Tuesday, 9 January, 2007

MyBlogLog to Yahoo!

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…

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Wetpaint

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.

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That was easy!

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…

Ch ch ch Changes

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!

Monday, 8 January, 2007

Digital Dialogues

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.

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Second Life Opens Up

Popular online world, Second Life, is entering into the world of open source, by releasing the code to the client application that allows users to access it. Says the Second Life blog, in a post entitled ‘Embracing the Inevitable’:

At Linden, we have always been strong advocates of the use of open standards and the advantages of using open source products. Though Second Life makes abundant use of non-standard technologies, our basic UDP protocol message system for example, we rely on open standards and open source implementations when appropriate and available. Since many of the components that will make up this network are not yet done, we are not publishing long white papers or RFCs at this time — instead, we are giving everyone what we have along with a goal of producing those open standards with the input and assistance of the community that has brought Second Life to where it is now.

This is an interesting move for Linden Lab, the company behind SL. CNN quote Sibley Verbeck, CEO of Electric Sheep – one of the top SL ‘construction’ companies:

Linden Lab has done extraordinarily well creating a platform for very motivated early adopters. But they have not made the front-end experience ready for the mass market. It’s hard to learn, hard to use, and hard to find content even once you learn how to use it…those barriers will be addressed very rapidly upon the adoption of this open source initiative.

Thanks to John for pointing out the story.

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Sunday, 7 January, 2007

Counterize II

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]