Sol Young » Utterz

Seeded 2025 for Broad Street 10-miler, Sunday May 3rd

Sol Young — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:27:07 +0000

Last year I ran Broad Street with 25,000 other runners and live blogged it (actually, live Twittered and Utterlied). It was a blast. I’m thinking about something similar this year, but probably a modification based on an iPhone app… More on that later this week.

Something cool happened this year that didn’t in the past. The organizers of the race appear to have implemented an automatic seeding algorithm for runners who have raced before. I got seeded 2025, which I’m proud of, but am in no shape to live up to.

We’ll see how this shapes up. My first run after about nine months off was a couple weeks ago. I’m hoping for a 7:30 pace. Runs last week ranged between 7:00 and 8:00 during 4 to 5 mile runs.

This is gonna hurt.

No unfollow on utterli?

Sol Young — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:22:41 +0000

One of the few competitors to Twitter that had some traction, utterli (originally named Utterz), has a nasty weak point. You can’t easily stop following another user.

Typically one can Unfollow, a lá Twitter, directly from the user’s page as well as one’s list. On utterli, not so much.

Utterli make it very easy to follow others, as well as easy to follow anyone following you via a single ‘follow all’ action. This is a great feature.

It becomes a problem as spammers join in. This AM I needed to remove an MLM huckster. It wasn’t possible from the user’s profile page, from his update page, etc. Only from my following page, and I’m following a few hundred people.

It’s a note of success that they’d need this blocking.

Scoble and Gary in DC

Sol Young — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:48:28 +0000

MCCXXIII

Last night I headed down to MCCXXIII, a club at 1223 NW. Connecticut, for a DC Social Media meetup. The meetup featured Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) and Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) as guests.

I’ve been following Scoble more than usual this week, as he’s come to DC to interview politicians and government officials with Rocky (@RocmanUSA) and his son Patrick (@pscoble). It’s been a merging of the blogging tech world and the US government (finally!).

The club was jammed, no room to move, great vibe and so packed the A/C was ineffective. It was awesome to see the turnout and feel the energy towards geeks making inroads to Washington.

Scoble described the experience in a single word, “Incredible.” We talked for a while on East Coast vs. West Coast interviews and the whole crew agreed that it’s been a refreshing experience. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the Silicon Valley CEOs are embellishing the value of their company. Here, it was described, instead of an executive power (pun intended), the power is more pure and the answers more honest.

When Robert described the difference in honesty I did a double-take. Seriously? Whoa. He described a few of the interviews, talking about some of his favorite moments and personal opinions. I’ll let you catch those in the coming days at Scobleizer.com and in video on FastCompany.tv.

A highlight he kept coming back to: His son nailed down the FCC chairman on the topic of porn (it wasn’t on video – wish it was). Robert’s eyes beamed with pride as he described his son having the guts to ask the questions.

Overall, a good meetup and cool to have Scoble out here for a few days, doing something different and interesting.

Existing posts on Scoble’s visit to Washington:

How is technology changing the world of Washington D.C.? (6/24/08)
Visit NYC & Washington D.C. with us (6/21/08)

UPDATE: Here’s the link for Gary’s book tour ’08: http://tv.winelibrary.com/gary-vs-book-tour-2008/

Gary Vaynerchuk is continuing his book tour, visiting the Rockville, MD, Barnes & Noble for a signing this morning at 9:00AM.

Micro-blogging a 10-mile run – Broad Street Philadelphia, 2008 – Utterz

Sol Young — Mon, 05 May 2008 02:42:40 +0000

I ran Philadelphia’s Broad Street run, a 10-mile race today, while carrying an iPhone, making calls, checking Twitter, and taking and posting pics. I chronicled the day with Twitter, Utterz, Flickr, and TwitPic. I used Snapture, iFlickr, and SendPics iPhone apps.

Quick Links to the streams:

My plan was to Twitter my progress and TwitPic/Flickr the pics out to my followers. But I woke up at 3am from a caffeine rush and a thought of typing for an hour becoming a nightmare – and boring. Utterz.com, a service doing pretty slick mashups of audio/video/text/photographs/etc, while harnessing APIs from pretty much every popular social networking service, caught my eye (more on Utterz later).

Here’s the day – check the Flickr photostream and the Utterz links below for my audio commentary while I running…

About Utterz: You start an utter by calling or emailing. Either one initiates it. After that, you have 10 minutes to add more content to the utter. Utterz automatically adds audio from a call or content from an emailed pic/video/audio/text to create an utter similar to what I created above. The call-in feature (dial, press 2, talk, hang up) is extremely simple.

Now, none of the above would be impressive except that Utterz.com is doing it right. This is how services today are supposed to work. Utterz is tied in to all the social networking and blogging services. Any new utter is announced on Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, or even your WordPress/Blogger/MoveableType/etc blog (hosted or self-hosted – COOL!)