Dan Gillmor has a new TypePad weblog. Grab your RDF feed or Atom feed if you would like to keep track of Dan’s new citizen journalism projects and other technology insights….
Category Archives: General news
Marc Canter rants again
I tried to leave a comment on Marc Canter’s weblog in response to his post reacting to requests for reasonably priced geek dinners, but his weblog is not setup correctly. If you want to use TypeKey you have to edit your Movable Type weblog preferences and add your TypeKey token. You’re not enabling a conversation! I was motivated enough to post here since Marc unfairly targeted some people trying to make the event work for everyone. Tantek’s idea was to try somewhere new and to make the event as inclusionary as possible. He’s been to geek dinners all around the…
Amazon customer images
Amazon allows customers to share its images of a product with the intention of helping buyers understand product features and uses. In the digital camera category customer images has become a high profile way to show off your work and be evaluated by other photography enthusiasts. Take a look at the customer images page of the Nikon D70 for a good example or view the top images in the camera and photo category. It’s an online portfolio hosted by Amazon….
FeedBurner announces FeedCount
FeedBurner announced new features today FeedCount, an image displaying the total number of readers of a FeedCount enabled FeedBurner feed. You can choose your own background and foreground color and choose an animated version. FeedBurner also claims 1 in 5 podcasts listed on audio.weblogs.com is provided by a FeedBurner feed….
Bay Area tech employment on the rise
Every day this week I have received an e-mail and phone call from Bay Area technology companies looking for a technical product manager. Some companies I have never heard of, others have a market capitalization in the billions. I would love to say they heard of me through my weblog, but most found me on Monster or some similar service. These companies just signed some big deals, more are coming, and they need to hire people quickly to support the new business. The Bay Area economy is picking up and many companies just can’t hire fast enough. Referral bonuses are…
Society of the Underemployed
As an economics nerd I have a lot of thoughts about weblogs and theories of incentive. Weblogs share some social and economic motivations with the world of open source software yet I struggle to quantify the economic effects on an individual publisher level. The key overlooked metric of the blogosphere is the society of the underemployed. People with full-time jobs and a paycheck who rather be doing something else on a full or part-time basis utilize weblog tools in an attempt to gain notoriety or possibly a new job. Weblogs are the karaoke night of online journalism where many participants…
Dan Gillmor starting new citizen-journalism project
Dan Gillmor is leaving the San Jose Mercury News in January to work on a citizen-journalism project. Wow! I better finish reading We the Media and tune in to what will surely be an interesting project….
Jason Kottke and Sony
Jason Kottke’s recent experience with Sony has him reconsidering his role as a publisher. Is the hassle worth it? Only big publishers have the budgets to deal with any hint of legal issues. I raised this issue at Lawrence Lessig’s Law & Blogging session at BloggerCon. Regardless of fair use, being on the right side of the law, it is difficult to gather the resources to respond to legal harassment. Lessig differentiated between a “nastygram” and an actual legal filing. Jason has demonstrated good judgment and community building in the past. I received an e-mail from Jason before he pointed…
David Sifry Red Herring interview
Red Herring published an interview with David Sifry of Technorati. The questions are pretty hard hitting and you get more background on Dave than the typical Technorati mention, like what he remembers about his high school prom. Secret to success? Work your ass off. Q. As much as Technorati is popular today, the company’s position in the industry can be considered tenuous. Do you have an exit strategy? A. Watch this space. Q. Are you profitable? A. Not yet….
The Canvas turns off all wall outlets
The Canvas is a café and gallery located on the edge of Golden Gate Park in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco. It is a nice, bright space with its own parking lot, good food, and interesting people. They also have free wireless Internet access and you will notice many laptops alongside food and drink. On a sunny weekend The Canvas can be crowded, and in the past The Canvas turned off their wireless Internet access to encourage turnover during their peak times. This weekend The Canvas decided to turn off all wall outlets, in what I assume is…