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

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 38 of 72.

How To Run Your Own Software Business presentation

Oliver Breidenbach, Steve Dekorte, Steve Gehrman, Will Shipley, Brent Simmons, and Dan Wood participated in a panel discussion about how to run your own software business. Below is my summary. I also have audio of the entire session (44.1 MB MP3, 1:36:48) except for mentions of Omnigroup lawsuits that were removed at the request of Will Shipley. Time to market varied for different software vendors. It took Dan 6 months to develop Watson. It took Brent 10 months to develop NetNewsWire including learning Cocoa. It took Oliver 3 weeks to develop his first product and receive his first payment. The…

Mac OS X Innovators

Delicious Library received first place in the Mac OS X Innovators contest announced today. I have seen the software for months, but I got to play around with the software in-person today, and hear about the product’s features from William Jon Shipley and Mike Matas. I have been waiting for this type of software for a long time. I am the type of user to update things I own in my Amazon account, rate them, and even leave a small description if anyone is interested in my collection. Now I will have the same information on a local store,…

Sam Levin on messaging and branding

Sam Levin just gave a presentation titled “Messaging & Branding; After the Product is Developed, What’s Next?” at the O’Reilly Mac OS X conference in Santa Clara. Below are quick notes from the session. I also recorded the session (21.1 MB MP3, 46:28). There are many Apple resources for developers and partners to tap into. ADC membership Apple Consultants membership Mac logo usage Mac Products Guide Mac OS X download ADC promotions Marketing 101: 20-25% of your total budget should be devoted to marketing. Data sheet. Example on Sam’s iDisk. Press releases, targeting good press channels. Editorial/reviews/awards. Put review directly…

Delphi XM MiFi satellite radio

Delphi announced XM MiFi, the first portable XM satellite radio. It will be out in December and cost $350. Five hours of batter, five hours of audio storage, six-line LCD, sports score ticker, clock, and alarm. $350 is steep, especially compared to the $125 I paid for my Roady2. The bundled accessory kit included with the MiFi is pretty extensive. The home and car kits usually cost $40 each, the remote control is a $20 accessory, and case and clip cost about $20 as well….

O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference

Tomorrow I am attending the O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference in Santa Clara. I posted my session schedule on .Mac if you are interested. All feature presentations will be recorded and made available by O’Reilly. I plan to record Sam Levin’s Messaging & Branding presentation and make it available on in MP3 format. I also plan to record the How To Run Your Own Software Business session. (I am still waiting to hear back from one panelist regarding permissions.) If you are at the conference look for me on iChat and say hi!…

Shirky spam?

Over the last few days I received multiple e-mails about a message submitted using an e-mail address I use only on my weblog and it’s feeds. The interesting thing is it appears this e-mail address was used to send a message to Clay Skirky’s NEC list. It looks like a spammer might be crawling weblogs specifically to spam weblog mailing lists and it’s the first time I have observed such a thing. Watch your inbox for a message from “nec-bounces@shirky.com” for approval of a message subject of “Re:” and you might observe part of a trend….

Suspicious package at Embarcadero station

A suspicious business envelope, standard overnight envelope size from on the street police information I could obtain, was found at the Embarcadero MUNI station late morning. By 11:45 a.m. the San Francisco police department had closed Market Street for two blocks from Main Street to Fremont Street as well as half a block to a full block for side streets. Not much known right now, but a lot of office workers are heading out for lunch to find Market Street cordoned off by police tape. Update: Bay City News reports a “white cylindrical container with black end caps, was found…

MEGA-RIM$

Rimmer’s Rims are the illest thing on the street! It’s not about practicality, it’s about mackticality. “May impede your car’s ability to execute turns.” (via Autoblog)…

Chris Anderson on Long Tails

Chris Anderson wrote an awesome article for Wired about the power of the Long Tail. I had heard the basic ideas behind the article before, with the exception of his take on MP3.com. Andersen argued that you cannot have a successful business containing only Long Tail elements. The problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail. It didn’t have license agreements with the labels to offer mainstream fare or much popular commercial music at all. Therefore, there was no familiar point of entry for consumers, no known quantity from which further exploring could begin. He believes that you…

Technorati Party October 28

Technorati is throwing a party next Thursday, October 28, at their new office space near SBC Park in San Francisco. The new office is within walking distance of the N Judah and CalTrain train stops. Free beer, WiFi, food, and interesting people….

NY Times technology video

I just finished reading David Pogue’s review of Google Desktop when I noticed a video box on the sidebar. Video supplement and The New York Times? Interesting. David Pogue compares Windows XP’s built-in search to Google desktop complete with a picture of a girl plugging her nose and David dancing to Who Let the Dogs Out by Baha Men….

Flickr architecture

Cal Henderson of Ludicorp gave a presentation to the Vancouver PHP Association on September 9 about Flickr’s general architecture and the use of PHP. A zip of the PowerPoint presentation is available on Flickr’s site. I converted the PowerPoint presentation to a PDF file for easy viewing. (via MovableBlog Asides) Some interesting statistics on Flickr as of September 2004: About 60,000 lines of PHP code. About 60,000 lines of templates. About 25,000 database transactions per second at peak. 13 selects per insert/update/delete. About 1,000 pages per second at peak. They use Java for their node service and as a FTP…

Feedster dinner

Tonight was the Feedster hosted blogger dinner at Vino e Cucina in San Francisco. Scott Johnson and Scott Rafer mentioned they are launching a Feedster Hacks site with the help of a librarian to classify and unify Feedster add-ons.. Feedster will also hold a “12 days of Feedmas” competition to highlight the best Feedster hacks and reward the authors with a new iPod. I highlighted the differences between Feedster and Technorati. Scott Rafer and I discussed the new focus of Feedster on channel searches such as jobs or politics. Talked with Jeremy Zawodny, Ray Goldberger, and Matt Mullenweg about FeedMesh….

Coral for distributed content

Scott Johnson mentioned this morning Feedster is looking heavily at NYU’s Coral distributed content system as a possible solution to RSS bandwidth issues. Coral operates over port 8090 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls. Your domain name server must also be aware of DNAME records. Good idea but it needs some kinks worked out for widespread use. BitTorrent uses ports 6881 to 6889 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls as well. Port usage has not stopped the widespread use of BitTorrent, although BitTorrent users are highly technical. A good conversation topic for tonight’s Feedster Developer Dinner at 7…

XM Satellite Radio

Faced with a daily commute to San Mateo — 23 miles each way — I weighed my options for driving entertainment. I could buy a 40 GB iPod to listen to music, audio books, and podcast tracks every day. I could also buy a satellite radio. I knew a lot about the iPod, but very little about satellite radio. XM Satellite Radio is the dominant player with over 2.5 million subscribers compared to SIRIUS Satellite Radio’s 600,000 subscribers. XM is $3 cheaper at $10 compared to $13 a month for Sirius. I have also been reading a lot about the…

New job at NexTag

On November 1 I will start my new job at NexTag, a shopping comparison search engine in San Mateo. I will be a product manager in charge of creating a developer and affiliate network to create a better community around the site and its offerings. I worked for one of NexTag’s competitors — PriceGrabber.com — in the early stages of product search so I know the industry well. My weblog did not help me win the job, but my experience in the online community and developer space will no doubt be utilized in my new position. I am excited to…

RSS aggregator roundtable

DrunkenBlog posted an interview with developers of the leading feed aggregators for Mac OS X. Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, David Watanabe of NewsFire, Rory Prior of NewsMac, Erik J. Barzeski of PulpFiction, and Graham Parks of Shrook answered questions about the basics of RSS, the threat of Safari RSS, auto-discovery of feeds, competing feed formats, and the business model for producing RSS feeds. Graham Parks on feed formats: Atom looks to be so much more reliable and usable than any version of RSS. Once v1.0 is published next year, I imagine there will be few new implementations of RSS. Of…

NewsGator Online Edition now free

NewsGator Online Edition is now a free feature for basic features: NewsGator Web Edition and subscription synchronization. New features include: Per-post rating system. Rate each post from one to five stars. Feed recommendation for paid subscription levels. E-mail feeds. I signed up for a free NewsGator Web Edition account. The service competes with Bloglines and offers cosmos data similar to Technorati. The press release mentions the ability for users to “add the rating feature seamlessly to their own blog site” but I cannot find the code anywhere….

Printer forensics

Purdue researchers have developed a method of recognizing unique patterns specific to each printer regardless of print cartridge used. Edward J. Delp, Jan Allebach, and George Chiu developed software to recognize intrinsic signatures revealing the subtle differences from one printer to another. A second step involved extrinsic signatures from specially designed printers for purposes of identification. (via Engadget) Counterfeiters could be traced back to their printers but you would need to have the equipment on hand to compare. I doubt we will ever have to register our printers upon purchase but unless you are paying cash your new printer is…

Google Desktop Search

Google Labs released Google Desktop Search beta this morning. Google Desktop Search allows users Windows 2000 and Windows XP to search their e-mail, AOL instant message sessions, Internet Explorer browser history, as well as text and Microsoft Office documents. Google Desktop Search uses your Web browser as its management interface. Connect to 127.0.0.1:4664 and you are greeted by a familiar Google search layout with a Desktop addition. I am able to access the Web interface using Intenet Explorer and Firefox but I am greeted with an incompatible browser message when using Opera. You have the option of including secure…

Howard Dean Yahoo! Local advertisement

Yahoo! has a new advertisement for Yahoo! Local featuring Howard Dean (listen to the MP3). Howard Dean lists some of the states he visited on his book tour. (via Yahoo! Search blog)…

Six Apart featured in Wall Street Journal

Six Apart was featured on the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal business section. The title of the article is “Folksy No More, Blogger Firm Taps Big Clients.” Pretty cool to have your own personal WSJ sketch. Yes, the Wall Street Journal’s site is available to subscribers only, so I will summarize some of the new information from the article. According to Technorati Six Apart is the third most widely used weblogging software behind Blogger and LiveJournal. Six Apart counters by noting that it has a large deployment behind corporate firewalls. Corporate customers account for about 35% of Six…

Seeking new employment

I am currently looking for a new full-time position in the tech industry. My current employer, Callan Associates, has threatened to fire me for having a weblog and making any reference to my work life. While I have yet to be fired my yearly review is now ten months overdue and I have been told not to expect any pay increase or job advancement. There are so many interesting services in the tech sector right now I would love to work on. I realize that I am not aware of all of the companies currently seeking new talent and I…

UCLA and Universal Studios crack down on P2P traffic

UCLA has a software program named Quarantine that revokes Internet access from users the system flags as a copyright violator. Quarantine uses the Automated Copyright Notice System developed by Universal Studios to identify and notify offenders. Given the close proximity of life in a dormitory asset swapping is not uncommon. The computer network is just an an easier method than sneaker net for the exchange of goods. UCLA was an investor in Napster….

EContent Magazine profiles Kinja

Kinley Levack profiled Nick Denton’s Kinja.com in the October issue of EContent Magazine. Product Manager Matt Hamer provides some behind-the-scenes insights into Kinja. Because many of Kinja’s users are getting their feet wet in the blogging world, they neither need, nor are expected to have, any knowledge of the behind-the-scenes how-tos. Users add new sites using the regular URL, at which point, “it is queued for parsing.” Hamer says. “We don’t require our users to find, understand, or enter the URL of the Weblog’s feed, if it is available at all. Our crawler respects the robots exclusion protocol, so if…