down the avenue

LeapTag Now Offers Publishing & Sharing

Client LeapTag news reader and content discovery tool now includes publishing and sharing. Users can upload personalized content to blogs and share it with friends and colleagues. LeapTag is the only product that filters what you do and do not like according to your personal interests, bringing you results from a variety of sources, including news feeds, blogs and books.

Their new publishing feature allows you to select news items discovered by LeapTag, add a few personal comments and then easily and immediately post these items to your blog in a variety of formats.

Additionally, you can now share your online discoveries with others by sending your ‘finds’ or entire tags via email to friends and colleagues. By importing your personalized tags, your friends will benefit from the efforts you’ve made in creating your interest tags. Immediately after they install the new tag your friends will see very similar results to the ones you have seen. Over time, as they vote on their new results, the tags will become personalized to them – bringing only the news, blogs and books that your friends consider important.

Once you have imported your RSS feeds into LeapTag and enabled LeapTag to filter and organize the hundreds of items it discovers for you, you can direct how LeapTag manages these RSS feeds in the future. Immediately upon import, LeapTag automatically determines which feeds to associate with which tags. However you have the ability to change this, ensuring that the content you trust is filtered and organized according to your preferences. Users can download LeapTag free of charge.

Yodio Makes Podcasting Easy

Yodio, which also launched today at DEMO, is about making it incredibly easy for anyone to create a podcast. All you need says their head of new business development is, a "cell phone, camera and access to the Internet."

Recording is easy. He shows us his MySpace inside of Yodio and how easy it is to bring in the audio. You can then productize your podcast package, using three different options.

1. YodioCard is a single track with a single image (if you move video or audio to an iPod, the image also shows up). After geo-coding everything, you can then send out the content. A drop down category feature allows you to categorize things so you can search for it later on.

2. YodioCast allows you to tell the world a story, such as travel tips, etc.

3. YodioTour - here, you can plan a route, tell a tour or describe an event with multiple steps and price it to sell if you choose.

There are a few ways to publish your audio. You can email it, message it or using a drop down menu, you can share your file with groups that you create inside Yodeo. They also have PayPal tipping enabled, as well as feeds and tags.

Blerts for Feed Overload

The PortNetwork announced Blerts at DEMO this afternoon. Their pitch is solving the problem around the abundance of RSS feeds and how real information indigestion has become real for so many of us.

A smattering of the DEMO audience subscribe to more than five RSS feeds – egads, I subscribe to more 90 and while I don’t read through all of them every day, I do plough through 20 or more.

Blerts is a way to consumer the blogosphere in bite-size chunks. You search for a feed you want to subscribe to and then select a graphical icon to represent the feed. You can customize the feed or choose one of their template designs. You can then decide what priority the feed should have – in other words, what alert level should it have, i.e., top priority.

Blerts actively monitors for RSS feeds in your system tray. The free service is about bringing the most relevant and important data to you when and where you want it. It is driven by advertising and you can contextually link ads to the subject of the feeds.

Blerts is just one component of The PortNetwork bigger picture. ThePort Social Media Suite offers the benefit of social media and personal content aggregation. These solutions have the potential to transform business models for publishers, sports and entertainment brands and industry associations.

ClipSyndicate on Video Syndication

ClipSyndicate launches at DEMO today. They tout themselves as a premier video syndication platform targeted to niche vertical market broadcasters, content providers and advertisers who are looking to reach eyeballs way out on the Long Tail.

They have over 100 content providers, including ABC, CBS, Fox, etc. who are putting clips into their Clip Syndicate platform, and more than 3,600 vertical market websites and blogs signed up. They show us a real niche example - firefighters. ClipSyndicate allows every website to create various video clips within their portal.

You can create a Smart Channel - doesn't NewsGator, KnowNow and others have something similar to this already? Its value? Not sure to be honest.....their spokesperson used nearly every buzz word in the industry, more than once and I felt as if they referenced The Long Tail at the end of every sentence. They say their value-add is a place where real websites, real content providers and advertisers meet up in a seamless environment for frictionless syndication. More buzz words. Video syndication is increasingly becoming more important - just wish they said why I should care in English.

Enterprise RSS Case Study

An interesting RSS success story from Dykema on applied RSS in the enterprise.

StartUp Camp Buzz to Begin

StartUp Camp starts tomorrow through Friday in Mountain View. David Berlind is in town (an east coaster through and through - he's in New Hampshire by the ocean baby, be jealous of him in the summer and fall) to keep the UnConference spirit going. Don't forget about the "best start up contest," where as an attendee, you have an opportunity to participate. I hope to make it down for part of the activities but there's that whole city/South Bay thing that I never thought I'd fall prey to. The inner voice says, "traffic, traffic, traffic...." The external voice says, "seek the South Bay sunshine, sunshine, sunshine...."

There's always wireless at these events so there's no excuse for not finding a corner to be productive if you need to. It's not quite social or participatory but it can be done and is often the reason why so many people have heads hung over their laptops at so many of these events. There's simply too many of them to go to not to be glued to your screen. Add to your workload a series of open wikis, chat rooms and open blog pages, it becomes an addiction.

The conference venues and coffee bars become your office and vice versa. Just ask Om Malik, who now spends more time in a Starbucks than his flat. Watch the blogosphere for on-site activity starting within hours.

Search Keynote

A great recap but such a FACTUAL one of John Battelle's keynote at Blog Business Summit in Seattle this past week. I wish I had been there. Sessions like this one need a more 'emotional' flavor, i.e, yeah, a woman present writing from a more personal perspective, even on search. Yes, even on search.

Start Up Camp

David Berlind writes about the upcoming UnConference, the second he has driven in the past year. (the first was MashUp Camp). In true UnConference fashion, there is no charge (Sun is sponsoring) and it will be held at the Computer History Museum November 2-3, 2006 in Mountain View, CA.

Here here Dave. He writes, "the last thing that was needed was another Web 2.0 event (whatever Web 2.0 is). "With entrepreneurialism to having taken off like a rocket in the last year, what seemed to be missing (and what our email has confirmed) was an event for the community of entrepreneurs (and those thinking about becoming one) who want to maximize their chances of startup success."

They will also be holding a Best Startup Contest, where attendees can vote for the startup that they think is the best one.

Hornik's VentureCast

This is hilarious and great to see. Hornik announces the return of VentureCast - download the first one here. It aims to be a truly "stream of consciousness podcast" recorded while he drives up and down Bay Area highways. We look forward to hearing more Dave. Keep 'em coming.

Blog Business Summit 06

How many conferences and events can one person be at -- simultaneously in various cities on the same days? September through November are insane months for conferences....this week alone, there was Digital Hollywood, the Future Imaging conference in Monterey, Blog Business Summit in Seattle and there are a couple of smaller east coast events I didn't even have time to explore, not to mention PhotoPlus next week in New York.

I blogged a bit about Digital Hollywood yesterday and plan to post my thoughts on the viral and organic marketing session within the next 48 hours......while in LA, I missed the blogging event in Seattle, where the likes of Jason Calacanis and John Battelle spoke this year, among other key Web 2.0 industry folks.

For the latest activity at the blog summit, check out this live blogging link to keep tabs on the sessions and insights.