Videora is like podcasting for video, using Bit-Torrent. Om just interviewed the creator of it. What I think is neat is it works without needing a special element (like <enclosure>) in the RSS, which incidentally means it works with non-RSS2.0 syndication formats as well. It doesn’t need any new formats, and works today. This is how I think other aggregators that support rich media will evolve, it’s podcasting without the hassle on the publisher end.
Category Archives: Asides
The Weather
It is definitely a stay-at-home and drink-hot-chocolate kind of day here in San Francisco. And I’m totally okay with that. Now if only I could get the 64-bit Windows installation disk to recognize my SATA controller, life would be good. I’m not a fan of Linux for desktop usage yet (I’ve tried it about once a year for 4+ years now) but I might be pushed in that direction, ironically, because of better hardware compatibility. This might be easier if I had a non-USB floppy drive, but I’m not inclined to go out in this weather just to get one.
Raptor Drive
The WD Raptor drive got here yesterday, now all I need to finish up this new workstation is to pick a motherboard/CPU combo. (And get matching memory.) Can’t decide whether to go P4 or Athlon 64.
Merlin Mann
I met Merlin Mann last night at the Creative Commons party last night and even saw the hipster PDA in action. Pretty neat stuff, I may even make the 43 Folders meetup on Tuesday Wednesday, but first I should probably finish up GTD. (I’ve never gotten to Part Three, which may speak for itself.)
Slashdotting
When I saw Giga Om at Jay’s lunch yesterday he happily informed me that his site, which is now on WordPress 1.5, handled Slashdottings two days in a row and all of the traffic from the LJ/6A story without a hiccup. I asked if he was running Staticize which increases the performance of WP significantly and he said no. (!)
WordPress Planet Back
The WordPress Planet aggregator is back, though it still needs a better design.
Windows AntiSpyware
To download the new Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) software you need to verify that you’re a customer “running genuine Microsoft Windows.” I’m pretty sure mine is legit, at least the guy on Market street said it was. Of course on the confirmation page, it seems you can get by their million-dollar verification system by choosing “No, do not validate Windows at this time, but take me to the download.” Hat tip: Robert Scoble.
Open Source LiveJournal
It seems some users are not optimistic about the future of an Open Source LiveJournal, especially in light of the recent changes to their Social Contract ( “They completely gutted the Free Software section.”), which was supposedly changed because “Lawyers didn’t like ‘contract’ in the name ‘social contract’ because it does not have the structure of a contract.” Seems to work for Debian though, which has lawyers out the wazoo.
Livejournal and Xanga
LivePress is “a Live Journal compatibility and synchronization plugin. It is designed to let WordPress users continue to use their Live Journal accounts with minimal hassle. It adds support for moods, music, synching posts between WordPress and Live Journal accounts and implements the lj-user and lj-cut tags in WordPress.” Then there’s Croissanga, which provides similar functionality for Xanga, another journaling site with millions of users that is frequently overlooked. Hat tip: Wordlog.
6A Aquires Gruber?
LJ Buyout
It’s confirmed and official now. Especially interested in this: “Will LiveJournal stay open source? The parts that are open source now will of course remain open source…” Another interesting thing is that on the 6A site they’re calling everything LiveJournal does “weblogging” which I doubt few bloggers or LJers would, but it’s clearly a deliberate wording on their part. Glad this is out the door, interested to see where it goes. Congrats to Om for the scoop, too—the 6A press release reads a lot like his post.
LinkRank Smackdown
According to PubSub, I am suddenly much, much less popular. Was it something I said? Fortunately this has no correlation with my actual traffic. Hat tip: Weblog Tools Collection.
Dan’s Calendar
Dan has an interesting photo calendar he’s selling with some fantastic dog pictures and for every $25 calendar sold $20 is going to the Red Cross. The donations are a fantastic idea, but isn’t the Red Cross already maxed out for donations they can send to many of those places? Others can speak to that issue much better than I.
Trackback Spam
The flood of truly vile Trackback spam today sadly confirms what I was worried about months ago: if we lock down commenting (with things like WP Hashcash and Typekey) it’ll just push them to Trackback. All the captcha in the world won’t fix Trackback. Our last line of defense is the content-based filters like Spam Karma, Spaminator, and Three Strikes.
The Cultural Divide
Six Apart and Live Journal
I’m a little late to this, but the word is that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. Congrats to the 6A and LJ teams! Big news, however you cut it. However, the question is: what exactly are they buying? LiveJournal has about 5.6 million accounts, but only about 2.4 million of these are active. That’s still pretty nice though, considering I imagine it’s about 24x what Typepad/Movable Type have now. Is it the technology? That’s already open source so they would have access to that anyway, and it’s Perl (which is 6A’s core competency) so I’m sure they could find they way around. (I wonder what will happen to the Open Source project after the dust has settled though?) That leads me to think it must be the people and engineers at LJ that 6A is after. Is this enough to position them against Microsoft and Google, as many have been suggesting?
98.6% of LiveJournal users don’t pay a thing, but that still gives 6A ~93,000 accounts paying $25/year. That revenue will be nice, especially since 6A has so many employees, but I don’t think it’s the coup most people are expecting. Remember the people who invested $10M in Six Apart are expecting it to be a quarter of a billion dollar business. It’ll be interesting to hear what the official word is on this, if and when an official word comes out. I’m probably missing something obvious. (And where is Yahoo in all of this? They better hurry up and buy someone too.)
WordPress App of Year
Mike and Clay wrote in that WordPress has been named Web Application of the Year by ArsTechnica. Wow, that’s quite an honor for the entire team.
PikaHolic
Oh my, must be seen to believed.
MusicBrainz
I remember reading about MusicBrainz forever ago but I’ve really started using it in earnest today and it’s totally blowing me away. Running a little slow though, this might be the application that gets me to upgrade my computer. Why don’t these guys have every music site and VCs pounding down their door? Fantastic, moderated metadata plus collection management? That’s hot.
SpamAssassin Plugin
This new WordPress SpamAssassin Plugin speaks to spamd directly and doesn’t have the Perl dependencies the old one did.