Category: Web 2.0

I’ve attended the second day of the international bloggers’ conference in IDC Herzliya. Most of the lectures and panels were very interesting. Meeting fellow bloggers and people in the industry was very fun.

More Blogference Pictures

Since the Israeli blogosphere has already written so many words about it, mostly live from the scene (live blogging is madness in my humble opinion), then I’ll just throw a few numbers. And pictures…

• 150,000 views for every episode – Ask A Ninja
• $250,000 to run GigaOm – Om Malik
• 100 silent readers for every commenter – Micah Sifry (while speaking about Daily Kos)
• 200 words max for a gossip piece – Jessica Coen, Vanity Fair, previously in Gawker
• 73 NIS – Taxi fee for getting to the event, after my car broke down

Since Steve Jobs’ initial presentation of the marvelous iPhone, there’s been high anticipation. I even found a web site dedicated to the iPhone buzz. It hits the US markets on June 29th.

I don’t get it. The invention of the cellular phone was a real revolution. In the past years, cellular phones have become more powerful, more sophisticated, and they work much better than in their first years.

My average cellular phone has a 1MP camera, it can record video, record sound, play MP3 songs, play music from the radio, has a humble calendar, a decent web browser and I even use it to make phone calls!

So can someone tell me what’s the buzz all about? What more can this fabulous iPhone give me?

At the meantime I’ll stick with my Nokia…

Google’s acquisition of Feedburner, confirmed a few weeks ago, seems very reasonable for Google. A major portion of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Serving AdSense ads through Feedburner feeds would give Google more income. Combined with Feedburner’s fabulous statistics, this could be a very powerful tool for serving targeted ads.

Highly targeted ads means more advertiser money, more money for Google and Feedburner, but also more money for the content publishers. The use of RSS is constantly becoming more popular, especially with RSS Reader integration into mail client software.

Many blog readers use their RSS reader as the only way of reading their favorite blogs. These blog readers don’t usually type the blog address, or use their Favorites or Bookmarks feature of their browser. Some of them don’t even bother clicking through to the blog, but just read the whole entry through the RSS reader. Targeted ads through the RSS feed would be the only way to reach such users.

Feedburner already has an advertising network, and Google is already experimenting with RSS AdSense. But, Feedburner’s strong side isn’t advertising, and Google’s strong side (although it conquers almost every field) isn’t RSS feeds.

The deal could harness the Google’s ads and Feedburner’s feed capabilites into a very strong tool.

And how does this encourage Problogging? Well, another serious income channel would be welcomed by probloggers, or potential probloggers. The only problem will be when too many ads on feeds might disturb users. If the blog is truly professional, and if the ads won’t be too aggressive, I’m sure that almost all the users will accept it. More money for content publishers means that more people can turn their expertise and writing hobby into a solid way of making a living.

The fruits of this deal will be very interesting to follow.

More on the subject at Workboxers.

Anyway, things.co.il isn’t a professional blog, therefore, it will remain (at least for now) ad-free. Also my RSS feed (English only feed) which you are encouraged to subscribe to, will remain ad-free.

During my use of Spotback‘s rating tools, I had a few comments about their service. I sent them to the contact person over there. I must say that they took my comments seriously, and they were very kind. I don’t think that will implement / or have implemented my remarks, but they sure are listening.

Now, Spotback’s service is open to any anyone. I was mostly impressed by the high ability to customize their widgets. You can really do almost anything with them, including playing with all the bits and pieces, and using CSS to change everything.

I am quite lazy, and I’m not so good in matching colors (well, I’m a boy), so the only thing I did was make a fast translation of their widget to Hebrew. Now, my Hebrew posts contain a Hebrew version of the widget. Anyway, they seem to be on the right track.

Picli

I wrote a somewhat nasty post about how Picli (the Digg for photos) can be gamed easily. I was very surprised that hours after that post, someone from the Picli contacted me. He explained that the current voting situation is temporary and asked me if I had more comments.

Again, I was impressed from the seriousness of the company. I hope that they will improve and have a good product (tough competition ahead…)

Both companies are young, highly motivated and have great ideas in hand. I wish them Great Success!

Picli.com, a new site that is the “Digg for Photos” launched recently. It aims to be a site where users can share links to photo. The photos can be uploaded, or linked from other places.

The site is totally immature. There are various flaws. The biggest problem is the easy “gaming” possibility. This is how I did it:
Continue reading “Photo Digg can be easily gamed”