Engadget has a new look. Nice. But am I the only one at this stage to have noticed that the back end changes in terms of voting on comments etc is Netscape. Clever work by Jason Calacanis to leverge the scripting from Netscape into his Blogsmith platform though. Still no support for trackbacks though. As Darren over at Problogger notes theres less ads as well. With a page rank of 8 I’d think they could live off the side bar text links alone 🙂

The long awaited first installment of the Chartreuse citizen media experiement has been delivered.

Wow.

Skip the Youtube insert and go straight to the .mov link at the bottom, the quality is much better. Superb editing. Interesting conversation. Interesting feedback, the compare and contrast montage at the end was quite honestly moving.

8 more installments to go.

Folks, head on over to Chartreuse and take a look. This is where the cool kids are, the ones with a brain in their heads that don’t always look at the world through geek-coloured glasses. I want in. We are looking at the future of citizen media. It’s being played out right now. Will this experiment change the world? probably not, and yet if it inspired others to seek the truth this could become a seed of a new revolution.

Tags: New Orleans, chartreuse, 1938 media

b5media’s latest blog: Jessandashlee.com, dedicated to all things Jessica and Ashlee Simpson. We launched it a day or two ago, I registered the domain off my own bat after a suggestion for Arieanna and Leora and did the layout myself, although Leora did the header. Super quick turn around, a great example of how important good communications and project management works across a small team. Of course as you get bigger and the team grows that’s not always as easily extended without the tool set to support the expansion, but it’s a fine starting point.

But back to the blog: it’s not breaking records in terms of traffic compared to some of b5’s existing sites, but it’s doing amazing traffic for a two day old blog, traffic that some people wait months before they get to that point, or may never. Will it keep up? I’d say I’d hope so but I know so. Arieanna Schweber and Leora Zellman, the b5 hit makers. These two are stars. If they were selling me something I’d buy it every single time. I’m tempted to knickname Arieanna Gold Finger, because everything she touches turns to gold, and Leora just has this amazing ability to click with readers. Great stuff. At the end of the day though celebrities aren’t particularly my thing, and I’m not an expert in the area, but I continue to listen and learn every day. It’s easy to drink the kool aid and be surrounded by the nodding heads of the white-boy geek set, it’s harder to listen to the warriors at the coal face. Delivery is about interaction with your customer or reader. Always listen to your people on the ground, they often know what works better than you do.

Performancing has a job listed for a Google Blogger. The company hiring is a firm by the name of Visual Connect. It’s an Australian company, never heard of them prior to now, but it’s the second time in as many weeks I’ve seen Australian companies expand into blog network plays. Of course, new blog networks are probably so last year or the year before, but finally the minow of Australia awakes…or as the case may be, is catching up.

Tags: Blog networks

They’ve got to be joking. Congrats to the site spammers though, the “ultimate news portal”! hilarious, given there would be dozens of other sites that do a better job out there already 🙂

Minic over at The Blogging Times is advertising for an intern. It’s a non-paid position but by being part of that team you not only get exposure at the site, you also get to pick the brains of the Hunter S Thompson of the Blogosphere, Chartreuse. Recommended.

I know that the Techcrunch gang came under a fair bit lot of fire in the Techcrunch comments previously everytime the site did a cross promotion for Crunchgear…but it looks like the left hand might not be quite sure what the right hand is doing, or thinking, or wanting…

In Bloglines showing the RSS feed:

And then the page itself:

So it was posted…then pulled. Now all of this happened overnight my time so I obviously didn’t get to see the comments on this one, but what is interesting to note is the next post on Zune references Crunchgear…but actually uses a shot from Weblogs Inc’s Engadget! Indeed, the sad thing I guess for Techcrunch readers is that the Zune post only links to the stuff at Crunchgear… whilst I don’t want to bag Crunchgear (I happen to think the site is doing a pretty good job), Techcrunch readers would have been far better served if the main post on the Zune linked to other sources out there covering the Zune launch, Engadget in particular, because to be honest other sources gave a far better run down on Zune than Crunchgear did. Can we see the conflict of interest happening now not only to Mike Arrington, but others writing at Techcruch? Indeed, if Techcrunch was a Weblogs Inc. site, Jason Calacanis would be under some serious fire by now for not linking to superior sources, or as the case maybe, only cross linking to owned network sites that do nothing more that republish information from elsewhere.

Tags: Zune, Techcrunch, Cruchgear, Weblogs Inc, Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis points to Federated Media’s new Digg style site:SearchMob. Haven’t had a deep look at it, but what I did notice is the link to the CMS, a Web 2.0 Open Source package called Pligg. Yep, you to can now run your own Digg clone from the comfort of your own home and all for free! 🙂

I’m currently running on a empty tank. Left the conference yesterday at 3pm local time (1pm WST) and got home at 2am WST. That’s a serious commute, then was up again at 5am. Suffice to say though it did give me some time to think about the conference as a whole. One note I would make that at least in the consumer stream (I didn’t attend the enterprise sessions, you had the choice of one or the other) the speakers on Day 3 where a whole pile better on average than the two days before, mainly because they spoke about their marketplaces, regulatory issues, conceptual issues in relation to their businesses, as opposed to just trying to sell me stuff…which was a relief.

But general thoughts in dot point:

• The standards of corporate management amongst Australian companies and local arms of international firms is all over the place. Sure not everyone is, nor can be a good public speaker, but what I did notice that there were speakers that got the concept of engaging an audience…and then there were those who were just there to plug their own products. What was perhaps surprising is that the type of business, in terms of size, wasn’t a determining factor in relation to the quality of the speaker/ representative of that company. As an observe it appears to be nearly random, although I’m sure if you analysed this further there may have been a statistical reason for this (for example, and only guessing, education, experience, background, even corporate location within Australia).
• The same goes for the understanding of concepts relating to Web 2.0, the more people I spoke to or listened to, the more it seemed nearly random. It would be easy to say for example that younger people get Web 2.0 more that those of the baby boomer generation, and yet this didn’t hold true. As I’ve noted previously though, the level of awareness of Web 2.0 and concepts such as engaging and being part of the conversation were foreign to a majority of the participants, and yet I know that a similar cross section of American IT firms and journalists for example would yield a totally different result. The Web 2.0 message isn’t getting through in Australia. I suppose the question then becomes is this the fault of Web 2.0 advocates within Australia (or perhaps more sadly, the lack there of), or is it more the generalised case that Australia is years behind in the IT game?
• Australia may not be producing enough quality candidates in Tech related fields to fill available positions. I can only conclude that due to the number of American accents I heard at the conference. Sure, it was primarily from multinational firms, but statistically given there isn’t a massive number of American’s living in Australia, they do seem to be over represented at the higher levels of management
• I discovered that there is VC capital in Australia, and a fair bit of it at that, although it probably doesn’t know much about Web 2.0 as yet.

I’ll probably think of some more things as I recharge my batteries in the week ahead. Generally speaking, I think the conference was a major success as a networking event, but I’m probably only half convinced in terms of the various panels and sessions themselves. I don’t tend to get to a lot of conferences, but people I know who do often tell me that most people attend not for the sessions but for the networking, and if this was why most people attended then it gets a bloody great big tick of approval. Would I go again if I was invited? I’d say yes, although I’d get Phil to boost up the Web 2.0 session :-).

Tags: Media Connect, Influence 2006