Last night I attended Seattle’s small (but growing) Web 2.0 roundtable, hosted by the kind folks at Wetpaint. The traffic was a bit tough, due to a Mariners game across the street, but we managed to start right around 6pm and the hours flew by.
The companies represented included:
Payscale
Their site isn’t as “open” as one might hope, but they do get a lot of data by restricting access until you complete registration (and provide salary information of your own). I added in my salary, drastically dragging down the average of CEOs in Seattle 🙂
All I have to do now is keep this information from the SEOmoz employees… UPDATE: You can see some cool stuff without logging in via their Research page and blog.
Wetpaint
Wetpaint offers free hosted wikis. I created a sample site months ago after first meeting with them, and I love the user experience. It’s so easy to make content and the formatting is highly marketable. Wetpaint is constantly improving, too – rolling out new features multiple times each month. There are thousands of Wetpaint wikis (view a few here), but one of my favorites has to be WikiFido. They’ve even got linkbait-worthy content in the form of this “every-breed-of-dog-ever” page.
We spent some time talking about SEO for Wetpaint and they’re clearly well focused on those efforts, though we all agreed that the keyword “wiki” should be somewhere in their title tag 🙂
BuddyTV
This service provides celebrity/expert commentary that accompanies popular TV shows. It’s a bit of an odd concept, but the delivery is quite good. Imagine watching your favorite TV shows with an experienced insider (oftentimes someone who’s worked on the show) and you’ll have a reasonably good idea of what to expect.
A good example is for Bravo’s Project Runway, which Mystery Guest is addicted to. BuddyTV has the winner from the second season provide commentary on all the shows – don’t skip commercials, just mute them and listen to what Grace Kelsey has to say about the Rebecca Romijn’s ultra-suede jumper.
BlueDot.us
This might have been my favorite company at the event, just because I love the idea of their service. It’s a bit like del.icio.us, in that you share bookmarks and content publicly, but the integration is much tighter, and the community aspects (friends, connections, etc.) are very well done. It’s not perfect by any means, but I think it’s a very natural crossover between social bookmarking and social networking.
From what I can see, they’ve grown exceptionally quickly since their initial launch at the end of June. The tags pages are filled and the members look to be over 5000 strong. It’s tough being a space like Blue Dot’s because of the massive competition, but these guys are making a serious claim to worthiness in the field. I wish them the best of luck.
I hope to be able to attend more of these in the future – sitting around a table with whiteboards, a web connection on a projector and lots of web-savvy, driven entrepreneurs makes for a great time.
