ben barren - rss'ing down under

"more global, more mobile, more social, more intelligent, and more playful."

2008-07-24T18:37:00.003+10:00

hello lambo.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

No MTUB for me unfortunately as tomorrow is the day along with 90k+ at the G for Hawks V Cats. But a littletidbit I liked from the back from Europe East Coaster Union Square Mr Wilson. This little sentence has alot of insight to ponder on your way to MTUB or The Game. From A VC : "When we went out to raise a second fund at the start of this year, we told our investors that the Internet was getting more global, more mobile, more social, more intelligent, and more playful." - So what is your investment thesis today ? :D

Or if u go more 4 the entrepreneurial change the world which seems the new 2.0 black check out Loic whose following quote I like (he must have met some australian investors that wouldnt know the difference between myspace, google and facebook but will happily tell u in a verbose way why u will fail but why u should let them invest at a lower valuation) : "It is a classic in the life of any entrepreneur, listening to "friends" who tell you all day long why you will fail and how. It always happen. It always takes some energy to go against that and sometimes they are right too..."

"But fresh challenges can also be addictive, which is why I've decided to step down as editor of this publication"

2008-07-23T18:37:00.002+10:00

freedom.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

It's always interesting seeing what people say in their "I'm moving on" post, and Engadget as Email King Jason Calacanis well evangelised was one of the first mainstream blogs, in the highly valued technology sector, and part of (one of?) the first major blog acquisitions. JC has talked about he recruited Rojas, how the blogger was the star, an equity holder, and that his role as the entrepreneur was enable his stars. So his 2IC Ryan Block is rejoining The Rojas, will be interesting to see what they do next. Geez the Web2/blogging industry is starting to feel like the musical chairs of ad agencies and Hollywood.

Ryan Block on Engadget : "But fresh challenges can also be addictive, which is why I've decided to step down as editor of this publication in late August so as to start a new company. I'm extremely excited.. It wasn't so long ago that Peter and I were scraping around, pitching stories to Slashdot, scrambling to get press passes, and just generally struggling to get a blog taken seriously in a magazine's world. Today it's easy to take take for granted that a publication like this even exists -- but I don't think anyone, especially us, ever thought Engadget would become what it has."

"It’s a beautiful, nasty, hyper-competitive + chaotic world we bloggers live in + most of the time I wouldn’t change it for the world."

2008-07-23T11:49:00.003+10:00

navy boat@willy.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

So Yday had everything in it - come to think of it not everything - but it was a good day in the business space, and maybe as a sign or buzzword of the times; Mobile. And where 'mobile' meets that other movement of the day "Social Networking". "Mobile Social Networking." And then on the way home via a Williamstown pizza avoid peakhour detour pictured, reading my email I see one with my blog's title in it, and I'm getting sent a Sony Ericsson C902 for a couple months, to um, play with. OK. Its an 8.4 out of 10 on cnet, noice. So rather than subtly disclose it, or not, or like some of the post modern sex blogs do, where the female writer will detail her encounter with Mojito Peppermint soy wax candle - I'm goin to go another way and put the Sony Ericsson C-902 thru a Mobile Blogging Bootcamp.

The C902's got 5 megapixels (i'm not going to parrot any pr material, nor have i received any to cutnpaste:) from what i've researched which given i lost my much treasured bought from ebay tres cheap black lumix 8megapxl that had the leica lense and the 3inch LCD back (amazing how few have 3in backs by the way : most r 2.5in for compacts, y?) - So 5 megapixels should be better than my Blackberry Curves. But will it do shozu.com photos better than the Curves does, which always crashes. How will it compare to BBCurve on Utterz using email function ? It shot video can i use Qik.com or one of the other competitors to shoot live video. It also has FM radio which my car doesnt:) so how much will it drain the battery. Basically I'm gonna put it thru a Power Blogging User's test, as long as its black and not a cherry chap stick red ...

Anyway throw a gadget my way, in 8 weeks, i will well and truly have taken it to Mobile BootCamp Guantanamo Bay style. Dont worry mr client, no children or animals were harmed in this little experiment. As ourheath The Joker says "Why So Serious?" To end with a Mike Arringtonism (from his TC blog today on blog acquisitions) that well defines the blogging world, well the competitive meets passionate part of it :

"And what’s most clear in all of this is that the small, independent, passionate blogger who writes day and night about whatever it is that captures her imagination plays an important role in the ecosystem. They keep the larger blogs honest, and the best of them will grow into large properties in their own right. It’s a beautiful, nasty, hyper-competitive and chaotic world* we bloggers live in, and most of the time I wouldn’t change it for the world*."

* im probably more likely to get a blog comment by having someone comment on the double use of "world" here and if there is some recursiveness happening. i did a minor an eon ago in philosophy and even by 2nd year philosophy it actually wasnt about dope smokin meanin of the world ideals, it gotta into constructs and a bit to close to maths for my liking. anyway if mike is saying its an xyz world and he doesnt want it to a go changin. even if scoble is on the pulpit and louis is trying to talk him down... i mean how fn pathetic is this blogging is dead meme. really. subscribing to 1900 feeds and adding 5-10+ a day, means i'm never bored by what i read on blogs. i barely get thru the published in the last hour of my google reader, let alone keep up to date with it. for people that read only techmeme, techcrunch, have 100 tech feeds in their bloglines/greader- then um what do u expect u wannabe nerd nonhipster ? even friendfeed doesnt encourage going outside the echochamber as people stay within their 20-100 people they follow. i get far more from google reader than i do friendfeed. for example what would blow me away now, would be a system that took my 1900 feeds, and provided me a 5000 feed opml bundle full of corresponding feeds to my tags. anyway thats not going to happen so maybe, the whole blogging is dead thing, is just a lifecycle thing as it goes from earlyearly mountainview adopter to laterearly global adopter. ok this rant is over, i have client work to do. specs, scoping, and paid feedreading/feature spec identification or fast following as those of us not in mountainview do : copy, spawn, move, fast.

"you cannot write about this on your blog” : “Don’t flatter yourself.” + “what’s her angle going to be on this?”

2008-07-21T18:51:00.004+10:00

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ad hominem
Originally uploaded by violet.blue

the blogher08 summize stream has been vinteresting, and if Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay posited ‘the personal is political’ then the equivalent would be all conferences are political, and personal. stephanie klein@greek_tragedy (one of first female blogs i read regularly) has dubbed the blogher ethos : 'sorority'. Just watch out for the private parties :

greek_tragedy : "It’s scary in a way that shouldn’t be. I hear way too many people mention “private parties” with apologies. “Oh, are you going to the Nintendo dinner?” she whispers. No. I wasn’t invited. “What about the private party at the suite upstairs by this sponsor? Oh, did you go to the sponsored private cocktail…” Since when did blogging become so elitist? It really is just another way, ironically enough, to feel rejected. Until, that is, you aren’t. Until those moments where you connect immediately to someone you’ve read before."

Or : read the blog of the aussie Simon Gerrans that is updating his blog after each day of Tour De France. He won the last leg in the mountains then blogged about it :)

aussie bloggers are from mars. journos from venus. time2breakup or makeup.

2008-07-21T11:42:00.018+10:00

With a little help from my tweeps
Originally uploaded by candy snap

In the classic marsvenus 'argument' the topic according to venus is not the point, but something else which mars has been chipping away at that leads to an #fom08 outburst. That is followed by make-up, or if it happens enough times, breakup. So there's still no post-coital cigarettes happening between the marsnvenus of the Aussie blogosphere, but 2use a venusism the fact that there is a heated discussion goin on at all shows the parties do care to start with. but do they care enough and r we arguing about the right things ?

I don't think, being a 9c degree Monday morning, I'm going to do a journalistic recap of hesaid-shesaid Australia's own Sarah Lacy moment, nor will i wax poetic on the death of newspapers (i guess rupe paid billions for wallstreetjournal because?) or the hitwise research @mspecht tweetrd that aussies visit social networks more than newspaper/media sites (and that the relative category shares overseas is even more pronounced)

what i will recount is my last 3.5 years of pounding the social media beat as a service provider to media companies, while also indexing 150K blogs via gnoos, and cracking out the odd 1000+ posts. blah. ill keep the list to some basic bulletpoints so i dont spend more than a coffee break on this when i should be working on said client projects or my own game breakers.

1. the biggest thing (well justification) stopping media companies adopting user generated content is legal; firstly interpretation of defamation policy, followed by copyright. if a newspaper provides blogging, social networking to their "citizens" and provide them with their own blog and subdomain and they then say kevin rudd is a scientologist etc, then their legal department says this may expose them to defamation exposure, as if one of their journalists wrote the piece. the consequence is to not offer blogs, heavily moderate blog comments, and wait for someone else to own the online community space and then buy them. (interesting to note they have not had to do this as all the major marketshare of users social media time has been on overseas domains ie facebook, blogspot, wp etc)

2. the second legal area to slow down media companies use of social media is copyright - ah, youtube/viacom/judges providing user ips of all videos watched ring a bell ? closer to home - afl suing foxsports/news i think for linking to afl youtube clips it was as telstra had online rights ? anyway, with video + copyright risks, if a 100 year old newspaper is to setup an online community where users upload video they dont have the right to, that is not preferred accg to the legal depts of media companies. operationally too, no1 wants a fulltime editor(s) assigned to moderate user generated content, esp as the cost/benefit analysis is highly negative as the sales people cant monetise social networking, y'know ?

2b. there are then smaller less obvious areas of copyright risk such as images, like when my flickr account was deleted because i had celebrity images in it. (while i can reblog images on tumblr, but the attribution is slightly different) anyway think smaller - what about a users avatar ? or an image they upload in every post ? suddenly u need filtering tools to ensure avatars are not breaking copyright. not joking. this stuff has absorbed my last 3.5 years, and these are the areas that need to be solved for media companies to take the lead.

3. with australia's oligopoly structure and cross media rules, no one wants to be first in user generated content. not surprisingly these copyright and defamation views are shared by the corporate departments and appropriately briefed collins street lawyers of most media groups. while there are ways to mitigate and manage this, easier to wait for someone else to trailblaze, then buy them as mentioned. except u cant buy facebook, twitter, blogspot, wordpress. or u could try and license them as news did by investing in netus who funded allure who licensed defamer/gizmodo. but this is just using pro contract journos blogging from home, combined with rerouting dentons australia traffic and syndicated content to allure.

4. most blogs arent media anyway : 80-90% plus are personal with a very low readership (under 20) comprised of family, close friends, and the author pressing refresh:) most ppl dont aim to establish an ad funded editorial based business. what is interesting tho at the intersection, is the term "news" - i'm deep in speccing one of these hybrid 2.5 properties for a traditional media business, and the term "news" came up. facebook's zuckerberg took alot of heat as he seems to, when he launched Facebook's Mini-News Feed (new version pic from jake jarvis below)- for the latest updates and actions by your FBfriends. He argued that was news. Not the politics/entertainment/business/sports type of news. But the latest member activity type of news. And even when it comes to news' news : we are finding it from friendfeed + twitter links, even if i end up on theage.com.au, news.com.au, or alleyinsider.com. So what is mainstream and what is social media is a continuum aiight.

5. There is no doubt major media are going to need to be able to meld to these new definitions of news and make decisions about which part of the value chain it wishes to participate in;

- Does it want to reinforce it's in the authoritative, best researched, written by the most qualified expert space ? (like weekend afr which i luv, or the $100m portfolio.com experiment, or rupes plans to broaden wsj and take it cross platform, global)

- And/or is it about being a infrastructure that is the first to break news ? Faster than other media incl blogs. In a TMZ.com for all news model. (when u see the 24/7 newsroom of guardian, fairfax, news etc i dont think this ethos is at all unachievable when compared to a spare bedroom in atherton) For example, name an equivalent of tmz or perezhilton in australia for entertainment blogs by either bloggers or msm. There isnt its quite sad. The closest is prob defamer.com.au - which while well written hasnt connected to the audience, as evidenced by the low level of (local) blog comments.

- Can it accurately aggregate and display the current conversations that are occuring locally ? Including the linkage, themes and rships running thru MSM pieces and blogs. Techmeme has shown the benefit in tech/2.0 space in algorithmic clustering, and this is why AOL bought sphere.com. Newspapers need to decide if they are going to bring in valuable 3rd party blog sources if they are reporting on the same story.

- How far into the quality video game are newspapers going to go ? You look at how fast the qik.coms and ustream.coms of this world are moving. Groups like fairfax have adopted video well for properties like drive to show video of cars they are reviewing. But this could go further. A flip camera for every reporter and a denton like revenue share based on traffic and adsales ? (btw the How low can u go? debate re Linkbaiting traffic vs publishing quality pieces : There are real tradeoffs here :)

- Aggregating and enabling Micro-blogging, referral of micro-news between readers ala the friendfeed, twitter model.. Will newspapers aggregate conversations around what is happening ala darkknight reviews, where people are eating locally that are happening on twitter, and the links they are sharing of youtube videos, delicious tags on friendfeed. Will they whitelabel identica or like news did for the recent pope tour setup a popedownunder twitter account and run a very strange set of tweets following the pope and his red loafers around.

- Attention vs Creation : Facebook's definition of news has an inherent understanding that news as well as being personal, can be about non content creating events - Those that became friends. Movies that were watched. Pictures that were commented on. What media groups will need to decide past the basics of the "Build it and they will come" of offering blogging/online community is how much mining of attention gestures they want to do; How many people favourited a story. What restaurant is being highly reviewed in a particular area. Who do the readers think will win the AFL B+F vs what journos/umps think. And I wont even get into the back end folkonomy tools and indexing and filtering algorithms needed for this :)

- Personalisation vs Serendipity : Should newspapers be going for one size fits all, or one size fits me, or practically what is the ratio between the two, and what controls are provided for the user to decide. When does personalisation play a part and how does it crossover into crowd sourced serendipity? I'm spending more and more time on this - and frankly there was more personalisation in IE4 when i worked at ninemsn in the mid90's than there is now on Australia's newspaper sites and portals. And its not like igoogle has done much better, altho it doesnt surprise me the next igoogle version is going to be alot better, and continue to cut share from au media groups with outdated feature sets. It's a pity the conferences downunder arent spending more time on this in the way defrag and other leading US conferences around Web 3.0 and the implicit web are...

OK I better stop there with my farely unstructured post. Alot of us on the nonconference front line doin it every day, meeting after meeting, milestone after milestone, equate this period to 1997-8 when online advertising was a tiny sub 1 percentage of total ad spend. Now its probably 7% on its way to 10% which would put it at an equivalent share of people's media consumption.

It's not a fait accompli that major media can just integrate social into its brands and operations, and in each case there needs to be an evangelist and a decision maker who can get things started : The continuing share that google is taking of ad dollars and facebook/myspace of users, means its increasingly affecting user topline and revenue bottom line. So the business case for social media approval in media orgs is getting order of magnitude better than when i started this slog a few years ago.

Just like most startups will die from having a bloated or niche offer that doesnt solve a real problem, so will major media's social media initiatives fall into known traps; Either build it and they will come assumptions that content will just be created, which it wont. Or over moderation and suffocation of community due to legal worries. Me-tooism will also likely topple a few wanting to be the facebook of travel/realestate/music/politics. But failure is better than not starting. As a percentage, the exception will succeed.

So I've ended up a waysaway from the what is the difference between a journo and blogger. And frankly I'm not really sure or care. The best bloggers are likely ex-journos, or if they've succeeded (ala an arrington) its not coz they weren't journos. Lots of good journos were lawyers like Mike was too. And ironically, the real issues needing addressing downunder firstly - so we can stop this being an overriding excuse to not do online community are legal : Copyright and Defamation. More understanding of social media research would be useful to be able to communicate the opportunities too (blogs + social networks are bigger than media) Then there are big product fit issues about which part of the UGC value chain should newspapers participate in. I guess I better put in my recommendations (remember im going to sell my products here, as this is my day job, not a 2 day conference respite:);

1. Clustering of the Conversations happening around the stories being published by a newspaper online. So readers can consume related blog content to a feature. Newspapers would get more traffic and become a more authoritative source on stories. Fact is there are more bloggers blogging on a story than a paper can afford journos. Combining the two equals three rather than being stuck with one.

2. Creating vertical social networks around mastheads, categories and stories; So consumers can be involved past a moderated blog comment. Dont make it a social network about nothing, the focus is people participating in the stories, topics and individuals covered by the companies properties.

3. Microblogging aggregation + Autotweetable content - As above cluster microblogging conversations in the mix, esp at a hyperlocal level and when specific linkage to a story. More so, turn stories into 140 character autotweetable micrchunx with one click. Take the work out of it for the consumer-creator. Being able to clip, widgetise, reblog stories, pictures and links is key. And drives more traffic, google juice etc. It keeps the story going.

4. Personalise me already. I dont care about rugby. I like Porsches. I work in technology, web. I have 1800 google reader feeds I can provide to you in opml. Here are my 3000 delicious items. You have alot of content, give me the subset that is interesting to me. I'll click on what I like and dont like, and over time your system will have a pretty good idea of what I like.

5. Show me what other like people, friends are doing. Ala Facebook mini-news feed. I'm always interested in the stories that people i like are sharing. Dont let friendfeed have all the fun. Their members are so mountainview focused anyway....

OK thats my feedback from the social media frontline... it would be good if we could get rid of these institutional stereotypes that ppl r using, and instead use more real life case studies. The battle is hardfought, and moves slowly inch by inch! As The Joker says somewhat prophetically “what doesn’t kill u makes u stranger.” RIP.

IRL the batman has heat.

2008-07-19T01:27:00.001+10:00

heath joker amazing.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

112am and just got in from a great nite where i scored a perfect middle centre back imax 550pm session with about 15 other @minm-mtub-twitter folk to see the batman dark knight. with the last bit of charge i got the attached pic of heath ledger the joker in a nurses outfit. thats as much as a spoiler as i'll give. that and the movie (first half) most reminded me of was heat, but rather than deniro v pacino, it was ledger v bale - equally talented genx rather than babyboomer adversaries. christopher nolan is a great director and just watching how quarter billion dollar film is made, along with such great actors of a generation, on the imax screen with some great folk, who up to that point minus the odd face didnt even know. so thx to @coliwilso for tix, @andrewsayer for reserving seat and leavn tick4pickup.. and all the other kewl IRL (in real life) folk where it's always good to 'cross-over'. u r kewl @candybug @girlbug @yonderboy @thommo @praxxis @bethanie @jackienopants + all the other awesome peeps, i believe there was an @cornetto with an m yank or similar. prob lucky my blackberry didnt have any charge or i prob wouldnt have been able to stop myself liveblog, but sometimes u have to live in the present, suspend motion, and just let it happen2u, the movie, life, and the next slice of pizza. as the joker said to the batman on a friday night "you complete me." now bed i guess, even if the adrenalin is running a bit, not used to this IRL thang :D

Bruce Wayne: I knew the mob wouldn't go down without a fight. But this is different. They crossed the line.
Alfred Pennyworth: You crossed the line first, sir. You hammered them. And in their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully understand. Some men aren't looking for anything logical. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

@minm mtub darkknight@imax sold out. duh.

2008-07-18T07:42:00.006+10:00

cant wait4 darkknight.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

lots of docs done this week, so ive achieved my goal of substituting travel to meetings with actual document production. now i'm back to square, which i seem to spend my life chasing. how long will the equilibrium last ? so i'm off to melbourne, and my whole day was based around seeing darkknight@imax with the @minm/mtub crew. (u have to like it when twitter/social media groups resemble the graffiti krews in melbourne we grew up with)

unfortunately because im not 'attached to the australian network' on facebook 'they' tell me, whatever that means, my rsvp for darkknight didnt happen - i thought no worries book a ticket from the imax site or go there during day friday and buy a ticket. (i also didnt want to rvsp if i wasnt in melbs) anyway totally sold out, as perez is saying it is in 700 US cinemas, really going to be one of biggest films ever if u look at twitter buzz. hopefully one of the @minm's pullsout. come on @thommo do u really want to go ?:)

Perez : "MovieTickets.com says The Dark Knight has sold out 700 performances in North America and is outselling 3 of MovieTickets.com’s Top 10 Performing Films of All-Time. To date, the newest Batman has more than 3-times as many advance tickets as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, more than 2-times as many as Spider-Man 3 and almost 2-times as many as Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers at the same point in the sales cycle."

So Enterprise or Blog CMS ? While Podtech sold for less than $500K after $7m, another lesson why VC' shouldnt make media/content production investments (esp in one based on a NPR/ABC serious boring public radio). But Fred already knows that, Oui! Although as nik says watch out for being bought by google if u actually want your integration to happen quickly - 3 year no thx. OK I'm off to Melbourne, twitter dm me if u want to catchup firstly if u have a blackknight ticket (ok u dont:) or wanna catchup... l8r, h8r.. or read a 2003 google product development process by marissa mayer which is still farely accurate and ignored by 99% of Australia :)

there aint no opensocial shindig goin on downunder.

2008-07-17T09:53:00.004+10:00

go cadel#1 #tourdefrance.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

did i mention how crap the broadband is here on mornington peninsula using iprimus (not my beloved internode) 24 minutes on a useless convo with IT support after waking up and cant even stream hughesykate@ nova100.com.au or load googlereader. lucky twhirl was chugging away. as part of my unseries on what australia doesnt have which america does, todays post comes from the linkedin blog and is about google's open -social and the opensource shindig project, in which i explore the long term damage to our psyche of receiving our movies months later than America while we were growing up, and television series sometimes not at all. (i still need to see sixfeetunder finale)

so how many australian startups or large web publishers are probably using, deploying, building a business around widgets ? im trying to raise a finger, but its looking like an inverted peace sign. Linkedin show the benefit of geographic proximity in mountain view where paperbag sessions involve geeks from different companies, using open source as a way of showing kewl things, that individuals at night and ultimately companies during the day, can use to their advantage.

The Linkedin Blog : "In September 2007, Google started thinking about Social APIs. Google Gadgets would be better with access to Social Data ... but that's just Google. It was recognized that this is something that many others would like access to.. In November, many Googlers started working on a Google Code project based on Java and iGoogle. However, there was too much proprietary code. In December, Brian McCallister of Ning created an ASF Proposal for Shindig. It was a rough port of iGoogle but with Ning's PHP code. This turned out to be a great starting point. It immediately got interest from Google, Hi5, MySpace and others. While most committers are still from Google, there are 12 developers that work on it full time and they're adding 2 committers each month. Shindig is a Java/PHP implementation of OpenSocial."

so 12 people fulltime working on opensource widget protocols, with a range of socnet companies/divisions from google opensocial, myspace, linkedin, ning, etc going to benefit. is any1 surprised that no aussie co's are involved ? i'd love to hear of 12 people working fulltime in australia on widgets ? :)

this is the point where i come back to finance : speaking to those with dotcom experience they think its farely easy to get engineers because they remember offering them stock options + salary. thats because 1997-2002 there were alot more companies funded, and the fundings were $5m-$50m. that created alot of jobs for engineers, who then got experience in building the widgets of the day. without the money funding the new widget businesses locally, how would a knowledge bank be built up of suitably skilled engineers? (who are able to better define a business technical roadmap and execute against it), which then becomes attractive to an investor.

it's a chickennegg problem which in australia means a straights sets loss. 'no goddamn widget business ere. i thought u said they were the new plastics.' ok rant over, im 7 documents done this week, with 3 to go, and some melbourne travel tomorrow.. if i can manage/afford /coordinate it, i really want to go to dark knight. they said on movie show last nite that heaths role has a touch of brando and cagney, i guess they like the old metaphors there, thats australia4u; old. All that said maybe there are some covert aussies currently working on or looking to get involved in the shindig project ?

Also : Check Mashable on Lightspeed Ventures, for how much better they do it in Israel : "Two years ago Lightspeed partnered with Gemini to create the Internet Lab, a venture designed to give seed funding to early-stage Israeli startups. They have invested in six companies so far as part of the Lab. The first of these companies was Outbrain, creator of a content rating and recommendations widget. Through the Lab they have also backed StyleShake, a do-it-yourself fashion company headquartered in the UK that allows users to design their own clothing and have it sent to them; Vestopia, a resource for investors; and Bahu, a social network for people under 25."

$15 for 20 minutes

2008-07-16T20:32:00.003+10:00

09-17-05_1355.jpg
Originally uploaded by anaeel

Technation is follown the umair to the future argument rather than invoking nationalism in our innovation arguments, so Tilda may have a sample of where we are going to end up : Sleeping Spas, hehe. From Fk a Love Story : "I could have a 20 minute nap for $15 and it was just a short walk from the office. Fuck, yeah. The place was a soothing pallet of deep pinks and oranges and, to my relief, there was no Enya or mating whale noises on the speakers.. I was escorted into a small, oval shaped room, its walls upholstered in crisp white.. My host slowly eased me back until my legs were just slightly above the level of my head. She draped a blanket over me and asked if I wanted the lights dimmed or total darkness (total darkness). After adjusting the volume of the thunderstorm, she reminded me that they can not guarantee that I would sleep, and left me to my "powernap."" If you cant get to a local sleep spa, but need a nap, do what Salavador Dali did...

what australia can summize about teh #fom08.

2008-07-16T09:34:00.004+10:00

summize.com redirect
Originally uploaded by redbarren

so yday the aussie media vs bloggers 2d world had a bit of a watershed where their leader the hyperconnected @mpesce twitterd something along the lines of the backchannel is the conference. once u've lived on technology for quite awhile u get used to, so for us the whole summize-ustream side of a conference is nuthn new. but the broader aussies are getting it. #fom08.

so sitting up at 2am and watching US come online with official confirmation of twitter buying summize, with summize redirecting and rebranded, shows how quickly things can move in 24 hours. 2 posts and points i found vinteresting to prod my current thinking of where i am with my business and what it takes to succeed ($15m exit, primarily in twitter shares i assume, think they had raised $750K-ish so the maths are nice)

the first lesson is summize to start with had a great team and the right space but didnt solve exactly the right problem, it was too broad. from one of their backers john borthwick (is betaworks building everything out of nyc?) : "The history of most startup’s is made up of iterations, learning and restarts — Summize was no exception. The Summize team worked hard for a little over a year developing sentiment based algorithms aimed at crawling the review and blogosphere. Late last year they formally launched a web product that let you search reviews for books, movies and music. It worked well — offering summaries of all the reviews for a particular book, structured programmatically so they could be organized and swiftly digested by users or publishers. Yet it was complicated — not in theory or in its presentation — but in practice it was a complicated problem that most end users didnt know they needed. As an old friend would put it Summize v1. didn’t address a discernible need or pain point. "

the 2nd lesson is the quality of the summize geeks. if u sell your company, this is exactly the blogpost u (well i anyway) want to read (reminds me of the way the feedburner way had their own unique voice) from summize leader Jay Virdy : "At Summize, we assembled a small, quirky, but highly efficient and experienced team to build a powerful platform to extract user opinions from blogs and review sites. Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases (e.g., when someone says “nice” it isn’t necessarily in a positive sense). Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine. In 2008, we discovered Twitter as a source of the most timely and relevant opinions on trending topics. We immediately embarked on a plan to develop the best Twitter search and discovery application to serve the Twitter community and burgeoning Twitter ecosystem."

so summize were able to refine quite substantially their initial vision, and rather than it be a radical change, were able to narrow in and find a hook for their overall structured indexing and sentiment analysis of the blogosphere, which became #hashtag + @username persistent searches. and they had the engineers to do it. I've extracted the technical elevator pitch on the summize ppl mentioned on their blog :

"Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases.."

"Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine"

"Matt Sanford, a web crawling wizard, ops extraordinaire, measurement zealot, and foreign language nut, to shift his attention from blogs to microblogs, and to Twitter in particular."

"Mike, a C++ and Java guru so he churned out fancy beautified code to parse tweets, thread disparate conversations, and pluck out highly accurate and meaningful trending topics from the Twitter public timeline."

"Nutty professor Adbur Abdir Abdur aka “El Hefe.”

"Eric’s also a self-acclaimed IR wunderkid who can speak in SQL and can invert, convert, revert, subvert, and even evert relational databases and inverted indices to do exactly what he wants."

"Greg, our CTO, the “Pixelator”, wanted to rename Summize “tweird”, so that tells you a lot about him.. he’s pretty good at UI design.. assembled all the pieces and served up an elegant user experience for the Twitterati to marvel at."

My point in highlighting the above, is point out the difference between Australia and the US. In Australia yday there was a conference where ppl were learning about what twitter and the backchannel was. Above u have a team of Dr's, Professors, ex-AOL'ers, entrepreneurs that have sold companies before, that are highly technical, were able to shift or narrow their initial strategy, got large uptake, nailed a product, then got acquired by an IT thing that itself had had problems scaling, and had disabled their persistent search product which summize do. They didnt spend the last 2 years going to conferences talking about print vs online media models. They built and refocused a 2008 search product which was obviously going to be bought. Didnt they just fly past tweetscan ?

In Australia, not only are we too late to get twitter (which is just a metaphor) but being on the entrepreneurial side, recruiting a team of equivalent to above, is near impossible locally. Recruiting a team (as a startup) at 50% of the above talent is near impossible. The pool just isnt deep enough. You could probably get 1, maybe 2 of the above standard people here to one venture. So i'd rate at about 25% max what we could achieve here peoplewise. And given summize barely made it, having to do a major redirection midstream, 25% leaves u dead in the water.

Dead in the water maybe, but also with pretty good guidelines about what is needed for success. In Australia, I agree with @bronwen that business development folk, and non engineering boys networks still control dollars. its all comfortable oligopolies + low standards.
It was said yday by one of the Future of Media Summit #fom08 backchanneler's that the future of media may be participation, and by that it was meant participation in the backchannel. What would be better if like broadband, we were able to build out our own piece of the backchannel, connecting in to other's pieces and api's as needed, but building and owning our own backchannel, rather than having a short term redirected, rebranded one owned by someone else. If somehow we were able to achieve some building blocks, get some domain experience into our engineers, rather than talk talk talk, we might be able to participate not just in the watching of the new teevee, but the making of it.

* Extra bonus point, some good points in blogosphere about twitters business model acquired via summize such as expoused by konterkariert found via betaworks : " Twitter + Summize is like ICQ + Nielsen//NetRatings ;-) Or Twitter could hyper target their ads to Twitter Messages with positive feelings about products, protecting marketeers to advertise their goods near negative sentiments related to their company. Peer39 is just starting this technology." Also reminds me of what Brad Feld said about Newsgator and people's impatience for companies to have business models obvious, sorted, clear, communicated etc

Feld.com : "I've been really pleased with the way NewsGator's widget business has taken off. Two years ago I regularly got questions from people about "how would NewsGator monetize the consumer web reader business." The answer to that is "they won't - but they'll use the infrastructure they've build - which is rock solid, scalable, and unique - to build a really interesting widget and data business based on RSS content."

ill take five by five lesbidaring with pretty dumb things than carrie 2.0 w/ nonsociety.com

2008-07-15T21:57:00.005+10:00

bubble burstn
Originally uploaded by redbarren

so there's the new geeks can be grrls post Carrie aspirants that take their Macbook Airs to the Hamptons and dine with 1938 + the post blogging LA poker kru. And hey i won't say their new "network" - nonsociety.com : 'see whats up with our crazy lives' (tv show must be close now! check hulu anyday) is not in my rss, as it is, just as perez tizzles. but when it comes to gender analysis, i'll much prefer to be schooled from pretty dumb things : 'more sesquipedalian than fuck, a big bunch of writing'. u had me at your blog title. i'll take my media non-mediated every time pls. big words just a bonus.

i'm not even a buffy fan, but i know enough intelligent postmodernists that do, to make me think i should rewatch and episode and mine the subtext. from chelseagirl's latest post : "There’s the constant play in language, for one thing. The way that adjectives become nouns, as in “It gives me a happy.” The way that the characters invent new slang, as in “That’s the kick!” for saying something’s cool, or “Five-by-five” to say A-OK. The way that the show employs neologisms like “vampification” and “lesbidar.” The way that the show pokes fun at cultural idiom, as when Buffy refers to vampires as “undead Americans.” All of that flavor of lexicographical jump-roping makes me get a good-down low tingle."

virtual #fom08'n : lookn4 hyperconnectedness in all places.

2008-07-15T09:27:00.003+10:00

so the syd 2.0 suit brigade r doing the hyperconnected across 2 continents thing @ future media summit, or more specifically #fom08 which is all u need to search and subscribe on summize, and its like u r there. the pollenizer peeps have been streaming audio so far ere, but seems a bit tanglnd ? Here is (videonall closer2front, more stable people in it room via) Stilgherrian uStream. Look at all those lovely suits taking notes, looking for hyperconnectedness in all the wrong places, so they can go back to their workplace and run lunchtime paperbag presentations; create grass roots web2 innovation training sessions, and be invited by the CEO to run a collaboration, wiki, blog social network, hyperconnectedness project. before long u r at newscorp, and ghost writing a twitter account for the follow no1 pope downunder.

ma' 60th + some sunday night back of moleskine 'me own hawtness' product sketchn.

2008-07-13T22:28:00.012+10:00

demons footy.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

so it's been a farely busy day, with my mums 60th bday party that incl a layer upon layer of cheesecake with blue, brie, camembert and other tasty cheeses! had a beautiful point leo dusk run in prep for a week where I'm not going to drive anywhere near the 22+ hours, 5 days straight, I did last week. im going2get detailed spec work done, props like hughs i'm behind on, vc questionnaires, get settled into new port melbourne office, and other action points u commit to in a meeting. focus, productivity, resolution, and hardball where/if needed. by friday, ill be bases loaded. locknload.

i've been sketching alot of product features in my moleskine @ coffee shop time, which my left brain/right brain categorises under creative/art. as it may get developed, or not. some of it goes into client projects, others into our own properties/plan. for quite awhile it's been the former, but i'm aiming to get some of my own technical resource. why give up your technical resource if u get nothing back for it?

as soon as i started using delicious alot (up to 3700 items now!), the area of tagging and annotating made alot of sense to me, and more so, created value. if i ever forget something i've published, i go to delicious/benbarren/whatever _tag_i_used.

similarly, when google reader launched "share" items that was a feature that was really useful to me. initially i didnt use it for much, but as soon I realised I could feedburn my shared items, and then publish to my blog sidebar, it was becoming pretty valuable. your 'shared' / favourited / liked items whether it be google reader or friendfeed are very high signal, vs thousands or in my case tens of thousands of blog posts that go past me every month.

from my google reader trends for last 30 days : "From your 1,836 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 45,738 items, starred 1 items, shared 1,678 items." - So the key there is 1 in 25 of the posts, from blogs I have subscribed to, I share. those are the items I want to do more with, that currently i go only do a very limited amount with, anyway....

recently i've also started using friendfeed's 'share on friendfeed' bookmarklet (my shares 'ere), and that is great for the benefit that u can clip/highlight images on pages, as well as cutnpaste text. the item then goes into your friendfeed stream, which others can like/comment on, but it doesnt seem to have it's own obvious rss feed, which could then be published on blog sidebar. (u can blogbadge your whole friendfeed stream tho)

so delicious + feedburner, google reader shared + feedburner, and my friendfeed page, along with other blogbadges such as flickr, are great ways of sharing non-blogged items on your blog and lifestreaming services. however what i'm missing is ability to manipulate the shared items further.

my google reader shared items outputs to a public page above header, that is very dumb/vanilla. there are some cheesy design templates, with about 3-4 to choose from. unlike blogspot where I can say i want 70 blog posts published on benbarren.blogspot.com home page; i can insert html, css etc; on google reader shared items page there is no blog theme or customisation of the page. similarly it outputs as one rss feed. there is no ability to tag items such as delicious. no way of grouping the videos, podcasts, hot auto pics, recently funded startups, sneakers, watches, and all the nichepassions i/we all have.

a simple solution is for google reader to allow me delicious like tagging of my shared items, and then create feeds for each of my tags. it would also be really kewl given they've bought feedburner and own blogger, that if i didnt want to just take the rss feeds and fburn onto wordpress, etc if i could turn each of these tags into widgets, whose layout/css/fonts/colours/size I could customise. And then put onto my (existing) blog sidebar, or wait for it.... setup a different page with a domain (+/or subdomain) of my choosing. use a non blog layout if i so desired.

then each of my tags could become a widgetable element of the page, and meta-tags could be created; for example i might use a meta-tag for video, podcasts, or big buckets like auto (porsche, ferrari, lambo tags), fashion (models, sneakers, watches tags), money (vc, startups, web2 tags) etc

using such an approach, instead of google just allowing me to choose between 4 headers (Ninja, already wtf?) - I could actually choose between different page layouts - blog format, sure no worries, 1 column rss reader format ? 2 or 3 column ? what about a fashion magazine layout ? or maybe u want a wall street journal look ? or that great new fashion mag architecture consumeristy post wallpapermag that all the designer r raving about!

my east-westcoast pitch is (the roll'yer'own magazine layout of) magcloud meets (high signal:noise of) google reader shared items meets feedly (excepts it about your public not private persona + all about customisation not reformatting googlereader), with the beauty + reblogging of tumblr. it's also prob solving the same one fred wilson has been blogging about (and using) zemanta - but coming at the solution from a more extending reblogging functionality from rss reader, than as a blogging platform plugin.

this customised realtime reflection of my best of liveweb at any one point of time, would have a range of CMS type features where I'd select (and hide) the items which I thought were best of what I'd selected from my feeds, tweets and lifestreams. I'd setup sections/headings/positions like :

ME OWN HAWTNESS (TODAY).

ABOVE FOLD
- Me Hawtness Image of the Day ala front page of newspaper
- My Latest Blog Posts... as I'd want people to read
- Ma Tweets, and anything else very recent ie last 4 hours.
- Videos Ive watched + rated, inline player
- Audio Im listening, inline of course, friendfeed doin this well
- Hawtness Objekts of the Day : porsches, sneakers, designy stuff
- Of Interest, people on friendfeed, on google reader, flickr that i tend to take an unhealthy interest in and i want to tell the world how good they r, and their avatar looks good on me'page.

BELOW FOLD
- Favourite Posts I've shared, viewable by recency or tag, needs to have that google reader, ajaxy scroll down the page, ideally some type of streaming ere, and or heck lets give em an AIR app option here. that would be good. And unlike google reader's shared items page, can there be more than 10 items per page, 10 is crazy, like google reader it needs to be infinite, until the isp has no more bandwith to push down the page or u run out of items....

Yeah so basically I want to turbo charge my google reader shared items, you can see the experiment i am running on the right hand side of my blog sidebar, where i've published 2 google reader shared items accounts (with same opml) and shared 2 sets of items to publish there.

I'd like to be able to take my shared items and then enable tools to do some tagging, feed splicing, and then widgety, page layout type tools. Or to be more ninja about it, a folksonomy based browser plugin to google reader, or some technical way that allows me to tag my google reader shared items at the time I share them. so i can then have individual feeds for each of the tags of shared items!

See below how feedly (worth tracking their blog to see their evolution, as they r very end user focused) reformat your google reader opml into another perspective on how to represent your feeds, what they dont do is provide a customisable re-aggregation of your favourite annotations : but they are well positioned to do so due to their advanced annotations/g-shared features!

alternately u bypass google reader alltogether and get fave hyperlinks from mining opml elsewhere, or index outbound links from twitter ? hehe but at moment the feedreader (followed by blog platform-browser plugin) seems to make sense as it's where people are in sharing (or alternatively blogging) mode.. just at moment goog reader sharing is dumb : its not going anywhere other than onto a reader's shared items public page/feed, people's blog sidebar, lifestreams like friendfeed, and aggregators such as readburner. (which i think could be a really kewl business, esp if it could get past tech/web2 etc)

so thats my sunday night back of moleskine sketching - google reader shared items 'me own hawtness' - as i listen to safran and father bob on their sunday JJJ show.

Inglorious Bastards - From the rumoured QT script.
My name is Lt. Aldo Raine, and I’m putting together a special team. And I need me eight soldiers. Eight – Jewish – American – Soldiers. Now y’all might have heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we’ll be leavin a little earlier. We’re gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin’ guerilla army, we’re gonna be doin one thing, and thing only, Killin Nazi’s. The members of the Nationalist Socialist Party, have conquered Europe through murder, torture, intimidation, and terror. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do to them. Now I don’t know about y’all. But I sure as hell, didn’t come down from the goddamn smoky mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half Sicily, and then jump out of a fuckin air-o-plane, to teach the Nazi’s lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got no humanity. There the foot soldiers of a Jew hatin, mass murderin manic, and they need to be destroyed. That’s why any and every son-of-a-bitch we find wearin a Nazi uniform, there gonna die. We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty, they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty, in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the German will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heals, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans, will be sickened by us. And the Germans, will talk about us. And the Germans, will fear us. And when the Germans close their eyes at night, and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us, that it tortures them with. But I got a word of warning to all would be warriors. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me, personally. Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And all y’all will git me, one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred Nazi’s or you will die trying.

keeping 70% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

2008-07-12T10:55:00.002+10:00

Originally uploaded by miso,

Today it's the big battle, traditional rivalry of Rye vs Sorrento. The Mornington Peninsula equivalent of Carlton vs Collingwood. Being neighbouring suburbs, u can have people that live within 100 metres use the football scream to yell abuse at each other. What could be better ?

Mashable make a good point about how on the web free is standard, so the itunes name the price keep 70% of revenue, is the adsense of the app world : ".. we can’t discount the fact that online apps are missing a key component: revenue models. Unlike the Web, Apple’s App store provides developers with the opportunity to sell applications at any price and effectively help them turn a profit on something that was making nothing online."

$30m / 3G

2008-07-12T01:58:00.004+10:00

Originally uploaded by miso,

@m0nty called the iphone jumpn the shark, and yes its about the 500 apps, and yes its about the freemium app upsell, but i just wish they'd invent a qwerty keyboard. Damn i luv that @miso stencil streetart. 20 hours into the 3.0 device being sold the twittersphere has been pulverised. Oh well, nice to see the Guardian prop up blog valuations with the PaidContent purchase - 10 times revenue ?

Gigaom with a good writeup : "While at first blush it doesn’t make sense that a newspaper company is buying paidContent, many overlook the fact that GMG also has a division called Guardian Professional, a multimillion-dollar B2B publisher. With its thriving conference and research business, not to mention a highly influential and targeted audience, paidContent is an ideal Trade 2.0 publisher. It’s no surprise they got acquired."

Speaking of acquisitions, the Facebook app sector doesnt want to get left behind - via InsideFacebook : "RockYou has confirmed that it has acquired two major independent Facebook applications: Pieces of Flair and Speed Racing. With over 475,000 and 200,000 daily active users respectively, RockYou adds the #11 and #27 most active applications on the Facebook Platform to its portfolio. Although no prices were confirmed, we’re hearing the acquisitions were some of the biggest prices paid for applications yet."

gnoos : RSS U @ Y!SearchBoss ?

2008-07-10T14:39:00.003+10:00

Hartford Concorso 63.jpg
Originally uploaded by VOD Cars

I'm really grokking the sound of the Yahoo BOSS search back end program. I've got to ask The Boss BigKev, as over next quarter we are going to focus very hard on the public developer and commercial publisher wanting to tap into hyperlocal user generated search, intelligence and syndication. But YahooSearchBlog is singing my ditty about what it takes to deliver the back end requirements of the Aussie Social Graph :

"Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure -- from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google. We believe the BOSS platform will begin to change that... BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure."

It seems like they've got some quality companies using the solution (hakia, me.dium) so if it isnt just an elaborate Yahoo Ad or rebadge our search offer, if it is more commercial open source : Lucene meets Amazon Web Services for example, that would rock. I'm projecting, but getting excited by focusing on the mile deep, inchwide side of hyperlocal UGC, rather than the horizontal milewide, inch deep of Enterprise 2.0.

Yahoo Search Boss product manager types feel free to contact me as I go check out what u've got on the interwebs and get my internal geek feedback, and any1 that's been checking out for their own perusal/use.. I'd like to take my 150k gnoos.com.au feeds and bolt them into YahooBoss. Feel free (in all $en$e$ of the word) to tell me what u think about it (is it serious enterprise, opensource, customisable, etc not just some widgety plugin thing), what u can actually do past the press release (do i have to use the - whole or designated part - yahoo index, can u use it on your own index) So tweet dm, email etc me. Irrespective of solution (there are lots of APIs/indexes/feeds we will be looking at fetching eg twitter/summize.com API for aussie users, etc), those with interesting stuff to say, and even better do, we'll be looking to hire, contract, as we need to find the search, filtering, hyperlocal, architecty developer gun(s). Location also is flexible, the closer to Melbourne better, but closer to search, UGC, RSS brilliance easily trumps location :)

my coopting of silkcharms social media bandwagon aimia rant.

2008-07-10T13:35:00.003+10:00

advertising is not art.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

Patient : benbarren.blogspot.com
Date/Time : 1:26-1:38pm Thursday 10th July 2008.
Therapy Topic : Social Media Bandwagon Rant coopted to car running out of petrol rant, but happy ending $18 later fixed.

Details : Car1 today at 545am didnt start, but was trying to turn over. I knew there was about um a couple kilometres of fuel left as it sure the needle was on the bottom of empty but it was the start of bottom of empty. Yday I drove the other spare car and as Car1's petrol cap isnt attached (drove off on it one day in rye when taking a pic of a classic stingray corvette) I think the petrol may have evaporated ? or it was just empty. Luckily I picked up a $11.95 can ick, and $6 of petrol and when i got home and tried it, it made a dodgy noise as the petrol folowed thru the engine's veins, but it turned over and kept running normally.

Next week I promise not to rant about this stuff, but this week u my blog readers are cheap therapy. U visit for free content and a 2 minute break in your day; I post for 12 minutes as a free therapy session. But negativity can be catching and I'll be taking a big dose of vitaminc happy pillz. (u get by on too many 4-5 hour sleeps in a row and your outlook can get wacked out... )

Supporting Evidence : After having spent $2600 2 months ago on new reco'd engine, I def didnt want to hear the heart transplant wasnt gelling, and it I was going to be offroad and up for a 4 figure bill. So like alot of this week : drama, interim resolution, live to fight another battle in between updating specs and answering 25 questions from a VC - all of which i wanted done by Tuesday - but meetings seemed to nail first half of week (most of them on said specs and questions, so progress has been made, just need some quality "compueter" you and i time in the next 36 hours before my mums 60th on Sunday, which will be a big event, as they get back from Airlie Beach up north in mid 20c's weather (rather than my folks usually prefer doing an annual explore of Europe arts, churches etc - this time they wanted a holiday, rather than an exploration)

Third Party Triggering Catalyst : Laurel - Australia's #1 Social Network Evangelist and member of most social networks if not most content generated, openID queen - Papworth, is never short of something to say, and her AIMIA rant is a good'un, definite lol facebook status update.

Silkcharm on "AIMIA connects interactive agencies with interactive agencies - a nice niche network." The punchline deals with their old new media treatment of the socialnet marketing channel(s) : '"Social Media Bandwagon? Facebook pages don't cost anything... if you don't mind them sitting empty. Which is why AIMIA Facebook page has 600 odd members, yet other newer ones for Australia have 1500+ . Anyone want to jump on the Mobile SMS Bandwagon? How about the Virtual World bandwagon? How dare you tell my clients this is a bandwagon deal? While some AIMIA events are no doubt worthwhile, calling social media a bandwagon is downright enraging. Get serious - or get out. *grumpy face*"'

Session Up : Feel free to leave rants about your day in the comments, or just rant out loud, i like the minimalism of no/low comments. And as every1 says the micro-conversation is on friendfeed, seesmic or at best for blogs disqus these days. OK back to specs and questions.... 12 minutes up.