See also: twitter, linkedin, facebook, fluther, quora, & hacker news.
29th Mar, 2007
I think this is cool, brave, crazy, dangerous, nuts, etc
Jane Stillwater is a 64-year-old Berkeley woman who left for Kuwait on Wednesday, hoping to embed with the U.S. military there and in Iraq as a blogger. And if she is refused? She’s got a sleeping bag and plans to sleep on the beach in Kuwait until her return flight in three weeks.
Here’s her blog.
26th Mar, 2007
This is cool, reality all starz is a competition to challenge “yourself and your friends to accomplish amazing adventures, feats of valor, or works of creative genius.” You go out into the real world and perform real acts like you’re a real human being. Then you submit proof online and receive points from your peers based on how well you did.
Some of the challenges are like party like a rockstar but there’s also a surprising number of people competing in survive a rollover accident.
It’s built by Peter Brown and Shelly Farnham from Waggle Labs. Shelly’s got a really interesting background in the academic side of social software (as a Ph.D and former researcher at Microsoft). Good people. Worth drinking with if you run into them at ETech.
25th Mar, 2007
ETech is my favorite O’Reilly conference because it’s the one that seems furthest from being vocational. My experience at OSCON is always around learning to use various technologies and my experience at Web 2.0 has been very business focused. The people at ETech always seem to be doing such far out things that I get caught up in their enthusiasm.
Sarah and I head out tonight. Hopefully I’ll finish the revision to Regular Expression Pocket Reference on the plane. Then tomorrow morning I’ll be rolling out the new design for my company so that I have something bright and shiny to demo. If you’re going to ETech I’d love to chat, partly because I’m looking for feedback but also because I want to hear what other people are up to.
20th Mar, 2007
In the comments of my post Social Network Fatigue is a Red Herring, Jon Udell challenged me to get actual numbers on how many people join more than one social network and how many networks they tend to join. Today I ran across this quote on the Hitwise blog:
the other [non-Myspace] 19 social networks on the chart above received 25.8% of their upstream visits from MySpace. In other words, one in four visits to the 19 other leading social networks came directly from MySpace, demonstrating the vast breadth of its influence among users of most of these other sites.
I first read that as conclusive evidence that there’s a very large group of people who aren’t effected by social network fatigue. But you could also claim that the traffic is coming from users with MySpace fatigue (a fatigue particular to MySpace and in no way damning of the sector) who are searching for a new home. In any case, the rest of the social network sector should be thankful, they’re getting the kind of traffic from MySpace that most web companies hope to get from Google.
Also of note, social network traffic accounts for 6.5% of all internet traffic, is up 11.5% over the last month and 87% over the last year.
19th Mar, 2007
The SF Chronicle had a story on online taunting the other day:
Nationwide, more than four in 10 teens have been victims of taunts and threats via social network Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, instant messages and text messages from cell phones, a new survey says. One in eight reported feeling scared enough to stay home from school, according to the survey by the National Crime Prevention Council.
What I want to know is how many of those teens only receive threats and taunts online. A lot of that bullying is probably going on in person. The difference is that the onliine bullying leaves a trail. It reminds me of the parents who sued MySpace, and lost, because their children had been the victims of sexual predators. Is MySpace creating increased crime? Or is it a honeypot that catches crime that would have otherwise been undetected? I say honeypot, but that’s a hard thing to say to the MySpace mothers whose children had been safe up until that point.
12th Mar, 2007
Urban hiking is the next big thing. We did a 9 mile hike through San Francisco’s Downtown, China Basin, Potrero Hill, and Mission Districts yesterday. Good times.
Here’s Justin’s take on Urban Hiking, along with pictures and another route map.
1st Mar, 2007
90% of travel happens within one hour of your home but almost every travel site is focused on big trips. That’s because it’s easier for them to get a cut of a $500 plane ticket than it is of a $50 meal at some out-of-the-way inn.
My buddy (and Odeo alum) Adam just launched 71Miles, a travel site focused on giving advice for your short weekend trips. Right now it’s just Northern California, followed soon by Washington D.C. and eventually all major US metropolitan areas. Unlike my copy of Lonely Planet Italy, which has sat untouched on my coffee table for two months, this is travel advice I can actually use.
It’s a very cool site. Check it out!
If all goes well Odeo alums could be launching three new companies before summer. Nice!