Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.
This morning I attended a presentation by
Matt Mullenweg, the Founder of WordPress, on 'Scaling
Your Community.' Matt started by defining scaling your community as "being as useful
to the last 100k people as you are to the first 100k." He talked about the four steps a
community goes through as they scale.
The steps he laid out for leaders of a community were:
The principals that Matt emphasized to build a solid foundation all revolved around taking a simple idea and articulating it clearly. Also he said that once you, as a leader, commit to a set of simple principals, it is essential to make sure all of the product development is consistent with that vision. Matt made the point that while this is very straight forward, it is often difficult to execute on. For example, at Word Press they have committed to "all free features will always be free". Unfortunately, this has proven difficult at some points because users have leveraged the system in ways they never expected (such as unique ways to track their blog's activity). Because of their commitment, they have decided to continue offering those features for free.
The Read/WriteWeb Job Board has now been combined with the Job Boards at two popular Web Business blogs, VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock. This means that when you post a job to the R/WW Job Board, it now displays on VentureBeat and Alarm:Clock as well as Read/WriteWeb. I'm not sure what numbers the other two blogs do, but by my calculations this gives your job postings exposure to 2-3 million page views per month. Allow me to explain the background to this change....
The blog job board market is a very tough one. There are lots of options for blogs and job posters alike. So I believe that for blog-based Job Boards going forward, unless you are big enough to go it alone (and I think top 10 sites like Engadget and Techcrunch are probably the only tech blogs capable of that right now), partnerships are key.
Here are the latest job postings on the combined RWW/VB/AC Job Board:
Software Engineer or Architect at SpongeFish in San Francisco, CA
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/d97af26327a5612868fe4335a
9068f17/?d=1
UI Web Wizard Designer at Prolific Publishing in Burbank, CA
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/bae03ad3ae1937601a3fc6e31
15eceaa/?d=1
BitWine is looking for web design advisors
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/0d5325e31b33e5f5d8c7991bd
7576a52/?d=1
Product Manager at Green Dot in Los Angeles, CA (Monrovia, CA)
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/df1ef57ad22bf5dd26a0dcb94
b5255fb/?d=1
Sr. Software Engineer/Architect at Maya's Mom in Palo Alto, CA
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/32ed56b35f4f74304629a5784
7343967/?d=1
Sr. Scalability Engineer at AmieStreet in New York, NY (or telecommute)
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/ae33cf64de8b6a0c3727cfa90
a669c3c/?d=1
Senior Software Engineer at DonorsChoose.org in New York, NY
(midtown-west)
http://jobs.readwriteweb.com/job/afd95d1532b1cacf2569e0670
c4c0c15/?d=1
Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.
On Saturday we covered an SXSW panel
called Web App
Autopsy, which examined four live web applications (RegOnline, FeedBurner, Wufoo, and Blinksale) for things like conversion rates and
revenue per customer. Today there was a similar seminar entitled "Barenaked
App: The Figures Behind the Top Web Apps", which looked at 5 web applications and
what it took to build and release those products. This time the focus was very much
around the financial costs to build and deploy these web applications (as opposed
to elements like lines of code or revenue). It also touched on what it costs
in monthly maintenance. Here is an overview of the data they shared:
One other interesting thing shared was that FreshBooks cost $430k total to build and maintain, until they reached break even ($140k of those expenses went to marketing).
At the end of January we wrote about a
new service called Imagini Friends, which is a
social network that calculates your "VisualDNA" and uses it to find other people that
match. At the time, it reminded me of the personality tests you find in magazines like
Vogue. Well it looks like Imagini has recently gotten a surge in popularity, thanks to a
huge digging (Saul Klein pointed
this out). The power of digg can be seen in the Alexa chart:
At the time of our review in January, I thought the most promising application for Imagini would be advertising and marketing - because of the demographic and consumer preferences data that it can obtain. As such, there are privacy implications for people who participate in this 'social network'. Some of the digg readers picked up on this, e.g. darkspire archly commented:
At SXSW there was a panel entitled 'Using RSS for Marketing' (our coverage here from Sean Ammirati). Mick Liubinskas, from group communications product Tangler, left a good comment on our post:
"RSS is a big topic of discussion around Tangler. Obviously we want to do it, but there's doing it and there's doing it well. Options with an RSS would be interesting and I'd like to see someone do that well.
e.g. Give me everything, or just give we stuff with the word collaboration in it. Or maybe, give me articles with 50+reads and/or 10+ comments."
That got me thinking about how many of you currently subscribe to RSS Remix feeds - i.e. feeds that have been filtered or mashed up with other feeds.
In my reply to Mick's comment, I said that RSS filtering is still a work in progress. Yahoo Pipes is at the geeky end of the spectrum, with its sophisticated "feed aggregator and manipulator" capabilities. But it shows where we're headed with remix feeds. Market leader in feed management, Feedburner, hasn't done a lot with filtering yet. However we've profiled several RSS Remix products recently on R/WW: FeedBlendr, FeedRinse, FeedDigest and BlastFeed. Others that have been mentioned in our comments are macro.scopia and the interestingly-named Profilactic. There are many others, I'm sure, but the point of this poll is to ask: are you using RSS remix feeds yet?
Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.
Today's keynote was a
conversation between Limor Fried of Adafruit
Industries and Phillip Torrone, the senior editor of MAKE magazine. In the conversation, they discussed a
new movement called 'Open Source Hardware'.
Open Source Hardware involves releasing all of the information necessary, to allow individuals to acquire the individual components of a device and understand how to assemble them together into a functioning device. Also, many individuals end up then extending a device to incorporate entirely new and novel uses. Limor talked about multiple types of open source hardware - including releasing the following:
Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.
This morning, I attended a panel titled
"Using
RSS for Marketing". The panel had a great set of participants including: Tom
Markiewicz CEO, EvolvePoint (moderator);
Emily Chang Co-founder, Ideacodes; Bill
Flitter Chief Mktg Officer, Pheedo Inc; John
Jantsch Owner, Duct Tape Marketing;
Greg Reinacker CTO/Founder, NewsGator
Technologies Inc.
Tom's style of facilitation (at least for this panel) guided the conversation to cover a broad range of topics extremely quickly. However, at a high level, the panel discussed:
The mashups of our Top
100 Alternative Search Engines list continue! The Name Inspector, a fun and interesting
blog run by a PhD in Linguistics, has done a linguistic analysis of
the 100 search engine names on the list. His conclusion is that "the search for search
engine names has drawn on some creative linguistic strategies." The top 100 alt search
engines (from February) fall into the following categories:
In addition, The Name Inspector has identified some search engines names that belong to more than one category, which he labels "mashonyms". An example is Phrase + Misspelled Word + Domain Hack = alltha.at.
Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.
The last panel I attended on the first
day of SXSW was entitled "Web
2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing". The panel was moderated
by John Wilbanks from Science
Commons. John did an excellent job showing how a number of general internet trends are
effecting scientific publishing. Specifically, I was impressed by three major projects
the panel touched on:
Melissa Hagemann, the Program Manager for Open Access at the Soros Foundation, was one of the panelist. If you aren't familiar with Open Access, it is an initiative trying to get all scholarly research available for free on the Internet. Melissa explained that many supporters are now requiring the research they support via grants, to be provided under Open Access. In fact, the US Congress is considering legislation to require all research supported by the United States Government to be distributed under Open Access. The reason is that the government and other funders are realizing they are paying for the research twice. Firstly, they are paying to have the information created and synthesized for publication. Then they are paying again to allow other researchers to get access to that knowledge.
Sean Ammirati of mSpoke is at SXSW in Austin, TX (USA). He is reporting for Read/WriteWeb throughout the event.
After attending a panel on collaboration
earlier this morning, I attended the panel "Under
18: Blogs, Wikis and Online Social Networks for Youth". The moderator was: Andrea
Forte of the Georgia Institute of Technology. The panelists were: Danah Boyd
PhD Candidate, USC Annenberg Center; Anastasia Goodstein Publisher, Ypulse;
Kate Raynes-Goldie TakingITGlobal; Erin Reilly Exec Dir, Platform Shoes
Forum; and Elisabeth Sylvan Researcher, MIT Media Laboratory. The presentation
started with a slide which read "Young People Online are ... a constant mortal danger or
fulfilling their inner potential?" This was a pretty good summary of the
conversation.
Each panelist opened with a brief presentation. Danah Boyd's opening provided great context for the rest of the discussion. She talked about how a hundred years ago 14 - 17 year olds participated in society and were mentored by adults. Then during the great depression the government instituted a policy of forcing 14 - 17 year olds to attend high school. She talked about how this began a process of creating a dynamic she called 'Age Segregation'. The concept behind this segregation being that society creates separate activities for teenagers. This however didn't change the fact that 14 - 17 year olds still yearn to participate and express themselves to society at large. The difference is that in the last few years they have begun doing it online. She pointed out 4 things that make this unique:
