MYBLOG by Ouriel

Twitter as a platform

This is no secret: i am totally captured by Twitter and the new windows of opportunities to interact with people and services. Services in particular

More and more companies, this is not a secret understand the benefits of using twitter as a platform, just like with Facebook. The only difference is that you have to be very careful in the execution since the Twitter can be very intrusive.

For example some news papers using RSS2Twitter like feature let you get alerts via twitter but that can become disturbing if a news arrive every 30 sec

I am now a DJ a FoxyTunes and i like what they did with Twitter because they give you control on what you can publish. FYI i am a beta DJ with Fred Wilson and Chris Messina on their new service.

Yedda is also using interestingly Twitter. Wefi will do that too very soon

Interestingly i realized that those 3 companies are Israeli: is there something special about twitter in Israel?

I guess that if you are a service that intend to use twitter think how you should give control to your users on what is published in their twitter account.

If i was available today i would seriously think about starting off a company around Twitter and other micro blogging services.

To finish: a smart guy created a FeedFlare Twit this for your feedburner account. I added it on all my blogs. Now you can twit directly a link you are reading or enjoying from my blog RSS

Technorati tags: twitter

ps: i will blog more and more about twitter from now on since this has become one of my first area of interest before online video and search

Wanna make easy money? think skins

This is clearly a big business trend. It was mainly due to mobile phones at first but later one to iPod. Customization of your favorite “toy” is becoming a good lucrative business.

We start to be surrounded by all kinds of gadgets that make also what we are and express some aspect of our personnality. But problem. they are all made the same. So why no just add a twist and give you what you need to make it really yours?

Just type iPod skins in Google and see the number of results to understand what i am talking about. I recently spotted 2 great ideas going that way

Tribbes is creating super skins for your laptop. I think i will by one soon.

Fantastic Brown is creating cool skins to customize your Nespresso machine

Those items are not expensive in absolute but compare to their cost of fabrication and light marketing i would say there is enough margin to make a really lucrative business.

So if you wanna start in that, just spot or anticpate a very popular gadget and create accessories for it. My favourite company in that field is Skinit

Some do it also in digital world with creation of templates for your site or your blog

My bet: iPhone will be massive / twitter should be a lead too

 

Tags: ipod, trend, design, accessories, templatemonster, fantastic+brown, tribbes

Someone please make urgently predicti.icio.us

I am now convinced i was right. A social service around predictions could be hot. So many bloggers (except me maybe, i prefered to have others doing it) are trying to make predictions for 2007. (also here in French)

For some reasons bloggers feel empowered of prediction abilities. Weird and amazing at the same time…

For those who’d ask the picture is that of Nostradamus

technorati tags: predictions 2007 pronostics

One free idea for 2007: social network on predictions

When i see the number of people trying to make predictions and wishes for 2007 at this moment of the year on the blogosphere, i can’t help myself to think that a small website that would aggregate all of those and become the reference for predictors could be a good idea

Not a VC business with IPO at the end. Just a plain good idea with maybe some good buzz and a few easy dollars to make on adsense.

Call it whatever (predicti.cio.us), pull a social network a good text/pic/video editor, ranking mechanism, comments, trackbacks, RSS, widget to export you predictions to your blog or even use blogs APIs to simulatneously post in the website and your blog. That’s it. Fast to set. Cheap to set

it could even be that 43things would be willing to white label their technology for that

Have no time to do it. But if you do, the idea is yours. Prepare it for next year…

If you make some money out of it, invite me for a beer

Here is my prediction for 2007: someone will launch this idea

update: my prediction did not take long to happen…well not exactly. Mashable is encouraging people to post their predictions…

If i was working at Flickr...

One feature i am dying to have at Flickr is selective sharing. All i can do right now is share privately with predefined groups (friends/family) or publicly. But i would like to have the possibility to share photos/groups of photos with only one personn some pictures or with groups of people that i could create simply on the fly(out of an imported contact list for example)

if someone works at flickr and read me, please work on it (and answering, “use the email function” is not a good answer). I never saw that feature in any pic site although i believe it is a great one.

ON A NEWEST BLOG ARCHITECTURE

I just realized the other that most of the interesting posts i wrote will hardly be discovered by a new reader of this (or any other blog). This is quite scary put in regards with the energy it requires. When you publish a book a reader has the chance to know all you want to talk about. NOT WITH A BLOG

Blogs are not built to discover most of the interesting content you are writting. Isn’t it scary? let me explain.

A blog is a daily diary. You update your thoughts and your reader daily or regularly get to know what you have to say. Some of your readers read you everyday, some every week, some once in a while and most of them arrive through Google.

According to my estimation if you are not a A-Lister (TechCrunch, Boing Boing or Scoble are part of those) most of your audience (at least 40%) will arrive through Google requests pointing to one of the posts of your blog.

This leads all of us to read blog in a chronological way. Meaning that the lifespan of a post is very likely to be very short. Meaning that your are not leveraging ALL the potential of your blog. And you know how you can find out this easily: you never get comments.

Blogs as they are built and written today creates an inconvenience that i will try to explain here. As well as giving some ideas of solutions.

• Indeed if most of your audience comes for the first time by a search engine they will read your post and in the best case will get hooked and will bookmark your blog and start reading it FROM that day (even if you are an A-lister blog) 
• If they arrive on your blog by recommandation then they will start to read it from the last day it is updated.
• Some posts are directly linked to the news or a specific date and will loose interest right after that date (results of a sport game, elections, …) some are not and could be interesting to read over time (a book review for example)
• Some posts in your blog will also drive much more interest and interaction than other (comments, trackbacks….) but will get lost over time in the mass of posts.
• Blogs architectures (because of chronolical structure) do not allow to browse/explore very well the posts that drove most interest and the ONLY way to find them is by scrawling categories or calendar.

So what is missing to better explore a blog?

• a post index: a way to see for a period of time a list of all post titles that were published. Something that could be called “most popular posts”
• a interest ranking index: a way to know from first page what where over time posts that generated most interest (comments, trackbacks, links
• a better way to browse blog over time and categories: faster blog browsing including a time tree to know how many posts over a week, month period.
• a new smart tagging mechanism based on time factor relevancy that would be able to know if a post is related to a specific date or not. this would enable readers to get to know all non-time related post
• A tools/widget for blog editors to showcase what they think their best posts are

Those features would help someone that arrives for the fisrt time, out of the reason he came first (google link, recommandation, …) to have a flavour of your blog in 10 minutes instead of having to wait another month to have that confirmation or spend 30 minutes crawling it.

If i was Typepad/MySpace/ Blogger execs or just an entrepreneur i would look in that way.

if you like the story you can digg it

note: i am not referring to WORDPRESS that has all the free plugins to do the above but to mainstream blog plateforms that drive 80% of the traffic

 

PS: last time i gave some indication on improving blogs it leads a few month later to cocomments or co.mments (maybe worth looking at then )

TV ON INTERNET WILL BE BIG

When i see the level of interest my post on FREE TVs ONLINE has been generating for the past 2 days i only can ecourage entrepreneurs to look more into that direction. I am not talking about another YouTube but about a true legal service enabling streaming of all TV channels worlwide premium or ad supported.

 

Logo creation made simple and cheap

I recently had to deal with logo creation. this is probably the most difficult task a marketer has to face and also a very expensive one most of the time.

Assuming you know what you want and that you have a top notch brief you will have to find the golden hands/brain that will bring it life. And the process is tough and long.

Now if you don’t want to go through all that and get something professional in a few days with only a 100 USD (yes ONE ZERO ZERO!) you should try 2 services: LogoYes and LogoWorks.

 

Those are kind of Logo factories with 2 different approach

• LogoYes lets you build your own logo by taking you step by step and suggesting at each level of creation templates/models. Results are immediate.

Here s an exemple of logo i created for myblog in less than 1 min.

• LogoWorks will receive your brief and will deliver submissions made by real designers in just 3 business days. They also offer website creation. Prices are a little more expensive (300 USD) but really worth. Results here can be EXCEPTIONNAL

But nothing replaces the traditionnal approach: working directly with a designer. Inspiration is something you cannot buy and that needs human contact. Logo creation is a process, a ping pong work that requires a lot of energy and analysis. And what you thought initially was good for your logo will evolve as the process of creation goes on.

That’s why those brilliant solutions are not made for demanding customers. But fantastic for urgent request. 

tags technorati : logo logo creation

MynuMo: one of the most brilliant 2.0 idea i saw recently

Take user generated content translated to mobile and you get MynuMo

Create, share, sell ringtones, wall papers,….

If i had to launch a company i would probably look into that direction. I think it will get good traction and business model is just right.

Entrepreneurs: if you search for a good idea to replicate/improve, here is one.

through mobilecrunch

Don t make a resume. MAKE A BLOG

So many times i hear ‘now that i have read your blog i know you better’. It s funny but i have never heard that when i went to a job interview where the employer only has your resume.

A blog, if done right, is a personnal mirror that can be your best ambassador.

• It talks about what you like and what you don t
• It will give an idea of your personal tastes
• It will say a lot about your presentation skills
• It will immediately testify about your intellectual abilities
• It will create a sense of proximity
• It will provide a thorough insight of your skills and interests
• It might even give an idea of your network / networking abilities

In a word a blog is doing all your resume can’t and that is NECESSARY for find a good job (actually you can also link your blog to your resume online).

So if i may just give an advice to any person who reads that post and don t have a blog: START. You can’t even imagine how rewarding it can be. Send your Blog along with your resume. Recruiters start to read them and know their value. A good personnal blog (even if you don’t have 1000 visitors a day) will make you stand out of the crowd.

My new employer actually found me though my blog.

Actually this can be extended to other opportunities. Blog can help you in making business, finding new friends/old friends, discovering new interests…I have proofs of that every day around me.

Blogs will become soon the must-have item along with any cover letter/resume. Monster and other JobBoards will create job blogs (here s a web2.0 idea) and this post will soon become a “Come on, we knew it!” post.

As i said to my father trying to explain how useful a blog can be “ You remember email 10 years ago? You did not have one. right? Well with Blog it s going to be the same”

PS:

A good blog/wiki idea would be to collect testimonies about HOW GOOD A BLOG CAN BE TO YOU. I guarantee success of whoever will manage it

Just SHOOT.