According to the Associated Press more people voted in last night’s American Idol finale than in the last U.S. presidential election. Seems like a pretty sad statistic to me.
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 share with the world, and where we want to access this personal information. Our gadgets are talking, but who should be listening?
One thing is for certain. Search companies will continue to tout their latest index size in terms of total pages, posts, feeds, blogs, and domains.
How many blogs will you produce in 5 years? What sort of feeds will be in your multiple feed aggregators?
PodSession: Startup Do’s and Don’ts with Matt Mullenweg of Automattic
Last night Om and I sat down with Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of open-source blogging software WordPress and a recent founder of Automattic to record our latest PodSession. Automattic is a software services company centered around the WordPress blogging platform.
We chatted about how to successfully scale a new web application. WordPress.com currently hosts about 200,000 blogs with mirrored hosting in San Diego and Dallas. Matt and I agreed that it’s best not to over-optimize at the beginning but instead sit back and watch the actual usage of your web application to fine-tune. Check out Cal Henderson‘s new book, Building Scalable Web Sites for over 300 pages to help keep your site online.
Om tried to shake things up with a Ruby on Rails vs. PHP showdown, but again it didn’t work. David Heinemeier Hansson and I talked about the same issue in our 37signals podcast last December. Pick a programming language you and your engineers are comfortable with, or you can easily pick up based on existing skills. Using existing programming libraries in a given language may sway your decision.
We talked about spam in the form of fake blogs and/or comment spam. The Akismet plugin has stopped over 40 million spam messages from blog owners and is also being used to identify the creation of spam blog accounts on WordPress.com. With the recent integration of blog search results to mainstream media sites such as Time.com and the Associated Press blog spam now has a new level of visibility and motive for attack. Hopefully startup companies are keeping on top of the problem and related items for “Bush” won’t be overwhelmed with camgirls.
This week’s PodSession, Startup Do’s and Don’ts, is 22 minutes in length, a 10 MB download.
Blogger dinner May 31
It’s been too long since we’ve had a blogger meetup over chinese food. Next Wednesday, May 31, Dave Winer and I are co-hosting a blogger dinner at Henry’s Hunan in downtown San Francisco starting at 6:30 p.m. Come out and meet a few new people, learn about Bloggercon and its themes, and connect with people and projects happening in the area.
Henry’s Hunan is located at 110 Natoma Street, just two blocks from the Montgomery Street BART and Muni station. Check out the journey through the Henry Hunan menu blog if you would like to see a blog entry for every dish on the menu. Each table of 10 will have their own bill. Expect a cost of around $15 and possibly less.
Details
Wednesday, May 31
6:30 p.m.-9:00 p.m.
Henry’s Hunan
110 Natoma Street
San Francisco
Please RSVP in the comments or on Upcoming so I can reserve enough tables for everyone who would like to attend. See you next Wednesday!
Nike+ iPod integration
Nike teamed up with Apple to offer new products and services combined with the iPod nano. The new partnership will include electronics, clothing, and online services for people who like to listen to music while working out. Apple claims 50% of iPod owners use their music players during a workout. The new campaign is called Nike+ and features community and social networking components.
The first product is the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, a $29 accessory connecting your shoe and your iPod. Runners can place a small sensor under their shoe insole and connect a receiver to their iPod nano to track statistics during and after their workout. Your workout progress and statistics such as pace, total time, and total distance are updated on-screen and with audio cues through your headphones. When you return to your desktop, sync your iPod nano and upload to Nike to track your progress over time and compare with friends. Nike will begin selling specially equipped shoes in June with a cutout for the sensor. Nike will also produce special apparel with an iPod nano pouch and headphone cord management.
The experience begins during your workout, but doesn’t end there. You can connect to the Nike+ website and track your running statistics and improvement over time, tracking your individual goals along the way. You can share your training information with others, and setup virtual races with friends to compare your times over the same course. Nike also launched a podcast to follow the progress of a marathon trainer in San Francisco. Perhaps in the future anyone could add their own audio to their workout blog and statistics.
Not sure what to listen to during your workout? Nike athletes have contributed their favorite “PowerSongs” to get them pumped up.
- Ronaldo: Elevation by U2
- Landon Donovan: Where is the Love, Black Eyed Peas
- Freddy Adu: Motivation by T.I.
I think the new service will be extremely popular. If Nike opens up its data, allowing for easy sharing, personal trainers could follow the progress of their clients and tune workouts. The program is not limited to Nike shoes; other manufacturers could support a similar sensor cutout to pair with the workout tracker. $30 to obsess over workout statistics seems like a pretty good deal. Thanks Nike!
Yahoo! is top portal
Hitwise just published rankings and market share for top portals in search, mail, news, finance, and maps. While Google dominates in search, Yahoo! is the clear aggregate leader across these top categories with an almost 10% lead over the search leader.
| Search | News | Finance | Maps | Total | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Market | 7.3 | 9.3 | 3.4 | 0.6 | 0.5 | 21.04 |
| 47.4 | 2.5 | 1.9 | 0.3 | 7.5 | 3.80 | |
| Yahoo! | 16.0 | 42.4 | 6.3 | 34.9 | 20.5 | 5.62 |
| MSN | 11.5 | 22.9 | 13.4 | 4.3 | 3.07 | |
| Other | 8.56 |
While Google Maps is an often-cited example of the Web 2.0 world Mapquest has 7x the market share according to these numbers.
Google Reader Mobile
Google Reader Mobile is now available on your mobile phone. The pages are served using XHTML 1.0 for mobile, including access keys for each list item.
The mobile reader is a good blend of what you would like to configure on your desktop but still access on a more limited input device such as a mobile phone. The mobile interface is purposefully barebones but utilizes features made possible by the full desktop experience such as browsing tagged posts.
Flickr moving to San Francisco
Yahoo! is opening a big San Francisco office later this year and Flickr just announced they will be one of the teams making the move to the city. I know at least half of the Flickr team lives in San Francisco so it’s a healthy move for the group and will probably mean more time working on Flickr things!
Flickr is the first Yahoo! team I’ve heard of moving into the San Francisco offices. It was previously rumored these would be ad sales offices but it’s good to see some product folk moving in.
Yahoo! unveils video sharing site, Finance redesign at analyst day
Yahoo! presented its business strategy to analysts yesterday and gave the world a sneak peek at what’s to come. A new advertising system is code complete and currently undergoing some testing and, if all goes well, will be rolled out later this year. Yahoo! plans to add advertising to it’s new “coming soon” video site. The webcast was not working for me this morning; all my notes below are based on the slide deck.
Yahoo! Video
The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well. The top navigation bar references “My Studio” which could be a way for anyone to author and upload their own video files or maybe add some special effects. The new site supports personal favorites, tagging, and ratings of each video. The existing Yahoo! Video site does not include any user-submitted content or metadata.
Yahoo! Finance
Yahoo! also showed off a new Yahoo! Finance design coming later this month. Charts are now interactive, showing the trading price corresponding to trading activity on a given day. It’s now easy to overlay competitors or a benchmark index onto the graph for comparison. It looks like the only news correlation may be splits and dividends, but I’m only speculating based on a screenshot in a slide deck.
Yahoo! My Web
Yahoo! mentioned it has learned a few things from del.icio.us and is integrating its acquisition more closely with the redesigned Yahoo! My Web shown above. Bookmarks now have an interestingness sort and an easier way to add a link to your own bookmarks. Tags are now exposed for the entire community, brought front-and-center for easier browsing.
Tetris using Yahoo! UI utilities
Yahoo! released the latest version of its UI utilities this week, including the components used in the new Yahoo! homepage design. You can use the various utilities to build your own website, but Dustin Diaz decided to build a version of Tetris.
The game combines Yahoo’s Event Utility and DOM Collection utility to create some cross-browser brick busting action.
One of the good things about releasing your code to the world is you never know just how people will use it. I doubt anyone at Yahoo! thought about gaming when they released the UI widgets but developers are resourceful!