The Boxxet Blog » Press

WebWare 100 Finalist

You Mon Tsang — Wed, 23 May 2007 22:09:19 +0000

w00t! Looks like Boxxet is a finalist for the WebWare 100. We are psyched to be in good company.

I’ve been a big fan of Rafe Needleman for a long time and his work as Editor of WebWare has made that site an important source for web apps news.

Boxxet Gets A Web 2.0 Award !

youmon — Fri, 11 May 2007 07:46:24 +0000

It is always terrific to be recognized for your work, so when SEOMOZ announced their Web 2.0 Awards, it put a little bounce in our step.

Against tough competition, we took second (I especially like the five stars for usability). While you’re at the site, go ahead and check out SEOMOZ if you are at all interested in search engines and SEO (it is a daily read for me).

Coverage of Boxxet from our January Launch

youmon — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 05:54:39 +0000

A long-overview wrapup of some coverage we got in January when we did a public launch of Boxxet.

For most part, we got extensive and thoughtful coverage, even though the traffic brought to Boxxet was surprisingly weak compared to traffic we get from general pop culture news. See my post “Jennifer Aniston vs Web 2.0“

From VentureBeat, where Matt Marshall is doing some great Valley coverage, “Boxxet offers sites on popular topics”.

From ZDNet’s Dan Farber, who I really admire and run into a lot at various industry parties, “Boxxet boxes up popular topics”.

From Webware’s Rafe Needleman, whose career I have long followed, “Boxxet packages the Web for you”. Interesting thing about Webware. The web site didn’t drive a ton of traffic to us, but when the same story appeared later in the week in their newsletter, the volume was pretty darn good. Yeah to email newsletters!

From the super-thoughtful all-around good guy Dylan Tweney, “Boxxet: Channel your enthusiasm”.

From Mashable, which I like a lot but I think Peter misunderstood us in this post, “Boxxet Launches – Will You Contribute for Free?”

From GigaOM, where I am becoming a fan of Web Worker Daily, “Boxxet Launches Automated Portals”.

From The Deal Blogs, which has a negative writeup, “The problem with Boxxet and other topic aggregators”. They are entitled to their opinion, but there is no byline to this off-the-mark driveby analysis. I’ve gone back a few times to check in on them and generally find that they have both snap positive and negative opinions. Caveat emptor.

From Search Engine Land, a must-read for anyone interested in search, “Boxxet Offers ‘Best Of’ Collections On Popular Topics”/

ack/nak by bob. All new software services: get bob into your beta!

You Mon Tsang — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 13:54:56 +0000

Bob Corrigan writes an insightful blog post on Boxxet. That’s cool. Especially because it is clear that he spent time understanding and thinking about product (rather than a drive-by review).

He writes that the “UI is clearly a work-in-progress.” OK. I email him and say, thanks for the post and write us back with examples when he has the time. In a few days, I get back about ten or so thoughtful critiques and ideas for Boxxet. Some of them we are starting to work on. And I don’t know bob from boo.

I thought twice about posting this and sharing bob’s talents and efforts with others, but there you go.

Boxxet on Webby’s World

You Mon Tsang — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 13:54:18 +0000

Joe Anderson at his Webby’s World blog has a post that details his experience with Boxxet. I think he has good insight and a balanced view on our strengths and weaknesses.

He calls us “Very unique. I really hope it grows.” We hope so too. Thank you Joe for taking the time to check us out and sharing.

Mashing Boxxet

You Mon Tsang — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 14:53:52 +0000

I take a look at the steady and sure traffic coming from Mashable to Boxxet and I know Pete Cashmore is influential with his readers. Take a look at his Alexa traffic and you’ve got to be impressed.

Pete got into our beta site very early and on his own (which means he is fast on the trigger on news). His posts are insightful and fair (and encouraging as well — thanks).

If you are interesting in tech news and have not been to Mashable, I encourage you to take a look.

Post: Best of the Web
Post: Memediggers!
Post: Fox Acquires NewRoo: Memetracker Space Heating Up?

Interesting Perspective from unmediated

You Mon Tsang — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 14:53:21 +0000

Launching off the comments on the Slashdot story on Boxxet, Michael from unmediated believes the Boxxet represents a threat of lazy, value-less re-purposing of content (my words). I agree with the threat, but Boxxet does not represent that threat.

The difference is that Boxxet DOES NOT allow anyone to come in and create a “web site” upon which that person can post ads. What Boxxet does is try to create a single best-of site for a particular subject (say the San Francisco Giants). The information that we aggregate will be vetted by the community and the traffic will sent away from us to the place where the content originated. At the end of the day, we hope that Boxxet and our users do real good by finding/filtering and vetting great content for our users.
But Michael has some good thoughts on the general subject.

Michael Fitzgerald for the Technology Review on Boxxet

You Mon Tsang — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 13:51:57 +0000

I had the pleasure to meet Michael Fitzgerald at ETech 2006. We had a great conversation about Boxxet; he was interested in what we were doing in light of the conference’s focus on attention and social software.

Michael got Boxxet quickly, wrote a thorough overview for Technology Review and then gave us good feedback on the service itself. All beyond the call of duty.

Boxxet on New Scientist and then Slashdot

You Mon Tsang — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 13:50:00 +0000

Celeste Biever from the New Scientist wrote an article on Boxxet. She focused on a certain part of our service which is used to create Boxxets. Her article was put on Slashdot, which was great. Many of the commentators assume that we were up to no good, which is, of course, no good.

But it is hard to complain about the awareness that was built and we will have to make sure the Slashdot community sees that our service is meant to deliver real value to our users without becoming a menace to the Web community.

I talked about this earlier on my own blog.

Matt Marshall of the Merc and SiliconBeat on Boxxet

You Mon Tsang — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 08:49:03 +0000

Matt Marshall is a busy man. Not only does he writes for The Mercury News (where he had to worry about the Knight-Ridder sale), he posts a ton for the Silicon Beat blog (a must-read for tech industry). I get tired thinking about it.

He graciously took a little under an hour with me to talk about Boxxet. Here is his post.