Feed statistics and advertising company FeedBurner has acquired web page tracker Blogbeat for an undisclosed sum. Blogbeat is located in Raleigh-Durham, giving FeedBurner a presence on the east (web stats), center (hq), and west (bizdev) in the U.S.. Blogbeat tracks visitors to a web page using a JavaScript placed on each site page. FeedBurner is able to provide similar tracking through its FeedFlare service but had not yet built a front-end allowing publishers to view the data. The acquisition of Blogbeat will allow FeedBurner to offer publishers a more complete view of their site, posts, and subscriptions by tracking…
Widgets are taking over the web, small pieces at a time. Big web destinations are opening their templates to custom configurations by users and pre-configurations with special partners. Mix and match your favorite content from around the web on your personal start page from Microsoft, Google, or Netvibes. Share a few live and always updating bits of information in your blog sidebar using widgets on WordPress or TypePad. Small(er) businesses can leverage the huge distributions of users across most of the top web properties. Over half of the top Internet companies for home users currently open up their pages for…
Mac geek Dan Lurie took his PowerBook to Squid Labs yesterday for a custom laser-etched cover. Dan designed a tag cloud full of Web 2.0 buzzwords for the world to see. He'll definitely have fun at the next Web geek gathering. I have a feeling most of the buzzwords will end up a historical blip like so many of the companies in the Monopoly .com edition I have at home. If you're coming to San Francisco for WWDC start designing your etched covers now! There are a few laser etching shops in the Bay area….
Update 8/15: PE Wire places the total amount raised at $10.52 million, not $7.6 million as previously reported. Technorati received a $10.52 million investment in June from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. The investment was revealed in a SEC filing on June 22 and made public on Monday. VentureWire reported the investment in its popular newsletter this week. Andreas Stavropoulous of DFJ and Ryan McIntyre of Mobius were previous investors in Technorati and have occupied board seats for close to two years. Technorati took an angel round of investment in the summer of 2003 from a few individuals…
Chinese online marketplace Taobao is lending its name to a new 12,000 square-foot shopping mall in Shanghai. Taobao, an eBay competitor with about twice the Chinese market share, will receive about $1.25 million a year for use of its name on the Taobao Cheng shopping center. About 300 retailers will be able to setup shops with broadband Internet access and discounted rent (about $22 a month) connected to their online storefront. Merchants can staff their brick and mortar store and fulfill orders placed online at the same time. Taobao is owned by Alibaba, which in turn is partially owned…
Yahoo! and Microsoft's instant messaging networks are now able to exchange messages between users. A Windows Live Messenger user can IM with their Yahoo! buddies within the Windows Live application and without having a Yahoo! account. Same thing in reverse for Yahoo! users. These initial features are just the beginning of planned interoperability between Yahoo! and Microsoft's networks. The interoperability should be especially popular in east Asia, where Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger are extremely popular. Desktop clients based on open-source libraries such as Gaim currently provide a single client for text-messaging access to multiple networks today, and the…
Harvard business school professor Robert D. Austin is writing a book on reliable innovation and shared some of his findings in a HBS Working Knowledge interview last week. He takes a look at how some big accidental discoveries such as anesthesia, cellophane, cholesterol lowering drugs, cornflakes, dynamite, the ice cream soda, Ivory soap, NutraSweet (and several other artificial sweeteners), nylon, penicillin, photography, rayon, PVC, smallpox vaccine, stainless steel, Teflon came about and what are key factors allowing accidents to happen and realizing value in what could be considered chaos. It takes a considerable capability to see the value in an…
According to comScore Media Metrix numbers cited by the San Francisco Chronicle Google Blog Search had 94,000 unique visitors in May versus 3.3 million unique visitors for Technorati in the same period. Google Blog Search has less than 3% of the number of users as Technorati under those metrics. Either that's a typo or Google is not very competitive in both blog search or shopping comparison verticals….
The World Cup Final match between France and Italy will be shown this Sunday in Dolores Park starting at 11 a.m. If you live in San Francisco it should be a pretty fun place to watch the game with a good crowd. Food and drink proceeds will help fund science field trips for Bay Area inner city kids to places such as Slide Ranch. I recommend a trip to Phil's Coffee on 18th and Sanchez to wake yourself up before the game….
If your site currently generates an Atom feed for use as a Google Sitemap you may want to hold back upgrading your feed to Atom 1.0. Google Sitemaps currently accepts Atom 0.3 only and will throw errors when it encounters the Atom 1.0 feed….
LiveJournal will soon rollout a Jabber service to connect its over 10 million users and content generated on the service. LiveJournal users can authenticate against the service using their LiveJournal username and password to connect to their online friends and receive real-time alerts on new posts and comments. Users will also be able to post to LiveJournal using a special chat bot. The team plans to federate the service to other networks, allowing interoperability with users on Google Talk and other compatible clients. The new service should be able to support Atom notifications over XMPP. Developers should be able…
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…
DeWitt Clinton: My recommendation to application developers today is to use Atom 1.0, not RSS, as the basis for your content syndication. DeWitt is the lead engineer at Amazon's A9 search engine. He took a pretty detailed look at RSS 2.0 and Atom as part of A9's syndication efforts (including OpenSearch) and shared some of his thoughts today on his blog. He appreciates the detailed implementation of the Atom Syndication Format allowing more lossless expression of data between content publisher and parser….
I heard a few questions yesterday about the future of Firefox and its product goals, differentiating factors, and its positioning against Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser. I've been following the Firefox process intermittently so I'll outline some of what I know in an attempt to spark community involvement and feedback on behalf of Mozilla and the Firefox team. The Firefox planners is divided into a few different functions such as planning, development, user interface, test, internationalization, and quality assurance, just to name a few. The product planners are currently engaging the community to determine what should be the…
About a year ago I said I would switch my blog's Atom output from 0.3 to 1.0 once Bloglines, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator supported the new format. Bloglines now supports Atom 1.0, so I just flipped my Atom feed over from 0.3 to 1.0. Everything should transition smoothly….
The state of Washington has declared today and tomorrow RSS days throughout the state. The declaration is in recognition of big companies, startups, and governments within Washington taking advantage of new technologies such as RSS to change the technology sector….
Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 is now available and includes some new feed reading features for users who like to browse their feed items in the browser. The new beta includes a refresh all option, mark all feed items read, and a few other final tweaks on the path to ship. Sometimes it's not fun to obey the machine and its update schedule. Advanced information hungry readers can now update all feeds at once, grabbing the latest content before disconnecting from the Internet or to be absolutely sure you're caught up on all your feeds. You can now mark a…
Vic Gundotra, Scoble's (former) boss' boss, is leaving Microsoft to join Google. Vic is taking a year off to allow his non-compete to elapse without legal issue. Vic is a general manager for platform evangelism and helped build Channel 9, 10, and other general developer evangelism efforts within Microsoft….
Germany plays Argentina this Friday, June 30, at 8 a.m. Pacific time. If you're at Gnomedex I'll have a viewing party in my room at the Edgewater. I'm rooting for Argentina. I'll be missing Chris Pirillo's opening statements and Mike Arrington's discussion, but no way they can't compete with Germany playing Argentina in Berlin. Sorry Om, I might miss the beginning of your session too. Given the possible matchups on Saturday such as England vs. Portugal or Brazil vs. Spain/France these will be tough choices for morning sessions….
The next version of Microsoft's Spaces hosted blogging product will include more social networking, gadget integration, and premium options such as no advertising on your blog. The features were announced tonight in a post on the Spaces team blog.
I am attending Bloggercon for the next two days, listening, participating and leading conversations on the world of blogging. Some quick observations from the last three hours of the conference: The live conversation surrounding me is competing with the conversations happening in the blogosphere. If the conversation becomes uninteresting I open my feed aggregator and see what's new among another few hundred sources of information. (pictured above: Marc Canter sleeping). Bloggercon is a non-commercial conference focused on users, with no commercial messages or pitches allowed to leave your mouth. A few attendees wore t-shirts with messaging instead, letting the…
Seth Sternberg of Meebo joined me and Om on this week's edition of Om and Niall PodSessions covering the latest trends and developments in instant messaging. Microsoft and Yahoo! launched new versions of their messaging software this week, including many features I will never use. What do end users want from their instant messaging software? Seth doesn't think the big portals have added a new feature that users have been clammoring for in years. Chinese company Tencent has captured about two-thirds of the Chinese market with its QQ client. Estonian company Skype has enjoyed tremendous success with its P2P and…
Apple is looking for ways to cut down on wait times at its stores' checkout lines and roaming WiFi-enabled processing stations in the hands of each employee may be the answer. The same employee helping you pick out the right set of headphones for your iPod can scan product barcodes and take payments via credit card right on the spot. Your receipt will sent to you via e-mail just in case you need to make a return or file an expense report. The handheld devices Apple uses in its store are powered by Windows. More information is available in…
Access to Mountain View's upcoming Google-powered WiFi network will require a Google account when it launches later this year. Users of the public WiFi network will land on a specially configured Google homepage for the city of Mountain View upon successful login with local modules such as weather, news, Chamber of Commerce, and school information. Requiring an account for every user means almost every person in Mountain View will have a GTalk account. Not only will you be able to likely connect instantly to people you know, but it will also be possible to browse users on nearby nodes if…
