Been a busy week, with more ideas for blog entries than time to write them. Here are some of the things I wanted to write about this week but didn’t get to:

Facebook Toast? Hot Today, Dead Tomorrow–Like AOL?

Article from Silicon Alley Insider on some of Facebook’s challenges. I “get” Facebook conceptually. I see the power. But on a personal level I’ve never truly enjoyed it. To me the whole idea of going to some closed destination site every day just seems kind of old fashioned and doesn’t fit the way I want to use technology. From the article, it sounds like at least a few others are with me.

A Sneak Peak at Wordpress 2.5

The Wordpress folks have put out their first release candidate for version 2.5. It looks promising. Hopefully they’ll have a final release ready in the next few months. (more…)

Get productive with the best Facebook Apps

Lifehacker breaks down Facebook Apps that can improve productivity.

A Social-Networking Service With a Velvet Rope

New York Times on Digg/Revision3/Pownce founder Kevin Rose. If anyone wants a Pownce invite, let me know in the comments. I’ve got a few left.

coComment to Launch New Version Tomorrow

A new version of this comment tracking service will go live tomorrow. You can check out the beta below:

http://beta.cocomment.com/
u: betatester
p: cocommentv2

Learning from Dave Winer

Joel on Software post explaining why he and Dave Winer don’t allow comments on their blogs. If I was a big-shot blogger like Winer or Joel, I could see how comments could get in the way. But as a writer for a specialized, modestly read blog, I’m happy to receive comments at all and think they add value to the posts instead of taking value away.

9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network

Techcrunch breaks down options for building a social networking component into your website.

Facebook is the New AOL

Jason Kottke expresses the concern a growing number of people are having about Facebook:

“As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007.”

Facebook has “thrown the entire startup world for a loop”

Valleywag speculates that the market for Facebook applications may already be saturated. They also explain how some changes in the platform are preventing new applications from going as viral as those that were available on launch.

Not Another Socnet

Joe Mansour makes the argument against Presidential candidate’s building their own social networks online:

“Most of the people who will make a profile will be the hardcore activists who already have a profile on Facebook. Furthermore, the work they’re doing to create content on the campaign’s own little internal socnet isn’t reaching anyone beyond the gated community….These in-house socnets, like Clinton’s, suck energy, time and resources away from where activists should be focused: reaching out to undecided, or as yet unengaged voters, and instead channel the focus inward. In effect the campaign is connecting with itself.”

MSNBC Launches Newsbreaker Online Game

Rohit Bhargava, who is a great blogger and a very smart guy, really likes it. I think it is pointless.

Blogger Removed from NCAA Baseball Game for Live Blogging (via CNET): Courier-Journal staff blogger Brian Bennett was removed from an NCAA baseball game by officials who told him that "blogging from an NCAA championship event is against NCAA policies". CNET author Daniel Terdiman hit the nail on the head when he said,

"It's understandable if sports organizations like the NCAA want to control access to video of their games, but it's hard to see how they can expect news organizations to keep from reporting the news as it happens.  And when they do, it makes them look like they are stuck very, very far in the past."

Why Real Estate Agents have Good Reason to Fear the Web (via Techdirt):  A study released by two economists from Northwestern University shows that home sellers in Madison, Wisconsin who use real estate agents do not get higher sale prices for their homes than people who sell their homes by themselves.  Apparently, Madison is home to a robust for-sale-by-owner website (FSBOMadison.com ) that allows people to circumvent real estate agents and successfully go it alone.  Authors on TechDirt and in the New York Times conclude that for-sale-by-owner websites legitimize real estate agents' fear of the web.  I think, however, that the success of this website is that real estate agents should expand their use of the web for marketing and outreach rather than shy away from it.  I found this report interesting given the relatively new popularity of real estate websites.

Google Gives Advertisers More Control (via CNET ; also see HULIQ): Google is changing its AdWords program to allow advertisers to see exactly which sites their ads appear on and to run placement performance reports, which will show advertisers performance metrics for each site where their ads appears.  These changes are an effort by Google to give advertisers more control over their ad campaigns and to provide more transparency to advertisers.

Ads of the World

Website that showcases the best and most interesting ad campaigns from around the globe.

User Generated Ads Don’t Pay Off

Frank Shaw from WagEd offers his take on a recent NY Times story that exposed some of the flaws of ad campaigns relying on user generated content.

FatDoor Launches Social Network for Your Neighborhood

Mashable has the scoop on a new social network aimed at building connections on the local level.

Democrats Have an Early Lead … in the Web 2.0 Race

Nice quotes from Rob Bluey, but I’m getting a bit bored with this particular story line.

Prince William: Facebook Fugitive

Prince William starts a Facebook profile.  Hilarity ensues.

Grupthink

Sort of a Digg for multiple choice questions.  Sample: What is the best open source project?

Truemors

Guy Kawasaki’s new rumor reporting site launches.  Apparently the whole thing was built using Wordpress.  I don’t think this is going anywhere judging from current content, but cool that it is all Wordpress.

Outsourcing Journalism? 

Local U.S. beat being covered by journalists in India? 

Which Candidates Are Holding Conference Calls with Bloggers?

A look at the Presidential candidates blog outreach efforts.

The Matt Drudge primary

Apparently, Drudge is fed some of those scoops by folks with agendas.  Who knew?

Study Concludes That Many Top News Sites Don’t Do RSS Well

Many newspapers don’t include all articles in their RSS feeds, giving users incomplete information.

How the netroots became the most important mass movement in U.S. politics

Great look at rise of the netroots.

16 Must Read Articles For Bloggers

Collection of articles that provide blogging tips.

The Art Of SEO For Wikipedia & 16 Tips To Gain Respect

Tips on how companies should engage with Wikipedia.

New Wordpress Stats Plugin

Wordpress has launched a new plugin that allows you to run the Wordpress.com stats program on blogs not hosted by WP.

CBSNews.com Turns Off Comments on Obama Stories

Apparently comment threads on CBSNews.com have been overrun by racist comments.  Awful.

Amazon S3: Show me the money

The CEO of the photo sharing site SmugMug explains how Amazon S3 will save him over $500,000 this year. Amazon and others are in the process of blowing up the hosting business - pay attention to this stuff. Via Echo Ditto.

4 Hour Work Week Blog

Lifehacker style blog from author Tim Ferriss. Twitter and Blackberry addicts aren’t going to like it - Ferriss’ big thing is that we’d be more productive in life and work if we were less connected. He’s right.

Politics is flat

Seth Godin thinks the upcoming Personal Democracy Forum could be a one of those “seminal events that everyone remembers attending years later… even if they didn’t.” We got our tickets on Friday.

ABCNews.com Relaunches with Citizen Journalism

Steve Rubel has the scoop on a new design for ABCNews.com.

From Many Tweets, One Loud Voice on the Internet

The New York Times takes a look at the Twitter phenomemon. Does this mean it is over?

Participation on Web 2.0 sites weak: Study

A very low percentage who visits sites like YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia actually upload or edit their own content. “The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation’s couch potatoes — voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer’s statistics show.”

Rick’s Ruminations: Full Feeds

“I think the primary justification often given for partial feeds - that it will drive higher clickthroughs back to the publisher’s site - is off-base. As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused.”

When is a Blog in Public Meant to Remain Private?

During the Viriginia Tech tragedies, reporters searched the social web for first person accounts of the shooting. In the process, they made public figures out of people intending to write soley for their family and friends.

Washington Post website redesigned as a wiki?

A Japan-based design firm has redesigned the Post in the wiki style. Interesting. Reminds me of a stripped down version of the current New York Times website. <Via Martin Stabe>

Wikis, Indexes, Context, and the News

Amy Graham from the Poynter Institute writes about how wikis might be used by the news media: “They could play a valuable role not just in supplying engagement and context, but in helping communities and news pros collaborate to create a less fragmented view of what’s happening, what came before, what might come next, and how it all matters and interrelates.” <Via Cybersoc>

European papers optimistic on future — with web’s help

Europeans seem a bit more optimistic about the future of newspapers than their American counterparts. I’m still waiting for the day someone really smart buys a local U.S. paper and reinvents it online. <Via Techdirt>

(1) Drinks with Dell

Jeff Jarvis, who has a bit of a history with Dell, went and had drinks with the Dell team in Austin. In this great post, he recaps the steps Dell has taken to rebuild itself after the Jarvis-lead Dell Hell mess two years back.

(2) MySpace Will Hold Presidential Primary

TechCrunch has the scoop on the MySpace Presidential primary that will be held in January of 2008. I’ve signed up for like 5 accounts over the years for various projects so I assume I get to vote 5 times. Awesome. I predict a victory by Ron Paul.

(3) Site Review: Tommy2008 And Thoughts To Guide Your Online Campaign

Mike Turk takes the scapel to another Republican Presidential campaign website. Turk deserves credit for coming up with creative ways of saying “this website is kind of horrible” over and over again. Sample quote: “If Rudy’s site, and Tancredo’s site spent a wild drunk night together, Tommy’s page would be the illegitimate offspring.”

(4) 10 Things You Can Do with Mixed Media RSS

Cool post by Marshall Kirkpatrick of Splashcast, which is at the top of my list of cool web aps I haven’t had time to play with yet. Here’s the elevator sentence on Splashcast: “Today, we’re the only company that provides a way for you publish a channel of mixed media content (video, photos, audio and more) that’s subscribable by RSS and can be displayed in an embeddable player.”

(5) Top 10 Reasons as to why I still need to be convinced about marketing on Second Life

HP executive Eric Kintz provides a nice breakdown of some of the flaws with Second Life as a marketing platform.

(1) Redefining The IMG Tag from TechCrunch

“This morning, AdBrite launches BritePic to help people add a lot of new functionality around embedded images. Just by changing the embed code, web publishers can add a caption, watermark, zoom, share, resize and other features. And an advertisement, if they choose to.”  Very cool.

(2) Online news design - awful or brilliant? from Design 2.0

Article shows screenshots of the website of large newspapers around the world.  Interesting to compare. 

(3) Washington Post redesign to focus on video from MarketWatch

The Post redesigns their homepage.  Pretty subtle changes in my opinion - I had study a bit to notice the changes.  My biggest problem with the Post site has always been that I don’t ever feel like I can find anything.  This doesn’t fix that.

(1) Twitter: All Trivia, All The Time

Is Twitter a phenomenon or the Spring 2007 version of parachute pants?  BusinessWeek takes a look at the pros and cons of the service.

(2) Blogs turn 10–who’s the father?

CNET tries to figure out who the first blogger was.

(3) How Arianna did it

Jeff Jarvis breaks down the role of networked journalism in cracking the Vote Different mystery. 

(4) Fears of a YouTube Swiftboat

Wired: “Campaign finance lawyers and others in the realm of politics worry that the explosive viral dynamic illustrated by the Vote Different video could lend enormous power to disinformation campaigns — the swiftboating of YouTube. Anonymous advertisements show a new ability to exert an outsize influence in shaping voters’ sense of reality and the candidates’ messages, they say.”

(1) Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design

Tantek Celik of Technorati explains that Twitter is successful in part  because it requires a lot less key strokes than blogging or email. 

(2) John Edwards has 792 Twitter Friends  

I continue to think Twitter is going to be the next big thing.

(3) Politics Online Conference is this Thursday and Friday

I'm out of town and won't be attending but Gary Bivings and Alex Clover from The Bivings Group will be there.  Say hi.

(4) State of the News Media 2007

An annual report on the state of journalism from the Project for Excellence in Journalism.  Via The Beta Stage. 

• A Blog's Blast Damage

  Washington Post column on their most recent blog controversy and the differences in process between online and print content.

• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen

  Good list of some cool themes for Wordpress junkies.  Some inspiration for blog designers as well.

• The transformation of IDG

  Colin Crawford of IDG provides some great stats on how the magazine industry giant is increasing it's web revenue.

• Stuffy Economist Magazine Experiments With Social Media

  The Economist launches a blog where they are publishing most letters-to-the-editor unedited as they come in.  A great idea.  Of course I'm biased, as we'd mentioned this a few months back. 

• Magazines start studios to join online video craze

  Time Inc and TV Guide have video studios in an effort to produce more video content for their websites. 

• TechPresident Launches

  The good folks at Personal Democracy have launched a new site that will provide info on technology and the 2008 Presidential race.