Propadoo - socializing testimonials

Propadoo is a "Positive Reinformcement EcoSystem" for the web. Basically, it's a widget that works by just adding a code snippet to your blog or website. People can then leave you compliments or positive comments by clicking on an icon generated by the code snippet. The free version takes the blog or site visitor to Propadoo's web site to leave their comments which are then sent back to the blog/site owner. For a fee, the "props" can be left in a simple pop-up window that is then forwarded to the blog or site owner, streamed to the website live, posted automatically to Twitter or Facebook, or several other options.

KillerStartups describes it as follows:

a service whereby testimonials and referrals are socialized by the use of elements such as profiles and pictures that let everybody know exactly who is who. And the Twitter influence is felt in the way that testimonials are provided - they are streamed on your the in a manner not that dissimilar to how tweets are displayed on the public timeline of Twitter.

The way the system works involves creating links to prompt people to prop you. These are placed not only on your site or blog but also on e-mails, and the resulting feedback will be automatically collated for you to weigh up.

In addition to being employed to generate higher sales, a system such as this one lends itself to complementing colleagues and giving recognition to city workers by recognizing what they have done for you.

This system is free both for companies and individuals. All that is required is creating an account beforehand, and that is done in less than 30 seconds.

Read more: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/propadoo-com-centralizing-referrals-testimonials#ixzz0ebNZpPSh

From Propadoo's own web site:

Individuals are using Propadoo by:
Make their compliments count by using Propadoo to preserve and promote them
Complimenting colleagues for a job well done
Recognizing teachers, coaches, civil servants etc. for going above and beyond expectations
Using positive reinforcement by telling someone what they’re doing right

There are some interesting posibilities here. I like the idea even if they haven't done exactly what I would have done with it...



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Light of the World Garden

Sorry, this is my only blog, so here's a non-genealogical posting:

Sculptor Angela Johnson is creating a "Light of the World" sculpture garden at Thansgiving Point near where I live. Here's links to some videos about it and her:

Drag to Top

Dragtotop is an interesting tool I came across today. I show the results of a search for "Family Search" here at right. Drag to Top pulls things from Google, adds twitter and news feeds, Google images, Google video, and gives a spot for comments. If you disagree with the top hits, you can drag from the full Google results to move what you think is the best hit to the top. The next Drag to Top user who performs the same search will see the one you dragged up. Over time, the more people who drag a particular hit to the top, the more it "sticks" to the top of the list. Hmmm. I guess you'd call it a search engine with social rankings modifying Google's page rankings.

I like the idea as well as the presentation and inclusion of Twitter, images, videos, etc. I wouldn't call it an earthshattering breakthrough or even something I would use regularly, but it's a great idea that portends things for the future.

From their own description:

Dragtotop.com is a manual search engine optimized by you, where you decide what is important and what should be on top. Simply drag what you like from web, images, videos and news search results to the top and let others in on the secret. Ranking your site on the first page has never been this easy.

While the Google search engine is very popular, Dragtotop brings all of what Google has and allows the users to simply Drag any site to the top and create their own search results. Search Dragtotop as you would search Google. When you find a result you like, just Drag It to the central column. Dragtotop has three columns, the first column on the left is search results from Google ; the second column shows user generated Drags and the third column is ads. Let's assume you searched for Car Dealers. The results are pulled from Google.com. If you like a search result on the third page, Simply Drag that site to the central column and next time someone searches for Car Dealers, the search result you dragged will show at the top of the second column, while the regular search results from Google will show in the first column. Your Drag will move down the list only when others drag new results on the exact same keywords.

www.dragtotop.com

ReFrame It!

I've been checking out an interesting FireFox Extension called ReFrame It. It allows any FireFox user to add the reframeit extension, then leave comments on any web page. Other reframeit users can see the comments when they go to the same pages, and add comments on the comments left by others. It essentially allows for commenting on web pages--you can even highlight specific parts of any web page to comment on a specific part of the page.

The disadvantages are that only other reframeit users can see the comments you left or make their own, and that it only works in FireFox. So at present, we have a tool which allows a group (think any group, team, family, or community) to share comments on any web page in the context of the web page. Even in its present form, it has a lot of potential. However, if widely adopted, the entire web could become commentable.

I played with it to add comments to the FamilySearch Wiki Home page-- see screen capture. We got a comment from a third party (the first two comments were me and my wife) which actually led to a change on the Wiki Home page. Not a bad idea...

See reframeit.com.

Odiogo, Podcasts, and iTunes

Six weeks ago, Odiogo launched a new, free service which will convert your blog text to audio and then broadcast the audio of your blog as an Internet radio broadcast, commonly called a podcast. This isn't exactly new, but what extends this interesting service even further is a new agreement with iTunes. ANY blogger can now have their blog postings converted to audio for free, and the audio podcasts will show up available as a subscription on iTunes.

This means I can subscribe to Eastman's Genealogical Newsletter on my mp3 player and listen to his newsletter postings as I drive to work--even before the newsletter is sent to my email! Yes, Dick has already jumped on the bandwagon and his newsletter is odiogo-ized. I can have my own blog postings converted to audio and set up my own "Internet radio channel" for others to follow my ramblings (I know, who would want to...?). The text to speech converter is pretty good, too.

Exciting.

Check out www.odiogo.com

Ancestry Member Connect

Ancestry has pre-announced their member connect social network and posted an image of their screen design. It's well worth taking a look. It certainly is an exciting time as leading web sites in the genealogy and family history industry try to move into the social networking world. Ancestry's blog post - http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2009/06/19/coming-soon-a-new-way-to-connect-with-others-researching-your-ancestors/. A partially functional preview of FamilySearch (Alpha) is also showing at http://labs.familysearch.org/alpha/index.php.

Google Wave

I’m not sure who might have already heard about Google Wave, but I’d like to share some thoughts. First some groundwork (only 2 paragraphs, not an epistle).

Groundwork
I often lament the difficulty of finding information that’s stored in numerous places. One has to be an information search guru, spend huge amounts of time sifting through mounds of data, and visit dozens of information repositories to find things. Wouldn’t it be great if I could search in just one place and find the information no matter where it is? Many thought we might have a partial solution when federated searching was first brought forward, but it hasn’t been that helpful.

When we want to get support on a product or service, we are faced with choosing the best form of getting that support—email, phone, self-help FAQ, self-help Wiki, Forum, live chat, etc. By offering support in so many ways, companies are trying to meet everyone’s needs, but perhaps they are diluting their resources and hiding what the customer needs by having it in only one of those tools, which may not be the one the customer selects. Wouldn’t it be nice if the customer didn’t have to select which tool to use, but could be directed to the help they needed in the format they desired?

Random Thoughts
In a way, one could call these two dilemmas examples of problems with information silos. Last week at Google I/O 2009, Google announced a project that has been going for a couple years called Google Wave which is intended to cross silos and remove barriers. The basic idea is to make the same content available across all formats & tools—and have it updated in all formats and tools when revised in any of them. There’s a lot more to it, but I can’t describe it without starting somewhere. What makes it exciting is that it’s Open Source. Google was engaging developers at the I/O conference to start writing extensions or even competing applications.

Google Wave allows collaborative editing. Instead of saving a document and letting people edit it one at a time, everyone looks at the same “document” at the same time and can edit collaboratively at the same time. Picture a meeting (physical or virtual). The group decides to make a list of some sort. As one person adds item 1, another is adding item 2, and a third is editing what the first person wrote on item 1 even before they come to the end of the sentence. Sounds a bit chaotic, but it has potential to facilitate virtual meetings as well as significantly shorten the time for collaborative authoring and editing.

Google Wave combines e-mail, instant messaging, and document and image sharing. It also improves it by making it real-time. You don’t’ have to see the “John is typing” message and wait for the IM sender to hit the send button, you see what he is typing as he types it. When recipients respond to Wave messages, everyone on the thread sees the replies as they are being typed.

Wave can let you post an e-mail you received to a blog (using an extension creatively called “bloggie”). If the author of the e-mail fixes a link or does some other edit to the original e-mail, or someone cc’d on the email adds a comment, the blog is automatically changed at the same time. If someone leaves a comment on the blog, it is added to the e-mail, even in the original senders “outbox.” It no longer matters whether the communication is a blog, email, tweet, IM, chat, or whatever, the content is what matters and is preserved.

There's a great extension called "spellie" (creative, aren't they?) which is a natural language spell-checker. If you type an IM saying "where r u, we bean waiting, but had to order. Their bringing been dip now," spellie will fix it to read "Where are you, we've been waiting, but had to order. They're bringing bean dip now." That's right, it knows bean from been and their from they're.

If someone is in a forum and finds an answer somewhere else to a forum post, they can copy and paste from wherever they found it. When that original source is later updated, so is the answer on the forum. Everything stays in synch.

It opens news ways to aggregate – you can automatically gather tweets on a subject into a wave (they called it a twave). Google wants developers to think of Wave as a possible enhancement to an existing workflow within an enterprise. The example used was a bug tracker used by software developers to identify and assign bugs. Bugs could be organized in waves; participants post the new bug to a global wave, then the team leader can assign bug tasks to individual team members within the wave, and developers can comment on their proposed task solution or fix for a particular bug as they are tackled and cleared, all within the same thread.

The demo was captured live and is online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ. It's a long one, so here's a few timestamps for some key points:

20:42 - link to content in a blog, or pull blog content into something else (forum, wiki, e-mail, webpage...)
36:30 - More than one person can edit the same "document" at the same time, with each seeing each others typing real-time.
1:02:30 - Link e-mail, blog, wiki page, or whatever, to an answer in a v-bulletin forum, and have the forum automatically updated whenever the linked item is updated or commented on (example given bug tracker)
1:13:30 - Rosie, an extension which translates instantaneously as you type to/from over 30 languages


I’ve also included below some comments found on blogs:

Technologizer:
[Wave takes] what e-mail should be and melds it with IM, allows for real-time document sharing, provides instant photo sharing, revolutionizes spell checking, provides on-the-fly translation, and allows developers to either build on top of the service or replace it with their own underpinnings, among other things.

Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu:
The part about Wave that excites us at Zoho is the interoperability it can bring to collaborative applications. While data formats are open and you can export/import out of Google or Zoho apps, from a real time collaboration perspective, these are still somewhat islands. Wave is an ambitious attempt to standardize the underlying real time protocol & rich document collaboration. If this attempt at standardization succeeds (a big if, I agree), it opens to way for a whole new set of applications.

Joel Dehlin (LDS-CIO) –
Wow!