Posts from September 2005

A am sitting at a café working and thinking of the ideals of a social yet commercial working place away from home. Le Procope created a meeting place and exchange of ideas for great minds such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Hugo. Is it possible to create an intellectual center for geeks to match the historical cafés of the Middle East, Paris, and London? What are the essential ingredients to creating a meeting place for geeks and a birthplace of ideas and companies? Historical coffeehouses contained small libraries, bulletin boards, and self-publishing. We now use the Internet, blogs, and cell...

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Dave Winer and Robert Scoble would like more blog outputs as OPML. I just put together a Movable Type template to output all of my entries in OPML format complete with top-level categories. I output the resulting file as my index.opml. Check out my OPML template if you would like to create a OPML output of your Movable Type install. I have not validated the OPML is perfect and valid (but I did e-mail Dave Winer), and I really should have full subcategory traversal. It's a start. Update: Dave Winer verified the output is correct and works with his browser....

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The popular gadget blog Engadget is moving into new offices in New York and will be launching a testing lab for in-depth product reviews. The Engadget team announced the new venture at their San Francisco Engadget Reader Meetup. Engadget Labs will perform benchmarks and in-depth reviews of products. It sounds like a nice departure from the typical pay-per-article model of weblog networks. Editors Peter Rojas and Ryan Block will work out of their new office in New York with possibly a few other members of the Weblogs Inc. network. The new office space will include a special podcasting room...

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Many people consider September 7, 1998, the day Google was incorporated, to be it's birthday. Google has a birthday logo on its home page today as well as a blog post about the the company's birthday. When is the born on date of a startup? When you first file papers of incorporation? When you move into your first company-specific office? When you hire your first employee? When you close your first deal? I consider the birth of a startup to be the first time you solve the problem you set out to solve. It might be the first time...

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According to OneStat over the last 8 months Google's share of the search engine market has decreased 0.3% while MSN's share of the same market increased 0.3%. Yahoo!'s market share remained stable. Could Google be losing a significant amount of search customers to MSN? Tags: google, msn, onestat...

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Technorati and Edelman are partnering to help public relations and corporate communications in general better understand the preferences of bloggers. I've had a lot of bad experiences with PR pitches and there is definitely room for improvement. If you would like to help companies better tailor their methods and their approach to blogging you can share your opinions and answer a short survey. A bad PR agency e-mails me a press release asking if I would please post the press release on my blog. Good PR is when I am introduced to new things that solve a personal problem or...

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Tag Tuesday is back! If you are in the San Francisco area come out to Varnish Fine Art this Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. Scott Golder from HP Labs will talk about his recent research paper on collaborative tagging and Kevin Marks of Technorati will talk about the design and implementation of Blog Finder. Tag Tuesday is a developer-centered event. If you are working with tags or related methods of user classification and would like to present, let me know. Tags: hp, blogfinder, tags, tagtuesday...

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I had the opportunity to talk with Beth Goza yesterday about multiplayer online worlds such as Second Life. Beth worked for Microsoft for seven years but just accepted a new job with Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world of Second Life. I have read economics papers on virtual worlds such as Everquest or World of Warcraft but last night was my first tour from a fan. Second Life is a user-created world. Linden Lab has its own scripting language, soon to be compatible with C# I hear. Users create scripts and virtual worlds, and even actions within those...

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Webzine 2005, a weekend grassroots event all about online publishing, is finally here! Thanks to all of the organizers for their months of hard work to make this happen for an attendance cost of $22! If you are in the San Francisco area this weekend, come down to the Swedish American Hall at 2174 Market Street to meet the people involved in personal publishing and grassroots media while hopefully learning a few things. I will present a workshop tomorrow at noon on publicizing your work using feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) and tagging. Tags: webzine, webzine2005...

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Six Apart just unveiled "Project Comet" a codename for a new approach to weblogs throughout Six Apart blogging tools as an online activity hub incorporating multiple media types, multiple authors, multiple readerships, and a lower technical and psychological barrier to entry. The new technologies will be available in early 2006 as a free upgrade. Mena describes the new approach as a result of observing the variety of users across Six Apart properties and thinking of ways to increase the user base across all tools. We've taken the stuff we've learned from the community features of LiveJournal and mixed them with...

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