Toluu : Sifry's Alerts

Sifry's Alerts

David Sifry's musings

Offbeat Guides Public Beta!November 3

I'm proud to announce the launch of Offbeat Guides first product in public beta!

http://www.offbeatguides.com/

What's Offbeat Guides?

Our first product is quite simple: On-demand, Personalized Travel Books. Travel books that are tuned just for you, only about the place that you're going, with local information like festivals, events, and concerts that are going on during the dates of your stay. We put in local maps that are tuned to where you'll be, and we even customize the guide based on what we learn about you, like the timezone differences from your hometown, electrical plug differences, embassies and consulates nearby, differences in tipping policies, exchange rates, local weather forecasts, and much more.

We provide guides for over 30,000 city destinations around the world - of course we cover New York, Paris, Rome, and

I'll be on KQED's Forum with Michael Krasny at 9am on 10/9October 9

It's a bit late notice, but I just found out myself - I'll be on Forum with Michael Krasny this morning at 9am PT. I'll be on with Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and my old friend Sarah Lacy, columnist for Business Week, co-host of Yahoo! Finance's "TechTicker" and author of "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0". We're going to be discussing the effects of the Financial Crisis on Silicon Valley.

I'm a fan of Michael Krasny - I often listen to the 2-hour long "Forum" show, and I've always found him to be articulate, intelligent, and very well educated on the subjects he covers, making great conversation with his guests - so I'm really looking forward to meeting him in person down at the KQED studios. I'll try to get some photos.

It should be an interesting discussion - especially with the market gyrations in the last 2 weeks, the all-but-closure of the IPO market, and now the tech M&A market, it sure looks like we're in for a cold winter.

But I think there's still room for optimism - busts are the perfect time for large companies with cash on their balance sheets to ride things out and gain market share, and also for small agile companies to develop and disrupt industries. I

Offbeat Guides Sneak Peek and Beta UpdateOctober 2

We've been hard at work on the private beta of Offbeat Guides, and I thought it would be a good time to give y'all an update on our progress!

We've been making huge strides both in making the site simpler and easier to use, as well as cranking away on the hard tasks of building out a deep semantic search service that dynamically builds guides for over 30,000 different city destinations around the world. We've taken a lot of what I've learned building comprehensive real-time search engines at Technorati, and also what Marina and her team have learned in building and curating a narrative experience when she was with Lonely Planet. We want to give you more than just the facts - to also get you a flavor and some the romance of the place and of your trip. We've expanded the partners we're working with to include even more local photographs, festivals, tickets, and events, and we've put in a lot of heuristic technology to help to make sure we weed out as much irrelevant information as possible. If you want to work with us, drop us a line.

Algorithms can't provide everything though, especially for the top travel destinations of the world - humans mean a lot too. We've got a team of people who have been digging deep into the top 1000 city destinat

State of the Blogosphere 2008 Wrap-up: Brands and the BlogosphereSeptember 26

To wrap up a long data-filled week, we've rolled out part 5 of the State of the Blogosphere report, which is all about how traditional brands are perceived and how bloggers interact with brands in the blogopshere. This data is taken from the large survey done on Technorati bloggers earlier this year, as described in our methodology. Here's a few of the interesting things we learned:

More than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews, and blog about brands they love or hate.
One-third of bloggers surveyed have been approached to be brand advocates.
Of those, more than six in ten were offered payments of some kind.
One in five bloggers don't think that newspapers will survive the next ten years.
Half of bloggers surveyed believe that blogs will be a primary source for news and entertainment in the next five years.
37% of bloggers surveyed have been quoted in traditional media based on a blog post.
Bloggers are most open to receiving marketing messages from other blogs. Even non-blog web content is more influential among this group than traditional media sources for brand information.
Bloggers spend twice as much time online a

Technorati State of the Blogosphere Parts 3 and 4: How, and How Much?September 25

Technorati continues to release our 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. Here's some highlights from the last two days of posts, on how most bloggers blog, and on blogging for profit (an eye-opening read).

One in four bloggers spends ten hours or more blogging each week.
Over half of the Technorati top authority bloggers post five or more times per day, and they are twice as likely to tag their blog posts compared to other bloggers.
From their use of RSS feeds, video, photos, and mobile updates, top bloggers are also tremendously sophisticated in leveraging the available tools to make their blogs more robust.
The Technorati Top 100 blogs had more than twice as many postings in June 2008 as the next 500, and more than 12 times as many postings as the next 5000.
The Technorati Top 100 are prolific, with 43% posting ten times per day or more often. Only 8% post once a day or less frequently, compared to 13% of the next 500 bloggers, and 22% of the next 5000 bloggers.
Among bloggers who have advertising on their blogs, two in three have contextual ads (such as Google AdSense). One-third of bloggers have affiliate advertising on their blog. One in five negotiate directl