Ryan MacMillan

Podcat  [pod-kat]
- noun.
Slang. Person who creates, or provides vocal soundtracks for, podcasts that influence popular youth culture.

Our latest article for Contagious magazine has seen us dip our KUDOS toes into the world of publishing.

The Other Side, a new, free monthly magazine aimed at London’s Northern Line underground commuters, has built an accompanying online community on social network, Webjam. Our Contagious article uses the KUDOS planning framework to see how the activity is measuring up so far.

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Oh, the agony of having vast amounts of content that every blogger on Earth wants to link to, quote, reference and purloin. The Associated Press (AP) is in a bit of a bind because, well, because it has a little too much social capital for its own liking.

The news service whose daily story output could represent the very embodiment of KUDOS would like all of you bloggers out there to, well, to back off. Which I guess, if they succeed, means that bloggers would be left chewing only on KUD. Perhaps the AP is pursuing, like American schoolchildren heeding Bert the Turtle’s advice for coping with an atomic attack, a DUK-and-cover strategy.

Anyway, the Associated Press makes a humble living selling news and feature stories to thousands of media organizations worldwide. Its influence can’t be understated. It’s the leading newswire in the U.S. by a long shot, but it’s also a serious competitor to Reuters, Dow Jones and Agence France-Presse (AFP) in the rest of the world.

Yes, life has been good to the AP. Then along came the blogosphere, whose rank and file started to copy and paste bits of AP stories into their posts.

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For the latest entry into the Department of Neologisms, I have decided to buck the trend - nay, the universal lockstep - of referring to the conjugation of Google and Yahoo! as ‘Yahoogle’. From now on, this blog (well, possibly only me) will speak only of Googahoo! There are many reasons behind this:

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Like Ben, I’ve been looking into some of the new travel planning and travel 2.0 sites cropping up, and I came across a cool new app called Whrrl, which has just received $15 million in funding which will go to expanding the service and bringing it abroad (it’s only available in certain US cities for now).

It’s a simple Google map mashup that shows icons of local spots (restaurants, bars, the like) where your friends have been. It averages their ratings of the places and puts an icon over it — one for positive ratings, one for negative, one for split opinions, one for “blah” and one for places that your friends have been to but haven’t rated. It’s available online and as a mobile app for Blackberries (which they promise is coming soon to other phones, including the now GPS-enabled iPhone), or as SMS for everyone else.

I’ve downloaded it to my Blackberry and am taking it for a test run, but no one I know is signed up yet (though I can toggle a setting on and off to view other members’ ratings), so feel free to add me as a friend if you want to give it a whirl (I couldn’t resist it!). So far, I like the concept a lot — there’s a ton of travel planning sites out there, but there’s not that many that put the spontaneity of travel back into the mix. I might clutch my itenirary for a day of tourism, but I like to wander when it comes to restaurants and bars. I’d love to know where my friends, not the whole world, have been and what they thought without having to read through a thousand reviews, look up an address, and try and find my way there.

Your thoughts?