Online Net Meeting

My world has changed (and I get to share with you)

Twitter’s new list feature is one of those things that seems simple on the surface and is easily ignored.

But it has deeply changed how I get my news and how I interact with the tech community.

Click through these lists and you’ll see a different world than you would have thought possible on Twitter. This is the order I visit the lists in the morning:

Tech News Brands.
Here’s 500 tech news sources. Everything from the Wall Street Journal
to TechCrunch. Watch this list for a few minutes and you’ll be up to
date on what’s happening in tech right now. This is far more complete
than Techmeme or Google News and far faster too.

Once I’ve gotten up to date on the news, I check out the people who write and produce the news.
Here you’ll find 491 journalists and bloggers and see what the back
channel is. Often this is more interesting than the tech news brands,
but it’s lots of fun to flip back and forth while some big news story
is breaking.

Want to know what the news will be tomorrow? Well, the rich guys who
are funding companies often know what will be big and so I watch this list of 415 venture capitalists and angel investors to see what they are thinking about.

The venture capitalists, though, are fun to contrast with 447 people who founded their own companies. Often these two lists have divergent points of view that are fun to flip back and forth between.

After all that I visit the tech pundits list. These are 451 folks who love to tell you what they think happened.

If you’re an entrepreneur I’ve built a list of weapons for you.
Everything from stationary companies to Yammer, for keeping your team
up to date. This is still a list in progress, so if you have a company
that has a weapon for entrepreneurs, let me know!

What about tech company executives? I have a list of 283 who are CEOs, CTOs, CIOs, or VPs.
Lots of times news gets announced by these people. Marissa Mayer, for
instance, announced that Google had made a search deal with Twitter and
if you were following this list you would have seen that.

Here’s a list of 376 tech companies and their official PR accounts (everyone from Google to startups). I find a lot of new products here and find out about updates, too.

Web Hosting and Cloud Hosting/Cloud Computing list.
500 people, news sources, hosting companies (not just Rackspace,
either). I’m trying to keep up to date on the hosting business and
Cloud Computing and this is how I do it. Find a more complete list
anywhere.

Everyone should watch their coworkers. I do the same, with a list of 302 Rackspace employees and data sources. Have you made a list of your coworkers? Why not?

These are my core information lists that I check many times per day.

But I have a few specialized lists too:

TechStartups:
this is a list of 500 startups that most people won’t have heard of yet
(mostly early stage). I’ll work on this list more over the next few
weeks.

Geolocation
(174 people and companies). I’m interested in developers and companies
that are building new kinds of apps that use GPS and location. Things
like Foursquare and Gowalla (both of those are on this list, along with
the founders).

iPhone. 500 of the top iPhone app developers and companies and other influentials and programmers.

Twitter tools and devs
(353). Twitter has a growing ecosystem of companies and people who are
developing tools and services. This list has everyone I’ve been able to
find so far.

Tech Event Organizers (239). These are people who run events and the events that they run. Everything from Emerging Tech to BarCamps.

Video or audio shows
(101 people and shows). These are podcasts and video shows, mostly tech
centric. Everything from Leo Laporte’s shows to Gillmor Gang.

My favstar list
(500 people). These are the people I’ve clicked “Favorite” on the most.
Favstar.fm keeps track of who I favorite the most and puts them on this
list. It’s actually one of my favorite lists, but less focused than the
others.

Web Innovators (79). If you’ve done something big for the Internet I put you on this list.

Programmers
(306). I’m not sure what I’ll do with this list in the future (Twitter
limits me to 500 people and obviously there’s more than 500 programmers
in the world). But, if you are looking for what programmers think this
is a good place to start.

Most influential in tech
(225). This is my most followed list, but it’s also the most
subjective. What makes someone influential? Well, I study who has the
respect of their peers and who gets stuff done. Or, who has a bully
pulpit and can get things focused on.

Anyway, if you are looking for other lists, I highly recommend using Listorious, which is a service that tracks lists (you have to add yours, if you haven’t you really should).

If you think you should be added to a list of mine, let me know in
the comments here or drop me a line at scobleizer@gmail.com. Thanks and
hope you get some value out of these. I know that these have
dramatically changed my world.

A few other things: 1. you should check out my favorites list. Every day I put my favorite tweets on there. In about two months I’ve put 8,000 items on this list.

My favorite Twitter client is now Seesmic Web, which supports lists now (and other new Twitter features like Geolocation). The other day I interviewed the Seesmic team about these new features and the video is very telling.

Thanks Robert,

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My world has changed (and I get to share with you)

Google’s Varian: Search scale is ‘bogus’ | Relevant Results – CNET News

Google’s Hal Varian would likely have raised an eyebrow at a term paper submitted by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the search market.

Varian, currently on leave from the University of California at Berkeley to serve as Google’s chief economist, thinks a lot of the arguments advanced by Microsoft in justifying its 10-year deal for Yahoo search are, in a word, “bogus.” Microsoft has said that it needs “scale” to compete in the search market against Google, saying that larger amounts of traffic and data allow it to improve the quality of its search experience.

Hal Varian, chief economist at Google
(Credit: Google)

As might be expected, that’s not exactly the way Varian sees it. He’s perhaps best known for perfecting the ad auction system that generates the vast majority of Google’s huge profits, having worked for Google since 2002. But he also holds forth over the array of statistical data and processes that Google uses to make just about any decision.

Varian shared his thoughts on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, the state of the economy, and the changing nature of innovation and Silicon Valley geography during a conversation at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., this week.

Q: One thing we’ve been talking about over the last two weeks is scale in search and search advertising. Is there a point at which it doesn’t matter whether you have more market share in looking to make your product better?
Hal Varian: Absolutely. We’re very skeptical about the scale argument, as you might expect. There’s a lot of aspects to this subject that are not very well understood.

On this data issue, people keep talking about how more data gives you a bigger advantage. But when you look at data, there’s a small statistical point that the accuracy with which you can measure things as they go up is the square root of the sample size. So there’s a kind of natural diminishing returns to scale just because of statistics: you have to have four times as big a sample to get twice as good an estimate.

Another point that I think is very important to remember…query traffic is growing at over 40 percent a year. If you have something that is growing at 40 percent a year, that means it doubles in two years.

So the amount of traffic that Yahoo, say, has now is about what Google had two years ago. So where’s this scale business? I mean, this is kind of crazy.

The other thing is, when we do improvements at Google, everything we do essentially is tested on a 1 percent or 0.5 percent experiment to see whether it’s really offering an improvement. So, if you’re half the size, well, you run a 2 percent experiment.

So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it’s not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it’s the recipes. We think we’re where we are today because we’ve got better recipes and we have better recipes because we spent 10 years working on search improving the performance of the algorithm.

Maybe I’m pushing this metaphor farther than it should go, but I also think we have a better kitchen. We’ve put a lot of effort into building a really powerful infrastructure at Google, the development environment at Google is very good.

So, how’s the economy look?
Varian: The news on the economy I’d say is pretty good. You look at the housing sales, they’ve leveled out, prices are up slightly. The auto sales and production are up, The financial markets have all stabilized, the initial unemployment numbers are down over 100,000. So everything is looking pretty reasonable, and it’s somewhat earlier than expected.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, because we’ve got a long way to go to go back up. But you look at a most of the economic statistics, they have really turned around in the last couple of months, not only here, but in Europe and Asia.

Has anything changed fundamentally?
Varian: Well, the savings rate is up. People had a negative savings rate for several years and now it’s more like 7 percent. In some sense, that’s a good thing, I know people are complaining about it but you have to restore some reasonable balance. Maybe it’s not so good that we had to get to it by going through this recession, but at least we’re coming out at a more balanced rate than we were going in.

How do you see things in Silicon Valley? We’ve been wondering about the growing cost of living in this area and what effects that has on business development.
Varian: Well, there are some outposts: I’ve been telling Diana (Adair, Google spokeswoman) that she should go buy a house in Pleasanton. That’s where PeopleSoft used to be, and Oracle has a big establishment there, it’s a nice town….

It’s 105 today in Pleasanton.
Varian: Actually, I live up that way, if you get hot, you jump in the swimming pool. Anyway, there are some outposts that are still closely connected to the Valley. I think it is getting awfully expensive to live here, and commuting is getting more and more unpleasant, so I think you will be seeing some expansion.

A year ago, I told Google they should buy in Stockton. But nobody listened to me. The deal is, you have to pay for your food but your house is free.

What did they say?
Varian: They said, nah, we couldn’t get anybody to live there.

Is innovation in the Valley as high as it was 10 years ago?
Varian: I’ll tell you an angle that I think is different from 10 years ago, and that’s what I call the micro-multinational.

One day I bumped into a friend of mine, and asked what she was up to. She said, I’ve got a company. And I said tell me about it, and she said there are 12 people, three in New Delhi, two in Mountain View, and there’s somebody in Spain.

And then two days later I ran into another guy, and he said I’ve got a company, and there are four people in Italy, two people in the Czech Republic, one in Spain, and three in San Francisco. And I said, whoa, what is this? A trend! It’s two of them!

But you talk to them and it’s amazing what you see in this area. I think the reason is that communication costs have basically gone to zero. We’ve got e-mail, Skype, Google Docs, wikis, doing round the clock continual communication and coordination that only the biggest multinational could have 10 years ago. The fact is that you have this essentially free communications and you’ve got entrepreneurs everywhere else in the world that can sync up.

So the question is, is it in the Valley? Well, in many cases, two or three of the people are in the Valley, but it’s not limited to the Valley.

I think it’s a crucial part because in a lot of cases you can find expertise, you can find venture capital. You’ve got the legal people to draw up the contracts, you’ve got the financing people, you’ve got the consultants and experts… But maybe it is part of the answer to this cost question, because you’ve got the expertise but the work can be distributed.

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At Austin Meeting, Seeking Exposure for New Tech Products – NYTimes.com

At Austin Meeting, Seeking Exposure for New Tech Products
Erin Trieb for The New York Times

John Otjen, left, and Jennifer Van Grove, gesturing, using new online services at the South by Southwest Interactive conference.

AUSTIN, Tex. — Benjamin Satterfield, a 33-year-old Internet entrepreneur, knows how fickle the Web’s tastemakers can be.
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Related
Bits: What I’m Looking for at Austin’s Tech Fest (March 13, 2009)
Times Topics: South by Southwest Music and Media Conference

Last year he unveiled an online collaboration tool called Twiddla at the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference here, which attracts thousands of influential Webheads. Twiddla won praise and even a prize at the conference’s Interactive Web Awards. But the spotlight quickly faded.

“We had millions of hits to the site,” Mr. Satterfield said. “Then it died off. I was in a trough of despair.”

This year, he tried to build something that would be used long after the conference buzz died down. He created Gigotron, a free Web and iPhone application that rounds up listings of nearby concerts.

The service is already running in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, and Mr. Satterfield is about to take the wraps off a version tailored for the Austin music scene. “You know you’re going to get traction at South by Southwest,” he said.

Mr. Satterfield is one of many entrepreneurs who flock to the conference in the hope of capturing the attention of attendees and elevating their product or service out of obscurity.

Twitter, the chatty Web service that is quickly entering the mainstream, first hit it big during the 2007 conference because of giant screens installed around the convention center displaying Twitter messages from the crowd. Shawn O’Keefe, who has been helping organize the tech-oriented portion of South by Southwest for nearly a decade, said that in the early days the conference also helped give a lift to the makers of the blogging tools Blogger and Movable Type.

But wooing the technorati is a tricky business. Start-up companies are aware that in-your-face marketing is a good way to scare off the kinds of people who go to South by Southwest.

JagTag, a company based in Princeton, N.J., that incorporates barcodes into marketing campaigns for the benefit of camera-phone users, decided not to attend the conference. Instead, the company sent a single employee loaded with several thousand promotional postcards bearing barcodes. “We didn’t want to do a hard sell,” said Dudley Fitzpatrick, the chief executive. “We just wanted to show it to them.”

“I’ve just been dropping them off at tables where people were taking a break,” said Scott Falconer, the JagTag employee assigned to promote the company. Attendees who snapped a photo of the barcode and sent it to JagTag were rewarded with listings of parties and events around Austin.

To some, though, handing out pieces of paper seemed a little primitive and, well, uncool. Rohan Walder and Mark Sando, who traveled from London to represent Rawrip, the music discovery site they work for, were not impressed by the fliers in the free swag bag that attendees received.

“When we first got our gift bags, we went through and threw away every bit of paper,” Mr. Sando said. “You would think that at a digital conference, they’d think of more intelligent ways” to promote a company.

The team behind PeopleBrowsr, an online dashboard that tracks updates across social networking Web sites like Flickr and Twitter, elected not to overtly market their Web application at all. “If we had a booth, I would be slashing my wrists,” said Jodee Rich, the chief executive.

Instead, they decided to release a special version of their service for South by Southwest attendees that lets users track events here. They got a few write-ups from tech blogs before the conference, and they plan to spend their time in Austin gathering feedback on the tool.

“We’re not pushing to the community anymore. We’re no longer hiring girls to pass out cards,” Mr. Rich said. “The community either loves it or they don’t.”

Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester Research who specializes in social media, put it succinctly: “Heavy marketing doesn’t work with the cool kids.” Those “cool kids” are the prominent bloggers or influential Twitterers whose endorsement could be valuable.

For Mr. Satterfield, even the best-laid plans were not a sure thing. Throughout the conference, cellphone coverage suffered as the influx of smartphone users overwhelmed networks. That could cut into the number of people trying out the new version of Gigotron during the music portion of the conference.

“I’m definitely worried,” Mr. Satterfield said, as the cellular network overload is “only going to get worse.” But he made arrangements to set up his own Wi-Fi router. That way, he said, “at least we’ll have a decent shot at getting some people to try it out.”

SOURCE

ED Note :

I am my own worst enemy when it comes to pushing my ideas through; I used to work in the creative dept. of one of the worlds´ largest advertising companies until I quit in 1998.

For me the writing was on the wall, advertising as we knew or know it was dead. The internet had taken over and life would never be the same :

i foresaw :

1. advertising being replaced by referral and references ( a.k.a the simple hyperlink )
2. the death of gurus and pundits; it doesnt matter where you find the link to a news item, promo code, product / service demo, video
3. the internet is FLAT, this is why pt. 2 is true, neither Robert Scoble nor the NYTIMES has an exclusive anymore
4. those who have the exclusives are the people MAKING the news
5. put a CMS in the hands of newsmakers and a newspaper goes out of business
6. if you put pt. 5 and pt. 1 together here is what you have – there are no ” major news sites ” anymore, so there is no place to go to where you can be advertised to
7. so where do all the Ads go ?
8. nowhere, advertiting is dead, Bambi.
9. Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook ( for a bit ), MySpace and all the other Social Platforms ( Orkut, etc. ) together with the humble Blog have emasculated Creative Departments, de-fanged Account Managers, frocked Account Directors and put a lot of pot-smoking, dart chucking Lee Clow – wannabes on the pavement, iBook in hand.
10. a few smart ones learnt HTML, then JSP / ASP, PHP / etc. swapped 3 cocktail lunches for tags, bought into geek speak via tag clouds filled with words like ” falt files, sql, web server, header and META tags ” and gave birth to Digg-nation – a generation of  androgynous, drug and alcohol shunning, perenially excited, preppy-fashion loving vegans who think that being able to edit a CSS file is what makes a ” Rockstar ” web designer, ( why not ? They ” outsource ” all the heavy lifting to China, Vietnam, India. ) while snapping themselves with Paris Hilton.
11. This IS the world we live in, only cows watch TV.
12. It is a world of exploration, discovery, chatter and threaded convos. where 140 character “sentences”  pass for a blog post.
13. In a world where attention is in deficit and desideratum in plethora you dont go where the brands tell you to, you go where your friends are.

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At Austin Meeting, Seeking Exposure for New Tech Products a.k.a Advertising is dead : Scroll to the end for details