PubSub introduced LinkCounts, a new way of looking at daily statistics for their database as a whole or just your favorite domain. Bob Wyman describes LinkCounts as "how many InLinks and OutLinks we discovered each day."
March 2005 Archives
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Mar31
PubSub LinkCounts
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Mar30
WordPress community issue with hosted content
One or more WordPress administrators decided to partner with a targeted content company to host almost 120,000 articles on high pay-per-click topics such as mortgage, asbestos, and diabetes. The articles section in question is linked off the WordPress home page and hidden from most web browsers using CSS. This content partner pays WordPress a flat fee for placement on its highly ranked site.
WordPress is a GPL-licensed product covering server and hosting costs mostly through user donations. Some WordPress developers are working on creating a WordPress foundation with non-profit status, applying for trademarks, and I am sure there are other project costs I am not aware of.
In a now closed WordPress support thread lead developer Matt Mullenweg comments on the issue raised by a member in February, noting WordPress receives a flat fee for the articles section.
Andrew Baio at Waxy jump-started the conversation around this issue.
I am personally not a fan of this method of raising funds for the development of WordPress and its foundation. I admire the success of organizations such as Wikipedia and Mozilla and their fundraising efforts. I just donated to WordPress to show my support for community-focused foundations and open-source projects.
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Mar30
Dark chocolate peanut M&Ms are coming
Dark chocolate M&Ms are hitting store shelves next week. The launch has a Star Wars marketing tie-in and a clever movie trailer.
Yum!
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Mar29
Guinness event next Wednesday
You know it is going to be a good day when you receive an e-mail from Guinness inviting you to an all you can drink party to learn more about your favorite beer and give the company some feedback. Brilliant! I know it is a marketing event, but I'm excited anyways.
I will take pictures and blog the Guinness event. I did not see any restrictions on the invite, so if you are in would like to attend a Guinness event in San Francisco or another city visit the Guinness Believer web site and use password "BELIEVER" to enter the site. I am attending the San Francisco event the evening of Wednesday, April 6, if you would like to join me.
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Mar29
Joshua Schachter quits his job, del.icio.us to take investments
Joshua Schachter has quit his job to pursue del.icio.us as a full-time business. "[T]he best way forward is to take on some outside investment."
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Mar29
AOL launches Red blogs
AOL introduced a new weblog service with advanced privacy features aimed at teens.
The Red blogs home page contains a search box for keyword search of the Red blogs community, editors' picks, and a daily top five weblogs listing.
According to the new AOL(R) RED(TM)/Digital Marketing Services survey, when teens are asked to choose whether they prefer to share their innermost feelings with their parents or a blog, they are split with roughly half (51%) selecting their parents and 49% choosing a blog.
It seems very odd to me to name a parental control service a "red" service. I have no idea how they arrived at that name, but when I see the word "red" mixed with controlling features I think of communist strong-arm regimes such as those led by Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. (not the opinion of Technorati)
It is also interesting that AOL is now using the term "blog" instead of "journal" at least in this use case.
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Mar29
High school bans blogging
Students at Proctor High School in Vermont can no longer write weblog posts at school. School officials are concerned for the safety of the children posting personal data online that could be used by an Internet predator. (via Weblogs Tools Collection)
The article only mentions one site as banned (MySpace? LiveJournal?) but this school of less than 200 students at the middle school and high school level was worried enough enough risk to students in rural Vermont that they blocked access to the site or sites.
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Mar28
Technorati nears one billion links tracked
One billllion...
Technorati is currently less than nine million links away from reaching the one billion links tracked threshold. One billion links is a pretty big milestone, so we put together a contest for our members who would like to guess when Technorati will cross the one billion links tracked threshold.
Five minutes could win you a 1 GB iPod shuffle. I am ineligible to enter, but you can read all the details over at Dave Sifry's weblog.
Remember as a kid when you tried to guess how many pieces of candy are in the jar? The same fun, but now we are geeky and count links instead.
So many variables to weigh!
- Yahoo! 360 enters its first beta period tomorrow
- Natural disasters such as the earthquake in Indonesia usually lead to more posting activity as people share their thoughts on tragedy.
- Is no bowl of chili safe from severed limbs?
There is no telling what will happen between now and a billion links tracked. You can follow all the action at the one billion links tag page.
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Mar28
Technorati User Salon this Thursday
This Thursday, March 31, Technorati will host a user salon to bring together Technorati staff and users for face-to-face discussions. The event will take place at Chevys at 3rd St. and Howard St. in San Francisco.
We will deliver short presentations about what is new at Technorati. The world of weblogs has been through a lot of change in the ten months since our last user salon last May. We would like to bring together the community to reflect on the last few months in the world of weblogs and discuss how Technorati may be of service in the future.
- What
- Technorati User Salon
- When
- Thursday, March 31, 2005 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
- Where
- Chevys Restaurant, 201 3rd St., San Francisco, CA 94103
- Google Maps
- Yahoo! Maps
Thursday is the seven year anniversary of the release of Netscape Communicator 5.0 source code and the creation of the Mozilla project. In celebration of this milestone Chevys will donate 20% of all event proceeds to the Mozilla Foundation.
Technorati will provide appetizers and drinks for approximately 50 people. Please RSVP to salon-sf@technorati.com and let us know how many people you are bringing so we can plan the event space, food, and drink.
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Mar24
Adam Bosworth is blogging again
Adam Bosworth updated his weblog for the first time in almost three months. Adam publishes one of my favorite weblogs, but stopped posting because people saw his words as the words of Google and attacked the company. Adam is Google's VP of Engineering.
I haven't posted for quite a while because my last posts caused unfair attacks on Google by twisting the words I'd used in my posts and attributing my posts to Google. I want to be really clear about something. The opinions I express in this Blog are my own. They have nothing to do with Google's opinions. Google only asks that I not leak information about future products. Period. But despite that, recent blog posts of mine were used to attack Google and this upset me deeply. Much to my surprise, Dare Obasanjo came up to me and told me, after some fairly vitriolic complaining from me to him about this earlier state of affairs, that he wished I'd continue to post. I thought about this over the weekend and decided that to some degree, you have to take your chances in this environment rather than just hide when you don't like the behavior and that perhaps I was being over sensitive anyway. There are too many interesting things going on right now anyway.
Adam is where he is at today because he has a huge amount of domain knowledge about the issues that are important to the infrastructure of the web. He is also a Google executive.
Can Adam's weblog have its own voice or is he always speaking for Google? There are many industry issues out there that need to be intelligently discussed and there has been a lot of negative energy creating a culture of risk-averse weblogs (see cheese sandwich).
I am very glad to see Adam's voice rejoining the conversation.
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Mar23
Scuttle bookmarks manager
Last night I installed Scuttle, an open-source online social bookmarks manager written using PHP and a MySQL backend. You can import your del.icio.us entries if you would like to get started with a larger dataset.
You are welcome to play around in my installation with or without and account. Host your own bookmarks manager!
Thanks to Phil for pointing out Scuttle.
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Mar23
Harvard Entrepreneurship Conference
Harvard Business School hosted an Entrepreneurship conference on March 3. Sean Silverthorne of HBS Working Knowledge summarizes the themes of the conference and provides choice quotes from speakers. Be passionate and humbly seek the advice of smart experienced people with domain knowledge.
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Mar23
WordPress Inc.
Later today Matt Mullenweg will announce WordPress Inc., a company created to develop WordPress solutions for paying customers. Jonas Luster is one developer involved with the new company.
They have developed some new WordPress plugins to accompany the announcement. Congratulations and I hope to see great things!
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Mar22
RSS your way with more options
My weblog now has a RSS feed for every category and individual entry. If you subscribe to a category you will receive a new item for every entry in the category as well as every entry in the subcategory. If you subscribe to a individual entry feed you will receive a new item for each approved comment and TrackBack related to the main entry.
Each RSS feed is exposed as a link alternate. In most cases you should be able to replace "html" with "xml" in the URL to access the corresponding RSS file.
You can now subscribe to only specific categories on my weblog or track comments and TrackBacks for an entry from your favorite feed aggregator. Hopefully this enriches your experience on my weblog!
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Mar21
Movable Type Wikipedia entry
I just updated the Movable Type Wikipedia entry with an extended history of the product. I rather have the document on the collaborative wiki than on my weblog.
I started putting together a history of Six Apart when I realized I was more interested in tracking the history of the Movable Type product. Enjoy!
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Mar20
The Simpsons on search engines
According to tonight's episode of The Simpsons Homer knows his search engines. Marge confronts Homer about his work habits such as Googling his name at work until lunch and Homer made a note on his Flintstones fun map to use Ask Jeeves to find out more information about Dino.
Dino. Short for dinosaur? Remember to ask Jeeves.
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Mar20
Six Apart dinner tomorrow cancelled
I just called the restaurant to cancel tomorrow night's dinner in celebration of two years of Six Apart. I did not hear back from anyone at Six Apart regarding the event and the community did not express much interest.
I think it is important for companies to celebrate milestones and create a corporate culture and sense of pride. Hopefully Six Apart will do something on their own tomorrow to celebrate this business milestone in their own way.
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Mar20
InterActiveCorp acquires Ask Jeeves?
The New York Times reports that InterActiveCorp is close to an agreement to purchase Ask Jeeves for about $1.9 million: $1.2 billion in cash and $600 million in stock.
InterActiveCorp owns Citysearch, Expedia, Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Evite, Match.com, and many more companies.
The best way to control search engine placement is to own the search engine.
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Mar20
Yahoo! acquires Ludicorp and Flickr
It's official: Yahoo! has purchased Ludicorp and Flickr. "Pro account holders will get super mega bonuses, to be announced soon."
News.com reports all Ludicorp employees will relocate to Sunnyvale later this year.
Stewart says: "we prefer to think of it as Flickr taking over Yahoo rather than the other way around."
As previously reported I am skeptical of the ability to maintain a passionate user base within a big corporation such as Yahoo!. Congratulations to everyone involved and I hope you can continue to build great things and passionate communities.
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Mar17
Six Apart anniversary dinner on Monday
Sunday is the two-year anniversary of Six Apart as a business entity. To celebrate I am hosting a dinner at Restaurant LuLu in San Francisco on Monday, March 21, at 6:30 p.m. Dinner should cost about $25, or $30 with drinks. Restaurant LuLu is located near Folsom Street and 4th Street in the SoMa area of San Francisco.
Thanks to the Internet Archive we can see what Six Apart looked like in 2003 and compare it to the Six Apart of today. Congratulations on making it this far, and creating a business out of a dedication to enable the individual voice.
If you are interested in having dinner in celebration on Monday evening please leave a comment below or send me an e-mail so I can make arrangements with the restaurant.
Update: Dinner cancelled due to lack of interest.
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Mar17
OpenSearch standard using Movable Type
OpenSearch is a search plugin technology building on RSS to allow content providers to enable searches from a multitude of sites from a common search protocol. You too can have an OpenSearch column using your Movable Type weblog and some small configuration tweaks. I will walk you through the necessary steps to create an OpenSearch channel for your Movable Type weblog. This hack is for advanced users who are comfortable editing their Movable Type configuration file. You break it, you fix it.
Create a new search template
First you need to create a new search template. Create a new text file named osrss.tmpl containing the text below or copy from this text file.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="<$MTPublishCharset$>"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:openSearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/">
<channel><MTSearchResults><MTBlogResultHeader>
<title><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$> results for <$MTSearchString$></title>
<link><$MTBlogURL remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></link>
<description><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description>
<managingEditor><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryAuthorEmail$></MTEntries></managingEditor>
<webMaster><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryAuthorEmail$></MTEntries></webMaster>
<language>en-us</language>
<pubDate><$MTDate format="%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S "$><$MTBlogTimezone no_colon="1"$></pubDate>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<generator>Movable Type <$MTVersion$></generator>
<ttl>1440</ttl>
<openSearch:totalResults><$MTSearchResultCount$></openSearch:totalResults>
<openSearch:startIndex>1</openSearch:startIndex>
<openSearch:itemsPerPage><$MTSearchResultCount$></openSearch:itemsPerPage>
</MTBlogResultHeader><item>
<title><$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTEntryLink encode_xml="1"$></link>
<description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml="1"$></description>
<pubDate><$MTEntryDate format="%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S "$><$MTBlogTimezone no_colon="1"$></pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="true"><$MTEntryLink encode_xml="1"$></guid>
<author><$MTEntryAuthorEmail$> (<$MTEntryAuthor$>)</author>
<MTEntryIfAllowComments>
<comments><$MTCGIPath$><$MTCommentScript$>?entry_id=<$MTEntryID$></comments>
</MTEntryIfAllowComments>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="MTEntryCategory">
<category domain="<$MTBlogArchiveURL$>">
<MTParentCategories glue="/"><MTCategoryLabel dirify="1" encode_xml="1"></MTParentCategories>
</category></MTIfNonEmpty>
</item>
</MTSearchResults></channel>
</rss>Next you will need to upload this search template to your
search_templatesdirectory inside your Movable Type installation.Edit your Movable Type configuration file
Open
mt.cfgin the root directory of your Movable Type installation. Find your alternative template section of your configuration file -- search forAltTemplate-- and add the line below.AltTemplate osrss osrss.tmpl
Save your configuration file and exit.
Create your OpenSource description
Next you need to create a special XML to describe your search channel to Amazon. Follow the sample markup for the OpenSource description format and create your own description file. You can take a look at my OpenSearch description document for guidance. Upload your completed file to your weblog's root directory.
You need to use a special URL in the descriptor to call the results of your newly created template.
<Url>PATH TO MT/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=WEBLOG ID&SearchElement=entries&SearchCutoff=9999999&Template=osrss&search={searchTerms}</Url>Please note that you must escape the ampersands.
Description of variables
- PATH TO MT
- The location of your Movable Type installation.
- WEBLOG ID
- The numeric value corresponding to the weblog against which you would like to conduct a search.
- SearchElement
- Enter entries to search just weblog entries, comments to search just comments, or both to search both entries and comments.
- SearchCutoff
- Restrict your search to a number of days in the past. Setting this value to a very large number will allow a search of all your designated content.
Submit your search
That's it! Submit your OpenSearch search to Amazon and run a test query to make sure you set everything up correctly.
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Mar16
Atom syndication format draft feed
I just finished my implementation of the latest draft of the Atom syndication format specification. I am currently publishing an Atom feed written to the new specification. If you use Movable Type you may be interested in my template.
I used permalinks for my
idand I realize permalinks are not a permanent identifier throughout time, space, and switching weblog platforms. Theidelement is changing with each version and I will sit back and watch for best practices before updating my template. -
Mar15
Ranchero Software interview on DrunkenBlog
DrunkenBlog posted a lengthy interview with Brent and Sheila Simmons of Ranchero Software. The conversation focuses on what it is like to run a small software business and what about Mac software makes Brent love to write clever applications.
Brent estimates NetNewsWire has a million users including the full and Lite versions. It has been estimated that Bloglines has 2 million users, placing Mac-only NetNewsWire at about half the users of Bloglines.
Ranchero Software: "We grow software."
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Mar14
Maintaining a high-return workforce
Professors Mark A. Huselid, Brian E. Becker, and Richard W. Beatty published a new book, The Workforce Scorecard, on the often overlooked issue of workforce strategy. HBS Working Knowledge published an excerpt from the book on its web site.
[I]f seniority and job level explain 90 percent of the variation in pay in your organization, you probably need to take another look at how jobs are valued in your firm.
The book emphasizes looking for key contributors outside of the structure of an org chart.
By treating all jobs more or less equally, the organization underinvests in high-return ("A") positions and overinvests in low-return ("C") positions. These losses are compounded by underinvestments in high-return employees ("A" players) and overinvestments in low-return employees ("C" players). As a result, high performers leave and low performers stay, which over time creates a drag on firm performance and the need for significant, and often unfocused, layoffs.
Human resource departments are often focused on correcting employees who are not a good organizational fit instead of creating an environment to nurture top performers. Low-return employees drag the performance of the organization down.
The excerpt mentions IBM's methods of identifying and enabling high-return positions throughout the organization. IBM is an on-demand business and attempts to create an on-demand workforce.
Key elements that help to create an on-demand workforce include deploying programs that recognize accomplishments, regarding people development as an investment, differentiating performance and rewards, nurturing leadership capacity, driving accountability, and balancing its human asset utilization.
Overall a really good article and in-line with my way of business thinking.
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Mar13
RSS source element: threading your feed
The
sourceelement in RSS 2.0 is the most under-utilized item element yet it solves many of the issues of tracking threads and citing an item's source. I would like to lift the veil on this optional sub-element ofitemand introduce new ways to track related content inside a feed aggregator.The purpose of the source element according to the RSS 2.0 specification is to "propagate credit for links, to publicize the sources of news items." It contains two pieces of information about a cited source: a RSS feed URL and the name of the channel.
<source url="http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/index.xml">Niall Kennedy's Weblog</source>
Using the code above a weblog post could define the source of the data contained within the post. Using the example from Brent Simmons' post, two posts from separate weblogs discussing the release of a software upgrade could both point at the software vendor's release page within their source element to give credit and provide a service to their users to track common threads.
A feed aggregator could gather all of the source elements and determine similar sources and near-neighbor relations. A user could browse a commentary by topic, follow a conversation thread, and discover the most commonly cited post within a given topic.
Sources are commonly cited in HTML by including text such as "(via linked source)." A weblog authoring tool could generate a RSS source element when it parses the post and discovers one representation of a source citation. Aggregators supporting authorship tie-ins should pass this data to the weblog authoring tool. If everyone utilizes the specification to its fullest we should have a much richer experience authoring and consuming new content.
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Mar11
Flickr photo printing with EZ Prints
Flickr users will soon be able to print their photographs from within Flickr. Flickr announced it will partner with EZ Prints for high-quality digital photofinishing fulfillment. The new printing options will be available when Flickr is out of beta. EZ Prints provides photo fulfillment services for Yahoo! Photos and Webshots.
EZ Prints offers up to 48" x 96" prints and a variety of sizes. I would like to see Flickr introduce new ways for photographers to sell copies of their photographs through a printing fulfillment center.
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Mar10
Chameleon Bloglines extension
Joshua Taylor created a Bloglines extension to track attention metadata within the Bloglines newsreader. The Chameleon Reader web application is an alternate viewing interface for Bloglines and utilizes Bloglines Web Services. Joshua has a Masters degree in human-computer interaction design from Stanford University and currently works as a researcher for HP labs in Palo Alto.
Chameleon keeps track of which feeds you read, how often, and when. It determines your favorite feeds and links and exposes the usage scores. Very cool!
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Mar09
More questions answered
I have been following the conversation around the blogosphere over the last two days regarding my Flickr post and subsequent weblog posts. Some common questions exist and I would like to address just a few of those questions here.
My previous post was consciously one thousand words to make a subtle artistic statement during my clarification and apology: a picture is worth a thousand words.
Questions and Answers
- Was the work created on your own time, on your own hardware, and uploaded to your own personal web server?
- Yes. I created and uploaded the image Friday night at home with my own personal computer.
- I really want to see the original poster. Can I have a copy?
- My original thought was to remove the work if one of the organizations depicted had issue with the use of their marks. One of the five organizations took issue with the use of their marks and I therefore removed the image from Flickr. This action was consistent with my original thought outside of the influence of Technorati. Technorati acted as a connector in this sense, alerting me to the concern of the pictured organization. I would have preferred the organization contacted me directly, especially given our shared history, but oh well.
- Why did you take down the post on your weblog?
- I wanted the whole thing to be over. I tried to return a HTTP response of 410 (Gone) but the Apache configuration on my host fails to comply. As I mentioned in my last post, I plan to return to the original subject of personal weblogs created by employees of corporations in a few days once my stress level is decreased and I get some sleep.
Do you have any questions I have not answered above? Leave a comment or contact me privately to continue the conversation.
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Mar07
Whose voice is it anyway?
Last Friday night I posted a modified poster originally created by Albert Dome in 1942 for the U.S. government's Office of Facts and Figures. The struggle of corporations to come to terms with a printing press at the fingertips of every employee is very interesting to me and as a history enthusiast I decided to express these curiosities through visual imagery from another era, an era of fear that the consequences of any action might be more than any individual would like to bear.
First, the full story. Every time I read stories about fear within organizations about employee weblogs I think of historical parallels and how society eventually moved on. The 95 theses of Martin Luther nailed to the Church of All Saints and the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Mainfesto posted on a website for everyone to view and comment. The struggle of Johann Gutenberg as he mass produced bibles in Frankfurt and the fear of the church that their authority would disappear as the ink no longer flowed directly from their quill to the eyes of the people. Control is usually exerted through fear, and propaganda posters from the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War epitomize a culture of fear and dire consequence awaiting you at every corner. I have talked about wanting to remix the themes of old cultures of fear represented by these propaganda posters with the new culture of fear emerging from corporate board rooms. I modified Albert Dome's image to show this culture of fear in a medium most people are familiar with as being over-the-top and reminiscent of an Orwellian world we would never like to experience.
I published the an image on Flickr showing the dropped note depicted on the poster replaced with the logos of Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger, UserLand, and Blojsom. I picked these companies because they represent the new printing press and the new medium of communication causing fear and excitement simultaneously from varied audiences.
I pinged a few people over IM after I posted just to make sure I was not being too strong or offensive. A coworker contacted me to let me know he thought some people viewing the image might not comprehend my message and may take offense, but I like art that elicits a point of view. When I got to work I met with my boss to hear his opinion and I talked about my view on the image and the historical contexts. He pointed out to me that others might not see the image as my own work and opinion, but rather as a Technorati opinion. I was convinced this may be true for him, a company executive, but not for me. He expressed concern there was not even a disclaimer in the image description to designate the work as my own. I republished my original post and Flickr entry and added a disclaimer of individuality thinking it would be enough.
So what changed? Towards the end of the work day I find out Technorati received some feedback about the image. I was surprised since no one had contacted me directly or left a comment on Flickr or on my weblog. What I had previously perceived as corporate paranoia became a reality as I saw the feedback channel did not pass through me.
I have since realized the imagery was in bad taste, especially to the organizations involved. I used the logos of other corporations I felt represented the printing press at the fingertips of the masses and associated those companies with an image of a dying American soldier, a rifle butt, and barbed wire. It is not the type of image I would want associated with my business. I apologize to the companies and open source projects pictured. I see you as leaders in the space and empowering the conversations I love to see happen. At some point in my blogging history I have used every piece of software pictured.
I failed to comprehend the effects of my actions on Technorati. I have always operated under the assumption that until I reach executive status at any company I work for I remain an individual voice and do not represent the organization. Just as weblogs and corporate transparency changed the world we love to interact with daily, it has also changed the way we see corporations. We establish relationships with companies through their engaged employees for better or for worse. The voice and actions of individuals become associated with the companies and organizations of their employ.
The past day has been a huge wake-up call. I see now that the voice of a company is not limited to top level executives, vice-presidents, and public relations officers. It is a huge responsibility on the individual and a bit difficult to fully comprehend until you have seen the effects of an economy of conversations. I need to be more aware of my actions as they are perceived as the actions of Technorati.
My interpretation of Technorati's current blogging policy is an attempt to make sure employees are aware of the weight their words carry in this new medium and new industry. It is a really difficult thing to communicate and I am still not sure how to communicate this message effectively to new employees. I will give the issue of corporate blogging some more thought and post again soon with my experiences and observations. It is for this reason it is recommended that Technorati employees seek the opinion of a coworker if they are unsure of how a post might be interpreted by others, to lend a fresh pair of eyes and an experienced mind to your intended message. Technorati subscribes to the idea that markets are conversations. We are all about a direct line of communication to our users and I intend to help facilitate those important conversations.
I am willing to answer any questions about what's going on with Technorati or general issues of blogging within corporations. An important aspect of any conversation is for both sides to speak with a human voice. I am human, I made a mistake, and I hope to continue to have open and honest communication.
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Mar07
Cheese sandwich
I had a cheese sandwich for lunch today. It was yummy.
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Mar05
Bloggers seen as loose lips
The commentary expressed on this weblog is my point of view and may not necessarily represent the point of view of Technorati.
Last night I modified a few propaganda posters from the 1940s to express how corporations would like to control what their employees say on a weblog, at a bar, or even to their famlies. When I hear the restrictions of fear from corporate executives images from wartime propaganda emerges in my mind and the person delivering the message of subjection takes the shape of Joseph Stalin.
I try to imagine what posters will hang in the break rooms of tomorrow as corporations attempt to exert absolute control over all aspects of their business.
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Mar01
Blo.gs for sale
Jim Winstead officially placed blo.gs up for sale today. 10,847 users tracking favorite sites and a large blog database. Includes a large ping database
The site cost $3500 to date and earned less than $750. Users will have a chance to delete their account before any data is handed over to new owners.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the service and how much people are willing to pay for a database, domain names, and some code.
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Mar01
Free TypePad weblogs on Friendster
Friendster now offers free weblogs powered by TypePad. The free weblogs are supported by advertising and limited to 250 megabytes of bandwidth each month. Friendster weblogs can be upgraded to regular TypePad subscription levels.
Is this a sign of things to come for the TypePad service? It could just be a partner offering or it could be TypePad but the paid barrier to entry of TypePad always made it a more distinguished address online.
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Mar01
Segway introduces new models with 24-mile range
Segway announced the Segway HT i180 today featuring new lithium-ion batteries with a range of up to 24 miles (400 watt hours capacity). The new batteries cut the Segway's ground clearance to only 3 inches.
I want one, I just don't want to spend $5,000 on one. A cool Java-powered gadget.
