700 Web2.0 sites “reviewed by hand”

Check it out, this is great. Not the be-all end all list, but pretty cool. Funny omissions: upcoming.org not in events. Podshow not in podcasts. NetSquared not in philanthropy, ouch – maybe next year. See any others? I love that Blummy was a winner! I use it all the time.

This is a great peek into the field. Quite a few I’ve never seen before. The company that came up with this site, SEOMoz, is brilliant. I found it via Digg.

Social Signal to teach strategic blogging workshop in B.C. this May

Here’s something the world needs more of: a workshop on blogging as part of your larger communication strategy. And not just any workshop, but a 4 day workshop in a beautiful location with great food. (Priced quite fairly, I think, given how intensive it sounds.) Alex Samuel and Rob Cottingham of Social Signal are very smart people, I met them and enjoyed their company at recent South by Southwest and NTen conferences. Rob is a politically savvy and very funny guy. Alex has a PHD from Harvard and does online work around blogging, tagging, RSS, the international digital divide and lots of other topics. (And with Net Squared, where we’re both contracted.) This workshop isn’t about the technical side of blogging though, it’s about the strategic side of the medium.

I know that in my consulting practice, and I hear the same from other people all the time, many organizations can have a hard time grasping the ethos and potential of self-publishing on the web – of blogging! I find that the better I understand the whole story myself, the better I’m able to explain it to other people, to make it happen and to get the most out of the medium. That’s why something like what Alex and Rob are putting on makes sense to me.

You can read about the workshop on the venue’s web site and about Social Signal at socialsignal.com

Inline chat with folks on your site


Group or private chat via Mobber.com

Check that out! Couldn’t be simpler, this service called Mobber was posted on Emily Chang’s eHub. What’s the e in eHub stand for? For the e in Web 2.0 names like Mobber that didn’t get eliminated. No, but it’s nice to see that e.

If readers here and I like this, I may try shrinking it and putting it in my sidebar. Can you imagine how much fun it would be to IM with some one reading the same article you are at the same time and say “have you figured out how to get this tool to work? Marshall’s writing is incomprehensible!” Talk about the loss of control over the message that comes through a site though! It almost scares even me.

We’ll have to see how all the specifics in IMness work out in this system. Seems like a cool idea though.

I just tried another service called userplane, but it didn’t make anything appear in a blog post. That one has a Drupal plug in though, which is nice. I think I like mobber.

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Back in the action again

I’ve been away for awhile at a conference about the web with almost no internet access at it. Had a great time but cannot understand why that happened. It made me very angry.

Now I’ve got to get back to posting on the various blogs I’m responsible for. Hope all are well, more later.

Tried Second Life for first time today

It’s true. Second Life, it’s all the rage amongst lots of folks – I had never heard about it before SXSW and I heard SO MUCH about it there. Like the American Cancer Society held a virtual relay for life event in Second Life. People were talking about using it for prison recidivism reduction and other forms of rehab. As a means of socialization for the severely disabled. All kinds of stuff.

To get a taste of where this wild new world is going, check out New World Notes. I got to have dinner with the author, James Au, in Austin and I think what he’s doing is great. Second Life is interesting enough that an exec from the company that runs it will be speaking at the Net Squared conference on Web 2.0 and social change.