When I first met David Marks at the STIRR mixer, I didn’t think he looked anything like Hunter S. Thompson. When I saw his picture on the Loomia website, I immediately saw a resemblance–if only in dress. 

David, a pilot in his spare time, co-founded Loomia two years ago. As a big fan of underground music, he created a crawler to find good (and I mean good to him personally) music on blogs. Unfortunately, what he found is that he only enjoyed about 1/10 of the music he was finding. He decided there had to be a better way to find stuff he liked, so he created an RSS-based program that gathered data about what he was already listening to (implicit data), and allowed him to rate the stuff he liked the most (explicit data). Eventually, the program would know him so well that it would be able to bring the music that he liked most directly to him.

Loomia’s product is an updated version of that program which helps users find the most personally relevant content on media sites, and the best products on Etailer sites. If you’ve read my blog entry on Ed Batista, you might notice several similarities between the two concepts. The difference is that AttentionTrust helps you learn more about yourself by tracking and giving you your own data to store, while Loomia helps specific sites provide you with the best content or products anonymously by IP address. And while AttentionTrust is non-profit, and Loomia is for profit, they both have the personalization of user content as an underlying theme for their products.

Since Loomia started as a way to find music David liked, I was interested to find out what he was listening to the most lately. One of his current favorites is an African congo band called Konono 1. They have a very interesting sound; you should check them out. 

In addition to being a pilot, David is also a trained acrobat who has played the Cello since childhood. Some of his past work experience includes helping run an online political campaign for Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and helping his friend, David McMurtry, set up a blog to raise money and awareness for Colombians who’ve lost thier houses to civil war. It’s no surprise that David’s startup would be one that aimed to help people!

After running BuzzShout for about 5 months, I’ve come to realize the importance of being able to sum up your company’s goal in a concise and easy to understand pitch. Everyday, I get company submissions with descriptions that could fill a book. That’s when I visit the site in question, and try to wittle down their essay into a few short sentences. Unfortunately, many times I can’t even begin to do any wittling, since the company themselves have lost sight of what their mission is! Aaron Post has had similar experiences, and started Your Elevator Pitch, which is a resource for businesses needing to hone their pitches.

The inspiration for their site is best summed up on their own pitch page, which gives an anecdote about a company that spent an hour presenting what they do. When asked what their elevator pitch was, they froze. This is reason why at networking events like Stirr, company pitches are limited to one minute. Getting to the pith of your company’s existence is the most effective way to communicate to potential customers.

Your Elevator Pitch lets companies submit their pitches for visitors to rate and comment on. It’s a great resource for any startup needing to tighten their verbage. They currently have about 85 submitted pitches, with a lot of ranking going on. You don’t need to login to rank, so it’s easy for people to jump in and put in their two cents.

In addition to pitch ranking, they have lists of various resources for making good pitches. Next time you submit something to BuzzShout, give Your Elevator Pitch a try to hone your companies description. I’m more apt to check out a site if the description is clear and exciting.

Calacanis has finally succeeded in getting a response from Kevin Rose, and it’s not a pretty conversation. After offering to pay $1000 a month to top digg users, the blogosphere is alive with banter about the controversial topic of paying social news users.

Calacanis’s stance is that the reaction from the idea of paying top social news contributors is no different than the reaction from paying bloggers via weblogsinc.com. Of course, Kevin and a good slice of the blogosphere is outraged at the mere thought of it.

Personally, I think that paying top digg (or newsvine or reddit or etc.) users a flat fee per month to do what they’ve been doing is a slippery slope. The problem isn’t because they’ll be paid to provide content–that’s okay. It’s the fact that we’ve now singled out a particular group of people as “top” users who deserved to be paid. By doing this, we’ve trumped the whole idea of democratic reviews. Suddenly, people who are not “top” users get the message that they don’t deserve to be paid, and therefore, their contributions are not as valuable.

But, social news sites rely on everyone’s contributions. The more contributions there are, the stronger the content of the site.

The only options are that no one is paid, or everyone is paid.

A compromise between digg and Calacanis’s flat fee idea is something like Squidoo’s profit sharing. Users should get paid with respect to the amount of value they are adding. This could be done through ads, or simply through counting the number of top digged stories they’ve managed to submit.

In the end, I think that there is space for both digg’s model and other social news models, whether they pay out or not. Social new is still young, and there’s a lot of growing that needs to be done.

AnooX is a different kind of search engine. The management claims that they are better than Google and Yahoo because user’s searches are first by computers, and then rated on relevance by other human users. What makes them really different though, is that they’ve recently announced that they are a not-for profit organization. This has some very interesting implications:

• AnooX will only be a search engine. This means they can concentrate on only one thing, search, unlike Google, Yahoo, MSN, who are involved in different businesses and always thinking about what others to get into.
• If AnooX does have any profits, they will give the profit away to AnooX community members, and to other non-profits working for public interest causes.
• AnooX will minimize pay-per-click advertising rates.

My biggest concern about the rating feature was that people would game it and choose their own companies results as the best ones. Obviously that was a huge concern of AnooX too: to become a voting member you need to sign up and authenticate your identity. Authenticating your identity can be done either by making a $5.00 (refundable in 60 days) donation with a CreditCard, or by mailing in a Notarized copy of your ID.

So after you’ve tried AnooX, login to BuzzShout and review it. Tell us all if it really is better than Google and Yahoo.

I also recommend checking out the Read/Write Web series “Search 2.0 vs. Traditional Search”– part 1 and part 2.

Over at the forums of yay hooray is an interesting thread where people are redesigning well known logos in the style of Web 2.0. Some of the companies include citibank, Fedex, and Nike. They’ve all been rebranded with the soft gradients and pastel colors that we’ve all come to love (or hate). The thread is really active with many designers giving their best shot at logo 2.0.

What is your take on the style of Web 2.0 logos? Are you in love with their soft corners? Or do you think all this soft gradient business is taking the edge out of the look and feel of web technologies?

Update: livewavecam has a gallery of some of the logos, so you don’t have to wade through the comments.

A well-designed logo is easily spotted, and belies the difficulty of its creation. Anyone who has tried their hand at creating an original and unique logo understands the difficulty and importance of the design. The logo is not only a simple graphic identification, it is the very entity that represents your company. It is also how your customers first experiences your company, and you better make sure that it has impact.

When it comes to logo design, critiques can provide an invaluable insight into elements about your design that you may not have thought of. Enter LogoPond, which allows users to upload, rate, and comment on logos, all embedded in an easy to navigate site.

The rating system is pretty typical of a reviews site. You can easily rate logos on any page that the logo appears, and you can also leave comments for each logo. Browsing can be done by tag, color, and date. However, there doesn’t appear to be many people tagging in depth with color yet, since many of the colors only yield a few logos.

For any logo geek out there, LogoPond is a great alternative to those large logo books that you can peruse at Borders. It’s also a valuable resource for obtaining community critiques and ratings. Currently, there are about 1000 logos uploaded, which is a good amount. As the community grows, expect LogoPond to be a major resource for logo designers. I’m already inspired just by perusing their site!

It looks as though LogoPond is being done pro bono at the moment, with some revenue coming in from Amazon book referrals and sponser banners. An interesting functionality to add would be to allow designers to upload different revisions of their logos. Then, we can all learn from seeing logos go through different design phases, and also how the designer responds to specific critiques.

Well, you actually won’t be going into space per se, but your name will be. Race2Space intends on getting individuals and businesses to buy promotional space on rockets to help fund research for start-ups who aim to lower costs of space travel and turn it into a consumer market. The organization is a partnership between the X Prize Foundation and LeadWurx, an interactive marketing agency. The monetary goal is to reach $6,000,000 in funding of which $2,500 has already been made. 

For $100 you will be able to link to your blog from the R2S site, and also receive an “official Race2Space mission patch”, a support sticker, and certificate by mail. For $500 businesses will be able to upload their company logo to the R2S website, plus 2 “official” mission t-shirts. Businesses can also buy several blocks in order to have a larger ad on the rocket. I wonder why an average Joe can’t do the same?

So is it worth it? I’m assuming you can write the donation off as a charitable one on your taxes. The cause probably isn’t the best one in the world to donate money to. Helping find a cure to AIDS or cancer, or helping the world’s starving are probably better. However, it is a known fact that the sun is expanding and ultimately humans will have to leave the earth. Maybe it’s best to do it in our own private space vehicles.

If one of the components of Web 2.0 is increasing the usefulness of the web for users, then JotSpot has made a fairly new online app–the wiki–even more “Web 2.0″. Today they’ve announced the release of their newest version that will allow users to enjoy increased functionality over the regular old text collaboration. With JotSpot 2.0 users can put their input on calendars, spreadsheets, file repositories, documents, and photo galleries.

We here at BuzzShout have just started using the online text wiki Stikipad, which we like eventhough it is just a plain text wiki without many bells and whistles. The simplicity, and the WYSIWYG format, is what we like most about Stikipad, and, well, it’s free. JotSpot is also free for up to 5 users and 10 pages, and then their prices vary from $10/month to $200/month for unlimited users and pages. 

 There are also several other wiki apps out there to choose from. WetPaint, TiddlyWiki (which James recently did an in-depth review of), PBWiki, and LittleWiki to name a few. Recently Robert Scoble asked his readers to recommend a wiki service for him to use for his upcoming Off-the-Grid campout. He had fifty responses from people who should be writing reviews on BuzzShout. No, I’m not bitter–it’s the Scobleizer, man.

For more info check out JotSpot’s press release or the CNET News.com Alpha blog article.

If you’re a writer who likes to take the path off the beaten trail, you should check out docly, which claims to be the equivalent of Flickr for writing, mashed up with a bunch of other sites. Users are able to publish documents, and potentially sell them online, backed by numly, which provides digital rights management.

There are already other literature oriented websites out there, including bibli.ca (which also states that they’re like Flickr for textual works) and ublot (for textual collaboration). However, docly is on the first to allow users to sell their content.

docly has a rich editing environment which is not much different than Writely. You’re able to style, add lists, and do a whole multitude of other functions that we’ve come to expect from any rich online WYSIWYG editor. But alas, the interface doesn’t work in my favorite browser: Opera, which is almost a deal killer for me.

After finishing your masterpiece, you’re able to publish the document and share it with the world. docly has three account types: amateur, professional, and enterprise. If you have the free amateur account, you won’t be able to charge for your works. The professional account costs about $5 a month.

docly launched earlier this month, and there’s not much material written yet. Currently, there are less than 50 users who have published anything, and I haven’t seen any works that authors are charging for. The types of materials that are on docly range from song lyrics to poems to prose. However, it still remains to be seen which types of works will be the most profitable in this new publication model.

One weakness of docly is that the interface feels a unfinished. For example, you can rate publications, but there’s no obvious way to browse through all the publications by rating. Browsing is also heavily dependent on tags, which is not a perfect solution if what you really want to do is a linear browse. Also, you can browse the tagcloud, but tags listed for each publication are not linkified. You’re also confined to searching through tags, not the body of publications.

docly certainly has a lot of technical and design issues to work through before they can be branded the Flickr of publications. The interface just isn’t as robust as many of the content interfaces out there.

In the end, content will literally be king for docly. It will be interesting to check back once more serious publishers sign up and use it for their distribution. Will Publish 2.0 be a reality?

Kevin O’Keefe, founder and president of LexBlog, has an interesting post about how the best blogs out there are sending audiences away, rather than keeping them in. The two giant examples on either end of the spectrum is Yahoo, which tries to trap users into their site, and Google, whose content is all about getting you out to the edge.

Personally, I’ve given this push-and-pull aspect of blogging some thought. Our goal here at BuzzShout is to create a great resource for finding new web technologies. That means at the core is BuzzShout, with links leading to new web technology sites at the end of the spokes. At present, I think that many users experience BuzzShout as a huge linked list, providing them with up-to-date information in the Web 2.0 world. However, our plan is to bake in some more functional goodies to the point where there is a balance between the urge to stay at BuzzShout, and the urge to check out the latest links.

In the end, I disagree with Kevin that you need to be massive linkers to make your blog successful. The real issue is the fundamental difference between the two types of bloggers: referential and experiential. There are many examples of both types of bloggers that have become successful through their content, not links.

This blogger classification can also be extended to sites, as we have seen with Yahoo and Google. I think that what most sites need is a good balance between the two. The aim is to make a community that is valuable within itself, but that also provides interesting links to the edge.

What do you think about this issue? Are you a fan of linked list sites? Or do you really like sites that keep the content in the center?