Creeva’s World 2.0

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/////////////////////////////////////////// 2008: Web 2.0 Com­pa­nies I Couldnt Live With­out Posted: 01 Jan 2008 01:02 PM CST http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CreevasSharedItemsInGoogleReader/~3/209649582/
This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Com­pa­nies I Couldn’t Live With­out.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, writ­ten a year ago, is here.
This is a list of the prod­ucts I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Word­press, Deli­cious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Ama­zon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are use­ful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as pro­duc­tive or happy with­out all of them.
The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also get­ting longer (see chart). Five prod­ucts have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, Tech­Meme, Skype, Word­press). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1–800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Deli­cious, Tech­no­rati). And there are seven new prod­ucts on the list (Ama­zon MP3 Store, Face­book, Fire­fox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twit­ter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be sur­pris­ing, like Fire­fox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock pre­vi­ously and was unhappy with Fire­fox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is per­form­ing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Page­flakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for exam­ple). And there are a bunch of star­tups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a cou­ple of favorite gad­gets.
Here’s the cur­rent list, in alpha­bet­i­cal order, of prod­ucts I use every day and couldn’t live with­out:
(more…)
Crunch Net­work: Mobile­Crunch Mobile Gad­gets and Appli­ca­tions, Deliv­ered Daily.

/////////////////////////////////////////// MeeMix Opens Beta To Pub­lic, Has Much Work Ahead Posted: 01 Jan 2008 10:26 AM CST http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CreevasSharedItemsInGoogleReader/~3/209649583/
Tel Aviv, Israel based MeeMix, which we first cov­ered in August, is kicking-off the New Year by mov­ing their taste-predicting Inter­net radio ser­vice from closed to open Beta.
Inter­net radio is already a very crowded space dom­i­nated by entrenched star­tups like Last.fm and Pan­dora. Smaller play­ers and recent entrants such as Spi­ral­Frog, Jango and Slacker are not increas­ing the breath­ing room. MeeMix wants its share of the pie, too, and is keep­ing its crosshairs focused on the U.S. mar­ket and its dom­i­nant rev­enue poten­tial.
MeeMix’s pub­lic beta launch is marked by the addi­tion of new features:

Meeps: Comment-based con­ver­sa­tions users can have regard­ing a song, album or artist.
Sta­tion Home: Every MeeMix sta­tion now has a ded­i­cated page allow­ing users to inter­act in its con­text and shape its playlist. Mee Feeds: This is basi­cally MeeMix’s ver­sion of Facebook’s News Feed. The feed indi­cates songs favor­ited, sta­tions rated, friends added, etc. Mee Jour­ney: Users can see other mem­bers’ pub­lic log or “jour­ney” of actions in MeeMix. Sta­tion Gift: Users can now send other mem­bers a sta­tion as a gift. The sta­tion is then the “prop­erty” of the recip­i­ent who can cus­tomize it with­out affect­ing the orig­i­nal sta­tion. Twit­ter Inte­gra­tion: Users can update their Twit­ter accounts with songs they’ve lis­tened to, their favorite sta­tions, etc.
MeeMix claims to have dou­bled its music cat­a­log, but a search for my per­sonal favorites ‘John Coltrane’ and ‘Miles Davis’ came-up empty. The same searches on Jango and Slacker both came-up pos­i­tive.
I would like to have seen the addi­tion of “genre” to the chan­nel cre­ation wiz­ard which is still lim­ited to artist and song. A wid­getized player also would have been a wel­come addi­tion, espe­cially the desk­top kind.
In my orig­i­nal post, I hypoth­e­sized that licens­ing its engine could become MeeMix’s core busi­ness. Looks like this might not be far fetched as the com­pany says they have been approached by a mobile oper­a­tor for the pur­pose of pow­er­ing a taste-based cel­lu­lar music stream­ing ser­vice. The com­pany has also shared with me some inter­est­ing offline deals on the hori­zon that should keep MeeMix’s poten­tial on a pos­i­tive note for 2008. We’ll post another update soon. In the mean­time, let us know how you think MeeMix com­pares to the com­pe­ti­tion.
Update: MeeMix also sent out an email to some users today say­ing that they will be dis­con­tin­u­ing the ser­vice in Israel for now due to licens­ing issues (Thanks Orli):

Meemix Load­ing infor­ma­tion about Meemix… Pan­dora Load­ing infor­ma­tion about Pan­dora… Last.fm Load­ing infor­ma­tion about Last.fm… Slacker Load­ing infor­ma­tion about Slacker… Jango Load­ing infor­ma­tion about Jango…

Crunch Net­work: Crunch­Board because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

/////////////////////////////////////////// The Glory, Bliss and How-to of Screen Scrap­ing for RSS Posted: 31 Dec 2007 10:57 PM CST http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CreevasSharedItemsInGoogleReader/~3/209649584/screen-scraping.php
Wired has an awe­some top story today on the world of star­tups uti­liz­ing scraped data from big com­pa­nies to offer new lay­ers of value for their own users. It’s a roughly objec­tive piece that I highly rec­om­mend read­ing but it was also inspi­ra­tion for me to finally record a screen­cast on the sub­ject (see below).
I love RSS, prob­a­bly more than any­thing on the web. If you’re not famil­iar with the con­cept, see my very old def­i­n­i­tion of RSS and my almost-as-old post on teach­ing peo­ple about RSS.
Not every page on the web pub­lishes an RSS feed, though. Thus the need for these won­der­ful screen scrap­ing tools. I’ve writ­ten about a vari­ety of tools you can use to cre­ate a feed for a site or page that doesn’t have one. Some­times, though, you’ve got to pull out the big guns. In those cases, it’s time for Dapper.

Dap­per is a com­pany founded in Israel, now ven­ture backed and was named in the afore­men­tioned Wired arti­cle. It is the sweet­ness.
Dap­per will let you pull data from almost any web page and get it in a wide vari­ety of out­puts, includ­ing RSS, email, iCal, a Google Gad­get, CSV and Google Maps. Is that incred­i­ble or what?
Let’s let the video do that talk­ing. I have an awful cold (it’s almost bet­ter, Mom!) so please excuse the very rough voice. I made the fol­low­ing screen­cast using Jing­Pro­ject, set­ting up an RSS feed of search results in Del.icio.us for arti­cles tagged from Read­WriteWeb.
Click­ing on the image below will open up another win­dow so you can view the 4 minute video full screen.

If you’re as excited about Dap­per as I am, you should check out Dap­per­Camp, a two day free con­fer­ence all about Dap­per com­ing up in early Feb­ru­ary in San Fran­cisco. IBM and Mind­touch are spon­sor­ing the event and Mitch Kapor is keynot­ing it. It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Take that, Wired Mag ambiva­lence! Really, though, you should read that Wired arti­cle — it’s a good one that dis­cusses some issues that are going to be very big once more peo­ple fig­ure out how excit­ing data porta­bil­ity is.

/////////////////////////////////////////// Jan­u­ary 1st, 1808: Slave Impor­ta­tion Banned In US [Great Moments] Posted: 31 Dec 2007 05:06 PM CST http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CreevasSharedItemsInGoogleReader/~3/209649585/january-1st-1808-slave-importation-banned-in-us
Con­sid­er­ing we spend a good deal of time focus­ing on leg­is­la­tion that pro­tects con­sumers and/or (usu­ally or) busi­nesses, we thought it appro­pri­ate to point out one of the big his­tor­i­cal moments of trade law, not to men­tion human rights—tomorrow marks the “200th anniver­sary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the impor­ta­tion of slaves into the United States was pro­hib­ited.” Hey, it didn’t stop the mad­ness, but at least it was a start.
Eric Foner, a pro­fes­sor of his­tory at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, argues in an Op-Ed piece that it was in fact this early shap­ing of the US slave-based econ­omy that helped pre­vent an even more dis­as­trous human rights sce­nario by the time the Civil War erupted:[Without the ban,] it is plau­si­ble to assume that hun­dreds of thou­sands if not mil­lions of Africans would have been brought into the coun­try.
This most likely would have resulted in the “democ­ra­ti­za­tion” of slav­ery as prices fell and more and more whites could afford to pur­chase slaves, along with a fur­ther increase in South­ern polit­i­cal power thanks to the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. These were the very rea­sons advanced by South Carolina’s polit­i­cal lead­ers when they tried, unsuc­cess­fully, to reopen the African slave trade in the 1850s.
More slaves would also have meant height­ened fear of revolt and ever more strin­gent con­trols on the slave pop­u­la­tion. It would have rein­forced South­ern­ers’ demands to annex to the United States areas suit­able for plan­ta­tion slav­ery in the Caribbean and Cen­tral Amer­ica. Had the impor­ta­tion of slaves con­tin­ued unchecked, the United States could well have become the hemi­spheric slave-based empire of which many South­ern­ers dreamed.Awww snap! Take that, dead South­ern­ers of the 19th cen­tury! Y’all didn’t get your empire! Happy new year.
“For­got­ten Step Toward Free­dom” [New York Times]
(Photo: Getty)