Niall Kennedy's home on the web
The Associated Press is running a pretty funny article about Six Apart. The quotes about Mena cracked me up.
Ben is shy and gets uncomfortable when people talk about him,” said Andrew Anker, Six Apart’s executive vice president of corporate development. “Mena gets upset when everyone is not talking about her every day.
Mena turned over the CEO title to Berkowitz, who keeps her happy by calling her “Queen.”
I have been busy this week organizing a Web Spam Squashing Summit to bring together key players involved in publishing and indexing content on the world wide web. Participation is limited to persons involved in creating tools that will affect a solution to the problem affecting our industries.
Getting all the key players together in one room is no easy task. Invitations were sent out to everyone we knew played a substantial role in the weblog and indexing industries. Dave Sifry put up a weblog post to invite anyone we may have overlooked to express interest and tell us a little bit more about their solutions and involvement.
The Web Spam Squashing Summit is a technical summit and the limited space graciously provided by Yahoo! will be filled with persons with the ability to positively contribute to the discussion.
Oakland mayor Jerry Brown has started a weblog on TypePad to discuss the issues of interest to Oakland and to provide a direct voice. His first post was crossposted to the San Francisco Chronicle and currently has 54 comments.
I’m glad to see all the lively responses to my entry into the blogosphere. I welcome the robust debate.
Tuesday’s Charlie Rose show featured a main segment on weblogs with Glenn Reynolds, Anna Marie Cox, Andrew Sullivan, and Joe Trippi as guests. Fourty-two minutes into the program Charlie Rose asks what people can do to find the voices of interest in the world of weblogs.
Charlie Rose: “How do you find out people who are showing a particularly incisive mind and ability to communicate?”
Glenn Reynolds: “If I had a big organization, like say if I ran The New York Times or some piece of it, I would pay somebody — and you wouldn’t have to pay them a lot, it’s not very hard — to just plug the URL for every New York Times story into Technorati which will then give you a list of every blog that links to that story and see what people say. And if you find a bunch of people saying there’s a mistake in it, I’d run a correction *snap* just like that and I’d credit somewhere on the website the blogs that pointed it out. And you would turn a bunch of adversaries into a bunch of unpaid assistant editors and fact-checkers overnight. And I don’t understand why more organizations don’t think that way.”
Charlie Rose: They might after this program.
A great mention of what Technorati is all about and how companies can involve weblogs in collaborative reporting and editing.
I grabbed an audio clip of the full comment as well. (792 kilobytes in size, 51 seconds in length)
A new version of Internet Explorer will launch before Longhorn. A beta version of Internet Explorer 7.0 will be available by this summer. Gates made the announcement during a keynote presentation at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.
I just noticed the new website design over at Six Apart. Lots of colors and rounded corners. They used real employees and not models or stock images to decorate their pages. Every page on the site is powered by Movable Type. Mule Design handled the redesign.
Their news and events feeds are passed through FeedBurner. The Movable Type home page is now a subdirectory of Six Apart. Six Apart added a contact form for security vulnerabilities.
WordPress 1.5 is now available for download. If you are upgrading you should follow directions and “reward yourself with a cold soda and some candy.”
If you are in the San Francisco area Matt Mullenweg is hosting an upgrade party tomorrow night.
MythTV 0.17 is now available. MythTV is an open-source home media center platform using Linux, MySQL, and other goodies.
The new release boasts FireWire capture and increased support for Mac OS X and HDTV among other features.
You can control the minimum delay between accesses for Yahoo!’s Slurp crawler by adding a “Crawl-delay” line to your robots.txt.
User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 20
Thank you Yahoo! Search Blog!
Ted Shelton of Orb Networks was the final Mobile Monday presentation. Orb Networks offers media streaming from your broadband connection and Windows XP computer to any Internet-connected device with a web browser and RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. You can browse and listen to music, movies, and television from your home computer while you are away from your desktop PC.
Orb Networks started in July 2004 and launched its first product at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show. They do not have to pay licensing fees since users have already licensed their own content. The top use of Orb is streaming music. Orb is a platform, not a network.
Orb currently charges $10 a month to stream content from your PC and determine the best encoding rate for your current device and data connection. They currently have over 2000 users. The next product release will allow members to share images.
I recorded the entire Orb Networks presentation as well as the question and answer session. The MP3 recording is 23 minutes and 55 seconds in length and a 10.8 megabyte download.