Neomeme

I’ve been tagged for //engtech’s new meme, which aims to informally find out which Web 2.0 sites we actually use, and more importantly, how frequently we use them. I would love to see some meaningful data come out of this, and show us some cool Web 2.0 sites we may not have heard of.

The Rules

1. Link to the original post and the post of whoever tagged you(this one).
2. Create a list of the web2.0 sites you use and categorize them from “daily use” to “weekly use” to “monthly use”. Include links to your accounts if you want so people can friend you.
3. Tag a bunch of people you want to join in.

Even if you haven’t been tagged yet, feel free to participate in the comments or to join in on the meme with your own blog.

My Web 2.0:

Daily

• Digg for funny pictures
• reddit for insightful articles
• Facebook because it keeps emailing me alerts about stupid things my friends did
• Avanoo because I work for Avanoo

Every Few Days

• Wikipedia because I can wander it for hours
• Freebase to explore the semantic web
• Technorati and Techmeme for keeping up with all the happenings in the blogosphere
• iminlikewithyou because of all the hype and because the site is just so much fun to use- it’s a work of UI brilliance.
• icanhascheezburger for yet another dose of lolcats

Once a week or less

• Mybloglog to check my community
• Slashdot/Ars technica/others to harken back to the old days of tech sites
• StumbleUpon for random entertainment
• Rottentomatoes to find stuff to watch

And if you have a Mac and would like a closer look at exactly where you spend your time online, I highly recommend Slife.

People I’m tagging to continue the meme(who happen to be some of my favorite tech bloggers):

• Tony Chung
• Amit Gupta
• Eliazar Parra
• Yulia Smirnova

If you haven’t heard of long shot Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel, you will soon. Immediately following his participation in the first Democratic debate, Gravel’s popularity shot up tremendously, thanks in large part to exposure online. If debate performance can be measured by the number of supporters won over post-debate, then Mike Gravel won the debate hands down. As I write this, the number one story on reddit is “Meet the Next President of the United States of America”, which links to a video compilation of Gravel’s best(and most provocative) statements in the debate. The same story is #1 on Digg, climbing to the top in record time. You only need to look as far as the thousands of votes Gravel received on reddit and Digg to see that he is popular, at least online.

The interesting thing is that Mike Gravel was dismissed by the mainstream media as a nobody with no support, and denied participation in the next debate. Ironically, it is this very rejection by the mainstream media as not popular enough/too controversial/too outspoken that has made Gravel so popular online. Read more »

I’ve started using FeedBurner to manage subscriptions to this blog, which gives your feed all sorts of nifty features. If you’re a blogger and you’re not using FeedBurner you should be- pretty much every popular blogger I can think of uses it. Anyway, if you already read this blog via RSS please click on the big orange button to resubscribe to my new feed which goes through FeedBurner:
Subscribe in a reader

And if you haven’t subscribed yet and you want to know when this blog is updated(answer: less often than you think) or if you want to read content from here in a desktop application or personalized online homepage without ever visting the blog directly, go ahead and click the big orange button.

Number of people who have switched from the old feed to the new feed:

In what is clearly an attempt to teach schoolchildren the true meaning of irony, a C|Net blog announces that the blog bubble has burst. They base this on Technorati’s highly respected State of the Blogosphere report which noticed that although the overall number of blogs is increasing, the number of active blogs has reached a plateau of around 15 millions. The facts are true- lots of blogs are falling silent every second, enough to balance out the growth in blogging. Tris Hussey thinks growth will pick up again once blogging gets a second wind, but I’m not so sure. Read more »

8:15AM: Jason Calacanis publishes the latest in a brilliant series of linkbaits. By 6:00 PM, he’s got 30+ blog posts mentioning him and linking, of course. And the number keeps going up and up. This is the face that launched a thousand(or at least a few dozen) blog posts:

Cute, huh? Calacanis finds all posts about him by subscribing to search feeds for all blogs mentioning his name. I know that Scoble does that same thing. I wonder how many other top bloggers religiously trawl Technorati regularly looking for positive mentions of their name. Read more »

Download Squad reports that Google got a facelift. Aside from adding clean white lines and gray text, they also added some very intelligent, AI-like features. First, Google now suggests related searches for almost every search you perform. But, even more importantly, Google can now intelligently guess which context you are more likely to be searching for a term in, whether that be blogs or images. A couple of screenshots will illustrate: Read more »

If you haven’t been reading Techmeme, you should be. Techmeme crawls the blogosphere searching for hot posts and groups related ones- sort of like Google news. The aggregation of related posts lets you browse conversations between bloggers in close to real time, and sometimes results in amusing point-counterpoint pairs like this:

Jason Calacanis attacks the Wired reporter, and Wired snaps right back at him, all presented in an orderly fashion for your viewing pleasure. Of course Valleywag is all over this, as are a bunch of other people. Techmeme lays the debate out evenly, presenting both sides of the story. Side by side, the contrast between Calacanis’ arrogant, angry diatribe against journalists and Wired’s witty, clever response is clear. There can be no comparison between preselected emailed form questions and a live conversation. Wired is not some fly-by-night gossip rag that misquotes people it interviews on purpose. Either Calacanis is incredibly arrogant and closed-minded, or a brilliant linkbaiter. I honestly don’t know which it is. And as for the 10,000 daily readers Calacanis has that render old-school magazines like Wired obsolete? Looking at the comments on Calacanis’ own blog, most of them are firmly against him, and email interviews in general. Read more »

Discover Magazine has a great visual representation of the blogosphere, and of the connections between all of us:

Each dot is a blog, tied by innumerable threads to others around it. The numbers represent a sampling of some of the communites forming around certain blogs/memes- for example, #1 is DailyKos,with a big cloud of outgoing and incoming links.

This map reminds me of this equally beautiful map of the Internet (no not this one ): a bunch of major, central nodes, with streams of data flowing to other smaller nodes and so on. The map gives us a starkly visual reminder of how reliant we all are on each other- the vast majority of all blog posts contain links to…. other blogs, of course, and many a post is dedicated to commentary on what another blogger has to say. Read more »

You may notice that you are getting redirected to neomeme.net. Yes that’s right, this blog finally has an actual domain. How exciting! To celebrate, here are some of my favorite posts so far, all linkified with the new domain name, in chronological order: Read more »

Update: The final, much-revised post has been posted at Found|Read.

This post is written for Found+Read and is targeted primarily at entrepreneurs working on social websites. But the same principles could apply to your blog or forum.

When building a social application in the Web 2.0 style, it is absolutely essential to develop a strong community, right from the outset. By “application in the Web 2.0 style” I do not mean fancy Ajax effects or a state of perpetual beta. I define Web 2.0 applications in their broadest sense- application that enable the sharing of ideas and create unprecedented connections between people. It is the creation of those connections, the forging of bonds between individuals and their ideas that I believe defines community. Read more »