(…) I don’t use Firefox (I prefer Safari) but it’s plug-ins like this that make me doubt my decision. BlogRovR lets you upload your personal OPML file of feeds you read, along with a selection of topical feeds they offer that you can chose between and then every time you load a web page, they check to see if your favorite sources have linked to said page. The viewing options are really nice too, but the concept - wow! Talk about bringing it all together - yes, please - automate a quiet notification if any of my favorite sources have also written about whatever I’m reading. Love it! (…) more… |
(…) This proves to be a great way to see, at a glance, what is being said elsewhere about the subject you are currently reading about and is a nice step closer to the semantic web we’ve been hearing so much about lately. Not only will the BlogRovR extension scan your list of feeds for related content, but it will also create a tag cloud for you, letting you know how these sites fit together in terms of the tags they have appended to their content. (…) more… |
(…) BlogRovR is really useful for research and analysis, provided you’ve loaded the right blogs. Newbies will appreciate the pre-populated bundles for business, entertainment, technology, etc. (…) This is great way to keep track of your compatriots. There’s also a nice way to increase your own blog traffic - see that BlogRovR ‘chiclet’ up there? That’ll add us to your BlogRovR tracking list. We like that. (…) more… |
(…) BlogRovR is basically a personalized vertical search engine for every page you visit - processed in real-time. How it works is that once you’ve downloaded BlogRovR, when you surf the Web BlogRovR is busy working in the background ‘fetching’ related blog stories for you. Keeping with the canine theme, the BlogRovR blog says that BlogRovR is "your best friend for keeping your finger on the pulse of the blogosphere." (…) more… |
Stickis offers a service that lets you post notices or stickis on Web pages, viewable by people who have chosen to read your notices. We first mentioned the San Francisco company in July, when it first got $600,000 in funding. It is about to close on a second round of angel funding. It is useful for collaboration, and research. Let’s say you’re interested in getting the GigaOm take on a company, say, Riya but are also interested in getting VentureBeat’s view, and perhaps even stooping so far as wanting Techcrunch’s opinion. You don’t want to go to each of those blogs to search for the reviews. Instead, you can just go to the Riya homepage and see them all there, via Stickis’ service. In other words, you can take your favorite blogs with you. It’s good for group research projects, and collaboration within companies about views on sites of competing companies, for example. Techcrunch reviewed the company here. Stickis has lots features best learned by playing with it. One of the main features is the channel. Any note I leave on a site also becomes part of my channel, so that someone who has subscribed to my channel can see anything I write, about any site. Similarly, if I subscribe to the channels of five people, I see a continuous stream of the stickis those five people are posting. I can keep these channels in view, or hide them. Moreover, sticki notes don’t have to be written on Web sites users can write a note about anything, and it will be included in their channel. There’s much more here to noodle with. |
lisa whelan, december 6, 2006
Last week, San Francisco-based start-up Activeweave launched an exciting new product called Stickis. At first glance, Stickis looks like any other web overlay and annotation tool (i.e. Google Notebook, Trailfire, Fleck, Diigo, etc.), but dig a little deeper and you’ll see that Stickis does more. If it reaches critical mass, Stickis could revolutionize the way that people interact with the web and each other. Unlike popular social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, Cyworld, etc., which require users to interact with each other within the confines of a specific website, Stickis allows users to interact with people in their network anytime and anywhere on the web. |
The channels can consist of notes left by people, RSS feeds (blogs), and even specialized data channels for web services such as OpenTable or Yelp. When you subscribe to a channel, be it another user’s “sticky notes” or Yelp reviews, that channel is added to your network and begins to populate, in reverse chronological order, a collapsible tray that’s tucked away on the side of your browser screen. Then, when you visit a page, such as TechCrunch, that tray is populated with summaries of any related notes or reviews from you network through an analysis of the url and tags of your current page and those included in the note. One click on a summary brings up the sticky note.
Creating notes is done with a fairly robust WISIWYG editor, allowing users to style text and backgrounds, as well as embed photos and movies by drag and drop. This makes it very easy to go through Flickr and start commenting away. Without the plugin installed users are still treated to a proxied version of the site with an AJAX version of the Stickis layered on top like this. A note or several notes can be replied to and even leave trackbacks when they link to blogs, because your personal Stickis channel page is in fact a personal blog where notes are stored as taggble posts. This can also be changed to post to a personal blog instead. Replies to notes will not clog your tray because you will only see the channels you subscribe to. You will see that a reply was made to a note, however, and can click through to it. If you see something you like, you can add the note’s creator to your network of channels. Stickis is based in San Francisco and currently funded by about a million dollars in angel financing. They plan to monetize the business through the third type of Stickis content channel: web services. The hope is that Stickis will provide an easier and more relevant way for surfers to get a publisher’s content, drive more traffic to their site, and use their services. Yelp and OpenTable serve as the first vertical they are testing this out with. It’s easy to imagine some other verticals as well, such as concert ticket sales or travel accommodations. There’s no specific talk about how payments would be structured but affiliate fees seem the most sensible. Feel free to get Stickis or view a preview of the service on TechCrunch through the link below: |
Stickis does a deeper analysis for the web service channels such
as OpenTable and Yelp, which makes it possible for a restaurant’s Yelp review and OpenTable reservation search widget to pop up in my tray when
I go a page linking to a restaurant. I believe this contextual method makes it a much more consumable service than others, which require you actively
seek out information by visiting an annotated page. It also allows for greater control of what data you see because of the subscription based method.
Stickis is a new service that lets you attach little sticky-type notes to Web pages you visit and lets you view the notes other people have left on pages.  Credit: CNET Networks There was a service like this during the last Internet bubble. The product, ThirdVoice, was criticized as allowing "graffiti" on Web pages, since anyone's markups would be visible to any other ThirdVoice user. Stickis is different. The idea with this service is that you intentionally subscribe to various commentators (such as bloggers), then when you visit a site that one of these writers has a note on, it pops up on your screen. You can respond to their note with one of your own. Bloggers can also add their feeds to Stickis, so every post they write automatically becomes a note linked to whatever sites they are linking to. Actually, anybody can do this for any blog. For instance, if there's an obscure political blogger you like, and you want to know when he writes about the stories you read on CNN, you can add his feed to your subscription list, and whenever he links to a story you're reading on CNN or any other site, you'll see a little alert pop up on the story page so that you can jump over to his blog and read the post. I tried this with Webware.com (of course). It was simply a matter of giving Stickis the URL. Then when I went to sites I'd recently covered, such as WhoToTalkTo and LicketyShip, I got a note pointing me back to my posts. Pretty slick. There are some user interface issues the site has to work through. For example, it's unclear how publishers will get the word out that they are writing Stickis content. In the beta I saw, I was automatically subscribed to several channels of content (all of them, I believe), and it was up to me to unsubscribe from the ones I didn't want. If Stickis takes off, opting out of new channels as they pop up won't be a satisfactory way to manage your content. Also, the Stickis plug-in is available for Internet Explorer only right now. Update: the Firefox plug-in is done. See CEO Mark Meyer's comments to this post. But this is a really interesting idea. It links Web sites together by content automatically, sort of like Sphere and YooNo. And I love the idea of the portable expert: With Stickis, you can take your favorite bloggers with you wherever you go on the Net. That's just incredibly cool. The service could stand to lose some of its advanced features in the name of not confusing the heck out of its users, but the underlying idea is powerful. |
clancy nolan, san francisco, july 7, 2006 (subscription required)
With $600,000 in seed financing, newly formed Activeweave Inc. is developing software to make the Internet more interactive. With a public version slated for this summer, Activeweave’s technology allows users to write short comments that are overlaid on top of existing Web pages. The comments appear as small windows on a third-party Web site - like a virtual ’Post It’ note - and are visible only to people in a specific group. The year-old company has found support from individual investors including technology writer Esther Dyson and Convergence Capital Partners’ Eric Di Benedetto, who has invested his own money in start-ups including Clickability and Rapleaf Inc. "There are all kinds of Web 2.0 companies that allow you to have social interaction on the Internet," said Di Benedetto, adding that the glut of applications can swamp Internet users. "We thought there was an opportunity to build an infrastructure there, aggregate services and get the benefit of the social Web." The idea of a "social Web," which links people, organizations and concept as opposed to documents, is not new. And neither is Activeweave’s general concept. During the dot-com boom, venture investors backed Third Voice, whose browser plug-in created a sidebar on Web pages where surfers could add their comments. That company - derided as Web graffiti - folded in 2001. Activeweave has a different approach, said Chief Executive Marc Meyer, and benefits from advances in technology, including Ajax and RSS. San Francisco-based Activeweave also aims to make its application unobtrusive, with a "tray" that slides out to reveal notes. The company is also looking for partners, said Meyer, who could integrate information - like review reviews, for instance - into their platform. In the past couple of years, venture investors have backed a handful of technologies designed to better organize the Web. One such company is Kaboodle Inc., whose software is designed to let users mark Web pages as they surf, and then automatically extract relevant information for the user and consolidate it onto a single page. Kaboodle has found backing from a slew of investors including Garage Technology Ventures and early Google Inc. backer Ron Conway. Similarly, Mayfield and Austin Ventures have sunk more than $8 million into Pluck Corp., whose Web browser companion application allows users to find, retrieve and organize information, including RSS news feeds. |
how social search will help us remix the web to our liking.
erick schonfeld, october 28, 2005
The Web is so vast -- 20 billion pages at last count -- that we are drowning in it. Even mighty Google sometimes can’t make sense of it all, especially when it comes to finding something specifically for you or me. The search term "turkey," for instance, brings up 181 million results. But if you are looking for the Turkey Point Lighthouse, instead of the bird or the country, you won’t find it until page 38 of the results. What we need are better filters than just the monolithic search box -- filters that know who we are, what we like, who we respect, and what we want to know. All the major search engines, and some minor ones, are working on ways to better tune the Web to work with our own personal compasses. They plan to do this through some combination of personalization (saving your entire search history), user input (letting you bookmark, tag, and rate webpages), and social search (sharing your bookmarks and tags with others). Social-bookmarking pioneer Del.icio.us started with shared bookmarks and searchable tags. Now both Google and Yahoo have their own beta projects (My Search History and My Web 2.0, respectively), as does a prelaunch startup called Wink and a Firefox plug-in called Outfoxed. The idea with personalized search is that any page that you’ve bookmarked, tagged, or even looked at in the past (that is relevant to a search) will come up at the top of the results page. The idea with social search is that any page that anyone in your social network has ever highlighted in the past will also come up. So if you do a search for "mountain bike," a mountain bike trail website you once saved might appear at the top of your results, but there might also be a whole bunch of specialty and enthusiast sites that were bookmarked a year ago by your friend Kenny, who is part of your online social network. You know that Kenny is a hard-core biker, so you trust his judgment on this subject and click on the links. Now you’re in business. All of Kenny’s research work from a year ago is being passed on to you effortlessly when you need it most. The beauty of social search is that the more people who use it, the better it will become. At least that’s the theory. But social search has yet to prove itself. There are significant barriers to getting it started because your friends and colleagues all need to be using the same search engine as you, and you still need to invite them to become part of your social network. The whole process is a huge pain. But what if we took this notion of a personalized and filtered Web one step further? And what if we didn’t have to return to these centralized search engines and portals, and instead our tags, bookmarks, and comments, and those of all the people we trust, somehow surfaced naturally as we surfed the Web? That’s exactly what a five-person startup called activeweave is setting out to do. CEO Marc Meyer and CTO Jean Sini are developing a product (in private alpha) called Stickis that allows you to add your own commentary, notes, or even tags to a webpage. The next time you visit that page, your semitransparent Sticki will automatically appear. "Stickis break the wall of the browser," Meyer says. And when you create a Sticki, you also create a bookmark, which will bring you back to that page from any other page on the Web. Each commentary also automatically creates a blog entry. You can make your Stickis private or public, and you can also limit who gets to see them. "There is a balance we want to strike between information overload and silence," Sini says. The author needs to invite someone to see his Stickis, and that person needs to accept before they start popping up all over the place. But that’s only a small part of it. The real advantage is that Stickis hold more than just notes. They can, in effect, become mini-webpages complete with links, RSS feeds, pictures, video, and even other applications. "In a nutshell, we are building a user-contributory system," Sini says. What users are contributing could one day turn into their own parallel, personal Web, overlaid on top of the regular Web. This may sound like a chaotic mess, but if done properly it could become a very customized filter. For instance, Stickis could help alleviate the problem many people have with blogs today: There are simply too many to pay attention to. I have about 60 that I subscribe to, for example, and it seems pointless because I can never keep up with all of them. But if I subscribed to all of my blogs through my Stickis, I would see only the entries that actually link to the webpage that I happen to be on. I could then also read the commentary a friend entered about that page on his Sticki. So, as I'm surfing the Web, if I land on a page that two of my friends have left comments on and that four of my 60 blogs have also linked to, those six entries from my blogs and my friends would show up on my Sticki. "It is an automatic search," Meyer explains, "It just comes to you. The Sticki helps you navigate the Web. It tells you what is related to this page." That is a powerful idea, because something like Stickis married to social search (why not also subscribe to your friends’ bookmarks via an RSS feed?) would allow you to mediate the Web right at the point of consumption. This isn't a case of a centralized approach vs. a distributed one. Both need to work together in tandem. But one worry raised by the notion of parallel, private Webs is that they could ultimately lose steam if their content is hidden from the public search engines. Another worry is that it will be too complicated for most people to understand. The key to success is for companies to make the tools as simple as possible. There is already too much clutter on the desktop. As my wife, Nadia, responds when I explain how all of this might work, "You know, I just want to read the page." So do I, but I want to read the right page. |
In 1999 Eng-Sion Tan launched a company called Third Voice, a browser plug-in that created a sidebar on web pages and allowed surfers to annotate the page by adding their comments. The service quickly devolved into web graffiti and shut its doors two years later. Even though Third Voice is gone, the idea had some value. And soon Jean Sini and Marc Meyer will be launching something that has some of the characteristics of Third Voice, but which will not have the same graffiti result. They call it Stickis. Stickis is still in private alpha. I don’t have credentials yet (they are keeping it very quiet and don’t want screen shots on the web), but Marc and Jean came by last week to give me a peak at the service. You can request an alpha invitation on their home page. To be honest, it took me a while to get it. The reason: they’ve built a platform that has at least two or three killer applications and I saw so much in so short a time that I was getting lost. I slowed things down by asking dumb questions and, in the process became pretty fired up about stickis in general. Once you are registered, you can add a “sticki” to any web page with your notes, which can be in the form of text or dragged in images. Every time you return to that page you can pull up your sticki. For lots of sites that I interact with, the ability to keep these notes is very interesting. Notes can be shared with friends or kept private. You can also subscribe to feeds from other sites, and if those feeds have linked to the current site you are visiting that content will also appear in the stickis. For instance, if you were to go to the Sticki site, and you had subscribed to the TechCrunch feed, you would see this post included in the sticki. They’ve also included a master page to manage the content you’ve distributed on various pages, and add feeds and friend’s content. Marc and Jean are in the process of raising an angel round - everything to date has been created on their own dime and with their own time. They’ve been working on it for about a year. |
