NowPublic has released a new feature called Scan that aggregates and geo-locates information from a wide variety of resources including unconvential ones such as micro-blogging services like twitter, Identi.ca and Pownce and presents the data to the public in a useful manner. Unlike current methods for tracking information which is limited to a single keyword of hashtag, NowPublic's Scan tool can handle many different keywords to monitor. Scan Sample: BlogWorld 2008 We'll use the current BlogWorld Scan2008 event in Las Vegas as an example of what NowPublic scan can do with all of this data. Now every channel will have Scan functionality so users can do the following: · See which NowPublic members are near a given story location · Track who is micro-blogging about a topic, where they are located and what they are saying; · See when the most activity on the topic occurred; · View the most popular links within a given topic; · View recommended microblogged posts; · Flag content as being high quality and pertinent via social search. Notice all of the keywords that Scan is using to track all of the news related to those keywords, in this case the BlogWorld 2008 convention in Las Vegas. In other monitoring services you can only enter one word where as NowPublic's Scan tool can handle many different keywords. Live and On Location NowPublic's Scan tools enables users to be feel as if they're live and on the scene thanks to all of the updates and information coming from people actually at those locations. In this sample, here's what people interested in BlogWorld 2008 had to say. Your Own CNN News Center The Scan tool allows you to create your own type of CNN center where by you can start aggregating all of your news resources into a centralized manner. No more surfing to countless sites to capture the news thanks to NowPublic. The layouts of the channels have also been changed. Conclusion The ability to track and monitor multiple keywords and spellings is an excellent new tool. The traditional ways have fallen by the wayside so this new technology is a much needed contribution to our online search mechanisms. The limitations of single keyword identifiers like those on hashtags will now be a thing of the past thanks to the Scan tool from NowPublic. Here's the Podcast of our very own Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins interviewing Michael Tippett, CMO of NowPublic.

Having children enter the public school system this last year has really opened my eyes up to a number of things that only parents can identify with. Not only is my son becoming something resembling a person (as opposed to a chubby mass of toddler cuteness), he's exposed to teachings outside the normal curriculum of information I'd normally expose him to (for instance, unlike the local public school system, I probably wouldn't have spent a week of lessons centering around the ins and outs of recycling).

It's not to the point where I feel like I need to intervene and start suggesting alternative topics for my son's teachers, but it is making me aware the need to be in touch with what it is the teachers do with our children during the days, and the importance of having a hand in helping your child get the best education possible.

That's why it was refreshing to sit down with Edward Fields recently on Mashable Conversations and talk with him about what he's doing as CEO of HotChalk.  They're a niche social network for students, teachers and parents that uses the power of quality user-generated-content to improve the education experience for all involved. It's a place for teachers to share in lesson plans that cater to students at all levels of development, parents to stay in touch with what the kids are learning, and kids to better understand and relate the the curriculum they're being taught.

This is one of the most apt and useful applications of the niche social network concept I've come across. If you have a school-aged child or are a teacher, this is a must-see site.

Listen to the MP3 to hear more from CEO Edward Fields and I as we discuss American education and how HotChalk aims to help our children succeed in learning.

Sean and I had the rare opportunity of unmasking a company today on Mashable Conversations. Our guest on the show today was Jon Labes, the founder of a new video marketplace called Plentitube (pronounced like "plentitude, if you change the 'd' to a 'b'). Jon is probably best known as being the creative mind behind Wallstrip, the financial podcast that was later famously sold to CBS Interactive for a tidy sum.

Through his experience in New Media production as well as the experience of taking a show like that from concept to completion to exit, he was made aware of the wide variety of issues that arise for successful independent video producers that we're just not equipped to deal with.  Legal issues abound, as do business decisions, odd technical issues, and sales situations; most of the time indie producers just want to, well, produce.

Plentitube is a marketplace built with that in mind.  It's currently still in an invite only beta situation, but their goal is to take top notch producers and pair them with advertisers, resources and potential investors and owners for the content.  In our interview, we explore the history that led Jon to this venture, as well as the intracies of the marketplace, and how it can benefit the New Media video producer set.

Discussion: YouTube v. Viacom, the $1 Billion Dollar Privacy Question
In our discussion segment, we talk a bit about the YouTube v. Viacom debacle, and what it means (from legal laymen) to open the Pandora's box on user records, and why we're glad it's Google getting sued.  Leave your comments below for inclusion in future shows.

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First of all, if you're American, and you're reading this - I have to ask why? The web is like a ghost town today. There isn't much going on via Twitter. FriendFeed is unusually slow, and about six or so of our two trillion readers showed up to leave a comment today. It's July 4! Independence Day! Go out and have a brew and a hot dog! For all our non-American friends and readers, and the six US readers who have nothing else better to do, Sean P. Aune and I have recorded a special episode of Mashable Conversations today. We scoured the web and couldn't find a guest to come in today, so we reverted to a topic that had particularly irked us from the week past - the bizzarre assumption by some in the blogosphere that Identi.ca is the natural successor to Twitter. I won't steal the show's thunder, but Sean and I puzzle over this idea and try to figure out exactly why this is being said. It's a short episode, so go ahead and watch before you throw on your swimwear and jump in the pool this afternoon.

With the proliferation of information sources and ways to read them, it seems counter-intuitive that one of the hotter topics in the blogosphere is still aggregation, discovery and syndication. Yet here we are, yet another day, yet another Twitter story, yet another FriendFeed story, and yet another Digg story.

Don't get me wrong - I too have a obsessive fascination with the nuanced myriad of way we can move our 1's and 0's around. That's why when I got a ping from Ari Newman, founder and president of company making an AI-powered news filtration service, my ears perked up.

I had a chance to bring him on the Mashable Conversations podcast so I could learn a bit about it. It's that's suitable for news junkies and professional bloggers like myself, but it's primarily targeted to marketing and public relations professionals, as it has a wide variety of graphing and search functions that serve to aggregate keyword searched news from just about every source out there.

It is capable of pulling in any RSS source, any Google alert, and is able to search across a wide variety of sources, from New Media and Old. 

What seems to be clincher on this is the review system, which attempts to learn with at "three dimensional rating system" exactly the style of news you're interested in.  After you're done setting up your complex filtering requirements, you can begin to subtly refine the filters to find the topics you're tracking by rating the source types.  For instance, if you're more interested in finding out user comments, you can place an emphasis on feeds coming out of FriendFeed or Twitter.  If you're focused on New Media response, or a specific response, you can highly rate certain blogs or a certain genre of blogs, and the system will pick up on those relationships.

It sounds like a very advanced system, and it only launched this Monday, so I haven't begun to explore the whole depth of it yet, but what I've been played with so far has kept me intrigued.

Is there anything more frustrating than working on your homework late at night, you get stuck on a problem and there is no one you can get a hold of for assistance? This is where Cramster, a site to help you with your homework, comes into play. If your homework is in the fields such as math, science, engineering and so on, this is the perfect site for when you get stuck in those late night cram sessions. You go on the site, pose your question, and instead of just getting an answer, users are encouraged to explain the steps they took to arrive at their answer so that you can actually learn from them. Some of the problems I took a peek at, even with explanations, made me scratch my head, but the people who needed the answers seemed thrilled. The company currently enjoys being the top educational app on Facebook in addition to their popular website, and as time goes on, they will be adding more of their functionality into the app to make it even more usable. As for the future plans for the original site, you can expect to see the addition of more professors answering questions, and a whole slew of new practice questions both licensed from text book publishers, as well as created by users. I had the chance to speak with both Robert Angarita and Aaron Hawkey about the site, and the future plans for it.

Lots of people have been letting others know on Twitter what they're listening to as they work through their day, but what if you could also include the actual MP3 for people to join in and listen along?

This is the idea behind Blip, a new service from Fuzz. that allows you to microblog ala Twitter, but with the added feature of using an MP3 search to embed the song you are currently listening to into the post so that others can check it out. Unlike SeeqPod, which has run afoul of legal questions, Blip is "Obviously it is legal and it's covered by the DMCA," according to Fuzz CEO, Jeff Yasuda.

One of the most amazing things about Blip is they have done something that everyone has cried out for Twitter to do: a self-refreshing feed page! What a novel concept!  It's true, the page updates itself without hitting refresh... it's obviously demonic magic.

We sat down with Gavin Hayes, lead singer of Dredg, to get his thoughts on what Blip brings to the music industry, as well as what he, as a musician, would like to see change in the dynamics of the industry. I have to say I was quite intrigued by his thoughts on pre-sales of albums, and how that might be a way to bring the artist and fans closer together.

What do you do if you have a chunk of time slotted to hang out and talk with the creator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic? You do what everyone else does in the Web 2.0 world - you talk about Twitter!

This Friday past, Matt took some time out to hang out on Mashable Conversations to chat with me and you guys, not because he had anything to pitch me, but because he's a genuinely nice guy who when he says offhandedly at a WordCamp that he wouldn't mind coming on your podcast at some point, gladly obliges.

Given that we had no particular agenda of topics to talk about, we chatted briefly about what's in store for the next version of WordPress (here's a hint - WordPress is going to be tackling video in their next version, and from the sounds of it will be an ambitious undertaking), and then I went down the laundry list of hot topics in the blogosphere at the moment.

I didn't bring up Twitter just for the sake of talking about it - a while back, Matt announced the release of a special theme for WordPress called Prolouge, which we covered here at Mashable. The idea behind the release was to provide small to mid-sized teams a way to have Twitter functionality without putting the company business out there for the world to see.  It's a great idea that they not only gave to the world, but use themselves internally at Automattic.

In the release blog, though, Matt had made an interesting statement about the theme:

Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to.

I tried to pin down with him what he thought the feasibility of this plan was, and the likelyhood of it coming about given the chronic downtime Twitter has been experiencing lately.

The biggest problem that Twitter has experienced, with regard to it being down all the time, is generally regarded as it's scalability problem.  This is an area that Matt could speak to with some authority, as WordPress has climbed the various Mt. Everests in terms of high usage situations, and generally weathered all the adventure without a hitch.

Aside from the Twitter topic, we also talked about the future of blog content, RSS, comment fragmentation, and how much he loves his Kindle (in which I took the opportunity to shamelessly appeal to Jeff Bezos, Mashable Conversations Listener, to send me a review unit).

It's definitely a riveting conversation top to bottom. Whether you're a WordPress user or just a user of the Web, the conversation is definitely interesting.

Twitter is down. I say that and it sounds like I'm playing word association games (I say Twitter, you say... down, that's right). It's unfortunate, given the inordinate amount of time people like us spend on the service that it's become so downright unavailable recently. There has been much more communication from the Twitterpeople with regards to what parts are up and down, and we're definitely glad that they're doing something about fixing it. On the other hand, contrary to the best predictions of Robert Scoble this on our weekend podcast, people just aren't happy to know why the service is down - they want it back up. A Tale of Romance Gone Awry Frederic Lardinois, regular panelist on the Elite Tech News podcast as well as blogger at LastPodcast, has filed for divorce today. Divorce from Twitter, that is. While the official reasons behind the breakup are listed as irreconcilable differences, he's told the readers of his blog a much more personalized account, citing that Twitter has made herself unavailable to him, there's been (*ahem*) performance issues, and at one point Twitter even locked out Frederic completely from accessing her with his Snitter:

It’s great that the folks at Twitter are starting to communicate with us, but I find it harder and harder to get myself to use Twitter anymore.

As it seems to be the case more and more these days, the truth comes out as Frederic admits he's had a thing for FriendFeed for quite some time, and finds that talking with FriendFeed is often more interesting that the same old same old with Twitter. Will I Stick Around? I'm not sure. I think that I've been using Twitter less and less myself prior to the outages, but for me my Twitter usage is pretty cyclical. I'll start using it heavily, then I'll get preoccupied with FriendFeed, or sometimes I'll just stop using both altogether and actually get some work done. Luckily, I haven't really felt the effects of the screwball outages this time around, because it happened mostly during a cycle of non-use for me. I'm starting to see my Twitter usage diminish to mostly passive. I check my @ replies a couple times a day, and I'm starting to add more automated methods of posting (such as the recent addition of my XboX status messages to the service). Most of my Twitter interaction happens these days on FriendFeed (but for the occasional political blowout - I'd link an example, but guess what? That archive feature is horked.). Most likely for me, I'll maintain an active presence on it and occasionally actively pop in from time to time. As for an actual heavy communications tool for me, I think those days may be behind me as well.

In 2006, rap artist Chamillionaire’s track “Ridin” became iconic in American pop culture, being infamously parodied by Weird Al Yankovic ("White and Nerdy"), becoming the most downloaded ringtone of all-time, and ultimately winning a Grammy for Best Rap Song. However, none of that was coincidence or pure luck.

At the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles, Pete got an opportunity to talk with the artist about how he uses social media to better connect with his fans and ultimately sell more music. Chamillionaire also talks about how the music industry needs new metrics to determine what’s popular, since album sales are meaningless in the world of a la carte purchases via iTunes.

It’s a must listen for anyone in the music industry and social media marketers that aspire to work with top artists.

I had a chance to talk to John McCrea today regarding the acquisition of his company by Comcast, and while a lot of the raw information is probably found elsewhere or in other analysis, the way he laid it all out to me showed me exactly how much sense the joining of these two organizations really made. This is a return visit for him, and he and I always have fun when he's on the show.

Given that Comcast isn't a huge shareholder in the Web 2.0 property market, a lot of questions were going around as to what this could possibly integrate with, how much integration Plaxo would make within the Comcast organization.

As it turns out, this buyout came as a result of a long relationship that they've had since the Plaxo tools were integrated into the suite of tools given out to Comcast broadband subscribers. Since then, they've continually discussed what an expansion of that partnership would look like.

When he was describing the future of all this, a conversation from an episode of Elite Tech News sprang to mind from a few weeks ago. The topic was whether or not Twitter and FriendFeed would ever see mainstream adoption, or if would forever remain the loved utility of us blogosphere folks.

The argument against it becoming widespread was that it just isn't accessible.  For it to be useful, the users really need to be on a wide variety of services like Digg, Google Reader, and Twitter already. This is in contrast to the future that McCrea sees with Plaxo Pulse, where your TV and movie viewing habits will tracked through the Pulse system, and integrated into the set-top box experience.

Yes, the TV becomes the platform, but just as important, the barrier to entry will no longer be existent.  My 92 year old gramma knows how to use the TV.  Explaining FriendFeed to her would be about as useful as explaining underwater basketweaving to her in Latin.

This is a potentially groundbreaking partnership in a number of ways, and McCrea definitely puts an interesting new spin on the whole partnership I hadn't heard yet.

I had a chance last week to chat with Sarah Lane, a host of the variety show on Revision 3's network called PopSiren.  It's essentially a collection of women that talk about things ranging from the "DIY world, to science with a dash of random cool stuff," as Sarah put it. The weekly show is 10 episodes in, and is all about attempting to bring a fresh perspective to Internet TV.

One of the tricks Rev3 uses to keep budgets under control? Hat sharing.  It's less unhygenic than it sounds.  For instance, Sarah Lane is not only the host of PopSiren, but the director of production at Revision 3. The VP of Sales, for instance, will occasionally jump in on an edit. David Prager, the host of Tekzilla, does a lot of other business development and event organization.

A recurring theme from the conversation was how refreshing and liberating it is to do a show on a barebones budget. Despite that, there is a concerted effort there at Rev3 to put stuff together as though those responsible know what they're doing, and it tends to show.

Another interesting topic we delved into was the struggle for growing for-profit New Media organizations to create content that generates money versus content that represents the core focus of the group.  It's a struggle that affects almost all professional content producers, regardless of the medium.  Sarah has a lot of interesting things to say about it and how Revision 3 is handling these challenges.

Twing is a relatively new forum search tool that launched back in mid-March.  Kristen recently reviewed them, and came to a lot of the same conclusions I did this week, as I sat down with Scott Germaise on an episode of Mashable Conversations this week and gave it a good once over:

I was happy to see a rather extensive filtering sidebar that's present for narrowing down all of your search results. Modify existing searches by category, forum name, exact phrase inclusion or exclusion, and more. This is helpful in the sense that it lets you sift through the forums without having to read through all of them. I hate sifting through forums in order to find one measly answer, even with Google caching and Firefox's "Find" function.

As I said at the beginning of our conversation, too, I'm not typically excited or enthralled with vertical search offerings in general, but just sitting down and playing with some ego searches and some brand searches for Mashable, I was able to find a wealth of conversation that previously had been undiscovered by any of my present brand-management feeds I have set up.

Interestingly enough, through their category selection process and the natural self-policing nature of forums, they've also a remarkably spam free set of results.

Scott explained a bit of why that is, and gave me an in-depth tour of the features and history of the website

It's not often we do news concerning gadgets, but there's been a few interesting social media bits of technology stories over the last few days.  The terrestrial radio inspired by the web was one sort of Web 2.0 inspired bit of technology, but there are a number of social media related device companies that have come across my radar recently. One gadget maker in particular was brought to my attention by the name of Prime Sense.  Israeli venture capital firm Canaan Digital Ventures recently just sank $20.4 million into a company called Prime Sense along with Gemini Israel Funds and Genesis Partners.

Prime Sense is an Israeli developer of interface gadget maker intent on changing the way that humans interact with machines.  Presently, they only have one device profiled on their company website, but what really interested me in what they're doing is their future plans.

That's what interested Izhar Shay as well.  Shay is a partner at Canaan Partners, and took some time to sit down with me and discuss what they're working on at Prime Sense on an episode of Mashable Conversations. He's now joining their board of directors there, and is very familiar (and excited) about the technology they're developing there.

Most of it seems to center around video technology, and gesture based interface.  The way it was described to me was that their intention was to make interfacing with entertainment consoles and personal computers as seamless and natural as interfacing with other human beings (think Minority Report, without the goofy Nintendo Power Glove).

I've seen a number of attempts at gesture based interaction, though, and most of them fall flat.  The problem, generally, is in the object recognition.  To fix this, Prime Sense has done a lot of work in what is essentially compositing and green screen technology.  During the development process, they've as a side-effect of their work created what Shay described as professional level green-screen technology that will be made available for consumer level prices.

This has the net effect of putting in the hands of independent video producers the technology that has generally been only available to folks with the budget for a $10,000 lighting set-up and a $5,000 Tri-Caster. I predict that Canaan and the other venture capitalists are going to make their investment back just off this product, should it perform to the level Shay described (which is even in sub-optimal lighting conditions, the system still performs flawlessly).

The bad news?  The technology isn't available yet.  Shay is convinced, based on the current development cycle that most of it should be ready by years end.

This is definitely one company to keep an eye on, and definitely one you want to hear more about.

New Relic, Inc. is an organization not only dedicated to disproving the myth that Ruby on Rails as a web development environment can't scale, but also an organization involved in developing tools to assist in scalability and bringing them to the developer landscape.

This afternoon, New Relic comes out of stealth status with the grand announcement of $3.5 million in first-round venture financing from Benchmark Capital. I had a chance to speak to founder and CEO of New Relic, Lew Cirne, a bit about his organization and exactly where these rumors of unscalability come from.

For most of us here at Mashable, the biggest, most well known application running on the Rails platform we can think of is Twitter - a tool hardly known for its stability. While this contributes to the mythology of the platform's instability, what really propagates it is a number of things.

My theory was that because RoR is such an infant development environment, just like PHP experienced in its infancy, questions of its scalability come from the fact that every major landmark in terms of size applications cross over into lead to new questions, and there are very few folks with whom to turn to for answers.  While New Relic hopes to be one of those organizations to turn to, Lew told me that this isn't the only reason we see the common occurance of problems scaling for Rails applications.

Rails is known for it's succinct programming style, where one line of code can be very powerful, and perform very complex tasks.  It's this simplicity that can also be a trap for developers who accidentally can trigger enormous processing tasks with what look like very efficient lines of code.

New Relic's software as a service offering can analyze these code bits and give exact and graphed out details about what sort of computing time-sinks may exist within the code, and offer suggestions of more efficient ways of executing that same statement.

All in all, it's a very interesting proposition - if you're a developer in the Rails environment (or anyone curious about how Rails applications work behind the scenes), you definitely want to catch this episode, as Lew drops some very interesting knowlege on the topic.

The Google I/O event is coming up at the end of May here, and it's set to be a defining moment for a lot of Web 2.0, particularly the social web.  Just about every big name in the social networking world and at the OpenSocial side of things at Google is due to speak or be present during this event designed to educated and propagate further development on the OpenSocial platform.

Google Product Manager Tom Stockey stopped by at Mashable Conversations to give us a bit of insight as to not only who and what will be at Google I/O, but a bit of insight as to the guiding philosophies of those involved in the group.  It's a quick conversation, but one worth catching.

Break Media has been at the leading edge of online video entertainment in terms of both content development as well as monetization and producer rewards for a good while now - longer than a lot of the other players that see a lot of press in the Web 2.0 game. They're leading again, as last week they announced the formation of the Online Video Advertising ROI Council.

The council bears a lot of similarity to the organization the Association for Downloadable Media in scope and focus.  Just like the ADM, the ROI Council consists of a large variety of online media organizations, including Break Media, Ogilvy One, truTV, National Geographic Channel, AT&T,], eMarketer, Panache, Lotame, Visible Measures, Horizon Media, and Initiative Media.

I got to speak with Keith Richman, the CEO of Break.com, last week and speak frankly about the state of the business and where things are headed. While the business of online video remains very lucrative for a lucky few producers and a wonderfully successful place to put your advertising dollars, for the vast majority of producers and advertisers, it remains a very difficult minefield to navigate.

Keith and I talked not only about the goals and aim of the ROI council, but the state of the indie producers, and when we'll start to see that boom for them that bloggers see today.  For some, that boom is now, with some of the top paid producers on Break earning several thousand a month.

This is a very valuable chat to listen to, no matter which side of the online video production business you aim to be on.

 

Ever since Hi5's OpenSocial-compatible developer platform launched back in late March, usage and installs have been going on at a breakneck pace. As of the first week of April (one week into the existence of the platform), the developer platform was fully deployed, 100% OpenSocial compatible, and with over 150 apps developed and deployed. The number of installs on these applications, in many cases, far exceeded the number of installs on the top MySpace applications.

This rapid development and rapid adoption is largely due to the multi-national userbase of Hi5, and the strong sense of involvement and development community they've cultivated since the inception of the service.

I had a chance to grab some insight on how this social network has become a Web 2.0 success story from  Lou Moore and Anil Dharni, two developers at Hi5.

RightScale is an organization that's essentially positioned themselves as the intermediary between the sometimes confusing world of cloud-based server environments and the end user. I, myself, am completely fascinated with the cloud computing world, and I understand the basic principals as to how it's supposed to work.

In practice, though, I find setting up and operating most of the cloud server environments to be confusing and ultimately impossible for a life-long developer like myself (yes, I'm the type of developer all you admin types hate to have accessing your boxes - I know my way around the server just enough to muck it up so that you need to fix it at least once a week).

RightScale is an organization that sits between people like me and that confusing world - sure I understand how to use most of the server environments I can program in, but I'll stare over and over at the EC2 documentation and still not understand what it is I need to do to set up an account and get it running like I need it.  RightScale does this for dolts like myself, and acts as a sort of contract admin team to solve the unique sorts of issues that can arise in that environment.

Their organization just recently raked in $4.5 million from Benchmark Capital in a Series A funding round.  RightScale's CEO, Michael Crandell, came on Mashable Conversations to educate me on how their business worked and gave a good benefit and downside run-down on the prospect of moving your server's computing to the clouds.

I had a chance to speak to Chris Parandian briefly back in March when I was in Washington D.C. for our MashMeet and the Politics Online Conference.  Chris is the founder of Tin Can Communications, a public affairs and new media centric communications firm out of DC, as well as a blogger at the social media/mobile industry blog Mobile Diner.

Chris is in a unique position to really monitor the convergence of mobile and social media, a topic we revisit quite frequently here at Mashable Conversations.  Given our interest in the topic, Chris and I had a great time exploring the intracacies of where this space is going and not only why it's so hard for new entrants to break out in the mobile space, but given that difficulty how exactly we got to where we are today, so many miles from where the mobile industry was back a decade ago.

This was a truly engaging conversation, and we covered a mountain of material too deep to enumerate here - definitely worth taking the time to wade through the whole hour-long conversation.

...and I really only say that because FriendFeed is one of those rare services that has the ability to convey a strong sense of culture that's relevant to the user.  It doesn't try to pollute it or dilute it or otherwise overpower it with a corporate branding effort like, say, Facebook.  When you're logged into FriendFeed and have a group of folks with which you're familiar with added to your circle, you can't help but feel a little like you're home.

DeviantArt portrays the same sort of feeling of community and strong culture, without being overbearing  in nature. DeviantArt has been around a whole lot longer than FriendFeed, of course, and has had time to cultivate it's very strong community (back when they still called them communities, instead of social networks); I've been a member of the service since 2003, myself.

I recently had a chance to sit down and talk about the history of DeviantArt with one of it's founders, still active in the company, Angelo Sotira.Given the fact that despite having an immense userbase that's been creating tens of millions of art pieces for the last eight years, they've recieved surprisingly little press. Angelo and I discussed why that is (hint: it's by design), a little bit of their history, and perhaps most interestingly how their culture has adapted to the new popularity of Web 2.0 and social media.

Jangl is one of those companies that provides a utilitarian service that you may easily overlook, despite the fact that they're absolutely everywhere. You can't hit up a single major social networking site out there without eventually running into their application - they're on Bebo, Match.com, Plentyoffish, MySpace, Facebook and Tagged, just to list a few.

Despite the fact that Jangl's been out there forever, and received exactly three metric tons of blog coverage, they're still one of those companies that not everyone knows exactly what they do. They're essentially a convergence provider, allowing two way mobile access to social network messaging by utilizing VoIP technology. In English, that means they use the various development platforms on social networks to deliver messages from people's voices to your inbox.

I recently had the chance to sit down with one of Jangl's founders, Michael Cerda, and we talked about the rise of his company, the very interesting funding and founding process they went through, and exactly what has fueled the growth of his organization.

An interesting tidbit I found out from the conversation was the the founders of Jangl are not just bussiness partners, but also bandmates. A true Web 2.0 success story, they found each other by way of Craigslist (see the original want ad below), and during the 'wait and see' portion of the funding process, performed gigs together under the band name El Desayuno. The band has actually published a CD (available on iTunes), and is quite good, in this humble geek's opinion. Check bits of their work out, both in the form of conversation about their company and clips from their music.

[This show sponsored by Audible. Get your free audiobook today at AudiblePodcast.com/Mashable]

A few days ago, Trulia, the real estate search engine, announced their integration with Google Streetview to bring a whole new level of detail to property tours online.  Currently, listings in 30 US cities are currently offered with a side dish of SteetView, and more material is to be added in real-time as it is captured.

This, though, is just a slice of what's available with Trulia.  To be honest, Trulia had escaped my personal radar of Web 2.0's I keep my eye on.  I imagine this has something to do with the fact that I worked in real estate related business for a number of years and burned out on them, combine with the fact that the search sector isn't my favorite sexy area of web technology.

Despite this, and given my experience in both areas, I'm keenly aware of how profitable these fields can be if gone about the right way. I got a chance to sit down with Trulia CEO Pete Flint, and they definitely seem to be going about things in the right way, having achieved the level of largest real estate search engine, providing a number of social and search tools to their users.

They're not the type of organization that just slaps in messaging and a couple of vampire vs. zombie applications and call themselves social.  They've thought out the bits and pieces of real estate utility that should remain social, and those that should remain anonymous, and those that can simply be served by search.

Additionally, they've got a number of API and webmaster utilities - and by the end of our conversation, I had arrived at the realization that a number of web design firms I knew could be cutting down a lot of their workload by using the Trulia API than trying to work with the hundreds of disparate real estate MLS systems that are in existence out there.

Our friends at Google gave us a ring yesterday, and wanted to know if we wanted to have a quick chat about the new Google App Engine today with our readers - we said sure. Our buddy at Google put us in touch with Google App Engine Product Manager Pete Koonen.  If you're reading this now, you probably missed the live call - which is fine, since we're sticking it in the podcast for you to grab that way, too.

He gave a much more succinct synopsis of the Google App Engine than I did in my fairly long first look, and cleared up a number of questions I and several readers had about the system.

We covered the topics of security, future languages that they'll offer, specifics about user privacy and Google Accounts (which is an optional system, unlike we originally thought). We even got a chance to chat about the biggest scandal of the week so far, apparently: HuddleChat-gate.

I had a chance to speak with Eric Litman today. He's a founder at Aux Interactive and the Managing Director of WashingtonVC. As you may have read earlier today, we are proud to announce a partnership with Litman's company Aux Interactive, a next-generation interactive agency focused on delivering high-value, metrics driven consumer and enterprise engagement through social media marketing and technology.

Or, in English, a social media agency that can get the job done when it comes to accomplishing what you want in terms of app development, re-tooling what current presences your organization currently has, or even getting to know exactly how you and your organization fits into the social media space.

To test out the theory that these guys were a bunch of geniuses, I spoke to their leader, Mr. Litman, and to be honest, I expected it to be a quick little show where we talk about the partnership, and maybe ad lib and riff on the nature of the Mashable/Aux relationship.  We ended up getting tangled in nearly an hour of conversation, covering everything from the history of technology as we knew it to the vagueries and elusive nature of profiting with applications designed to run on social networks.

In short, he agreed with almost every point of analysis I put out there, so that told me automatically he's a smart fellow. 

 

Brightcove today announced a partnership with a bunch of new content partners - Bebo, Meebo, RockYou, Slide and Veoh.  Besides making a pretty sing-songy headline, the partnership serves a number of useful purposes.  We took a look at the press release, and while it was pretty long, we figured it didn't really cover all the aspects and nuances of this new set of partnerships - the type of companies talked about here, while they're all content companies of some kind, are very diverse in what they do and how a partnership would work.

We sat down with Brightcove's Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy Adam Berrey to discuss that specifically.  Interestingly, he was also willing to discuss a blogosphere dustup that I had back in December with Jeremy Allaire, regarding Brightcove's strategy with regards to independent producers and monetization.

All in all a good listen, and a decent resource for content producers looking for wide distribution and those interested in advertising in online video.

Gizmoz is a bit of Web 2.0 technology that often gets pigeon-holed as strictly avatar software, but in fact is quite a bit more than that. Their technology is, at it's essence, the ability to generate 3D model object off of 2D images (namely, your face) - and then re-insert that into a 2D video file or image.

Aside from using it simply as a plug-in to your favorite messaging tool, you can also use it as a lightweight production tool, an art generation utility or a system to generate interactive widgets.

I sat down with founder of Gizmoz Eyal Gever on Mashable Conversations recently, and he explained a bit of the technology and the space that his company inhabits, and a bit about their recently raised funding. It's definitely an interesting conversation to sit in on.

Tim Huffman is a man with many stories, and one terrific company.  At first blush, the company blends in with a lot of other video and audio purveyors on the Internet, offering paid downloads of music related video.  What they've actually developed at iVideoSongs, though, is a unique blend of audio and video that provides not only entertainment value but a serious amount of utilitarian value as well.

Kristen reviewed the service back at DEMO in January:

I sat down with CEO Tim Huffman, talked a bit about his personal history (it involves a Grammy!), and the unique and unintended aspects of his company's work that have arisen since he's started.

Tremor Media is a video advertising company targeting mid- to large- size publishers. We recently reported on their Series B funding round, where they raised $11 million to help accelerate the growth of the business.  Jason Glickman, CEO at Tremor, came on by Mashable Conversations to talk about the challenges of video advertising. We also delved pretty heavily into the topic of what it takes to build a successful programming lineup both on the technical side as well as the organizational and program direction side to create something that'll be both attractive to listeners and a commercial success.

Publishers and those in advertising will want to catch this episode, as there is a lot of good information there.

I had a chance to sit down with the co-founders of crowdSPRING, Ross Kimbarovsky and Mike Sampson the other day, just shortly after they were featured as our sponsored startup of the day.

What crowdSPRING is, is a virtual marketplace to find the creative talents to fulfill just about any sort of digital endeavor one can conceive. With it's ancestral roots in sites like GetAFreelancer and eLance, it tries to take the concept much further by presenting an even playing field where work product is judged on it's merits, rather than a resume or CV.

It sounds like a simple concept to execute, but in terms of what's involved with creating an online economy like this, anyone who's tried to use these types of sites before knows that it can get mighty complex very quick.  Ross, Mike and I all talked about these challenges and the extreme amount of thought, testing and care they've put into trying to make this the most fair place to find, perform and hire creative work.

This has been an interesting several days in the lifestreaming space. Just about every day, there's been an interesting take, opinion, or newly debuted feature for one of the major lifestreaming services. Yesterday, it was the long awaited first answer to comment fragmentation. Today it is the major announcement of the FriendFeed API, a debut that's being widely hailed by just about every blogger as the best thing since Oprah Winfrey.

I have to say, for all the attention and hyperbole that is likely to be heaped onto to this release, I'll say here that most of it is likely to be justified. FriendFeed is positioned to have it's Facebook Dev Platform/Twitter moment here. And like we discussed the other day (and briefly mentioned earlier today), with the Twitter update, the conversation fragmentation issue had begun to be solved. With the API release, that problem is completely fixed.

Under the API, very handy feed widgets like what RSSMeme released the other day that counted all the Google Reader shares of a blog post, FriendFeed comment counts and even feeds of the conversation can theoretically be embedded within blog posts, and created as additions to the normal cavalcade of feeds available from your typical blog.

Last week two of the four FriendFeed founders, Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor stopped by Mashable Conversations and talked about the launch of search for the service, as well as a bit about the API and conversation fragmentation memes that have been running around as well.

JamBase, the original social network for live music aficionados and producers, recently celebrated 10 years on the web and 1 million listings in their database.  The function of JamBase hasn't legitimately changed in those ten years, but what we tech folks call it and the new sites we pressure them to be interoperable with have.  Back when JamBase was first starting, we called them community portals.  These days, they're social networks.  

And of course, back then, I was a highschooler promoting punk rock shows in the East Texas area.  These days I'm a tech blogger reminiscing about the good old days.  I did a bit of that when JamBase CEO David Rosenheim stopped by Mashable Conversations to talk about his company.

It was a great conversation and we touched on all the interesting interactions we'd both had with indy music in the past (he had a touring rock band as well), as well as the future (how a Rock of Gibralter website like his maintains it's relevance in the rapidly changing landscape of social media).

A few days ago, John McCrea, the Veep at Plaxo in charge of marketing stopped by to do a live interview yesterday. The occasion that brought him by Mashable Conversations was the announcement of the results of the concepts of open and DataPortability when applied to a social network.  The graphs he supplied us with prior to the interview and announcement were simply amazing. 

 

Stan did a bit of commentary himself on the topic, but John McCrea and I go into great detail on the motivations and specific details of these philosophies as they've been applied to his company.

The Kidzui Browser is a software download recently released, targeted for kids age 6 to 11.  Rather than to a stodgy review based on my rather adult perspective, I sat down with my six year old son, AJ, and had him play with the browser for an hour and give his thoughts and experiences on it.

I recently had an opportunity to talk about quite an interesting Web 2.0 Cinderella story in published author Scott Sigler. Scott helped pioneer the New Media version of audiobooks (a concept I learned is now called "podiobooks"). Frustrated with traditional methods of attempting to take a novel from concept to mainstream publishing, he went the rout of turning his manuscript into a fusion of the audiobook and the podcast.

The story netted him so much support of his fiction work that he was able to land a publishing deal with Crown Publishing, and have his book reach the masses.

We chatted a bit about his journey, the techniques he used to get his books from concept to publishing, and the strategies that worked in terms of promoting his unique brand in the social media landscape. After all of that, we also got a chance to even talk a bit about his book, the plot, the concept, and some of the inspirations.

This is one of the more fun-themed (that is, less business-centric) podcasts we've done in a while, and definitely worth the listen, and thanks to the generosity of our sponsor, Audible, you can get a audio copy of Scott Sigler's book for free (just follow the link for details).

One of the last remaining 'dead-spots' in our Western, technology-enhanced lives is the airplane. Scheduling our travel schedules for distances that exceed that which is comfortable to drive have to account for a day capping the beginning and end of the trip for a blackout time, when you're basically off the grid - few phone calls, spotty Internet connections, and little connection to the outside world.

That is soon to change, as AirCell's SVP Tom Weigman explained to me this week. They're announcing that later this year, their inflight broadband services will be in place in American Airlines and Virgin America flights nation-wide, ending the communications blackout that is air travel.

We sat down on the Mashable Conversations podcast to talk a bit about the impact this will have, the specifics of what it'll cost, and for the truly interested, even a bit of the mechanics of how it works.

Casual gaming is a big growth area, especially in the social media and mobile media realms. AirPlay is on the absolute leading edge of that growth area, capitalizing on trends in pop culture and sports fandom by tying together your mobile phone or computing device with your television viewing experience - an unconventional but truly genius method of convergence.

Morgan Guenther is the CEO of AirPlay and the former President of TiVo. He took the time last week to stop by Mashable Conversations and talk about what his company is doing to create a truly interactive television viewing experience without rolling out expensive set-top boxes, or creating a new platform to go on the mountain of devices you already have hooked into your home entertainment system.

While I had him on the horn, I also took a minute to get his thoughts on the other side of convergence, that of Internet video programming and the set-top DVR/PVR boxes most of us currently have in our living rooms. As the former President of TiVo, he was able to provide some really unique insight to the conversation.

David Glazer over at Google's OpenSocial initiative sat down with Senior Editor Adam Ostrow and I to discuss the upcoming launch of OpenSocial's version .7.

Google just revived their wiki acquisition JotSpot as Google Sites.  PBWiki is the current leader in the Wiki space, now , and Chris Yeh, an executive at PBWiki graciously decided to join us today on Mashable Conversations to discuss the offering.

The lovely and talented Ann Bernard has an interesting story to tell about her startup.  Sometimes when you simply read descriptions of Yet Another Social Network, you think "Do I need this?"  If you fit the always moving or traveling niche, chances are, you do! Definitely a good conversation.

VideoEgg CMO Troy Young returns to Mashable Conversations to talk a bit about their new foray into engagement based advertising, AdFrames.

Rob Walch, the VP of Podcaster Relations at Wizzard Media and the longtime host of Podcast 411, stopped by Mashable Conversations to talk podcasting - it's past, it's future, and the reality.

Metacafe recently made headlines from some changes to their producer rewards program.  Michelle Cox, the director of corporate communications over at Metacafe stopped by Mashable Conversations to talk a little about that and the future of online video as a business.

Mark Pincus of Zynga, the Facebook gaming network, had a hole in his schedule as he and his wife made their way back home from their Aunt Mildred's home late last week.  The first thing that came to mind was 'I gotta get on Mashable Conversations.' We talked a bit about his funding, their buyout strategy, and new offers they have for FB app developers.

ReFrameIt was inspired by the scrawlings of thought leaders in the margins of the greats.  Bobby saw their scrawlings and the value it added to the original text, and wondered how a 5000 year old medium could have a still superiority over the most interactive medium invented ever, the Internet.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Alex Quilici, CEO of free voicemail provider YouMail.  It never occurred to me how lucrative a business providing that type of a service could be, nor what an effective form of advertising text messaging could be.  Sit in on this conversation for some valuable nuggets.

Rosenbaum's Magnifry is an interesting service, one that as we talked, we found we could easily analogize to the rise of link blogging. With the glut of user generated content on the net (as well as a good deal of professional grade content), the need arises for more program directors and less content producers.

I had an opportunity to speak to Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas, particularly well noted recently for writing, recording and producing the viral video chart hit "Yes We Can."  The video features Barrack Obama's speech after winning the South Carolina Primary, a speech so moving that it literally inspired Will to song.

Michael Bayer returns to Mashable Conversations to chat a bit about their recent upgrade, Super Tuesday, improvements in podcasting, and Microhoo.

MG Siegler, Louis Gray, Frederic and Steven Hodson launched a new Reddit spinoff, and MG stopped by Mashable Conversations a bit to talk about the test case for Dave Winer's proposal.

Greg met up with us at one of the NYC MashMeets, and after we got to know him, we knew we had to snag him for a session with Mashable Conversations to talk about the nature of satire, and why it is more trusted than 'real news.'

Mark Effron is in one of the businesses I'm a fan of - converting Old Media institutions into New Media powerhouses.  We sat down to have a short conversation that went real long as we couldn't stop exploring the nuances of turning Old TV into New.

It isn't often that you run into a Web 2.0 startup that has all its vowels.  It isn't often that you run into a startup that is so simple, yet so versatile.  Check it out, very interesting conversation on this useful utility.

There's been a lot going on with DataPortability, and a fair amount of questions regarding where it's headed, and if it is more than hype.  I sat down with one of the brains behind the big idea of DataPortability, Chris Saad, and address the question: "Where's the beef?"

VideoEgg announced some major partnerships with imeem, Buzznet and Metacafe.  Mark took that opportunity to talk with Troy Young, CMO for VideoEgg, and get his perspective on the video advertising market, American recession, and the effect of one on the other.

Greg Brady sat down with Mark of Mashable to discuss the launch of his blog, problems with SoundExchange, the beauty of the blogosphere conversation and social media in general.

Andrew Mason of thePoint.com and I talk politics and social action using this unique and invaluable Web 2.0 tool.

UStream recently received their angel financing round. Brad Hunstable, founder of UStream, took a minute to sit down and discuss the state of the business and what the future holds.

Technorati's launch of the percolator has made a splash today in the blogging world.  Aaron Krane took a minute to discuss the new space of memetrackers that Technorati is now competing in.