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social|median

This blog presents the observations, thoughts, and opinions of socialmedian's founder, Jason Goldberg.


return to blog, thinking about the evolution of the Internet and the social paradigm shiftAugust 27
Sorry I haven't blogged in a while.  Been very busy working on new features at socialmedian.  Also, it's just so much easier to micro-blog/post on socialmedian, twitter, and friendfeed that my everyday thoughts go there several times daily, while I hold out bigger things for full blog posts.  I'm sure others are starting to notice the same shifts in the way they micro-blog vs. blog.

Anyway, I was leaving a comment today on a socialmedian post that I thought it was worth sharing more broadly.

The comment is wrt to an article in CIO magazine regarding the importance and impact of social networking & socialmedian beyond just for fun.  My comment is below.

Summary
Social Networking Stands to Benefit BusinessesSocial networking may be best known as a consumer phenomenon but as a communication and collaboration concept it also stands to benefit businesses Read the full article






Winners Announced: socialmedian iphone application design contestAugust 15
We are ready to announce the winners of the socialmedian iphone application design contest.

Designers were given 1 week to dream up and represent the ideal socialmedian user experience on the iphone.  We received 9 entries in the contest.  Each of the entries were really well done.  The typical entry contained more than 10 pages designed.  We are very thankful to all of the designers from around the world who put a lot of effort into the contest.

We have two prizes:
1.  A public vote.  Winner of the public vote will get $500 and a free iphone.
2.  socialmedian team judging.  Winner of the socialmedian team judging wil get $1000 and a free iphone.  Note:  If the socialmedian team independently chooses the same as the public vote, then there will just be a single winner of $1000 + a free iphone.

The Public Vote:
  • The public vote took place here on socialmedian.  socialmedian users were asked to vote by leaving a public comment with their preferred choice.
  • In all, 159 comments were left and more than 100 votes were tabulated.











socialmedian RSS feeds, friendfeed, and a search workaround, and those pesty registration requirementsAugust 14
As previously noted, one of socialmedian users'  top feature requests since we went beta a few days ago has been for us to RSS enable all the socialmedian pages so that people can get their sociamedian feeds anywhere they prefer.  Makes a lot of sense and is something we had hoped to get done prior to beta but decided not to hold the beta up for.

So, today, we have now RSS enabled the following pages:
  • The "My Networks" feed on your homepage.  This is the aggregated news feed of the news networks you belong to.  Here's mine. 
  • The "Me" feed on your homepage.  This is the feed of your key activities on socialmedian.  Here's mine.  We have formatted this feed so that it will work well if you put it in a widget on your blog or on sites like FriendFeed.  Each item starts with the activity, such as, "Clipped on socialmedian:  [followed by title of story].  I've gone ahead and added this feed to my friendfeed so that my friendfeed friends can track the stories i'm reading on socialmedian without having to always visit socialmedian.   It looks like this on friendfeed:






What is socialmedian up to this week? 8/14/08 -- Bug fixes and some new featuresAugust 12
This week:

  • Enable un-registered users to click external links without registering on the site.  DONE 8-14-08
  • Show a list of popular sources that any user can one-click to add to a News Network DONE 8-14-08
  • Enable user who created news network to edit primary topic, go back to News Network wizard to easily add more popular sources, etc.    
  • Expose the volume meter to all users not just the person who created the News Network, enable everyone to personalized their own volume meter in each news netework.
  • Some users are finding that after using the socialmedian bookmarklet a few times in a row, the site no longer allows them in until clearing cookies
  • A number of backend improvements to how we use solr for search, memcached for perf, etc.
  • Most of the key pages on socialmedian will be fully RSS enabled by end of week
  • About 50 more user submitted bugs
Also working on this week but will not be quite ready this week:
  • Widgets for bloggers -- some stuff you would expect, and some stuff you might not expect.  We're working with about 15 bloggers on this.
  • Automate Google Reader shares and Diggs directly into socialmedian
  • Open up every user's public page on socialmedian to be available without registration
  • Suggested people to follow
  • Report spam
  • Warn user
  • Moderate comments
  • Favorite news networks quick links, navigation imp





7 Months Into My 2nd Stint as a Startup CEOAugust 11
One of the first things I did when getting started on socialmedian 7 months ago was to write out a list of many of the lessons I learned in my first turn as a startup CEO at Jobster from 2004 to 2007.  Trust me, there were plenty of them.  You can read them here.

As I set out to apply these lessons the 2nd time around, I promised myself that I would periodically stop to write an update.  I had meant to do the first update after 6 months at socialmedian but we got so busy with our recent beta launch that I'm just now getting around to it about a month late.

Starting a second company reminds me of a valuable lesson from my first day of undergraduate studies at Emory University years back.  The dean of something-or-other walks into a room full of about 500 nervous yet confident know-it-alls and says:  "You are going to learn a lot of lessons the next 4 years.  But let me be the one to tell you the most important lesson of all right now, and it's not anything you are going to read in a textbook.  Go home tonight and take out a picture of your parents and study that picture and remember their ways.  Because I promise you that you are going to spend a good part of the rest of your life both running from your parents and becoming them.