Thank you for all these pieces of advice.

co.mments.com is really cool indeed. My friend Assaf built it.

I will need to add support for it on the blog when I find the time for it.

Stumbled upon your podcast with the ZDNet between the lines people.

It’s not that I haven’t been talking about this stuff for years… but it was just so damn refreshing to hear the ideas coming from soneone else for a change. I’m in the “social media” space. A.k.a. video blogging and podcasting. In that realm Web services make even more sense because media is all about sharing experiences.

One of my favorite pet projects is mefeedia.com. We’re talking online media management and content management via bookmarking, favoriting, tagging, sharing, Piping media to whatever device or computer you like, managing subscriptions, queuing media from anywhere on the Web. All this makes infinitely more sense in the new media space, because it’s social. Every action you take, wether favoriting, or subscribing, or queueing a piece of media makes it that much more likely others, especially your friends will find it, or will find what interests them.

What’s interesting about that space is that it really was born online… It’s made the clean bread from the 1.0 world to 2.0… In fact you might say it didn’t exist until now.

In an odd bit of perspective I’ve often pointed to Netflix as the original media 2.0 application. It centralized the intelligence into a central and social experience on the Web. The only difference is now we use RSS 2.0 with enclosures to ship our bits instead of snail mail. Which makes our services infinitely more cost effective.

Anyway, it was great to hear your talk with the ZDNet guys. Very refreshing perspective. I left my comments here because I noticed that in mentioning Salesforce.com you didn’t mention cost. I’m just going to assume it’s expensive as heck. It sure sounds like it.

Lastly… here’s a great pure 2.0 Web service for you. I’ve lately fallen in love with co.mments.com. It’s a comment tracker. It can track responses to your comments, no matter where, indeed anywhere you leave them on the open Web. Because of this you can just respond to me here. I’ll get it, as sure as if you’d sent me an email. It’s completely liberating. I find myself leaving more comments and sending less emails. As you said in the between the lines ZDNet podcast: :what needs to be private?” Certainly not this. In fact it’s very beneficial to have inter-personal conversations that just so happen to be public… It’s in fact one of the founding principles of videoblogging & podcasting.

One last tidbit: GIS (GPS based) services are exploding right now. I’m sure you’ll have noticed by now Flickr has introduced a buggy but promising beta of photo maps. But in my opinion the real innovation is elsewhere, as in collaborative maping and route sharing. If you’re a cyclist, hiker, motorcyclist or just love travel you should check out bikely.com and routeslip.com. Two brand spanking new route sharing sites. Route sharing, collaborative mapping, and geotagging are going to explode the Web back into local meatspace, reviving pride and interest in local geographical community… a.k.a. localism.

Peace,

-Mike

You’re right, even though Gmail lets you set the ‘From’ field.

You’re right on target. This is exactly what is needed. Ideally, you should be able to use any web-based email client such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. A lot more work has to be done in this area…