VentureBeat

Yahoo’s blog community site, MyBlogLog, has launched a new acitivity stream (a list of activity from you and your contacts on a social site) portion of its site, which it’s dubbing “New with…”. While a nice addition for users of the site, this new feature simply doesn’t compare to similar products from competitors — namely, FriendFeed.

As you’d expect, MyBlogLog lets you enter your user name for dozens of services around the Internet and then aggregates this data, along with the data from of all your contacts, in an updating list on your main profile page. Facebook’s News Feed brought the activity stream into popularity — even though it was controversial at the time. Since then, a number of services, including Plaxo and FriendFeed, have extended and improved on the idea by adding dynamic features such as commenting to these streams (our coverage).

MyBlogLog started out as an easy way for bloggers to create communities around their individual sites. Yahoo bought the service just over a year ago, but hadn’t done much with it other than integrate it with their sign-in system.

The problem with adding a feature like an activity stream well into a product’s lifespan is that it can drastically alter how that service is being used. For example, as a member of the service for nearly two and a half years, I have accumulated over 990 contacts. I added so many simply because there was no reason not to. Anyone who requested me I befriended.

Now, if I actually wanted to pull some useful information from this MyBlogLog activity stream, I would have to unfriend the vast majority of these users. There is simply way too much going on from a lot of people I don’t really know.

Instead, it makes more sense to keep using a service like FriendFeed that was built around the activity stream. That service, which just went public a few days ago (our coverage), has a much cleaner look and feel and is more intuitive then the offering from MyBlogLog. I already mentioned that you can comment on items on FriendFeed, but you can also do things such as ‘like’ items and selectively filter certain streams to your liking.

In fact the only real advantage MyBlogLog seems to offer over a service like FriendFeed is that it does, as of right now, allow you to link up your profiles on a lot more services.

 Updated

Ever notice how some blogs are filled with mean-spirited, crude or self-serving comments, while others have few comments at all?

Palo Alto’s SezWho, a service that lets you build a reputation based on the quality of your online comments, thinks it can change that. It launched a test version publicly last week.

The company offers a widget that plugs into a blog’s comment board and adds the question “Was this comment useful to you?” after every reader’s post Each commenter has a rating of 1-5, represented with small boxes next to his or her name.

Jakob Nielson, a respected pundit on web behavior, has written that when it comes to posting on blogs, 0.1 percent of the readers contribute the vast bulk of comments. The idea is to offer readers a chance to get recognized for their insights, giving them a new incentive to post. However, it could chase away those commenters whose rankings sink. Readers have the option to filter out the comments from posters with low ratings.

To leave a comment, you enter your e-mail address, and from then on SezWho starts building your reputation and creating a profile. You also have to give your e-mail address to rate a comment because SezWho gives more weight to your rating if you have a strong reputation, and less if you don’t.

Your profile, which others can access by clicking on a link to the right of your name, contains links to all the posts you’ve commented on in the past. This, says SezWho’s chief, Jitendra Gupta, is key to the service’s value for bloggers: It will leverage the contributions of their most prolific commenters, drive traffic to their older posts, and increase page-views overall.

If you want, you can add a picture to your profile, some brief information, and a link to your own blog.

One neat aspect is that your profile is portable, meaning your reputation goes with you to other blogs that have the widget installed. However, these reputations are context sensitive, so if you’re reputable on a tech blog, for example, your reputation won’t necessarily be strong on a blog about sports.

SezWho expects to make money from subscription fees — paid by bloggers who use the widget on their sites. The prices of the subscription, which range from free to $200 per month, depend on how many times commenters’ profiles get viewed. For its paid plans, SezWho guarantees it will increase pageviews by five to eight percent (depending on your subscription) or give you your money back.

SezWho also plans to use the reputation system it builds to identify influential contributors surrounding any given topic and offer marketers the ability to reach out to them. This will be opt-in only, however, so if the commenter doesn’t want marketers to have access them, they won’t.

There could also be some targeted advertising involved.

SezWho faces some competition from reader-centric blog widget, MyBlogLog and tools like Co.mments and coComment, which help you keep track of your commenting around the web, but SezWho is different and well-executed enough to possibly make a mark. Right now, it only works on Wordpress, but we’re Wordpress users and are thinking about giving it a try.

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Here’s the latest wrap-up of Silicon Valley tech news:

Cisco sues Apple over iPhone name — Who cares? If Apple loses, it will come up with a different name. Like, ApplePhone, or iPodPhone. Details of suit.

Yahoo signs deal with Akimbo to deliver video to televisions — Just the latest move in a huge number of deals pushing video to your TV. More details here.

Avvenu shares music via link in email — Avvenu, a Palo Alto start-up has been around for a while, but has introduced a new service for sharing music. By downloading a free music player, users can select tracks they wish to share (250 for free) and send links to friends via email. Recipients click on the link to listen for up to five days. Users sharing their music must have iTunes software downloaded, though recipients don’t. Works on Windows mobile software, too.

The latest on Jeff Bezos’ space project – Here’s the scoop from Amazon.com’s Bezos on Blue Origin, which reveals a cone-shaped vehicle to be used “to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.” Tests have already been made, though the program has some ways to go.

MyBlogLog sold for reported $10M, after no venture capital, and then spammed — The service, which lets bloggers and others see who is reading their blogs, and where those readers tend to go afterward, has sold to Yahoo for a reported $10 million. MyBlogLog became popular last year, after its little widget started showing up on blogs with the pictures of their readers. Some 45,000 bloggers had signed up for it. Om talked with chief exec Scott Rafer. Lately, though, some have showed it is relatively easy to spam.

Update on Techdirt’s analyst service — As reported (see here), Techdirt raised $600,000 to build out its Insight Community product, which hooks up expert bloggers with companies that seek their advice. Mike Masnick (left), of Techdirt, who has built the company without outside investments over the past decade, tells VentureBeat he finally bit the bullet, realizing it made sense to raise money to help build out the project — given all of the interest he’d received in it. It is still in testing mode, but he’s now building more interactive features, letting people in the network communicate with each other, rather than limit it to one-to-one relationship originally envisioned. Entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, one of the investors, joins the board. Also, investors were all outsiders. Insiders didn’t participate, as suggested earlier by the PEhub report, Masnick said.

Slideshow company Slide raised $20 million — We’d reported Slide’s venture round last year. Reports suggest Slide raised $20 million, giving it a valuation afterward of $60 to $80 million. This gives it some runway, even as competitor Filmloop lays off most of its workers. Here is our earlier story.

Weatherbill, an online site to sell weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses — Sounds boring, but it has all the Map mashups and other Web 2.0 candy to make it worth a look (via Techcrunch)
It has raised a first round of round of financing from NEA, Index Ventures and a number of angel investors.

Second Life has opened its application to developers — Many people find the virtual world Second Life difficult to get the hang of, which has no doubt limited its growth. Now it has opened its software for developers to provide alternatives. It isn’t clear whether this will spark a vibrant developer community or not.

Podzinger searches words in YouTube videos — Podzinger gives you a way search for words that are mentioned in YouTube videos. Podzinger has a tab letting you do this on its front page, and it tells you how many minutes and seconds into the video the reference is (although we couldn’t figure out how to zip automatically to the reference, like Pluggd does). More details here, at Splashcast blog. Blinkx is another company that searches audio and video files.

PayPerPost drops its purchase of Perfomancing assets — Details here.

Aaron Swartz, of Reddit, not done dreaming — Good piece in the Chronicle mentioning the impressive rise of Swartz, who built his first web site at 13, got bored, and then, circuitously, ended up building Reddit, which was bought by Wired Digital. Now 20, he says he’s headed back to academia soon. Re hanging out: “I’m so shy I don’t even hang out with the people I know now.”

Hype at Asiatech? — Days ago, we reported on the purchase of software developer Mediabolic by Macrovision. Sources told us the return was marginal, giving later investors slightly more than the money they invested. But it was no where near a two-fold return claimed by AsiaTech investor Katherine Jen in an interview with VentureWire recently, they said. Jen did not respond to a request by VentureBeat for comment about her “2x return” claim.

See Jobs’ demo of iPhone — It is striking, and worth it. See here, and click on “touch navigation” for starters.

(Updated) roundup of the high-stakes game going on in Silicon Valley:

Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter memo — The Yahoo executive complained about the company’s “proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside.” This is noteworthy, because he himself was hired from the outside. Before Yahoo, he’d served as chief executive at DialPad, and drove that company into the ground. We reached out to Brad Monday night, and hope to get comment soon.

Larry Sonsini can’t be at fault — Fortune does a long piece about one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful lawyers, Larry Sonsini, and provides good insight into his character. Much of the substance, though, has been covered elsewhere already. Still, a notable quote from entrepreneur TJ Rodgers about why Sonsini is innocent in the options back-dating scandal (reason: he’s too expensive):

“How to give options is well known,” says Rodgers, the Cypress CEO. “You hire outside counsel, they have their word processor kick up a bunch of documents, and they charge you 50,000 bucks. Then you and your HR person give out options according to the plan. You administer it; they’re not involved. You don’t want them [outside counsel] involved, because you don’t want to be sent a bill for $2,000 every time you give out stock options.”

Chris Tate takes back Zooomr sale price — Valleyway says Zooomr, the photo site that likes to think of itself as a competitor to Flickr, turned down a $2 million dollar offer from Google, citing Zooomr’s founder Kristopher Tate as the source: “We’re going to take over the world!” he allegedly told Valleyway, adding that his selling price today would be $15 million. VentureBeat checked with Tate, and he had a different tune. He said he didn’t comment, either way, on the price, but did say he’s going to take over the world.

Reid Hoffman kept out of YouTube by his own VC firm — Reid Hoffman, chief executive of LinkedIn tells the New York Times that he wanted to make an investment in YouTube, but that his own venture backer, Sequoia Capital, edged him out by offering better terms. Sequoia could make nearly $500 million from the Google-YouTube deal. The NYT reporter quotes Hoffman saying he is envious of YouTube. However, Hoffman now says he was quoted out of context, i.e, that he was referring to how other people could be envious, and the Times reporter changed his words. He’s sent a letter of protest to the NYT reporter, a copy of which was slipped to VentureBeat.

Blackstone places $36 billion bet on real estate — This is the biggest buyout ever. VentureBeat don’t usually write about later stage deals, but this is just the latest example of the huge amount of private money circulating the economy, and it is trickling down to the venture world too. As we’ve said before, great time to raise money.

Cisco’s acquisition strategy defies science — Here’s an amusing 16 minute podcast of an interview of Dan Scheinman, Cisco SVP of corporate development by Wharton management professor Saikat Chaudhuri. Once you get in a bit, Chaudhuri keeps pressing Scheinman on the “science” of Cisco’s acquisition strategy, because he’s teaching a class on it, but Scheinman keeps letting him down — diplomatically, at least — insisting its largely intuition. He says an acquisition’s success is all in the timing, and these days Cisco is almost always better off waiting. Cisco checks blogs and discussion boards for news about the start-ups its looking at, again an apparent surprise of Chaudhuri.

A degree from Stanford without actually attending — Notable story in the Merc today about increasing number of people getting a degree remotely, in places like China.

Two years later, California’s stem-cell institute is still on life-support — It gets loans while it fights of lawsuits. This is getting ugly.

Yahoo buying MyBlogLog? Nah –MyBlogLog is a site that helps bloggers see who their readers are. Yet no one took time to confirm rumors with either company. We looked up Scott Rafer, chief executive of MyBlogLog several days ago, and he said was just out talking to a bunch of people about options; he seemed miffed with the inaccurate reporting. But Yahoo did acquire Swedish mobile company Kenet Works.

Iconix and RockYou have apparently settled — Here’s update story about the suit we wrote about here.

Fenwick’s lawyer says founders may be going too far in this rosy VC environment — Ted Wang, an attorney for several Web 2.0 companies, suggests they may be overreaching in the terms they negotiate with VCs.

Infinera’s 100 Gigabit Ethernet demo — Just recently 10 Gigabit Ethernet had become the cutting-edge technology for optical data transport. Now, Sunnyvale’s Infinera has demonstrated the first ever 100 Gigabit Ethernet network across 4,000 kilometers.

Getting paid enough? — Salaryscout just launched a simple way for you to compare salaries. Downside is, there’s not much there yet to compare. Techcrunch has a review.

Silicon Valley never sleeps. Here’s the latest tech stuff:

Digg subverted — The news site that ranks stories based on how many users submit them, is being subverted by a group called Spike the Vote. It lets its members conspire to submit certain URLs of stories — thereby lifting the odds those stories will get front-page coverage.

MyBlogLog goes live — This is a site we’ve mentioned before, while it was in testing mode. It hasn’t changed its basic model, so we’ll refer to that earlier story for the full background. MyBlogLog has provided a way for bloggers and other sites to get more information about its visitors. One of its offerings is a “recent readers widget,” which shows the photos/avatars of the recent readers on a site. So for example, every time we show up at blog of venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who has implemented the widget (see lower left hand side), we are surprised to we see our own face. It is opt-in, so if you haven’t signed up to MyBlogLog, your photo won’t be there).

Three of the four major music companies make money off of YouTube deal — This is a bizarre. Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony and Bertelsmann’s jointly owned Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and the Warner Music Group — each quietly negotiated small ownership stakes in YouTube as part of video- and music-licensing deals they struck shortly before the sale to Google, the New York Times is reporting. The music companies collectively stand to receive as much as $50 million from these arrangements, sources told the Times.

Moreover, the music companies rushed to complete the deal ahead of the YouTube deal, in part so that they could benefit in the jump in YouTube’s value, the Times said.

Sounds a bit like extortion, in other words: Wink, nudge, you let us make $50 million, and we’ll let you acquire YouTube and leave you alone legally — for the time being.”

Sneak preview of the Sling Media for Mac — Here.

The $1,200/year online calendar — Trumba has some guts. The Seattle start-up (which we mentioned here), backed by profit-focused firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, August Capital and Oak Investment Partners, is lifting its price to $99 a month from $39.95 — even though a host of free competing calendar offerings exist on the market. We don’t get this one. (Via Jeff Nolan).

Paul Graham always makes you think — The essayist has written “The 18 Mistakes that Kill Start-ups” and it’s great reading.

Friendster says it has a new patent — Liz Gannes at Gigaom says social networking company Friendster called her up to chat about the new patent it has , which Friendster says covers uploading a photo and associating it with someone you are connected to on an online social network. Friendster says it should extend to “videos, audio, comments,” and any other content type, supported in public or private forums, within a social network. But we don’t see any reference to video or audio in the patent text, so we’re not sure what they’re talking about. We’ve contacted Friendster to check.

SF’s WiFi project derailed, or seriously delayed, by crazy nut jobs — Or so says David Freeberg. Sounds like Google’s Chris Sacca was right when he blew up in frustration about this earlier.

Google Optimizer — If you are an advertiser on Google, this new tool lets you experiment with different headlines, copy, and images that people see when they click on an ad link and come to your site. This experimentation, Google says, will let you find out which combination results in the most conversions.

Washington is in sad state of ignorance — On Tuesday, we referred to comments made by the AeA’s Bill Archey, a lobbyist for high-tech, bemoaning the ignorance most members of Congress show on technology issues. Eric Schmidt, chief exec of Google, made a similar point Tuesday: Those in the know about technology must spend more time reaching out to governments and helping them understand the Internet’s role in society, he said: “The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff,” ZDNet quoted Schmidt saying. “There is a generational gap, and it’s very, very real.”

Kongregate lets game developers make money directly — This is a San Francisco start-up that lets game developers upload their Flash-based games, and gives them a cut in any revenue made from users. It is in a closed testing phase, but is eager for feedback. Founder Jim Greer told us yesterday the company is raising a seed round of capital.