While many write about social aggregators like FriendFeed and Profilactic, I come to promote Secondbrain. I think my reasons, aside the subjective note, will prove that Secondbrain is the new “it”:

• the name of the service doesn’t remind me of medicine (from Profilactic to prophylactic, which means medication or a treatment designed and used to prevent a disease, the plunge is not too deep) but it does make me thing of brain surgery or at least of brain transplant…
• the design of the site is refined, discoverable and elegant (unlike FriendFeed which features the ugliest Web 2.0 logo imaginable and some squeaky ducks as main graphics that all made me wonder about the users’ age range… but what else would you expect from ex-Google employees?)
• the vision to become the Web’s largest user generated content library makes Secondbrain the most ambitious social media aggregator and somehow… greatness is made of bold dreams. Secondbrain is on the right path.
• compared to FriendFeed and Profilactic, Secondbrain still has a few more baby steps to take to become at least popular. The Macbook Air and xbox 360 giveaway is a nice touch: it motivates subscribers to become active users, to contribute to Secondbrain’s dream of becoming Web’s largest content library. In a few words Secondbrain is about “people and knowledge growing together.” But unlike FriendFeed and Profilactic that counted on users to improve their service without giving much in return, Secondbrain has the courtesy to reward and motivate social contributions with prizes of genuine value. I’d like to add this too at the reasons why I like Secondbrain and I will not stop…
• only a few days ago Yvonne Russell started a very interesting conversation at the Writer’s Café featuring Secondbrain. Her excellent review received positive comments not only from her usual readers, but also from Secondbrain founder Lars. When startups’ founders take the time to provide feedback where needed, it’s always a good sign. Will Lars keep up this good habit in the future, when Secondbrain becomes at least as popular as FriendFeed? Time will tell. For now his actions show a rare feature trait: respect for the web users. Good move! After all, without these users no lifestreaming service would ever have a chance to grow and survive competition.
• last but not least, I always admire companies able to listen to their customers. In Secondbrain’s case the customers (users) are also the “employees” as their contribution is vital in Secondbrain’s growth. A recent blog entry on the SB blog denotes respect for the SB members as well: they are encouraged to provide feedback that will help Secondbrain aggregate new services that are truly valuable for the users.

Secondbrain already aggregates content from del.icio.us, digg, StumbleUpon, twitter, fave, blogger, Metaweblog, WordPress, Google Docs, MindMeister, Slideshare, Zoho, Flickr, Revver, Picasa and YouTube. This is nothing compared to 180 services supported by Profilactic, but it is a lot to start with. In fact, these are the most important and most popular services right now and for many users they are more than enough. Somehow services like Secondbrain make the less savvy web users fear adopting them – even on Yvonne’s blog we see that although they sign up the users let their accounts “sleep” because they find SB too difficult to use. Secondbrain has a very clear tutorial for beginners on site, but maybe the link to it should be placed in a more visible location instead of the website’s footer.

The Time to Become a Secondbrainer Is Now

Social aggregation is not just a trend; it is part of a clear evolution towards the semantic web which is another definition for Web 3.0.

Social networks and social bookmarking sites were just the modest beginnings.

The early adopters of these movements are still harvesting the profits. In an article by top stumbler Brian Reeder we find out how he became a “top stumbler”:

If you think becoming a Top Stumbler isn’t possible, you’re wrong. I signed up on StumbleUpon in October 2007 and by December I was one of the top 50 stumblers in the world. I try to find 30 to 50 new websites a day – I look for good content that hasn’t been discovered yet.

For a StumbleUpon user it is pretty clear what “top stumbler” means: more traffic to his StumbleUpon blog, hence more traffic to his bookmarks.

Becoming a “top user” in any social community has the same effect. Becoming a top user of social aggregation service can have even more ramifications: traffic yes, but popularity and authority will skyrocket. These “social skills” are a must in the modern employment scenery – many employers look for candidates at FaceBook, digg, propeller and so on.

Becoming a top Secondbrainer now will give you more than the advantage of being popular and boosting traffic to your bookmarks, it will also make you eligible to win a Macbook Air or other prizes.

The win in the long term may prove more valuable, as social aggregators compile all your web content in one place making sharing faster and easier.

On my Secondbrain page you’ll see real time updates of my activity, you’ll be watching me step by step, live. All these updates will also appear on the Secondbrain main page under “recent updates.” Thousands of visitors access this page in a day, and this is just the beginning. As the community grows so do the chances for these feature entries to reach to a larger audience.

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Warning: links in this article lead to pages with explicit sexual content.

In an article at World Net Daily posted only two days ago you can read some shocking news: FBI investigates the Wikimedia foundation as a result of reports about the presence of questionable material (with serious, explicit sexual content) present on Wikipedia. The list, according to WND, includes:

• Recordings of women experiencing orgasms
• Videos of nude men participating in “ejaculation educational demonstrations”
• Detailed photographs of men and women masturbating
• Images of mammary intercourse
• Close-up images of topless women and male and female sexual anatomy
• Large-scale photos of men performing oral sex on one another (and performing oral sex on themselves)
• An illustrated list of sex positions
• Threesomes
• Photos of nude strippers
• and a photo of a nude girl (possibly aged 10) “in a provocative pose. Her chest is completely exposed and a small crack is placed over her vagina.“

The last item on the list is still present on Wikipedia as I write these lines. Apparently the Wikipedia editors who included such content on the site consider the image “educational.”

Virgin Killer is the fourth studio album by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. It was released in 1976, and was the first album of the band to attract attention outside Europe. The album’s original cover portrayed a naked prepubescent girl with cracked glass covering her genitals. The band explained the cover as having something to do with “a little girl who doesn’t know about the bad things in life” and “time being a virgin killer”. It generated significant controversy, and in response the band released a second album cover consisting of a group shot.

The image is seriously disturbing, especially for all rational parents in this world who have children that age. What is more disturbing is that the image was nominated for deletion on 2007 November 27 and the result of the discussion was keep.

It took FBI a while to finally come up to the idea to investigate the reports. Personally I’ve never searched for pornographic content on Wikipedia, but for the sake of this article today I proofed my sources and as I write, I am still in deep shock. Just take a look at the image on this Wikipedia page.

Now let’s make things clear: many children and teenagers use Wikipedia as reference for their school projects. Can we still regard Wikipedia as a serious educational resource for our children when we find such content in its pages?

Jay Walsh, head of communications at Wikimedia, comes up with an even more disturbing explanation:

We don’t censor any of the content. There are a number of images that people might be alarmed by. … You could open up a classic Britannica or World Book Encyclopedia, and you’d find entries on sex and sexual topics, perhaps not as deep or prolific as you might find on Wikipedia, but that’s kind of a reality of the 21st century. - source of the quote WND

Where do we draw the line between sexual education and hardcore?

Mr. Walsh is obviously aware of the fact that Wikipedia displays images with more than “explicit” sexual content. Such images are illegal for people under 18 in many countries, not only in the US.

Personally I don’t give a damn on what is legal in the US. The truth is that some of the images on Wikipedia are illegal all over the world and Wikipedia belongs to the world. Come on, Wikimedia and Mr. Walsh: this is the Internet. Show some respect!

There are no warnings such as “content not suitable under 18″ on any of the pages about hardcore pornography at Wikipedia. Besides, how can any one in the right mind compare Britannica, which is authored by respected scientists, with Wikipedia where any porn advocate can publish his trash freely?

If Wikipedia wants to keep the porn pages and images, fine. So be it. But what about password protecting such entries? What about letting this content available solely for the registered editors of the Wikipedia to tame their thirst of pornographic knowledge?

Wikipedia has a “porn star award” for “outstanding contributions to pornography articles on Wikipedia” if you can believe this.

Where are the awards for outstanding contributions to history articles, culture and such? Obviously education, when it is not pornography, comes in second at the Wikipedia.

Safeguard your dream, Mr. Wales!

Think about it: Jimmy Wales is a visionary, a man who spends his time helping children of the third world prepare for a better future. I am sure he is somehow aware of the content of Wikipedia, but I wonder if he is aware o the “deep” and the “prolific.”

Mr. Wales, when the people you hire to keep an eye on your dream talk without thinking, you should probably hire someone who can - of course, unless your dream was to create the world’s most respected pornographic resource.

Should we add wikipedia.org at the list of banned domains in our child-protection software? Wouldn’t that deprive the children of all the other great content at Wikipedia?

Why do we need FBI when things could be solved so easily: Wikipedia should never allow pornographic content. We have enough pornographic sites on the Web (somehow they all manage to display a “warning: sexual content” on their pages). Why do we need to worry about Wikipedia too?

We should carefully monitor what our children are doing online, the porn advocates will argue. All right! How many of you, mothers and fathers, were aware that Wikipedia is in the red light district?

Update: an article at Mashable points out that Wikimedia recently hired Erik Moeller, a pedophilia advocate. This is getting scarier and scarier as we dig deeper!

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I just got off my instant messenger with Khris Loux, CEO of JS-Kit. We chatted about this post and in essence a new way of providing a transparency to beneath his startup. JS-Kit just announced via TechCrunch, a widget that essentially traverses the Web - with its users - carrying a degree of credibility and potential unheard of before. Advisor, as it is called, is truly the next generation in Web carry on luggage.

Over the last several months Khris, his team and to a lesser extent Pamil Visions PR have evangelized Khris’ vision of partnership and collaboration. Khris and his development team are providing people with seemingly small innovations (widgets in some cases) with tremendous potential and reach. I like to call these types of innovations “3 Deep Objects” or objects that carry far richer data than what we have experienced in the past.

Developing Relationships

With deals like the Experian partnership and the ensuing JD Power one JS-Kit is embarking on ventures that can and probably will alter the face of the Web. Bringing physical world (or traditional) companies into interaction with digital tools and companies is at the leading edge of what true Web value is all about. The things that do not connect th two realms will be simply categorized as entertainment rather than real Web applications.

It is interesting that the simplest tools might provide the framework for connectivity such as this. But then, visions like that of Khris Loux are often the catalyst for much farther reaching innovation. I am sure because of my inside view into many of these dealings, that we will soon see theses ideas applied atop what will be Web 3.0. The advent of a more semantic Web and super refined content/data is virtually at hand – the good news is people are finally seeing these possibilities, as illustrated in some of Khris’ partnerships of late. Solid relationships between Khris, his vast network , credible and progressive companies and for our part everyone on his team are all aimed at one target – next generation engagement.

Inside A Vision

Beneath the outward Web expression of the website, deals and developments are forged every day. I was never privy to these goings on as a writer for several Web 2.0 blogs except as an interloper via my testing a reviews of many startups. Working with many of them since crossing over into PR and consulting, we have become acutely aware that Web 2.0 was and is in fact what many of us predicted it would be all along – a vast and dynamic web of collaborative efforts at expansion and improvement. However, even I could not have predicted that smaller companies like JS-Kit might begin to lead the way in these efforts.

Over the past few months we have approached dozens of startups, blogs, websites and more significantly traditional businesses in an effort to foster not only Khris Loux’s vision, but that of numerous CEO’s and developers who we believed shared the same vision. The galvanizing stimulus for this “dispersion” however, has been JS-Kit’s efforts in partnering with Experian, JD Power and many other more traditional expertises. The Experian widget is the culmination of one stage of Loux’s plans for versions of this “3 Deep” tool, but it was not exactly an easy sell. It is difficult to express how a simple widget can convey user data, Experian credibility and an extremely viral branding element.

Never Concluding

It is not possible to disclose more about JS-Kit’s evangelism efforts other than to say the TC story is fairly the tip of the iceberg. JS-Kit’s widgets will soon be utilized by over 20 million unique users via the announced and unannounced partnerships. The entirety of these great collaborative and business partnerships reaches far afield from this however. The people we approached in the online aspect of this evangelism so far would make a decent “who’s who” of Web 2.0. As for the traditional corporate aspect, the same holds true.

In the end, it is apparent at this point that Khris’ widgets will soon be integrated in not only blogs but search, video, social media, bookmarking, directories, social communities and a host of other online applications. The most exciting aspect of all this besides being associated with great people is that there is literally no end in sight. One vision, some simple but effective tools and a lot of cooperation equals Web 3.0 – Bravo TechCrunch for carrying the story and especially to Khris and his team – of which we are proud to be a member.

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