This is awesome…can’t wait to see the innovation spurred by the availability of an official API. The mind boggles…
UPDATE: It’s official, I no longer have enough hours in the day to play with all the cool shit being launched these days…Waxy points out that Yahoo! Maps also has an API.
I just registered another domain name, 1000000monkeys.com (?)…no, I don’t really know why. Great name for a blog though…maybe I’ll move this blog over there [note to self: gotta get around to upgrading WP first].
For the past 24 hours I have been hammered by comment spammers (we’re talking hundreds). None of these comments are seeing the light of day thanks to the spam karma plugin for WordPress, but it doesn’t stop the bastards and their automated spaminator software.
The biggest hassle is that I may being losing some legitimate comments in the deluge…aplogies to any commenters if this is the case. I must upgrade to WP 1.5 and investigate one of those captcha plugins to try and stop them even posting comments to start with.
This is perhaps the greatest example I’ve seen of the Lazy Web in action.
Waxy creates a competition around a great idea (animating wikipedia history revisions so you can see graphically how things have changed over time), and tips in a few bucks for the winner. Others join in to sweeten the pot and the quality of entries is just amazing.
Came across this pic on Flickr, and was first attracted to it because it just screams of that classic punk rock aggression…that is until you look closely and notice that someone up in the left corner is holding an electric fan on the guy who’s obviously feeling the heat, poor chap.
Who knows, maybe it really was that hot and the only way the show could possibly go on was for someone (a fan?) to hold up a fan?!
Delivr managed to stick it out in the Contagious Media Top 10 for the first week, the highest it got was number 6, but it didn’t last and we ended up down in 18th (I was still pleased)…so what did I learn?
Look at the traffic stats for the winning entries and you’ll notice that the vast majority of the traffic comes from a very small number of sites…getting picked up by Collegehumour.com will deliver way more traffic than a 100 regular blogs (A-listers excepted). Delivr did all right to start with thanks to a bunch of links from bloggers, but the gap really widened when the hilarious and viral entries like Forgetmenotpanties.com got picked up by very popular sites…I guess these are the sneezers (in Seth Godins terms) and connectors (in Malcolm Gladwells terms) of the online world…the sites which tip an idea virus over the edge and into the mainstream.
Another point is that email plays a hugely important role in spreading links (duh!)…once a link gets into circulation that will deliver way more traffic than even the most popular sites…check out the stats for forgetmenotpanties.com…those “Direct Request” referrers are mostly people clicking on email links. I thought that Delivr might benefit from email, but I realize now that Delivr doesn’t lend itself to easy and wide circulation…sure users send someone an email, but that’s just one person and recipients arn’t very likely to forward it.
And it doesn’t seem to matter what your URL is. I heard (or read) someone say that all entries should sport their own url because if they used a “contagiousmedia.org” sub domain then everyone will know it is designed for that purpose and wil be less likely to spread it…makes logical sense, but a subdomain sure didn’t hurt in this case…forgetmenotpanties.contagiousmedia.org won by a country mile.
At the end of the day I am pleased with the results. I’d been thinking about Delivr for a while and the contest gave me the push I needed to pull it together…and the real prize for me is that the folks at Flickr liked it enough to add it to their services page as an example of their API in action, stoked :)
OK, so I have been a little baffled about reblg myself, so this post from Marc Canter helps clarify things. My favorite line…
Aggregating micro-content is gonna be HUGE! IMHO.
Couldn’t agree more…been thinking a lot about this recently myself.
Richard McManus, you don’t need to go to Silicon Valley. We need to build our own little Silicon Isle downunder…I reckon you and Phil Pearson should be looking at this space. Lots of opportunity here.
UPDATE: Lucas points out that actually he and Phil Pearson are on the Reblg development team…so I guess he’s already well in the loop on this stuff! Richard too I’m sure…anyway, the point remains, there’s lots of opportunity in the micro-content aggregation space.
A bunch of people have already linked to Steve Job’s recent commencement address at Stanford…I just got around to reading it and it is really quite good. You should read it.
Update: Whoops I got the date wrong…still, I am not going to be there for reasons related to living in middle earth.
The Contagious Media Showdown Awards night will be in full swing at this very moment, and I am here in the office :(
Would be cool to be there…and Ze Frank is hosting.
I find myself semi obsessed with customer service stories (good and bad), I think because the way a business handles complaints or issues, and indeed the way they interact with Customers generally, says a lot about the companies culture, but also it’s often a reflection of its health as a business aswell…I am reminded of that old classic, The Service Profit Chain.
Anyway, for this reason I just wanted to share my complete satisfaction with Google’s Adsense support team (Dan particularly).
With the move back to New Zealand I had to set up a new Adsense account, migrate all my sites, and have the old balance transfered to the new account.
I am certainly no priority for the Adsense team, but the support they provided during this transition was brilliant. Rather than the usual terse responses (written with the assumption that you can read minds) which characterize so many email based customer service interactions, the team at Google have put considerable thought into every element of the process and have clearly thought about it from the customers/publishers point of view. The result was a perfect and seemless transition where they provided all the info I needed (and some) to make sure everything went off without a hitch.
I actually put things off for a while because I assumed it was going to be a nightmare, but it couldn’t have been simpler. Keep it up Google.
The news of Yahoo!s acquisition of Blo.gs seems to reinforce what I was saying a while back about Ping-o-Matic.
Actually it is still a bit surprising to me that Yahoo! would buy rather than build something like this. I guess there is more going on under the bonnet than I thought. Makes you wonder if Ping-o-Matic will be acquired also.
Dude, I am so looking forward to The Dukes Of Hazzard movie. Totally grew up watching the good ‘ol boys, and the trailer looks like it might be quite good.
Never can tell for sure but they have some good casting choices…Burt Reynolds as Boss Hogg, and Willie Nelson as Uncle Jessie. Should be just the right amount of stupid one liners and mindless car stunts :)
The other thing that really appeals is their use of the Spiderbait remake of the Ram Jam clasic Black Betty in the sound track.. Spiderbait are a bunch of coolio Australian rockers…go watch the trailer with the sound up to catch that.
