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photoshop album unlock

May 27, 2006

fast food notion

NYTimes food critic Frank Bruni, who has a good blog now as well, writes about his 9 day, 15 state, 3,650 mile trip sampling fast food across the country, "to size up and single out the best fast food from familiar national chains, relatively unfamiliar regional chains and tiny local chains I had never encountered."

I'd love to see this blown into a full book, with photos, please.

(via the very welcome new megnut food blog.)

Posted by tshey at 11:06 AM

May 20, 2006

queue by cube

timelapse1am.png

New York -- where there's always enough people with the time to wait in a big line on opening day (see: Trader Joe's, Shake Shack). Apple has put up time-lapse movies from the first 24 hours of the new flagship fifth ave store. Each one elapses a full hour - you can find someone in a yellow or red shirt and follow them through the line. Kind of liked this frame from around 1 am (7 hours after opening) when there's finally a visible end to the line.

Not nearly as spectacular as the Apple Japan opening day , but we do love that cube. And hooray for the MacBook winners, who look like nice people, don't they?

Posted by tshey at 11:04 PM

May 16, 2006

moved.

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Posted by tshey at 03:34 AM

May 10, 2006

webby winners announced

shey.net favorite blogger Regine has won the Webby for culture/personal blog. and our old friend Jonah & his website The Huffington Post won both awards for best political blog -- the Webby and the People's Voice. congrats!

Posted by tshey at 09:34 AM

May 09, 2006

unhappy hour

Well, it's our last week in DC. Friends, colleagues, if you'd like to send us off, please join us at the Cactus Cantina (corner of Macomb and Wisconsin) anytime from six to eight on Thursday. We'll be in the back bar, and the margaritas will be flowing... really hope to see you there.

Posted by tshey at 10:49 PM

May 06, 2006

the mother of all social networks

For the past several months, I've been helping a great company called ClubMom with their goal of refocusing their strategy around user generated content, social networking, and blogging. As of this week, some of the results are showing up online: ClubMom’s website now includes a public beta of The MomNetwork, which applies social networking features to helping moms connect, based on shared challenges and interests, in a safe environment (registration required; you can also see some screenshots in this Flickr photoset).

MomNetwork Login Page

The idea’s nice and simple in this first phase -- any existing ClubMom member (membership is free, with over 2 million to date) can log in and create a profile, including a personal statement, photo, and as many interests, hobbies, and challenges they'd like to list for themselves or their kids. Over 6,000 have done that so far, which has definitely exceeded our expectations. Once you’ve created a profile, it's fairly simple to start exploring the network to find other moms who share your interests, or narrow by additional criteria (like kids' ages or location), and from there, bookmark or private message the moms you find. We’ve also integrated privacy controls throughout to give moms control over how much they share with their personal network and the public as a whole.

The key feature is the way that we’ve integrated with the site's member-created content. Over 20,000 of the articles on ClubMom have been submitted and rated by members, and when you read an article by a mom you like, if she has a profile on the MomNetwork, you can click through to view it, and add her to your own personal network if you'd like to follow what she's contributing to ClubMom. From then on, her new articles will be indexed on your personal page (like a simplified RSS aggregator) and the articles she's rating and commenting on will appear in a sidebar. As the network grows, we’ll have to rework this interface a bit in order to effectively keep track of all the moms members add to their networks, but for now it does the trick.

In a related effort, we recently reviewed applications from over 300 moms to become paid bloggers on the site. We've chosen a really great founding group to blog on a whole range of topics, of which the first few are already launching, and we seem to already have at least one hit on our hands (Go Amalah! DC bloggers in the house). We'll be looking to integrate the blogs more and more with the Network in coming months, to make it easy for members keep up with the bloggers they like on ClubMom.

We’re building the network in an iterative phase, and letting members’ feedback guide what we do next. The very next phase of development, however, will most likely include the ability for moms to easily join and launch groups around shared interests, and I don’t want to say much more than that, in that we have some pretty good ideas as to how we’re going to take that hoary old standard feature of social networks and implement it in a way that’s really useful and practical for moms.

ClubMom’s a fun company to work with, full of genuinely nice, smart, creative people, from the newest recruits to the founders, who include CEO Michael Sanchez and actor and activist Andrew Shue (both of whom also co-founded the community service group Do Something), and an actual mom -- someone named Meredith Vieira.

It’s a rewarding thing to be able to design for an audience you care about and understand – after all, we all know a few moms – and to try to apply some of the innovations of the last few years to making their lives, hopefully, a little bit better. This is not your mother’s MySpace... it’s something else entirely.

And to my own inimitable mom, Happy Mother’s Day – hope you enjoy the MomNetwork!

Posted by tshey at 02:50 PM

May 05, 2006

so where's the ad money going?

admoney.png

archived video and web chat of the OnHollywood panel I participated in the other day. You decide if we were funnier than Tom Green.

Posted by tshey at 05:36 PM

May 04, 2006

may 1st, nyc photoset

may 1, foley square, nyc

We also took a little bit of video with our little point and shoot cam, just to show an idea of what it was like near the endpoint of Monday's march in NYC. Be sure to watch for the dancing luchador at the end...



video from the may 1 immigration protest, nyc on Vimeo

Posted by tshey at 01:40 AM

May 03, 2006

in LA

Catching an inhumanly early flight to Los Angeles right now to speak at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood event. I'll be speaking on behalf of the happy band that is Rocketboom, and providing one answer to the panel's question, "Where's the Ad Money Going?" On that note, we've been rolling out the Earthlink ads all week after each episode, and they're interesting enough to check out - today's "I" ad is pretty fun.

In other news, Helio launched service officially yesterday with Rocketboom as one of its initial video partners, along with adult swim, ABC, and FOX Sports. The video page is like reading my own resume... quite a coincidence.

Posted by tshey at 04:49 AM