TechAddress

What’s Your Favorite Celebrity/Gossip Site?

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:37:18 +0000

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

As much as we appreciate you reading Mashable, we realize you probably spend at least a little bit of time perusing some of the celebrity gossip blogs. And if you’re really obsessed, you might even read blogs maintained by actual celebrities, or participate in a celebrity’s social network (just not Nick Lachey’s, we hope).

Some of these outfits have turned into mainstream media operations, with things like TMZ’s syndicated TV show and Perez Hilton himself making regular appearances on MTV and VH1. Who does the best job of serving your celebrity gossip fix? Nominate your favorite using the widget below:

Make Your Nomination

Mashable Open Web Awards

Spread the Word

Feel free to elaborate on your nomination in the comments, or try to gain more support for your favorite service by copying the widget to your blog (click the “Grab This” link in the widget above)!

Support Our Sponsors

The Open Web Awards is made possible by our sponsors. By supporting the Open Web Awards, these companies reward and encourage innovative web technologies. We can’t thank them enough for sharing our passion: building great web companies.

Platinum Partner

“PartnerUp brings small business and social networking together to create a community where entrepreneurs find the people, resources and information to grow their businesses.”

Gold Sponsors

“iStockphoto is the world’s leading image market and a revenue-sharing social network. Browse 3.5 million images and videos starting at $1 or become a contributor.”

“With Quintura’s advanced visual-based search and analytics solution, content publishers can increase site usage while creating new ad revenues”

Prize Sponsor

“Infinite and Instant, Zazzle is the only on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of retail quality, one-of-a-kind products, most of which are produced within 24 hours.”

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

What I Learned From Robert Scoble About How to Become Internet Famous

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:33:20 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy.com.

I’ve interviewed Robert Scoble several times about how to become Internet famous because I’m dying to get some fame. I know it’s not the kind of thing I’m supposed to admit, but I’ve noticed that people who are better known have an easier time launching and growing projects.

Scoble is one of Forbes’ 10 biggest Web celebrities, but he’s also ultra-patient, so he indulged my quest. Here’s what he taught me:

Attack Where There isn’t a King

Web 2.0 already has its big names. Why waste time fighting them for dominance?

Scoble told me to notice how big Gary Vaynerchuk became by going after wine, an industry that didn’t have an online celebrity until he got there. “If I started out today,” he said, “I think I would follow Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.”

Follow the 15 Reader Rule

Building a reputation takes time. So you have to focus on a subject that you’re passionate enough about to keep pursuing, even when hardly anyone else notices. “Passion,” he told me, “will keep you going after you figure out you only have 15 readers.”

Get With REAL Celebrities

I think Hollywood is a big waste of time, but I can’t deny that movie stars are the real celebrities. Scoble told me to find ways to connect with them. I’ve interviewed several Internet CEOs who told me their traffic jumped just by featuring movie stars.

“Mix in celebrities from movies with the technology,” he told me, when I insisted that I’m obsessed with interviewing Internet success stories.

Start the Avalanche

I wake up every morning wanting to take over the world. Scoble suggested I take a step back and dominate one small niche first, then another and another until I start my avalanche.

“All avalanches start with one snowflake,” he said.

Keep Producing

I got to know about Scoble because I kept seeing him online. That’s part of his plan. He keeps producing content so that he stays on top of Google’s search results and stays connected to his readers. I’ve watched him pull out his iPhone between conversations and add content to FriendFeed, Twitter and other sites.

His biggest message to me was: “Publish a lot, because this is a Google world.”

Do you have any suggestions for how to become Internet famous? Add them to the comments.

Andrew Warner’s last internet company was a big stinking failure and he had to shut it down. To keep from having a company collapse again, he’s interviewing as many Internet successes as he can. You can hear his interviews on Mixergy.

Image via Wikipedia

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Coolspotters Puts Celebrity Fashion on Display | The Startup Review

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:37:50 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Gmail’s mobile application is getting a useful upgrade today. You can now compose and send emails when in a low/no coverage area and have them automatically delivered in the background when you regain a signal. While this is essentially the same way that offline email works on Blackberries (my device of choice) – which can already be tied to your Gmail account – the new Gmail for Mobile will allow you to perform these functions on other handsets like the Nokia N95 and Sony Ericsson W910i.

Along with the offline support, Gmail has added a few other features. Most notable is the ability to switch between multiple Gmail/Google Apps accounts from the Gmail Mobile interface. There are also shortcut keys for performing basic functions like jumping to the top or bottom of your mailbox, or undoing your last action.

As a Google product manager explains in the brief demo below, the offline support is probably going to be most useful for users that bounce in and out of coverage when traveling:

Source:Mashable!

There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of weeks about two Twitter ranking tools, Twitter Grader and Twinfluence. Any tool that measures the effectiveness of a Social Media site for a user is important to serious and casual users alike. The fact that there are now two tools presenting a user’s “ranking” in different ways is an indication of the efforts of Social Media to be taken seriously.

Tools that give an indication of the “influence” of a particular user are of use not only for users seeking authoritative users to follow, but for professional users seeking key “influencers” to work with. I decided to run an experiment with them both to see what actions affect your scores and what don’t and if affecting my scores actually did anything for me other than improve my own sense of self worth.

Twitter Grader and Twinfluence

Twitter Grader bases your score on the number of followers you have, the power of this network of followers, the pace of your updates, the completeness of your profile and “a few other factors.” Twinfluence gives you a slightly more sophisticated scoring, though I have found the system has a lag of about 24 hours. Twinfluence breaks your Twitter ranking into Reach, Velocity, Social Capital & Centralization:

• Reach measures the maximum number of people a particular Twitter could get a message to (basically your followers and their followers).

• Velocity measures the average of first order followers and second order followers added on a daily basis since you started your account.

• Social Capital measures the value of your followers network, e.g. how many followers do your followers have?

• Centralization measures how dependent your reach or ability to influence is on a small number of followers who have a large following. E.g. If the bulk of your network is made up of 10 superstars each with thousands of followers, then you have a very centralized network and it is perceived by Twinfluence to be fragile because if one or more of those superstars stops following you, your reach collapses in direct proportion.

How they compare

The two systems agree on the first factor being measured. Twinfluence’s measure of Reach is the same as Grader’s first two factors - the number of followers you have and the influence of those followers. After this, according to their descriptions they diverge. Grader adds the completeness of your profile, which does not seem to be a factor in your Twinfluence ranking. Grader measures the pace of your updates, Twinfluence doesn’t count that. Grader has a secret sauce, which may well contain some of the elements that Twinfluence is measuring as well.

At this point I can’t say which method I prefer most. Grader has the advantage of presenting a single grade, which makes it easy to see and take in, but I think some of their measures are great (profile completeness?). Twinfluence has some great metrics. I like Social Capital as a measure, but I find the site seems to have a lag that Grader doesn’t.

The experiment

Using these metrics I decided to see if I could affect my own score by trying different strategies. As I already mentioned, simply shotgunning Twitter and following hundreds of people might give you a short term boost in your score, but eventually it will backfire.

Why? Because it speaks directly to Social Capital. If by some chance you manage to attract followers who are highly ranked themselves but provide nothing but a stream of updates about your cat, the state of the coffee in your office and what you are going to eat for lunch, you are going to lose followers, and with them will go their followers and on both systems your ranking will diminish.

Analyzing top Twitter users

Just following the top 10, 20 or 50 Twitter users will lead you to similar problems. Here is an analysis of the top 5 Twitter users who have a score of 100 on grader right now:

• MarsPhoenix - Followers: 36,453 Following: 2

• Hodgman - Followers: 12,306 Following: 40

• wilw - Followers: 19,380 Following: 69

• Dooce - Followers: 17,771 Following: 60

• Timoreilly - Followers: 11,316 Following: 323

See the pattern there? Yes, they all have more followers than they do followees. So getting them to follow you and your adventures in cat training, coffee drinking and lunch eating is highly unlikely.

So how do you go about increasing your score? Well, the answers are really simple:

• Be Passionate: Think about why you want to network in the first place. What is it that you want more of? Search for like-minded individuals and follow them.

• Share: Provide useful, timely information to your network. Remember, it also appears on the public timeline (unless you protect your posts), which will attract more followers.

• Ask: And you will receive. Post questions, make them relevant of course - not “why is the sky blue?”

• Review: Check your network. Do you have spammers in there or people who aren’t contributing? Take them off your list of follows, unless of course they are your family and friends, in which case get them to read this post.

So, why would you care about improving your score? You probably shouldn’t apart from the fun factor. But by following the steps above, what you will find yourself with, in a very short space of time, is an amazing network that you can reach out to. People that you can help and that can help you. People that will provide you with a wealth of information and to whom you can pass along great information.

Let’s face it, with all that is contained on the Internet, it is impossible for one person to monitor everything that is going on, but with a significant number of people reading, watching, listening and most importantly, sharing, it becomes a little easier to obtain the information that is important to you.

At the beginning of this week I had a score of 36/100 on Grader, as of the time of writing my score was 66.

Simon Salt is CEO of marketing communications company the IncSlingers. He writes daily at www.simonsalt.com and weekly at Chris Brogan’s parenting blog Dad-O-Matic, and is also an avid Twitter user. He is focused on dragging traditional marketers into Web 2.0 before the arrival of Web 3.0. He loves to help out and volunteers his time and knowledge whenever asked. He is Director of Technology for the Austin Chapter of the AMA and is currently working on a Twitter guide for all users.

Source:Mashable!

Company Name

Coolspotters

20-Word Description

Coolspotters is your place to discover and buy the products, brands, and fashions being used by your favorite celebrities.

CEO’s Pitch

Put simply, Coolspotters is an association engine - centered around pop-culture. It provides tools for users to share everything they know about their favorite celebrities, products, brands, and entertainment.

Through a set of simple and easy-to-use tools, users can “spot” celebs with the fashions they wear in their real lives, or with the movies in which they’ve appeared, etc. Users can also spot products or brands with the TV shows and movies in which they’ve been featured. The result is a universe of interconnected profiles, allowing users to discover the latest style trends in pop-culture and entertainment.

Mashable’s Take

There are many places in the celebrity media space that position themselves as pseudo news and marketing engines. You know, the standard “who are you dating and who are you wearing?” scrutiny that the Peoples, US Weeklies and PopSugars of the world dedicate themselves to dishing piecemeal to a hungry audience.

Coolspotters does away with the gossip, and sticks strictly to what sells. If you want to learn about Madonna’s divorce, you’ll need to consult other sources. Instead, if it is the bag she’s toting or car she’s driving, Coolspotters promises you the details. And for some items, the site will even direct you to places where you can spend your cash on those very things.

Based on user contributions and user ratings, the product discoveries shown on Coolspotters are not just taken from sightings in Beverly Hills or during the red carpet stroll had before and after screenings at Cannes, Toronto, Tribeca, Sundance, and elsewhere. Picks from movies and magazines, advertisements, etc., are all presented in kind.

Does all this whet your consumerist appetite? Perhaps less so now than in years past, I’ll venture to guess. A toss salad of economic matters can do that to your wallet. But if you simply harbor an interest for things the famous carry, and as well as the automotive carriages they carry those packages with, Coolspotters does the trick. And just to be thorough, names in the political realm are not beyond users’ purview. A search for Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin brings up quite a few items. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, too.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Searching for the Real Britney in ‘therealbritney’

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:30:11 +0000

Source:Mashable!

You know, it’s true. You really do learn something everyday. Take for example the fact that the much maligned (justly or unjustly, I leave that to you) pop icon Britney Spears is now, in some manner of speaking, on Twitter. Also, I for one am learning for the first time in my 24 years of existence that wine salesman and guru Gary Vaynerchuk relishes the woman’s music. That being said, he’s got a lesson for Spears as she travels the social media universe that can be pimped and promoted none too much.

To take Vaynerchuk’s message and make a kind of TinyURL from it, his thinking is that there is just one standard that needs be complied with in the Twitter space. That standard is authenticity. He wants Spears to be the one commanding her 140-character relays. Not her managers, not her handlers, not her brother, sister, or mother. The Britney. Which makes sense, right? Sure. It might be a little too wishful to expect, but it’s an honorable pursuit all the same. (I think I might regret using the word honorable.)

If you think Britney’s entry into the Twittersphere is nothing but trouble, I’ll only say this: I hear what you’re saying, but I disagree.

Not because I’m a fan. Like many of you, I’ve got my guilty pleasures. (Uh Huh Her, anyone?) Though I draw a firm line between musicianship and non-musicianship. If she could work out a decent riff on a six-string or hold up her end on a percussion track or whathaveyou, that’d be something. But from what I gather, that’s not on the resume.

Rather, I’m bullish on Britney’s newest social media experiment because Twitter may soon grow considerable larger in membership.

Indeed, it is a good thing, despite some users’ tendency to enjoy smaller, more exclusive communities. Twitter needs to take that next step. It’s become increasingly involved in news and politics. Corporations use it to keep tabs on public discourse about their brands and their products. Why not Big “ivory tower entourage” Media, too? The Britney machine might be pushing PR material without any real intervention on her part, but the move brings to mind that tired and old, but still fairly valuable adage that goes something like: “at least there’s some effort being made.”

What say you, fellow Mashables?

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

HOT or NOT Moves into Celebrity Gossip with New Site

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:54:55 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Last.fm announced today that it has made its service available to Japan and will start streaming music to the country in an effort to expand its presence across the world. Lost amidst the otherwise mundane news, the company also included an interesting fact: since offering its free on-demand service that lets you stream full songs three times, its click-through purchase rates are up an astounding 119 percent.

The company (rightfully so) believes this success is due to its willingness to let you stream the entire song before you decide whether or not you want to purchase it.

It may seem like a small piece of a far more complicated puzzle of music downloading and purchasing, but it’s an important element. I don’t know how many times I’ve used iTunes or tried to buy a song on Amazon’s MP3 service only to find that the thirty-second clip didn’t let me hear any lyrics or failed to capture the section of the song that I actually knew and enjoyed. And when that happened, I was forced to hold off my purchase.

But if I had been able to listen to the entire song, I would have bought it right then and the music industry would have had itself another satisfied shopper.

Of course, it’s that same music industry that doesn’t allow me to stream songs in full and only begrudgingly allowed Last.fm to do just that. But if it finally wakes up and realizes that it shouldn’t be scared of users, but more inviting to them, it stands to reason that more people would be buying songs, if the Last.fm statistics were representative of buying preference.

But once again, the debate on this issue goes back to trust. Can the music industry find it within itself to finally trust the users and allow them to consume songs at a rate that they desire? So far, it can’t.

Regardless of the progress Last.fm has made, we’re still fighting against an industry that has a deep distaste for users and has gone out of its way to make sure you don’t have the kind of freedom you should expect when you license the right to play a song.

The only thing working in our favor is the simple fact that business and money rules all else in the music industry and more times than not, these companies would be willing to jump on the bandwagon if there’s a proven record of streaming an entire song yielding higher revenue. Unfortunately, the revenue probably won’t hit a suitable level unless full songs can be streamed on iTunes before purchase and the chances of that happening are, well, practically zero.

And so we find ourselves in a Catch-22. In order to have the ability to stream entire songs, we need to buy them and show the music industry we like that feature. But in order to have that option, the sales need to be high enough for them to justify allowing major vendors to offer the option.

Maybe one day the music industry will wake up and realize that sharing music and changing business models aren’t bad at all. But until that day, expect more of the same.

Source:Mashable!

I’m not sure why HOT or NOT didn’t do this before, especially when you consider all of the clones that emerged across various niche topics with applications of the famed HOT or NOT voting system, but the company has finally launched a celebrity gossip vertical, hosted by Zack Taylor. The celebrity blogger will post content related to prominent pop culture happenings, and readers can rate the pop culture items in the same way they would rate someone’s photo.

There are, of course, plenty of opportunities to rate celebrity photos, such as Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard, who is posing nude for a PETA campaign. By leveraging Zack Taylor’s existing audience, HOT or NOT is going after a broader demographic in its efforts to grow its user base and points of interest. This appears to be a good fit, given the short form content typically found on gossip sites such as Zack Taylor’s, as well as the higher level of interactivity involved in watching videos and rating content, both of which encourage users to participate with the content and ultimately offer feedback.

I imagine HOT or NOT will be looking to apply its ranking system to a few other verticals across other topics of interest. It can ultimately provide such ranking data as supplemental information on the views of particular audiences around these topics of interest, effectively expanding the life and potential of HOT or NOT as a brand.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Celebuzz Confirms Apocalypse is Upon Us with Celeb-Focused Social Network

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:41:22 +0000

Source:Mashable!
Ever try to travel to a Web page hosted within the Microsoft.com domain or other domains the company owns, and come across one of those thoroughly discouraging 404 signs? Plenty of times, right? We’re with you. You see that error and you’re on your back button in a flash. Which isn’t how the engineers in […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Microsoft Dusts Off Its 404 Page With Web Page Error Toolkit”, url: “http://mashable.com/2008/06/03/microsoft-web-page-error-toolkit/” });

Source:Mashable!
Hold on to your virtual panties and pop open the Dom Perignon because the ultimate celebrity social network is here. Pop culture-oriented social media company, Buzznet Inc., has announced its newest prodigy, Celebuzz.com.
Celebuzz is the first social network for celebraholics who like to get celebrawasted on gossip. In other words, anyone with bright pink hair […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Celebuzz Confirms Apocalypse is Upon Us with Celeb-Focused Social Network”, url: “http://mashable.com/2008/06/03/celebuzz-celebrity-focused-social-network/” });

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.