Kevin Rose launches WeFollow via Digg

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wefollow

With Pownce closed and sold to Six Apart in December of 2008, Kevin Rose apparently had more up his Diggnation shirt sleeves. Say hello to WeFollow a user-generated Twitter aggregator that makes use of common hashtags to determine your “niche” as a microblogger.

What’s brilliant about WeFollow is that there is no need for sign ups: all you need to do is tweet hashtag categories (you can see recommendations in the WeFollow sidebar) to @wefollow and the service organizes you into up to three

Kevin Rose blasted WeFollow into Digg today and the results are epic. There have been a number of creative ways to monetize Twitter and WeFollow may just be another portal to do so. Categorizing Twitter users according to niche adds more value than the regular mess of the front page time line.

How did you explain new media to your folks?

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Before he retired, my father was a banker for more than ten years. But he devoted a lot of his spare time writing for a national broadsheet and a few magazines (he still continues to do so online). When he finally joined Facebook two weeks ago, it became easier to explain my work in this “new media” industry.

I guess I’m lucky. I don’t find the need to submit cringing stories to My Parents Joined Facebook — not that I have anything to hide from my dad, but I’m glad that he gets it, as a former journalist who found the need to catch up with the times. There aren’t too many people in their 60’s who bend over that way. For him, converting his column to an online medium allowed him the luxury of not having to go through an editor — he found the idea of not having a deadline attractive, and being able to get instant feedback almost immediately more enthralling. To him, it isn’t about “print being dead” — it’s about forcing the traditional industry to learn new tricks. You can only be senile up to some point.

How did you explain blogs, YouTube, Twitter and all that to your folks? More importantly, have they taken the plunge as well? Believe it or not, the main reason why my father joined Facebook was PEER PRESSURE from his old friends from high school and college who are now happily retired in their 60’s, and perhaps have nothing better to do than play Pet Society.

Happy weekend, blogosphere!

Dave Winer has yet to hang his pajamas

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Dave Winer wrote a rebuttal to Daniel Lyons’ piece on the latter’s hanging of the blogging pajamas. “There’s no money in blogs.” says Lyons. Winer on the other hand says there is — he just made 2 million:

So when I told you I made over $2 million with this blog, why did you immediately look for ads? I can save you the trouble — there aren’t any. And in the 12 years this blog has been here there has never been an ad on this blog. With a caveat, unless you count me talking about my products. Because I do talk about my products here. I try to stay as balanced as I can, but of course I tilt toward the positive. I have a bias — I wouldn’t have made the products if I didn’t think they were good. But like all people with real products I know they’re not perfect, sometimes they’re imperfect, and I try to be honest about that. [quote]

[Read more…]

Getting “tangled up” in iWeb ’09

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A raise of hands please: Blogger? Joomla? Moveable Type? WordPress?

In the world of blogging, these are more than likely the top platforms you’ll recommend to friends if they’re out to set up a new blog. But how many out there will actually recommend using iWeb? Wait, let me rephrase that question. How many Mac users will actually recommend using iWeb for publishing your blog?

How many of you are running blogs built on iWeb? [Read more…]

Determining Media Values for Blogs

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Have you ever wondered how a PR or marketing agency computes for media values within blogs? This is very different from advertising value – as there’s always a dollar price slapped on to a specific ad slot. But media value is different – as it takes into consideration other things such as how the message was communicated.

Media value is nothing more than a quantitative way to express the PR generated from your product through TV, radio, print and other below the line events. If you’re an Internet marketer or PR firm, have you developed a way to determine media values for your client? [Read more…]