Technorati has partnered with Salon.com to integrate weblog content and commentary in Salon.com's home page, the end of every article, and a roundup. Richard Ault took some good screenshots of the new features if you would like a small walk-through. I am really excited to see the writing of the masses combined with the edited writing of the few. Salon.com has been publishing original content online since 1995 and I have been reading the site intermittently since it started. Salon owns The WELL, the most famous online community. Salon chose to measure its hottest stories by the number of bloggers…
A year ago today Six Apart launched Movable Type 3.0 and introduced their new pricing structure and rebranded as a publishing platform. The announcement resulted in over 800 TrackBack links. Each Movable Type download had yielded $0.38 and the company decided it was time for a new pricing structure. Six Apart underestimated the community's reaction to the change. The commercial license pricing remains unchanged a year later while the personal licenses are a lot cheaper than originally announced. Six Apart has since introduced educational, non-profit, developer, and single author personal use licenses for their software….
Tim Draper broke into song during yesterday's speech at Stanford. I have never before seen a high-profile venture capitalist prance around on stage, play air guitar, and slap his ass, but luckily I had my camera ready to capture this unique moment. Tim Draper recently attended an event with a very unique auction prize: Scott Cargo of The Eagles would produce a song using your original lyrics. Tim won the auction and wrote "The Riskmaster." Draper Fisher Jurveston sent a CD of the recording to 5,000 business associations last December, and I happened to get a CD from Tim. The…
On Wednesday I attended a lecture by Tim Draper of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurveston at Stanford. Tim talked about new ideas that will change the world and solve common problems of humanity in the process The Draper Fisher Jurveston logo was designed to symbolize change. A globe is at the forefront, representing the referenced but uncharted world. The delta in the background symbolizes changing that world through new investments, ideas, and support. Tim likes to think in terms of "cyberspatial" competition. Given an environment of perfect information a new idea or breakthrough will spread throughout the world…
IDG reports on some possible future product direction for Blogger. Nothing terribly exciting we could not have guessed on our own, but Google does confirm they are dedicating resources to a possibly entry into Blogger for corporations. Google is also weighing whether to develop an enterprise version of Blogger that would be tailored for workplace use, as opposed to individual consumer use, Stone said. It's something we're always thinking about, something we have a few people thinking about and looking into. It's definitely being researched he said.
FeedBurner announced Total Stats PRO, its premium statistics package, offering per-item statistics and referrer reports among other features. The new service is an up-sell from the company's standard statistics offering starting at $5 a month. I do not use FeedBurner but I signed up for a trial account so I could review their new features. FeedBurner tracks the each item through the use of a web bug. The web bug is the URL of the feed with a parameter of g with a numeric value equal to what I am guessing is the post identifier in the FeedBurner database. Example:…
WordPress 1.5.1 is now available for download. The new version features extended pings, better Atom output, and much better handling of international character sets. I helped with some bugs that were fixed within a matter of days. If you are a developer who loves open source, WordPress is written in PHP and has an active community that really cares about their tools. They really do need the ability to export, and I might write that in Atom….
Next Monday The New York Times will introduce a new Business Day section with a regular feature about the world of blogs written by David Carr. On Mondays, Business Day will focus on media and marketing news, with technology included as it relates to those industries. David Carr will write a column on new media; the world of blogs will be covered as a regular feature.
Groxis, a data visualization company, converted its Grokker desktop software to a Java applet and is demonstrating the ability of its software using Yahoo! search results and advertisements. I tested it out with an ego search of course. I am able to see generalizations of how Yahoo! search users might view me based on the size of circles. You can adjust the starting date and number of search results through the tools on the bottom of your screen. Overall a very clever way to show off what Grokker's technology can do for other data sets.
AlwaysOn Network is working with Technorati to create a list of 100 top individuals who are leveraging the power of communities online to accomplish great things. The list is branded as the "Open Media 100" but has nothing to do with the Open Media Network. The list will not be ranked, but will include 100 individuals in the categories of pioneers, tool smiths, trendsetters, practitioners, and enablers. I am pretty sure members of the Open Media 100 need to publish a weblog and that requirement excludes people like Ward Cunningham or John Doerr. I think Dave Sifry and Joi Ito…
Last night I saw Paul Graham speak at PARC about how to sell a startup. Eventually the text of the speech should be posted to Paul's site. Paul sold ViaWeb to Yahoo! in 1998 to create Yahoo! Stores. Paul believes startups should be created and quickly sold for profit. Below are some tips shared by Paul last night. The most powerful motivator is the fear of loss. Startups get bought for one of two reasons: revenues or strategic purpose. You have to convince people at big companies that not buying you would be a big mistake, either as a…
Yesterday I attended the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar to hear Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit and corporate coach to startups such as Google, interview Danny Shader, CEO of Good Technology. Stanford posted a video of the seminar. Danny Shader has an interesting background including companies such as GO Corporation, Collabra Software, Netscape, and Amazon.com. Danny was an entrepreneur-in-residence with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital before joining Good Technology. Bill Campbell was an economics major and a former football coach before his highly successful software career. Good Technology originally developed audio hardware for the Handspring Visor…
Why does Technorati's search page paginate through 11 result pages when other search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves all use 10? Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap explains it best in this clip shown below. When you're at 10 where can you go from there? If we need that extra push over the cliff we go to 11. Especially for the all-important presence amplifier.
Tonight I had the opportunity to meet Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake of Flickr at Cafe Abir in San Francisco. The entire Ludicorp team has moved to the Bay Area and Stewart was sporting his purple Yahoo! access pass. Cafe patrons thought the Flickr meetup group was a wedding reception for Stewart and Caterina; it was interesting to see their reaction to this small independent café taken over by a bunch of photo geeks. I liked how Stewart and Caterina sought out different groups of people even when it involved walking over couches. Stewart mentioned the gift accounts were…
Yahoo! 360 will be released to the general public in the next few weeks according to an interview with Paul Brody, Yahoo!'s director of community products, in PC World. The public release of Yahoo! 360 will include more customization abilities and support for TrackBack….
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has some new statistics available from its survey of 2,871 internet users from January 2005 through March 2005. 9% of internet users now say they have created blogs. 6% of the entire U.S. adult population have created blogs. 25% of internet users say they read blogs. The number of adult readers of blogs is about 40% of the size of the talk radio audience. The blog-reading audience is about 20% of the size of the newspaper-reading population. I will comment more once the full report is available….
When something really good happens I feel inspired to get up from my chair and do a little dance in celebration. It might be a press mention, a new business partner, or some code finally behaving the way it should.
Mena stayed up until about 3 a.m. last night writing a long response to some of the issues raised by Jason Kottke and others about the current cycle of business activity and how companies may not be promoting open community involvement from its employees.
I am changing web hosts and while the name servers update you may experience odd things within my web space. Not to worry, it is expected, and I will bring my site back to life on its new home on TextDrive.
Jordan Weisman, Sean Stewart, and Jim Stewartson 4orty2wo Entertainment are speaking tonight at the San Francisco International Game Developers Association about alternate reality games and I Love Bees, highly successful marketing campaign created for the launch of Halo 2.
