MyBlogLog is the cool site that lets you make communities out of the people that visit your website. We’re listed there, and if you are registered, you’ll probably be able to see your photo down the right-hand side of the site somewhere.

Well, like all cool Web2.0 startups, they’ve been bought up. And like Flickr, del.icio.us and countless others, the purchaser is Yahoo!. Here’s some details from the MyBlogLogBlog:

Yahoo! is going to put loads of resources into MyBlogLog and help us roll out a ton of new features. Plus, we’re moving to their infrastructure, which should help with those occasional slowdowns.We are not going to become one of those corporate casualties that never make another step forward. We are hard at work on the custom communities and soon everyone will be able to skin their community to look like their own blog or site.

Good for them! Mike Arrington reckons the deal was worth something like $10 million. He goes on:

The fact that MyBlogLog will be in the Yahoo Developers Network is a good signal. Yahoo’s recent acquisitions have been handled pretty well from a user-care standpoint, and it looks like they’ll be taking a similar approach here. Bradley did say that eventually users will be able to log in with their Yahoo IDs, though. That will expand the potential user base significantly.

Congratulations to the MyBlogLog team. This thing took off like a rocket and never looked back, and we are a proud member.

Hopefully MyBlogLog will be able to continue to grow within Yahoo! and provide an even better service in the future. As for what Yahoo! get out of it, well, I wonder if all the recent interest in site metrics has something to do with it…

Technorati Tags: mybloglog, yahoo!

Wetpaint is a hosted wiki service – more like Wikia than PBwiki, in that it’s probably suited to community sites. The difference between Wetpaint and Wikia though, is that Wetpaint looks good.

Mike Arrington and Zoli Erdos both mention it today, which is how I came by it. Arrington reports the $9.5 million funding they’ve just received. He goes on:

Wetpaint’s key competitor, Wikia, has had more traction with users according to Alexa and Compete statistics, and claims 2.5 million page views per day. Wetpaint doesn’t disclose page views, but CEO Ben Elowitz told me they are “doubling quicker than every 2 months.” Wetpaint has a much more newbie-friendly user interface than Wikia, and is targeting a different audience. Frankly, it’s just a lot more pleasant to look at a typical Wetpaint site than a Wikia one, although the content on Wikia is often much deeper than the equivalent on Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 150,000 unique wikis and over 2.5 million pieces of content contributed by users since launching last June.

Zoli adds his thoughts:

Wetpaint isn’t really just a wiki, it’s a wiki – blog – forum hybrid. Even novice users can just happily type away and create attractive pages with photos, videos, tagging …etc. without the usual learning curve. These pages can be shared, other users can contribute, entire communities can grow and thrive – in fact that’s what it’s all about: online community creation.

So what’s it like? Great! It’s dead simple to sign up to create a new wiki, and it also makes it easy to add all sorts of content. You can see some of the sort of things that are possible at  Wetpaint Central, the  support wiki.

There are plenty of templates you can choose from, including text pages, photo galleries, calendars, schedules and event details. Every page can be commented on, so a sense of community interaction is easy to achieve.

I can think of plenty of uses to put Wetpaint to. Heartily recommended.

Technorati Tags: wetpaint, wikis

In the end, I just used the same theme as hyprtext, but changed a few things around. I like the look, but all the widgets I’m using might make the place look a little cluttered.

Any feedback gratefully received…

Things will be going a bit wobbly ’round these parts over the next day or two. Will be upgrading to 2.06 of WordPress, and sorting myself out with a new theme.

Wish me luck!

Here. Download it while you can!

[tags]jimmy wales, wikipedia, bbc, 5live[/tags]

Simon Dickson reports on Digital Dialogues, of which the DD website explains:

The purpose of Digital Dialogues is to assess the capacity of ICT to support central government’s communication and consultation activity (principally with the public but also with internal stakeholders).

Digital Dialogues takes technology as its focus and seeks to build the capacity within central government for setting up, managing and evaluating digital technology’s contribution to promoting public participation in the policy process. Digital Dialogues has the additional objective of promoting collaboration and exchange between departments.

Just before Christmas, the Hansard Society released a report, which you can read here.

Dickson notes that:

The good news is that, perhaps predictably, the online world comes out of it pretty well. Public engagement is a good thing, and the majority of those drawn to online channels were not previously ‘engaged’; but it should be seen as a complement rather than a replacement for conventional offline methods. There’s also a fair bit on the importance of appropriate planning and ongoing management / moderation.

It all makes interesting reading.

Technorati Tags: social media, digital dialogues, hansard society, simon dickson

Technorati Tags: second life, open source

Counterize II is a cool WP plugin that allows you to track site stats within the WP dashboard. Nice and simple.

Have installed it here and on hyprtext.

[tags]wordpress, counterize, plugin[/tags]

Have been back online for a few weeks now, though much of my attention on local government and new media matter has been focussed on the IDeA Communities of Practice platform, run by Steve Dale. I’d recommend that anyone interested in this space heads over there and signs up.

LGKnowledge, the social bookmarking service, is currently being spammed into oblivion. I need to figure out a way to stop this happening. In the meantime, please don’t expect much from it.

Thanks to Daniel Champion for his recent email, correcting the URL I had down for Clackmannanshire Council. I’ve updated it. Remember – check if we have the right address for your authority by checking the list on the wiki here.

Just a quicky this one. Zoho Show will now let you upload ODP files. What are they? Well, it’s the open format that OpenOffice.org uses.

As the Zoho blog says,

With the current update, Zoho Show now has full OOo support.

Who needs Windows Live?

Technorati Tags: zoho, odp, openoffice.org

Mike Arrington posts that the Performancing Metrics deal is off:

It’s not often that a company announces the acquisition of another company and then subsequently walks away from the deal, but PayPerPost isn’t a typical kind of company.

In a post on the PayPerPost blog today, the company said “We…dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn’t what we were looking for right now.” That came just a week after the official announcement of the acquisition.

Generally speaking, responsible companies “dig into” the acquisition target before they announce a deal.

Nick Wilson at Performancing puts a slightly different spin on it:

After much discussion, we’ve decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isnt right for us or our community. It’s regrettable that we should part ways as I still feel that Dan and Ted are stand up guys breaking new ground, but in the end, the deal was just not right for them or us.

On his personal blog (which is wonderfully profane, as are his expletive-ridden podcasts), Nick is a little more candid:

It’s a huge relief not to have to lose Performancing.com.

We’ve made our mistakes, now it’s time to crack on…

Chris Garrett, another guy involved in Performancing – though not a shareholder – gives his view, again seeming relieved that the deal is off:

• I am pleased because I don’t think the two communities, Performancing members and PPP members, actually overlap or make as good a fit as PPP assumed they would.
• I’m looking forward to an open source Metrics and I will work on it given time
• For me the best news is that Performancing.com is staying with Nick. We put a lot of work into building the site and community, with a terrific group of members. The Performancing domain and brand is hopefully still a valuable asset

Good news though, rather than find a new buyer (which might be hard now anyway), Performancing Metrics is being opened up to the community and made open source. Cool.

What form it will take will be unknown for a while, but I reckon a small metrics service that each site hosts for itself would be a good route to go down.

Performancing for Firefox will remain ScribeFire – excellent news, it’s a much better name and can give focus to the blog editor as a project in its own right.

Two things come out of this. One is that not only is PayPerPost a crappy idea for a company, it’s a pretty crappily run place if this mess is anything to go by. Second, the breakdown of this deal will be good in the long term for Performancing, Scribefire and the bloggers who will use the future open-source metrics.

Technorati Tags: performancing, payperpost

Google have removed their controversial ‘tips’ feature, according to FireFox dude Blake Ross:

Google has removed the tips feature. Perhaps it was always intended as a test; I don’t know the official reason for its removal. In any case, thanks to Matt Cutts and other Googlers who listened and responded to feedback with an open mind, and over the holidays no less.

Nice to know they’re listening.

Technorati Tags: google, tips, blake ross

One of the earliest posts on hyprtext was about the proposed new community search engine proposed by Jimmy Wales. There was quite a lot of kerfuffle about it, largely due to confusion over Amazon’s involvement, and quite a lot of debate concerning the name of the project, which everyone assumed was wikiasari. Most people agreed that this was a terrible name for a search engine.

Since then, I have had a chance to have a good poke about the site where the engine will be designed, search.wikia.com. The first thing the site does is put right a few misunderstandings:

Amazon has nothing to do with this project. They are a valued investor in Wikia, Inc., but people are really speculating beyond the facts. This search engine project has nothing to do with Amazon’s A9, etc…

This project has also nothing to do with the screenshot TechCrunch are running (which belongs to Wikisearch), and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia…

Wikiasari is not and will not be the name for the free search engine we’re developing. It was the name of a former project.

So, search.wikia is the name of the wiki where the project is discussed. Wikiasari is the name of a previous attempt to get a wiki based search engine going, and WikiSearch is a search engine that searches Wikipedia and all sites that are linked from it.

The new engine as yet has no name. But it’s being talked about.

I have to admit, I’m interested in this project, and I’d like to see it work. So, I have done as Jimbo implores us to do, and joined the mailing list. The first thing to pop into my mailbox was a missive from Jimbo, entitled First steps to getting it right…

…For now I just want to point out that the largest amount of skepticism about what we are going to try to accomplish here is driven by the inherent issue of spammers. There are huge incentives for people to try to abuse our good will and we have to anticipate and expect that. But, unlike many of the skeptics who think that this is impossible, I am very confident that if we can build a genuine community and give ourselves as a community the tools we need, then we can deal with this issue without a lot of trouble.

Tomorrow I will write more about how I see the core design working.

I’m looking forward to it.