General news items.
Om Malik announced he is leaving Business 2.0 to found a new micropublishing company combining blogs and content-focused web services, among a few other things. Om's new company is the first investment of True Ventures. Both Om and True recognize the new era of lean, agile startups, and planned the early stages of the startup accordingly.
I wish my friend Om the best of luck in his new life as an entrepreneur.
In the summer of 2000 I became fed up enough with clueless recruiters calling me I decided to create a fake résumé to test how bad the industry had become. The résumé was not just slightly fake, it was over-the-top and obvious to anyone in the industry. I put the résumé up on Monster.com with my real name and phone number and a completely altered work history.
I had calls within 20 minutes, including recruiters claiming to work for KPCB and Benchmark encouraging me to come work at companies such as BroadBand Office or Catapulse. I had so many calls I had to shut off my phone to get back to work.
Do I remember the bubble of the late 90s? Yes, why yes I do. I hope I never again get a call from a recruiter interested in vaporware experts.
The latest numbers about blogging terms reaching the mainstream masses have little interest to me based on the questions that have been asked. Asking people on the street if they can define RSS or podcasting is like asking about a PSTN or 802.11g wireless networks. It makes much more sense to focus on current uses of the technology to determine the pervasiveness of new ideas.
I'll use my mom as an example because she is afraid of her computer crashing if she changes anything, even plugging in a new keyboard. Some of the news she cares about the most is thousands of miles away and not well covered by TV, radio, or print publications in California.
My mom would love to have daily updates on a few things: the latest news from Ireland, the latest news from in and around my brother's military base in Iraq, and updates from my sisters' schools. If she happens to be home at the right time on a Monday night she can catch 22 minutes of news geared towards Irish-Americans interested in what's going on "back home." My parents visit a blog to find the latest news from my brother's base in Iraq, but they have no clue they are reading what some people call a blog. She visits school websites to find the latest general news.
If my mom opened up her web browser and found all her favorite news sources in one place, time-shifted and waiting for her on her schedule, she would probably be using RSS, podcasting, or some other fancy word but wouldn't be able to tell you what is powering the experience.
Stewart and Caterina from Flickr are on the cover of the April 3 issue of Newsweek for "putting the 'We' in Web." The article introduces readers to the idea of a participatory web where small teams can enable millions of users to create their own site, community, and data interactions. My favorite quote is at the end of the article:
The Living Web means that there may be plenty of opportunities to become the next Flickr, and hundreds of start-ups are trying to do just that. At Tim O'Reilly's recent Emerging Technology Conference, it seemed that 1,200 people had signed on to some collectively generated business plan: starting a company in a spare bedroom, outsourcing the programming to some Indian company they found on the Web, getting content from users and then having users organize the content by tagging, pocketing money from Google ads placed on the Web site and, finally, selling the company to Yahoo. (Bad news: Yahoo's Horowitz admits, "We can't buy everyone.")
UPN and The WB will launch a new network named CW this fall and shut down their existing channels. No word on how the change affects airing of Simpsons reruns.
Joyent, a groupware product that launched six weeks ago, has just acquired TextDrive, a 18 month-old web hosting company. Joyent was struggling with its infrastructure and TextDrive wanted to become more involved in the hosted applications space so the acquisition makes sense in that context.
The announcement definitely seems like a case of startup synergy from two cash-flow positive businesses.
I host my sites at TextDrive and received a 1 GB bump in my storage allocation this morning. TextDrive offers cutting edge developer features including the latest versions of Apache, Lighttpd, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. TextDrive also donates 50% of its profits to an open source web project chosen by the account holder.
I will have to wait and see how the acquisition changes the combined company.
It's 5 a.m. in San Francisco and the Google/Riya story I blogged about on Wednesday night is currently the #4 story on Digg.com with 313 diggs as I write. My server is still holding up nicely under the load, but since there has been a lot of talk about Digg lately I think it's interesting to share some stats.
Unlike Slashdot which has posts listed in reverse chronological order, I believe a top digg can rise or fall over time since I am currently #4 on Digg yet the post has more diggs than #2 and #3. I mention the difference because I cannot tell if this traffic is indicative of a #4 spot or if I was #1, #8, #12, etc. before I took a look this morning
Over 2600 visitors from Digg in the last 5 hours. Memeorandum referred about 40 visitors in the last 5 hours by comparison.
Tags: digg
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!
I had a cheese sandwich for lunch today. It was yummy.
A new version of Internet Explorer will launch before Longhorn. A beta version of Internet Explorer 7.0 will be available by this summer. Gates made the announcement during a keynote presentation at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.
Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »