Apr

30

The ever expanding gap between early adopters and mainstream users

April 30, 2008 | Comments

I have been thinking a bit more about the chances for the recent crop of Web 2.0 social media darlings like FriendFeed and Twitter to go mainstream and especially why FriendFeed has gone from zero to being the default social media aggregator for most folks in the tech blogosphere within just a few months while [...]

Apr

10

Lesson for Flickr: don’t mess with your paying users

April 10, 2008 | Comments

I thought that Flickr adding video wasn’t a great idea - there is a 90 second maximum and you need a pro account ($25 a year) to even upload videos.
Flickr’s users, however are the ones that really didn’t like this new service, especially that Flickr put their money towards developing a video service. Wired [...]

Apr

8

Blogrize Review: Shared Feeds meet Social Networking

April 8, 2008 | Comments

Jesse Spauling, the developer of Blogrize send me an invite to try out his new service yesterday. Blogrize is still in a private beta. Louis Gray had some invites yesterday, but they seem to be all gone at this point there are still some left, so hurry to Louis’ site and grab one.
Blogrize describes itself [...]

Apr

2

IBM Still Lives in 2006 and Opens a Private Island in Second Life

April 2, 2008 | Comments

Remember Second Life? Faintly? Spend five minutes checking it out because of all the hype and then left never to return? You’re not alone.
The virtual world that had all the hype and no real use has found a steady partner in IBM. I though there was a problem with Techmeme indexing old stories when [...]

Mar

27

Me too! Me too!

March 27, 2008 | Comments

Ed Bott uses last weekend’s ruckus over Apple ‘forcing’ Windows users to install Safari on their machines to launch into an interesting rant about the echochamber effect on Techmeme:
Techmeme is the Short Attention Span Theater of the blogosphere. It’s an echo chamber. It encourages reactive, uncritical thinking. The blogswarm gets outraged by whatever they see [...]

Feb

12

Rumor: Google Likes Your 404 - Reality: Not Really

February 12, 2008 | Comments

 
According to a number of reports today, Google’s latest beta of the Google Toolbar hijacks 404 pages and reroutes them to a Google 404 page with ‘Suggestions,’ including some hints for what to do next and, of course, an option to search on Google.
The reality though is different: Google isn’t taking customized 404 pages and [...]

Feb

11

VentureBeat Gets Angel Round Funding

February 11, 2008 | Comments

Congrats to the guys and gals over at VentureBeat, a blog that focuses on technology VC news and is run by former Jose Mercury News journalist Matt Marshall. According to Matt, they have just raised $320.000 cash from a number of angel investors:
VentureBeat has grown steadily since launching more than a year ago. We’ve been [...]

Feb

1

TellDodo - Dumb, Dumb, Dumb

February 1, 2008 | Comments

I had never heard of TellDodo until I noticed that somebody from there was leaving comments about the service on every blog post that mentioned the barcodes Google is putting in newspaper ads. Here is the post explaining Tell Dodo as it appeared on my site:
Think of it as a verbal equivalent of tinyurl. Google [...]

Jan

29

Next Frontier: Comments

January 29, 2008 | Comments

As I wrote and read about Friendfeed and other services that pull together our output on different web services, I started thinking about how this, in some way, is a one-way street.
What got me thinking about this was how people started commenting on items I posted in Friendfeed instead of on the original blog [...]

Jan

27

How I Use Twitter

January 27, 2008 | Comments

Dave Winer today asked for advice for Twitter newbies. I’m not sure I have a lot of advice for newbies (given that Twitter is still a young product, aren’t we all newbies and figuring out how to use it anyway?). However, I can write about how I use it.

I never use the website. I use [...]

Jan

22

Roll Your Own Reddit

January 22, 2008 | Comments

Reddit announced some new features today. Most importantly, they will soon give you the opportunity to run your own reddit:
You will be able to make three kinds of reddits: public, restricted, and private. A public reddit is just like the current reddits: anyone can view and submit to them. A restricted reddit allows anyone to [...]

Jan

21

Pownce Coming Out to Party

January 21, 2008 | Comments

Pownce, a Twitter-like web app and the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, will be coming out of beta tonight.
They also added a few new features, most importantly, an easy way to import friends from other services like Digg and Twitter:
Users can now bypass the tedious process of adding new friends to yet-another-social-network. The new [...]

Jan

21

Wordpress offers 3GB of space - not a big deal

January 21, 2008 | Comments

Update: Andrew Watson put together a nice comparison chart that nicely illustrates the different offerings of the big blog hosts. 
Here is another nice example of complete non-news making a splash in the blogosphere. Wordpress has announced that it will now offer 3 GB of space to its bloggers.
Really! 3 GB. Can you imagine any [...]

Jan

20

No attribution

January 20, 2008 | Comments

Louis Gray wrote what I think is an important post today (sadly, it’s diving down the list on Techmeme rapidly) about the fact that some bigger “A-list” blogs tend to be rather stingy with their attributions to news that broke on “B-list” blogs (I’m just waiting for Calacanis to jump out of the woodwork to [...]

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