zenpundit.com

Much like Zenpundit himself.

On a serious note, I really enjoyed the presentation of Sliderocket by Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated.  Sliderocket would appear to be a huge leap in dynamic presentation quality that should interest anyone who has do public speaking or briefing (Tom, Steve, John, Shlok…).

Signing up for private beta….

Heard about Quotably on Twitter, wasn’t sure what it was until I came across this post by Gerrit at Smart Mobs.

Web 2.0 has evolved to the point where we need special search apps just to manage our social networking apps. Actually, what I really need is a  securely encrypted “universal remote” app for all the platforms I’m using or would like to use.

UPDATE:

Reader and twitter compadre Sandbaggerone also suggests Friendfeed.

Theofanis D. Lekkas, a longtime Zenpundit reader who comments here occasionally under the handle “TDL“, is in the process of launching a fantastic Web 2.0 start-up, RealScoop.com, currently in Beta. In a nutshell, it’s a mediacentric Youtube mashed up with a voice-stress analyzer lie detector. Any celebrities or politicians you love, hate or love to hate ?  See what topics send them off the Richter Scale.  A few examples:

Senator Barack Obama

Vice President Dick Cheney

Former Governor Eliot Spitzer

And on a lighter note, Tom Cruise on a deranged rant about psychiatry

This is all in good fun and I wish Theo every success with RealScoop.com but there are interesting implications if this platform were to become as ubiquitous as is youtube or yahoo. Imagine, being a politician or public spokesman and knowing that your every word simply isn’t going to be parsed but run through a voice stress analyzer and transformed into a virally formatted visual clip. How would that change your media strategy ? Your deposition strategy? Being a laconic, strong, silent type might actually come back into style.

TDL may have hit on something here. Feel free to send him any comments when you peruse RealScoop or leave some here – he’s interested in your feedback.

“If you build it, they will come…”

A start-up called Creative Weblogging  is attempting to build a stable of  business/finance/tech bloggers from scratch by paying unknowns a modest but not unattractive sum ($ 84 -140/ month) for steady posting.  In fact, they offer a “Pro Blogger Compensation Package” of sorts:

Pro Blogger Compensation Package:

• Monthly compensation: $84-140 (US) – paid via PayPal or Moneybookers
• 3-5 posts per week are required, min. of 70 words each.
• Traffic bonuses for aggressively growing traffic are available.
• Access to our vibrant community discussion group with 80+ bloggers, where you can share tips and network.
• We take care of all the technology with an advanced blogging platform.
• We also provide marketing support.
• Virtual shares program: blog with us for a year and you can earn virtual shares in the company.

Hmmmm…..Do “virtual shares” pay real dividends? 

Kind of interesting. Where Newsvine tried relying upon an ego-driven reputation management economy to gain free content, these folks are betting on actually sharing some of the wealth with creators will assemble a social network that can be commoditized.  As most bloggers produce inane drivel, especially when they are new to the game, the payment is far more than the labor is worth – until they find a blogger who can pull in hundreds of thousands of hits a week. Four of five of them should pay the bills for all the failures.

Presumably their business model is some kind of targeted RSS feed subscription marketing to justify ad revenues and later by hyping products by raising their status in the attention economy, assuming the network ever commands that kind of traffic leverage. I suspect the company retains intellectual property rights to what their bloggers write but I could be wrong. Bears watching as an experiment in the evolution of Web 2.0.

( Hat tip to Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

I’ve decided to follow John’s lead and hop back on to this platform once more as more of my blogfriends seem to be active on Twitter this time around.

Long day but a productive one.  Just realized that networking and leveraging attention is half the battle.