Comical

I am featured in today’s bLaugh comic (pictured above) playing soccer for France’s national team, or at least wearing their latest kit. I’m kicking a 70’s style Adidas Telstar ball. I have not been in a caricature since high school (prom or sober grad party, I forget which one). Chris told me I beat out Joe Lieberman for today’s spot….

Amanda Congdon off Rocketboom

The latest popular blogger to step out on their own is Amanda Congdon of popular video blog Rocketboom. According to a video post on her personal blog Amanda was kicked out by majority shareholder Andrew Baron. My guess as to what happened? Rocketboom was looking to expand into a video blog network and restructuring the company and ownership in preparation for the new move. Amanda has one of the most popular faces in video blogging so expect her to have a new job or startup soon. Andrew Baron is director and producer of Rocketboom. A statement on Rocketboom says…

Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup

Reports are coming in from the Vloggercon conference about Robert Scoble’s latest career move. According to Beet.TV and a few other verbal sources who were at the conference Scoble will publicly announce he is leaving Microsoft within the next few days and joining Silicon Valley startup PodTech.net as a videoblogger. Scoble has been at Microsoft for about three years and plans to move back to the Bay Area. Robert Scoble was employed as a videoblogger at Microsoft’s Channel 9 developer center, interviewing teams across Microsoft on their latest releases and features. Later in his Microsoft career Scoble’s popular blog became…

The machines have a blog of their own

Your gadgets are blogging. Every time you take a picture, listen to a song, or play a video game you might also be blogging. Our shoes log and share our every step, our scales analyze our weight and body fat, and our cars let the world know it’s been too long since your last oil change. The creation and exposure of data from our daily lives is creating new data available for search and subscription. It’s time to rethink what we call a blog. The availability of this new data will cause us to rethink what we want to…

Dave Winer relaunches Share Your OPML

Two years ago Dave Winer created feeds.scripting.com to help people share lists of feeds and discover other members of the community with similar interests. Winer just relaunched the site at a new URL, share.opml.org, to connect a new community and raise awareness of the OPML file format. The new site was based on Manila and the new site is built on top of WordPress. The Share Your OPML site collects lists of feed subscription URLs from its members and presents lists of most popular feeds, individual feed subscribers, and a peek into the lists of other members with similar reading…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…