A weblog asks Web 2.0 leaders pointed questions about business models and such.

Question 5: Do you have a marketing plan that extends beyond Digg, TechCrunch, Delicious, and Technorati?…

Rapleaf: we’ve never heard of Digg, Delicious, and Technorati – can you send me their domain names? We’re still focused on Geocities and PlanetAll.

Good enough for me: here’s some link-love for Rapleaf.

Last laugh? PlanetAll and Geocities fetched hundreds of millions of dollars when acquired by Amazon and Yahoo respectively.

Here’s my shill for the week

We just launched a new blog covering MetroWest, complementing the west section of the Globe. The reporters post updates throughout the week. It’s organized by town, so you can see all the Holliston posts if you’d like.

If you want to keep track of Holliston news, you should also subscribe to the Google News search for Holliston. Along the left-hand side, you can click “news alerts” to get emails, or click “RSS” to subscribe to the RSS feed.

[tags]Holliston[/tags]

Over the past few years, I’ve manage to accumulate several decent pictures of elephants, from Tanzania and Thailand. I wanted to try out a couple of things, so I set up a separate little mini-site to highlight the pictures.

Check out my elephant photos.

I always knew this in my heart, but it’s nice to see it confirmed by science.

Antonio mentioned that Sadie and the Cheerios might work well as a Tabblo. Let’s take a look:

See my Tabblo>

Click through on the image for the full-size Tabblo.

[tags]baby, Cheerios, Tabblo[/tags]

I’m working on writing a gallery-o-matic for this site, an easy way to roll up some of my pictures. Here’s a start: A night in the Monster Seats.

Here’s another one: Animals from the Franklin Park Zoo.

Once I have this fully debugged, I should be able to put up a lot more galleries over the next few weeks. Woo hoo!

[tags]Fenway, Red Sox[/tags]

This is a nice colloraboration: We at Boston.com have included “Save to del.icio.us” links on all our stories. I hope our customers will find this useful.

If you ever want to read my mind a little, you should check out my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Here is an insightful tale of a conservative blogger’s visit to the Globe, well worth the several minutes to read.

I learned some appreciation for the Globe’s esprit and for that of the whole newspaper business – a business that worries deeply about disruptive competition from the Internet in ways that remind me of the automobile business during my youth in Detroit, when today’s automotive climate of heavy government regulation and global competition was just beginning. The newspaper business has real concerns about competitors from the Internet. Yet the Globe and newspapers have at least two sustainable advantages. First, they deliver their product daily to my doorstep before breakfast in a form that, while venerable, is quite satisfying and will remain so. Second, they can marshal a relatively large group of talented people to create their product. If they do their reporting jobs well, they may even be able to support an insular Op Ed board that seems to believe their target market is the Harvard faculty, and others who react with hostility when ideologically challenged.

It’s interesting. I walk through the lobby several times a week and I’ve never really noticed the stone map of New England. I’ll have to check it out next time I’m over on Morrissey.

Friend and fellow ex-Abuzzer Antonio Rodriguez’s company Tabblo is profiled in the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.).

We’ve been playing with Tabblo for the past week, arranging digital shots into collages — some with text descriptions and some without. Katie made a tabblo of pictures from a friend’s graduation party, and Walt made one of photos from the Journal’s recent “D: All Things Digital” technology conference.

We used various background colors, photo sizes, style arrangements and image effects, and got results that required very little effort on our part yet still looked professional and polished. An 11×17-inch Tabblo poster that we ordered turned out to be an attractive keepsake that displayed a bunch of photos all at once, eliminating the need to leaf through stacks of prints or scroll through hundreds of digital files.

This is a massive coup. Few startups get the Mossberg treatment.

Congratulations, Antonio!

(Previously: Tabblo launches.)

Friend and fellow ex-Abuzzer Jay Brewer is profiled in the Wall Street Journal, talking about his success in building out the Blogpire.

[S]ix months after he launched singleservecoffee.com, traffic and revenue had both more than quadrupled, Mr. Brewer says. He realized he could make the blogs a full-time job, but he had to make sure the performance in that fourth quarter of 2004 was not a fluke. He set up a forecast for the first quarter of 2005 for the blogs to maintain half the traffic they had in the fourth quarter, with the notion that if the sites met or exceeded his expectations he would quit his job. He began looking for more writers for each blog, while rolling out more at the same time.

By March 2005, Blogpire had outperformed his forecasts, he says, and he quit his job.

Congratulations, Jay!

(Previously: Jay’s week of Internet Fame.)

I don’t normally envy others’ success, but this is one damn fine AdSense check.

This is an interesting article with Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post about the intersection of programming and journalism, an intersection I often find myself exploring.

The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:

1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It’s reporting.

2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant.

3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the distilled information into a format that is accessible to the readership. Some examples: writing style (inverted pyramid, etc.), photo color-correction, newspaper page design.

“Doing journalism through computer programming” is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible.

I’ll be at BarCampBoston this weekend. It looks like it should be a fun gathering, and I look forward to learning from my fellow campers and sharing my own experiences (for what they’re worth…).

If you’re going to be there, drop me a line and we’ll try to sync up.

[tags]BarCampBoston[/tags]

Wow, such a fun link from Boing Boing: a reel of 70s toy commercials on YouTube.

These toys look like so much fun.

Antonio Rodriguez and team launched Tabblo this morning. It’s a great tool for putting together combinations of pictures and words to tell a story.

I’ve built my first Tabblo. It’s pretty easy….

I look forward to playing with it more tonight. It’s great to see local Boston startups doing interesting things.

If you haven’t already incorporated Wikipedia into your daily workflow, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s 9:20am, and as I’m reviewing some financials from the mothership, I’ve already used it to look up two different terms of art for which I didn’t know the precise meaning, EBITDA and CAGR.

It is really quite handy to have all the world’s knowledge freely available at your fingertips.

As you know, we watch The Colbert Report each night. Last night, Colbert hosted the White House Correspondent’s dinner; today, the blogosphere is all atwitter.

Colbert ripped the President to shreds, playing one long extended game of the emperor’s new clothes, with some pretty funny lines.

[Talking to Jesse Jackson is] like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.

Some people are upset at Colbert’s disrespect. They aren’t challenging his premises, just his taste in making comments so near the President. Which may be reasonable, given comments like this:

I haven’t. I stand by [President Bush]. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, has he stood on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Here’s the transcript. Here are video links, to part one, two, three. You should watch the whole thing, not because it’s brilliant comedy — some places are pretty flat, not helped by a hostile audience — but because sometimes the court jester is the only one who’ll speak bluntly.

I suppose this qualifies as my embarrassing disclosure of the day. Here are a couple of videos I found this morning, videos that brought me back to the mid-eighties, when I knew everything about professional wrestling.

Hulk Hogan wins the WWF championship from The Iron Sheik
From January 1984.

Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant vs. Big John Studd and King Kong Bundy
From January 1985′s Saturday Night’s Main Event.

Also, the WWE store has a Hulk Hogan anthology that looks pretty impressive. Check it out.

For even more fun, check out the Wikipedia entries for these folks for these men. Sadly, many of them are dead.

Hulk Hogan
The Iron Sheik
Andre the Giant
King Kong Bundy
Big John Studd

If you’ve never tried it, you should check out YouTube and do a couple of searches. You will be able to find all sorts of interesting things.

I’m waiting anxiously for the new Tufte book to come out. If you don’t already have them, you should go get the Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations. They will change how you think about and present data.

In the meantime, here’s a Tuftian map visualization project called WorldMapper, where they allocate space by all sorts of different factors, including things like:

Land mass – This is the normal map of the world, though it may look odd if you’re used to the Euro-centric Mercator projection.

Population in 1 AD – “The territories that now encompass the Ganges, Tigris, Yangtze, Nile and Po rivers were the most populous.”

Population in 2050 – “62% of the people will live in Africa, Southern Asia and Eastern Asia – numerically this is the same as if all the world’s current population lived just in these regions.”

Net out-tourism – Fun fact: Germans leave Germany five times as often as non-Germans visit Germany.

Aircraft flights – America dominates.

(via O’Reilly Radar)

A good editor is hard to find.

That’s why I read the Globe online each morning, why I read the Times, the Journal. The world is a busy place and I have only a few minutes to catch up. I rely on the editors’ judgment to make the best use of my time.

Recently, I’ve been spending more time with the algorithmic editors, specifically del.icio.us/popular, Memeorandum and Reddit. Each of these sites use technical means to determine what’s important; each has its own algorithmic special sauce. They haven’t gotten to the point where I trust them to replace the newspapers, but by harnessing the wisdom of the crowds (at least the wisdom of techie crowds), they provide a useful complement.

Now, I just need to find an algorithmic solution that matches my own varied interests. One of my little projects for 2006 is to write a “Daily Me” program that will scour the web and find things I will want to read. I’ll be able to program it to find exactly what I’m looking for, while also preserving an element of serendipity.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes…