Blogstring will be representing full force at podcamp boston this coming weekend (meaning Sarah and I will both be there, but it sounds better when I refer to "blogstring"). I will be there as a kind of split personality, as I will be wearing the blogger hat (not literally, unless I can find a hat that just says blogger. in that case, I’d definitely be wearing that), and the matchmine hat, as matchmine is a sponsor.

Also, I’ll be running a panel discussion on Sunday at 1:30-2:15 entitled "Discovery- How people find blogs, podcasts, and video and what that means to you." I have a couple of panelists ready to go, but I’m hoping to find some more. So if you’re interested in participating in the panel, please let me know via email (nathan dot burke at blogstring dot com). Here’s what I’m hoping for:

Since podcamp is mostly aimed at helping content producers learn how to better produce, distribute, and promote their content, I wanted a panel on how consumers of UGC find the things they watch. How do people find the podcasts they end up subscribing to? With the millions of YouTube videos and blogs out there, how do you find your favorites? And on the flipside: as a content producer, how can you best leverage the different distribution networks, directories, and search engines to promote your content to people that would love your stuff?

I’d love to have representatives from both sides of the same coin: representatives of companies that help people find stuff (examples: YouTube, Odeo, Podcast.com, BlogTalkRadio, Blogged, Technorati, Revver, etc), and content producers that have found innovative ways to get their offering out there.

So again, please contact me if you’re interested, and definitely stop by and say hi.

This morning was one of those times when I realized what a true web dork I am. I found out yesterday that the .me domain names were going on sale at 11 this morning, and I desperately wanted to get aweso.me. Godaddy had a little countdown timer for the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the names were available to buy.

When there was one minute remaining, I opened a new firefox tab and typed in aweso and set the dropdown to .me. The minute counted down, I hit submit, waited and……

Success! Aweso.me was available. So I bought it for two years and went through the checkout. Seconds later I received the following email:

Aweso.me, right? I was so excited and dreaming up what I was going to do with it. Then I got another email:

Whaaaa? So I picked up the phone and called. What ensued was a circular conversation about how Godaddy was completely unprepared for a "land rush", how it’s likely that none of the good .me domain names were available at launch anyway, as they were probably "pre-registered". I asked about the pre-registration process, to which I was told "I don’t have insight into that process, but know it exists".

So, thank you Godaddy for both making then ruining my day. I’ve always used GoDaddy to register my domain names (20ish), but I’m bummed.

Oh yeah, and this has happened to other people I know today, and yes, Godaddy did charge us all for the domains they said were available then decided they were not. Refunds "should be available within the next 72 hours."

How 2.0: How to Make a Twittering Teddy Bear from My Home 2.0 DIY on Vimeo.

Image via Wikipedia

So…..

I’ve had this site for years. I used to use nathanwburke as my “personal” blog, but that was in addition to my work blog, my tech blog, my multi-author blog, and on and on. So I finally decided I’d had enough and just stopped using this one.

Well, lately I’ve been in the mood to consolidate.

My Blogging

Blogstring.com will be my social media and startup blog. I’d love to be able to say I’ll update that site daily, but it’s just not going to happen.

The matchmine Blog is my work blog. It’s the official blog for matchmine, the company I work for.

NathanWBurke.com is going to just be a mix of all. I’ll pull in posts from all my other “stuff” and it’ll appear here.

Stuff

Speaking of stuff, here are some examples of what I’ve been up to.

ContextuallyActive.com- A blog I started to show funny and ridiculous contextual advertising. I still love the idea, but it’s just fallen behind. If someone changes the length of the day to 36 hours, I’d probably be able to update this blog a lot more.

DullKite.com- I tried out BrightKite and was kind of overwhelmed by all this “lifestreaming” stuff. So I made a parody. In the universe, I’d bet there are around 8 people that would find this funny.

Flooblr.com- This is my newest super-secret project. Nothing really there now, but just you wait. I’ll keep you posted.

Twitternothing.com- There are so many twitter tools out there, and I decided to make one that does nothing whatsoever. Absolutely nothing.

End

That’ll do it for my 5th first post on this blog. Let’s see if I can keep it up this time.

Full Disclosure: I work at matchmine. Just saying.

Today matchmine announced that blogged.com has gone live on the matchmine Media Discovery Platform. It’s weird to say it as “matchmine announced”, since, well, I’m part of matchmine. Almost like when people do their “about” page in the third person, but I digress.

Here’s what that means: Blogged.com is a directory with over 200,000 rated blogs in its catalog. Since their mission is to help users “find better blogs”, they need to constantly find ways to help connect users with what they’re looking for. By partnering with matchmine, they’re able to deliver relevant content to anyone visiting blogged.com that already has a MatchKey.

Since its launch, it’s been no secret that I’m a fan of blogged. I’m constantly looking for new blogs to check out, and blogged is a great resource for that. [They also rated blogstring.com a 9.0 out of 10, which I'm pretty happy about] And I may be biased, but now that they’re offering recommendations based on what I like- what’s stored in my MatchKey- blogged.com’s ability to deliver stuff I’ll like is that much better.

But enough of the rah-rah marketing hype. Let’s take a look at this thing.

Let’s assume you don’t already have a MatchKey and you’re not already a member of blogged.com.

Step One: The Signup

The first step is to sign up as a member of blogged.com.

Pretty self-explanatory. Once you’ve signed up, you have the option of inviting your friends by scraping your address books:

Step Two: Add Your Blog (If You Have One)

If you have a blog, this is where you can add it to blogged.com’s directory. They’ll have an actual human being review it, and will give you a score out of 10.

But we’re here to check out the recommendations, so let’s skip this part.

Step Three: Tell Them What You Like

Now you’re a member of blogged.com. Congratulations. Here’s what that looks like:

Since you’ve got no favorites, blogged.com starts off by showing you what’s popular. But if you want personalized recommendations, you can click to get them:

When you go the recommendations screen the first time, you’ll see a list of blogs you may like, based on what blogged.com knows about your preferences…..and that’s not much since you just started and haven’t rated anything yet:

Clicking on the “how’d we pick these?” link gives you:

And that’s the MatchKey part. The things you rate, click, and favorite on blogged.com are stored in your MatchKey, giving you better recommendations. But since we’re just getting started here, let’s improve our recommendations by saying what we like. To do that, I clicked on “Improve Your Recommendations”:

Here goes. I like Movies & TV, love Sports, love Web 2.0, love Business, like Gaming, hate Politics, love Tech & Gadgets, like Career, hate Home, hate Food & Drink, hate Health & Fitness, hate Automotive, hate Shopping, hate Kids & Parenting and like Travel & Culture. In blogs, anyway.

Step Four: See The Recommendations

Once you’ve rated stuff, your MatchKey evolves in the background. The recommendations change based on that preference evolution.

The first recommendation: Blog Maverick. Mark Cuban’s blog. I love it. Then there’s Tommy Lasorda’s World. Excellent. Blog Psychologist? Sounds interesting. Profy- love it. It’s one of my favorite new blogs.

I have to be honest in that my first page of MatchKey-based recommendations are right-on. I’m not shilling here. I actually like what they’re giving me here, and I can understand why I’m getting these recommendations.

Final Thoughts

I have to take a step back when thinking about how I would rate the blog discovery process on blogged.com. First, I love finding new blogs. Second, I work at matchmine. Third, I already love blogged.com (did I mention they rated blogstring 9.0 out of 10?). So, can I possibly objective when talking about this?

Well, I think I can. At the end of the process I’m given a set of recommendations, and I am being absolutely honest in that they were good.

But that’s just me. What do you think?

My blog post on the idea of the Guilty Pleasure is now up on the matchmine blog.

Plurk- A New Microblogging Service

So, the new service everyone’s talking about is Plurk. It’s kind of like twitter, as it’s a microblogging service. But, unlike twitter, you can only use plurk on the plurk website. You can’t use it via sms. There are no plurk clients available yet. Oh yeah, and when I try to see the timeline using firefox, here’s what I get:

To be fair, it works in IE. Here’s what it looks like when it’s working:

Ping.fm-Update Your Accounts From One Interface

Ping.fm is a service that lets you update your social networks from one place. You can update from anywhere using AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone, SMS and E-mail. Currently ping.fm lets you udpate facebook, twitter, hi5, bebo, jaiku, plurk (that was fast), xanga, tumblr, blogger, myspace, linkedin, mashable, livejournal, and pownce.

Here’s what it looks like:

Just add your text in the box and hit ping it, then you’re done. Everything gets updated.

I Don’t Know What I Want

Okay, I admit it. I don’t know what I want.

I complain when twitter’s down, but just can’t get comfortable with any of the alternatives to twitter. I want a service that lets me update all my services from one place, but using it is unsatisfying, as it’s only a post technology and I can’t see my friends’ posts.

I complain, and what I get what I ask for, I’m not happy with it.

Meh.

This morning I installed the Zemanta plugin, which suggests photos, links, articles and tags while you’re composing a blog post. After you write 300 characters, the Zemanta plugin gives contextual suggestions from Flickr, and article suggestions from 300 media sources and the blogs of Zemanta users.

Here’s what it looks like:

Since this post is about trying Zemanta, the first related article is entitled “Have You Tried Zemanta?” The pictures, on the other hand, are kind of a mystery. The first is 19-year-old Japanese woman at a teahouse blogging, the image on the bottom left is a photo of a plug-in hybrid car, and the one on the bottom right is of particles colliding. I get the blogging photo, but the rest seem very odd.

In this paragraph I’m just going to talk about monkeys. Since Zemanta updates every 300 characters, I want to see how many times I need to mention monkeys and gorillas before I get some simian pics. See, I really like orangutans, but dislike squirrel monkeys. I prefer chimpanzees to spider monkeys, lemurs, and tamarins. It’s really just a judgment call. Perhaps I need to talk about bananas too, as I’m still not getting the monkey images I want. By the way, I honestly believe that greeting cards with chimps are always a good idea. A monkey smoking a cigar? Always relevant. Even a condolence card is made better by a frowning monkey.

And there it is:

The bottom left and bottom center images are of monkeys. So the suggestions are fairly responsive.

And, as I just scrolled down, I see that there’s a related article entitled “B.C. zoo break-in leaves monkey dead, one missing.”

Okay, enough with the monkeys, back to Zemanta. I actually really like this. When I’m coming up with a post, I always like to look around to see what others have to say about the topic. This seems like a great tool for that. Rather than searching and leaving my blog editor, I can see related stuff right next to the post I’m composing. In addition, there’s the potential for a new source of traffic to my blog. If my posts are suggested to other Zemanta users (and they link to them), this could be a nice source of new traffic.

Here are some of the suggested articles related to this post:

Every company tries to sell the notion that “customer satisfaction is our #1 priority.” Well, get satisfaction says “prove it.” And let me tell you, I love them for that.

What is GetSatisfaction

GetSatisfaction is a site that acts as a user-to-user support board for companies and products, but it’s a lot more than that. Where company support forums are semi-private and only deal with that company’s products, GetSatisfaction is a support site for EVERYTHING you use online. Any company can set up an account for free, allowing users to ask questions, give suggestions, or just talk with other users. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a look.

GetSatisfaction For Users

If you’re a user (and by that, I mean not a representative of a company. I’m not making inferences about drug habits here. This is a family blog.), you can either go straight to the site itself, or you can find GetSatisfaction links on sites you already use.

Twitter uses GetSatisfaction on their help page. By embedding the GetSatisfaction code, users are able to search topics, ask a question, and see all the active discussions about twitter happening on GetSatisfaction.

Clicking on one of the discussions brings you over to:

The topic page on GetSatisfaction where the threaded conversation is happening. But let’s pretend we’re going in cold. We have a problem with Twitter, and you can’t find the answer anywhere. Let’s run through that.

Step One: Go to the Twitter Page On GetSatisfaction-

After searching for Twitter I land on their page.

On this page I can see that twitter has 14 employees on GetSatisfaction ready to help me out. I can see their products and services, as well as the recently active topics on Twitter.

Step Two: Ask Your Question

I’ve already looked and couldn’t find anything in the existing topics. So I go to the “What do you want to ask?” box, type in my question and click go.

Step Three: Categorize Your Question

Let GetSatisfaction know if you’ve got a question that needs an answer, an idea you’d like to share, a problem that needs solving, or a discussion you’d like to start. Then, you can give your question a title.

Now this is what I love. You can tag your question with words, then you can tell you how the issue makes you feel!!!!

If you’ve filled in everything, the GetSatisfaction Notice-o-Meter will let you know the chance that someone will answer your question.

Using GetSatisfaction As A Company

If you’re a company, it’s incredibly simple to get an account for your product or service. You just sign up, claim your company, and they verify that you actually work at the company you claim. Then, you just upload a text file to the root of your web server and you’re done. You can add other employees, change roles, and you’re all set to join the conversation.

The 5 Reasons GetSatisfaction Pretty Much Rules

1. As a user, you can get your questions answered- Where you’d expect canned responses, “we’ll look into it”, and non-answers, you’re far more likely to get the right answer on GetSatisfaction. Why? Well, it’s public. When you move a company’s support forum out of the dark and into the public square, you up their accountability. The non-critical answer is that when you combine user-to-user support with company employees, you get better answers.
2. As a user, you can see how others use the products and services you are interested in- Browsing through discussion topics related to the products you use can be a great way to find new uses.
3. As a company, you can see the questions your users have, answer them, and avoid repeating the same answers to the same questions- As a company, you absolutely want to help out the very people using your products, and in doing so, you want to build goodwill. This is a great way to do both, in an easy-to-find, searchable way.
4. As a company, you can directly interact with early adopters and see what they think of your offering- It’s so important for startups to be able to help out the early users of their products. Otherwise, they’ll bail.
5. As a complete web startup addict, GetSatisfaction can introduce you to new stuff you’ve never heard of- I love finding something I’ve never heard of on GetSatisfaction. That way I can browse through the discussions, decide whether it’s worth signing up, and move along.