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Missing out on a super interesting week

Published July 10, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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The coming week, July 12th, is looking like one of the most interesting weeks in the last 6 months for the local internet and SU scene, second only to that week end of March.
And I’m gonna miss all of it!! Here’s what we have planned for the week. The reason for my absence is at the bottom of the post.

Monday, July 13th
Globes‘ annual Internet, Communication and Media Conference will kickoff Monday the 13th, at David Intercontinental Hotel in Tel Aviv (map). The event is sponsored by Bezeq and the.co.ils, media sponsors are TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, Go2Web20, TechAviv and The Next Web. During the event the.co.ils will hold their highly anticipated TWS2009 – the most promising Israeli web and mobile startups competition. Throughout the day, 10 pre-selected startups (that were picked by these judges) will come on stage and present their solution/service/product before a crowd of VCs, CEOs, internet evangelists and media professionals.

Other than the TWS2009 there will be some cool panels and 1-on-1 interviews: Trends in consumer marketing; Future of communication (VoIP, Cellular, IPTV and more); Twitterring of course; Building personal brands by @garyvee; How-to get eBay to buy you; Creative thinking and the highlight of the event – a video-interview with David Plouffe – Obama’s Chief Campaign Mgr. in the 2008 Presidential Elections.
Full agenda for the entire event is available here (Hebrew only, sorry).

If you have ANY interest in the local internet scene, you must be at TWS2009. The 10 startups will also present at this year’s DemoPit at TC50 coming Sep. If you are unable to attend (like me), start following @tws2009 and #tws2009 on twitter to catch all the highlights, photos, videos, announcements and excitement.

Sunday, July 12th
Like any internet event there will be a pre-event party, by invitation only, sponsored by Sequoia Capital, Sunday evening. You’re welcome to try and get a ticket here.

Saturday, July 11th
Even before that, on Saturday, Technorati founder Dave Sirfy (who’s also a judge), will host 2 photo walks at Tel Aviv, for those who fancy walks, photos and internet of course.. 😉 The first walk will be to Neve Tzedek (morning) and the second to Old Jaffa (evening). Dave was here last some 20 years ago, so this might be a good chance to catch up with him.

Wednesday, July 15th
Towards the end of the week, Wed. the 15th, the Israel Internet Association will hold a half-day event focusing on the daily implications of social media, such as GUI interactions, Creating personal branding and the effects of twitter of course. You can read more about the event and its speakers here and on facebook.

All week long
Now, why am I going to miss all those events? Well, I’ll be pre-occupied somewhere in the desert, paintballing my way to the target, while staying clear (and clean 😉 of the ‘enemy’. Among other things… Wish me luck and see you all next weekend :-))

StatusSearch – Get (more) reliable results

Published July 6, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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The Jewish mind keeps coming up with new inventions and ideas, luring CEOs to the holy land, even in the July sun – no wonder Israel has some 3,500 start-up companies, 2nd only to the US.

My friend Lior Levin joined forces with ROR dude Elad Meidar to form StatusSearch.net, which brings you results from your friends’ updates in twitter and facebook. The idea is improving reliability of course – if I’m searching for Michael Jackson, my friends will provide better results than the general population, or I wouldn’t have followed/friended them to begin with. LinkedIn and MySpace integrations are on the way as well.

The idea is simple, and is a semi-semantic way to filter results. While twitter search crawls the entire user base, statussearch.net looks at your friends only, assuming they know what they talk about.. 😉

Couple of things I noticed from a brief use that are worth mentioning/conversing:

  • True to the ‘real-time’ reality, the results are 1-paged, no option for ‘more’. You do get an icon to see the source of each result, but if your answer is 2-3 days old, you won’t see it. Also, it’s unclear to me how frequent the crawler works and if there’s any attempt to ‘even’ the results between twitter and facebook (think not). Does the engine displays ‘power users’ results first (because those users are more connected – thus what they say is more accurate/important/RTed/Liked)?
  • Size matters? I’m following some 650 people and sport 950 friends in facebook, which makes my pool of knowledge average I guess, at 1,600 minds. There is wisdom in there, don’t get me wrong, but how will a 500-mind pool looks like? or 5,000?
  • Memory loss. Sometimes I wish to see stuff I updated, and in that case I go to my own stream at twitter.com. Although I tried several times, no results from ‘me’ appeared in statussearch timeline, but that’s probably because I’m no longer friends with myself… 😉
  • Integration points. There are 2, email alerts and a firefox search plugin, both highly welcome. You can create unlimited number (free, for now) of alerts and receive an email once something happen (daily or immediately). The FF plugin (accessible from every page, right-hand side) is most useful – I’m a huge search plugin fan that makes the solution serve you, where/when/how you want, and not vise-versa.

Overall, I think Lior and Elad are on to something. The web is filled with junk data, and everyone, big to small, are trying to come up with solutions that will filter the gold out. StatusSearch is not a semantic search engine, but by tapping your friends’ knowledge instead of the general population, we’re one step closer towards finding that ONE result we want.

Twitter/Facebook gave me 1000% boost

Published July 4, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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Relax, not me personally, my blog got that boost.
With June (and 2Q) wrapping up last week, it’s an excellent time to gather some statistics around my blog, and I decided to make a comparison to the previous period, and maybe identify some trends. The period I looked at is 1H08 vs. 1H09.

Google Analytics is truly a powerful tool, and I was able to go very deep (drill-down) and round up some interesting figures. I wanted to verify 2 assumptions I made since Jan 2008:

The results supported both assumptions.
Traffic-wise, the first 6 months of 2009 generated 13,004 visits and 18,660 page views, almost twice than the 2008 period. The increase was expected, but the sources breakdown amazed me. I have a 3-step process for pushing my blog’s content: update my twitter, post to facebook and save to del.icio.us – between those 3 networks I cover almost 5,000 eyeballs (directly). It did the trick, big time!
Facebook generated 5 times more visits – 76 in 1H08 to 480 in 1H09, and twitter generated roughly the same growth – 82 in 1H08 to 490 in 1H09. Direct traffic from Google also increased, by 110%, from 2,800 in 1H08 to 6,030 in 1H09.

Location-wise, I got 3 times more visits from Israel, jumping from 930 in 1H08 to just under 3,000 in 1H09. The US remains my main source of readers, with 4,050 visits in 1H09 (comapred to 2,700 in 1H08). The EU were also loyal readers, with +50% increase in France, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Italy. Australia, India and Canada showed similar increases.

To be honest, I expected those results. With the explosion of new media, facebook, twitter, friendfeed and others, I would be surprised to see a lower figure from those 2 sources, especially when taking into account the amount of self-marketing I did these past 18 months.

Looking into the near future, I wonder what my 1H10 vs 1H09 will look like.. what source will show the most increase in visits? will blogs still rule the world or will we all lifestream our lives? What do you think?

Disconnected. Not by choice.

Published June 30, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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Tuesday started early for me, 06:30, getting ready for my army reserve training day. With my new rank and position at the army, and the goal of the day – paintball training – I was looking forward to it. Unfortunately, my cellphone wasn’t as thrilled as I was.

After getting into the car and pulling my phone to open twibble and Gmail and start the day, I noticed my N95 screen went black. OMG!! And being away from home there was no way my cellular provider will send a replacement device, so basically I was stuck. The phone was working, but I couldn’t see who’s calling, and had to guess the location of my buddies at the address book – apparently I’m good at that.. 😉

Long story short – excellent day, a true learning experience, paintball fighting in an urban environment, although it was hot. Very hot. Very, very hot. Some pics will be posted later this week.

Exclusive tour at Channel 2 News

Published June 25, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
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Just got back from the first bloggers’ tour at a news company, as 15 of us visited the offices and broadcasting studios of Channel 2 News (web and web) in Neve Ilan. The tour was organized by Liran Dan, VP Interactive Services and Anat Ginio, who among other things is the ‘voice’ behind @channel2news – thanks guys! One fact I learned at the beginning is that according to Israeli Law, every news broadcast MUST be aired from Jerusalem and Channel 2 News got an approval to shoot at the Jerusalem area – Neve Ilan is midway between the capital and Tel Aviv. Weird law, but that’s for another discussion..

It’s always interesting to visit at a news network, being at the studio and all, but with the Iranian election in the background, and the change twitter is bringing into this medium as well, it’s even more interesting. The goal of the visit, at least for me, was to understand how social media, twitter in this case, can support the on-going efforts to bring the news, as they happen, to the viewers.

Channel2news joined twitter some 6 months ago, and in the past 2-3 months they are putting some 50-100 updates a day, mostly breaking stories, special reports, live coverage and Q&A. Their online strategy includes twitter of course, and they sport a youtube channel as well, but are always learning this medium, trying to figure out the best way to use it. Learning is also about listening and asking for feedback, which Liran was interested in getting. We suggested to open a second twitter account, for breaking news (much like CNN Breaking News), that would alert followers to new stories as they happen, and also raised the option of ‘pulling’ live conversation data from twitter (trending topics or twitterfall) to get the public’s reaction to the story. I’m guessing the adoption of the latter will not happen soon, but our first proposal might.

Still, there’s much to consider when mashing community conversations with journalism, and I for one think it’s wise that Liran is exploring this step-by-step. Only 4 weeks ago they first asked viewers to submit questions to the weekend show (Meet the Press), and even thou they could promote this initiative more, they’re going slowly, for now. Twitter (and other social services) are changing the way we consume (and produce) content, but once you started, it’s almost impossible to undo.

I do believe social services will change the way we view the news, and the recent events from the elections in Iran proves it, but the battle between traditional vs. new media will bring new challenges, that must be solved. Journalists have a tough job these days, as they see/read/hear stories as they happen, but cannot report them until they were authenticated, and thus losing the scoop. The next 12 months are going to be pivotal in the history of the social web and its effect on the way we consume the news, so stay around, we’ll be right back… 😉

Links:
Channel 2 News on twitter
Channel 2 News on mako.co.il and reshet.ynet.co.il
My photos from the tour, Kfir Pravda‘s photos and Yarin‘s photos (on facebook)

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.