January 2006
6 tags
kill all beta males
I am gleefully presenting Rick Segal with a better title for the thread he has been pushing at recently, where the economics of Web 2.0-ish companies is eroding the traditional value that VCs bring to the innovation game: New Venture Economics. After a long, long preamble, he gets to his core insight: if VCs aren’t needed for money (based on the new economics of startups), what are they...
5 tags
Kottke on Blogs versus the NY Times in Google
Kottke presages the results of a bet between Martin Niseholtz of the NY Times and Dave Winer: whether blogs or the NY Times would have higher authority (from the Google perspective) in 2007. And the answer, today?
[from Blogs versus the NY Times in Google (kottke.org)]
Here’s the overall results, excluding the Judith Miller search:
Overall winner (in spirit): Media (beating citizen...
4 tags
Jack Shafer on The Future of Newspapers
Shafer argues that newspapers can’t survive by retreat: just cutting costs and trimming the stock quotes won’t win when bloggers are doing so much. Newspapers have to decide to excel in a way that bloggers can’t, or else:
[Not Just Another Column About Blogging - What newspaper history says about newspaper future By Jack Shafer]
[…]
The newspaper guild (again,...
5 tags
Jeff Jarvis on Revolutionizing the Conference...
Jeff Jarvis, of BuzzMachine, wants to revamp the conference business, because we pay too much to get too little.
[from Exploding the conference business by Jeff Jarvis]
Too many conferences suck. They’re too expensive. They are filled with boring panels. They are all about speeches and not about conversation and argument and learning and meeting. They don’t capture the...
10 tags
First Take: Rrove
While in San Francisco last week, I met with David Quiec, who gave me the rundown on his startup Web 2.0 company, called Rrove.
Rrove (pronounced “rove”) is a mashup leveraging the various map solutions, like Google’s. Using a bookmarklet — once you’ve created an account — you can save locations found on Google, Yahoo, Mapquest, and MSN, and then post...
4 tags
Tyranny of the Majority
Umair Haque is worried that a steady diet of tech.memeorandum is making him stupid:
[from The Problems with 2.0, pt 34514]
I luv Memeorandum and all it’s reconstructor cousins. It’s one of the first things of my reading list. It’s hugely slashed my search costs in finding new stuff. But there’s a problem. Ever since I’ve started using it to the point where it...
3 tags
Google gets pragmatic and enters China
Googlescoped uncovers a new demonstration of lack of transparency at Google regarding their complicity in Chinese censorship:
[from Google Removes Its Help Entry on Censorship, More News]
Incredible. Google removed their help entry on censorship, as Gary Price discovered. Here’s what it used to read:
Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our...
4 tags
More Gloom-and-Doom For Newspapers
I was embroiled in a discussion (argument) with Chris Nolan earlier this week regarding my apocalyptic pronouncements about the imminent collapse of traditional journalism, especially newspapers. She asked me (more or less) whether I really thought the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other premier sources of news and opinion would really be pushed aside by lunatic-fringe bloggers.
...
4 tags
Rooting For A Great Sales Lead - Forbes.com
Liz Moyer of Forbes writes about the inverted, unmarketing model being championed by Root/Markets:
[from Rooting For A Great Sales Lead - Forbes.com by Liz Moyer]
Root/Markets is based on the premise that consumers—being ordinary folks—should be able to control the information collected on them every time they log on to the Internet, fill out forms and sign up for stuff. Every...
4 tags
Davos Dispatches: Brin defends Google's China move
Sergey Brin equates Google’s acquiescence to China’s request for censorship about democracy and freedom to blocking Nazi content in Germany and child pornography in the US. Please.
[Davos Dispatches: Brin defends Google’s China move - Jan. 25, 2006]
Brin: […] We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services...
4 tags
Poynter Online on Interation Isn't Optional
More musings on the role of social in social media — which some more mainstream types refer to as interactivity:
[from The Costs and Benefits of Interaction Poynter Online]
interaction isn’t optional. Maybe it never was — an institution that behaves arrogantly eventually reaps the whirlwind. A lot of the anger directed against “mainstream media” comes from...
5 tags
Andy Abramson on Yahoo Messenger For Mac
The long anticipated Yahoo Messenger for Mac is rumored to be imminent, acoording to Andy Abramson:
[from Yahoo Messenger for Mac]
I heard through the grapevine that the in production version of Yahoo Messenger, that is being rewritten from the ground up, for the Macintosh will include Video.
I’m also hearing that the USA launch of VOIP with Y! Messenger is likely within the...
5 tags
RSS Menu, Firefox, Safari
The screwy behavior of RSS Menu — where it resets all my RSS feeds to some redirect proxy page — happened again yesterday. This time it was the TMobile redirect page at Starbucks, instead of Logan airport (see I Hate Logan Airport). So I threw it away.
I also got sick and tired of the spinning little ball at Firefox: can’t they ever fix that memory leak? So I decided to...
4 tags
Dont bother searching for Tianenmen Square
As I drove across San Francisco Bay this morning, I heard via NPR the news about Google joining the ranks of MSN and Yahoo, caving to pressure from the fascist Chinese government to support censorship:
[from Version of Google in China Won’t Offer E-Mail or Blogs - New York Times by David Barboza] In an effort to cope with China’s increasingly pervasive Internet controls, Google...
10 tags
Marketing is Dead ... Long Live Marketing!
David Kline at BlogRevolt poses the question:
[BlogRevolt.com: What’s Holding Back Corporate Blogging?] Why did the much-predicted 2005 stampede by corporate America into the blogosphere fail to materialize?
The number of Fortune 500 companies with strategic public blogging initiatives, after all, is still quite small — somewhere between 3-4%, depending on how you figure it....
3 tags
Steve Rubel Crushes Wrickr
Steve Rubel referenced new startup Wrickr, which I guess (it’s hard to tell) will be yet-another-personalized-RSS-page thingie. It’s another example of a start-up’s server getting crushed when an A-lister points to your domain, because when I went to the blog, and attempted to click through on the demo (like 25,000 others) I got the interesting error message: “XML...
1 tag
Calendars Don't Work
I am totally frustrated with dumbness of calendars. On all levels.
First of all, why do we use a base 12 hour system? 60 seconds in a minute, and 24 hours a day? Can we go decimal, please? I thought the beat time was a good idea, especially as it solved the time zone issue — no time zones in beat time, just a thousnad ‘beats’ per day — but it will never catch on.
So...
7 tags
Steve Rubel on Yahoo Gives Up On Search
Steve Rubel has a great response to Yahoo’s statements about not being able to catch Google on search:
[Micro Persuasion: Yahoo Cedes Search to Google and So Do I]
That’s it, I am no longer using Yahoo Search. I have no interest in using a product that the company doesn’t aspire to make best of breed. If search is no longer hip to Yahoo, then Yahoo Search is no longer hip...
4 tags
Hoder Going To Israel
Hoder, aka Hossein Derakhshan, a friend and well-known Canadian blogger of Iranian background, is headed to Israel:
[from E:M | Visiting Israel, breaking a major taboo]
I’m going to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist.
As a citizen journalist, I’m going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there. The...
16 tags
Tello and Iotum do the presence thing
Jeff Pulver — a guy who really gets the convergence of VoIP, IM, presence, and ubiquitous mobility — has pulled together three Musketeers to ride beside him on the path to a presence-enabled future:
[from Say Hello to Tello by Steve Rosenbush]
Now, Pulver wants to help revolutionize business communications. His latest venture, Tello, is set to launch on Jan. 23 with the...
3 tags
iTunes Traffic Grew 241% in 2005
BBC reports on Nielsen figures on iTunes growth:
[from BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple iTunes users growing fast] Statistics gathered by Nielsen NetRatings shows that traffic to iTunes grew by 241% in 2005.
Between December 2004 and 2005 the numbers of people going to the site grew from 6.1 million to 20.7 million.
The figures mean that about 14% of the net’s active population are...
8 tags
Chris Heuer on Brainjams
I love this explanation of how the upcoming Brainjams in DC came about:
[from Chris’ Insytes: BrainJams DC: A slow but steady start by Chris Heuer]
I just got off the phone with Greg Narain who is working on his new startup called SyncPeople. You may have heard of him from his Beercasting days. We can directly trace the lineage of BrainJams back to him - because if it was not for...
6 tags
RSS Readering, Redux
Paul Kedrosky (RSS Sucks) and Scott Karp (How to Fix RSS) are tapping into the inadequacies of RSS, but they are off target.
Karp carps about the terminology, as if using ‘subscribing’ instead of ‘syndicating’ would solve the real broken parts of the whole RSS mess. Paul does a better job enumerating real problems, which can be summarized as feed overload.
But the...
3 tags
Mark Hall on Corporations as Rights Guarantors?
Mark Hall points out that Google is standing up for us and trying to stare down the government. Is that a new, social ethics form of competitive advantage?
[from Corporations as Rights Guarantors?]
Ironically, maybe eventually interestingly, this could create a competitive dynamic that is helpful. If Google is consistent in its apparent protection of its users, it should consistently gain...
5 tags
Zvents. Probably the Best Event Calendar in the...
I was surprised to see that my Stowe Travel calendar in the right margin unexplicably was empty this morning. It seems that Eventful has lost its mind, and I thought at first it might just be me, but I think the database is hosed, or offline. Not only does it claim that I have no upcoming or past events in my Stowe Travel calendar, but when I examine those events that I know are real, like...
4 tags
Performancing: I Really Wanted It To Work
I have been going through a big change, moving back to Typepad from Moveable Type. I found I was using Performancing — the blog editor that pops up in Firefox — more than formerly, I guess because I find the Typepad experience a little annoying after MT.
But I am going to have to drop Performancing. I like the concept: I select some text on a webpage that I want to use as the...
6 tags
Still Not Integrated Enough
Jeffrey Zeldman again proves that you can judge a man’s wisdom by the degree to which he agrees with you. Therefore, I think he is very smart indeed.
[from A List Apart: Articles: Web 3.0 by Jeffrey Zeldman]
[…] ours is a medium in which, more often than not, big teams have slowly and expensively labored to produce overly complex web applications whose usability was near nil...
3 tags
First Look: Veetro
I saw that Emily Chang’s eHub mentioned Veetro a new project management, billing, time management, crm, “jeepers-creepers, is there anything they haven’t included?” solution.
I gave the free trial a whirl, and was planning to create an invoice — since I had to do that anyway. Creating my first contact, I got a bomb:
I guess I will wait a few weeks before...
6 tags
Pete Blackshaw on Nielsen BuzzMetrics
Pete Blackshaw announced the acquisition and merger of Intelliseek with BuzzMetrics to form Neilsen BuzzMetrics:
[from Intelliseek + BuzzMetrics = Nielsen BuzzMetrics]
Today, I’m incredibly pleased to announce that that consumer-centered commitment is dialing up a big notch through the creation of a new company and brand, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, that brings together the company I work...
3 tags
Gina Bianchini on Ning -- RIP?
Michael asks, whatever happened to Ning?
[from TechCrunch » Ning - R.I.P.? ]
The idea of Ning, which launched in October 2005, is brilliant. Let people easily create social applications tailored with difference web services. Allow others to clone those applications and take the code from them directly into whatever they are building instead of building from scratch. Watch everything...
7 tags
Gina Bianchini on Ning -- RIP?
Gina Bianchini, the CEO of 24hourLaundry adriotly riposted the post I
made a few days ago, building on Michael Arrington’s “Ning — RIP” post. I thought I would pull her comments out, if only to get them into the RSS feed:
[from comment on /Message: Michael Arrington on Ning — RIP?]
Stowe,
Thanks for joining the conversation. I just want to address the...
1 tag
Oh, Man, You Are Sooooo Wrong
Noticed this in a post by Javier Martí:
This experienced but modest guy, Stowe Boyd…
Well, he’s half-right.
7 tags
ATTENTION PLEASE: Who decides what gets noticed?
Scott Karp poses a great question (before wandering into a maze of ideas that peter out without a solid conclusion):
[from Publishing 2.0 » Who Are the New Media Gatekeepers?]
Who decides what’s worthy of your attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?
In ...
7 tags
Feds Want Search Data To Justify Anti-Pornography...
Danny Sullivan is tracking the breaking news on the US government’s efforts to get data about searches from search engine companies to support its defense of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA):
[from Bush Administration Demands Search Data; Google Says No; AOL, MSN & Yahoo Said Yes]
It’s important to note that from what I read, the requests do not involve user data at...
5 tags
Instant Messaging in Literature: Part 1
I bought a paperback in the airport the other day, a new page turner by W.E.B. Griffin, called By Order Of The President. Early on in the book, we meet a thoroughly-modern General, who has adopted instant messaging as a way to plow though some of the inconveniences of his meeting-cluttered life:
Having the laptop on the commanding general’s desk and on the conference table had been...
8 tags
Good Works, Bad Works, but Karma doesn't work
Richard McManus at ZDNet’s Web 2.0 Explorer and Read/Write Web investigates the karma system at Reddit, and wonders if it’s better than Digg’s:
[from » Collaborative filtering: comparing Reddit’s karma system to Digg]
Indeed Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian says that “with reddit, we’re hoping that by focusing on filtering, users will be inclined to vote...
4 tags
I Hate Logan Airport: Screwed Up My RSS Feeds
So I was in Logan Airport, again, yesterday, and I hate the stupid Comcast wifi there. The fact that I am a Comcast user, and I pay them like $90 a month for that privilege, is irrelevant. They still want to hit me up for $10 for 24 hours wifi access.
Worst of all, I mistakenly hit “Refresh all feeds” in RSS Menu, or maybe the polling cycle clicked… in any case, the stupid...
7 tags
FaceToFace Next Big Thing?
I was mulling over my notes for today’s AMA Hot Topic presentation in Chicago — I’m talking about pod/videocasting and the power laws — when I saw Michael Arrington’s rumor about YouTube getting acquired:
[ from TechCrunch » YouTube Acquisition Rumors]
Rumors are flying that Silicon Valley based YouTube (profiled here) has signed an agreement to be...
6 tags
Google Talk and XMPP
Gary Burd of Google announced today at the Talkabout blog that Google Talk is now federated with the world-wide XMPP public network [pointer from Om Malik]
[from Google Talkabout: XMPP Federation]
I flipped the switch to connect the Google Talk Service to the public XMPP network this morning. Google Talk users can now chat with users on other XMPP services and vice versa.
I asked Peter...
3 tags
Chief Networking Officer, Isn't That What I Do?
It sounds odd, but I guess it makes sense:
[from openBC appoints Chief Networking Officer press release]
openBC appoints Chief Networking Officer Hamburg - January 17, 2006 - openBC creates a new position born out of the growing importance of business networking. Udo Hamm joins openBC as Chief Networking Officer (CNO) and will be applying his proven networking skills to the full benefit...
5 tags
Apple Is The New Microsoft?
Tell me it’s all just a horrible nightmare. Apparently, Apple’s new iPhoto 6 “photocasting” uses an RSS format that only Safari can handle:
[from SitePoint Blogs » Apple “photocasting” Mac only, uses invalid RSS by Kevin Yank]
The long and short of it is that Apple’s new iPhoto 6 produces invalid RSS that most feed readers will be unable to process. In order...
1 tag
According To Hugh, I Am Sunk
Hugh Macleod posts ten reasons why nobody reads your blog, and stabs me right in the heart:
[gapingvoid: top ten reasons why nobody reads your blog]8. The very fact that you’re whining about traffic makes people not want to read your blog.
Instead it makes them want to emulate the champagne-swigging A-Listers currently mocking you.
9. You’ve only been writing the damn thing ...
5 tags
Lessig's Experiments In Presentation Technology
Lawrence Lessig has a great description of his attempt to unify audio with slides using iMovie and Keynote.
(1) print the slides from Keynote so you can see what’s coming (2) export the slides as JPEGs (3) import the slides into iMovie (4) import the audio into iMovie (5) using the bookmark function, listen to the audio, and bookmark where there is to be a slide change (6) marking all the...
4 tags
The Blog Herald (being) Sold
The owners B5Media is [thanks for the clarification, Jeremy] are selling The Blog Herald, which sets a new model for what successful blogs are worth:
[from Ensight - Jeremy Wright’s Personal Blog » The Mystery Blog]
Why did Duncan sell it? I’ll let him give the full reasons, but the biggest and best were that he was no longer enjoying writing it as much as he used to, and that there...
5 tags
Tom Zeller on China Still Winning Against The Web
The hue and cry about Microsoft’s acquiesence to China’s censorship of blogs will not die down, and Tom Zeller’s piece in the Sunday NYTimes attempts to present a balanced view, but ultimately, that falls apart:
[from China, Still Winning Against the Web - New York Times by Tom Zeller]
The company said it was simply facing reality. “Microsoft does business in many...
3 tags
Why (The King Of Love Is Dead) by Nina Simone
Once upon this planet Earth, Lived a man of humble birth, Preaching love and freedom For his fellow man.
He was dreaming of the day Peace would come to Earth to stay, And he spread this message All across the land.
“Turn the other cheek,” he’d plead. “Love thy neighbor,” was his creed. Pain, humiliation, death he did not dread. With his bible at his side, From...
5 tags
DC 2.0 Launches
It seems I spend half my time
elsewhere—San Francisco, New York, Boston, or in transit — so I am glad to say that Dion Hinchcliffe, Ken Yamosh, and I decided to set up a metro DC salon to bring together locals interested in all things Web 2.0. We have dubbed it DC 2.0, and we plan to start having regular events, although the tempo remains to be established. Check out the site:...
And I Thought I *Was* A Pet Monkey
This brave new world is already leading to new encounters:
[Stowe Boyd - your wish is my command by Bright Meadow]
Finding someone whose voice makes sense to you, is a rare thing in this brave new world where everyone and their pet monkey thinks they can craft a sentence, despite glaring evidence to the contrary.
Thanks, Cas.
New Mac Client For Plazes
I noticed that the folks at Plazes, the many hyphenated wifi-geolocation-based-social-networking tool, have a new client for download, created by Martin Pittenauer.
The new client has two great features:
A buddylist showing geopresence of your Plazes buddies.
The ability to set your iChat status to be your Plazes geolocation.
Same Voice, Different Megaphone
Welcome to my new blog. As many of you know, this is not my first blogging experience.
Long ago, starting in 2000, I wrote an online pub called Message From Edge City, which ended in a horrible way. One day, the investors in the company that hosted my blog, called Convey.com, just shut it down… and sold the servers! You can still see some of the front pages at the Internet Archives...