It's finally out! Meet the new Technorati (beta), a complete redesign and a few new features thrown in as well. Technorati blogs! Yes, it's true. Technorati is a blog search company yet had no blog. Now we have two: one for the main site and one for developers. Snazzy new tag pages full of Ajax goodness. Related tags, photos, and links all load after the rest of the page. Subscribe to RSS feeds for tagged posts! This feature has actually been available for a few months but never exposed. We do not include the feed as a link alternate because…
I just got back from lunch with about twenty-five Macintosh small business owners and developers visiting San Francisco for this week's WWDC. We talked for about ninety minutes about common business problems and people shared their experiences with running a small business selling applications for the Macintosh operating system. Some quick notes: If no one complains about your pricing, you priced too low. Higher pricing usually leads to lower support requests. Most software publishers allow users to use trial versions of their software before making a purchase. eSellerate dominates as a payment provider but most developers choose to use…
I often receive questions from people about how search engines gather and distribute subscribed search results such as the results provided by Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, PubSub, and MSN or Yahoo! Search. It's worth a brief explanation. Caveat lector, I work for Technorati but I will try to deliver an impartial view of the world of ping and search while keeping the post relatively brief. All of the aforementioned sites output search results in the RSS 2.0 feed format. Your feed results will differ between services based on what is indexed, how frequently it is indexed, and what content is made…
It's pretty easy to make an XML Sitemap of your blog for easy parsing by Google or other search engines. Just create a new index template and copy the code below. Choose an output file that is easy to remember such as sitemap.xml. Save and rebuild your new template file once you paste the code. 1.0 Now you need to let Google know where to find your sitemap. Open up your web browser and enter http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= + the URL-encoded location…
Google today unveiled Google Sitemaps, a way for webmasters to let Google know about the files on their site as they are published. Webmasters can create a XML file describing the files available on their site and ping Google or simply ping with the location of a RSS or Atom file with each update. You can sign in to your Google account to add and track sitemaps. Update: User-Agent seems to be new: "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" coming from 66.249.66.1….
CNN reports that Country Music Television has just signed Christopher Nelson to a $100,000 contract to watch Dukes of Hazzard and blog about it. Nelson emerged from almost 2,000 applicants by creating a website for a fictional character called Slick. No news on whether a 1969 Dodge Charger comes with the job.Tags: dukesofhazard…
Anil Dash appears in the Thursday, June 2, edition of The New York Times posing in the Six Apart offices wearing a goatse t-shirt. I think it's in bad taste to appear in a national publication in your employer's offices while wearing apparel promoting pornography but that's just me. (via Boing Boing)Tags: goatse…
eBay has agreed to acquire shopping comparison site Shopping.com for $21 a share in cash, or about $620 million. Shopping.com just went public in October. Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, told the Wall Street Journal eBay became interested in the comparison shopping sector after they noticed sellers listing on both shopping comparison sites and eBay. I am not sure this acquisition will cause other players such as Yahoo! or Google to acquire a shopping comparison site such as PriceGrabber or NexTag. Epinions was not mentioned in the press release but I am sure eBay would like to provide…
Technorati Japan just entered beta. It's exciting to see the first of what I hope will be many country-specific Technorati sites unveiled to the world. Have you ever wondered what are the top blogs in Japanese or the most talked about books in Japan? Now you can! The internationalization process is really interesting and exposes a lot of details about your data structure but mostly how you look at the world. Every society and country has their own ways of using weblogs and Japan is no different. Recent legislation in Japan requires all personally identifiable data travel over SSL. Anonymity…
Lately I have been giving a lot of thought to how theories of incentives apply to small groups and teams in startup companies. The employee base is relatively small (less than 50), the team size is less than 5, and the level of stress is mind-blowingly high. Our economy has experienced large gains from the always-on interconnected lifestyle of the last ten years, but employees are also increasingly mobile and volatile. I have yet to see good research studies covering this new work environment so I will offer some quick observations. It's mostly a brain dump because I am exhausted….
The New York Times reports Accel Partners invested $13 million in Thefacebook.com, a social networking site focused on the college market. Jim Breyer, currently on the board of Wal-Mart and Real Networks, will join the company's board.Tags: thefacebook…
The Wall Street Journal published some good quotes from this week's sessions at the D conference in Carlsbad. Mena Trott of Six Apart has a new self-described title of "chief egotist." Anna Marie Cox of Wonkette mentioned that people at the top will get commercialized but "there is always someone in the garage." Donald Graham of The Washington Post described the self-publishing nature of the blogging world as "one person who's Ben Franklin and 100,000 people who think they're Ben Franklin." Peter Kahn of Dow Jones thinks publishers in general have underpriced their products. "I don't think we were particularly…
Yesterday Joi introduced me to Mitchell Baker, President of Mozilla. We talked about the Mozilla community, gathering feedback, and planning new products that build upon or extend existing features. Mozilla's two main products are Firefox and Thunderbird, used by millions to interface with the Web, e-mail, and RSS. Sunbird currently a community project but not a Mozilla product. The Mozilla Foundation has been very successful gathering the technical talent it needs to develop its open-source software. It is currently in need of good product managers to identify critical features and keep everyone on track to release a competitive and innovative…
Apple is offering pre-orders for upcoming albums such as Coldplay's X&Y (planned release is June 7). You cannot preview any of the tracks on the album through the store even though the first single, Speed of Sound, is currently available for purchase. Apple is trying to get people to order digital music files for future delivery. The iTunes album includes a two exclusive pre-oder tracks, a digital booklet — liner notes? — and a video file. I presume iTunes will download the album the first time the application is launched on or after the full availability of the release. I…
Movable Type allows you to easily publicize your blog by pinging Weblogs.com, blo.gs, and Technorati with each post. Movable Type administrators should view these three built-in services as default options that can be easily changed for each Movable Type installation. Think of the three checkboxes above as three variables: BlogsPingURL, WeblogsPingURL, and TechnoratiPingURL. These variables can be overridden in your Movable Type configuration file (mt.cfg) by adding a line with the variable name and value. Each replacement server must be a valid XML-RPC ping beacon similar to Weblogs.com. BlogsPingURL http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ Adding the line above to your mt.cfg file will send…
I was just informed by a source within Friendster that employees were called into a conference room this morning and pink slips handed out. I will post more information as the details emerge about the size and the scope of the layoffs since early reports vary the number from five people to one third of the company. [Update 19:30] Seven or eight people were laid off due "headcount adjustments" I am told. Friendster has about 20 total employees and is based in Mountain View.
Porsche is planning to introduce a hybrid powertrain in its Cayenne sports utility vehicle in the 2008 model year. Combined with the new Cayman it's obvious Porsche is trying to decrease performance and aim for the lower end of the performance car market. Porsche sales are currently divided almost equally between its Boxster, Cayenne, and 911 product lines. In my mind the 911 is the only true Porsche and I am definitely alone in this opinion. A Boxster is for someone who can not afford a real Porsche and the Cayenne is for someone that wants to feel sporty while…
I received an invitation from KRON-TV, a local San Francisco Bay Area news station, to attend a blogger gathering on June 11 at their television studio in San Francisco. From the open invitation: We recognize the significance of the personal media revolution, and we want to listen to what you're saying. We think this is a good way to start. Sounds great! KRON is a local TV channel that was approached by NBC a few years ago but did not sell. They are still alive and kicking with local programming from parades or the back roads of local parks. The…
Is it just a coincidence that Google scheduled its "Factory Tour" for press and analysts at the exact same time as Yahoo!'s shareholder meeting? Definitely a strategic PR move. I wonder if anyone will stop covering Yahoo! for the day to attend….
NewsGator Technologies has purchased Bradbury Software in a cash and stock deal. Bradbury Software is develops FeedDemon, a feed aggregator, and TopStyle, a website editor, for the Windows operating system. Nick Bradbury lives in Franklin, Tennessee and is the sole developer and runs his entire business from the top floor of his house. Nick develops in Delphi. I used FeedDemon from its first beta until I moved to Mac last May. NewsGator develops free feed aggregators for Windows Media Center, and online as well as a paid aggregator for Microsoft Outlook. NewsGator is currently developing an enterprise server ("Dino") for…
I just upgraded my PowerBook to OS 10.4.1. Safari now supports the second Acid Test! Nevermind, I posted too quickly after I thought I had found the proper rendering. Sorry about that, nothing to see here.
Jim Winstead just announced blo.gs has been sold to an undisclosed buyer and the site will change hands on or after June 13. The new owner will "continue providing the same features that exist now, and will be working on making blo.gs even better." Blo.gs is a pretty large ping beacon, second only to weblogs.com in its level of integration into all the different weblog tools available. My guess is a company wanting to move into the space purchased blo.gs for its ping beacon and its database of posts. There is a small chance the acquirer cares about the site's…
Dana Stevens, television critic for Slate, recently wrote about how television media chooses to cite blogs in their news coverage. I have yet to see the blog coverage on CNN or MSNBC, but it seems like they have the wrong approach to including this new medium. We witness cross-media citations all the time. News organizations care about who broke the news and who had the best commentary and the best sources are usually cited multiple times on big stories. Newspapers or radio stations often break stories and CNN reports on these breaking stories just as they would their own original…
