Tag: social media

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New York Times Co. Leads Funding for New Online J Site ‘Daylife’

daylifeA formal announcement is forthcoming from Daylife — the news site that has popped up in conversation over the past year because of Craig Newmark, Jeff Jarvis and others’ involvement in the project.

The New York Times Company appears to be one of the top investors, which could foreshadow a bold move into user-generated news and reader-customizable content.

Staci Kramer at Paid Content writes:

The mission is to gather and organize news in ways that are most relevant to the user. That could be by event, topic, author, geography or other factors. Source pages that show what a journalist writes about or who is quoted are part of the mix. RSS plays an important role. In an interview, [Upendra] Shardanand [founder of Firefly] said the distributed platform—designed for use across multiple sites—will be open “to a degree” with options for revenue sharing and licensing for those doing a heavy volume. “Anyone can take what we’re building and add it to their own site … Obviously, we have to make some revenue.”

Nice to see the Times making a proactive move long after their relatively idiotic acquisition of About.com. Interested to see how — if at all — Jay Rosen‘s NewAssignment.Net is involved.

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Future of Web Apps Summit Podcasts

MP3s and video of most of the speaker presentations from last month’s FoWA summit in San Francisco are now available for public consumption. Chow them down here.

Also: Here’s a collection of links to the great PowerPoint presentations of some of the speakers:

Speaker Presentation Slides

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Future of Web Apps Summit — Day 1

Following are some highlights from my notes after the first day of the Future of Web Apps Summit in San Francisco. Overall, its been a great experience, with a nice synergy of speakers and useful presentations/tips. Here’s a bit o jerky to chew on:

Dick Hardt of Sxip opened with an entertaining, metaphor-filled powerpoint. In a nutshell, we all need to develop a “V1agra” app — one that enables the user to do what they otherwise are unable to do. Smart and secure, yet marketable use of identity seems to be the Sxip pitch, as the information collected in an Internet users multiple accounts and usernames help “predict future behavior based on what people have done in the past.

Next, Kevin Rose presented a little Digg history lesson, and then treated us to some apps and widgets in development (as well as some blog plug-ins that is slowly rolling out, i.e. at feedburner).

Rose touched on themes that were repeated throughout the afternoon — “keep it simple and rewarding,” “destroy the garbage.” Stamen is incubating a number of new features for Digg.

He credited the “Inside LiveJournal’s Backend” PDF as an inspiration and door opener.

That’s it for now — I’m off to an open-bar shindig hosted by the fine folks at Google especially for Summit attendees. More breakdown to come… Technorati’s Tantek Çelik was kind enough to post his entire presentation on Microformats at his Web site. Check it out.

Great photos of all speakers and the laptop-infested geek scene at flickr and also these gems at Laughing Squid.

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Facebook’s Zuckerberg Apologizes; Is Not lonelygirl15

mark zuckerberg, facebokThe 22-year-old proprietor of the infectiously popular Facebook, the two-year-old social networking Web site for the college set, apologized this morning, for what I — and others — felt was merely exposing the obvious.

Zuckerberg and his staffers will take part in a chat Saturday at 4 p.m. ET in a Facebook group he started last week addressing net neutrality and the upcoming election: “Free Flow of Information on the Internet.”

Nobody but the 9 million + Facebook members appear to matter, however, as the majority of the social network watching blogosphere has become wholly obsessed (as before it was only moderately obsessed) with the mystery of lonelygirl15, now playing in a USAToday (popcandy blog) and L.A. Times near you.

Thanks Staci @ PaidContent for the heads up.