Veronica Belmont Interview

I interviewed Veronica Belmont Saturday after Community Next. We discussed her 7-month stint at Mahalo. Yesterday she announced on her blog that she’s moving on after having launched Mahalo Daily. I’ve been a fan since she started speaking up on Buzz Out Loud… what will she get up to next?


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Caught Live on the Scobleizer Qik-Cast

At Hollywood and Highland, Outside Community Next conference, which is oddly being held in a nightclub, in a mall.

UPDATE: Check out my interview with Scoble, where I drill him on everything from the iinevitability of Microhoo to ideas on the next Twitter… HERE.

In the first video, I show off my Sierra Wireless 881U AirCard for AT&T that I just picked up. Hopefully bandwidth won’t be an issue when I use this, *ahem* but I’vebeen very impressed with it’s 1-2Mbps down and 1Mb up speeds on AT&T’s 3G network and it’s Mac compatibility. All I really want for Christmas is an N95 (or 96) but they don’t appear to be falling from the sky at H&H. Not yet at least.


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Is Ping.fm a Lame Data-Mining Op? Or is it Just Annoying?

go away pingfmSomeone seriously has to cut the noise around here. I signed up for the Ping.fm Beta because, well, I love signing up for betas for no particular reason.

Right off the bat I knew this service was totally pointless. Why would I want to post the same message to 5 or 6 different social networks at the same time? So my friends that are also on one, two or six of the same networks hear me like a broken record? I knew it was dumb, but thinking that — just maybe — someday it could be useful, I signed up, with no intention to actually use it (I’ve done similar thing with Digg, Yelp, GrandCentral and more — signing up early and not really using until I trusted the service.

ping.fm is a scam
ping.fm is a scam

It hasn’t been an hour, though, and I am trying to close my Ping.fm account, but there is no apparent way to opt-out once you sign up (though I did change my account e-mail to no@than.ks). Unfortunately, it’s already too late — they immediately spammed my Pownce and Twitter account with the messages above. THEN, I read their Terms of Service (I know, I shoulda known better) and realized that this was the operation of two kids who likely were more interested in purging people’s data from multiple social websites than actually providing a useful service.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with throwing myself out on the Internet in all transparency and am fully aware of the risks therein. But I hate to see myself and my friends get not only spammed (by each other) but also punked by signing up for a seemingly legitimate service (see Mashable‘s review today). Before we get into the small print, let’s just look at the “company” behind Ping.fm.

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