If you think regular bloggers get trolled in their comments sections, the discussion on Blogband is likely to get heated. Comments will be moderated before being posted and any off-topic rants will appear on the Off Topic Comments page. While the page is currently empty, depending on the decisions made about fiber, ISPs and infrastructure, it's likely to light up like a Christmas tree and read like The Best of Craigslist.

Like Clipmarks, Amplify works via a browser extension. When you click the button it adds to your toolbar, orange boxes appear on the page you're viewing allowing you to select the text you want to clip. You can also select text using your mouse. The boxes surround the text up until a paragraph break, so if you want to add more text to your clipping, you just have to click again on the following sections until you've grabbed all you want to save. Images can be clipped as well.

The next step is to click the "Click Here to Amplify it!" button. That brings you to your clip blog's "Save page" where you can fill in more info like the title of the post and any additional commentary you want to add. By the way, your clip blog is called a "Clog," which is kind of funny, but to be honest, we're not entirely sure the term will catch on.

The clip blog reminds us a lot of Tumblr site, a scaled down blog platform for sharing tidbits from around the web. (If you'd rather post to your Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, or LiveJournal site, you'd be better off using the Clipmarks solution instead.)

Before you post to your "clog," you have the option to check a box and post the clip to Twitter. You can even customize how the beginning of the tweet should read. If you look further down the page, you'll see a link that says "post this clip to Facebook, Delicious, or Clipmarks." Clicking here will take you to a new page where you can configure these services, too.

Once you've added the additional services, they'll be checked by default every time you clip something and post to your clip blog. If you don't want to always tweet or update Facebook, you'll have to uncheck the checkboxes on the "Save this Clip" page with each use of Amplify. We wish there was a setting that would let those boxes be unchecked by default for those of us who don't want to over-share.

If you decide later that you want to add or remove services, you can no longer do so from the "Save clip" page of your blog - you'll have to log into Amplify and access your Admin settings from there - a bit of an annoyance, but one we can live with.

Great Features: Groups and Sharing from Your RSS Reader

There are three features that make Amplify the better choice for clipping, in our opinion: Twitter sharing, of course, but also groups and the ability to share from RSS. The groups feature lets multiple users from a business, organization, class, etc. create a community site to which they all contribute. Because the groups can be synced with Twitter and Facebook, this can be an easy way to keep up a shared Twitter account or Facebook page.

The other great feature for voracious RSS users is the ability to share clips directly from your feed reader, be it Google Reader or Bloglines. When you use Amplify from either of these services, it will find the source URL and link back to the original page - not the feed URL. That makes Amplify a handy way to tweet, bookmark, or share the best content from your feeds without having to open up the article in a separate window.

To get started with Amplify, sign in from the main page using your Twitter account. If you don't use Twitter, you can create an Amplify account instead. You'll then see the option to install the browser extension (Firefox only) which is the last step before you can start using the service. For more info on Amplify, you can view the YouTube video embedded below.

The concept behind Zcapes is somewhat reminiscent of the mobile social network Brightkite's feature called "placestreams." With Brightkite, users can post text and images surrounding a particular place or event directly from their mobile phone. Zcapes is very similar in concept - except instead of being a social network whose primary goal is connecting you to other users, a Zcape page is just the placestream, nothing more. However, Zcape pages aren't limited to a physical place in the real world or an event like a conference or concert. They can also be created for an activity, like "watching the Oscars" or a group - like your coworkers, for example. The pages you create can be set to public or private, as you choose.

If you want to tap into conversations surrounding a particular keyword, the service could easily do that. However, it's not limited to web chatter alone. In addition to tracking the real-time web of Twitter updates and Flickr uploads, the service can also track RSS feeds while letting you integrate messaging options, text boxes, images, polls, RSVPs, maps of a particular location, and other features that a traditional blog might have right into your Zcape page. (You can see Zcape in action by checking out this one for ReadWriteWeb: http://rww.zcapes.com or this one for SmartMobs, which recently introduced the service to us.)

How To Share Your Creation

Once you have created a Zcape of your own, you can share it via email, Twitter, or even QR code. Upon creation, the service provides an image of a QR barcode which you could easily stick somewhere in the real world - especially if you had one of these portable, ink-free photo/sticker printers. Make sure to save the image right way, though, because once we left that final page of the creation process, we had trouble finding the sharing options again.

To interact with the Zcapes created by others, you'll need to sign up for a free account. You can then "Favorite" Zcapes by clicking on "Love this!" which is found at the bottom of all Zcape pages. The pages themselves are designed to be viewed from a mobile phone, not a desktop/laptop PC, as you can see from the image below, captured on a laptop.

Where Does Zcapes Fit In?

To understand where exactly a product like Zcapes fits in, you can refer to the following diagram, which will either simplify the concept for you or confuse you, depending on how well you interpret diagrams!:

Zcapes was founded by Raimo van der Klein, Claire Boonstra and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, who are mobile service architects from a strategic creative consultancy called SPRXmobile based in Amsterdam. Together with their technical partner Triple IT, they built this service which launched last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

For more information about Internet-connected "things", see the following articles: "5 Companies Building an Internet of Things" and "The Next Node on the Net: Your Car!"

After four years leading what's become the most widely read productivity blog and one of the biggest blogs period on the web, Trapani announced at the start of the year that she was leaving her position as Lifehacker lead editor. She posted a long goodbye and look back at the site's history two weeks later. Trapani has been one of the most important figures in the rise of the blogging medium. She's also one hell of a nice person.

If you can't get enough of Gina, you can follow her on Twitter and on FriendFeed. At the very least, we're sure you'll want to join us in subscribing to Smarterware.org.

Photo CC by Will Pate.

Originally called "Blog Networks," the creators decided to change the application's name to "NetworkedBlogs" when they purchased the external, independent web site at networkedblogs.com where an online blog directory is maintained. The application itself has not changed - it has only grown and improved. The company recently ramped up their infrastructure to handle pulling a lot more feeds and released a feature to pull the blog feed directly to your profile on Facebook. They're also continuing to improve their feed reader by adding more social elements to it.

Although we saw the potential for a simple but powerful community-building app such as this back in June, there was no way to know for sure whether or not it would catch on with Facebook users whose app preferences tend to favor games and other time-wasting applications.

As it turns out, NetworkedBlogs is fairly popular...at least among blog applications.  They currently boast nearly 450,000 active users - that is, people who interact with the application by reading, commenting, adding a blog, etc. And the total number of installs sits at just over 700,000. That's huge when compared to the other blogging apps out there. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't have a category just for blogging apps, but a search for "blog," "blogs," and "blogging" shows that their nearest competitor hasn't even cracked 100K, and, in many cases, other apps haven't even gathered 5000 users. 

Additionally, bloggers who are using the NetworkedBlogs application are adding about 500 blogs per day, bringing the current total to 125,000 blogs available via this Facebook blog network.

What's New: A Network Widget for Your Blog (+Invites)

The latest big addition to the network is a new Network Widget which can be added to your blog's web site. When the widget is clicked, a Facebook Connect window pops up allowing your visitors the opportunity to follow your blog on Facebook. The widget is currently in beta, but the first 50 ReadWriteWeb users interested in trying it out can let us know in the comments. You can see the widget in action here on this blog (see the column on the right).

Love it or hate, there's no doubt that FriendFeed was one of the up-and-coming services of 2008. Although recently the service was the subject of a debate as to whether it would last - it's been described as too confusing and noisy for first-timers - those behind the service are asking us to give it time. Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler and creator of Gmail who now builds FriendFeed, just recently reminded us that "overnight success takes a long time."

That said, if you're like many of the FriendFeeders we've seen out there, your lifestream on FriendFeed's site is probably being ignored. The only people whose streams are rewarded with likes and comments are those belonging today's big web personalities or those belonging to people who spend hours per day on site participating in the community and building a name for themselves.

That's why a service like Kakuteru, which finally lets you do something with your FriendFeed lifestream, is so appealing. Instead of hoping that someone will chance upon your activity on FriendFeed's site, Kakuteru uses FriendFeed as the raw source code of a lifestream which can then be modified as you wish by switching services on or off. All the while, the Kakuteru stream sits behind your own personal domain name, branding, and customized design.

Kakuteru is Not Sweetcron

If this sounds a little bit like Sweetcron, the self-hosted lifestream which launched back in August, you're half right. Sweetcron lets anyone host a lifestream on their own site in a way that's similar to a self-hosted WordPress installation. However, Sweetcron begins and ends at lifestreaming, but Kakuteru lets you blog, too. Update: Sweetcron developer Yongfook notes his software provides blogging functionality, but the implementation is different. Sweetcron is a lifestreaming framework and you can customize it however you want by using the API. Kakuteru offers less customization perhaps, but, by default it pins the most recent blog post to the top of the page.

This is an important difference because, let's face it, self-hosted lifestreams, while quite possibly the future, aren't necessarily going to replace long-form content by prolific writers. Yet for anyone who wants to incorporate a lifestream into their current blog now, the only other options are to create a new page on your site or smash a FriendFeed widget into your sidebar. There isn't a great way just yet to combine your lifestream and your articles into one continuous stream on the page. But with Kakuteru, you can.

The Kakuteru lifestream, which lets you toggle services on-and-off, would be even better if it let you do so on-the-fly. Instead of turning off Twitter and removing all the tweets from your lifestream, it would be great if Kakuteru would just stop posting Twitter for the time being without removing the older entries. That would perfect for bloggers who want to occasionally import extra content. For example, if attending an event, your Twitter stream could be switched on to integrate your micro-blogged activity; if recording video, you could enable your YouTube stream for a while, etc. Unfortunately, though, the Kakuteru toggle is an all-or-nothing switch at the moment.

The Kakuteru Service

Created by Dominiek ter Heide, Kakuteru has been keeping a low profile since it made its debut on Louis Gray's blog in late December. (Check out that article for a blow-by-blow on Kakuteru's features.)

At the moment, Kakuteru is in its earliest stage of development, which means the site is rough, a bit buggy, and sometimes slow. However, don't let that dissuade you: Kakuteru is a good idea. With built-in Web 3.0 features like auto-tagging (at last!) and other semantically-based options like the incorporation of articles from Zemanta, the blogging portion of Kakuteru is a glimpse of a next-gen platform.

Kakuteru also integrates Disqus comments out-of-the-box and allows you to add in other services like the Addthis social bookmarking plugin or your travel schedule from Dopplr. It even provides a native RSS feed for your stream.

Invites

Dominiek has generously offered ReadWriteWeb users invites to the still closed service. To get your invite, please comment here. (OpenID users - remember - we need your email address!). Invites will be sent out within a couple of days.

ASP.NET

The major roadblock for a lot of potential users, however, is that Oxite is an ASP.NET application, and most standard hosting services run Linux servers, which can not run ASP.NET. This, of course, makes sense, given that Oxite is also meant to be a demo for the ASP.NET MVC framework, but it will surely disappoint a lot of users.

Channel 9 has a short interview with the developers that describes some more of the software's features and the history of its development.

Given that Microsoft uses Oxite to run its own Mix Online site on top of Oxite, it must surely be a stable and powerful platform, especially for sites with multiple blogs.

However, it definitely would be too early to say that Microsoft is competing with Wordpress, Typepad, Drupal, or Joomla. There still seem to be a lot of missing pieces and we are not even sure yet if Oxite features an extension architecture that third-party developers would be able to develop for. However, it's nice to see Microsoft release this project under an open source license, even if it is at least partly for self-serving reasons.

The program launched over the weekend through via this lighthearted post over on TypePad.com which reminds you that "Tumblr...will not pay your bills." According to the company, they've already seen hundreds of journalists signing up to participate.

As detailed in the TypePad blog post, the bailout program includes the following, a dollar value of at least $150 per year (the price of the TypePad service alone), if not more :

A free TypePad Pro blog account, the same service that powers many big-name media blogs. It includes professional support so Six Apart will answer any questions you have.

The blog is enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are display ads that pay a more than Google text ads, and bloggers get to keep the revenue.

Six Apart will promote the new site on Blogs.com, a directory of the best in blogs. Blogs.com will be a way for all of the bloggers peers in the Journalist Bailout Program to cross-promote and share traffic for their independent sites.

Lots more. Six Apart can also introduce you to their VIP program to help drive traffic to the site, help connect blogs to LinkedIn profiles, make it easy to manage your comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically promote posts to your Facebook friends

There are no rules on how the blog must be used. Journalists can use the blog showcase their best work, launch something new, or hang onto the site, you know, "just in case."

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

We're in the midst of a great upheaval. The internet is impacting the business models of so many established ventures. Newspapers and magazines aren't the only industries affected by any means. The internet has left nothing untouched, whether music, video, news, sports, communication, marketing, advertsing and more, those wishing to stave off its force of change are simply trying to outswim a tidal wave.

What's better for those being impacted is to be prepared and thinking ahead for the future - what is Plan B? As we mentioned earlier this week, not everyone sees the death of the journalism ahead - media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for example, sees opportunity.

And if you think successful journalism can only come on the platform of old media, you're wrong. Look around. So many journalists are now getting into blogging, but one of our newest favs that proves the potential success of the model is TechFlash, home to John Cook and Todd Bishop, both of whom left their respected papers and struck out on their own to deliver quality tech news in readable format without all the bias, backstabbing, and petty quarrels the tech "blogosphere" seems to get itself involved in from time to time.

Journalists may also want to keep in mind Arianna Huffington's recent, but vague, promise to begin funding investigative journalism through her incredibly successful The Huffington Post site, one of the most recognizable and read blogs out there.

So journalists, get your platforms ready...there's no better time than now and no better price than free.

Note: Six Apart's Movable Type weblogging platform is what powers our blog here at ReadWriteWeb.

Perhaps the greatest challenges to companies like MySpace Music and Facebook may not be from the big players, but startups that offer artists greater control over their work and pricing flexibility.

This is fair picture. Forecasts generally call for moderate growth in online advertising through 2009. eMarketer expects the market to increase 14.5 percent in 2009.

Even with this outlook, digital music companies face challenges above and beyond what lies ahead with the economy.

MySpace Music is definitely the big player, but criticism about the service ranges from a poor UI to how they treat indie labels. Add to that a potential competitor like Facebook and the issues intensify. Brooks took repeated questions about why they gave the major labels preferential treatment. Brooks said that MySpace Music will phase in new services to provide the indies more of a presence. That reality materialized today. Digital music distributor IODA has signed on to make its catalog available on MySpace Music.

But perhaps the greatest challenges to companies like MySpace Music and Facebook may not be from the big players, but startups that offer artists greater control over their work and pricing flexibility.

Rise of the Band Blogs?

Of the startups that presented at the conference. Bandcamp received some of the highest acclaim. BandCamp is a blog platform designed for musicians. The platform is similar to Blogger or Wordpress but with limited flexibility. The service is free. Sites are designed for search engine optimization. The site has a Flash player but everything around it is HTML. BandCamp includes an analytics platform that details page views, music sales and what tracks musicians played. The service integrates with Paypal. Tracks may be offered for free.

Artists determine the price for their music. The artist uploads their tracks as .AIF or .WAV files. BandCamp converts the file and then offers the artist a selection of different formats for their play list. Artists may choose to sell the music as an mp3, for instance, at a high or low bit rate, setting the price accordingly. There even appears to be the ability to do variable pricing, something the majors have wanted to do for quite some time. BandCamp takes no cut from the sale. Musicians host their own sites.

For BandCamp Founder Ethan Diamond, the service is about giving artists control. He likes to call themselves the "very nerdy" fifth Beatle who takes care of all the geeky stuff so the band may do what they do best.

In his presentation, Diamond sharply criticized the practices of companies that do not provide artists with complete ownership of their works. Diamond has said before that Imeem and MySpace Music both fit into this camp. The companies that engage in this practice he called "online sharecroppers."

Already The Dynamics Are Changing

Steve Jang, vice president of marketing and business development at imeem, sat on the panel with Brooks and Batt. He seemed pretty quiet compared to his colleagues.

He must have had a lot on his mind, listening to his counterparts talk about the business. As we reported this week, Imeem is up for sale. They've laid off 25 percent of their staff. Warner Bros, as you may recall, sued Imeem earlier this year. They later dropped the suit in exchange for an equity stake in the company.

And so, who will purchase Imeem? Is this a play for Facebook?

Oh, these times are a changin'. :-)

With the new SmartSpace service from GoDaddy, anyone can create a personal web site which aggregates your activity from across the social web, combine that with other sources of news and information, and then create a personalized start page containing everything of interest to them. The service can also be used as a blogging platform with social elements like chat already built in. The idea is that you can use the SmartSpace platform to create the kind of site that's right for you, whether that's a social network of sorts, a traditional web site with social elements, a place to host your podcasts, or whatever else you want.

SmartSpace is designed to be easy to use, even for non-technical users. With a click of a button, you can grab content from sites like flickr, YouTube, Google News, Facebook, MySpace, or any other web site that offers an RSS feed.

You can even customize this content to your own personal preferences. For example, if you only want to see Flickr photos of lolcats, you can just type in "lolcat" in the tag field provided. Alternatively, you could select the RSS feed of a particular person's photos.

In addition to this dynamic content form across the social web, GoDaddy also makes available various pre-selected news feeds which you can add if desired. This content is categorized by subject, and is similar to the types of selections that many of today's personalized homepages offer.

Chat & Email

The Chat application lets you have online text conversations right on the site. With the included administrative controls, you can launch a room, invite users, ban users, and participate in both public and private chat sessions. Again, there's nothing technical involved in adding this to your page - the app is already set up and ready to use. All you have to do is make a few choices about how it's displayed and whether it's loaded by default when you log in.

Also, because SocialSpace users have purchased a domain name via GoDaddy, there's an option to set up email addresses using that name. The interface for doing so is much easier to manage than GoDaddy's usual UI for creating email addresses (an ugly and geeky interface). Here, you're basically able to push a button and set up multiple email addresses associated with your domain. The inboxes for these can then be added as widgets to your homepage.

Photo Albums

If you don't keep your images online with a web service like Flickr, you also have the option to make your SmartSpace an online photo album using the SmartSpace photo application. With this, you can upload photos from your computer and then share those photos both publicly and privately in albums that are added to your page.

Web Site and Blogs

For text-based content, you can choose to either add a web site or blog to your homepage. With these options, you can select from a number of pre-built templates to configure the site. Although not as robust a platform as WordPress, the blog will probably work fine for casual users who want to take advantage of the other elements of the SmartSpace service.

Just Another Personalized Homepage Or A New Type Of Social Network?

SocialSpace could be linked to some patent filings the company filed earlier this year which describe a web portal that functions as a social network aggregator. According to those filings, the aggregation could be done using login systems like OpenID. Although there's no mention of OpenID integration in the SmartSpace support documents yet, we hope that integration is something they plan to add in the future.

Still, even without OpenID, what GoDaddy has launched today is a viable competitor to the other personalized homepages out there like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc. But GoDaddy's SocialSpace goes beyond what those sites offer in a number of ways. Although widgetized content like photos and RSS feeds can be added to nearly any start page today, GoDaddy actually lets you own a domain name, set up a blog or website and then easily, instantly turn it into a personalized social network that aggregates content from the social web and includes chat functionality for instant interactions with your friends.

Will SocialSpace kill MySpace and Facebook? That's highly doubtful, but it could be a nice aggregator for those looking to establish a web presence with minimal work. And because it's from GoDaddy, a household name thanks to their high profile TV commercials and ad campaigns, this move also represents what may be the final leap where "social media" fully crosses over to the mainstream use and acceptance.

More Info

Prices for SmartSpace start at $4.99/month for 2 months. From there, the prices are as follows: 12 mo: $4.74/month, 24 mo: $4.49/month, or 36 mo: $4.24/month. You can watch a short introductory video here. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php Products Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:45:00 -0800 Sarah Perez