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For my “Ingram 2.0” column last week, I wrote about a Toronto-based social-networking startup called PikSpot that is designed to help create communities of interest, and has launched with two groups based on Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo’s UndoTV and Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics. I thought I would reproduce the piece here for those who might have missed it.

When it comes to Web-related ventures, Scott Waddell is not your typical twenty-something, working on a MySpace clone while doing his undergrad degree — in fact, he’s pretty close to being a veteran. He was involved in several early Internet companies in the mid- and late-1990s, including iRover, a content-management system for Internet service providers. He also helped pioneer the use of streaming video for sites like Accuweather and MSN, long before YouTube came along.

Mr. Waddell’s latest venture, with partner Geoff Norton, is called PikSpot.com, a social-networking hub that can be used by groups, companies or individuals as the engine behind their community. While “Web 2.0” sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and so on tend to be focused on the type of content that users are sharing — Flickr for photos, YouTube for video, MySpace for blogs, etc. — PikSpot is designed to handle all of those, but is more focused on helping to create communities, regardless of what kinds of content are involved.

“PikSpot is all about collecting, organizing and promoting user-generated content,” Mr. Waddell said. “It’s designed to create niche communities based around shared interests — whether that’s funny videos or knitting or cars — and letting people publish and share their content with others in an organized kind of way.”

Kim Robinson, an investor who is also chairman of PikSpot’s parent company Wired Kingdom, says the site helps turn the “Wild West of the Web into a more organized set of collaborative communities,” one that even companies wouldn’t hesitate to use for internal communication and teamwork.

Continue reading “PikSpot wants to help tame the Wild West”

My friend and fellow mesh organizer — and all-around smart guy — Stuart MacDonald has a great blog post up today on the end of Web 2.0. But don’t get depressed, all you fans of blogs and podcasts and wikis and social media. All Stuart means is that Web 2.0 as a hot new concept (albeit one that tends to be poorly defined) is over, and what we’re seeing is the start of Web 2.0 as something that can really mean something to the general populace.

In other words, instead of just being something cool that goes “ping,” all the things that we associate with Web 2.0 are becoming part of how people use the Web, whether they realize it or not. People are reading and commenting on blogs and using social media and those kinds of tools without knowing that they are doing something Web 2.0 — and that’s a good thing. That’s why mesh is called Canada’s Web conference, and not Canada’s Web 2.0 conference (no, it’s not because O’Reilly sent us a C&D letter).

Remember when every company sent out press releases to say that they had a website? Those days are gone (thankfully), and now the Internet is something millions of people use without ever really thinking about it. And it’s no wonder that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the guy we have to thank for the Web, got a little testy in an interview awhile back when asked about Web 2.0. There is no Web 2.0, he said — there’s just the evolution of the Web. All that interactivity (and more) is something he envisioned in the first place. It’s just taken us awhile to get there.

Anyone who attended the ridiculously successful mesh meetup on November 15th (blog post is here) at the Irish Embassy in Toronto may have seen a woman with a small microphone interviewing various luminaries and other assorted folk. As some of you may know by now, that was podcaster extraordinaire Leesa Barnes, and the fruits of her labours are now available for all to enjoy.

That includes interviews with Dr. Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests, blogger Juan Gonzalez of global-culture.org, Norman Young of The Talking Company (which is in stealth mode), new blogger Rob Schaumer and Bernie Aho of Conceptshare.com — and those are just the beginning. There are more to come. Thanks again to Leesa for all her hard work, and also for the compliments she bestowed on all of us in a recent post she wrote about mesh.

Podcasts were produced by Leesa’s company Caprica Interactive Marketing, with music from the Podsafe Music Network by Uncle Seth.

Here are the podcasts:

1. Juan Gonzalez

Juan talks to Leesa about:

• Ways in which your online conversations can help you meet people in different countries
• Why Juan left Mexico to settle in Canada (and it wasn’t because of money)
• How to talk with your hands using your blog

2. Norman Young of The Talking Company

Norman talks to Leesa about:

• An idea Norman has for Mesh ’07
• How to handle the misconceptions that mainstream audiences have over the word podcast (or should it be netcast?)
• Why the interactive space will never take the place of the physical space (the Mesh meetup is a perfect example)

3. new blogger Rob Schaumer

Rob talks to Leesa about:

• His big challenge is and whether or not he can do it
• What he hopes to learn when he attends Mesh ’07
• His 3 tips for staying young
• Advice on what to do if you’re interviewing someone really boring

4. Dr. Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests

Tony talks to Leesa about:

• Whether Mathew Ingram looks better in person than he does online
• What Web 2.0 means
• Why he is excited about Mesh ’07

5. Bernie Aho of Conceptshare

Bernie talks to Leesa about:

• Why ConceptShare.com decided not to set up shop in Silicon Valley and chose Toronto instead
• How ConceptShare.com is building buzz without spending enormous sums on advertising
• How their biggest frustration sharing visual concepts over email turned into a business idea
• Web 2.0? It’s now time for Web 3.0
• Why Bernie would be part of the Mesh organizing team
• Which is colder – Sudbury or Toronto? Bernie settles the debate once and for all

On the so-called Lenox Globe, one of the oldest known maps from the 15th century, there was a Latin inscription on one unexplored region that said “Here Be Dragons.” Maybe the CBC should have inscribed that over the stage door leading to their venture capital reality show The Dragons’ Den. A Toronto startup called JobLoft certainly got chewed up during the filming of the show — although there is some debate about who did the chewing, and whether they deserved it or not.

As Rick Spence outlines on his blog, the JobLoft guys got a $200,000 cheque from the four venture capital “dragons” — and a commitment that they would get lots of great advice and assistance — in return for 50 per cent of their company. On the final episode of the show last night, however, the company’s advisor (a professor from Ryerson) criticized the dragons and their offer, and the dragons tore up the cheque. Ryan Coleman of Clay Tablet has a video clip and some thoughts about the show.

A couple of things strike me about this situation. The first is that while all this makes for great TV, I’m not sure it’s a great way to raise money. In other words, it’s a sideshow. Just as going on Who Wants to Date a Millionaire isn’t a great way to find true love, Dragons’ Den probably isn’t a great way to find a good VC match. The JobLoft guys say on their blog that they’re glad of the experience and that it got them publicity, but in the long run I’m not sure that it was worth it.

A lot of people in the comments at JobLoft’s blog take them to task for blowing the deal, and argue that their advisor was wrong to confront the dragons, etc. Waiting until the last minute to raise concerns is certainly not a great approach — and I would agree with Kempton that the insults that their teacher lobbed at the dragons were also totally offside in my opinion — but at the same time the JobLoft guys note that they got very little face-time or input from the dragons, contrary to what was promised.

In the end, it’s also worth noting that $200,000 for half of your company seems to me like selling yourself pretty short (as Toronto entrepreneur Austin Hill noted in this excellent post on the show). Maybe it’s just as well they got out of it. Ben Yoskovitz has some thoughts too.

Not content to let the gigantic egos of Jason Calacanis (ex of Netscape) and Nick Denton (former and current editor of Valleywag) battle it out alone, TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington decided to wade into the fray with a post on the recent back-and-forth posts by J.C. and N.D. For what it’s worth, Mikey seems to be siding with Jason rather than Nick.

As my friend Rob Hyndman points out, this is all very High School 2.0. And it’s obvious from reading the comments at TechCrunch that even some fans of Mike’s think talking about the bitchy posts by Denton and Calacanis is beneath him. “I thought this was TechCrunch, not DaysOfOurLivesCrunch,” says one. Another suggested the post belonged on Mike’s personal blog, CrunchNotes, “if that.”

As I said in the comments on Rob’s post, blogs and social media are inherently more personal and more interactive than traditional media — and that personalized nature comes through in many ways. It’s true that you would never see that sort of behaviour in the “old” media (apart from the gossip columns), but that’s because old media is by its nature more impersonal. With a more personalized media, you have to take the good with the bad.

The Scobleizer says that we need both Valleywag to tear things down and TechCrunch to build things up, and then reaches for a somewhat bizarre geological metaphor, with Mike Arrington as the famous Yosemite landmark El Capitan and Jason Calacanis Nick Denton as (I think) a glacier. He’s right though. For better or worse, both TechCrunch and Valleywag have their purposes.

It’s been around for a little while now, but a site called TurnHere sort of escaped my notice until recently, when I ran across a mention of it in two vastly different places (always a sign that I should sit up and pay attention). The first was on video site Beet, which wrote about the service and posted an interview it did with one of its investors, William Randolph Hearst III. Beet also had an interview recently with the founder of TurnHere, Brad Inman, which it linked to in the post as well.

What TurnHere.com is creating is a repository for short films about different locations. It already has hundreds of video tours of everything from Toronto’s Chinatown and Annex to dozens of locations in the San Francisco Bay area, and from Dublin in Ireland to Cabo San Lucas. And it is syndicating the videos through other sites, including — and this is probably the coolest — Google Earth, which has links to the videos embedded at various place marks.

The second place I found a mention of TurnHere was completely serendipitous. I recently got to know Leigh Himel, the CEO of a startup called Oponia Networks (which was co-founded by a friend of mine, Vanessa Williams). And Leigh recently started a blog, in which she mentioned some things about herself — like the fact that her father’s cousin is married to Suzanne Somers. She also mentioned that her brother Dave had appeared in a funny video.

Needless to say, I clicked on the link (like most Web surfers, I can’t pass up a funny video) and was taken to a site that linked to a video from TurnHere, in which Leigh’s brother Dave strolled through Chinatown talking about its various highlights, including his favourite place to get Chinese pork and duck, and then a trip to his Chinese herbalist and acupuncturist. I thought it was terrific — just a regular person giving you a personal view of a place through their eyes.

I haven’t checked out any of the other videos from TurnHere, but if a substantial number of them are as good as the one I watched with Dave touring Chinatown, I think the service is likely to be a hit. And it also shows the increasing penetration of video into our everyday Web lives. Greg Sterling of Screenwerk has also written about TurnHere.

My friend Paul Kedrosky notes that Flickr has introduced something interesting (and here I was writing just a few posts ago that Yahoo hadn’t really done anything since buying the photo site) with its aggregated data on what cameras its registered members use. Paul (and Tim) believe that data is “the new Intel inside,” and that many companies are as valuable for the data they can aggregate — in various interesting ways — as they are for their actual services.

Paul said much the same thing about my fellow mesh organizer Mike McDerment’s company Freshbooks, which does online invoicing and time tracking for companies. Mike and his team recently introduced a feature that will aggregate the data from all of its users (more than 100,000 now) and allow them to benchmark their companies against the rest of their industry, or other industries. Valuable stuff.

Now Flickr will tell you what the hot camera is, and allow you to see which ones are climbing in popularity and which ones are dropping. Yes, it’s true that some of this data might not be correct, for a variety of reasons (as Matt Hurst notes) — and the trends could be distorted if large numbers of people remove their EXIF data before uploading, as some do — but despite those caveats it’s still worth having. And it’s a sign of what other services could do with their data.

It was possible to get the camera data from Flickr before from various places, including this site, which pulled in the EXIF data from uploaded photos, but now Flickr is providing the numbers itself, as well as some nice graphs and charts. And as Shoutblog points out, they have also linked in camera price comparison and shopping via Yahoo Shopping, which is smart.

A couple of stories today came together in my mind as evidence of what you might call Envy 2.0. The first is the New York Times story about how the rich are envious of the super-rich. It seems that Web 1.0 success stories like Reid Hoffman of PayPal (now running LinkedIn) are envious of former colleagues Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube, who are now hundreds of times richer.

What a problem to have, right? I feel sorry for poor old Reid, as I’m sure all of you do too. The article is cited by some people as evidence of a bubble mentality, and it’s hard to argue with that perception. There’s no question that the urge to make a mark, particularly a large financial one, is part of what drives many entrepreneurs — and that’s a good thing in my mind. But when it becomes raw envy, it can make people do stupid things. Nice to see that the Hot or Not guy is trying to take a step back.

The second Envy 2.0 story is the bitch-slap going on between Jason Calacanis — until recently the head of Netscape, and former CEO of blog network Weblogs Inc. — and Nick Denton of competing blog network Gawker Media, who is writing the gossip site Valleywag after the rather sudden departure of former editor Nick Douglas. The match au pissoir got started when Nick wrote about Jason jumping ship because Netscape is cratering.

Not one to take that kind of thing lying down, Jason posted some comments on Valleywag about how Nick’s numbers were all wrong (even though he claimed to have gotten them from Omniture, which would be internal-only, and to have cross-checked them with ComScore), and then posted his own invective about Gawker and how it is getting creamed by sites like TMZ and PerezHilton. And of course Jason used Alexa traffic stats, which are widely viewed as unreliable.

Is Nick envious of Jason for selling Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $35-million $25-million? Maybe. Is Jason envious of Nick for being able to say whatever he thinks and do his own thing, instead of having sold out to The Man and then having to quit? Perhaps. Plenty of envy to go around, it seems.

Muhammad Saleem, a very perceptive blogger who is also a top submitter at Digg and Netscape, has written a post that looks at the problems with “socially-driven” news sites, using as an example a fake news story that someone submitted to Digg about Sony recalling 650,000 PlayStations. The story made it to the front page of the site in only a couple of hours, and stayed there until it was apparently removed. Muhammad sees this as another example of how many people don’t read stories.

He’s right, of course. And there’s no question that the geek-heavy audience at Digg is likely to vote up stories like the PlayStation one regardless of whether it’s true or not — as appears to have happened in this case — just to take some shots at Sony. However, I’d like to point out that fake news routinely makes its way into newspapers and onto TV newscasts as well, and in those cases there are a heck of a lot more checks and balances in the system (theoretically at least) than there are at Digg.

In those cases, the fake news lingers in print and video — and in various databases — long after it has been shown to be wrong, which often gives rise to urban legends about people getting abducted so their organs can be removed, etc. At least in the Digg case, commenters on the story repeatedly pointed out how fake it was. That’s a service social media can offer that traditional media can’t (at least, not yet).

Update:

Muhammad and I have been having a discussion via IM about the fact that Digg appears to have removed the story, not just from the front page but from the site completely. He argues that this is wrong, and that Digg administrators should have removed it from the front page but left the story up and flagged it as inaccurate. As it is, it looks as though the site is trying to pretend that the incident never happened. Tony Hung says that by removing it, Digg is going against its stated principles as a social media site. What do you think?

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Vancouver resident Markus Frind is a bit of a 21st-century superhero. After all, he helped to catch a suspected murderer who was featured on the TV show America’s Most Wanted. But instead of using superhuman strength or the ability to see through solid metal, Markus used his abilities as a programmer and Webmaster who runs one of the world’s most popular dating websites, PlentyofFish.com.

According to news reports, Mr. Frind got an e-mail on Saturday night from the U.S. Marshal Service, saying someone had seen a picture of the suspected killer, 26-year-old Calvin Bennett, on the dating website. Bennett had a warrant out for his arrest in the murder of an elderly couple in Nashville on October 30. Pierce Odell and his wife Mary were shot in the head and their bodies dragged into the woods after being robbed (more details on the America’s Most Wanted site here).

Provided with the user name that Bennett used on his site, Mr. Frind went through his logs and found several conversations the suspected murderer had had with women online, and eventually determined that he was staying with one of those women in Wisconsin (since messages from both Bennett and the woman came from the same IP address). Armed with this information, the U.S. Marshals Service was able to track down and arrest the man on Sunday. Parked outside the house was a truck matching the description of the one belonging to the elderly couple from Nashville.

“There are millions of people who use the site and I feel like I am responsible for them,” said Mr. Frind in an e-mail interview. “It felt really good to capture him. Unlike the other dating sites, who I’m told take days to get ahold of, I was able to do this all within 10 minutes on a Saturday. But all in all it feels surreal — this is what you hear about in the movies but you never actually expect to happen.”

Although it is one of the most popular dating sites on the Internet, with more than a million users a day and advertising revenue estimated at almost $1-million a month, Mr. Frind runs the entire website himself on three computers. And nabbing a suspected killer isn’t his only claim to fame: A research paper on high-level mathematics that Mr. Frind co-authored was recently used as supporting research for another academic paper that helped to win its author the Fields Medal, also known as the Nobel Prize for math.