Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 25 of 72.

Movable Type 3.2 includes free license for unlimited weblogs

Mena Trott just announced a new license structure for Movable Type 3.2: “all users will be entitled to unlimited weblogs. This goes for free users, as well.” Six Apart’s current pricing structure allows an unpaid user of Movable Type up to 3 weblogs with unlimited weblog licenses available for a Personal Basic license fee of $70. The change makes sense as it allows Six Apart to track all of its licenses based on the number of authors. Tags: movabletype…

Geek dinner introductions

Last night’s geek dinner brought together a variety of people from the world of blogging. I enjoy sitting at a table with a group of people I have not met before and learning about how they meet their personal or business goals by creating or reading blogs. I spoke with a woman in charge of web content for the nation’s largest ball bearing company. She is using blogs to help her company communicate better with its suppliers and differentiate themselves from the competitive market. I always joked about how some day people would use blogs to sell even small things…

Geek dinner tomorrow night at Henry Hunan in San Francisco

About 50 geeks plan to attend tomorrow’s night’s dinner at Henry Hunan in downtown San Francisco. We will have a mini-blogging conference over spicy noodles. Dinner starts around 6:30 and the restaurant closes at 9 p.m. I plan to have the restaurant divide our large group into about 5 separate bills, or one bill for each table of approximately ten people. If you or a friend would still like to attend please feel free to join us even if you can only stay for some dumplings. Henry’s Hunan Restaurant 110 Natoma Street 6:30 p.m. Tags: blogbusinesssummit, geekdinner, hunan…

Kent Brockman on blog rumors

B.L. Ochman was given a tip from a venture capitalist that Technorati is about to be sold “to a large search company.” I immediately thought of The Simpsons’ Kent Brockman from the Deep Space Homer episode in season 5. You can watch the 4.7 MB video clip of the ant overlords and have a good Friday. As for the rumor? No comment but I hope any company interested in search and using Technorati’s services will check out the Technorati developer APIs to get a better idea of how they might be able to work with Technorati and its underlying data….

Odeo receives venture capital funding

Odeo just announced a funding round led by Charles River Ventures and joined by Amicus Ventures and 14 individual investors. Individual investors Emanuele Angelidis Francesco Caio Ron Conway James Hong Don Hutchinson Mitch Kapor Josh Kopelman Joe Kraus Mike Maples Tim O’Reilly Dave Pell Ariel Poler Barbara Poggiali Ed Zschau No word yet on the total amount investor or who sits on the board. Tags: odeo, podcasting…

Geek dinner next Wednesday, August 17 in San Francisco

There will be so many interesting people in San Francisco next week for the Blog Business Summit we need to have an informal dinner to mix and mingle. Let’s get together at Henry’s Hunan in downtown San Francisco next Wednesday, August 17, starting at 6:30 p.m. Henry’s Hunan is located at 110 Natoma Street only one block from Blog Business Summit at the Palace Hotel. Please leave a comment below or contact me if you plan to attend so I can coordinate with the restaurant. Please plan for a cost of around $20 with drinks or $15 without. The restaurant…

PodShow receives $8.85 million series A round

PodShow has received $8.85 million dollars in venture capital from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers according to today’s Private Equity Week Wire. The board is currently comprised of John Doerr and Ray Lane from KPCB, Jerry Newman of Bear Stearns, and angel investor Ram Shriram. PodShow was created by Ron Bloom and Adam Curry last year. The PodShow strategy podcast from April provides more information on the company and how they plan to expand. (financing tip via Jeff Clavier) This investment is a big deal for podcasting and user-generated distributed media. I have not really been following…

Google site search highlights

I was searching Google this morning and I noticed some new links under the top search result. I was searching for FTP software Transmit and I noticed four screenshots immediately below the search result for transmit. How interesting! People searching for Transmit can immediately view screenshots of the application. A search for Technorati reveals a few chosen links within Technorati’s many web pages as well. So what’s going on? My guess is Google is experimenting with ways of surfacing multiple results within the same domain. We currently see this exposure of up to four links for the top search result…

Eurekster launches SearchPublisher platform

Eurekster, a social and personalized search company located in San Francisco, just launched their SearchPublisher platform that provides site publishers with web search unique to their site or group of cites and personalized for each user. Site publishers receive a revenue share for any advertisements selected by its users. SearchPublisher provides sample searches based on recent search activity in your defined activity. If you are too small to create an interesting search sample you can join a SearchParty and receive results from other groups such as the Blogs SearchParty. It’s the first interesting search engine I know of with revenue…

Firefox feed styling

I downloaded the nightly build of Firefox this morning and noticed a new default styling for feeds. Firefox is currently displaying headlines only but it looks like you may be able to adjust that preference through the hovering preference and information box on the right-hand side. A checkbox appears next to items with a link currently in your browser history. Deer Park is the name of Firefox binaries while in alpha development stage. Tags: firefox, deerpark…

Paul Graham on blogging and open source

I just finished reading Paul Graham’s latest essay he prepared for OSCON: What Business Can Learn from Open Source. Paul is an excellent writer and hit on a few key points I want to emphasize here. I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that’s news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn’t know this, I mean the structure of business doesn’t reflect it. Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by…

BlogHer reflections

I just finished a full day of sessions at the BlogHer conference in Santa Clara, a conference focused on female voices expressed through blogs. A met a variety of women who blogged about anything from the life of a professional dominatrix, favorite cupcakes, and analysis of the Supreme Court. You could hear the passion in the quivering voices of women as they stood up to speak in front of this crowd of hundreds and share their story. Most of the attendees I spoke were not local and the conference provided a way for them to meet face-to-face women they…

My first house, other big news

Today was a huge day for me. It’s my birthday. I just bought my first house, a one-bedroom condo in San Francisco’s south of Market district near 9th and Howard. I just found out my younger brother is being deployed to Tikrit, Iraq in about six weeks with his Army unit. Posting might be light while I fill out forms and move physical locations. Tags: sanfrancisco…

Apple Cupertino headquarters not removed from MSN Visual Earth

There has been a rumor floating around this morning that Microsoft intentionally removed Apple’s current headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop from their satellite imagery of Cupertino. It’s not true. The satellite photograph used by MSN Visual Earth is from U.S. Geological Survey and was taken on October 30, 1991. I called Apple’s Public Relations department and confirmed the current headquarters building was not built at this time. U.S. Geological Survey also has a photograph of the area from February 27, 2004 but it looks incomplete. Microsoft Terraserver Imagery MSN Visual Earth USGS National Map Viewer If you look at the…

Tag Tuesday with Odeo July 26

This Tuesday, July 26, is the second meeting of Tag Tuesday. Odeo developers Rabble and Blaine will share their experience evaluating tagging systems and coding a tagging directory of poscasts at Odeo.com. They will also discuss best practices for tagging backends. Odeo runs on Ruby on Rails with a Flash front-end and makes heavy use of Ajax and RSS. Sound interesting? I hope you can join us at Varnish Fine Art at 77 Natoma Street (between 1st and 2nd) this Tuesday starting at 6:30 p.m. Varnish serves drinks but not food, so I recommend you stop off somewhere on 2nd…

Microsoft RSS Search coming on Monday?

MSN has been busy this week crawling all the syndication feeds it can find. It looks like Microsoft is getting ready to announce feed search for MSN Search on Monday morning. The move is not too surprising as we have seen MSN dabble in RSS search with the small Start.com research project in public for a few months now. Are you curious what MSN has been up to? Check your server logs for IP addresses 207.68.146.41 and 207.68.146.47 to see the initial probe and 207.68.146.53 for the deeper revisit. 207.68.146.47 – – [21/Jul/2005:00:15:05 +0000] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0” 200 37 “-“…

RSS is still an obscure term

Pew Internet & American Life Project asked over 1300 Internet users about their awareness of certain Internet terms. While 88% of respondents had a good idea what the term “spam” means only 9% had a good idea what “RSS” means. 26% of respondents had never heard the term “RSS.” I am sure MP3 was just as obscure before the term became synonymous with all digital music….

Yahoo! quarterly numbers

Yahoo! announced quarterly results yesterday and gave us a peek at what’s been happening for the last 3 months. The Yahoo! Music service seemed to cause the most excitement among analysts on the conference call and Yahoo! plans to fully release the service by the end of September. Terry Semel said over half a million publishers are submitting feeds to My Yahoo! and over 4 million sites have “Add to My Yahoo!” buttons on their pages. He also mentioned the relevance of personal content producers using Flickr and blogs during the recent London bombings. Yahoo! had 3.14 billion average…

Intelliseek introduces BlogPulse profiles

BlogPulse profiles are now online as a beta feature. The new tool from Intelliseek displays various information Intelliseek collects about a the top 10,000 blog URLs such as people linking to the blog, sites linked by the blog, most recent blog posts, and common keywords. They also provide a list of 10 blogs that cite similar links and text. My favorite feature is the common keywords identified in recent posts. It would be fun to take a group of keywords and guess the blogger. Tags: blogpulse…

Microsoft RSS search using Start.com

Microsoft announced a new version of Start.com yesterday that includes news and feed search. You can view the new Start.com and search for yourself. Search results are displayed in a JavaScript window and each search category’s results are displayed using asynchronous JavaScript. You can subscribe to the feed of any result in the RSS search results. I still don’t like the branding of feed search as “RSS search” but I do still ask for a Kleenex even if it’s a Puffs and my parents call a vacuum cleaner a Hoover even if it’s a Dyson. Tags: microsoft, feedsearch, rss…

Bloglines feed statistics

Ask Jeeves just released some statistics about the size of their database and subscribed users. 1,121,655 feeds with at least one subscriber Slashdot is the most popular feed with 37,400 active subscribers. Bloglines indexes almost 600 million articles (items/entries). Bloglines adds over 2 million new articles to its index daily. My blog has a RSS feed for every post, category, month, as well as custom keyword searches and a feed for the last 15 blog entries. That’s thousands of feeds without even mentioning my Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 feeds. I am definitely not conservative in what I produce and…

News Corp buys MySpace parent company for $580 million

News Corporation announced it will acquire Intermix Media, Inc. for $12 a share, or approximately $580 million in cash. Intermix is the parent company of MySpace.com, a popular social networking and blogging service with over eighteen million members. News Corporation is an international media conglomerate and consisting of Fox, Sky, DirectTV, New York Post, and Harper Collins. Intermix Media recently settled a spyware suit with the State of New York for $7.5 million dollars. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter pending shareholder approval. MySpace.com is attracting 2 million new registered users every month according to chief…

Newsweek and Time Magazine editors discuss sources and blogging

Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, and Jim Kelly, editor of Time Magazine spoke tonight at Stanford about the current state of journalism. Topics included confidential and anonymous sources, the influence of blogging, and the consolidation of news media. On Mark Cooper and Karl Rove Time Magazine and reporter Matt Cooper were recently criticized for turning over the names of sources after a grand-jury subpoena. Jim Kelly explained that while reporter’s notes and research are their own property Matt Cooper included the names of his sources in company e-mails that were later demanded by the grand-jury investigating the leak of…

Atom 1.0 template for Movable Type

I just finished my Atom 1.0 feed template for Movable Type. I believe it is compliant with the Atom 1.0 specification and my feed validates according to Feed Validator. Movable Type template My Atom 1.0 feed I will not switch my blog’s advertised Atom feed from 0.3 to 1.0 until Bloglines, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator support Atom 1.0 format. Tags: atom10, movabletype…

Blog trademark filed

Marble Sportswear of Beverly Hills, California recently applied for a trademark and service mark for the word “blog.” Is there a new line of blog-specific clothing on the way or are they just squatting? Small Business Blog is also an applied service mark the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council and their “virtual destination where small business owners and entrepreneurs can communicate about issues impacting their enterprises and the economy.” Both trademarks seem pointless but maybe pushing the government papers really does pay off. Tags: trademark…