We met the CEO of EchoSign, Jason Lemkin, at the Office 2.0 pre-party. In August of this year, they took home the IBD Network “Judges’ Choice” award for best Office 2.0 application:

EchoSign solves a long term problem of handling, tracking and storing company documents that have to get signed and then manages them once they are signed. It also goes a step further than the standard Jfax service by automating the process of emailing a copy of the signed document out to all the parties that need it.” — Under The Radar, 08/16/2006

He was also coming off a big announcement at the Salesforce conference, and the future is looking bright for this contract management company. Find out why they’re one of the leaders within the online document signature space.

  

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The Search Engine Journal points to an ad campaign that Wendy is deploying on YouTube. No, this isn’t the typical viral marketing where fans are given the task of creating home-made commercials for cash prizes. Rather, these videos have been purposefully placed by Wendy’s on YouTube.

The response from users vary from outrage to delight to confusion. One user commented

I dont get it, do you guys work for Wendys. its wierd

I don’t have a problem with these videos being on YouTube–if the videos are entertaining, then people will want to watch them just like any other video on YouTube. If, on the other hand, they become spammy and uninteresting, no one will watch them. I still have faith that in the social media space good videos will rise to the top, while the crap will fall to the bottom.

Certainly, companies like Wendy’s will want to penetrate the social media advertising space, since it’s dirt cheap and easy to deploy. Digg and del.icio.us have already gotten their fair share of dealing with spam. In fact, BuzzShout’s site submission has been targeted by many spammers (luckily, we hand moderate everything, which keeps the spammers at a minimum).

The bigger question is whether what Wendy’s is doing is considered gaming YouTube. Well, you might say yes if you believe that YouTube should be purely about user generated homemade content. But, of course, this isn’t true by a long shot, given the large number of copyrighted professional media that exists on the service. In fact, YouTube’s community guidelines say nothing about spam or promotional videos.

Some users have clamored for a “mark as spam” flag. But, if the so-called “spam” is highly entertaining, why wouldn’t YouTube and its users want to showcase it? If Wendy’s goes through the trouble to make a popular viral video based on its content, I don’t think it should be penalized just because a corporation is behind it. As long as Wendy’s isn’t somehow hacking the pageviews on their videos, they’re in the clear.

That being said, it takes a careful balance of promotional and entertaining elements in a commercial for it to be popular on YouTube, and still effective for Wendy’s purposes. Because, as we all know, it can be highly unpredictable what will make it big on YouTube, and what won’t. On a side note, does anyone else think that Wendy’s is trying too hard to be weird in the video above? It’s as if they think viral videos will never take off if there’s not a combination of weird sounding voices, shoddy camera work, and a penchant for alien masks.

My daily online written world is dominated by blogs. Maybe it’s just that I don’t go out of my way to read Webzines, or maybe I’m just partial to reversed chronologically ordered text. I’m not even sure when I last picked up a physical magazine in my free time. idio aims to change all this by providing a new kind of interactive magazine that pushes personalized content to users.

After signing up, users provide feedback about what their interests are using various sliders. idio then matches the contents of the magazine to suit your taste. The whole magazine is served via Flash, and, from the looks of it, seems to be pretty slick. On the bottom of the interface are various pages, which are marked different colors based on if you’ve read the contents of each page or not. They also let you rate each article, which will allow them to adaptively change your preferences based on your ratings.

The service is due to launch on October 25th, and they are currently soliciting writers for content. They are hinting that the ad revenues are lucrative, since they can easily serve up rich multimedia ads within their interface. And in true Web 2.0 style, they are giving away iPod shuffles to one out of every 25 authors. Initially, they are focusing on topics in design and music.

The real question is whether idio can sway readers with their customization features. Personally, I wouldn’t seriously consider this service. I’m savvy enough to customize my own set of blogs that I read myself. However, people who are regular online magazine readers and like having content being pushed out for them might have a different opinion. The founders of idio describe it like a “glossy RSS feed” which aggregates the best content around various topics. This may be the happy medium between the traditional editorial staff who picks and arranges the content and the total free-form nature of blogs. I’ll be checking this out after it launches in a few days to see what content they have garnered. It will be interesting to see if many bloggers would want to be syndicated to an online Flash magazine.

idio is based in the UK and has obtained angel investor funding.

We caught up with Jeffrey McManus of Approver at the last Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup. Approver is a dead simple document approval system for use with groups. It has found its way into numerous niche groups around the country, and is growing.

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Interview with Jeffrey McManus on Approver.com
6 minutes (direct download)

The below post is written by Lawrence Coburn, CEO of RateItAll. He has a groovy blog called SexyWidget, that focuses on a variety of different widgets. James and I will choose our favorite widget from each week, and syndicate an edited version on the Shoutblog. Let us know what you think, or, if there is a specific widget you’d like Lawrence to check out.

Last.FM is a music recommendation service that draws data from a person’s implicit music listening habits. The metadata of music– which is listened to by Last.FM members on their computers– is uploaded to Last.FM via iScrobbler, which enables Last.FM’s core services: creating custom music stations, facilitating introductions between “musical neighbors,” and recommending bands.

The Last.FM Widget –- called Last.FM Music Charts by the site -– is a visual representation of the music data collected for each user. In other words, Last.FM charts what you’re listening to, and allows you to add these charts to your blog, social network profile, or personal Web site. At its simplest level, the Last.FM music widget allows Last.FM members to show off what they’re listening to during any given week, without actually having to do anything (once they’ve installed the widget).

Applications and Opportunity

With the explosion of digital music through iPod/iTunes and individuals surge of interest in creating customizable profile pages via social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, the Last.FM music widget has a huge potential market to work with. The implicit nature of the data associated with this widget is a significant advantage as well; unlike other music content widgets, the user doesn’t have to make any explicit choices about what bands or tracks to display. All the users have to do is what they were doing anyway-– listen to the music they enjoy.

The Last.FM music widget plays directly to the vanity of music snobs. People who love music tend to wear their music listening habits like a badge of honor. Among connoisseurs, it’s a big deal to discover that next big act, or conversely, to consistently listen to stuff that nobody else has ever heard of. The Last.FM music widget is the perfect vehicle for music snobs to display how good their tastes are.

The biggest challenge that destination social media sites have is getting the word out about their service. Last.FM’s music widget allows its existing members to recruit new members, and perfectly conveys exactly what the site is – a personalized music player. This widget would seem to be a nice strategic tool for Last.FM to attract new users.

Configuration

It’s a little tricky to find the widgets section of Last.FM. I couldn’t find it on my user profile dashboard of controls, and clicking the “Charts” tab does not take you to the widgets section, even though Last.FM calls their widget “Last.FM Charts.” You need to click on the “Tools” tab to get things set up. Once you find the right page, the process is very smooth, customizable, and elegant. You can configure your widget with bands or tracks, and with weekly or all-time data.

You can build your own design with a nifty chart builder tool, or you can choose from tens of template designs. Template designs are neatly laid out by popularity, editors’ picks, or recently added. Interestingly, Last.FM widgets are generated as images on the Last.FM servers, and sporadically updated on the widget output pages. My guess is that this is to avoid heavy crunching of the Last.FM servers. I haven’t found the lack of a dynamic feed of data to be annoying however. Weekly updates are enough to allow the Last.FM widgets to portray what music you’re listening during an approximate time period.

One minor annoyance is that it’s a little difficult to tell in most cases which widget designs will fit in a sidebar, and which will only work in a wider area.

Testing

I was able to add the Last.FM music widget to Blogger, Typepad, and MySpace without a problem. Because it’s an image and not a script, this widget should work anywhere that allows html. As mentioned earlier, this widget does not provide dynamic data updates – in my experience the lag for updates has been about a week.

Editorial

I have not found a widget that I appreciate more than the Last.FM music widget. Its key strengths are its ability to portray something unique about the publisher, the fact that it’s fueled by implicit and not explicit data, and the almost universal desire of folks to share the music that they’re listening to.

The only possible knock that I can think of about this widget is that it’s a nice to have, not a need to have. It doesn’t provide any additional functionality to a Web page, like the Meebo Me widget, for example. If you fast forward two years to when every online business is pushing a widget of some kind, I can see adoption decisions being made along the lines of required vs. preferred. In this sort of a world, the content based Last.FM widget may lose out to a functionally based widget such IM or a shopping cart. By then however, I would expect the Last.FM widget to evolve to be an actual music player.

Clearly, the real hurdle for Last.FM is getting people to download its software. Once you do that, the adoption and enjoyment of its music widget is an absolute no-brainer.

We had the chance to interview Marc Orchant of Foldera during the pre-party cocktail for the Office 2.0 conference at the SFMOMA.

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Marc talks about Foldera’s feature set, which provides a novel way to organize people’s information online. He also goes into detail about the typical problems we run into when organizing data the old way. Lastly, he talks about his blog called Office Evolution, which documents the changing nature of working in the office.

I’m a huge Pandora fan. I used to listen to Radio Indie Pop a lot, which features many obscure indie pop bands that are hard to find anywhere else. However, I’ve found that Pandora has 90% of those artists listed and analyzed so that they can serve up suggestions for other indie pop bands.

If you haven’t used Pandora before, you should definitely give it a shot. You’re able to create stations which are based on your favorite artists or songs. The service is free, and, one of the only limitations is that you aren’t able to go back and play a specific song. In fact, you’re never allowed to play a specific song. Their business model requires that you listen and rate as much new music as possible, in hopes of monetizing on a CD sale. It’s really an effective model that let’s users branch out and discover new music in a slick flash interface.

With all that aside, Pandora’s most compelling feature isn’t the interface or the business model–it’s how they allow users to rate songs in the context of a particular station. In other music rating interfaces, you are forced to rate the song objectively. Is this particular Death Cab for Cutie song your favorite? Well, I’m not sure–it really depends on my mood. The beauty of Pandora is that each radio station is based on a particular artist or song, which inherently has some baseline mood. I am much more inclined to rate a song in the context of a mood.

For example, I might not like a particular Death Cab for Cutie song because it’s melancholy, and I’m not feeling melancholy. But, if I were melancholy, then yes, I would like it. In iTunes, I would be less inclined to give it a thumbs up. But, in Pandora, I have no qualms doing this. In essence, I am refining what the particular station should sound like. Later, I can return to the station and recreate a mood.

Now, if only iTunes could extend the stations idea to your library.

Update: It turns out there is something like this for iTunes. It’s called Soundflavor DJ, and provides you with a Pandora-esk interface into iTunes. The software pulls recommendation data from Soundflavor’s servers. Similar to Pandora, Soundflavor has years of experience in analyzing different styles of music. What’s their business model? Alongside the tracks, you’ll occasionally see similar songs that aren’t in your library, but which you can buy through Soundflavor.

Thanks for the awesome tip, Brad.

There are many choices in the online world of collaboration. During the last SF New Tech Meetup, I got the chance to speak with Christopher Peri of Vyew, a flash based collaboration tool with a plethora of features. Video after the jump.

Update: Congratulations to Christopher Peri and Vyew, for winning the “Best Demo” award at the Office 2.0 conference held this past week in San Francisco.

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Interview with Christopher Peri of Vyew.com
6 minutes (direct download)

Most people create applications with a particular use case in mind. Speaking from my experience, I like to meticulously plan things out by imagining exactly how users will react to and use new features. But, what a lot of people don’t realize is that intended use cases in Web 2.0 may be flipped upside down by your users. In most cases, this is a good thing.

Take the Facebook groups feature, for example. The creators probably thought that users would like to create groups for their clubs, friends, and activity partners. Groups would bring comradery to the web of weak links in a social network. As the developers left the drawing board, they probably had a very clear definition in their heads of how groups would be used.

Imagine their surprise when they found out that the most popular groups in Facebook have become rallying points for raising awareness for heavy hitting world and health issues. In fact, there is a group that has exploded to nearly half a million members in a few days called “For Every 1,000 that join this group I will donate $1 for Darfur.” This all happened organically–Facebook never requested their users to do any of this.

This isn’t only happening at Facebook. Dogster, a social networking site for dogs and dog owners, allowed users to maintain a blog. The blogs were meant to be used by owners to let other owners keep in touch about their experiences with their pets. Instead, the owners are now blogging like they are the dogs themselves! Myspace, with the launch of their music features, exploded with music artists wanting to keep their fans up to date on their latest recordings and events. In both of these cases, the users took the creative tools and expressed themselves in surprising ways.

Many companies have met this phenomenon of unforeseen use cases by leaving their system as open to expression as possible. One of the best examples is Flickr, which allows for many creative uses via tagging, albums, and an easy-to-use open API. They never stand in the way of creative uses of their site–in fact, it’s encouraged.

Social web applications should never restrict users to doing one thing one way. Freedom of expression is paramount, and organic growth rules supreme. Successful companies out their will know how to channel this to their advantage.

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Length: 5 minutes (direct download)

One million users and a three year anniversary was enough of a reason for Yahoo! owned del.icio.us, the innovator of the social bookmarking, to have a party. BuzzShout was there, drinking beer and wine, socializing, and doing our first video interview with Kristopher Tate of Zooomr. 

Zooomr, for those of you who don’t know, is a photo sharing site that, like flickr, let’s users connect with each other through their photos, but has a larger upload limit than flickr. Zooomr recently passed 250,000 pictures uploaded, and has some new developments being released soon, so stay tuned to the Zooomr blog for updates.