I have noticed while surfing Techcrunch that they have added a new feature today, that they plan to announce tomorrow. The feature in question is Seesmic, and at the bottom of every post now on Techcrunch users have the option to add a video comment. This inclusion was really only a matter of time, due to the fact that Mike Arrington is an investor in Seesmic, so any publicity is obviously good publicity.

This comes a month after Mashable had added a similar option to their site, but partnered with Viddler to do so. On Mashable however they dont have too many comments on posts to start with and also as far as I can see the Viddler partnership has added absolutely nothing to the site or user experience. Thus, im curious to see if the Seesmic option on Techcrunch actually gets used.

Update: Mike reported about adding video comments, but didnt even link back to my article that was published first. How rude! haha.

Mashable is one of the worlds largest technology based blogs, and they are obviously in the same market as us but there is now way at the moment they are our competitors. Anyways, that all being said I have noticed some big changes over at Mashable. Pete now seems to have a lot of fulltime staff writing for him, and how does he pay their wages, advertising! Mashable at the moment seems to have more advertising than ever before and also more advertising an any other blog in the tech market.

In the left column on the Mashable front page there is currently 6 ad units and in the right 4, but they have just open up another section in the right column for another 6 units. Thus bringing the advertising space totally to 16 adveritsing spaces on the front page alone. Is this amount of advertising over the top? Do the readers actually care about the amount of advertising? Do they even notice?

I think advertising is ok if it doesnt actually seem like advertising. If the website had a right side that was sponsored, but only allowed companies to sponsor if they were actually tech products that are worth using. This is what im hoping to achieve with Crenk one day, well when I actually get a new theme done.

The voting in the first ever Open Web Awards is over and Vizu has validated the results. We look forward to meeting all the winners and nominees at the Open Web Awards live event on January 10th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. A final thanks to our blog partners, sponsors and most importantly everyone who nominated and voted - in excess of 250,000 votes and nominations were cast!

PEOPLE’S CHOICE

Without further ado, here are the 13 winners in each respective category of the People’s Choice component of the awards. These were nominated and voted on by readers of Mashable and partner blogs.

Mainstream and Large Social Networks

Applications and Widgets

Social News and Social Bookmarking

Social Search

Sports and Fitness

Photo Sharing

Video Sharing

Start Pages

Places and Events

Music

Social Shopping

Mobile

Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

Open Web Awards Nominations are now live. In this post I will list the Categories in which you can nominate.

To nominate please leave a comment in the following format: Nominate - Category - (company you wish to nominate). Nominations will be open until midnight Tuesday the 4th December! Once nominations are closed, we’ll tally the most nominated web sites, confer with Mashable, then open up voting for the winner on December 6th.

Nominations will be followed in the coming weeks by 1st Round of Voting and then a Final Round of Voting.

Categories are as follows:

1. Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
2. Applications and Widgets
3. Social News and Social Bookmarking
4. Social Search
5. Sports and Fitness
6. Photo Sharing
7. Video Sharing
8. Start Pages
9. Places and Events
10. Music
11. Social Shopping
12. Mobile
13. Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

As mentioned to Nominate just comment!

Nominate - Category - (company you wish to nominate)

If you liked this post please subscribe to Crenk and keep upto date on all the Open Web Awards and News from around the blogosphere.

It is getting towards the end of 2007 and the website awards seem to be coming out of the wood work, but really are any of them worth winning?

Awards:

• CNet Blog 100
• Mashable Awards
• The Crunchies (wow, cant take this one seriously!)
• Weblog Awards
• Bloggies
• And so on….

It seems like the list of useless blog awards never stops. What do you actually receive from winning one of these awards? Additionally, have you noticed that it is mostly the same websites winning or nominated for all the awards! This all seems to be because of traffic numbers which will push everything. Hence winning awards like these dont push traffic to your site, but the opposite you need the traffic to push the awards.

For a long time now I have been reading the web 2.0 news blog, Mashable. After reading Mashable for so long I have come to know the writers and their individual writing styles, but I have never understood why they are classed as “new media experts”, and what they might or might not have done before Mashable.

Founder/Co-Editor - Pete Cashmore: Pete calls himself a “new media expert”, but it is very difficult to work out what he actually has done in his career, except start Mashable. Nowhere on the web can i find a good profile of Pete or even more information, so if your reading this Pete please get in touch for a real interview!

Co-Editor - Adam Ostrow: Adam writes his own blog over at AdamOstrow.com. He has just become official editor of Mashable a few days ago. Adam seems to be the only Mashable staff member with some actual web startup experience. He has co-founded 2 startups, Mindsay and Qwizzy.

Lead Writer - Kristen Nicole: Kristen seems to write about 20 articles a day for Mashable. Im sure she wrote her own blog before this, but I cant find the link.

Writer - Stan Schroeder: Stan seems to have disappeared from the regular Mashable writing team. I have noticed he has been posting a few articles on his regular blog FranticIndustries, but Mashable hasn’t been on his radar.

Writer - Andy Angelos: Andy seems to be the new writer on the block. He has his own blog at AndyAngelos.com. Andy has a good deal of experience, he has worked with projects such as; VentureMidwest, Venture Capital Conferences and Inventables.

Compared to the other web 2.0 news sites out there, the Mashable team is quite inexperienced with actual startups and companies with relevance to their own interests. They just cant compare to Calacanis, Arrington and Scoble, who has just so much work experience. Arrington has an amazing team around his and Read/Write Web has started to grow their team also with very creditable staff, so Mashable it is very hard for anyone to take you seriously especially when you lack experience and credibility.

Im sorry I havent been posting a lot in the last few days, but been very busy on a few projects that will be launching soon. However this said, I have just been reading a few RSS feeds from a variety of sites and I see that Techmeme has launched a new “leaderboard“. The Techmeme leaderboard shows that frequency of blogs providing main topics on the Techmeme site. I must agree with Jason on this one! Who really cares!

I was an avid reader of Techmeme but in the last few months I have very much lost interest in the site and the service it is providing. As Jason mentions the majority of the links on the site is just from sites that re-post the news and dont actually give their overall perceptions on the news. It is no longer about peoples opinions, just about reproduction and increase reader numbers!

I am trying to move Crenk away from just basic news and stories of the day, and actually providing my views on why sites will or wont work and also help web developers, owners and investors where every possible. I have written articles not to get on Techmeme and get more exposure, but i have never understood why i can get links from sites on Techmeme and never actually show my news on or link to my site from there.