Strong post from GigaOm on the value of communications to social networking sites.
It's interesting to think about the difference and complementary nature of self expression and communications to your point of online presence. (or points of presence since we often "belong" to several online communities including email and IM).
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Happy Thanksgiving fellow Canadians
Tip of the hat to Mark for this video.
Urban riding has its thrills.
I stand poised to begin work again tomorrow, and I'm very glad. I was very lucky - twice.
We are not among those who were satiated with holiday this summer, but it was a great summer nonetheless. My son was born, and my daughter started talking up a storm, and we went back to Canada to celebrate my nephew's first birthday. Since he was born 2 months early and is now everything a one year old boy should be, I have nothing in the world to complain about.
But boy am I glad August is over.
My August started a month ago, on the 4th, a friday, while I was biking to work. I crashed - and without going into details - I was very very lucky. Concussion, short term memory loss. road rash. Ambulance ride. ER. CAT scan. Discharge same day. Scared the hell out of my poor wife - I'm sorrry. My friends Joe and Paul were there and helped me through the day - I am very grateful. Nothing more serious.
or so I thought.
Unfortunately I believe I picked something up in the ER.
something called MRSA. It's a bacterium; the flesh eating kind. 20 days later I was in another ER after thinking I had a couple of bad spider bites that weren't responding to antibiotics. Thankfully the ER doctor diagnosed the MRSA, cut it out, and put me on two different "oh you have the big boys!" antibiotics to kill the little buggers. It took 4 days of pain and daily outpatient checks before the infection started to turn. Then another week or so of being knocked on my butt after doing anything other than lying down. That would bring me through the end of August.
I am very glad to be going back to work tomorrow. I was lucky. After I got this, I heard about many people who've had these bacterial infections and been hospitalized for weeks, antibiotics injected into the muscle or through IV, had feet or legs amputated or died. Before I got it, I'd never heard of Staph. Maybe I did once on House. But it certainly never occured to me that "normal" people get it.
One thing if you happen to stumble on this post. If you get an infection - these infections look like pimples with lots of red around and are hot and painful - get it checked out by a doctor - immediately. There are forms of Strep and Staph that will kill you. fast. They aren't just in hospitals, and they apparently kill tens of thousands of people per year. I read somewhere that they kill more people in the US than AIDs and breast cancer combined. And you never hear about them. So you don't think about it.
I was lucky twice in August. Looking forward to a good september.
Mike Arrington just launched CrunchGear, a "a daily journal of all things gadget-tastic".
Sounds promising - Mike seems to be as passionate about gadgets as he is about start-ups, and he's hired a good editor in John Biggs.
Blog software is pretty incredible. It's amazing how the same software can be used by a 14 year old girl to write daily rants to her 10 (100?) friends, and also be used by a small team of passionate editors to launch a media property. Are they all bloggers? I guess.
Amazing to think that CNET had to build a pre-caching content management, template, database and server system when it launched CNET.com 11 years ago. The concept of a presentation template being separate from the content was a new one. flat html ruled the day.
Anyway - I wish them luck. Wonder what we'll be ruminating about in the year 2017.
TechCrunch highlights that MSFT live labs is working on a product called photosynth - essentially a new way to group photos and view images based on pattern recognition.
My description doesn't nearly do it justice - it's a very cool UI - sort of virtual reality meets slideshows and albums, with zooming, 3D flying etc. Here's a tour.
Live labs architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas likens the potential to Narnia worm holes, where you can use the pattern matching and UI to go from one of your photos of the basilica to more photos of the basilica taken by others.
It looks slick - I am very curious to see how they plan to integrate photos from outside photosynth. Wonder whether the pattern matching works at scale at all the various places in the world. They definitely should include geotagging and maps also.
Oh yeah - if you want to see the Basilica, we have a few (44,214) photos from Webshots here
My friend Shel is writing a new book - the main subject centers around Global Neighborhoods - and he just posted a blog interview with me on the topic.
In case you don't know Shel, he and Robert Scoble wrote the book on business blogs, Naked Conversations - a must read. Shel did some consulting for me in the spring - I highly recommend him.
The concepts that are being explored by Shel will contribute to a more human web and one that is ultimately more personal and useful, as well as socially rewarding. He's a very thoughtful guy, and a good storyteller, so the book should be very good.
Many of the ideas we discussed are being applied to the new and improved Webshots, which relaunches in August.
We'd purchased chowhound a little while ago and began rebuilding the software (and updating the UI). It just re-launched over the weekend. Although it's built with the latest ajax and ruby on rails, the site is designed to appeal to people passionate about food, not code.
The members of the site are *very* passionate treasure hunters - who share their finds and opinions on restaurants and food around the world - for example, one of my favorite members is melanie wong . To give you a flavor of the site, Melanie just posted that proscuitto de parma is on sale for $9.99 per half pound.
Prosciutto di Parma ($9.99/half-pound) at Traverso's
Friday afternoon I stopped at Traverso's in downtown Santa Rosa to buy something cold to drink and found a prosciutto di parma sale in progress. Genuine prosciutto di parma is reduced from $32/lb. to $9.99/half-lb. until Wednesday.
The counter people know how to slice here, giving me a sample to make sure it was as thin as I wanted. It was almost gossamer, thin enough to see through but still holding together. I got six slices for a pre-dinner snack for two bucks. The prosciutto is quite delicate with a sweet and faintly salty flavor. I'm pretty sure that it was Fratelli Beretta but not entirely positive."
I love that we can build global neighborhoods around stuff like this. Stay tuned for the upcoming launch of the new companion food site Chow.
Just came back from the under the radar conference, where I had the pleasure of "judging" about 10 start ups from podcasting to video remixing. A few of my fellow CNET'ers were there, Rafe moderated one of panels and Dan Farber was there with digital camera in hand, and each had insights galore. I met Debbie Landa, who runs the conference, and have to say how impressed I was - a real human being, smart, down to earth, opinionated - like to see her again. I will be back, and hope to bring more people from the CNET Networks business side. We all don't get out as much as we should.
We just posted the first public comp of our new design for Webshots in the Webshots blog to get user feedback, in advance of the upcoming beta in late june/early july. I'd love to get your thoughts too.
and yes, that's a video player where the photo should be. more on that in a minute.
For the last several months we've been working with an advisory group of Webshots users to get their perspective on the needed changes to the front end design and UI.
Additionally, we have been adding talented designers and producers/developers and I now feel we have the necessary user centered design skills to do a complete overhaul of a site that serves 19 million people per month.
Everyone knows that the current Webshots front end is functional, but it needed major major changes. our members knew. you knew. we knew. it's all going to change. for the better (we hope).
The new changes will be risky - because they touch most areas of the site, and they are pretty radical.
- all major user flows and pages are getting changed. signing up, uploading, sharing, browsing, searching. signing up to webshots currently takes something like 9 pages/steps and we ask people to download the software to "get started". ugh. changing.
- category pages will be changed and will pave the way for tags (finally) - but we'll be combining tags with cagtegories.
- our members' pages will be changed. we are adding better ways for them to publish and share.
- most of the ads are being changed. no more banners. no more skyscrapers. no one likes them. out out out. In with sponsorships, paid links, and what we call MPUs (square ads).
- the site will better highlight the great content we have in the community, and the breadth of passions from our users, from citizen news to travel, their hobbies, art, and good times.
- the site will show more of our members (that just doesn't read well). anyway - we'll highlight people as well as photos.
- finally - the site redesign will pave the way for video. The cameras we all have take both short videos as well as photos, so after you've captured both video and photos of a recent trip, why shouldn't the site allow you to share both, together?
The photo page design layout here will be the same for photos and videos, and our albums will allow members to go chronicle something with both photos, text and video, and store it all in one container, so someone can see everything to do with your trip, or the next hurricane or whatever, all in one place. you won't have to upload your photos to one service and your videos to another.
The Webshots logo in the upper left is a placeholder - we're not changing the name - but the logo/font will be changing. More later.
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