Our team is growing and to celebrate we have a new logo and a new
website.  Out with the old, in with the new.  The site still needs some
work, but it is getting closer.  What do you think?

Scott Ryan and Jason Hudgins will be heading to the Crunchies in San Francisco to pick up our Crunchie (assuming Mike used refurb voting machines from the 2000 Florida presidential election).  In all seriousness, Mike and his team at TechCrunch have been a great asset to the community over the years and it makes sense to pay them back by showing up despite the fact that ShopSavvy is the longest shot in the history of longshots (I encourage everyone to show up if possible).  You can still vote: http://tinyurl.com/savvyvote

While Scott and Jason are getting to San Francisco I will be boarding a plane, headed home from AndroidDevCamp Amsterdam where I will be giving the keynote (note to self: prepare something!).

Meanwhile, Ryan will be spending ALL week coding (24/7) getting ShopSavvy ready for our EU launch – we will be live in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic and Austria.  Hopefully, ShopSavvy will be ‘Big in Europe’ – Jonas honored us with another Godzilla poster/t-shirt design for our EU launch (what do you think?):

We do interviews about ShopSavvy and our company almost daily and the most common question is, “Why is your company called Big in Japan”. I figured it was worth a post.

The phrase ‘Big in Japan’, according to Wikipedia, “was originally a scornful phrase applied to rock bands that failed to sell many records in the US and the UK. During the 1960s and 70s, Japanese pop culture was not yet considered very cool in the English-speaking world. Thus, though a band might have tens of thousands of Japanese fans, it was not considered truly successful: the band was only big in Japan.”  Of course, by the early 90′s Japan had become cool and everyone wanted to be big in japan so the phrase lost its original meaning.

Now that we have the origin covered, I will give you some of the reasons that had nothing to do with the name.  First, some of you have asked, “was the name inspired by Tom Waits…?”  Nope David, I had no idea Tom even sang a song called Big in Japan, but thanks for the new reference:

Others have asked how long ShopSavvy has been available in Japan; I assume they think our company is Japanese.  Our application is only available in the US and the UK currently and none of us have even been to Japan.  However, we will be in Tokyo meeting with NTT DoCoMo for our Japanese rollout in a month or so.

The next favorite question is whether not we named the company after the Alphaville song – Big in Japan.  Of course, the song is burned into my subconscious; becoming popular in the U.S. in the late 80′s.  But, no we didn’t really think about the song when we named the company.

Fewer people remember the punk band from Liverpool called Big in Japan, but no, we didn’t name it after them either.

The real reason is rather silly.  A colleague and I were sitting in a hotel in San Francisco during the Web 2.0 conference a few years ago after listening to Sky Dayton talk about how everything related to cell phones was “Big in Korea”.  We had an interview with INC magazine later that day and needed a name for our tool business.  I said, “how about Big in Japan?”  Thinking that it would look cool on t-shirts we went with it.  More than a year later we combined our consulting (WeblogsWork) and our tool business (Big in Japan) and during a conversation with new hire he said something that convinced me we should dump WeblogsWork in favor of Big in Japan.  He said, “Whenever I tell anyone that I work for Big in Japan they smile” I thought, ‘what better reason could we possibly have for choosing a name?’

Earlier this year we refocused our business for a third time and the name seemed to make even more sense – i.e. since mobile phones are so much bigger in Japan than they are here in the US.  I wish I had a better reason, but that is it.  It was a split second decision that stuck.

P.S. The domain we use ‘biggu’.com is the Japanese word for Big.  Of course I wish we had biginjapan.com, but I have never been able to get the owners to call me back.

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!

Shame we didn't get to meet Amber MacArthur at SXSW, as she's evidently a fan of Big in Japan. She talks about the Big in Japan toolkit on this episode of CommandN.

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

Seems like some folks are getting bent out of shape about YouTube policies. (We heart YouTube as a viewer, but haven't really published much there.) Here's what going on with PodServe, one of the Big in Japan tools.

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

We talked with Jim & Charles of Jambo before the last Refresh Dallas meeting. Check out our first vlog (look out, Irina) — at the Weblogs Worknotes page, download the file directly (~19MB .mov) or grab the whole feed.

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

A few more thoughts on Sphere's launch. I'd like to talk more generally about how we think about social media and how we talk about and build the tools we need. I have a baseball metaphor, which may be appropriate, given that Sphere CEO Tony Conrad is a baseball geek like I am.

I think we are confused when it comes to social media. Even though we talk about micromedia, microbranding, getting small fast, when it comes to success metrics we revert right back to the lingo of Big. How many results returned? How many page views? How many subscribers? Downloads? Links, comments, etc. This is blockbuster thinking smuggled into a microchunked world. Even today's leading blog search service (who has done a *ton* to advance this field & spread microformats, etc.) perpetuates this kind of thinking with their Technorati 100, most favorited, emphasis on the raw numbers of the blogosphere, etc. Dave Sifry's insights about the magic middle are far more powerful than the quarterly stat pr0n around the growth of the blogosphere.

In his review of Sphere today, Steve Rubel runs a test to find the number of results Sphere returns against other engines, as though that is a useful way to figure out which has more value. Gabe Rivera once remarked about the strangeness of that: that you would measure the effectiveness of a filter by looking at what it doesn't filter out.

So, I applaud Sphere in that the focus is put on quality, relevance, connection. (That's the point of this blog, after all.)

Connection is more than a link. Or, rather, links are not the only measure of connection. Sphere starts to offer some tools to grok that dynamic.

So, we can see a bit more clearly what is actually going on. Social media engagement is nuanced, time consuming. Working the edge means doing your homework. You can't merely get a list of the top bloggers and spam them with your press release link. You have to understand the web of connections they exist in: the ecosystem. That's what Sphere starts to give us.

To baseball. To the untrained eye, baseball games are won & lost in 'key at bats.' Does the guy get a hit or not with the tying run on second? While 'true', this sort of analysis leaves out the thousand small interactions that led up to the game situation. Baseball, too, is a collection of small moments loosely joined into a larger outcome. How often did the pitcher go 3 & 1 and have to throw a hittable pitch? Did an outfielder miss a cut-off man and allow an extra base? Did the shortstop bobble a ball that made a sure double play into a fielder's choice and extend the inning? Did a pitcher go 3 & 2 and give the runner on first an extra head start? Did someone fail to bunt or hit behind a runner to move them along? Did the pitcher throw too many pitches and run over his pitch count early, bringing on an early substitution. Did a batter pull a ball away into a ground out instead of hitting it back through the middle or going the other way for a rising line drive?

You get the drift. Anyone can tell you the final score or highlight the 'big' plays. None of which really gets you inside the game, which is a game of small moments. A game of inches, as the old chestnut has it.

Social media are collections of small moments. One reader at a time. One comment at a time. One post a time. It's a microchunked world. Remixed, recombined. We are nowhere near having the analytical or technological tools to fully engage this new ecosystem. But the only way to get there is to recognize the shortcomings. Our reliance on blockbuster metaphors. Mass mediated thinking. I welcome the launch of Sphere, the next Barcamp, Umair's forthcoming book, and all your comments as ways for us to get there.

Technorati Tags: david sifry, gabe rivera, sphere, steve rubel, technorati, toni+schneider, tony+conrad

I’ll be leading a roundtable discussion on social media tonight at Refresh Dallas with wicked smart boys John Keehler, Jake Mckee & Blake Burris. Starts at 7:00 up in Plano. Come hang out with us.

Here’s the Upcoming page for Refresh, which happens each month.

Presentation: Get Small Fast: Microbranding & Next Gen Social Media

We’re way beyond the blog. Not that blogging’s done. Far from it. We’re just at the beginning, but already social media means much more. Look at the growth in MySpace, YouTube, podcasting. Flickr’s on the cover of Newsweek; danah boyd is on with Bill O’Reilly (what? what?). We’re not in Kansas anymore.

This installment of Refresh Dallas is a roundtable chat with a few local social media mavens (Brian Oberkirch, John Keehler, Jake McKee, Blake Burris). There may be a t-shirt given away to someone who says something inspiring. (T-shirts & stickers are Web 2.0 costs of entry, eh? “Our software is free. Our schwag rocks.”) Let’s talk.

Technorati Tags: blake+burris, jake+mckee, john+keehler, refreshdallas, social+media