No matter. As we said the other day, this is all a distraction from making great stuff & using our powers to help people make better connections. The Web community is large and does contain multitudes. Do we contradict ourselves sometimes? Very well then. The very nature of things shifting to the edge means that it will be harder to name the thing, to describe it simply. To contain it. Do your homework. Live in the communities. Soak it in & listen. What is happening will not be something you can subscribe to in one feed, read one overview, watch one channel.

The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. And if you are paying attention, you’ll see people all over the world pointing at the new stuff on the Web. Each his own Adam naming the animals.

Mule has the definitive response.

(Brad Burnham, Fred Wilson, Charlie O’Donnell) 

After wrapping up the social media sessions at Ketchum and grabbing a burger with Amit Gupta at the Shake Shack, I walked over to the offices of Union Square Ventures and talked with Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham and Charlie O’Donnell. We talked about what blogging and social media have done for their deal flow and visibility, about some of their portfolio companies like Feedburner and delicious, and about what the new investment environment is like for the types of companies they are interested in: technology-enabled services firms.

Listen to the podcast:

• At the Weblogs Worknotes page
• Download the file (~45 MB .mp3)
• Subscribe to the feed

Unlike a number of my colleagues, I can’t get that excited about Shift’s attempt to remake the press release format. Are press releases lame? Sure. Do PR pros need to change their way of thinking? Sure. (That’s one of the things we’ve been preaching @ Ketchum and lots of other places lately.)

That said, this template is a distinction without a difference. Social media is about connection, not content. If you take the same-old corpspeak and put it into a sexier format (“The kids are using the Digg, make sure our ‘news’ is Diggable.”), you haven’t done much. In no way are you availing yourself of the real power of social media. Didn’t one of the newswires bake in delicious support for their material recently? Again, glad that you are aware of the aggregators that are going to render your distribution channel inefficient & therefore null, but you still haven’t done much in trying to hijack delicious.

Instead of making clients feel like they are doing social media by tarting up their message points and pushing it out via other channels, how about:

• Having them actually read & track blogs.
• Actually participate in the communities that matter to their business.
• Banish the media relations mindset from their approach (along with the odious ‘blogger relations’) and instead start genuine conversations with media, developers, customers, etc.
• Take a truly niched approach and actually use the range of tools available to work the edges.
• Teaching clients the value and potential of syndication (which Shift could demonstrate by offering RSS feeds of its own press material).

We are stoked that the discussion is headed in this direction. We think that media outlets and PR shops alike have to do much more than merely add cosmetic changes to stay relevant.

Follow more of the conversation here & here.

What do you get when you put a bunch of geeks, a bunch of do-gooders and a bunch of wine together for a weekend in California's Calaveras County?

You get WineCamp !

WineCamp is an ad-hoc geek and non-profit gathering taking place at a lovely vineyard over the weekend of May 26-28th. Everyone will arrive in the afternoon/early evening of Friday the 26th, pitch our tents, and join the rounds of campfire songs. On Saturday morning we'll rise with the sun to a cowboy breakfast, then we'll move straight into presentations, discussions and collaborations where everyone participates. On Sunday, we'll introduce wifi and power to the equation so that project teams formed the day before can get down to work.

Our goal: to bring non-profits and technology together to improve the world around us…and we thought that a nice place to do this would be on a vineyard.

For more information, visit the website: http://www.winecampcalaveras.com. The official registration is now open (not the wiki or Upcoming).

[p.s. for those that are 'camping' squeamish, there are nice hotels in town...just book them soon!]

Technorati Tags: chris+messina, mashup, nonprofit, tara+hunt, web 2.0, web+development, winecamp

Then Alex and I did an Inside the Net interview (mp3) with Amber & Leo, all about Big in Japan and the building block ecosystem of newer Web apps.

Technorati Tags: alex+muse, amber macarthur, biginjapan, brian oberkirch, commandn, inside+the+net, leo+laporte

The podcall feature is getting play in the media and from potential clients. Frank Barnako @ Marketwatch said this:

Your podcast is calling
PodServe.com, a quick way to create standard, social or public podcasts is working on technology that you might call "going retail, door-to-door." Brian Oberkirch and Alexander Muse, founders of Podserve, said their free hosting service for podcasts is going to offer production tools, too.
One of them will let you type your phone number on a Web page and Podserve will call and allow you to record. Podserve will then create and upload the file to the Web.
"I am so frustrated with these stupid microphones and Skype and Audacity and Gizmo … if I could just pick up a phone and make a podcast, that's what I want to do," Muse said.
Oberkirch and Muse talked about Podserve, and their other free software applications, on a recent "Inside the Net" podcast. Listen to it.

Plus we're talking with two large companies about doing OEM installs of PodServe, primarily because of the ability to integrate VoIP telephony into a corporate podcasting program.

What is PodCall? It's a new feature where you give us a phone number and PodServe will call you at that number, let you walk through a simple phone tree and record a podcast just like you would leave a voicemail. PodServe will then automatically drop that sound file into the right podcast stream for you, within minutes of completing the call.

Also, we've secretly added the ability to add .mov and .mp4 files to your PodServe podcasts, so you can vlog as well with the service. We'll limit the files to 100MB right now.

Technorati Tags: biginjapan, podcast, podserve, youtube

(Photo by Tantek)

A great interview with Chris Messina a bit ago about a lot of things. (Can you just talk with Chris about one thing? We think not.) Here he talks about microformats — a standardized approach to structuring metadata making it easier for everyone to remix & reuse stuff to further the emerging info ecosystem. It's the first in what we hope is a series with lots of folks talking about microformats. Tantek? Kevin? Ryan? We'd also like to interview other developers, designers, business guru types or anyone interested in taking up the cause of microformats.

Listen to the podcast:

• At the Weblogs Worknotes page
• Download the file(~19MB .mp3)
• Subscribe to the feed

Technorati Tags: brian oberkirch, chris messina, microformats, podcast, Weblogs+Work, Weblogs+Worknotes

Technorati Tags: brian oberkirch, charles+ribaudo, jambo, jim+young, refreshdallas, vlog, Weblogs+Work, Weblogs+Worknotes

So, Sphere. Sphere's basic premise is that everyday folks want to get right at the good stuff. They don't need a zillion features that would interest power bloggers — they want to find good posts about topics they care about. In other words, give me fewer results that are more relevant to my search. Give me less to wade through. Filter for me, don't just find. The focus is on simple search & introduction to other blogs and other media discussions related to these search terms.

Sphere builds its index three ways: link structure (which T'rati prioritizes), analysis of meta data and semantic analysis of the post content. Sphere then lets you review its results and use them as a jumping off point in a number of ways. First, you can use its blog search results filtered by relevance (the default) or recency:

You can also use sliders to customize the date range you want to search for something — around a certain event, say.

Once you've identified a relevant link, you can easily find out a bit more about the blog itself by hitting the profile button.

(More is coming on these blog profiles. They'll add descriptor text to this initial bit of information.)

Then you can move off into discovering other relevant blogs for certain search terms by using the Featured Blogs. Sphere CEO Tony Conrad said that Sphere can generate dynamic featured blog lists for about 15,000 terms today.

Here are the featured blogs you get when you search for 'podcasting'. You can also suggest other blogs to include, and I expect the results to improve as time goes on and more users help groom the system.

You can also see how the conversation is being carried out in other media, using Sphere's Related Media link.

Here you can see that a search for 'blogging' gives us Webshot photos using that tag, Yahoo news stories that are related, as well as books and podcast listings.

The cool thing is: Sphere is creating links between relevant content where none previously existed.

The most whiz bang example of this is using the Sphere bookmarklet — Sphere It!. You install the bookmarklet in your browser toolbar, and click it when you want to see what relevant blogs are saying about any Web content that you are reading. Let's say we're reading yesterday's story about Apple's song pricing. Sphere It returns the following results:

Again, Sphere has created these connections through metadata and semantic analysis, so I can follow blog discussion about the topic, even if the blog in question hasn't actually linked to the article I want to use as the basis of my search. Kind of like having a memeorandum engine in your browser, aimed at whatever topic is important to you at the time.

There is a great deal of discussion out there today about Sphere. Check out the tech.memeorandum conversation.

Mike Arrington has a thorough review and a podcast with Tony Conrad & Toni Schneider about the launch.

Om has a rundown the initial investment for Sphere.

Sphere is one of the first companies involved in Adapative Path's New Ventures program, and Ryan Freitas has an extensive essay detailing the design and development process for the service. The whiz kids at Mule Design also lent their handiwork.

Technorati Tags: adaptive+path, mule design, new+ventures, sphere, toni+schneider, tony+conrad