Social networking site Pownce is to shutdown on the 15th December 2008.
According to their blog, pownce have already stopped accepting new users requests and as of the 15th December will be shutting down their service altogether. To ease migration the pownce team have created an export tool to help users move their posts to other blogging services like VOX, Typepad or wordpress. Pownce have said that they will soon be emailing pro members with further details of what will be happening with their accounts.
Pownce founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone have been taken on by Six Apart, the company behind such blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox.
Is this the just another start up that failed to get off the ground, an indication that there isn't currently room in the maket room for the vast number of social networking sites and services or the first signs of the credit crunch hitting tech industries. Whatever the reason, its a shame to see them go, they have built up quite a community and its always a shame to see communities collapse (whether in the real world or online).
Many thanks for the time and effort you put into the project guys, it was great while it lasted.
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
Sunday, 16 November 2008
SunderlandCommunityCamp
Earlier this year I blogged about going to Barcamp North East. This was a stark contrast to the codeworks thinking digital conference, earlier the same week.
Barcamps sometimes refered to as unconferences tend to be the habitat of the stereotypically geek. There is no set itinerary in advance of the event, there is no charge for the event, everyone is encouraged to join in, and everyone has to contribute something to the event.
One of the great things i found about barcamp was that they are all about sharing, sharing ideas, sharing knowledge, sharing experiences even sharing equipment. No matter what your background, what your age, what your sex, what your experience or what your position in your day job. Everyone is equal at bar camp.
One of the most unfortunate parts of barcamp is that at the moment it is still a bit of an underground movement, widely heard of in the techie community, but less well known to the rest of society. The are also a hardcore of barcampers that travel great distances to attend as many barcamps as they can afford to get to.
So what is so special about this event in Sunderland? Well firstly it isn't a bar camp as we know it. It is in the bar camp tradition of being free, not having a predetermined speaker list or itinerary, but it differs in the way that its been promoted, there is no wiki, its not stricktly first come first served, certain groups and individuals are being specifically invited. But the reason for this is quite a good one. This event is not just aimed at the geeks among us, its aimed a getting a perfect balance between local community groups, local geeks and local councils, and to encourage them to learn from each others expertize.
Social networks are springing up all over on the internet, and while these groups have the technology to enable people to share and communicate they often don't understand how to build and sustain a strong community environment. Similarly local community groups often know all about their local communities and how to organize local services, activities and events, but are quite often lacking the technical know how to take that to the next level reaching to larger audiences and providing extended services via the internet. Local councils quite often want to help these groups and have the technology infrastructure in place to provide all sorts of assistance but without those groups providing them with the intormation they need, they are unable to help.
This community camp in Sunderland, is one of the first i have heard of, of its kind, and there are very high hopes for the event, not is it taking some of the barcamp philosophy to the masses, but its doing it in a very specific environment, where with a bit of luck there can be some very tangible benefits.
Sunderland is a city that has a very strong industrial history in shipbuilding and coal mining, so while there has always been a strong community feel, its maybe not the place that springs to mind when you think of cutting edge technology, but maybe that is about to change.
Tara Hunt one of the original barcamp founders said that this kind of event that she likes best, where is its not just 'geeks' but also members of the local community, she also said that these sort of events are really hard work but that they can be really rewarding.
Barcamps sometimes refered to as unconferences tend to be the habitat of the stereotypically geek. There is no set itinerary in advance of the event, there is no charge for the event, everyone is encouraged to join in, and everyone has to contribute something to the event.
One of the great things i found about barcamp was that they are all about sharing, sharing ideas, sharing knowledge, sharing experiences even sharing equipment. No matter what your background, what your age, what your sex, what your experience or what your position in your day job. Everyone is equal at bar camp.
One of the most unfortunate parts of barcamp is that at the moment it is still a bit of an underground movement, widely heard of in the techie community, but less well known to the rest of society. The are also a hardcore of barcampers that travel great distances to attend as many barcamps as they can afford to get to.
So what is so special about this event in Sunderland? Well firstly it isn't a bar camp as we know it. It is in the bar camp tradition of being free, not having a predetermined speaker list or itinerary, but it differs in the way that its been promoted, there is no wiki, its not stricktly first come first served, certain groups and individuals are being specifically invited. But the reason for this is quite a good one. This event is not just aimed at the geeks among us, its aimed a getting a perfect balance between local community groups, local geeks and local councils, and to encourage them to learn from each others expertize.
Social networks are springing up all over on the internet, and while these groups have the technology to enable people to share and communicate they often don't understand how to build and sustain a strong community environment. Similarly local community groups often know all about their local communities and how to organize local services, activities and events, but are quite often lacking the technical know how to take that to the next level reaching to larger audiences and providing extended services via the internet. Local councils quite often want to help these groups and have the technology infrastructure in place to provide all sorts of assistance but without those groups providing them with the intormation they need, they are unable to help.
This community camp in Sunderland, is one of the first i have heard of, of its kind, and there are very high hopes for the event, not is it taking some of the barcamp philosophy to the masses, but its doing it in a very specific environment, where with a bit of luck there can be some very tangible benefits.
Sunderland is a city that has a very strong industrial history in shipbuilding and coal mining, so while there has always been a strong community feel, its maybe not the place that springs to mind when you think of cutting edge technology, but maybe that is about to change.
Tara Hunt one of the original barcamp founders said that this kind of event that she likes best, where is its not just 'geeks' but also members of the local community, she also said that these sort of events are really hard work but that they can be really rewarding.
Sunday, 2 November 2008
Scour pays users for what they already do, search!
Scour say their purpose is to "bridge the gap between searchers and relevant results". Results from the 3 largest search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live are agregated, in a rather slick interface, showing a summary of the page alongside which engines have indexed the result and how they have ranked the page. It also provides a platform for the user to vote and comment on relevancy, searchers connect with one another creating a social search community.
Unlike some of the other search engines that combine alogrithyms with user rating, the interface is extremely simple there is a thumbs up or a thumbs down for each result and an option to add a comment.
Founded in 2007, Scour was originally known as Aftervote.com, a 1 year later, it was acquired by Internext media, owner of the ABCSearch Network and re-branded as Scour.com
Unlike some of the other search engines that combine alogrithyms with user rating, the interface is extremely simple there is a thumbs up or a thumbs down for each result and an option to add a comment.
Founded in 2007, Scour was originally known as Aftervote.com, a 1 year later, it was acquired by Internext media, owner of the ABCSearch Network and re-branded as Scour.com
So, how does the paying users to search thing work? Well it appears to be quite simple, you get 1 point, for each serach, vote or comment you add, and you get 25% of the points of anyone you introduced to scour. There are also a few bonuses, for thins like downloading the toolbar or inviting friends. Once you aggregate 6,500 points you can cash them out for a $25 Visa gift card, which you can spend on whatever you want.
To get started simply click on the link above, set up an account and start searching.
My guess is this will be a bit like airmiles, in that while many of us will collect the points not many of us will ever make enough point to cash them in, and i'm not sure i really want to add another tool bar to my browser. Having said that the interface is quite clean and easy to use, and i do quite a lot of searching, so i might just give it a go.
My guess is this will be a bit like airmiles, in that while many of us will collect the points not many of us will ever make enough point to cash them in, and i'm not sure i really want to add another tool bar to my browser. Having said that the interface is quite clean and easy to use, and i do quite a lot of searching, so i might just give it a go.
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Flocks RSS Feed Folders
At long last I have started updating my website and my world of it blog, which are both well overdue a face lift and a bit of fresh content. As part of the process of deciding what I wanted to do with these spaces, I've been looking at lots of other interesting blogs and
website. Anyway, I decided pretty early on that I might as well add the rss feeds of the ones I found useful to the feeds tab in my browser as i went along. Pretty soon i'd got quite a selection, so I thought i'd better organised into folders to make finding them for a bit easier in the future.
Quite serendipitously, i discovered that flock deals with rss feeds in a really lovely way. If you have a number of feeds organised into a folder, it aggregates them for you. So when you click on a folder, you see all the entries from all of the sources within it sorted by date/time. This makes it really simple to see whats going on within that whole area, of course if you are interested in a specific feed, go can click on that particular feed and get just the data from that feed.
This may seem a really small thing, but like they say small things, please tiny minds, and i guess given the amount of time we all spend online these days, your choice of browser is a pretty personal thing. As far as i can tell explorer, firefox don't do this.
website. Anyway, I decided pretty early on that I might as well add the rss feeds of the ones I found useful to the feeds tab in my browser as i went along. Pretty soon i'd got quite a selection, so I thought i'd better organised into folders to make finding them for a bit easier in the future.
Quite serendipitously, i discovered that flock deals with rss feeds in a really lovely way. If you have a number of feeds organised into a folder, it aggregates them for you. So when you click on a folder, you see all the entries from all of the sources within it sorted by date/time. This makes it really simple to see whats going on within that whole area, of course if you are interested in a specific feed, go can click on that particular feed and get just the data from that feed.
This may seem a really small thing, but like they say small things, please tiny minds, and i guess given the amount of time we all spend online these days, your choice of browser is a pretty personal thing. As far as i can tell explorer, firefox don't do this.
Saturday, 11 October 2008
Introducing the Recommendation Engine
One of the problems with the internet has been that there is so much information out there, and so much being added every second, that its not possible to keep up. So how to you see through all this clutter to the information that matters to you?
Well, the answer is that you use social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia or del.icio.us or content sharing and discovery site like stumbleupon, digg or mixx. These work by allowing you to see what information other people are looking at, or finding interesting. In effect its like a giant popularity contest the more people recommending a link the more likely it is to be displayed on the main page. Recently Yahoo introduced 'buzz' combining their search analytics with user recommendation.
In recent years there have been all sorts of interesting improvements to social discovery, in terms of the ways that information is displayed digglabs coming up with the stack, swarm, bigspy and arc and most recently pics options. While these are all really fun, they are still more entertaining than labour saving. Sure splitting the information into groups is useful, but its still not accurate enough to make it really useful.
I spend most of my day connected to the internet in one way or another, so its no surprise I have tried most of the social bookmarking and content sharing sites, and one of the things that i have always wished for, was the ability to submit a url to a site and have the site come back with recommendations on related information that i might find useful.
It would seem that this request was at last been answered, Digg.com just launched a Beta of a service they are calling the recommentaion engine. The recommendation engine works in a quite complex way cross referencing what it knows about you, with what it knows about people with similar tastes to you, and what it knows about the url you submitted to come up with links to relevant information.
Well, the answer is that you use social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia or del.icio.us or content sharing and discovery site like stumbleupon, digg or mixx. These work by allowing you to see what information other people are looking at, or finding interesting. In effect its like a giant popularity contest the more people recommending a link the more likely it is to be displayed on the main page. Recently Yahoo introduced 'buzz' combining their search analytics with user recommendation.
In recent years there have been all sorts of interesting improvements to social discovery, in terms of the ways that information is displayed digglabs coming up with the stack, swarm, bigspy and arc and most recently pics options. While these are all really fun, they are still more entertaining than labour saving. Sure splitting the information into groups is useful, but its still not accurate enough to make it really useful.
I spend most of my day connected to the internet in one way or another, so its no surprise I have tried most of the social bookmarking and content sharing sites, and one of the things that i have always wished for, was the ability to submit a url to a site and have the site come back with recommendations on related information that i might find useful.
It would seem that this request was at last been answered, Digg.com just launched a Beta of a service they are calling the recommentaion engine. The recommendation engine works in a quite complex way cross referencing what it knows about you, with what it knows about people with similar tastes to you, and what it knows about the url you submitted to come up with links to relevant information.
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