Technorati Hackathon

Technorati is hosting a hackathon next Wednesday starting at 7 p.m. in their new offices in San Francisco. Parking should be ample. If you take the N Judah to SBC Park (3rd and King) Technorati’s office is a one block walk. Tantek extends an invitation to web designers and web developers. it’s not just a night of API developers. I created a wiki page on the developers site to track topics. I would like to work on a RSS aggregator plugin that sorts feeds by source authority. Anyone else interested in such a project and would like to collaborate?

NewsGator partners with Six Apart

NewsGator Technologies announced a co-marketing relationship with Six Apart yesterday. NewsGator will resell Movable Type and Six Apart will resell NewsGator for Outlook to its corporate customers. The two companies are also planning joint development work. NewsGator will release a plugin in the next week that lets NewsGator for Outlook users post to Movable Type and TypePad. From the NewsGator press release:

NewsGator and Six Apart, the leading provider of weblog publishing software, announced a co-marketing relationship focused on enterprise sales of the two companies’ leading technology platforms. NewsGator also announced that it will be releasing new plug-ins and other technology to make it simple to post feed content from NewsGator products to Six Apart blogs in Movable Type and TypePad. The companies plan significant future co-development work to enhance the experience for RSS and blog customers.

Andrew Anker, Executive Vice President of Six Apart, said “We’re very pleased to partner with NewsGator as they continue to make it easy for their big installed base of weblog readers to become weblog creators. Tighter integration between NewsGator’s products and Movable Type and TypePad will be great for our mutual customers.”

Greg Reinacker, founder and CTO of NewsGator, said, “We’re very excited about these strategic partnerships. Closer integration with other applications, including the leading desktop reader and the leading weblog publishing systems, will significantly enhance the RSS experience for consumers and enterprises, and our arrangement with Moreover strengthens our content offerings as well. Combined, these arrangements signify our ongoing investment as the leader in the RSS platform space to ensure that this technology penetrates as rapidly as possible.”

Marketing via weblogs

Thomas Mucha of Business 2.0 takes a look at weblogs as a marketing tool. Some good quotes from Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems and David Sifry of Technorati. Technorati reports there are about 5,000 serious corporate blogs. Some good quotes. “[T]he blog is about competitive advantage.” -Jonathan Schwartz “It’s the same risk as giving someone a telephone.” -Jonathan Schwartz on whether blogging poses a corporate risk “Bloggers were talking about Kryptonite’s lock problems a week before the story hit the mainstream media. If Kryptonite had been paying attention to the blogosphere, they could have reacted sooner and smarter.” -David Sifry (hinting at Watchlists)

Terry Gross interview on Salon.com

David Talbot of Salon.com interviewed Terry Gross about her 29 years hosting Fresh Air and her views on the journalistic process. She talks about the difficulties of interviewing Bill O’Reilly, Paul McCartney, and Sean Penn. It is interesting the work that goes into preparing each show such as reading a guest’s book and knowing the right way to work yourself into a subject area they might not want to spend too much time addressing. Terry Gross is currently new book, “All I Did Was Ask.”

I think of myself as being a member of the first generation of women who genuinely had a choice about whether to have children or not. And genuinely had a choice for two reasons — one, the reproductive technology, the Pill or the diaphragm or something, and two, a social climate in which you could make that choice and not be a pariah, someone we should all feel real sorry for, who could never be a part of the mainstream.

J2SE 5.0 launch on Thursday

Sun is throwing a launch party for J2SE 5.0 this Thursday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I plan on being there to talk Java with lots of interesting people. I have never been to the Computer History Museum but I have been meaning to check it out. If you are wondering when J2SE 5.0 will finally be released, the answer seems to be Thursday. I have been using some of the new features of J2SE 5.0 for the past few months. Generics, autoboxing, enhanced for loop (think foreach) and many more new features available.

Bay Area Mobility Forum on BREW

On Saturday I attended the second meeting of the Bay Area Mobility Forum. Ray Rischpater spoke about BREW development and how to get your application into the carriers’ mobile shop. I learned there are a lot of gatekeepers in the world of BREW and as a result individual developers usually do not have the financial resources to develop for the platform. You need to purchase a VeriSign document ID, submit your code for independent testing, and convince the carrier your application is unique and worth inclusion in their mobile shop. Some applications receive special placement and reap the rewards of featured status. The lure of Verizon’s 40 million subscribers is enough to get software publishers excited enough to play this restricted game.

I received permission from Ray to record and post his presentation. The presentation is available in MP3 format (28.1 MB, 1:01:49).

Gender promescuity tracked through DNA

Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona in Tucson tracked the DNA of three separate populations and found there was less variation in the male chromosome DNA. His findings, published in Nature Genetics, suggest that over the years half as many men as women have passed on their genes.

[F]emales also tend to be similar in their tastes, which means some males get chosen far more often than others, and therefore have more offspring. Females, by contrast, tend to have about the same number of offspring each.