Posts from July 2005

News Corporation announced it will acquire Intermix Media, Inc. for $12 a share, or approximately $580 million in cash. Intermix is the parent company of MySpace.com, a popular social networking and blogging service with over eighteen million members. News Corporation is an international media conglomerate and consisting of Fox, Sky, DirectTV, New York Post, and Harper Collins. Intermix Media recently settled a spyware suit with the State of New York for $7.5 million dollars. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter pending shareholder approval. MySpace.com is attracting 2 million new registered users every month according to chief...

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Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, and Jim Kelly, editor of Time Magazine spoke tonight at Stanford about the current state of journalism. Topics included confidential and anonymous sources, the influence of blogging, and the consolidation of news media. On Mark Cooper and Karl Rove Time Magazine and reporter Matt Cooper were recently criticized for turning over the names of sources after a grand-jury subpoena. Jim Kelly explained that while reporter's notes and research are their own property Matt Cooper included the names of his sources in company e-mails that were later demanded by the grand-jury investigating the leak of...

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I just finished my Atom 1.0 feed template for Movable Type. I believe it is compliant with the Atom 1.0 specification and my feed validates according to Feed Validator. Movable Type template My Atom 1.0 feed I will not switch my blog's advertised Atom feed from 0.3 to 1.0 until Bloglines, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator support Atom 1.0 format. Tags: atom10, movabletype...

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Marble Sportswear of Beverly Hills, California recently applied for a trademark and service mark for the word "blog." Is there a new line of blog-specific clothing on the way or are they just squatting? Small Business Blog is also an applied service mark the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council and their "virtual destination where small business owners and entrepreneurs can communicate about issues impacting their enterprises and the economy." Both trademarks seem pointless but maybe pushing the government papers really does pay off. Tags: trademark...

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Tom Foremski wrote this morning about a presentation that included some possible future products from Technorati. I won't comment on future products, but it's interesting to take a look at some of the underlying issues some bloggers are worried about. Commercial Use Can another company make money off of your content? I currently receive a lot of referral traffic from a variety of search services such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Each search company sells advertisements alongside an excerpt of my content. I have no problem with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN making money off of my content because they also...

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Lorem ipsum is the new alpha. Thanks to three year beta programs by large companies such as Google I think we all place little value in the term "beta." Why should alpha be any different? The solution? Keep some lorem ipsum on your page so your visitors know this site is not yet ready for a general audience. It's like leaving the top corner of a house unpainted to let everyone know it's not yet ready for the realtor. Tags: loremipsum, alpha...

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Yahoo!'s new RSS search site was introduced to the public domain this morning. Yahoo! RSS Search is no longer exposed outside the firewall so don't be surprised if you are redirected to Yahoo! Search when you follow the aforementioned link. This early version of a future Yahoo! search component appeared to restrict searches of Yahoo! Search's index to only include content published as a feed. I presume Yahoo! will use RSS as a generic term referring to feeds including RDF, RSS, and Atom. A search for "Niall Kennedy" returned 205 results on Yahoo! RSS Search compared to 565 results...

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Technorati has created a special page dedicated to aggregating weblog posts related to the four bomb explosions in London this morning and the corresponding activity in London and around the world. The sidebar contains links to popular sources of news and information chosen by the Technorati staff. There is a lot of information still being discovered and it has been interesting to watch the story unfold from millions of keyboards around the world. I was especially surprised to see the number of photographs people posted of their televisions tuned to news channel reporting. Tags: 070705, london...

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The current issue of The McKinsey Quarterly has a good article on building long-term corporate goals. Most companies focus on short-term results such as quarterly earnings at the expense of long-term corporate health but I was really surprised to hear the results of a recent study of 401 financial executives and their planning goals. A majority of the managers polled said that they would forgo an investment offering a decent return on capital if it meant missing their quarterly earnings expectations. Indeed, more than 80 percent of the executives responding said they would cut expenditures on R&D and marketing to...

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