Web 2.D’0h! Roundup: Message Boards, Razume & Drew Carey, cont’d

The latest sweepings from the factory floor of Web 2.0. . .

The Roamin’ Forum

Not long ago I wrote about Twing, a search engine that plumbs message boards for what’s known as “deep content”–the stuff Brother Google and his ilk often miss or dismiss. Twing is a great way to find content you won’t find elsewhere. Some is valuable, some. . .not so much.

Which brings me to an excellent item this week on the Mashable blog, which surveys a group of message boards 2.0. My favorite of the bunch: Lefora, a hosted plug-and-play forum you can attach to just about any site to which you’d like to add talk-among-yourselves functionality. [I've kicked the tires on this one on behalf a client, but haven't implemented it anywhere yet.]

There’s a simplicity to Lefora that I like. Many of the 2.0 message boards tack on features designed to make the board the center of a social community–live chat, blogs, etc. I’m skeptical that’s possible or wise. Still, most of the newcomers are a major upgrade in usability compared to the old-school forums we all knew in our callow youth.

Crowdsource Your Resume?

Speaking of callow youth, a D.C.-based incubator/very-early-stage funder of promising startups called Lauchbox Digital recently previewed an upcoming demo of nine companies in its portfolio. Of the bunch, my favorite is Razume, a service that essentially lets you use the wisdom-of-the-crowds to burnish your resume.

Here’s a snap of my comment on one of the resumes posted on the beta site:

Sure, I’m being tough on the kid, but I’m just trying to help. . . Speaking of professional, though, the site is a model of excellent usability. Should all startups come out of the gate so easy-on-the-brain and friction-free.

Are you sure there are no dumb questions?

I always get a kick out of seeing what keyword searches lead people to this blog. A recent one was “what dorm did drew carey live in at kent sState?”

Alas, the blog entry Brother Google sent the searcher to–the preposterously popular “Al Gore vs. Drew Carey: Another Nail-Biter”–doesn’t answer that question. The entry compares Al Gore’s Current TV left-leaning web video operation to comedian Drew Carey’s libertarian-cranky ReasonTV. [Gore wins by a nose.] Along the way, I confess to having been Drew Carey’s dormmate at Kent State.

But I try to answer all questions on this blog. So, for posterity: Leebrick Hall, 3rd floor.

And finally, our regular sighting of the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse ™:

BigThink, a site that presents brand-name thumbsuckers responding in four-minute videos to the kind of Big Questions that briefly entertain college freshman [at least on the 3rd floor of Leebrick Hall]. What is your personal philosophy? Is the American justice system fair?

Is there a more vivid illustration of medium-message mismatch anywhere online? Pull an all-nighter with a six-pack of Pabst and discuss.

The 2.D’oh! Weekly Round-Up: Vol. II

As we head into another weekend, let’s take a look at some of the more curious, conniving and craven developments in 2.0ville we’ve seen over the past week.

Sign Here–or Not

Now that online job listings have stolen nearly all the business from newspapers, they need to steal business from each other. This may explain why Monster.com has launched JOBsign, a masterfully twisted viral goof that invites people to answer a series of odd questions that ultimately cast them as one of eight well-known work types: The Low-Flier, the Bossling, the Cockroach, etc. [This will date me terribly, but the graphics and sound recall an ancient CD-ROM (remember when we called them that?) titled Freak Show. Or Myst, maybe.] Oddly, there is no category for Unfocussed Time-Wasting Cube Dweller, which may be the most fitting tag for folks who e-mail this to their friends.

Unsettling Media Trend of the Week

Women 45-54 will watch a total of 1,142 hours of TV, DVDs and movies in the theater in 2007, according to the Center for Media Research. Do the math, and that’s over a month and a half of 24/7 viewing. Women in that age group are the highest consumers of such media. Their teenage daughters will watch about only about a month of TV, DVDs and in-theater movies, the report states.

Newser Than What?

As part of a Wayback-Machine countershift to human-powered content-filtering (see also the dirty-hands search engine Mahalo), a site called Newser presents the events of the day as filtered by those with opposable thumbs. It hopes to become the first “real” news site native to the Web–news without newspapers (or broadcasters). The news seems to pass through some sort of algorithmic colander, after which humans pluck and digest selected reports into text blocks the size of playing cards. Click for a longer summary or the article itself; keep clicking to get related stories. At this early point the news picks seemed odd: Everywhere I clicked I felt like I was seeing that damn story about the French President visiting New Hampshire. (You call it news, I call it August filler.) Some of the headlines were so mundane they almost read like Onion satire:  Foreign cars outsell American models. Negin to Feds: Cut Red Tape. Bush Aide Stonewalls Senators. Truth told, the automated news feed from AP riding the right rail was far more interesting, with good follow-up reports on the Minneapolis bridge disaster. And I swear I am not making this up: As I was viewing the site it featured an article titled ”Newspaper Editor Assassinated.” 

Running 2.0

RunnerPlus is a great example of a social network that has nothing to do with teens, geeks, predatory shagmongers or venture capitalists. It’s handsome and clean and lets runners post their training logs, shout encouragement, form clusters and so on. The crowd is international and at this point does not seem infected by product pimps. Coolest bit of tech: the runners’ logs. Click on the slider at the bottom for some pointlessly cool but understated animation.  

And finally, our weekly Noted Without Comment feature

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