Social Media Rock Stars Break Out In A New Way

A trend that started almost a year ago is now breaking out more noticeably while creating new loyal group of viewers for some high profile tech websites and blogs.

Some well-known names in social media and microblogging circles are being recruited by larger, more established websites and blogs, as regular contributors.

With keen knowledge of their own 'spaces', they're not only bringing new and interesting content to larger audiences, but they're furthering their own personal branding efforts, while bringing the many friendships they have made over the years (electronic and otherwise), as fans and readers to their new 'spaces'.

I first noticed the 'crossover' some time ago when Tamar Weinberg, who had been primarily working with Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable and other SEO-related projects, began writing at Lifehacker, Mashable, as well as other well-known blogs ..... including several of her own.

About the same time, Ann Smarty, a respected and heavily networked SEO, began writing for Search Engine Journal.

The most obvious ramp-up of this latest chapter came when ReadWriteWeb enlisted the talents of Corvida, Sarah Perez, and Frederic Lardinois.  All established bloggers in their own right, with a strong presence in both the social media and microblogging spaces.

Recently, Mashable began to add to their contributing 'social roster' with articles appearing by Steven Hodson, Leslie Poston, Mark Dykeman, and just this past week, Mike Fruchter.

Sarah Perez (and I have NO IDEA where she finds the time ??) also writes for Microsoft's Channel 10.

It's a win-win for these authors as well as the publications they're now partnered with.

The interesting part is a continuing convergence of so-called Generation X and Generation X perspectives which, to me, is becoming much more important in today's times.

I wish them all continued success as one thing is obvious.  They all love what they do, and do it well.

Another game changer for Friendfeed !

It's no secret that I was somewhat early on the scene as a user of Friendfeed, and like many others. including Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, Susan Beebe, Mike Fruchter, and Mike Reynolds (and many, many others), I have been a strong advocate of using the tools in the cutting edge web community.  My stream continues to appear, as always, to the lower right on this blog (and others that I write or participate in).

In recent weeks, I have been concerned about newcomers to the service being 'confused on arrival', simply because of the exponential growth of Friendfeed.

Who do I follow?  What room should I join?  Should I block someone?  What is re-share?

Where once there was a small community and literally no learning curve, there is now a lot of new people rapidly discovering what many of us have.

It is the only service of it's kind that gives you complete control with little if any need for moderators.

Over the past week, while on the road exploring my own personal 'next big thing', I spoke with many in the  'social networking' crowd that said straight out, "I haven't had time to learn it yet", confirming my concerns. 

The 'intimidation factor' had arrived, despite the fact that the Friendfeed crew has continuously added numerous new features to separate comment streams, discover others' conversations, and engage new people in a way that very simply, no other community does.

There's an unrivaled sense of community at Friendfeed that, in my opinion, can only be compared to meeting people face to face.  That sentiment was echoed by other existing users in my recent travels as well.

Earlier today, the Friendfeed team, which has already proposed new standards for importing and retrieving RSS feeds and more, added yet another standard dubbed 'long polling'  The timing was GREAT as Friendfeed typically heats up, just after a Presidential debate.

The new feature, described by Casey a short time ago on the Friendfeed blog, addresses a concern expressed by many Friendfeed users .... wearing out their F5 key or, hitting 'refresh' every few minutes, to see the latest comments.

The new live stream, or 'Friendfeed real-time' test is here.

How was it during the debate?  Like it always is when politics come up.  Crazy! ... but interesting and thought provoking.

I've said it before.  It's all about the dialog, as the Internet (and the world's economy) continue to move into unchartered territory. 

Friendfeed makes it easy (sometimes too easy :) to comment, but unlike other services, you can delete a previous comment... should you wake up the next day and think "Maybe I shouldn't have reacted like that". 


I've made more important contacts and people on Friendfeed than any other service since arriving on the Internet scene in it's very early stages on 1995.  Many of those friendships turned to 'true' friendships as well as business relationships.  It just works.

If you haven't already, I urge you to join the conversation.

Log in.  Sign up.

If you're lost or have any questions, simply post them.
My guess is the active Friendfeed community will answer them quickly in a matter of minutes, or now, in real-time ! :)

Kudos to the Friendfeed crew once again. 

Charlie

PollDaddy is latest Automattic acquisition

Fresh on the heels of acquiring Disqus competitor Intense Debate, the parent company of WordPress, Automattic announced the acquisition of PollDaddy a short time ago.

The announcement came on Matt Mullenweg's blog.

WordPress has been 'moving right along' as the defacto leader in blog platforms and continues to maintain that position.

I've often found it interesting that many Google (and ex-Google) employees still use WordPress instead of Google owned Blogger, which has been innovating to 'some extent' at draft.blogger.com.  (This blog is on the Blogger platform).

A few months ago I began to experiment once again with WordPress for my personal blog (which I expect to reinvigorate sometime in the next two weeks .... finally), and that's when I discovered the reasons why WordPress continues to be favored.  The flexibility, especially for those that want customization in their blogs, is excellent, and there's a tremedous amount of third party plug-in support (as well as hundreds of free and / or inexpensive custom templates).

Earlier today, PollDaddy was automatically enabled on all WordPress.com blogs.  A plug-in for self-hosted or remotely hosted WordPress platform blogs in already available.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

More information on the new feature, acquisition, or PollDaddy just visit Matt's blog, or the PollDaddy blog here.

Second Annual Blog Action Day

Today marks the second annual 'Blog Action Day'.

Blogs, large and small, will be making posts similar to this one around the world throughout the day.

To find out more about Blog Action Day, or make a contribution, simply click on the graphic below.

Together, we can make a difference.

Flock 2.0 launches with latest Mozilla engine

Flock released Version 2.0 Final a short time ago.

The 'social' web browser now uses the latest Mozilla engine (used in Firefox 3.0.3) and continues to integrate  a variety of social networks and micro-blogging platforms.

For some, Flock will be enjoyable and potentially make life 'a little easier'.  The browser consolidates your contacts in a 'people bar' and alleviates the necessity to open separate tabs in Firefox.

Digg, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Pownce, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, Photobucket, Picasa(web), Piczo, Blogsome, Livejournal, Typepad, Wordpress(.com), Xanga, Delicious, Magnolia, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail are all integrated into this version along with the familiar 'media bar' for quick photos and videos, as well direct blogging to various platforms.

It would be nice to see identi.ca, socialmedian, seesmic, a few others and (are you listening Evan?? :) Friendfeed included as well.

You can check out the latest version of flock here.

Re Firefox 3.1 Beta download (Correction!)

Updated October 14 PM :

Well, it appears we're getting a few conficting signals from the Mozilla gang today.

The Beta 1 download noted today at Lifehacker and Venturebeat are, in fact, downloadable as Firefox-branded Beta releases (as of this hour??!!).

Note: Your extensions and add-ons may not work as with any Firefox Beta.
The info below (posted earlier today) is relevant to the nightly builds (which are not necessarily stable and are released for testing by the Mozilla contributing community).

Posted earlier:

Some websites are reporting that Firefox Beta 1 has been released.

Just a quick post before a whole bunch of you hit the Mozilla website....

1) The Minefield test build of the future Firefox 3.1 did go from Beta 1 to Beta 2 today. 
2) It is still very much a Beta, not a Release Candidate, and should be downloaded by beta testers or those who wish to participate using non mission critical computers.
3) True - Some cool new stuff is coming !
4) Your extensions don't work yet.

Some brief facts for those who overdo the 'early adopter thing' (Like I do .....)

Charlie
PS:  The Mozilla FTP nightly build download site can be found here.

Edited Oct 14 PM

Sorry Google. We're not supporting you.

As anticipated, Microsoft unveiled the latest version of their Adobe Flash competitor this morning.

Silverlight 2 (build 2.0.31005.0) removes the 'Beta' tag and takes the product 'Final'.

A quick preview across a number of Windows based computers provided some interesting results, as well as a few disturbing ones.

Silverlight 2 performed like a rock star using Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.  Similarly, it rendered Silverlight-based rich media graphics well with Internet Explorer 7.

The turnkey upgrade (if you have a previous version installed) also installs and works well with the increasingly popular Mozilla browser, Firefox 3.

As for Google's new lightweight browser Chrome ... "We're sorry, please see the system requirements". 

(To be fair, the Chrome team is still working on add-in and extension possibilities including Sun's Java, but Flash does render well inside the Chrome browser).

The immediate (and hopefully premature) concern is that we're not headed back to a 1990's style web standards war, which would make the life of a lot of web designers just a brand new compatibility nightmare.

In recent months, Microsoft has made many more of their websites compatible with Firefox and the latest Gecko engine.  Let's hope that trend continues on ALL sides so we don't have casual web users wondering "How come you can see it and I can't??"

Silverlight 2 will be delivered (most-likely later today) directly to Windows users via Microsoft Update.  For those interested in development, a new SDK has been posted to the Microsoft Download Center.

Capital Research quietly gobbling up Yahoo! shares

Capital Research Global Investors has been buying even more stock in Yahoo!, according to a Reuters report on Friday.

Already a significant investor in the company, they have been very vocal in the company's management as pointed out in August by Kara Swisher of AllThingsDigital.

According to the Reuters report, Capital's two investment funds, Capital World Investors and Capital Research "now own 22 per cent of Yahoo! collectively".

While it's hard to speculate on the investment groups' strategy (and the 10K was unavailable as of this post), it's likely that the 'fire sale prices' last week on Yahoo stock (NASDAQ: YHOO) was part of the motivation for the increase.

With tech stock price still somewhat depressed, this is probably one of the many announcements we can expect in the coming weeks as Venture Capital and Private Equity companies begin to take stock (for lack of a better way of putting it :).

Different times YES ... Meltdown less likely

Futures had indicated an up opening on Wall Street this morning after a weekend chock full of announcements by the world's central banks..., that they were prepared to inject cash into their respective banking systems.

A quick snapshot (click to enlarge) shortly after the opening in New York (at 9:41 ET) showed most tech and media stocks were tracking the Dow, while others were breaking away a bit (notably Viacom).  Yahoo, not shown, was lagging the others, up approx 4.5 per cent.

 

 Update 1:  Markets at mid-day appear to be reacting to what may be a return to some level of liquidity.

It's worth noting the change in Market cap in these companies in just 3 hours! (11:55 ET)

Update 2:

Here the same list at the end of trading today:

Here's hoping things level off a bit and we can all concentrate on continuing to innovate, explore, develop, and create.

Wishing everyone a great week (Stay cool :)

Charlie