Chris Pirillo has posted some new bios for folks attending Gnomedex:

David Sifry – Technorati founder

Scott Gatz – Responsible for Yahoo!’s content syndication / RSS initiatives

Bob Wyman – CTO and co-founder of PubSub

Jason McCabe Calacanis – co-founder and CEO of Weblogs, Inc.

Scott Rafer – President and CEO of Feedster

Dean Hachamovitch – General Manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team

I’m also posting this to test out a method to implement Technorati tags on BlogHarbor weblogs…

I’ll be going to Gnomedex in 10 days and I am very much looking forward to it. It should be an exciting event, and I hope to learn a lot from the very smart folks who will be attending. Bob Wyman will be there, and I’m hoping to learn more about the Feedmesh from him; also looking forward to meeting Eric Rice, Roland Tanglao, Steve Garfield, and so many of the other folks will be at this event.

And if there are any BlogHarbor bloggers there, you know the first drink’s on me…

Please let me know if you would like to get together for any after hours sessions. 😉 日本語を話せる皆さん、いっしょに飲みませんか？

I’ve seen a number of articles recently (like this and this) about why Yahoo, MSN, Google et. al. will crush companies like Six Apart and services like our BlogHarbor and I think the idea is ludicrous.

Will those companies be bigger than us? Pretty likely. Have more customers? Sure. But there’s not a reason in the world to think that they would crush us as in put us out of business.

Remember back five years ago this month (wow – has it been that long?) when NTT bought Verio for $5.5 billion? That was supposed to be the beginning of the end for the small web hosting companies. A watershed event – the takeover of web hosting by the bigcos.

Well, it never happened. Today there are thousands of thriving web hosting businesses. And there are great and profitable web hosting companies that have been created just in the last few years, when conventional wisdom would have told you that this had already become a commodity business and that creating a new web hosting company was insanity.

If you think Yahoo, MSN, and Google will suddenly become industry leaders at:

• Answering the phone when you want to know why your account isn’t working the way it should
• Replying to your email where you asked about some CSS code you can’t get working on your blog
• Helping you understand your billing options
• Creating a custom solution for you that isn’t “on the menu”
• Going the extra mile in helping you with an issue that is technically outside the “sphere of support”

then maybe you’re right, the bug guys will take over this industry. But I don’t think anyone would tell you that these are things that are viewed as the bigco’s strengths. When was the last time you called Google and asked them to explain to you why your site wasn’t ranked so well in their search engine? To help you fix your Blogger posting? Got a prompt reply from Microsoft about how to format a table on your MSN Spaces blog?

Why then, would you expect any of those companies to crush any company that can provide a comparable product or service with far better support?

You get what you pay for. There’s a reason that MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, and Blogger are free: the companies that provide those services do not want to get into the support business. And web hosting – and its subset blog hosting – is inherently and primarily a support business, not a technology business. It’s much easier to create a scalable blogging platform than to support it. You only have to create it once, you’ll need to support it every day. Now that’s hard.

Hosting companies who understand this have nothing to fear from the big guys getting into blogging in a big way. Let them spend their marketing dollars convincing the public to get themselves and their businesses a blog. And when you or your family or friends or your business is feeling a little frustrated with the lack of support from your free blog provider, or are in need of something not on their menu (maybe a blog with a splash of domain name and a side order of email?), check us out: www.blogharbor.com.

I was looking for podcast icons today and came across this source listing a bunch of options. If you’re looking to jazz up your blog layout with icons denoting your podcast feed and files, [blog.forret.com]has a great listing of icons you can use.

Nice summary by Shel Holtz of the Internal Uses Of Blogs. This jumped out at me:

I’ve been engaged in employee communication for 28 years. When I started as an employee communications representative at ARCO in 1977, we used manual typewriters, a Compugraphics typesetting machine, and our primary communication vehicle was the weekly newspaper, the ARCOspark. I’ve watched all the advances in communication and few are as exciting as blogs.

He points out some of the internal uses at corporations would be:

• Executive blogs
• Alerts
• Projects
• Departmental
• Business literacy

Colin Charles has an interesting article at the Red hat magazine on Installing Fedora Core on the Mac mini. He summarizes the installation of Red Hat Fedora on the Mac mini:

A pretty swanky mini box! That’s what the Mac mini is… tiny, aesthetically pleasing, and great with Linux. Save for the wireless, where a USB dongle might suit, everything pretty much works out of the box with Fedora Core 4 Test 3.

Mini servers, anyone?

I met sportswriter Henry Abbott at the recent NYC geek dinner; he’s got a new blog called True Hoop. Looks like he’ll be blogging the NBA scene; make sure to check it out if you’re a basketball fan.

And if you ever meet Henry, make sure to ask him to tell you what it’s like to go to a bagel shop in the midwest… Good luck with the new blog, Henry!

I went to a “geek dinner” in NYC on Monday night, a get together organized by Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble, which coincided with Dave Winer‘s birthday. I posted pictures here, and some on Fickr too, other Fickr pics are here and a movie is here.
It was an enjoyable night, and there were many very smart and interesting bloggers and tech folk there; I was able to meet many of them but missed most of them. Maultasch was there and he said he hated it, and I can very much see why. There’s a huge difference between the way that, say a group of sales and marketing extroverts might get together for fun and networking, and the way that self-confessed geeks get together…
Us geeks can be shy (Michael from Hacking Netflix and a few other folks notwithstanding). Maybe we could use a little structure with an informal gathering of 50 people. Opening welcoming remarks by the organizer, a simple ice breaker of some sort, a box of stickers from Staples for us to write our names on and slap on our shirts…
Maybe some folks might think that would go against the “grassroots nature” of this type of informal gathering, but my feeling is that it would make introductions easier and help take a little of the focus off the A-lister and put a little more on the guy next to you, enabling us to make more connections with each other. Making more connections with each other being one of the things that makes blogging such a worthwhile activity…

A Decade Since AutoWeb…

Dave Winer is often referred to as the godfather of blogging, the inventor of RSS, and so on. Dave has probably forgotten about more great software he’s written than other programmers have written.

So on his 50th birthday, I would like to say thanks to Dave for AutoWeb, which the docs of the day referred to as the newsroom system for the worldwide web. AutoWeb was a Frontier suite which came out in early 1995, when Dave was just hitting 40. I used the tool for almost three years to build the Newsbytes Pacifica website for the late, great Newsbytes News Network.

AutoWeb was a godsend for the someone with limited programming experience looking to create and manage regularly updated websites. It allowed you to drop text files into a folder, then run a script which would process the test files into HTML, integrate those files with content already stored in Frontier’s database, process any macros contained in the database, and regenerate your website complete with Next and Previous links linking the pages.

AutoWeb featured pseudo-category support with “Surface Links” and “Dive Links” and integrated with the Anarchie FTP software which would automatically upload files for you once your site had been regenerated. To show you where we were in early 1995, Dave wrote this about the FTP upload feature: Go have a cup of coffee if you (like me!) have a 14.4 slip connection and a big website. A slip connection, when was the last time you heard any one say that.

I’d never been a programmer, but I learned a lot about scripting from AutoWeb. Frontier was the first programming language I tried to learn. While Perl might be the duct tape of the Internet, Frontier was definitely the duct tape for your Macintosh, allowing you to send email messages from Eudora into your Autoweb site, or integrate your FileMaker database with Netscape and so on. It was great fun learning how to read in a file on your Mac and send its contents into a Filemaker database, or how to get Netscape to save a series of URLs to disk for later offline browsing.

A very belated thank you for AutoWeb, Dave. It helped me build websites, inspired me to learn about scripting languages, and I’m still digging a decade later with the hosted blogging service I founded.

Happy 50th Birthday, Dave!

Via Slashdot: The Big Red Juicer. The Juicer is a wirelessly controlled, programmable juice maker which will mix each ingredient of a recipe to the exact proportions every time. A demonstration of ingenuity by some Cornell students.

Via Eric Rice: The Skype pay phone. Woah.

Businessweek writes in Blogs Will Change Your Business:

…the blogs are turning [the world of mass media] on its head. Set up a free account at Blogger or other blog services, and you see right away that the cost of publishing has fallen practically to zero. Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up.

Well then, let the dolts go to Blogger. The rest of us non-dolts with a working computer and an Internet connection will become blog publishers at BlogHarbor. They do say that blogs are the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself, which the royal we would have to agree with.

Saw this at an electronics shop at Narita airport on the way home. Note this is the traditional Japanese USB Memory, not some of that new modern USB memory. This is memory like it used to be.

Continue reading →

Mark Cuban says: The countdown for the extinction of CDs is about to begin: When it happens, the music industry will EXPLODE and sales and profits will go through the roof.

He makes some great points:

MP3 players are changing peoples listening habits. We dont carry folders filled with CDs anymore. We carry our library in our MP3 players. We dont listen to CDs. We listen to playlists that we adjust all the time. We dont burn CDs anymore, its too time consuming. We copy all our music to our MP3 players so its all available at our fingertips.

All of our music in a single device. Available to us where ever we are, for whenever we want it. Music how we want it, when we want it. Easy and breezy. Thats how we want to consume music.

Daily Yomiuri: Companies count on blogs to cut cost of Web.

Some companies are taking a more creative approach to promoting their products, as shown by world-famous celebrity cat Hello Kitty.

Of course, the fictional kitty doesn’t write her own blog, which is run by character-goods maker Sanrio Co., inventor of the character. But the company uses the blog to bring the cat to life, making her a familiar character and bringing her closer to her fans.

Click here to access the list of Hello Kitty blogs (Japanese).