The guys behind the bestselling Freakonomics have switched their blog to WordPress. Hat tip: Andrew.
South
South is a community sponsored journey to the South pole by foot, a feat that has not been attempted since 1912. You can donate and “own a mile” of the trip. Far better use of the money than that silly million-dollar home page thing.
Less is Less
Less as a competitive advantage, Jason Fried’s talk at Web 2.0.
Global Broadband
Om Malik is mapping out broadband across the planet.
Weblogs.com Sold, Ping Outlook Bleak
Verisign, which does not have a particularly good history in the blogosphere, has purchased Weblogs.com. This leaves Ping-O-Matic as the only large-scale and independent ping relay service left. (Blo.gs was sold to Yahoo earlier in the year.) I can definitely see why Dave did this, he has probably found as I have that keeping up with the spammers exploiting the service requires a fair amount of daily effort, and I’m sure he has more interesting things to work on. People have been talking about this for months now, and while I was skeptical before I suppose it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise.
I’ve been trying to pin down in my mind why this deal just feels sketchy, like when you find out that nice girl you went to school with is engaged to the class bully. It just doesn’t feel like a healthy, long-term relationship. When blo.gs was sold to Yahoo it was an open-source and technically robust service being supported by a growing company full of smart people who really get the Web. The transition of blo.gs has had some bumps along the way, but it’s obvious that Yahoo is operating it for its intrinsic value to their other services, not trying to move their bottom line or impress investors with the buzzword “blog” in their next quarterly report. (Look at how all the press is saying things about RSS, even though it is only tangentially connected with RSS. Not an accident.) Weblogs.com is an older service that has stagnated for a while being lost to a company with a history of evil and a declining business with plans to embrace, extend, and monetize what should be a public service.
We should have been better prepared for this. Earlier in the year Verisign had the Boston Consulting Group calling people in the space trying to pick their brains, while at the same time refusing to reveal who they were working for. (Shady.) The “real time web” group also took me to dinner at one point and outlined their view for a “value-added” ping ecosystem (with Verisign in the middle, of course). Every major content producer and every company relying on the ping stream should be very worried about this move.
Other people have gotten so frustrated with the ping mess they’ve abandoned the existing ping community and standards and decided to produce their own feeds in a corner and let everybody come to them. In a format different from the over-hyped Feedmesh, no less, and with no discussion on that group. (As an aside, if the Livejournal stats match what their front page says, which looks like it would be 5-15 pings per second, that would be well within the means of Ping-O-Matic to handle in addition to its current load.) The state of the ping community is fairly bleak
What do we need to keep a BigCo from exploiting this space? A free, open, non-profit, and stable alternative supported by a consortium of organizations who understand that value should be built on top of pings, not in front of them. Ping-O-Matic is not this today, though the seeds of it are there in the servers and services Textdrive and Technorati to make the service 1000% more reliable than it was. Getting competing services to work together is never easy, but I fear if we don’t Verisign is going to successfully exploit the situation.
Google Aggregator
Check out the Google Reader, their new RSS aggregator.
At Web 2.0
This conference is really great. Right now Barry Diller is on stage fielding questions and it’s pretty high quality conversation. At the “launchpad” most of the demos were pretty unpolished, but one that stood out was Zimbra, which I blogged a few weeks ago. The best part, as with most conferences, is running into people outside of the sessions.
Web 2.0 Conference
Blogging may be light as I’ll be at the Web 2.0 conference and the surrounding activities the next few days. Since I couldn’t afford to attend it last year (a couple of grand is high for a college kid in Houston) I’ve been really looking forward to everything this year. I’m part of a workshop on “Open Source Infrastructure” at 9:45 AM, Wednesday. If you’re going to be at the conference I would love to meet you, so please don’t hesitate to introduce yourself!
More on Ubuntu
So after starting the installation a few minutes ago, Ubuntu is up and running! I’m really more shocked than anything, I had already put 6-10 hours in getting Gentoo running and then it just wouldn’t work, probably something to do with my SCSI card. Ubuntu just worked. I’ve got a beautiful desktop running right now. I plugged in a USB mouse and it works with the scroll wheel. That might not seem trivial, and it is if you’re on Windows or a Mac, but my previous experiences with desktop (as opposed to server) Linux have been so awful, this is like heaven by comparison. And installation was so easy… Ubuntu is the WordPress of Linux distributions.
Web 1.0
I got a pass to Web 2.0 this year (Open Source Infrastructure workshop) but I’m also going to check out Web 1.0, which looks like the most promising conference of the year.
Thank you, Ubuntu
Thank you, WordPress.com! You’re very welcome, I’m installing Ubuntu this weekend because of this blog.
Nano Scratches
I got an iPod nano a week or so ago and I’ve been very happy with it ever since. I even got it engraved with one of my favorite jazz quotes because I thought that this would be a device I would keep for a long time. However it has gotten pretty badly scratched, and I haven’t been too hard on it. Kind of a bummer. Update: Just to clarify, I’m fairly hard on electronics but I haven’t treated this iPod any different then the last one and yet it still looks pretty bad. It scratched when I wiped it with a microfiber cloth.
Small World
A few hours ago I was walking out and I ran into Adam Curry in the lobby of my building. I had forgotten that the “Curry Condo” is upstairs from me! We caught up for a few minutes and exchanged numbers, it sounds like Podshow is doing some pretty interesting things and it’ll be good to have Adam in SF.
Rita Update
Thanks everyone for your kind words. I just got through to my Mom on her cell phone, which has been tricky because the circuits are always busy. I’ve also been told people are having trouble getting to my cell which is a Houston number even though I’m on the other side of the country. Anyway she and my father are still in traffic in Houston, after leaving over 15 hours ago. When I drove from Houston to San Francisco 15 hours of driving was about 60% of the way to California. They were extremely lucky to get some of the last gas from a station before it closed, it seems everyone’s cars are dying because none of the gas stations along the evacuation routes have any fuel. They had to wait in line for 2 hours to get gas.
On Rita
Houston is the 4th largest city in the entire United States. The neighborhoods that flood the worst are the poor areas, but that doesn’t sound like it’ll matter with the magnitude of this hurricane heading to my home of 20 years. My parents have been on the road for 10 hours now and haven’t made it out of the city yet. Many other members of my family are staying, along with my Grandmother who is too sick to travel. After Katrina there was a rush of people metasearches and directories, NOW would be a good time for Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and the other giants to pool their resources and get the infrastructure in place to help before it hits. This one is hitting much closer to home for me, it’s hard to think about.
Zimbra Groupware
Zimbra looks like a really nice AJAX Outlook replacement.
WordPress for Business
eWeek says WordPress is Good Fit for Business. Hat tip: Scott Abbott via email.
Webzine Approaching
Webzine is this weekend and looks like it’ll be a blast. It’s only 22 bucks (!) but I heard they might sell out so it’s worth ordering your ticket online soon. I’ll be on two panels, Making Media with Open Source Tools and “Blog Wares Dance Off,” the latter of which I promise not to dance. (Too much.)
Company Soul
The Soul of a New Company, is a hard thing to capture.
5 Party Killers
5 things that killed your party, from the inimitable Mr Mann.