thomas marban | notes

popurls blue survey

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:01:42 +0100

as announced earlier this year, popurls and intel have teamed up to create a custom version around enterprise IT news at blue.popurls.com. if you're a regular visitor to the site and got a minute to take a short survey we'd greatly appreciate your feedback.

» link to survey

thanks from thomas & intel!

conversion in highly-customized brand campaigns

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:06:41 +0100

here's an interesting slide from an intel presentation on popurls blue, a branded subsite that i've created for them. basically, visitors to the site were 100% likely to interact with intel's content assets, which is a pretty decent conversion rate in a space of ad fatigue.

popurls for blackberry

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:16:21 +0100

if you need some amusement in your next board meeting, popurls is now available as an official blackberry edition at b.popurls.mobi. it features all the main sites of popurls.com as well as the most popular stories of the last 1&24 hours.
see popurls.net for the complete overview of custom versions.

the big picture

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:50:59 +0100

the boston globe recently launched the excellent daily the big picture blog which is now directly available in the quickies section.

firefox 3.0 extension

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:59:23 +0100

the FF extension is now available for the new 3.0 release.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7112

revamped twitter section

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:19:45 +0100

the twitter section on the bottom of the page was formerly just a glimpse at the public tweet stream and has now been revamped in order to feature only emerging links that were posted by several users.

joining gawking

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:18:23 +0100

i'm happy to announce that i've joined the soon-to-launch gawking network in order to monetize readbag, just like FM does for popurls. gawking is a comparatively small, but highly exclusive venture of six original sites, targeting the creative and enthusiast audience. check out gawking.net for the first infos.

use google accounts on popurls

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:42:39 +0100

if you've not yet created a popurls account for personal recommendations, sharing and customization you can now use your existing google account as an alternative to openid et al. simply head over to popurls.net, click the google logo and you're good to go.

cm summit nyc

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:13:50 +0100

i'll be in new york for another cm summit as well as the webby awards gala.
ping me if you're around.

star your links

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:58:37 +0100

you can now star each link which allows you to share them with the world via an own feed (like in google reader) or use this feature to mark a story as important.

starred links will have an asterisk in the title on all mobile versions, feeds and email digests.

import your links

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:51:24 +0100

you can now import links from other services like del.ico.us (typically stories you tagged with “toread” etc.) or any other site that offers an rss/atom feed. just click “import”, enter the feed url, hit import and the happy readbag robot will transmit your links.

opera support

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Sun, 18 May 2008 17:21:35 +0100

the readbag bookmarklet now fully supports opera; please update it if you’re using it.

overnewsed - underinnovated

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:56:21 +0100

during my recent valley stopover the undoubtedly most asked question was about the estimation of the next big thing. people nagging about incremental-innovation-only, no stones being left unturned and (again) missing business models - in fact a reasonable time for a three-year big sleep. a few boilerplate reasons i could bring into mind:

the real opportunities and eyeballs move from the web to the internet (ubiquitous space, platforms and devices)
that being said, too much focus is still on web-sites alone, which in fact lose much of their mojo to superior authorities et al
low entry barriers make it easy to chew through every obvious idea in a gazillion of variations rather than to look sideways
the gatekeepers aka ole' boys club remain the same and in turn become more risk averse (what got you here won't get you there)
most companies are seeking parity (feature matrix) with the competition instead of sustainable difference
dead on arrival: the much cited attention crash is near + services neglecting to figure out a pleasure model right from the start

in general i agree that it's been a while since we saw the last big spark but on the flip side i still advocate that it's more reasonable for startups to build on a tangible context because it's just a lot easier to label something as new than to create something that's actually desirable.

spring cleaning

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Sun, 11 May 2008 19:15:58 +0100

back from california, met with great minds like kevin kelly, chris anderson, guy kawasaki and jason calacanis (+dogs) - probably the four most diverse people on the net. did a little refreshment here on the site and i'm off again to hamburg for next08.

maker faire

thomas@marban.at (thomas marban) — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:13:36 +0100

i'm currently at the maker faire in san mateo which probably has the highest geek density next to burning man. here and here are videos of the combot cup that takes place as well. scoble has the mentos thingie.