The River Tab

Dave Winer today writes:

I’ve felt for a long time that every serious news organization and blog should have a river associated with their publication. The river would include the news sources that the publication “reads” — to give their readers a sense of the community they both belong to and the community they define.

It’s a simple yet incredibly powerful concept. As with all new concepts it will receive endless push backs (I’m seeing some incredible resistance to the concept of publishing content aggregated from feeds from all kind of organizations) but then it will be broadly adopted.

Our new tool is designed specifically to manage original and aggregated content. Not even in two tabs but on the very same page. Ours is not a river (also if you could easily create a river just by not filtering feeds), but the underlying concept is quite similar: share a unique view on your world by publishing a list of feeds that are relevant to you.

CQSpark.NEWS: Aggregator based CMS

When demoing our enterprise collaboration tool, CQSpark, very often I’m asked if some of the pages built with our WYSIWYG tool using the aggregated content can be made public.

This lead us to consider building a version of the platform specifically designed to manage simple sites based on a mix of aggregated content (automatically tagged using Open Calais and/or AlchemyAPI), and original content posted by one or more editors.

So, here’s the first test site built using this new version of our technology, which we are calling CQSpark.NEWS: paolo.cqspark.com

The content of the two columns of the right has been aggregated from a list of feeds that I extracted from my aggregator, while the left column articles have been posted directly on the page using a very simple tool. This is how I see the page as an editor of the site:

The system is using CQSpark’s super easy to use sharing box, which is optimized to scrape/embed articles, videos, tweets, it supports drag and drop publishing of photos and files, and with one click also allows you to cross-post to your accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

I’ve always thought that aggregators a formidable tool not only to create personal streams of content but also to run public sites, with this new tool I think we have reached an excellent combination of ease of use and power.

Little boxes indeed

Euan writes:

I have been writing text in little boxes on the interwebs for twenty years. Used to be called usenet, then bulletin boards, then blogs, now social. Still little boxes.

The tools we use to write have been pretty much the same for a very long time. Sometime in early 1984 my dad came home with the first Mac 128. It came with two floppy disks, each with the whole operating system and an application on it: one for MacPaint, one for MacWrite.

MacPaint was my favorite, but I remember MacWrite well, here’s what it looked like:

Now, what I find odd is that some 28 years later I’m still writing in a box which pretty much offers the very same features (actually I have lost tabulation).

Why haven’t writing tools evolved? Why are not relevant content from the interwebs popping up while I write this, helping me finding more information in real-time? Why isn’t this post appearing in real time on Euan’s screen, while I’m writing it, allowing us to develop a conversation? Why aren’t previous rants I wrote about how technology has not evolved enough for me automatically linked to this post?

There are ways to do all this, but they are far from being mainstream.

PS: true, there are outlines.

Hope for Flickr?

For the first few days the news about Marissa Mayer becoming the CEO of Yahoo was good but not that interesting to me: I’m not using any Yahoo product.

And then I remembered: Flickr!

I have always liked the service, and I have years of pictures uploaded there. I still prefer to upload a photo to Flickr rather than Facebook (well… I do upload stuff to Instagram too, but that’s another story).

I have all my food porn photos on Flickr, and I love paging through years of archives in calendar form.

I was ready to give up, and not renew my pro account next December. But now who knows… maybe there’s hope for Flickr. (Or maybe Marissa will shut it down).

PS: it looks like I’m not alone. And someone is listening.

Start from sharing

Last week Euan Semple wrote an interesting post about his experience working with managers in companies:

Working, as I do, mostly with managers in their forties and fifties I would say that 90% are unsure of themselves online. Yes they are on Facebook and Linkedin, and some of them have Twitter accounts, but their use of these tools is predominantly passive. They are consuming rather than creating stories.

I think that the pressure that these managers feel is mostly due to the nature of today’s blogging style: while when I started 10 years ago blogs were mostly lists of links with short notes, today blogs are almost always collections of short essays. Like this one. And usually, with no links.

Luca De Biase recently wrote “nobody is linking anymore… the blogosphere is turning into a newsstand where everybody is pushing their own newspaper, not understanding that when alone they are weaker”.

In a corporate environment we should rediscover links as a way to narrate the world and enhance our point of view. That’s why we have designed CQSpark trying to make linking and sharing as easy as possible. You can post original content if you want to, but most of all you can share your unique perspective on the enormous amount of data which is flowing in front of all of us every day. In other words: you post links.

About the #sotn12 personal logos

Award winning agency Tassinari/Vetta was behind the brilliant design of the visual identity for this year’s conference.

For the logo, Tassinari/Vetta designed an original font, where several permutation of the same letter are available to create new and original designs.

Conference badges have then been manually prepared using a variation of the SOTN font and making sure that every combination of letters was unique.

Insanely proud

After a day of chilling and sleeping, a few thoughts about State of the Net.

First: I’m incredibly proud of what we have been able to achieve. All the feedback that we have received has been very positive, from the audience who came to Trieste, and also from those who followed the event from outside. The organisation has been flawless, the direction of the video stream perfect, the location was absolutely awesome.

I’m also very satisfied about the show: all the speakers devoted their time not only to come to Trieste, but also to work with us on the editorial side of the event to ensure top-notch content from the first keynote to the last panel. I can’t believe how smart they are and I’m very proud to call some of them friends.

I’m also tremendously proud of my accomplices and friends Beniamino and Sergio, whom I truly enjoy working with.

This time the event resonated much more than before: thousands of tweets, page views, video downloads, articles on the press, all metrics recorded record levels, and an incredible amount conversations started and are still evolving.

So, after these two days, what do I think about the real State of the Net in Italy?

Good news and bad news.

Bad news: Italy is not where it should be on pretty much every single international chart you can find. It is improving, but it’s not nearly as fast at it should be.

Good news: there is much more awareness than there used to be, and 22 million users on Facebook is a pretty huge number (we learned that this number is both good news and bad news, depending from whom you are asking to ;-) ).

I think that we proved that the state is after all much better than what it would seem to be if you were looking only to the portrait of this country provided by the mainstream media. More than 350 people coming to the Magazzino 26 proved that the Internet is very much part of the present, not of some remote future made of “gurus” and “little magicians” that newspapers seem to like so much for their titles.

So while on one side there is plenty of attention and a sincere drive to learn new things, on the other we are slowed down by parts of our society that persistently ignore all this, it would appear hoping pathetically that the genie will be put back into its bottle if they just keep ignoring it.

It simply means that we will have to try harder. And we will.

See you all at State of the Net 2013.

Foto di Alessio Jacona

Busy days

A lot of things going on these days.

We are about to submit the first version of smartfi·sh (site under construction… we have been busy) to the Apple Mac App Store. If everything goes well it should be available for download shortly. Needless to say, this is all quite exciting.

I’m also working on another launch: next Tuesday at LeWeb London we will present CQSpark: come and find us in the Demozone 2, Pod10, if you are in London.

Last but not least, Friday and Saturday of next week we will run State of the Net, our own conference in Trieste. We already have more than 360 registered attendees, an awesome group of speakers and a pretty exciting program.

Meanwhile, my awesome partners at Evectors are working on some pretty exciting new Pages projects.