I wrote about Upcoming a while back in a post titled, “My Favorite Social Tools: Upcoming” and I am pleased to announce that Upcoming is getting better. Yahoo has announced they have added a number of new features including:

• Undiscovered Events: now Yahoo! Local events are automatically included in metros in an effort to kick-start slow moving metros like Dallas.
• Event Filters: making RSS or iCal feeds better.
• Flickr Photos for Events: add your upcoming tag for an event to a flickr photo and Flickr will auto add a link back to the Upcoming page and vice versa.
• Buddy Icons: I could care less, but if you are excited about using your Flickr buddy icon on Upcoming – woot! you are going to be happy.
• New Events Pages
• New User Experience

Scoble could’t get his son in…

photo credit Scott Beale / Laughing Squid laughingsquid.com

When we launched the Hurricane Blog project we thought that it would be temporary.  Almost a year later we took the blog down and one of our former employees complained that we were “breaking the web.”  We are now faced with a similar problem.

The Real World: Key West sponsor, Mystic Tan, asked us to build and manage a blog to run in conjunction with the show.  The show ended in July and the client sees no need to continue the project.  The blog is called “Inside the booth” and is authored by Ricky Croft from Mystic Tan.

What do we do?  Are we obligated to keep it up and running forever even though Mystic Tan is not going to pay us for continued management and hosting?  There are hundreds of links into the site, by taking it down we effectively break the web according to Adaptive Path, Mike Arrington and David Parmet (guys I really respect).  On an ironic sidenote, the Adaptive Path post titled “The Web is Fragile don’t Break it!” now shows a 404 error.  I am not sure why they took it down, but I suspect it has to do with the veracity of the information they received.

Any ideas?  What obligation does the world have to continue to maintain electronic ideas in the form of websites when the ideas have run their course?  Some people say that bandwidth and space are cheap so you should just keep everything up and running.  But what about people to keep things running?  What about WordPress upgrades?  Do we upgrade the sites that are historical?  What about security patches?  If we are running various historical sites at various version levels and there are security issues we will have to resolve them on a blog by blog basis.  In some cases we will have to upgrade them to current software revisions.  At the end of the day, the cost isn’t just bandwidth and space – there is a management overhead that will grow with each piece of “history” we become responsible for.

Our team is working more and more with companies seeking to launch wikis in their businesses (internal and external wikis).  This summer we spent some time with the Socialtext guys in our effort to recommend and support the best products available to our cliens.  Joshua Porter pointed out that Apple might be a direction our team needed to explore.  Boy, was he dead on!
Apple is now making push into social tools such as wikis.  With their new wiki server as described by Apple:

“Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet.�

Of course the wiki server is only one great social tool included in Leopard.  Others include iCal calendar sharing (say goodbye to Exchange?), iChat screen sharing and social iTunes.  Oh, and of course Apple is going to allow “teams” to turn on these features.  Apple explaines:

“Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet.�

We have been talking about blog monitoring for some time.  Last year we began offering it as a service.  Soon it became clear to us that monitoring served as a crutch for many companies allowing them to feel good, but ultimately not making much of a difference.  We would produce reports and client’s wouldn’t have the slightest understanding of what we were talking about.  They were not in the conversation, instead they were simply reading the translated trascripts we provided.

Today we still help companies monitor blogs, but instead of doing the monitoring we teach them the “how” and the “why” allowing them to join in the conversation.  Josh Hallett, our go-to-guy for design, wrote about his experience with Nikon in a post titled, “Big Thanks to Nikon.”  Josh details how Nikon’s team read his blog post about the D80 and his need for a new SLR before its release.

Nikon, to their credit, found Josh’s blog, recognized his interest in their product, understood his need and provided a solution.  I suspect they created a “fan for life” in Josh and it doesn’t hurt that he was already talking about Nikon.

If your organization needs to listen better.  Start by listening for problems – i.e. to avoid getting Dell’d – before they become nightmares.  Then begin listening to your fans, and think of ways you help your average-everyday fans become rabid sales machines for your company!

On the way home this weekend I heard David Sifry on NPR being interviewed by Scott Simon.  Crazy!  Here is David’s post on the interview and the interview.

Seth Godin compiled and updated entries from his blog in a book titled, Small is the New Big.  Jake got an advanced copy and said it was worth reading (he is a third of the way through).  Some of the content was a little out of date, but generally it was some great stuff.  Check it out.

[via Guy]

If you haven’t noticed it yet, Om Malik is taking the blogosphere by storm with his very popular web property. In June he announced he was leaving Business 2.0 to focus on his own venture, GigaOM. Having raised venture capital from Jon Callaghan at True Ventures, Om is getting advice from some of the brightest stars in the valley including Tony Conrad and Toni Schneider.

Who is this guy anyway? To start he is a great technology writer who you may have read in The Wall Street Journal or Crains. He was one of the founders of Forbes.com and of course was a driving force behind Business 2.0 and a senior writer for Red Herring. He took a brief break and became a venture capitalist by joining Hambrecht & Quist as an investment manager. Prior that he attended the Yale of India (St. Stephens College in New Delhi).

What is going on? Om is building a great team to build GigaOM including his most recent hire Liz Gannes. Contributors include folks like Daniel Berninger who is an analyst from Tier1 Research, Jackson West from SFist, Robert Young a serial entrepreneur and of course Katie Fehrenbacher formerly with Red Herring, now a staff writer for GigaOm.

Why should you care? Om is becoming the go-to source for immediate, smart, informed and critical information about VoIP/Telecom, Startups, Mobile, Broadband and Software. He has been in the game since the mid-90s and simply has the best rolodex around. If there is a story, Om will have it and be able to explain why it matters to you. If you can only read one tech blog I highly recommend GigaOM.

Two months ago we were hanging out with Liz Gannes at the Under the Radar party and joked that she should become GigaLiz (Om had just left Business 2.0 to start his own venture GigaOm). Just got the email yesterday that Liz took our joke to heart and decided to leave Red Herring and join GigaOm. Wow! We were only joking!!! But, WOW, what a great idea. We are excited for Liz and expect even greater things from GigaOm now. [via myself]

My parents bought us the World Book Encyclopedia when we were kids.  I loved browsing through the pages learning about new things.  By the time I was ten I think I had read the whole set.  Fast forward to today and I am still hooked on the encyclopedia, Jimmy Wales’ internet version called Wikipedia.  I use it every week – it is simply the best resource I have found for information on everything.  It suprises me how many people have never heard of Wikipedia, much less used it to uncover information.  Wikipedia describes itself as:

Wikipedia (IPA: /ËŒwiË?kiË?ˈpiË?di.É™/, or /ËŒwɪkiË?ˈpiË?di.É™/, else /ËŒwɪkɪˈpiË?di.É™/) is an international Web-based free-content encyclopedia project. It exists as a wiki, a website that allows visitors to edit its content. The word Wikipedia itself is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to the website. Wikipedia’s main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

The best part of Wikipedia is YOUR ability to add information to the system.  If you are an expert on a subject you can add your knowledge to the wiki, don’t worry the community will keep you honest (if you make a mistake they someone else will edit it for you).