A new kind of (Mini) Venture Capital

A couple of days ago, Jeremiah Owyang visited this blog and commented, "Friendfeed Integration - Brilliant".

The fact is, I had nothing (or very little) to do with it.

About a month or so ago, Louis Gray posted a note to Friendfeed.

"How much do I have to pay someone to create a Friendfeed integration script that works with Blogger".  There was already one for WordPress, but no Blogger.

It was a good approach.  With LOTS of brilliant coders (young and 'older') on Friendfeed.
Shortly thereafter, Hutch Carpenter matched the offer.

It didn't take too long before Pat Hawks was working on it (I think he probably would have done it anyway, but there's nothing like a couple of bucks to motivate an ambitious young mind!).

Watching the threads go by, it was pretty apparent that everyone wanted the 'likes' included, and, a lot of people were watching.

After a couple of revisions, and an  ongoing discussion on his website, Pat delivered.

The adoption rate was almost instantaneous.

Many had already realized they were getting more comments on Friendfeed than on their own blogs.  In fact, Hutch has a discussion ongoing today about this.

I implemented the code here a couple of weeks ago.  It worked ... but it wasn't perfect.  The 'fix' was simple (but I didn't know it).

Pat visited the site and used Disqus to send me the 'fix' (Note: I didn't ask him.  He's obviously proud of what he did and wants it to look right everywhere it appears).

So we have Private Equity, Venture Capital and now, what I'm going to dub, 'Enablers'.

It's a great idea in this context.  It worked once and it can work again.

Why not think about what you need and try it.  You may be helping to support a student?

(Don't ask Louis.  He'd probably do it ... but he just had twins! :).

Welcome to User Generated Financing!

Whose next?

Now it's real - NBC to acquire the Weather Channel

As some of you know, I'm no stranger to the weather space.  As it looked more and more likely that the Weather Channel units of Landmark Communications were going to be acquired, I posted a piece here on May 30.  Have a read.  Most of the 'juice' and background to this story is there.



Behind the scenes of the weather media landscape, and why this deal, just made official by NBC, is so interesting. 



For those that are interested, or are 'weather fanatics' like me, I maintain a modest directory of weather resources on the Internet here. It's a legacy site, recently updated. A collection of bookmarks (the old-fashioned way :).



Weather on the Internet has gotten MUCH better over the past few years. Especially, the imagery!



The weather is always there.



For many people, it's the first thing they look at when they wake up. There's no doubt that the Weather Channel is the predominant brand, and a good deal for NBC.



My current favorite is AccuWeather's Professional.  Great stuff from a great team.

(.....and they Twitter and Plurk too :)



Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend

Charlie



edited July 7 AM

Reuters gets it. Blog integration and making money

In the past we've focused on various media companies that 'get it'.



That space is changing so fast, you need a team of people and computers to keep up (and still make money).



Reuters (by far) is this month's .... 'They get it'.



It only takes a quick look at a few pages to see why.



Most already know about their deal with Blogburst.  The Pluck editors do a great job.  Click the technology tab and, at the bottom, you'll see occasional stories from here, as well as regular entries from 'larger places' such as Mashable, Techcrunch, and many others.



They give away a LOT of video ... "Here's the embed code".



The latest addition is the one that puts Thomson Reuters over the top.  The Reuters partnership with Yahoo on You Witness News.



Sure, CNN has iReport.  Everywhere you look, news channels invite you to send in your photos.  Do they PAY YOU?



To some people, the 'pay me' part is important, plus, where else can you get this kind of worldwide syndication with attribution. 



Yahoo or not, this approach by Reuters takes user generated content to the next level.



They give you stuff for free, buy your stuff and sell licensed prints, etc.  The mix looks extremely good.



The story of course, will be told in their next annual report.

Two more major sites get friendly with FriendFeed

In the past two days, two major Web 2.0 websites added integration with Friendfeed.

Wednesday, it was Read Write Web adding FriendFeed integration to it's comments.

Wednesday night, Mahalo's Jason Calacanis was part of an interactive conversation with a few people on Friendfeed, explaining the website's new open editing feature.  The thread went on for some time and it appears Mahalo's founder was either surprised, impressed, or both.

Late Yesterday, the Mahalo Blog announced that you can now add Friendfeed to your Mahalo profile.

As for me, at least for now ( and the foreseeable future), FriendFeed remains my daily start-up page.
I'm pretty convinced, this is just the beginning :)


Have a GREAT 4th all
Charlie

Microsoft updates SteadyState to Version 2.5

We first reviewed Microsoft's new small network workstation shared access tool, 'SteadyState' just a few weeks ago.



Earlier today, the tool was upgraded to SteadyState version 2.5 and now supports Windows XP (SP2 and SP3) as well as Vista.



Formerly known as the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP, SteadyState delivers a (very) easy to use interface for small group administrators to manage permissions on individual workstations and more.



The utility is a true time saver and can be deployed easily and quickly across small and medium size networks.



The new version of SteadyState can be downloaded here, as well as a new handbook which can be found here.

Bye, Bye Expedia - Hello Orbitz for MSN

MSN users in the US and the UK will no longer be seeing Expedia as the portal's travel partner.



Up until this morning, Expedia has always been the primary travel provider to Microsoft's MSN.



Microsoft has inked a deal with Orbitz for MSN Travel.



Expedia was initially was owned by Microsoft and later became part of IAC /Interactive, and more-recently was spun off into it's own IAC-controlled group which includes Hotels.com, TripAdvisor, Hotwire and others.



Orbitz announced the deal late yesterday which includes ebookers.com (Their brand in the UK).



Staff edit Jul 2 PM

HooSetMicro: The saga continues

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is still in talks with several partners to acquire and distribute the assets of Yahoo!.  Time-Warner and News Corp are mentioned in the article, which was posted to the WSJ online edition late Tuesday evening.  The report went on to say that talks were preliminary and were unlikely to result in a deal for Yahoo.

Earlier Tuesday, Microsoft confirmed they have reached an agreement to acquire San-Francisco-based Powerset.  Powerset recently launched with a search of Wikipedia.

MSN going social in Europe

Note: Due to several e-mails regarding the excessive load-time of the video that appeared here, it has been removed (but was a great test while it lasted ).

Google to begin to crawl and read Adobe Flash files

There's been a lot of frustration among web designers about Google's inability to read Adobe Flash files.

Their clients wanted a new, exciting, and rich media experience for their websites.

Flash has been the platform of choice to render the new multi-media pages.

In many cases, the SEO teams immediately tried to stop what is generally known as 'legacy migration'.  The fact was, that while Google could index the Flash files themselves, they couldn't read them, potentially causing search engine ranking problems.

This forced ongoing compromises between those in the SEO groups and those doing web design.

Earlier this evening, Google announced the long awaited initiative to 'read' Flash.  Adobe has agreed to provide their Adobe Player technology to both Google and Yahoo! and work with the search companies to begin to index the contents of Flash files.

The move will put Flash out in front of Microsoft's relatively new rich media competitor Silverlight, as more and more  businesses and individuals begin to realize the importance of organic search engine optimization.

Updated 11:30 AM ET - An excellent clarification of how this will work can be found on Ryan Stewart's blog here.