Recently the winners of the MobileMonday Peer Awards were announced, coinciding with the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We covered the 25 nominees here. The award recognizes early stage and emerging Mobile Web start-up companies.
Buzzd, a provider of local real-time search information for bars, clubs and restaurants, won the jury, audience and community awards under the 'early stage' category.
GeoXtract is a powerful tool that allows you to integrate your own data with Google Maps or Google Earth. Using this desktop application, you can create a personalized map with no programming experience required.
The problem with running a site that relies heavily on users to generate content, is that it puts a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of those users (in relation to the site owners). If users are unhappy with something about the way a site that relies on user generated content is run, they can theoretically hold the site hostage until they get what they want. This week, eBay sellers unhappy with the auction giant's recent change in listing prices and policy, launched a week-long boycott of the site. So far, the impact appears negligible, but the action highlights a risk that any business that relies on a UGC-centric model takes.
This is guest post by Dan Zarrella, a social media marketing consultant. You can follow him on Twitter here.
While some people have said that Digg has begun to lose its relevancy since the recent algorithmic changes, I believe it still represents an incredibly rich resource for studying social media and how stories and links spread throughout the web community. Once a link "goes popular" and is listed on Digg's homepage it is seen by many and perhaps even a majority of web geeks. Very often these readers have their own blogs, and if they like a story they may blog about it or link to it. This is why many webmasters yearn to be Dugg -- not for the first wave of traffic, which is often substantial but hard to retain, but for the viral wave of traffic and links that comes as a result.
Last week we wrote a piece questioning whether perhaps 37Signals had lost focus with the upgrades to their popular Backpack organizational tool. We argued that the changes were morphing Backpack from a simple organizational tool into a robust intranet system that put it on a collision course with Basecamp, the company's groupware application. Many commenters on the 37Signals blog felt the same way, though most on this blog seemed to disagree. Ultimately, we decided that "whether [37Signals has] fallen prey to feature creep will really be measured by the response of their users."
Blist, a darling of the DEMO 08 conference, is announcing this morning that they have raised a $6m "A Round" of venture capital. Who knew that spreadsheets made social = big investments? That's what they do, they make database information and spreadsheet social.
Here's a test for Web 2.0. Cuba's Fidel Castro announced yesterday morning that he is resigning from his post as ruler of that communist country. What better way to celebrate the departure of an authoritarian dictator than to look at how the free flow of information in online social media provided coverage of the event? Or, depending on your take on Castro, what better way to celebrate a populist leader in the international fight for social justice and against imperialism than to look at the people-powered social media reaction?
Unfortunately, we could use some better results.
In the midst of the current US economic slowdown it is clear that the good old days are over. At least for some chunk of 2008,
more likely for the whole year, we are in for some gloomy times.
Companies are being forced to cut costs and let people go. Some smart people aren't sitting around waiting to be downsized - instead they're jumping ship and hopping aboard another.
Our 9th daily Comments Competition winner is Falafulu Fisi, for his comment on our post Web 2.0 Meets Medicine. Falafulu told us that the "current state of the art in medicine 2.0 of today is the automated online CDSS (Clinical Decision Support Systems)", which he says is starting to do diagnosis via the Web. Congratulations Falafulu, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. Here is Falafulu's full comment:
Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks did an analysis of current frontpage stories on digg, the popular social news site that started out as a tech competitor to Slashdot. Allen noted that now just 15% of frontpage stories are technology ones, which is a huge change from its roots. Slashdot meanwhile continues to focus exclusively on ultra-geeky topics.
I can add my own bit of analysis to Allen's. At the end of last week I did a check of which tech publishers were getting the most frontpages.
