"I like your roundups of eHub!" says Emily Chang in an email.  All the more reason to keep doing the darned things.  Emily Chang's eHub is a great resource for learning about new or newly highlighted Web 2.0 services and products, but it can be overwhelming.  In the spirit of helpfulness, I've now done a number of weekly summaries of my favorite items on eHub.  The following is the most recent in the series.  No substitute for reading eHub itself, of course, these summaries are just my favorites on the weeks I find time to do a write up.

Listed in order of my excitement this time instead of chronologically:

Social-Mail
Happy day!  Send emails to an RSS feed.  I feel far more comfortable using this tool, a Big in Japan offering, than I do using my previous stand by, mail2rss.org.  Mail2rss.org has worked well for me so far, but the fact that it's remained in "extreme  alpha" mode since I found it makes me very glad to find an alternative.  I use these tools all the time to create feeds for organizations that don't offer them (many in the nonprofit sector, for example.)

Byoms (build your own mobile search)
Not highlighted directly on eHub, but the product of a company that was (Kozuro).  Custom search via IM with support for natural language queries, search sharing and RSS feeds.  Not sure how all of these will work together yet, but those are some of my favorite features for anything - so I'll be watching closely for the June 5th public beta release.  The company says you'll preselect certain sources you want to be able to search, then you can use IM to query those sources on your computer or mobile device.  Sounds pretty cool to me.

Netvibes ecosystem
Makes ajax homepage modules easy to share.  Netvibes is one of the most popular Ajax homepages, which are themselves very poor ways to read anything more than a few RSS feeds with few items in each one (in my opinion).  But it may be one of the most realistic ways to hope for further RSS adoption, and the ecosystem's sharing does help make tangible the portability of feeds. There's an API that's being used to develop new modules, a Word Press plug-in - the announcement of the ecosystem got a lot of coverage throughout the blogosphere.

Farecast
In private beta, this system will use historical data to allow users to predict future airfare offerings.  Have to wonder if another larger vendor will buy this one out, I'm sure that's the idea.  Probably one of the best examples, in fact, of a technology built to flip.  Landing page visual design at least looks totally hip.

Big Blue Saw
You may have read some of the articles around lately about low cost rapid fabrication from CAD files.  Big Blue Saw is an Atlanta based service that offers just such an affordable service.  I've read about this type of thing being the future of manufacturing in the developing world, for now this service is getting press in Make Magazine at least. 

Spinvox
Turns voice mail into text messages or email.  Sounds great, presuming that it works well.  Discussion at MobileCrunch points to two likely problems:  long voicemail messages and the difficulty of trusting a translation to text of the important subtleties in spoken language (like the world "not").  Not having tested this myself, I don't know whether the text messages I get are going to tell me what the names of the callers are as well as my phone's recognition of contacts.  That would be very important.


That's this week's highlights from eHub according to yours truly.  Don't forget to check out the whole site for hours of fun.

Steve Rubel discovers coverage and then goes in depth on eBay plans to incorporate blogs and wikis in their service offerings.  It looks like an impressive implementation, but I have a few questions about it.

• First, if people wanted more in depth discussion - wouldn't the product descriptions and the buyer/seller feedback be less mass produced than they are now?  "Great customer!  Would sell to again for sure!" over and over again.  What percentage of the auction pages are mass produced by huge eBay store owners?
• Given that this will be a pure commercial space it seems like the promised land for comment spammers.  Will eBay be able to fight spam in a way that doesn't shut down discussion but works for users?
• Not sure that these mediums are the best suited for this context.  It seems like kind of an awkward application of two very hip, exciting tools.
• Tag support makes sense if implemented in conjunction with pre-selected categories and full text search.  Given the nature of this particular market, though, I wonder if this will be the space where we really see tag spam emerge in a big way for the first time.
• Internationalization of discourse will be an interesting mess to watch, I'm guessing.  Most businesses large enough to do a lot of international business mitigate language and cultural differences by hiring specialists to help with these issues.  Micro-businesses will not have these resources and I'll be curious to see how many miscommunications, previously silent prejudices and other communication issues emerge.
• Business blogging often helps build relationships between companies and their customers.  How much loyalty do you feel to any particular eBay store?  I'm guessing not very much.  Thumbs up, thumbs down on reputation may be enough reputation/communication system for the vast majority of eBay users.
  

I'm not sure how much adoption these tools are going to see.  Blogging takes time and energy.  I'm not sure that people will find that investment worthwhile when sprucing up product pages and optimizing for search is already doable.  Does conversation drive commerce, as Rubel says?  Or in this case are we dealing with an intention economy - where people come to eBay intending to purchase something and only need help finding the best option at the best price?   I've never been too clear on how great an option it was to be able to call a seller on Skype, so I'm not sure how great an idea this is.  I've only been ripped of on eBay once, though, so perhaps I don't understand other peoples' need for communication. 

The O'Reilly Radar profiled a pre-release service today named SuperOyster.  It's to be federated out to commercial vendors with high demand and a line of prospective customers.  The vendors use it to manage their waiting lists and draw revenue by facilitating the sale of postions in line to people with longer to wait, for whatever.  Football tickets, winery events, super exclusive foo-fee-foos.  I don't know that much about rich people, but isn't a certain amount of the hipness quotient mitigated by the public knowledge that you didn't get into the soiree because you were hip enough to know about it first - but because you bought out some one else who did?

One way or the other, I find this software offering-to-be fascinating.  The company says it utilizes "a patent pending process known as waiting list monetization."  Presuming they get past the non-obviousness requirement in the patent proccess, it could be quite a succesful service.  I'm sure their value proposition will rest in the quality of their services, even if you or I feel like we should have thought of that once we see what they are doing.  Their FAQ adresses the "why should I not just use eBay?" question by saying that they provide a direct link through the trusted vendor you're wanting a ticket to patronize.  I imagine most jerks online would be less willing to stiff say, the 49ers, than you or me over eBay.  That's an interesting proposition in thematic terms, and seems smartly alligned with some key psychological tendencies in the e-commerce space.

 MySpace has announced it will partner with the print magazine Nylon to prerelease an online version of the mag with links to the MySpace pages of bands and others profiled in Nylon stories.  Sounds like a good idea.  The publication in question appears predictably vapid, but the model here could foretell similar agreements in the future.

The move brings to mind the thesis of Nick Carr, who predicts in his forthcoming book and current Gilmor Gang appearances that on-demand media and contextual advertising will decouple high-revenue low-value content from the low-revenue high-value content it has effectively subsidized in traditional media institutions.  (Think Britney Spears coverage selling the ads that then pay for the investigative journalism found in section A or F, whichever the case may be.)  Perhaps the analogy here is that MySpace's partnerships like this one with Nylon will help raise funds to help pay for the hard-hitting critical thought of Fox News.  Hmmm.... no it's probably an example of the kind of cultural destruction that Carr sees on the horizon.  Fluff will pay for nothing but profits and more fluff while journalism that, for example, challenges those in power, will become an underfunded, far less visible niche market.

One way or the other, agreements like this, the WaPo's Technorati partnership and now Time.com's embrace of newbie Sphere all point to a real blurring of the line between traditional and new media.  That doesn't even seem a relevant question any more.  It's about being smart, not about whether new forms of media will beat old ones.

MySpace/Nylon story via Alex Bard and WebProNews.

Feedburner made another big announcement today, they are now providing their RSS management, advertising and FeedFlare services for Wired Magazine.  As far as I can tell, they are a great example of providing an awesome free service to consumer-level users (bloggers) as a way to gain visibility and a foothold on the enterprise market.  Who wouldn't want to keep track of their number of subscribers?  For more details on Feedburner, check my recent interview with biz dev VP Rick Klau.

Emily Chang's eHub is a good place for new Web 2.0 services to announce themselves.  But if you're like me, it's hard to keep up with them.  Thus I'm trying out a practice of summarizing my favorite items from eHub each week.  It's just my option, though, and I missed the week before this one - so for goodness sake go check out eHub yourself.  This week saw 28 items in eHub.  After the jump are my descriptions of my favorite 8 of them.

ResourceShelf.com points this morning to TrafficLand's new service for New York City.  Pretty neat implementation.  Click on a node of interest on a Google Map and you'll get a good view of what traffic is like in that location.  Adds all over the place, could get alot of traffic - if you will.

The company offers delivery to mobile devices and has partnerships with cops and media outlets.  Very interesting.  I find private, as opposed to public, surveillance fascinating.  Hardly ever discussed.  This, though, is a public/private partnership as they say.  The cameras are owned by local government agencies and presumably their feeds are licensed by TrafficLand and who knows who else.

Whew, what a day it's shaping up to be!  Lots of interesting developments.

• TechCrunch launches a podcast, called TalkCrunch, that will profile and interview Web 2.0 startups.  Mike Arrington seems like a pretty nice guy (almost to a fault) and he couldn't be more connected to the startup world, so this should be good depending on his interviewing skills.
• Rafat at PaidContent.org is reporting that AOL (owner of this blog) is going to relaunch Netscape.com as a Digg-style hub for user selected content with Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis at the helm.  Nice, sounds like Netscape could be relevant again.  Unfortunately, Calicanis is on the record as saying he thinks the new Digg comment moderating system is worthless.  Perhaps that means we can expect a load of worthless comments to remain above the fold on the Netscape site.
• The shockingly smooth new OMPL reader Grazr is available online.  See a couple boxes worth in action over at Darwinian Web.  Can't wait to see this puppy put to a variety of uses.
• John Furrier gets a bunch of cash to turn his small tech-podcasting network, Podtech.net, into "the NPR of podcasting."  I'm always interested in Furrier's guests, but can't listen to his show because he really grates on my nerves.  Maybe I've just been getting jealous in advance.
• Blog software provider Six Apart gets even more money, in part to move forward with plans to offer private blogs.  Cofounder Mena Trott believes that blogging is unlikely to ever go mainstream until it was easy for people to limit access to their content online.  Maybe I don't have enough LiveJournal experience, but I question how widespread the practice of regular posting is going to be on personal sites that aren't publicly visible.

Maybe things will slow down a bit so we can breathe a bit before tomorrow.

Federated Media, home of Digg.com, BoingBoing, Dooce and other popular blog-type sites, announced that it's completed a Series A round of fund-raising with contributions from JP Morgan, the NY Times, Tim O'Reilly and others.

It's interesting the think what this kind of funding could be used for in the user-generated content context that a number of the sites in the network represent.  I can only guess that it will lead to even more user generated content.  Once it moves past the early adopters, who all know about most of these sites already, I wonder whether the fundamental nature of the communities there will be changed.  Will there be new demands in making more and different content scalable?  We shall see.

SpotRunner is a new service that finds and sells shockingly inexpensive 30 second TV ad slots to anyone.  I'm impressed.  The home page highlights prime time slots in Central California on ESPN ($44), Bravo ($18) and AMC ($13).  They offer a number of basic commercials that you can customize.  I suppose we'll see how well those work!  Perhaps we're all watching template ads customized for different customers already.  One way or the other, this seems to have some interesting potential.  The company says there are far more unbought ad slots on TV than you might think.  Found via ZDNet.

After a few days off I'm in the swing of things at SXSW, where the first thing I got to do was  interview Eric Rice (off-site) of Audioblog.com yesterday.  Audioblog started as a service that allowed people to record podcasts by calling a phone number; today the company offers many more related services - including video hosting and delivery.  Found out a number of interesting things.  First, the company is in the process of rebranding and will soon be referred to as Hipcast - to better reflect their offerings beyond audio and blogs.  Second, they are expanding operations into Japan with Castella.jp.  Eric Rice is a busy man in the podcasting scene and his company looks to be on the ascent.

Sanjeev Narang, a Washington based consultant, has compiled a huge directory of Web 2.0 web sites organized by category.  There's a lot that isn't listed, but there's a lot that are.  It's impressive.

In exchange for a small donation to the Seattle childrens' literacy organization Page Ahead he'll send you the full list in an Excel file.  That's cool.  Found via Rev2.org

Keith Teare and Michael Arrington were kind enough to give me a tour of their new online listings service Edgeio last week and now that it's begun to open to invited users seems as good a time as any to write that conversation up.  I thought the concept, look and functionality of Edgeio all looked great.  I'll discuss those, but I'm also interested in some of the questions the service will face at it forges into a radically new space for information services.

The basic idea behind Edgeio is that off-site content producers (bloggers and others) will add meta-data to their own content that will designate certain information as intended to appear on Edgeio.  That content will include, but not necessarily be limited to, items for sale and events being promoted online.  There are a variety of ways this will be done, ranging from simple code like many people add for tags destined for Technorati to an even more usable text signifier that can be added for users uncomfortable with HTML.  Arrington says bloggers will be the primary contributors of content to Edgeio, but that any site that publishes an RSS feed will be able to participate.  All of this is good news for usability and diversity of content.

So rumour has it that YouTube has just been acquired. Place your bets, ladies and gents -- who's the lucky suitor? My money's on Yahoo.

[warning: rumour, speculation, disclaim disclaim yadda yadda]

Just caught wind of this as I was guffawing over this World of Warcraft mashup video -- it appears that MySpace is blocking YouTube, not just embedded videos but all YouTube URLs and even any references to the YouTube service. Apparently MySpace hasn't responded to any inquiries from YouTube staff or MySpace users who also use YouTube. Considering the overwhelming amount of strange and random multimedia crap I have seen embedded into MySpace profiles, I find this a little odd. Anybody know what's up?