House site which has over 35 pages of pictures.

Last night I found a really cool article that Duff McKagan wrote in the Seattle Weekly. Did you know that he was a blogger now? Interesting. He writes some good stuff btw, on many different topics. Of course I find the disturbing items also, such as another puppy mill that was found in Missouri.

The nice thing is that you can see all the different items that I tumbl on my tumblr site to the right. So if this blog isn’t updated for a few days, have no fear, I’m probably just fine as long as you see entries on the tumblr blog. In fact, it’s much easier to leave a quick thought as you surf than having to write an entire blog post.

Also, as of last night I added Disqus commenting features to the tumblr site. So you can leave a comment on such items as whether you agree or disagree with Andreessen starting a VC fund right now. Of course this was @BRoodman who suggested this, and I’m glad that Disqus had easy instructions to add this quickly.

Technically Speaking, first there were blogs, than there was social networking, than came the 140 character micro-blogging that made twitter famous, FriendFeed provided a stream of data and now there is so much content out there – you only have time to leave commentaries – which tumblr provides. What’s next? Why not leave a comment to answer that question!