Category Archives: General news

General news items.

  1. Flickr on the cover of Newsweek

    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...

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  2. Blog*Spot, Hammertime

    MC Hammer is now a blogger and podcaster. He signs off each post with "--Hammertime." Video on demand will allow you to see my art, my life and work on demand and without the infection of those who have hidden agendas. This is the revolution and it is on demand. There is no stopping this movement and you can't contain it. The music was built from the vibrations and the call of the people.We will dance. Hammer talks about his huge dance pants and plans to launch instructional dance videos. The videos and blog posts had me laughing in...

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  4. Podcast trademark rejection cites Wikipedia

    The United States Patent and Trademark Office rejected a trademark application last September for the term "podcast." Attached to the rejection letter is a complete printout of the podcasting entry on Wikipedia, citing the previous history of the term and its use describing a characteristic or feature of a product. A few searches in the trademark database found entries for "podcast ready" audio players and a rejected application for vidcast, both citing blog entries. The accuracy of the podcast entry on Wikipedia has been under dispute and depending when the trademark office took a look at the entry the examining...

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  5. Correcting Kottke

    Popular blogger Jason Kottke recently posted an entry criticizing blog search companies for the incompleteness of their results compared to his internal search tool powered by Movable Type. I happen to know both Movable Type and blog search pretty well, so I decided to dig into the data and see where search engines might have missed the mark in the interest of improving quality. I found that Jason's criticisms where a bit unfounded yet still may alter the perceptions of many people who are heavily influenced by what they read on his blog. Jason found more results searching his installation...

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  6. Paying bloggers for generating useful content

    As more and more companies create business models around "consumer generated media" individual publishers are beginning to wonder when they might see a slice of the revenue. I believe there are opportunities for bloggers to be paid for their content without compromising editorial integrity and also rewarding the tool builders. Profiting from consumer generated media is not a new thing. Shopping sites such as Amazon.com or PriceGrabber have been doing it for years, asking an author to turn over the rights to their content in exchange for the author's work being featured alongside a product. At PriceGrabber we paid anywhere...

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  7. Urban blog advertising

    I was walking home tonight when I came across a very different form of lamppost advertising. Someone had posted two of their latest blog posts at a busy street corner in San Francisco. The top post introduces weblogs and the topics they cover, encouraging people to read more weblogs for the latest news about their community and the topics they care about. The bottom post talks about comments by radio host Rush Limbaugh against homosexuals. Someone came by and added their own Xanga blog URL to the post about Limbaugh, possibly as a way to supplement the existing 88...

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  8. PodSession on blogs, RSS, and advertising

    The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. Om and I sat down at his apartment last week to talk about blogs, RSS, and advertising. Om asked most of the questions, focusing the discussion about how to make the right choices in blogging software and services to become a better blogger. Full show notes are available on the Om and Niall PodSessions site. This week's podcast is 21 minutes in length and a 9.7 MB download. After the podcast I gave Om's RSS a makeover including switching his feed to FeedBurner, adding more branding by utilizing more...

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  9. Joyent acquires TextDrive

    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....

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  10. San Francisco municipal WiFi is live

    MetroFi announced today the deployment of wireless mesh networks at San Francisco's Civic Center, Ferry Building and Portsmouth Square. I visited all three locations this evening and SF TechConnect, San Francisco's wireless access grid, is definitely alive and broadcasting. Using the network supposedly currently requires visiting a splash screen and accepting a terms of service document, but I could not establish a connection to any of the nodes. (pictured above are the three network locations plotted on a Google Map. Please open this post in a web browser if you do not see a map) Macworld reports the system...

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