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Your Space, MySpace, Barack’s Space

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Senator Barack ObamaSome people consider 2008 Democratic Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama to be the most “wired” candidate in either major political party. That is, he has utilized online social networks and even streaming video channels to his advantage – showing that he’s hip and understands a younger generation. He even has a MySpace page profile that had 160,000 “friends”. An Obama supporter has been running it for nearly three years, with the blessing of the Senator’s campaign team. They suddenly decided, though, that they were uncomfortable with an “outsider” running the page, which of course represents Obama’s viewpoints, etc.

The campaign team wanted control of the profile page, and the supporter, Joe Anthony, a paralegal, was fine with that, though he wanted nearly $50K in total fees to do so, which the Senator’s team said no to. Big mistake. At $50,000 of effort put in by Anthony to build 160,000 friends, each “friend”, and no doubt supporter of Obama, cost only about thirty cents. The stink that ensued caused Myspace to step in and decide that the Senator’s team could have control and Joe Anthony could take the contact info. All 160,000 friends. So what if it was supposed to be volunteer work?

Does this translate into 160,000 lost future votes? Maybe. Maybe less, maybe more. Who can know? The fact is, there are now only just over 21K friends. Obviously, it was a monstrously stupid move for the campaign team of a seemingly well-loved, charismatic candidate who has been a historic figure and may continue to be. Someone on the campaign team should be fired. It’s not like the campaign money isn’t there. But even more to the point, Anthony obviously was a good buffer and did a tremendous job building goodwill for the Senator.

Will the MySpace page be the same with the official campaign team running it? I doubt it. However, the Senator phoned Anthony to offer his apologies and try to win back his vote. Had the campaign team invited Anthony to be part of their team, everyone would be way ahead.

Originally posted on May 3, 2007 @ 2:29 pm

Mashing Up Spreadsheets

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Dave Winer describes a very cool piece of web functionality: web service data calls from web spreadsheet cells. Need a piece of data to plug into your ZohoSheet, Google Spreadsheet, or whatever web spreadsheet you use? The syntax he describes would make a request to the desired web service and the returned value would appear in the requesting spreadsheet cell. As a stats junkie and a regular user of web services, I was wishing for exactly this functionality, except I hadn’t thought about the syntax or methodology.

What’s nice is that the framework already exists. Spreadsheets simply have to add this feature. And since Dave has a history of his ideas manifesting, we should see this functionality soon. It’s one more piece in interconnecting documents and data of all sorts. Sort of like a hyperlinking of data objects, if I understand correctly. I see very powerful uses of such functionality on the horizon.

Web services calls from web spreadsheets

In the example above, a spreadsheet to analyze your stock portfolio might synchronize with notes/ events from your Google Calendar. The spreadsheet makes calls to both servers and receives data back. Logic on the spreadsheet side, of course, decides what to do with the data, including possibly even sending an email or SMS alert, or initiating chat session. (Google Spreadsheets apparently has chat features now, though I haven’t tried it.)

I can also see how this functionality would be great if you’re a blogger managing multiple blogs, and want to get a simple overview of web statistics for all of them in a single spreadsheet. This is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and might in fact be the iceberg that sinks standalone spreadsheet applications such as Excel. (Anyone else wondering why Microsoft still doesn’t have a web version?)

Originally posted on May 1, 2007 @ 6:37 pm

You’re Brand One?

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Are Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and Jason Calacanis really too self-worshipping in building their online brands? Or is Valleywag wagging the tongue in accusation a bit too much? (See what’s said about Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel and a few other blogcelebs. Hoo boy.)

With millions of websites/weblogs, aren’t strong personalities required to win out? Name a few A-list bloggers that do not have “strong” (i.e., self-promoting) personalities. Okay, maybe Darren Rowse and Steve Pavlina. These two earn most of their income from revenue-producing websites (or just one in Steve’s case). The others above mostly earn their income from offline activities.

Does the means of earning a living determine how aggressively a blogger has to self-evangelize? As a bit of a foot-in-motormouth myself, I’d have to say you need to stand out online if you want to be in the blogosphere’s A-ranks. What do you think? Note: the infographic below is done to the best of my knowledge and may not be accurate. It suggests there are no bloggers who earn income from all the indicated sources simultaneously, at least not publicly.

Income sources for bloggers

Originally posted on May 1, 2007 @ 1:51 pm

New SplashCast Features

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SplashCast, my favorite slideshow/web broadcast tool to date, just released a new version featuring brand new features on Monday. The foremost among them are MyPodcastNetwork, which is a podcast directory, and support for other RSS feeds that include ‘standard media enclosures” (ie., audio and images).

SplashCast already supports RSS feeds from Flickr and YouTube, but now they expanded their range. Unfortunately, because of the way Yahoo Pipes builds output feeds, I cannot take my custom Yahoo /Twitter /Flickr mashups and send them to SplashCast.

These new features have unfortunately raised some concern over how the enclosures from RSS feeds are or are not being handled on SplashCast’s servers, and whether originating sources are being credited or not. If you look at the bottom left of each frame for the “i” in a circle, click on it and you’ll see accreditation for media content, including links when available.

Originally posted on May 1, 2007 @ 8:10 pm

Can Twitter Make Money?

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twitter.jpgThis is something I pointed out the other day: there’ll always be a market for instant blogging services such as Meshly, Jaiku, Tumblr and Twitter, though at some point they have to monetize. Download Squad has outlined six ways that Twitter can earn money. Evan Williams, the founder (and who founded Blogspot), offered a couple of those suggestions. Here they are below, with my own comments:

(1) Twitter Pro. Paid service, with lots of addtional features. Very cool.

(2) Merch. T-shirts, etc. I’ll pass – rather boring logo. If they come up with a graphic, maybe so. I’m not a big “t-shirt with logo” type of person. That doesn’t mean this won’t work.

(3) Biz. Twitter for business? Hmm, very interesting. This could work for employees to stay in touch. But then it’d be up against established players like Lotus Notes’ IM and others. Pimp Your Work offers some other ways to use Twitter for business.

(4) Forums. Ad-supported. Really? Would you spend time in a Twitter forum rather than just tweet? Seems odd and time-consuming in comparison. On the other hand, it’s hard to “talk” to another member if they are not one of your followers. I follow 27 people but only have 10 followers. That’s fine, but if one of the other 17 tweets something I’d like to reply to, they’ll never see it. Forums might work. I should point out, however, that I do have other means of contacting these people, but a quick tweet in reply is more appropriate than an email.

(5) Ads on site. Obviously, with a great volume of users, this will pay off. Will it pay off enough? Will current users get pissed and quit, maybe move to Jaiku, etc.? Probably, but that’s normal. I never “get” those people who think everything should be free for their taking.

(6) Biz, part 2. Charge a fee for marketing/commercial use. There are a few sites, such as Woot, who are doing that. I don’t know if they’re paying, but since this suggestion (and #5) are from Evan Williams, they might soon be.

(7) Sell it. This from a reader in the comments. Of course, someone is waiting, no doubt, to scoop up Twitter and monetize the traffic.

Originally posted on April 26, 2007 @ 2:30 pm