Stumbleupon Reviews

I have come across a couple of nice reviews of StumbleUpon from Kyle, Baron and Gregg. I am hearing lots of good things about it. There is a little learning curve when I first started but it is not too bad.

I haven't been spending too much time on it yet, but I have been stumbling on the "online-games". Most of the games are pretty decent and I was hooked to these web games like Desktop Tower Defence, Curve Ball (Warning: they are pretty addictive!)

The other day I was just checking my about page on SU, and it reads "I am a 26 year-old guy from Ontario, Canada". So, I wondered what is the demographics of StumbleUpon and I found out that it is skewed toward the 35+. I guess it is a more mature web2.0 site?

Giveaway of the Day - Software Download Site

There is a free software download site called Giveaway of the Day. Unlike other traditional download site, they promote different software one day at a time. Every day they offer only one free licensed commercial software for download (with a 24 hours window).

I haven't downloaded any software in the site yet but I see that it is a very unique way to start out a free download site with limited inventories. The look and design of the site is exactly likr a blog, and it is powered by WordPress. Users are also allowed to rate and comment on downloads just like other download sites. Each post is getting around 100 comments and I think the website is getting some interest from software companies/developers that would like to promote their products.

Web 2.0 for Enterprise 2.0

Raghu from Random Bytes has a post regarding to the challenges of rolling web 2.0 inside the corporate environment. With the rapid growth of social networking, it does make sense for any companies to jump into web2.0. But what factors are holding them back?

• Risks are not very well known as yet - The risks of how to manage simple things like an employee’s time on these activities can be high. For example if an employee blogs for say a couple of hours in the work day how would you actually measure his performance ?
• Security concerns of allowing employees to collaborate with the outside community is a difficult question to handle as well.
• Data concerns - right now the enterprise has significant control of how data is managed and stored inside the enterprise. Bringing in web 2.0 approaches into the enterprise can throw up some significant challenges of how data is managed.

It is not surprising that only 48% of marketers are looking to try social network channels this year because it is very difficult for a company to find the right people to handle this task. For the rest of the 52%, they are either still speculating or have no idea what to do ...

OpenCourseWare, Education 2.0

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived 2nd generation of Web-based services - such as social networking sites (namely Myspace/YouTube/Digg/Wiki), emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. [Wikipedia]

The idea behind this is to share and improve a product or idea so that the maximum number of people would be able to benefit from it. There are tons of open source software on the web today(e.g. Firefox and Wordpress). Many of the open source programs are becoming very popular and the force that drive behind them are the countless plugin and upgrades created by different developers all over the world.

I have recently found out there is an open source education site that has the same principal. OpenCourseWare (OCW) has a wide selection of course material from different universities around the world (China, Colombia, France, Japan, Netherlands, UK, US, etc.). All of these courseware is available for all to use and openly licensed for redistribution.

The organization began with MIT OpenCourseWare, an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from MIT's undergraduate and graduate courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere.

PCWorld's 50 Most Important People on the Web

PC World listed the top 50 most important people on the web. As much as we like web2.0, online personals, social networks, YouTube videos ... without the folks who create the Craigslists, MySpaces, and YouTubes of the world, it just won't happened.

There is not much surprises on this list, as the top guns in the blue chips made up more than half of the list. Execs/Founders of Google, Apple, YouTube, Microsoft, Yahoo & Wiki are the usual guests in these kind of lists anyway.

There are a couple world famous bloggers made to the list as well:
23. Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos
26. John Battelle, Searchblog
30. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
38. Gabe Rivera, Techmeme
39. Dave Winer, Scripting News
41. Perez Hilton, Hollywood blogger
43. Mikko H. Hypponen, F-Secure
45. Nick Denton, Gawker Media
48. Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, Iraq the Model

Digg Unbanned Sites

According to Naffziger's Net, Digg has unbanned all but 4 of the banned sites couple days ago. There are different speculations all over the blogosphere. In fact, the site seems very slow and not very stable these days; I have even seen a dugg story was broken into 2 halves. There is no words from the official Digg office regarding to the unbanned sites issue yet.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch had a chat with Kevin Rose,

"Digg thinks they are winning the war over the problem of "grouping" behavior (where groups of Digg accounts are controlled or effectively controlled by a person or group and can push stories to the home page). The changes they've made to Digg over the last few months, Rose says, allow them to monitor grouping behavior and stop it before it can drive a story to the home page. Thus, there is no real need to ban any particular site from Digg. They are confident that if a story from a previously banned site makes it to the home page, it deserves to be there."

It sounds like Digg maybe studying the digg behaviour of their user groups in some kind and putting a final test to the new algorithm. My guess is that they might have further degraded the value of the friend's vote on a user's friend list, which remind me of their vision of creating a friend system that is based on a user interests.

11870

For the last two days, "11870" is the highest search term in Technorati. But what is 11870? Is it a short code for a mobile service? Whose number is it?

Zenblogger has the answer,

"11870.com is Spanish bookmarking networking directory that tracks it’s
users professional and business suggestions and reviews. Basically a user is given a profile page where they list professional services or businesses they have used and they can share opinions, photos, videos, labels, etc…"

This sounds like a Spanish Digg/Netscape to me! Just by looking @ the design of 11870.com, it has certain similarities with Digg/Netscape. I also see that they rank popular places, photos, videos. It sounds like a good place for some gaming to me!

WSJ's Wiz of Buzz Review

Ever since the Digg's top user list dropped from the site couple of weeks ago, the biggest Digg related buzz has been the WSJ's "Wizards of Buzz" article. WSJ has contacted many top users of the major web2.0 sites and done a little write up on many of them.

After the article is published both online and offline, there doesn't seem to have any impact on these Web 2.0 sites right away. The fact is, the traffic of Digg and Netscape didn't increase significantly after the release.

Here are some of the reasons why:

1) The article was published on the weekend, where most people are spending their time offline with their families and friends. Who is reading the weekend WSJ anyway?

2) The article covered all the major web2.0 sites, so it is like a roundup on the industry itself. The impact to a individual site is minimal.

3) It is not easy for the outside world to understand what impact does the featured users made.

It is good to see some faces of the user behind web2.0 in a major media. After all, it is hyped as user created content right? The biggest winner is probably WSJ themselves though (look at the traffic increase and the links generated pointing to their site) .