Want to get around the firewall at work? Need your fantasy baseball or football fix but are blocked out. PEERmadness will get you there and do it all anonymously so your IT guy won’t know. Get to MySpace and Facebook too.

From the site:

The PEERmadness network is proprietary, unpublished and not open to any
third parties. The communication across the network cannot be monitored
using traditional methods. PEERmadness users are even safe from their
ISPs blocking their traffic based on corporate whims. The goal of the
PEERmadness team and the PEERmadness application is to bring the power
of the internet back to the consumer. By providing a protected
“internet within the internet”, PEERmadness can block all unwanted
content to the inner network.

Watch the video on how to set it up and how it works:

Technorati Tags: peermadness, p2p

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Heck, in my world, people are still using the word “hits” on occassion. Scary.

MySpace really opened up the world of “put content anywhere” in the form of widgets. So now, if you have content, you can place it virtually anywhere, in small blocks for people to look at, and in some cases actually interact with. With that in mind, anything on your current website should, in some form, be portable. Tag everything, upload pictures to flickr and picassa, videos should be distributed everywhere (revver, google, youtube, etc). Content that you update frequently, should also go into a blog and be tagged appropriately. Create your own widgets and get them out on your MySpace pages, get content into Facebook. These sites are big and powerful, so use them.

Rich media banner advertising hasn’t even touched the surface of its newfound (and probably live-saving) ability to create mini versions of your own website. The ability to create “touches” with your content, whether it be for informative purposes or advertising is powerful. Placing them in widgets and interactive banners lets you get your information out where the people are without interrupting them too much.

In 2007, let’s start counting touches, they are going to be a very powerful thing.

Technorati : pageviews, touches

If you aren’t willing to figure out a way to get your content and services on different devices (make it portable), someone else is going to do it for you. Take Slingbox for example. They are in the business of delivering all of your tv channels (and other content) directly to your mobile device (pretty much in real-time). Hanging out at your kids’ swim meet? Fire up ESPN and pass the time away. Browsers are getting more robust on most smartphones, delivering flash, video, audio and java experiences that rival what computer browsers a few versions ago could handle. And they are doing it at speeds that are not half-bad. Heck, you can take your Motorola Q and listen to XM or Sirius Satellite radio.

Pretty slick, and as the wireless carriers continue to beef up their highspeed offerings (EDGE, EVDO, etc), the consumer is going to win.

Who else is becoming a portability site?

Technorati : mobile20, portability+sites, portals, slingbox

Sounds like a recipe for a new Google Labs offering that will eventually compete (no pun intended) directly with the other metric firms out there. Talk about a powerhouse of data. While others are busy creating panels, search bars and paying for data from ISPs, Google is obstensively getting it for free.

Add in video usage data from Google Video, pageview and social interaction behavior from the all-of-a-sudden quickly growing Orkut, and the quiver-full of other fascinating properties that Google is gobbling up and you have the makings of a very powerful metrics source for determining how different web properties are performing.

The question is: will it be a more accurate and definitive picture than the other web data offerings or will it have its own apples to apples quirks?

Technorati : alexa, compete, comscore, google, hitwise

With all of the acquisitions lately (Writely, YouTube, and Jotspot), is it safe to assume that we can now say:

“I am going to the store to google some eggs”?

Technorati : google, jotspot

Mybloglog.com has been getting quite a bit of attention, particularly by several noted A-list bloggers (AVC, Read/Write, Techcrunch, Calacanis, and others). With all of that exposure, membership has rising (most likely fairly dramatically).

The concept is terrific. I’ve had it up on my blog since the beginning. I like to see who is looking at my blog, who is commenting (whenever that starts), and the service gives me a chance to explore other blogs, mostly by people that I ultimately find interesting to read. Most of this is free. The freemium model at its finest. I can also see limited stats about where people came from, what they clicked on, and what outgoing links they looked at. Unfortunately, after the trial period, you have to pony up $3 to see real-time stats, otherwise, you are relegated to looking at yesterday’s results. Which is strange, since there are countless other free services that can provide you the same statistics in real-time. It would be nice if they sought an alternate strategy to make money and gave me back the real-time stats

With the influx of new signups from all this exposure, comes the inevitable (and there was some of it before this coverage hit): spam. That’s right, spammers will start rolling in, joining communities, posting comments, trying to add in links to profiles, making a mess of the whole thing. How mybloglog.com responds will be interesting to follow.

The growing pains are about to begin. Figuring out where to place advertising (I do not think this freemium model is going to hold water) will be a challenge. More importantly, however, is how to integrate value-added advertising, which I think can happen. I would consider allowing a small advert to be a part of the mybloglog widget on my blog in exchange for getting the real-time stats back.

Oh the irony: just received an email from mybloglog.com letting me know that they’ve automatically added me to a community. They claim:

Part of what makes MyBlogLog so special is our ability to automatically add you to communities in which you have shown a repeated interest.

Funny, I never recall visiting the site, nor that community that they just added me to. That is like Netflix adding movies to the top of my queue based on other movies that I watched or looked at, thinking I liked it. Looks like the spam has already started. The community I was just automatically added to is called “quick online tips”. Great, thank you and no thanks. I also do not see anywhere in the preferences how I can “unsubscribe” from this auto-community-joining feature.

UPDATE: Thank you Eric and Rafer for looking into the above. I have serious egg on my face, as I did in fact visit the site above during my travels around the net. I thoroughly enjoy the service and am happy that they took my claim (even though it turned out that I am an idiot here) seriously and followed up. Thanks guys.

Technorati : blogs, mybloglog, mybloglog.com

Craigslist has positioned itself as “the” go-to place for online classified ads. There’s a Craigslist for nearly just about every metropolitan area, and state-wide ones for places that are a little more rural (maine.craigslist.org for example).

So the real question is, and there is plenty of evidence of it already (just browse around a little): Is Craigslist a viable place for an online advertising strategy to take place. It should be in the mix, there isn’t much to stop you from doing it… you can list anything under services, you can selectively place advertising of products into the classified sections where they are appropriate.

The benefits:

1. Lots of eyeballs - depending on your target audience (especially if they are net-natives) it could be a gold-mine.

2. SEO placement - Google simply loves Craigslist, and why not, in terms of traffic, they are right up there with the best of them.

3. Easy to post. Sure you cannot auto-bot post stuff, but if you really take the time to craft a thoughtful message advertising a service, job opening or product, you can seemingly reap some serious benefits.

I am not suggesting that you spam Craigslist, you will inevitably be caught. But selective use of their services under the guidance of their well-thought out TOU, could prove to be fruitful and should be considered as part of your online advertising mix.

Technorati : advertising, craigslist, online+advertising

The copyright stuff that Cuban and others have been mockingly using to call YouTube a walking lawsuit ready to happen is blown out of proportion. Sure, the site is chock full of infringing stuff, but so is the rest of the internet. Google will clean it up and get it to an acceptable level that everyone will be satisfied with. I have a hard time believing that a company like Google that has been through stuff like this before (Google Books anyone) didn’t analyze every possible scenario imaginable associated with the risk that YouTube’s treasure trove of copyrighted material presents.

Also, everything that is on the site prior to Google’s takeover isn’t really their problem either, that should all be on the previous owners. As long as Google makes a strong effort to thwart it in the future (not an easy task in this consumer generated haven we now live in)– and clean up what is there now (not an easy task), all should be well.

The idea is that now our favorite place to find video of everything and anything, is in the hands of a company that can deal with the underlying infrastructure and continue to integrate it with the rest of their tools that more and more people are finding useful everyday.

Lets be happy that it happened, commend Google for making such a bold move, and move on. The more interesting story here is how Google will integrate YouTube, how they will monetize it (or not) and what it means for broader distribution and inflitration of online video to the masses. GoogleTV may really not be that far behind. All delivered via the internet. Cable and satellite be damned.

Let’s also not talk about Facebook anymore either. They will end up where they end up.

Technorati : facebook, google, myspace, youtube

First Yahoo brought it to the masses (millions) when they released the new version of Yahoo mail with a built in RSS reader. People do not need to know what it is, just how to use it.

Google upped the ante for browser-based readers with its revamped Google Reader.

Now Microsoft is pushing out IE7 with an integrated, albeit harder to understand, RSS reader built right in.

(look for the little orange button… look for it… got it? good.)

What does the proliferation of the little orange button mean? Hard to say at this point. It certainly has changed the way I consume online content– allowing me to digest 10x more in a given day. In a world of Tivos and 5-minute-brownies-in-2 minutes, it might just be the next new thing.

So now, the web 2.0 world looks to Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google to educate the masses about the power of the little orange button.

I agree with Steve, the day of the little orange button is here. So now they have it, but will they get it?

Technorati : google, ie7, internet+explorer, microsoft, rss, yahoo, yahoo+mail

Take a useful service and layer social networking into it. Connect the people who are already connected by a service, but only as users of the service.

Can Delicious turn itself into a mashup of LinkedIn, MySpace, with the Delicious tagging engine driving it all. Delicious already has plenty of useful content in its folds. Not much escapes its bookmarking functionality. Videos, mp3’s, websites, files, the list goes on.

And they’ve begun to gel it all together in a way that makes sense. Added plenty of useful tools to redisplay data and other tools to begin allowing members to build networks of peers.

The next step in social networking is not hundreds of copycat sites (the ones that pop up every day) that provide MySpace functionality, but those sites that already have very useful content (netflix, delicious, IMDb, etc) that layer in useful social network tools to better help people connect and learn.

It is nice to see that one of my favorites, delicious, is apparently heading this way.

I look forward to seeing the birth of delicious 2.0.

Technorati : LinkedIn, delicious, imdb, myspace, netflix, youtube