First, we were in on the whitehot Naked Conversations book launch party at Rancho Techcrunch on Friday. Today, four of our logos show up on Stabilo’s extended mashup of Web 2.0 logos. We’re not even serious about egorRSS, yet there it is. WeblogsWork, PodServe and SimpleTicket are also there. Now all we need is an interview on Geek Entertainment TV & the trifecta is complete.
Surely venture funding isn’t far behind. We’ll invite you to the crazydelicious launch party, of course.
Technorati Tags: bubble, logo2.0, podserve, simpleticket, techcrunch, techcrunch5, weblogs+work
Blake Burris (of CocoaRadio fame) did a podcast interview with us at Barcamp Dallas. We talk about why we think it’s important to do things like Barcamp, what Weblogs Work is about, and where we might take all this from here.
Listen to the podcast. (4.5 MB mp3)
Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampdallas, blake burris, brian oberkirch, cocoaradio, Weblogs Work
Edgeio is about to launch a free service that will make it simpler for you to use your company blog to widely distribute job listings, a service or product for sale, or anything else for which you’d have traditionally used eBay or Craigslist as a centralized market.
You’ll post a listing on your own blog and add the tag ‘listing’ or ‘listings’. That’s it. You can also go claim your blog (as you’d do for Technorati), use more descriptive tags to improve visibility, and add the Edgeio ping servers to your blog (Weblogs Work will be doing this for our clients) to make Edgeio work even better for you.
We wrote more about Edgeio here. You can also follow the launch at the Edgeio blog. Or track what people are saying about it.
Technorati Tags: corporate+blogging, edgeio, job+search, keith+teare, listings, mikearrington, webreakstuff
Hugh McLeod has a great update post about the progress of his blog marketing campaign for Stormhoek:
Blogging doubled Stormhoek sales in less than twelve months.
So, great ROI, right? But more key is the insight that Hugh offers about how it worked:
I have been saying this for years, and still not everybody believes me: “Blogs are a good way of making things happen indirectly.”
No, bloggers and their friends didn’t start suddenly descending on supermarkets, buying the wine in large numbers. That’s not how it works.
What happened is that by interfacing with the blogosphere, it fundementally changed how Stormhoek looked at treating their primary customers (the supermarket chains) and the end-users (the supermarkets’ customers).
i.e. It caused an internal disruption, both within the company and the actual trade. Wine drinkers’ basic purchasing habits didn’t change because of the meme, but the meme allowed Stormhoek to align itself more closely with said habits.
Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, hugh+macleod, stormhoek
Wink is a new search engine that is about to launch to the general public. It combines tradtional search results with a global look at tagged social bookmarked sites. So, now you can easily search across pre-filtered content, which Wink users can reinforce by ‘voting’ on certain stories that match their search terms. The more we all use it, the more we collectively filter the results.
More from Steve Rubel, Mike Arrington, Matt Marshall, & Om.
Technorati Tags: search, steve+rubel, tag, techcrunch, wink
Weblogs Work & M Ventures are featured in an article on Web 2.0 in a piece in yesterday’s Seattle Times — a syndication of an article that ran a few weeks ago in the Star-Telegram. The piece focuses on Alex’s rapid development of elfURL, one of the apps in the Big in Japan toolbox we’re working on. I was able to put in a plug for the sandbox meme (check out Peter Merholz’s ‘Designing for the Sandbox’ blog):
“Web experiences aren’t things you control so much,” said Brian Oberkirch, chief executive of Weblogs Work, a self-described Web 2.0 company. “It’s more that you create a sandbox people can play in.”
Technorati Tags: alex muse, biginjapan, brian oberkirch, elfurl, mventures, web 2.0, Weblogs Work
Start Up guru & evangelism evangelist Guy Kawasaki sent out word that he’s going to start blogging on January 1. We encourage you to watch his site for it. We really dig Guy’s style. You can also participate in a free online seminar on some of Guy’s ideas in a recent book, The Art of the Start:
This is the link for the online seminar for The Art of the Start. It’s
January 4th at 10 am Pacific, not 9 am Pacific.
Technorati Tags: artofthestart, guy+kawasaki
Blogging gives you the power to expand on your own story. You no longer have to be satisfied with the media account, hoping they’ll amend the story, print a retraction, etc. Mark Cuban said he started his blog for just that reason. (And he gives another example of how he felt his comments weren’t accurately portrayed in a New York Times story over the weekend.)
Here’s a more local example. Alex Muse wrote a blog post not too long ago about his biggest failure — his inability to max out the value he was building with his telecom services start-up, LayerOne. Right after he did that post, the Dallas Business Journal named LayerOne’s acquisition by Switch & Data one of the best corporate turnarounds of the year. How could the company be both a failure and a successful turnaround?
For that, you’d need to go back to the TexasVC blog to get the rest of the story. Alex lays out, in self-deprecating detail, how it all really went down. He even apologizes to his first round investors who lost serious money on the deal. The net net, LayerOne went bankrupt after putting $20 million into a growing business that was just starting to take off. They put together a new team to buy the assets for a fraction of that, got a few centers cashflow positive and then sold the business off to Switch & Data for a few million more than the initial investment. Who won? The management and the post-bankruptcy investors. Who lost? The first round investors and the 60+ employees who built LayerOne, but who weren’t around to share in the post-sale windfall. Including one very smart cookie, Catarina Wylie, who hired me to work on the LayerOne launch. I’m glad to have had that rocketboom experience with Cat, Alex & that great team. I’m also proud of Alex for using his own DIY media tools to tell it like it is. Or at least tell his version of things. The great part is, others can come behind and add their own experiences to the story.
Technorati Tags: alex muse, dallasbusinessjournal, layerone, mark cuban, texasvc
The Architel corporate web/blog site has been launched. The open source WordPress architecture allows the company to launch the site and make continious changes to it over time. So you can never say a site is ‘done.’ Kudos go to Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits for the xhtml/css design (as well as the new Architel logo). Weblogs Work integrated the xhtml/css into WordPress (actually three WordPress installs).
Architel is a boutique IT support company located in Dallas, Texas that supports small businesses (20-100) employees. Their unique IT service delivery model (one flat-monthly-fee for all-you-can-eat support) aligns the interests of the small business owner and Architel. The company was a pioneer in this space and is now a pioneer in the ‘blog as corporate website’ meme. Here are screenshots or just visit the site yourself here @ architel.com.
The site was entered in the website design contest at SXSW conference and we are crossing our fingers that the judges will enjoy the tight integration between the blog CMS and Dan’s xhtml and css. What do you think about our work?
Two days ago we noticed that Weblogs Work was ranked 24th out of all PR blogs and blogged about it here. Moments ago I read on Alex’s blog that Weblogs Work was ranked 6th - I figured he must have misread the rankings, but he didn’t! According to PubSub, Weblogs Work is now the sixth highest ranked PR blog. Imagine if we had the time to really start blogging!
Remember Gahbunga? It was a neat little application for teenage girls, a hot-or-not for their camera phones. Basically, you could take a picture of your date, send it to Gahbunga and get a rating from your friends or the entire Gahbunga community. Our WebWork Team recently decided that there was not enough room on the boat for several of their current projects including Gahbunga. The team is almost completely focused on the development of a set of Web 2.0 tools they are calling Big in Japan: Web 2.0 Toolbox.
No one on the WebWorks Team wanted to ‘own’ the project by promoting or adding features to it. The team decided that the best solution would be to sell it on ebay so here is a link to the auction. Own a dating service? Own a dating website? Want to start a cool little online dating business? Maybe Gahbunga is for you. Wonder if they will get any bids?
There is a tight little Web 2.0 bombsquad all squatting together out in Atherton, CA this week: the TechCrunch boys, Frederico Oliveira and Richard MacManus. They’ve decided to gather their sites under one offering — the Web 2.0 working group. TechCrunch focuses on product launches and new startups, Fred’s site Webreakstuff on design & usability, and Richard’s Read/Write Web is a must read site for trends and analysis.
You can get all those sites in one convenient master feed here.
We mashed it up with our new pre-beta project, FrankenFeed, then tidied up the URL with elfURL. We encourage you to follow these guys.
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