Jason Clarke

Woomu is a new video sharing site with a couple of interesting twists. The biggest difference between woomu and other video sharing sites such as YouTube is that woomu is simply an aggregator, rather than a video hosting service. While this approach provides relative freedom from pesky copyright troubles like the ones YouTube has faced recently, I’m inclined to think that it may stifle other advantages such as easy sharing.

Like Digg, Newsvine, and other community-driven content sites, woomu also allows users to vote on individual videos, determining which files appear on the homepage of the site. The woomu twist is that besides voting files up to the homepage, users can also vote an individual file down. This two-way-street approach is one that other community-driven sites have stayed away from for the most part, choosing instead to go with a weighted voting system that favors reporting bad links over straight down votes. woomu puts the yea vs. nay on an even keel- but will it work?

Dave McAdam, co-founder of woomu, took some time to answer some questions about the new service via email. In the interview, Dave talks about the difference between woomu and other video sites, how the service fits in with the emerging distributed content model, and what the name means. The entire interview appears after the break.

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If you visit jasonclarke.org via the old-fashioned web browser rather than through RSS, you have probably noticed a slight change in the design of the site. In fact, I think it’s a pretty signifigant upgrade, even if the site’s general structure is the same.

Besides a complete re-write under the hood, the site is hopefully more pleasing to look at in a variety of small ways. One big change I made was to follow Derek Powazek’s concept of a “useful footer”…my useful footer isn’t all that useful, but I did my best to provide some things for those who scroll down that far.

The site redesign comes on the heels of a major change behind the scenes as well. For almost two years, GearHost served me well as a fully-featured web host. They stayed strong as my weblog, Moorelies.com, was generating 20,000 visitors a day during summer 2004, and I appreciate Ryan, Mike, and Sean’s support services.

But it became time for a change, and DreamHost not only met, but exceeded my expectations for a host. My first weekend with them has been great, particularly the IMAP email, which I’m loving.

It may be a bit bumpy around here and my other blogs, like Network Landscape, over the next few days. And sadly, because DreamHost doesn’t offer ColdFusion, I made the difficult decision to shut down Moorelies.com after nearly three years (the site is built on ColdFusion).

Going forward though, I’m excited about the new possibilites offered by DreamHost. For one, I hope to experiment with podcasting in the near future. Stay tuned…

Adholes, an ad-industry specific social site, has been sending me marketing emails for quite a while. I have now unsubscribed via their unsubscribe process twice, both to no avail.

By my definition, that means they are spamming me, and as a result their reputation is now officially crap in my view.

If you’re going to be aggressive with email marketing, you must, I repeat MUST, have a reliable unsubscribe process to deter against exactly this type of thing.

You may think the previous post on my blog, in which I listed a propane fireplace for sale, was a little bit strange. In fact, there’s another reason for it besides my desire to sell the fireplace (after all, I’ve already paid to post it for sale elsewhere). The ad was also my first test of the new distributed classifieds service edgeio.

Edgeio is still in beta, so you’ll need a password to check out the site. But without visiting it, you’ll have to trust me when I say that it’s not only a great new web-based classifieds service, it’s also a promosing hope for the future of distributed content and community on the web.

So that’s what makes edgeio so exciting, but what makes it tick? Simple. Instead of the ebay model, where you create a separate account, a separate identity, and sell your listings on their site, in their market, edgeio makes all of the web a market. Rather than posting an ad for sale on edgeio, you write a blog post listing your item, service, or job opening. Tag it with “listing” and other keywords, and edgeio reads your RSS feed and automatically lists your item. In my first test today, my listing- including the image I posted on it- appeared on edgeio within a few minutes.

After it appears, you can enhance your listing with graphics, keywords, by claiming it. The point is that while edgeio is a convenient place to search for and view items in context, the actual item itself is generated from within your own central place on the web.

Behind the simplicity of this difference lurks another tremendous benefit: identity.

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We’re selling a beautiful Empire propane fireplace with a full-featured remote control. It’s very much like new- it was only barely-used for one season by the people we bought our house from, and we’ve kept it in great shape since then (just a few months). It’s a top of the line, sturdy, stand-alone, steel unit in solid black. It includes the front grate and a couple fake logs. Because it requires no venting, it’s perfect for warming a bedroom, living room, or even garage or basement. It’s also ideal as a reliable, clean, convenient backup heat source.

We’re selling it for $950 or best offer. It will be expensive to ship, so you’re better off living withing reasonable distance of Bangor, Maine.

I wrapped it up in tarps and put it in storage before I remembered to take any photos but on this post is an image I scanned in from the owner’s manual. It’s an accurrate representation of the unit, except you’ll have to visualize the fake logs inside.

CONTENTS OF SALE:

1 Empire propane fireplace
1 remote control unit (required, $200 value)
1 owner’s manual

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Email me at jgc-at-jasonclarke.org

UPDATE: We sold this on Sunday, April 30 2006. The buyer found it via this post.

In case you missed it, the good folks at coComment stopped by my comments section the other day in response to my review of the service. They were kind enough to post three invite codes to beta test their new service. I’m re-publishing them here for all to see.

If you use one of these codes, please leave a comment here so I can update this post when all 3 codes are taken.

Thanks!

coComment invites codes- visit http://cocomment.com to use them:

1848-9898-3693
6373-5033-3319
9201-1893-4171

I know I don’t have to say this, but please consider your fellow human and only take one of these codes if you plan to try the service. Thanks!

coComment is a new service that’s been generating some healthy buzz in blogosphere over the past week. It started with Robert Scoble’s post last Saturday night and continued throughout the week as various bloggers weighed in.

If you haven’t heard, coComment sounds like quite a nifty new service…and it is. It’s a site that will help you keep track of all the comments you leave out there in blog-land.

Thanks to coComment’s Merlin, I was invited to beta test the service.

The idea behind coComment is simple, as as I’ve been commenting more lately, it’s something I was wishing before even before I knew it existed. Here’s the gist: coComment will save and contexualize all of the comments you leave out there on the web in one handy place for you.

The big question many people are wondering is, how do they do it? Well, it’s not fancy, but it does work…for the most part. How it works is you visit a site like normal. You type your comment as normal. Then, when you’ve finished typing- but before you click the ‘publish’ button- you click the coComment bookmark saved in your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. That step tells coComment to scrape the page, read your comment, and store it in your account at coComment’s site.

That’s a bit of a clunky process- I wish it didn’t allow for so much human error- but it’s simple, and it doesn’t require something far uglier like making you visit a separate site to leave comments.

Once your comment is saved, coComment does the rest. My favorite feature so far is the way the coComment site saves not only my comment, but the ones before and after it also, creating a contexual thread for me to view my comment within. If you leave multiple comments at multiple sites, you can already see the value of a site that collects all those streams into once place for you. I’m also a fan of the RSS feed they give me. Any service launching this year that doesn’t give me an RSS feed of my data, if it’s even remotely relevant, is not something I’d consider using. There’s just too much stuff out there to try things that I don’t think could become eventually uselful, and any service not offering RSS is ever going to fall into that category.

From what little testing I’ve done so far, I think the biggest drawback is that currently, coComment only works with a finite set of websites, mostly many of the top blogging platforms (WordPress, MovableType, etc.), along with some other notable non-blog sites such as Flickr and MySpace. This is a clear limitation on the service, as there are countless other places I’d potentially comment. As with its human-generated comment tracking method, here the service needs to expand not by adding more places, but by devising some method to cover any instance where commenting might happen. Not sure if that’s possible or not, but as the web itself gets bloggier, they might want to look into it.

In this early stage, I’m giving coComment a B. It’s getting crowded out there in social software land- I wonder if a service that does something as granular as tracking comments has enough relevancy to stick.

Michael J. Totten, the enterprising solo reporter/blogger who published a fascintating first-hand report on Iraq yesterday, is back today with an even more amazing post (with photos!) on the future of Iraq’s Kurdistan region. This is groundbreaking, amazing original reporting that also happens to be extremely readable and engrossing. If you have ten minutes, please check this out.

Michael J. Totten, a freelance reporter, spent some time in the northern Iraq city of Erib and files an engrossing first-person report on his time there.

Michael’s braveity in venturing into Iraq virtually on his own is to be greatly admired. Perhaps even more so is his willingness to report back with candor, narrative, wit, and depth.

I thought I was a bit off when I launched a redesign of my TV blog, Network Landscape, with not 3 but 4! columns. Today though, I stumbled across the Hartford Courant’s website, courant.com, which features 5 columns above the fold! I’m still not sure how I feel about that, at least not until everyone on earth has a 24″ monitor like the one my brother just got. Then, I’m in favor of 6, or possibly even 7 columns.

Reminds me a bit of the legendary battle brewing among men’s razor makers, who are releasing more and more blades (3 blades! 4 blades!) in a seemingly never-ending effort to outdo each other.