OnSugar is a new blogging platform with a twist. The service has added several functions usually found on other social networking sites so that it feels like a blend of WordPress mixed with Twitter. For example, on the homepage you can view the public timeline which updates with posts from all blogs or just those you follow. You can also follow bloggers and their blogs and send them private messages (just like Direct Messages).
One of the most useful features is the dropdown menu that allows you to jump from one of your blogs to another. The other menu item (see right image) displays all of the tasks that you can perform on the blog you’re currently visiting. For example, you can create a new post, edit drafts, change themes, widgets or pages. You can also change your site settings or invite other bloggers to guest blog on your site.
Speaking of themes, you can use existing themes or copy them and change them to make them your own. You can also create your own original theme from scratch if you want.
The Start Following link appears on all blogs and acts like the subscribe to RSS feed option that we see on all blogs these days.
When you create a new post you’re presented with a great deal of choices, which is another thing that makes this blogging platform different than most standard platforms. You can create many different types of blog posts. Besides the standard text post, you can also create polls, question and answer type quizzes, quotes, links and more. As for media, you can upload audio and video files or embed them.
The home page has a cool filtering system that lets you display whatever you want to see. For example, you can choose to see all new posts from all blogs or just the sites you subscribe to.
You can select what kind of posts to view too, such as only posts with audio, video, polls, quizzes, links, etc. It’s a unique way to let users manage and control their blogs and those that they follow.
The service might appeal more to women because of its initial look and feel, but there seems to be a significant amount of men on the service already. The platform is different so we’ll have to see what shakes out when more traditional bloggers give it a try. Is it a good idea to mashup social media services with the blogging platform model? I think it is. WordPress and Blogger have made strides (ever so slowly) to give their users more social media tools and functions. Time will tell how much farther they will go to make their blogging platform more social.
If you are a Windows user and follow any of the vast number of blogs that specialize in talking about Microsoft and Windows chances are you will have heard about Long Zheng and his istartedsomething.com blog. Long has been blogging for quite sometime about both and has acquired quite the reputation for breaking stories that have to do with Microsoft and its operating system. The great thing about this is that he is still going to school full time while he builds what could end up being a very successful Web business along side his already popular blog.
It all came about nearly six months ago when on what was originally just a whim he created the first version of his Windows UX Taskforce web site. The idea was simple enough – to provide a single place where people could document the problems they were finding with the user interface in Vista. In a very short time the site became very popular with Windows users and apparently caught the eye of Microsoft employees on the Windows team. The site became so popular that Long then revamped it to provide a more robust reporting system for the users of the site as well as recoding the whole backend with an eye to the future.
Recently he changed the name from Windows UX Taskforce to Areo Taskforce and is in the process of redoing the graphics to better resemble the Vista interface colors and style. He is doing this because just recently at the behest of many Mac users he has created the same Taskforce site for Mac users – appropriately enough called Aqua Taskforce. As Long said in the post announcing the new service:
One of the first requests I received after launching the Windows UX Taskforce was “when can you make one for Mac OS X.” This came at a surprise to me because I didn’t know OS X had user experience flaws, but apparently it did and still do. Having said that today I’m proud to launch Aqua Taskforce, a taskforce site for Apple users to submit, vote and comment on OS X user experience quirks.
While it might still be early days for his Aqua Taskforce site it is already beginning to see items being added. Now whether the site will see the same involvement from the Mac OS team at Apple as the Area Taskforce does from Microsoft remains to be seen, but hopefully they will be paying attention.
As Long noted in his announcement post about the Aqua Taskforce site, he has completely revamped the back-end code so that even a single log-on will work for both sites. It also has been re-engineered so that the codebase can support multiple task-force sites with a single log-on as well.
This is were the accidental success could be something that Long Zheng didn’t anticipate. With this re-engineering he has created a backend to a system that will allow him to deploy any new taskforce site in literally minutes. So any company that would find something like this useful could be up and running with their own task-force site minutes after contacting Long.
Literally out of a single idea Long has utilized the power of the Web to provide easy to launch services and built himself what could be a nice profitable business – and he’s still in school. It is amazing how sometimes such a simple idea that would seem to be out of the norm of what we expect a web business to be these days can with some imagination take off.
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Just as online sites have grown increasingly niche as interest groups continue to find each other and flourish within environments filled with like-minded users, Glam Media’s advertising empire has been launching multiple niche channels in order to better target ads within its quickly growing network. Having rolled out verticals for topics like Entertainment, Living and Family, the latest new channel in the Glam Media network is Glam Wellness, which encompasses mind-body-spirit, empowerment, and a healthy planet.
Those brands related to this particular category, including Glam Wellness launch sponsor SOYJOY, can take advantage of Glam’s network in order to better target interested consumers. Glam wouldn’t be able to offer such targeting without the enormous reach it has, spanning a very wide array of female-oriented sites that participate within Glam Media’s network. Having recently raised more than $80 million, Glam is continuing to push out more verticals, further branching out its advertising network and potentially providing more quality targeting capabilities to participating brands.
Aside from display ads and other basic advertising methods, Glam has recently introduced its Glam Applications Platform. We’ve also seen other branding pushes come through Glam with a more recent partnership with Flock, which features direct delivery of Glam network content to users that utilize the fashion- and entertainment-centric Flock web browser. Such partnerships allow Glam to explore various forms of unique advertising opportunities as well.
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Twitter has confirmed that it is buying Summize and rolling it into the San Francisco-based company’s main offering. After the rumors of the deal were reported by Josh Chandler last week, I was able to confirm that the deal was done and would be announced on time. So right on time, the two companies made a joint announcement.
As indicated in the post, I promised to get some more financial details on the acquisition. Peter Kafka pegs the price at $15 million in stock and cash, though I am much more confident on the information from my sources, who say Twitter gave away north of 10 percent of the company to acquire Summize. My sources peg Twitter’s value at around $80 million. If you remember, I had reported about $15 million in new funding earlier this summer. As part of the deal, Summize employees are going to join Twitter, though CEO Jay Virdy is going to leave and do something else.
We’re excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Summize—an extraordinary search tool and an amazing group of engineers. All five Summize engineers will move to San Francisco, CA and take jobs at Twitter, Inc. This is an important step forward in the evolution of Twitter as a service and as a company.
As I outlined in my posts last Monday and yesterday, I think it is a super-smart move by Twitter, and if the company plays its cards right, it’s going to pay dividends in the long run. What they have given away is chump change compared to the potential. As I wrote last week:
The deal would be a good move by Twitter, and would be putting some of its recently acquired $15 million in VC funding to decent use as it would help the company get hold of of a business model.
Summize has come up with a clever way of peering through Twitter’s vast data stream and finding out what’s hot, where and how. The results are essentially keywords — topic-, person- or location-based — and thus can be used to show contextual advertising next to the pages that show these results. Summize has thereby developed an ability to monetize conversations without being intrusive.
Unlike a lot of others, I am not ready to throw my lot with some of the newer services just yet. One of the things that continues to attract me to Twitter, warts and all, is the relatively simplicity of it core service. I fell in love with it long before it became a Silicon Valley diva with a bad drinking problem. Of course, we all know recovering divas can slip into bad habits again. That is one thing I worry about: ability of Twitter to actually harness and not screw up this new acqusition.
If you use Google’s Blogger platform, head on to draft.blogger.com and you’ll find several new interesting features for your blog. Besides some minor updates and bug fixes, they are:
* Webmaster Tools Verification lets you automatically verify all your blogs on Google’s Webmaster Tools.
* Star ratings let you add a 0–5 star rating control to the bottom of your posts.
* Import / export of blogs; a very nice backup option which enables you to create a full backup of your blog which saves into a single XML file.
* Embedded comment form, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.
* New post editor, with drag-and-drop image placement and better HTML handling.
These features are still labeled as beta, so don’t be surprised if something goes wrong. Based on user feedback, Google will enable them for everyone when they’re bug-free.
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Steven Hodson is the cranky old fart as well as respected Web 2.0 and social media pundit behind WinExtra.com. His guest post today is a continuation of a short series of articles that examine alternatives for the very advertising-dependent world of Web 2.0 and social networks. The series began with Steven’s opinions on the donation model of Web 2.0 monetization.
When it comes to getting a start-up out there in front of the millions of people always on the look out for the new and cool; especially in the Web 2.0 and social media space, the bar to getting them up and running is pretty low. Through using things like LAMP, Amazon’s S3 services or even the new Google AppEngine just about anyone with a glimmer of an idea can launch a web start-up. It happens almost everyday as new start-ups announce stealth mode launches, private invitation launches or regular old launches.
As easy as it might be to launch even the most serious offering or just some flight of whimsy it is a different matter when it comes to being able to monetize your work. After all hosting fees, database services and even employee costs don’t come free. At some point the bills need to be paid and food put on the table. The problem in this day and age of everything for free is that asking your users to pay for services is tantamount to joining some evil empire. So the question remains - how to I make this sucker pay for itself and set me up on the road to easy street.
For some it seems that they are operating on the get hot fast and get bought up by one of the big boys mentality which is fine except the chances of that happening are getting slimmer and slimmer as the bigger the Web 2.0 bubble gets. The other solution advocated by many in the Web 2.0 sphere of development is one advocated by Fred Wilson back in March 2006
Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.
Fred with a hat tip to Jarid Lukin called this model Freemium and from that point the term has stuck to the point it has its own entry in Wikipedia.
The argument put forward in defense of the Freemium model is that you provide a base set of services free of charge in order to keep the traffic flow going but then charge a fee for specialized services. Typically the freemium model supports its free offering with advertising of some sort which then is used as an added incentive to step up and pay for a subscription based version of the service.
This is fine but considering that the vast majority of Web 2.0 start-ups out there are hitting the web with no advertising model at all (FriendFeed and Twitter) and in most cases with a good set of features these services could face user revolt should advertising be introduced at a later point.
Another problem is that as these start-up build out and try to attract more and more users they find themselves adding new features. So the question remains at what point do they freeze new features and if they do have they suddenly stopped being attractive to the early users that they are relying on to spread the word and bring in new users. Plus when do you introduce those new features that you’ve held back for the paying users? Not to mention will this necessarily translate the freemium users into paying or will it in fact piss off the freemium users because they think those features should have been part of the features for all users.
This is definitely a minefield for web start-ups as they try to move forward with their products and it’s not like the Freemium model doesn’t have its proponents other than Fred Wilson. One such believer is Allen Stern who points to Clicky Web Analytics who use the free/freemium model for their web analytics service
I’ve written before that too many startups who employ the Freemium model give away too much for free and customers never have a reason to upgrade. But giving a taste of premium features every now and again makes perfect sense for trial.
Another such believer is Spencer Fry from Carbonmade who said on his personal blog
The freemium model is simple to employ and as your free customer base grows, so will your paying customer base. Even if a small percentage of your free customers upgrade to your paying plan (say, 1%), you’ll begin generating much needed revenue to pay your bills and do very well.
As utopian as these very smart people like to make out that such a model is there are equally as smart people who warn that this is a dangerous road to travel down and one that could come back to bite you on the ass.
Andrew Parker on his blog The Gong Show quite rightly points out how this freemium model could end up alienating the very advertisers that are keeping you alive in those beginning times
But, this revenue model seems silly to me. Advertisers pay a premium in order to reach people in their specific demographic with disposable income. This idea of people paying to remove ads ensures that the audience for your ads are actually CHEAPER than the average internet audience. Why? Because the people in your audience with disposable income who are willing to pay for web services are the ones that will self-select out of your audience for your ads because they are willing to pay for your product. So, all that remains in the audience for your ads are people that are too cheap to pay for your service. That doesn’t sound like the audience that Disney, Coca Cola, or even your average direct response advertiser wants to reach.
Alexander van Elsas also questions whether or not this advertisement sponsored freemium model is really benefiting the users or the advertisers
I believe that in most cases this type of forced attention doesn’t provide the user or the advertiser any value. The click through rates of advertisement are not that high in social networks. And that is pretty obvious, social networks are for interaction. And when I interact with friends there is simply no room for advertisement. Its trespassing.
While the freemium model might initially be the one that attracts the first rush of users that can get your web start-up off the ground the long term effects of such a model is something that must be seriously considered. Will you be alienating those advertisers who feel they are being denied the real target of their ads but are now behind a no advertising wall? Will you drive away members when you either introduce advertising or introduce new features at a price they feel should have been included for free?
As idealistic as the freemium model may appear it may not be the best answer for any of the parties involved - whether they be the start-up, the advertisers or the users.
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Earlier this week, Six Apart spent a moment on stage during the opening keynote of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference demonstrating its first native iPhone application, to be launched in conjunction with the debut of Apple’s App Store. Which means any users of the current generation of the device will need to wait a few weeks in order to enjoy things like super easy mobile photo blogging. Suffice it to say that patience is no virtue in the world of tech.
In seeming recognition of eager Moveable Type fans to get to posting in new ways on the go as soon as possible, Six Apart has today unveiled an iPhone-friendly version of its “Blog It” service, which it previously offered for Facebook users in April. The freshest release is called Blog It for iPhone. To access the service, just type the standard ‘http://blogit.typepad.com/’ URL into Safari Mobile and you’ll be directed appropriately.
iPhone-based blogging isn’t new to Six Apart, mind you. The company last year introduced a TypePad service formatted for use through Apple’s Safari Mobile browser. Still, some may prefer more options to how they broadcast their posts to the Web. So they’ve put together something new.
What’s bound to trigger the interest of many iPhone fans in the custom-crafted Blog It service is its multi-service utility. What does this mean? In addition to working with Movable Type, and Typepad’s Vox service, users can now post content to Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, Jaiku, LiveJournal, FriendFeed, Facebook, Pownce, LiveJournal, Wordpress.com and WordPress.org. Quite comprehensive indeed.
What’s more, Blog It for iPhone has integrated OpenID login support, an increasingly requested feature for Web services of virtually all varieties. As David Recordon of Six Apart describes the build:
“Our designers worked hard to try to keep it simple so that even if you don’t know what OpenID is you’ll still be able to just login with your account from Yahoo!. This also means that once you’ve chosen to link your accounts together, all of your existing settings from Blog It for Facebook will automatically show up on your iPhone and any changes you make will be reflected no matter where you use Blog It.”
If you’re a Blog It user on the desktop, and happen to carry Apple’s mobile platform around with you wherever you go, today’s announcement for iPhone owners is certainly a handy convenience to have. And of course, as with its preceding releases, Blog It for iPhone is free to use.
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Blogger and former Fred Thompson for President eCampaign Director Sean Hackbarth brought up an interesting set of observations today regarding the military and its policy towards soldier-blogging. As the late military blogger Andrew Olmstead noted (along with a number of other tech blogs and news sources), many of the members of the military had been blogging in violation of Defense Department directives.
It turns out, though, that that certain folks running things at the US military are changing their minds. Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the man who heads up the Combined Arms Center and Ft. Leavenworth, has recently issued a memo directing students and faculty to begin blogging as a part of the curriculum. The blogs will reside both on .mil domains as well as in the general wilds of the web “in an effort to communicate the myriad of activities that CAC is accomplishing and help assist telling the Army’s story to a wide and diverse audience.”
The military currently seems fairly savvy to the technology behind a lot of New Media methods, with RSS and podcast technology playing a central role in their information dessemination (their site lists around thirty or so podcasts and a good number of various RSS feeds). The move here seems to be furthering their entry into this world by gaining an understanding beyond the technology, and into the culture of the blogosphere.
Noah Shachtman at Wired’s Danger Room notes this as well:
It’s a position that appears to run counter to stated Pentagon policy. YouTube is officially banned on military networks. Personal blogs cannot be maintained during duty hours. Many influential blogs are blocked. Stringent regulations, read literally, require commanding officers to review each and every item one of his soldiers puts online. And in televised commercials, screen savers, and flyers, troops are told that blogging is a major security risk — even though official sites have proven to leak many, many more secrets.
The subtext here is that perhaps the military can gain more flies with honey than vinegar (or to over-extend the metaphor, with a container devoid of any fly-trapping substance).
This 
holds true for just about any business, and it’s why I vehemently disagree with a lot of the commenters from yesterday’s story with regard to YouTube’s determination to continue to host videos by terrorist organizations. This isn’t anything to do with free speech, it has to do with marketing.
Having a branded, interactive and prepackaged product that represents your brand (in the military’s case, blogs - in the terrorist organizations case, YouTube videos) raises brand awareness and promotes the message you’re trying to promote. In both cases, it’s fair to say that while there may be variations of opinion by the members of both groups, they’re of a unified spirit and message. The terrorists want to kill all secular non-Muslims, and the US Military is promoting a message of liberation from oppression around the world.
Regardless of whether you agree with either message, engaging social media to market and create discussion around your brand will grow your followers, those acquainted with your message, and equip them with what is essentially your ‘company line,’ which is of course designed to make the overall organization look better.
This is the nature of social media. This is a savvy move, if it gets pursued further by the US Military, and it was a savvy move by the terrorists, as I’ve said many times.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/20/milblogging/
You can never have a too wide choice of templates for your blog, especially if you’re the experimenting type. Therefore, we started another round up of Blogger themes, this time focusing on fresh and modern designs, and came up with about 70 of them.
Please note that many of the template authors’ sites are not in English and you might want to run a Google Translate on them. Some of them might also require a free registration to download the templates.
Don’t forget our originals, 50 More Beautiful Blogger Templates and BLOGGER.COM TOOLBOX: 30+ Templates & Tools for Blogger.
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Up and coming lifestream aggregator Ping.fm (still in private beta), has just added MySpace Status and Blogger support. That means that you can post to MySpace Status and Blogger with your updates, along with all of the other social networks, blogging platforms and micro-blogging services that Ping.fm already supports, including Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and more. Support for Bebo, Hi5 and LinkedIn are on the way.
As a centralizing service for the purpose of self-broadcasting in an outward manner, it’s rather important for Ping.fm to roll in support for as many services as possible. As a blogger, I know how important it is to be able to spread your content in as many places as possible, from a single service, and have it appear as native as possible. Ping.fm’s prior mobile integration was a little roundabout, but this latest release also includes optimized mobile interfaces, including an iPhone interface.
While I’m aware of the necessity for a service like Ping.fm, I’m still hoping for a browser plug-in, though desktop apps are really taking off as an ubiquitous alternative for micro-blogging (which Ping.fm already supports). We’ll be seeing such cross-network updating tools become features for a number of services, including profile aggregators, social search services, and social browsers, though I feel that Ping.fm will likely survive for some time as a stand-alone service.
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