technology

For the New Version of Gawker Stalker, which launches today, Gawker are using Wists as their blog publishing system. This allows them to publish items and create maps which show pictures and locations of celebrity sightings in Manahattan and gives a sneak peak into some of the kinds of things that you'll be able to do with the new version of Wists that we are working on.

The best blonde joke ever meme has resurfaced after a couple of years. You put a link that people are likely to click on - like 'best blonde joke ever' and this links in turn to the same headline which in turn links to it somewhere else again, recursively. Kafsemo has built an edge labeled graph

Tom Foremski reports on the irony of America's most famous investor buying Business Wire, a company that flourished under web 1.0 but is entirely obsolete in web 2.0. Online press releases will be part of an open infrastructure rather than a walled garden service. Which means no long term room for Business Wire, period. 5 other companies that Buffett could buy to match his most recent acquisition: Xerox Siebel Kodak Sun Silicon Graphics Buffett acquires business wire

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs Heh, great post. Having never had a proper job since i left architecture, I used to fantasize about doing job interviews since I could really tell the truth if I wasn't looking for a job. Now that its possible to bootstrap a modest web service, I fantasize about really telling the truth to VC's. Top 5 fantasy replies to questions in a presentation to a VC: Q. How big is your market? A. $0 [The current market size is $0 because I haven't been doing any paid work because I have been building this product for a marketplace of 1 - me. I built it because I really want this and believe in it.] Q. What is your burn rate 6 months from now to fund growth? A. No real growth will be apparent 6 months...

Digg is the real deal for web 2.0, in the sense that, for all the hype, it does absolutely nothing new but is about to render obsolete, geek central itself, Slashdot. Zawodny goes through the usual ideas as to why digg is successful - and then hits it on the nail - 'Lets face it. The slashdot guys are getting old'. Sure there are some improvements over Slashdot in the way the Digg does things, but this is not the product shakeup of Google Maps vs. Mapquest. Digg wins because the community has more vitality. Digg is about fashion, it makes Slashdot look like a bunch of ageing rockers. We are seeing the first generational switch in web applications - and that is really web 2.0. If this is natural churn, then someday someone else will beat Digg, and if this is a precedent then the lifespan of an otherwise...

It seems that a war is brewing between the carriers (Verizon) and the service providers (Google). The carriers want to tax revenue generating traffic based upon the revenue potential rather than the traffic, and they want to charge both the sender and the receiver of the traffic. This is like charging Walmart trucks more than other trucks for a bridge toll, just because Walmart make more money than other companies, but where the equivalent of the toll has already been paid for by Walmart's customers. One can assume that everyone is being superficially friendly but playing hardball in the background. The problem is that its impossible for the carrier to know the value of a single 'bit', since it varies according to what the 'bit' contains - is it part of an app, an ad, a video or text. Verizon want a slice of the action because they know that...

The Ironic thing about Steve Rubel's 'Google Book Search Hack', which he jokingly said he was posting because he was in the mood to 'get Digged' - and was, is that it contains all the right keywords to attract 'Diggs', but no actual information. Steve's post is basically a description of how to type words into a search engine. So the irony is this - by posting a description about how to do something 'technical' that isn't and using words like 'O'Reilly, hacks, Digg, Google', you can become one of the top links on a techy links site. This may seem trivial - but I think it is a good example of why the Digg voting system does not really work in its current form, unless the algorithm for vote weighting is much more sophisticated. Micro Persuasion: Read Most of O'Reilly's Hacks Books for Free Using Google

To say that Wikipedia is OK, that it is about as accurate as Britannica, not fantastically better or worse, is not much of a news story. Much more melodramatic to say that Wkipedia is a disaster, a threat to civilization, full of lies etc. The reality is that a system that is open for anyone in the world to try to post a lie, that has only been going for a few years, whose contributors don't get paid has only managed to produce a couple of pretty obscure hoaxes. The truth is that it is a much more accurate reference tool than the Internet as a whole, than most books and, as has just been suggested in a blind test, its pretty much as accurate as Britannica. Its true that the Britannica test was only for scientific articles - but to be honest, if anybody seriously believes that topics like...

Build your own search engine with no hardware cost, with Alexa: $1 per CPU hour consumed. $1 per gig of storage used. $1 per 50 gigs of data processed. $1 per gig of data uploaded. John Battelle's Searchblog: Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game

Writely continues to add word processing features which are actually useful, unlike Word which takes several thousand options and millions of calculations per second to provide the functionality of a typewriter. It looks like the entire Microsoft edifice is held up by Excel, the only product I can think of that is better than competitors'. Is Excel really worth as much as a medium sized country, in the long term? Web word processor adds PDF conversion | CNET News.com

The worst mistake we made at Moreover was to raise too much money. The Bay Area prides itself on the sophistication of its investment structure, but most of the successful Web 2.0 'exits', from a founder perspective, have been non-Bay Area companies or ones that didn't raise too much cash. Perhaps the further you are from Mountain View, the less likely you are as an entrepreneur, to be seduced by Bay Area style startup investment. If you are in a casino and you are $5M up, the best thing you can do is walk away from the roulette table. If you are a young entrepreneur $5M is a life changing experience and selling a company after bootstrapping or a seed round of investment can give you that. A series B round could very well give you more - but it is a much bigger gamble and as recent evidence suggests,...

Riffs is a very nicely executed relook at reviews, another slot in the web 2.0 trend of looking at things that are a good idea but haven't had a makeover since the dotcom days. Interestingly enough Riffs founder Bruce Spector was behind one of the original web components - the first online calendar app. someone with enough vision and clout to propel Riifs. Publishing on the web is becoming standardized the way the browser and search engines standardized Internet based information retrieval. Before the web, full text search was a relatively obscure area dominated by the likes of Verity. Today the lack of full text search within Windows seems amazing, the web having made it mainstream. Looking at services like Riffs, which make publishing content an almost subconscious activity, something interesting is happening: the interface for publishing is gravitating towards the same interface as search. Google has a bunch of...