Posts from December 2004

FIFA announced an insurance fund to compensate clubs for injuries sustained by their players at the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Each national association will contribute 5% of its prize money to the insurance fund for a total of $13 million. The surplus will be reimbursed after the tournament. it's good to see assurances to the companies sponsoring these athletes and their long-term development. The World Cup would be very different without club soccer and the two need to learn to get along....

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Tonight is the first ever meeting of the first Technorati Users Group at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment in San Francisco. I will give an overview of Technorati and dive into its APIs. We will meet upstairs in the loft area. Everyone in attendance will receive a Technorati Users Group founding member t-shirt. You could also win one of two books. Good beer, good food, and a chance to learn about a service you can use for free. Come on down! I put together some slides to cover the basics of how Technorati works, how you can access their data,...

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San Francisco Business Times writes about Six Apart's planned move to San Francisco next month. Some interesting statistics: $2 million in revenue for 2004.$5 million projected revenue in 2005.New office space on 4th Street is 14,000 square feet.40 employees in San Francisco, 11 in Paris, 12 in Tokyo.Plans to add 60 employees in the next eighteen months....

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Technorati's servers will be down this weekend as they move to a new colocation host. I mirrored the API documentation and SDK if you would like to continue developing without the live servers. Adam is posting pictures from the move on Flickr. [Update: As of 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday servers are back online.] Old compared to new:...

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Amazon allows customers to share its images of a product with the intention of helping buyers understand product features and uses. In the digital camera category customer images has become a high profile way to show off your work and be evaluated by other photography enthusiasts. Take a look at the customer images page of the Nikon D70 for a good example or view the top images in the camera and photo category. It's an online portfolio hosted by Amazon....

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The Feedster developers contest is over and developers are waiting for the winners to be announced. You can view all of the entries on the Feedster submission form. What do you think about the contest submissions automatically being posted on Feedster for all to see? Good idea or bad idea? I went through the entire list of submitted Feedster hacks, removed the garbage entries seeking free linky love, and was able to put together my own list of winners while we wait for the official results. Best use of Feedster in a standalone RSS aggregator David Watanabe added Feedster search...

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Come drink beer and learn more about the Technorati API next Tuesday, December 21, at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment in San Francisco. I will introduce Technorati API calls, demonstrate some existing applications built using the APIs, and lead you through some sample code using XPath and Java. A few Technorati employees will stop by and provide updates on the developer program and provide the latest company news. If you are interested in learning more about live search, web services, or corporate intelligence this event is for you! The Technorati developer contest ends December 31 so this will be a...

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Charles Ferguson has a lengthy analysis of Google and Microsoft in the January edition of MIT Technology Review and how the search wars might play out over the next few years. Will Microsoft crush Google like it crushed Netscape? Ferguson bets on open standards and APIs as Google's saving grace, creating a lock-in of tools and services. Winning architectures are proprietary and difficult to clone, but they are also externally “open”—that is, they provide publicly accessible interfaces upon which a wide variety of applications can be constructed by independent vendors and users. In this way, an architecture reaches all markets,...

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FeedBurner announced new features today FeedCount, an image displaying the total number of readers of a FeedCount enabled FeedBurner feed. You can choose your own background and foreground color and choose an animated version. FeedBurner also claims 1 in 5 podcasts listed on audio.weblogs.com is provided by a FeedBurner feed....

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The next version of Macintosh operating system, 10.4 code named Tiger, defines a default RSS reader at the system level. Preferences in the current early start kit allow a user to define the time between feed updates, the color annotation of a new article, and when to remove stored items. Hopefully this means aggregators will be able to share a common feed storage location. Update: MacNet took down at the request of Apple Legal. The preference pane showed a drop-down boxes to select the default RSS reader, choose an update interval, highlight new items, and the length of time to...

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