What I’m reading / checking out.

1. Travel + social discovery – great blog post by one of my buddies @pkattera. I was going to write about Adioso and Hipmunk as well, and his insights into how social serendipity and your social networks can influence your travel destinations are quite interesting. Yes, you should blog more!

2. Dear Mom and Dad – The first one is by Zach Klein, who founded Vimeo (think Youtube for HD videos). His current project is Boxee. If you know me, you’ve probably heard me talking about Boxee – great program. The blog post above is about social discovery, well Boxee helps you discover online video content and organises your media. Dear Mum This Is Why I moved To New York is another blog post by an employee of Boxee, Nick Crocker. He’s actually an Aussie who moved to New York. He co-founded We Are Hunted (another website I like).

3. Promote concerts using Posse – Came across this site a few months ago. It allows fans of music artists to promote concerts to their friends. You can generate money by selling tickets. In a way its like crowdsourcing promoters for concerts and generating a groundswell. The selection was initially quite limited, but it looks like its expanding. Win win for the artists and fans. The tech startup firm Pollenizer worked on this and Mitch Malone who I’ve met at Cebit is one of the devs at Posse.

4. News Corp to create iPad only newspaper. Magazines and newspapers have translated really well to this form factor. Question is whether an iPad only newspaper will get enough traction. As most of the iPad newspapers generally have an offline offering, but is also available through other online channels, predominatly a website.

5. I thought this was pretty funny – MySpace forced to offer FaceBook Connect. MySpace capitulated to FaceBook, but did they really have a choice? They had to allow it –  its the biggest social network. As has been written by many people smarter than me like Mark Mulligan, MySpace needs to reposition itself as a music social network not as a cool place for early adopters which aggregates your social information. Embrace it MySpace or die like Friendster. Oh, and the new logo sucks as well.

I’m out like Friendster,

Matt Ho