Author: Mathew Ingram

For a company that has only been around a few months, Sphere.com seems to have already made quite a mark, including signing on for a trial with Time magazine that involves putting “Sphere It” links on Time stories. Clicking the link does the same thing as the Sphere It bookmarklet — that is, it searches the blogosphere for posts that are relevant to the story or page being viewed.

To me, the fact that Sphere has managed to strike such a deal when Technorati.com is already well-established in that area (it has arrangements with the Washington Post and Newsweek, among others) is indicative of how wide-open the whole field of blog search still is. Remember when Google’s blog search launched, and how excited everyone was? And yet, Google’s size and might doesn’t seem to have translated into dominance — in fact, its blog search is distinctly underwhelming. Icerocket.com, formerly owned by Mark Cuban, is a little better but not much.

Even Technorati.com, the kingpin of the field, often produces results that aren’t particularly relevant. Although my own demo of Sphere over the past while has been hit and miss, there have been several occasions in which it came up with distinctly more useful links than Technorati. The reason for this appears to be that Sphere — which uses software from predecessor companies Waypath and Yodel — does a “semantic analysis” of the text in a page and uses that to judge relevance, rather than just tracking raw links as Technorati.com does.

Susan Mernit is no doubt right that being in the right place at the right time and having a cool widget also makes a difference, but I think the search technology matters too. Sphere may not be perfect, but it’s better than we had before, and it’s certainly better than what we get from the king of search — Google — which seems like a real missed opportunity. Maybe Google is too busy launching things like Google Notebook and Google (chicken) Coop.

It seems like ages ago now that Mark and Stuart and Rob and Mike and I were all standing around nervously waiting for mesh to begin, but it was only a week ago. I have to say that even though I am a bigshot columnist at a big-city newspaper, I was a little starstruck at the calibre of Web 2.0 talent in the room at MaRS, including Om Malik, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress.com, Andrew Baron from Rocketboom, Jason Fried from 37signals.com, Paul Kedrosky, Steve Rubel, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina.

In case you haven’t seen any of the posts by Tris Hussey of Qumana or my new pal Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0, it was by all accounts a smashing success. And much of the success was due to all the meshing that happened between participants and panelists and speakers in the atrium and at the cocktail party afterward — and also at The Drake, where many fascinating conversations were had, including Andrew Coyne talking with Tom Williams of Givemeaning.com about a market-based approach to charitable donations.

If you missed the photos that are up at Flickr.com (tag “mesh06”), I’ve got some here — which I put together using Bubbleshare, fittingly enough, since Albert Lai of Bubbleshare.com was at mesh on a panel with Malgosia Green of Nuvvo.com and Mike McDerment of FreshBooks.com. Included in this series are some of us nerve-wracked organizers, one of Amber MacArthur and Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla, and some of Om and Paul and Matt and Jason yakking — including the now infamous shot of Eliott Noss of Tucows.com getting introduced to Matt Mullenweg of WordPress (Tucows has a competing blog platform called Blogware).

Mark’s column reminded me that I had been meaning to post something about the financings announced at mesh, including the seed capital that Michael Tippett and his team at NowPublic.com got (Michael was on a panel at mesh), and the $6.5-million combination of seed and venture capital that Colin How and the gang over at Pixpo.com recently got (Colin was one of our “15 Minutes of Fame winners). Coincidentally enough, both are based in British Columbia — which makes one wonder if Web 2.0 ideas flourish better in warm weather.

The funds for Pixpo came from Madrona Venture Group, a VC based in the Pacific Northwest that specializes in early-stage companies, as well as Canadian VC group GrowthWorks, a Canadian fund called Yaletown Venture Partners that focuses on Western Canada, and a Calgary-based early-stage fund called Springbank TechVentures (started by one of the early investors in MetroNet, which was sold to AT&T in 1999 for $7-billion).

Pixpo’s software — a modified version of “peer-to-peer” software — allows computer users to share their photos, music, video and other media without having to upload it all to some external site such as YouTube.com or Flickr.com. Instead, the user just leaves the photos or music or videos where they are, and gives outside Web surfers access to those files on the PC, while keeping that access secure enough that the user doesn’t have to worry about hackers messing around with other files.

Hosting all the files on your home PC can pose its own problems, however, including the strain that gets put on both the PC and your home Internet connection if your video clip of your cat falling into the bathtub happens to get linked on BoingBoing.net and millions of people try to access it at the same time. Mr. How says that Pixpo uses a combination of a modified P2P network and a hosted-server network so that if certain files become particularly popular, they can be cached or hosted on Pixpo’s own servers. He also said that in contrast to other streaming-media software such as Orb Networks, Pixpo is more flexible, faster and provides a better quality video feed.

I originally wrote this for the Globe and Mail — and Mark even linked to it, which I thought was quite nice of him — but I thought I would reproduce it here for people who might not get to the Globe that often. For you tech-savvy blog readers out there, please ignore the dumbed-down parts designed for non tech-savvy newspaper readers 🙂

The bare-knuckle bout for VoIP supremacy is still in the opening round, but Skype has thrown what could be a haymaker punch. The voice-over-Internet pioneer that eBay acquired from founder Niklas Zennstrom last year for a mind-boggling $2.4-billion (U.S.) – and up to $4.1-billion if Skype meets certain performance targets – is now allowing users to make VoIP calls from their computers to any landline number for free.

The freebie for what the company calls “SkypeOut” calls is only a short-term offer, however. It expires at the end of the year, and is clearly designed to suck new users into the Skype vortex. But is it a smart move by eBay to build a customer base and take on Vonage, or a desperate move to justify that multibillion-dollar cheque it cut?

Skype said in its release that “completely free calling in the U.S. and Canada will expand Skype’s increasing penetration in North America and solidify Skype’s position as the Internet’s voice communication tool of choice.” And there are those who believe it will make the service – which is based on P2P or “peer-to-peer” technology originally developed for the Kazaa file-sharing network – a lot more appealing to non-geeks, since the previous free VoIP service only included PC-to-PC calls.

Continue reading “Skype lands a blow in VoIP battle”

Well, mesh is a wrap, as the TV folks like to say, after a few months of brain-storming and occasional head-pounding, and an awful lot of hard work by a lot of people — particularly Sheri and her team of miracle workers at MCC planners — not to mention a lot of patience on the part of the “significant others,” i.e. my wife Rebecca, Stuart’s wife Anna, Rob’s wife Victoria and Mark’s wife Pamela, who didn’t even blink when we effectively took on second (or third) jobs putting this crazy thing together.

As Rob has mentioned, it was really an amazing and gratifying thing for us — five guys with absolutely no experience at this kind of thing whatsoever — to get the kind of comments we did from people as they came out of the various panels, or left at the end of the day. I lost count of the number of people who told me that it was one of the best conferences they had ever been to, or thanked us for putting it on in Toronto and getting people fired up about Web 2.0, or said that they really enjoyed the lack of eye-glazing PowerPoints and the focus on conversation and discussion.

That is exactly what we were shooting for, and it sounds like we achieved it. And more than anything else, the part that I enjoyed the most was watching people connecting in the atrium during lunch or the networking breaks, or at the cocktail social upstairs after the first day, or at The Drake later that night. Lots of fascinating discussions with Andrew Baron from Rocketboom.com, the incomparable Om Malik, my pal and Ottawa Valley homeboy Paul Kedrosky, Matt Mullenweg and Chris Messina and a whole pile of other amazing speakers. They were the stars, and we were just the roadies.

If you want to check out some of the spinoff effects from mesh, there are several hundred photos already at Flickr.com tagged “mesh06,” and I haven’t even uploaded my hundred or so yet (there’s also the mesh pool). And plenty of people have been live-blogging along the way, including my buddy Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0, who has a gigantic synopsis of the conference that is truly a sight to behold. Tris Hussey of Qumana also has some here, and so does John Ounpuu, and Sacha Chua — who also volunteered at the conference, and even handled a bunch of the IRC backchannel that got running on day two (thanks, Sacha) — has a bunch as well. And Connie Crosby did some, and so did Lieutenant Dan. Mark even managed to work in a couple of podcasts.

What can I say? Awesome couple of days. And more than anything else, I’d like to thank Mark and Stuart and Rob and Mike for making it possible. You guys rock.

Still a couple of panels and workshops left to go at meshconference.com, but we can see the finish line approaching after what seems like a nine-week marathon run, and the worst part about it is that everyone seems to be having such a great time we don’t want it to come to an end — but unfortunately they’re going to kick us out at some point, or charge us more money 🙂 We’ve had some great discussions this morning, including the keynote with Stuart MacDonald and Steve Rubel — Tris Hussey of Qumana posted about that here — and I had a one-on-one with my friend Paul Kedrosky, in which he talked about Maxthon, the front-end to Internet Explorer, getting millions of dollars in financing, which he argued (and I agreed) was stupid, bordering on insane.

There were also some great panels with Stuart and Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners, Jonathan Ehrlich of Chapters Online and Bruce Philp of GWP Brandengineeering; Mark talking with Rick Segal of J.L. Albright and Jason Fried of 37signals.com; Leila Boujnane of Idee Inc. talking with Albert Lai of Bubbleshare.com, Mike McDerment of FreshBooks and Malgosia Green of Nuvvo.com — a panel that was all about what mistakes they had made, and what they learned from them — and some really interesting workshops, including one with Tony Chapman of Capital C, which was blogged about here. And to finish off the day we had Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com and Stowe Boyd and Chris Messina (ex of Flock.com) talking about software and Web 2.0.

A long journey, but definitely worth it — and gigantic thanks are due not just to the sponsors, and MaRS and the MCC gang who helped keep us from tearing our hair out, but to the audience and participants, and most of all to people like Jason and Rick and Matt and Tara and Paul and Scott and, well, too many to name. A fantastic mesh experience.

Just a quick post, on the morning of the second day of mesh in Toronto, to say what an amazing day we had down at MaRS, with keynotes from Om Malik and Michael Geist — both of whom have been getting rave reviews for the ideas they generated, at least from the people I talked to — and then panels involving the politics and media streams, including the ones I was involved in on the future of newspapers and whether bloggers are journalists.

We got a great discussion going in the latter panel with Om Malik and Michael Tippett from NowPublic.com, as well as my friend Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 — and I’d like to thank all of them again for coming. The mark of a great panel for me is when I find myself wishing it could have gone on longer because we were getting such a great debate going, and I certainly felt that — and others who attended told me they did too.

There was plenty of discussion going on at the mesh breaks and the cocktail social after the day’s events too, which was really nice to see, and at The Drake there was much meshing going on as well. That’s a big part of what we were hoping to achieve with the conference — just getting people who are excited by and interested in Web 2.0 into a room so they could throw ideas around and talk about some of the things that are going on. Plenty of people made use of the “unconference room,” which was fantastic, and a couple of the workshops I saw were also packed.

Thanks again to Sheri and everyone at MCC for all the work they’ve done to keep us organized and make things really hum, and to all the volunteers as well. Mark has also done a shout-out on his blog — and thanks to everyone who asked all those great questions.

Now on to day two of mesh!

Just a quick post, on the morning of the second day of mesh in Toronto, to say what an amazing day we had down at MaRS, with keynotes from Om Malik and Michael Geist — both of whom have been getting rave reviews for the ideas they generated, at least from the people I talked to — and then panels involving the politics and media streams, including the ones I was involved in on the future of newspapers and whether bloggers are journalists. We got a great discussion going in the latter panel with Om Malik and Michael Tippett from NowPublic.com, as well as my friend Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 — and I’d like to thank all of them again for coming. The mark of a great panel for me is when I find myself wishing it could have gone on longer because we were getting such a great debate going, and I certainly felt that — and others who attendedtold me they did too.

There was plenty of discussion going on at the mesh breaks and the cocktail social after the day’s events too, which was really nice to see, and at The Drake there was much meshing going on as well. That’s a big part of what we were hoping to achieve with mesh — just getting people who are excited by and interested in Web 2.0 into a room so they could throw ideas around and talk about some of the things that are going on. And thanks again to Sheri and everyone at MCC for all the work they’ve done to keep us organized and make things really hum, and to all the volunteers as well. Mark has also done a shout-out on his blog — and thanks to everyone who asked all those great questions.

Now on to day two of mesh!

At the same time as we — that is, myself, Mark Evans, Rob Hyndman, Stuart MacDonald and Mike McDerment — have been organizing mesh (which is taking place today and tomorrow at MaRS in Toronto), Mike and his team at 2ndSite have been busy renaming their company and their product and getting ready to relaunch it. So it’s fitting that on the day mesh 2006 launches, so does Mike’s new company, called FreshBooks.com.

You can read a bit more about why the company decided to make the name change at www.brandmurder.com, but suffice it to say that it still provides the same great Web 2.0 service (featured in an “enterprise Web 2.0 apps” piece by Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet), which allows companies to do all their invoicing and time-tracking seamlessly online. FreshBooks is also launching a new feature in a couple of weeks, which allows any user to send a printed invoice by first-class mail using the U.S. Postal Service (including a self-addressed envelope). If you want to give it a try, you can check out with this “sneak peek” URL (this creates a short-term demo account that will eventually expire).

Way to go, Mike. Congrats to you and the team.

The occasionally irascible but always entertaining billionaire sports-team owner and media gadfly Mark Cuban (hey, that would look good on a business card, wouldn’t it?) has a great post today about blogs and the traditional media. His first point: “A blog is media.” Simple, and yet many people miss that one completely, or go around talking about “the blogosphere” as though it’s a single giant entity, which drives many (including Jeff Jarvis) crazy. Say it with me, everyone: the blogosphere is “made of people,” just like the stuff in that great old campy horror movie Soylent Green.

In his post, Mark notes that:

“In traditional media, you are first defined by your medium. There is some constraint to the physical or digital definition of the medium the content is delivered on or by, that for the most part determines how you are perceived. There is a cost vs time vs interest vs access series of constraints that determines who your audience is, how you reach them and what they expect of you.”

In other words, newspaper comes to the door in the morning and is read (or not) at the table or on the bus, radio happens now and then in cars or during dinner, TV is on in the morning and after dinner but rarely during the day, and so on. Newspapers have to print stuff on rolled-out sections of dead trees and then load it onto trucks, radio has to beam stuff from tower to tower, TV has to pay anchors obscene sums of money for hairspray and plastic surgery, etc. etc.

The other big point, however, as Mark puts it, is:

“In a nutshell, blogging is personal. Which is really where the paths of blogging and traditonal media diverge. Traditional media has become almost exclusively corporate while blogging remains almost exclusively personal… Sure, there are bloggers that want to make money from their blogs [but] they are the infinitesimal minority. 99pct of blogs are about what someone has to say. 99 pct of traditional media is about making money.”

In typical Cuban-esque fashion, I think that hits the traditional metal fastening device right on the head. Blogs are personal, traditional media is corporate. Are there columnists and stories and people within the regular media who achieve some personal connection to readers or listeners? Of course there are — all the way from Howard Stern to your favourite columnist at the local paper. But it’s harder. Blogs make that a whole lot easier, and therein lies their power.

One interesting subtext to all this, of course, is that the personal power of his blog has gotten Mark Cuban into trouble before — including just yesterday.

Update: Jeff Jarvis has taken issue with some of what Mark said in a post at Buzzmachine, and Mark has responded in the comments. And Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has an interesting take on Mark’s post, about the differences between “vocational” and “avocational” media. Interestingly enough, Mark has also followed up his post with another one on what newspapers do better than the Internet.

Well, after about three months of blogging, meetings, BlackBerry-thumb, pleading/begging, brain-storming, hair-pulling and more than a dash of good, old-fashioned dumb luck, the bright idea known as mesh is two days away and we are sold out. In other words, you waited too long and now it’s too late to get a ticket 🙂 Now that the selling is done, all that remains is to put on a kick-ass show, which we plan to do starting bright and early Monday morning, with a whole pile of smart people and great questions and debate, followed by a big party at The Drake, and then another whole day of even more smart people and great debate. Check the mesh blog for updates and hopefully we’ll get some pics up at Flickr too, tagged “mesh06.”

Josh Kopelman’s post on “the first 53,651 users” has been getting a lot of comment. A VC with First Round Capital, Josh talks about all the Digg.com clones and Flickr knockoffs he sees, and suggests that startups shouldn’t pay much attention to their first 50,000 or so users — since that’s about how many RSS subscribers TechCrunch.com has. In other words, don’t believe that all those thousands of geeks signing up for things represents a real stab at mainstream success.

This is a great point, as my friend Paul Kedrosky and others, including VC Brad Feld, have noted. Most of the 50,000 people are probably just like me — they sign up for everything that comes along (as though there were a giant score sheet somewhere recording how many “invite-only” betas we have all managed to get access to) — use it maybe once or twice and then in most cases completely forget about it.

That’s not a great indicator of whether a company has a sustainable business model, I grant you. And it’s also not surprising that most people’s grandmothers, or aunts, or the guys down at the hardware store haven’t heard about Digg.com or even Craigslist.org. Does that mean they aren’t good businesses, albeit in a very early startup stage? I’m not so sure about that. Flickr started that way, and has reached a point where I would argue it’s a darn good business, and I think Thomas Hawk is right that there’s more to it than just “don’t pay any attention to the first 50,000 geeks.”

Not all that long ago, most people probably thought Google was just some geeky website with a stupid name, and I was likely one of the 50,000 or so who started using it early on because it was better — qualitatively better — than everything else. Obviously, every Digg.com clone isn’t going to become Google, but that doesn’t mean those 50,000 early-adopter geeks won’t turn out to be right.

Staci over at PaidContent.org pointed me toward the new ad network that was just launched by BlogHer, the women’s blogger network that started as a conference and has become much more than that. There’s more info on it here, but it looks like a slam-dunk idea to me (not that anyone asked me, of course). The service is starting with about 25 of the BlogHer network’s bloggers — not sure if that’s all of them or just the top 25 (it’s neither; see the comment from Debi Jones below) — including Badgermama (the mommy blogger with the purple hair), CityMama, Chookooloonks (a Jamaican Trinidadian term of endearment, in case you were wondering), Ninja Poodles and Surrender Dorothy.

As Staci explains it, the network is launching June 1 with a single advertiser — Sweet Simplicity Sweetener — and adding other ones later, in “contextual categories” starting with food. Participating bloggers agree that it will be the only graphic ad on their blogs, and agree to editorial guidelines. There’s a letter from the founders of BlogHer (Elisa Camahort, Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins) about the new venture here. This reminds me a little of The Deck, which Coudal Partners launched with a select group of blogs including Daring Fireball and Kottke.org. I wrote about that here.

Update:

Debi Jones of mobilejones.com also points out that there’s competition in the mommy-blogger space: a site called ClubMom.com has also launched a blogger and advertising network, in which bloggers are paid to post at least 5 times a week.

I just had to post something here about this because it totally blew me away. Not to pick on the folks at Alice Hill’s RealTechNews, but I was just reading a post they had about something, and down near the bottom there was a gigantic line of icons, each of which represented a social-networking website where you could click and either submit the post or bookmark it or whatever.

I’ve included a screenshot here because I found it so incredible — there are 25 icons, from a little animated TV set to a star and a sheaf of wheat. They represent everything from Digg.com and del.icio.us to news sites such as Newsvine.com and Fark, to lesser-known bookmarking sites such as Spurl.com and RawSugar, to ones I’ve never heard of such as LinkAGoGo and Scuttle.com.

If you’re a VC and you’re thinking about investing in the social networking space, I suggest you take a look at these and despair. And this isn’t even all of them — I can think of a few that aren’t even on the list (maybe their icons weren’t cute enough), such as Diigo, eSnips, Dogear, Kaboodle, LookLater, StumbleUpon and Frassle.

Like the rest of the geek blogosphere, I watched a bit of the Google Press Day event and then checked out some of the new toys they launched, including Google Trends and Google Co-op (or www.google.com/coop — which seems to have more to do with chickens, but then hyphens don’t translate that well into URLs) and I was somewhat underwhelmed — if that’s a word. Particularly with Google Trends, which seems like mostly a buzz-meter a la Alexa, with dubious long-term value, although Steve Rubel has had some fun playing around with it.

But it was Google Co-op that really floored me. This thing makes the incredibly complicated and mind-bogglingly obtuse Google Base look like a Hallmark greeting card. I know that Google is all about algorithms — not just because it’s obvious, but because that’s what Eric Schmidt said during the press conference; he said that Google Co-op wasn’t about social networking, but about making search better, and that for Google pretty much everything was about algorithms. But damn — Google Co-op in its current form is enough to make a non-math geek hold his head in his hands and weep, or head for the Xanax.

It seems simple enough. Google wants you to “Help other users find information more easily by creating “subscribed links” for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best.” Great. I know how to label things with tags like at del.icio.us, and I know how to subscribe to things via RSS and whatnot — how hard could this be? Well, pretty hard actually. If you go looking for more detail, here’s what Google tells you:

“In order to use the API you need to define one or more ResultSpecs. A ResultSpec contains a Query and a Response. The Query gives a general trigger pattern of queries for which you want to trigger your result. The Response provides a template for the output you want to display when the trigger pattern is matched. The id attribute of the ResultSpec tag uniquely identifies the ResultSpec. Every ResultSpec must have an id attribute.”

And that’s just the introduction. It gets worse. You have to learn about structured queries and data objects and output methods and formats, not to mention the frighteningly named “extractors” and validators. Obviously, this is for people who like programming in the same way I like ice cream. And I know that like Google Base, this kind of setup is meant for companies and services to set up their own databases and then feed them into the Googleplex, just as Google Base does for used cars and real estate and whatnot.

But still. Couldn’t it be just a little more user friendly for us non-programmer types? As Paul Kedrosky notes, it breaks one of his primary rules, which is that people are lazy. Even Danny “SearchEngineWatch” Sullivan couldn’t make it past the introduction, and Cynthia over at IP Democracy said that Google needs to remember the KISS rule. But how can you keep it simple when you’re hiring 300 math geeks a month?