In December 2008, Six Apart acquired Pownce, a microblogging service that never managed to attract a large following. Pownce was shuttered after the acquisition, but its two-person team joined Six Apart to help integrate the technology into Six Apart's blogging services. Today Pownce founder Leah Culver has written on her blog that she's leaving Six Apart, where she spent the last year working on its TypePad and TypePad Motion products. Culver writes that her next project is developing an iPhone application for Plancast.

Despite reports to the contrary, Culver isn't joining Plancast full time (at least not yet). Plancast founder (and TechCrunch alum) Mark Hendrickson says that she's joining on a contract basis to build the iPhone app, but that the long-term future is uncertain. Culver's blog notes that she might continue working on Leafy Chat, a web based IRC client that's in private beta.

One thing worth pointing out: Culver and Mike Malone were Pownce's only engineers, and they were absorbed into the Six Apart team as part of the acquisition. Malone left Six Apart just over a year after the acquisition to join SimpleGeo, and now Culver has left just a few months later. It looks like they had a one-year post acquisition cliff, and given their departures soon thereafter, it's possible the integration of Pownce's technology didn't work out as they might have hoped.

Image by hyku

If the acquisition of Touchco wasn't enough of an indication that Amazon is preparing for a skirmish with the Apple iPad, this should make it perfectly clear. Mike Nash, a man who has quite a history of accomplishments at Microsoft for the past two decades, is leaving the company to work on the Kindle business for Amazon.

Before leaving Microsoft, Mike was the Corporate Vice President of Windows Platform Strategy and was responsible for pieces of Windows business strategy, ecosystem engagement, consumer security, Internet Explorer, and emerging markets, according to his bio on Microsoft's Web site.

In addition to his most recent role, Nash has had a string of historic positions at Big M including a role as the first product manager on the original Windows NT marketing team; the Corporate Vice President of the Security Technology Unit; and a driver of a number of Microsoft acquisitions in the security space.

There's been no official announcement yet from Amazon so we're unsure of Nash's focus within the Amazon team.

[Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet] [Amazon Kindle]

Disclosure of Material Connection: http://dsclszr.us/5

Related articles by Zemanta

• Amazon acquires Touchco and a Microsoft exec (macworld.com)
• Another Windows exec Mike Nash is leaving Microsoft (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Amazon Hires Mike Nash from Microsoft to Work on Kindle is a post from: Magical Tablet

Charlie Rose Talks with Walt Mossberg, David Carr and Mike Arrington About iPad is a post from: Magical Tablet

My Thoughts On Techcrunch And Daniel Brusilovsky

FRANK SINATRA

May 4, 1976

Mr. Mike Royko
"Chicago Daily News"
401 No. Wabash Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611

Let me start this note by saying, I don't know you and you don't know me. I believe if you knew me:

First, you would find immediately that I do not have an army of flunkies.

Secondly, neither myself, nor my secretary, nor my security man put in the request for police protection. It is something that's far from necessary.

It's quite obvious that your source of information stinks, but that never surprises me about people who write in newspapers for a living. They rarely get their facts straight. If the police decided that they wanted to be generous to me, I appreciate it. If you have any beefs with the Chicago Police Force, why not take it out on them instead of me, or is that too big a job for you?

And thirdly, who the hell gives you the right to decide how disliked I am if you know nothing about me. The only honest thing I read in your piece is the fact that you admitted you are disliked, and by the way you write I can understand it. Quite frankly, I don't understand why people don't spit in your eye three or four times a day.

Regarding my "tough reputation" you and no one else can prove that allegation. You and millions of other gullible Americans read that kind of crap written by the same female gossip columnists that you are so gallantly trying to protect; the garbage dealers I call hookers, and there's no doubt that is exactly what they are, which makes you a pimp, because you are using people to make money just as they are.

Lastly, certainly not the least, if you are a gambling man:

a) You prove, without a doubt, that I have ever punched an elderly drunk or elderly anybody, you can pick up $100,000.

b) I will allow you to pull my "hairpiece"; if it moves, I will give you another $100,000; if it does not, I punch you in the mouth. How about it?

(Signed, 'Sinatra')

cc: The Honorable Richard J. Daley
Supt. James Rochford

Mr. Marshall Field, Publisher
Mr. Charles D. Fegert, Vice Pres.

FS:d

This material has been copyrighted may not be reproduced unless used in its entirety and sets forth the following copyright notice:

(c) Frank Sinatra 1976

Friend, smart dude and all-around good guy Micah Baldwin wrote up a post yesterday that hurt me a little bit quite a bit, if I must be honest. It bothers me because he's right.

On every account of where the failure to find funding comes from us, me, you he's right. Whether it's not searching in the right spot, pitching the wrong story, a flawed product or the inability to get over ones self-importance, the blame can go to one person, you.

Let's break this down . . .

I want to focus on one section from the post and give it a bit more fleshing out for those that might need it. This is especially important for those that are preparing to go out for funding the first time.

If you are struggling to raise money, look back at the decision points:

1. Does your idea excite the people you are talking to;
2. Do you excite the people you are talking to;
3. Are you talking to the right' people (not the easy' or big name' people)?

Three

I'd like to speak to them in a new order with number 3 being first. This is the hardest one to get right and the most important. Being enamored by the big name' will only lead to heart break and misery when the big name' investors tell you no. That no could be for one of a million reasons but most likely number 1 or 2.

The right people are those that don't already have portfolio of companies that can do what you are looking to do, they could be someone that you strike up a conversation with at a conference or the seat next to you on a plane.

Believe me on this from when I went through it, the people I should have focused on pitching were right in front of my face and asked for more of my time. I was too enamored with big names and brands to see these opportunities.

The right people also don't have to be early investors in other up and coming startups. There are plenty of investors in the fringe that might be able to help even more. It is a matter of finding them.

One

On the account of number 1, Does your idea excite the people your are talking to? It must if you've gotten your foot through the door. If you haven't haven't, don't be disheartened with a quick no from a potential investor. They are respecting your time by not wasting it.

To maintain this excitement, prepare like you have never prepared before. Take the time to analyze your business, role play your presentation and be certain to understand the investor you are pitching. If a friend helped to put you in this position, ask them for some advice. Cover your bases.

Two

On the account of number 2, Do you excite the people you are talking to? The answer is really up to you. If you get number one right and convey the passion that you have for the startup then the answer is yes. If you get elements of number one right but not all of them, you'll definitely lose points. Those points could cost you the funding and more importantly a future relationship with the potential investor.

Conclusion

Micah's post is brilliant. Any entrepreneur that is looking to raise capital should study, answer all of the questions he asks and fill in any other missing components that they see fit. It is a blue print for how to be a digital hustler and mean it.

Now that I think about it, there is another set of guidelines that combined with Micah's thoughts could be the ultimate startup cocktail Mike Dunn's Tech Due Diligence. That is a cocktail worth whipping up.

Photo credit: (cc) Kenneth Yeung www.thelettertwo.com

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

The Right Investor and You is a post from: TechStartups.com

Last week we had a search come in for what happens in a startup merger? A brilliant question that is most likely being asked at the worst time the merger.

This question might have been asked by an employee of the startup, but let's for this instance suppose that it came from the lucky founder of a startup that found an exit well before the business has matured. This merger allows them financial compensation and just how much is at stake.

What appears to be missing from this founders startup experience and vocabulary is a very important term and process due diligence.

One of the best, if not the best, resources for helping this startup founder would be the Technology Due Diligence (TechDD) written by Mike Dunn (@glemak). Mike's current role is CTO of Hearst Interactive Media. He's a tech veteran with stripes pre and post bubble that guides Hearst's technology investments like Brightcove, BuzzFeed and UGO.

Dunn's document is a view behind the curtain of venture capital. It gives a startup a view that a potential investor or a more experienced merging company has of the process that is about to unfold and seeks to make it as smooth as possible.

Dunn describes his open source TechDD as:

The goal of this due diligence process is to allow us to fully understand the technology practice of your company, including how you are staffed, your tactical and strategic utilization of technology and the processes that allow them all to work together to produce what you do for your company. We would like to be able to understand this for both your current state and your roadmap. So where relevant to your business, please be prepared to discuss and provide written answers for the following scoping questions

And scoping they are.

The documentation is broken down into three sections:

1. Technical Staffing
2. Infrastructure and Architecture
3. Workflows and Processes

Each with a keen focus on extracting the most information that will allow outsiders to understand the inner workings of the startup. If these questions are answered truthfully by a startup before being approached by a potential investor the process of a merger wouldn't cause anxiety but provide for a source of relief that from the very beginning the building of the business was transparent.

The Technology Due Diligence documentation that Dunn has created isn't designed to trip up an entrepreneur. It is written in the spirit of the open source community to be a transparent and genuine glimpse into what is often the most fear inducing a process and unprepared startup can find itself in.

The document is a comprehensive primer for any tech startup to integrate with their business plan. It clears the way for building a business that is investment or acquisition ready at any time.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Tech Startup Due Diligence is a post from: TechStartups.com

Startups, it's time to begin shortening and tracking your own URL's. Taking control of your data is the simplest way of measuring your engagement online next to direct conversations with users. Look at it like taking a survey without asking a single question.

So what?

There is a wealth of data to be collected from that shortened URL that can help you make your product(s) better. Take for instance if your job is to write blog posts and then tweet about them. If you're tracking the data yourself you can measure the most active click-through times and tweet then. Another example might be your desire to track other click-throughs and track the geo-location of your biggest fans.

Other great information to get from this one-click survey is what site did they use to click-through, also known in the biz as referrer and what some might call the holy grail of necessary data for digital product development, user-agent. For when you need to know the application or platform, such as mobile, to better your products. So that's so what.

So how?

There are a couple of ways to get it done. If you want the data and tracking that I described above without having to parse your log files you can use the code samples that I will add below. If you simply are looking for a way to brand your URL shortener and use it on Twitter, then you can follow the discussion and directions in this forum thread for using .htacess on Apache [http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/2545.htm].

For those of you ready to get it on with a kick start and build on top of it, here we go. I should mention that this is for those on a LAMP box. Not sure what LAMP means? This isn't for you then. If you do and are on another platform, feel free to follow along for the concepts.

First Get a short URL

The best choice doing this the right way is to figure out something that comes close to your regular URL. Say your site is goldfishbowlpirate.com and you found that gbp.me was available. Then you would snatch it up and your short URL's would look like http://gbp.me/1234. Make sure you host the account on a LAMP server.

Second Edit the .htaccess file

Simple copy and past job into your .htaccess file will get you on the road to tracking your click-throughs like a champ.

code: RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^[0-9] /

Third MySQL table

You'll need to setup a couple of tables: one to store the URL's that need to be redirected and one to store the click-through data.

The base table

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `url_base` (
`url_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`url_key` varchar(6) NOT NULL default '',
`url_value` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
`bookmarklet` tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '0',
`user_host` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
`create_time` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
PRIMARY KEY  (`url_id`),
KEY `url_key` (`url_key`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

The clicks table

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `url_clicks` (
`hit_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`url_id` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`hit_host` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
`hit_time` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
`hit_referer` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
`hit_agent` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
PRIMARY KEY  (`hit_id`),
KEY `hit_agent` (`hit_agent`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

Fourth Code it up

This is where the magic truly happens. We need code to create shortened URL's, handle the redirects by looking up the shortened URL in the url_base table and track the click-through in the url_clicks table.

I've created a zip file that has all the necessary files in it and the SQL above for download. Also Included in the zip are the .htaccess file and four PHP scripts.

1. config.php A configuration file
2. index.php To act as the index incase there is an error with the redirect
3. makeit.php To make shortened URL's. It can be called by other programs like an API
4. makeit_b.php To make shortened URL's for a Bookmarklet for easy testing and copy and paste. To use the Bookmarklet simply right-click on your bookmarks toolbar and paste the code below into the Location' section. Make sure to swap out yourshorturl' with your own!javascript:(function(){var%20a=window,b=document,c=decodeURIComponent,d=a.open('http://yourshorturl/makeit_b.php?url='+c(b.location),"bkmk_popup","left="+((a.screenX||a.screenLeft)+10)+",top="+((a.screenY||a.screenTop)+10)+",height=145px,width=200px,resizable=1,alwaysRaised=1");a.setTimeout(function(){d.focus()},300)})();

Now that you've got all the code you need to begin shortening and tracking your own URL's you can take a look at a sample of a very simple admin page. I've been using this system of shortening for nearly two years for all of my Twitter URL's.

A special thanks to Mike Marusin for writing the first version of this code for his own personal URL shortener back in 2007.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Post from: TechStartups.com

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Scott and I got married to one another on Saturday, September 26th. It was an amazing day and while the weather wasn't quite as warm as I would have liked, the rain held off until just after we finished cleaning up. The food our friends and family brought to share was delicious, the cakes that I made were perfect and people had a really good time.

One of our goals with this wedding was to keep the ceremony portion short, as we were asking people to stand for it. So we kept our vows brief, funny and to the point. Here's what we said to each other.

Marisa, to Scott

For the years that we were nothing more than friends, I swore up and down to anyone who would listen that you were not the man for me. It wasn't until you started dating someone else that I realized how deeply I adored you (despite the fact that you didn't have a driver's license and that you are undeniably a picky eater). Now, I can't imagine my life without you.

Scott, I am delighted to be marrying you today, and I vow to you to love you for the rest of my life, even when you're painfully stubborn, when you turn up your nose at my sauted string beans or when you fling your dirty socks across the room. I promise to support your dreams and will never stop encouraging you to write those novels we all know are in you. I promise to respect your Star Trek cards, weekly D & D dates and general geekery, and appreciate your similar courtesy for my jars, cookbooks and sundry kitchen implements.

Scott, I vow to give you the quiet time you need and to be the one in our relationship who deals with the minutia of daily living. I solemnly swear that I'll never stop laughing, even if things get momentarily grim. And most of all, I vow to always embrace your whimsy, your humor and all your wacky charms.

You are my person, my favorite boy and I love you with all I've got.

Scott, to Marisa

If you asked me 10 years ago, or even 3 years ago, if I would be getting married to a hippie, at a potluck wedding officiated by a lesbian I would have laughed at you. And yet, here we are and words can't express how happy I am. Funny how life works, isn't it?

Marisa, you and I are complete opposites in many ways. I'm tall, you're short. I hardly know what day of the week it is, you're always on top of the details. I'm funny and you're well maybe we can move on.

Marisa, I vow to do as I am told most of the time. I promise to not make your life any more difficult than I normally do. I promise to talk you through moments of panic and anxiety with a smile and love in my heart. I vow to at least try and express my feelings more than fortnightly, and above all else I promise to be your partner in all of life's adventures and misfortunes.

You are the love of my life, the reason I wake up in the morning, the spring in my step, and I can't imagine life without you.

The video clip above, from YouTube, is grainy, but TechCrunch's Mike Arrington assures readers it's in the final movie. I hadn't seen the film myself, unaware it touched on social networking, but Arrington writes that MySpace takes up a solid five minutes of the movie.

The treatment is brutal. Early in the clip, MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson asks Sandler if he actually uses the product. The star's reply: "No, no no. I fuck girls, Tom. I don't have time for that." When he goes on stage, the comic greets the MySpace crowd as "nerds" and then trashes their users: "They say the more friends you have on MySpace the less friends you have in real life." .

Sure, MySpace's competitors are insulted, too. But companies like Silicon Valley-based Facebook are fighting hard to avoid Hollywood; Facebook trashed Ben Mezrich's book about the company, The Accidental Billionaires, and by extension the Aaron Sorkin movie based on that book, calling it inaccurate.

But MySpace is based in Beverly Hills, close to Hollywood, and seems to have a better handle on the big picture: Being on the silver screen, in any context, means you're culturally relevant. Why not embrace the opportunity to make your virtual community a lot more real? (Via TechCrunch.)

From the "Social Marker" blog post:

When I visit San Francisco I am always surprised how often the name of my friend, Robert Scoble comes up in random conversation, unprompted by myself. Why is that? Why is he so well known? Is his blog REALLY that good? Is he REALLY that smart and interesting?

Well, I could give a whole stack of reasons to explain why I think Robert's success is well-deserved. But one major reason that his blog's traffic is so high, and his name so well-known, is that his personal brand has somehow managed to become a Social Marker inside the Silicon Valley ecosystem. The same could also be said for Mike Arrington, Loic Le Meur or Mark Zuckerberg. Dropping their names into random conversations allows people to quickly and efficiently contextualize themselves.[Thanks to @scobleizer and @arrington etc.]

My guest for this week's Innovators show is Mike Dunn, a veteran media technologist who recently attended, and spoke at, the 2009 Semantic Technology. Mike and I were both impressed by Tom Tague's keynote talk, which avoided theory and focused on practical ways that here-and-now semantic technologies are helping media businesses work smarter and more profitably. In this conversation, Mike describes some of the ways that his company, Hearst Media Interactive, is proving that point.

Search engine optimization is currently one of the best ways to profit from data-enabled content. Meanwhile, one of the expected benefits of semantic technology better search recall and precision hasn't materialized. But although most users may not care about querying archives more comprehensively and more precisely, writers and editors should. And not only because it helps automate the assembly of context around a current story. If you can review an archive in a precise and comprehensive way, you can do a better job of planning future stories that acknowledge and advance the ones you've already done.

If you're out to create something truly great, you'll likely need to challenge some widely held but incorrect beliefs. Challenging conventional wisdom is much harder than most people realize, and those that do make us uncomfortable. Which is why it's so important to learn how to identify and embrace people who see the world differently than you do.

Evolutionary Biology and Conformity

Imagine our ancient ancestors out on the savanna in search of food. Chasing a large group of hunters who were running after something out of view was probably a better survival strategy than pursuing animal tracks that may or may not have led to food. Gregory Berns argues that mankind's propensity to follow the crowd is at least partially a result of evolutionary biology.

Such a propensity is so ingrained in human nature that we will go to ridiculous lengths in order to adjust our beliefs to those of a group, as proven in the series of conformity experiments run by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. According to Wikipedia:

In the basic Asch paradigm, the participants the real subject and the confederates were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of questions about the lines (which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc.) The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud and the confederates always provided their answers before the study participant. The confederates always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses. In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. However, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (36.8%). 75% of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.

It's very challenging to make decisions based on your own information and logic when everyone disagrees with your point of view. We have an urge to conform, as we learn again with each economic boom and bust. Unfortunately, as David Hirshleifer describes in The Blind Leading the Blind: Social Influence, Fads, and Informational Cascades, If there are many individuals, thenwith virtual certainty a point in the chain of decisions will be reached where an individual ignores his private information and bases his decision solely upon what he sees his predecessors do.

Weird Ideas That Work

The inspiration for the title of this post came from the book Weird Ideas That Work, in which Robert Sutton suggests hiring people who make you uncomfortable. He argues that employers typically hire people like themselves and that most interviews are more about the social fit between the candidate and interviewer rather than the candidate and the job.

So what can you do to embrace those who make you uncomfortable?

1. Identify your heroes.

Chances are that the historical figures you hold in high esteem made those around them uncomfortable in their day. Einstein did. Gandhi did. Jefferson did. Apple's Think Different campaign was as much about communicating what the company stood for to its employees as it was about selling Apple products to its customers. An organization that embraces unconventional thinkers has an unfair competitive advantage in a world governed by conformity.

2. Adjust your hiring process to focus on what really matters.

Jeff Cordova, a former Yahoo colleague of mine, puts all engineering candidates through a code test before he determines cultural fit or the like. He literally sits down in a room with a candidate and spends a few hours coding up an application with them. At the end of the test, he has a very good idea of their software engineering skills and often asks other members of his team to drill down in a particular area of expertise. It's only after qualifying their skills as an engineer that he allows his team to determine their fit within the organization.

While software engineering is relatively easy to test, you can apply a similar type of testing process for just about any role to reduce the impact of social bias in hiring. Microsoft notoriously put candidates through case study interviews (I don't know if they still do), as documented by William Poundstone in How Would You Move Mount Fuji?

Spend more time thinking about interview-based experiments that you can run on candidates to test what really matters for the role and you might find yourself hiring a different type of person.

3. If you have a negative reaction to an idea, use the 5 Whys.

The 5 Whys is a method to get at the root cause of a problem. When you hear an idea, before you immediately respond, try to understand the underlying reason for your knee-jerk reaction. You may find that your reaction is more about protecting existing orthodoxy or the source of the idea than it is about the merits of the particular approach at hand.

4. Consider increasing organizational diversity.

The true benefit of diversity is that it has the potential to produce better results. Diversity along the lines of age, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation has the potential to make an organization more resilient to conformity. Different people from different backgrounds bring in different biases. And groups that have experienced greater prejudice may have a membership inoculated from group think as a matter of self-preservation that is, when everyone hates your group, you tend to hold a differing opinion.

It's not easy working with one of the rare people who is deeply nonconformist. But if your goal is to be innovative, to create something great and to make a difference in the world, you should be prepared to make those around you uncomfortable and recruit others who do the same to you.

Mike Speiser is a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. His thoughts on technology, economics and entrepreneurship will appear at this time every week.

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Jazzin the Black Forest - The Complete Guide to Saba/MPS Jazz Records -Published by Crippled Library c1999

Jazzin the Black Forest is the story of the SABA/MPS jazz label. It was established during the early 1960s and is considered to be Germany s first independent label. From the label's beginnings up to its sale to Polygram in 1983, SABA/MPS released over 700 LPs. This book features full color images of all the LPs, a complete index as well as poster reproductions.

Saba/MPS played host to an impressive list of artists including: Albert Mangelsdorff, Joachim Khn, Volker Kriegel, Wolfgang Dauner, Baden Powell, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Jean Luc Ponty, Monty Alexander just to name a few.

According to the amazing Birka Jazz website Joachim-Ernst Berendt produced a large number of records, especially live recordings and recordings in studios outside Villingen. Berendt, and his wife Gigi, also contributed to the label's visual look. Their interest in modern art led to that MPS frequently brought in artists to adorn the covers. Gigi Berendt also designed album covers herself.

The book is currently out of print, but maybe if enough people contact the publisher they would consider republishing this gem.

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Also worth checking: Mike Cina Jazz Mix

Album covers from the Groove Merchant

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Fever and the Future of Feed Readers

Time was, every self-respecting geek lived and died by his feed reader (or aggregator, if you prefer). Just several years ago, the number of subscriptions in your RSS-chomping tool of choice made for bragging rights. 200? Oh, I can get through 500 feeds a day. More subscriptions meant you were more in the know. Really good lists of subscriptions were traded amongst friends, but cautiously, just as one might hold back a recommendation to a superb but little-known restaurant.

At the time, the only real debate was around the best way to present all this information. Some preferred a river of news, others preferred their content categorized and neatly filed, like sections in a newspaper. But everyone was in agreement: having all this fresh content collected for you in one place was a boon. It was a change in mindset, and it seeded the demand for what is now being called the Real-Time Web. (Incidentally, the Real-Time Web is next year's Web 2.0. If you'd like to appear cool and aloof, start disdaining the expression now).

Today, at least in the web-tech echo chamber, feed reading is quickly falling out of fashion. Too many sites producing too many feeds of dubious quality means information overload, and a creeping sense of obligation to keep up with a torrent of questionably relevant content. Some have gone back to checking a handful of bookmarked sites, as we did in the early days of the web. Others rely on social aggregation sites like Reddit, Digg, and Hacker News to show them what's worth reading. Both strategies are highly manual and, to me, distressingly unoptimized.

Abdicating Aggregation

Another camp all but eschews the idea of trying to keep up with feeds. Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of the superb social coding site GitHub, is one of the more visible advocates of this approach, saying in a tech conference keynote last year:

Stop using Google Reader or NetNewsWire or whatever the kids are using these days. It's not worth your time. [L]et other people do the filtering for you. Use your time for other things.

This statement initially rings true. We're in the age of social networking, after all. I've told social sites about my friends, and my friends are always talking about things, so just show me what my friends are talking about and I'll always be in the loop, right? Then I can focus on my own interests and projects. Sounds great.

The problem with abdicating your content consumption to other people, though, is other people. Perhaps it's overestimating my ability to find interesting things to read, but I don't trust my friends and the Internet at large to educate and entertain me. In the venn diagram of my interests and my friends', there may be 80% overlap, but most of the content that I'm going to find deeply engaging is probably in the leftover 20% at the margins.

There's also a sort of collective danger to the strategy of exclusively consuming information through social osmosis: if everyone does it, who's going to find the interesting stuff? Who takes the reigns as the editors, the arbiters of taste? Going back to a post I wrote in 2003, who will be our cool shit aggregators?

If everyone took Wanstrath's advice, nobody would do any filtering and nobody would consume anything. Realistically, we're in no danger of that, but we're also not seeing a radical improvement in the way we consume information on the web. Surely someone's investigating another strategy?

Blending Subscriptions with Social Data

Google Reader is, as evidence of the slowly dying field of feed reading, pretty much the only regularly-updated, widely-used aggregator left on the web. Bloglines has been gasping for air for over a year, and NewsGator is positioning itself towards the enterprise, presumably trying to scrape some money out of the generally unprofitable business of aggregation.

Reader has been something of a playground for Google, and one of the products for which the behemoth has been most responsive to public feedback. When Reader launched, its interface was nigh-unusable. It was updated, improved, and gradually became the only feed reader worth using and not just on the web, something it pains me to say as the owner of licenses for multiple desktop aggregators that eventually had their price driven down to free, and have since seen little attention from their developers.

Today, Google seems hellbent on cramming its otherwise clean and speedy products with cumbersome, poorly conceived social features. Presumably they see social networks as a threat to their valuable side business of, uh, completely free products, and this is their ham-fisted response. In Reader's case, the user response has been one of confusion and derision.

Seeing content filtered through my social lens seems like the marriage of traditional feed reading to Wanstrath's more osmotic approach. Reader's implementation doesn't prove this to be a happy union. The tool is now cluttered with smilie faces indicating content that my friends liked, only Google has fairly incomplete view of who my friends are because they've yet to create a social experience that encourages me to share that information. Reader's myriad competing ways to share, vote on, annotate, and remember items further detract from its former appeal.

I've given up on Reader, but I'm not ready to give up on feed reading just yet. I wanted to try one more experiment.

Enter Fever

Fever is a feed reader designed and built by Shaun Inman, the developer behind the popular Mint web traffic analytics product. Like Mint, Fever is $30 (USD) and runs on your server a ballsy proposition in an age of free software running in the proverbial cloud. It is unapologetically for power users.

Fever's proposition is straightforward: supply it with the feeds you always want to read, and supplement those with feeds that you only want to read the juicy bits of. Fever will then show you a sort of personal Techmeme or Google News, pulling together stories that reference common URLs. Fever's precise formula for this isn't discussed on the product's relatively curt homepage. Take it or leave it.

I forked over my money, spun up a virtual server, and have been using Fever for several days now. Installation was as straightforward and slick as you could hope for given that Fever is a self-hosted web application. Special features aside, it handles the basics well imagine Google Reader before all the social bloat and with a far more attractive design. Fever's design is not perfect, but it's easy on the eyes and pleasant to use. Put another way, Fever doesn't make it harder to read feeds much as you always have.

The $30 question, though: does Fever really float the best, most relevant content to the top in a personalized way? Can it dig through all the noise on the web and show you what you need/want to know at a glance? The free answer: sort of.

For starters, it's easy to pollute your corpus of signal feeds, which Fever calls sparks. Fever needs sparks that contain a lot of links. If you put top feeds from Digg, Reddit, and the like into Fever, you'll basically just end up with your own dim, mostly irrelevant slice of the web. Fever really needs folks like Waxy, Laughing Squid, and Trivium to keep churning out link blogs full of references to good content. Without those sort of quality, URL-rich feeds, your Fever's view of what's hot is going to be lukewarm.

For this reason, Fever is just fine for floating good techie content to the top, but poor for most any other subject. I'd love it if Fever could find me good posts from the set of minimal techno or cocktail blogs I subscribe to, but link blogs and, indeed, linking outside one's own site just aren't as prevalent in those communities. Fever did similarly poorly given a number of sparks for top world news; a paucity of URLs means Fever can't replace Google News for figuring out what's on the front pages of the world's newspapers.

It's disappointing that I can't depend on Fever to be a one-stop shop for my daily information intake. With my current heavily-curated collection of subscriptions, I can rely on Fever to be a sort of no-bullshit Techmeme, but little more. For the topics of world news, music, art, culture, humor, food, and drink, I still need to read a number of feeds entry-by-entry.

Given Fever's initial cost, plus the ongoing cost of hosting a server on which to run it, I can't imagine that it's a tool that will last long in my tool belt. I already regret the time I spent setting it up and tuning my feeds, and I can't really justify keeping it around for the sole purpose of being a less-encumbered Google Reader.

The Future of Feed Readers

I'm not sure what the solution is here. Feed readers as we've known them are dying, but it's as yet unclear what will take their place. Filtering feeds for relevance algorithmically seems all but fruitless; filtering through the social graph is only a slight improvement, but misses the rare content that may only strike a chord with a small audience.

If there's one thing I'm convinced of at the end of this exploration, it's that there's more work to be done, and more businesses to emerge in this field. Social networks alone aren't focused enough tools to bubble up and share quality content. My hope is that a surplus open data of the sort we're trying hard to share at Twitter will help spawn a new generation of tools to manage the flood of content. I don't think it's a problem that Twitter, or any other pipeline for information, can solve on its own.

With all that said, perhaps the right approach really is to abdicate one's consumption of content to whatever you're passively exposed to, and to occupy your mind with other things. The act of creation is almost always self-affirming, and the act of consumption so rarely is.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Probably not.

But you can mock up basic cloud services, such as those for a shopping cart application, on your PC so you can see how the Web app you are working on will interact when it eventually reaches out and touches the real cloud, says says Chris Kraus, product manager for iTKO, the testing software vendor, which offers tooling for recording or mocking cloud services.

He sees growing interest among customers for the personal cloud concept, allowing developers to code and test Web applications that will eventually interact with services in the cloud. Cloud services on a PC provide two major advantages for developers during coding and testing, he says. [Disclosure: iTKO is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts].

First, the developer working on a cloud application is free to work anywhere, anytime regardless of whether the real cloud services are available or accessible. If a cloud service for a shopping cart is down for some reason, developers are not impacted since their version of the service is on their laptop. They can also code when they are on a plane, or in another environment with no access to the cloud.

Second, although this is probably first in the minds of budget conscious IT managers, the developer is not running up charges for accessing the cloud services, Kraus says.

If the services are hosted on a cloud from a third party and I have to maintain physical

What developers could use is a Personal Cloud that would allow them to configure their local environment in multiple ways and take it with them wherever they go

connectivity, I have to pay to do that, he said. If I have a personal cloud on my desktop, I can take development offline, interact with those services, make sure my HTML is tight, and do all the stuff that is important to me. Then I point it to the real cloud and actually get the development up.

Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, also sees value in the personal cloud concept.

In a recent post on his blog, Developers Need A Personal Cloud, the analyst also sees the value, in terms of portability.

What developers could use is a Personal Cloud that would allow them to configure their local environment in multiple ways and take it with them wherever they go, he writes. I know this sounds like virtualization and it is to some extent, but extend PC virtualization with cloud concepts and you get the Personal Cloud.

One commenter on Gualtieri's blog suggests this concept might be dubbed local virtualization.

I had an intriguing chat with HP's Jeff Meyers and iTKO chief scientist and co-founder John Michelsen last month at HP's Software Universe conference. The confluence of SaaS and cloud with application development and the test phase is changing rapidly, we observed.

Compressing the test phase into the development and production becomes more feasible. And as virtualization becomes more common, building an application or service in its own runtime stack bubble from inception to sunset starts to make sense. OSGi fits into the vision nicely.

And while we're combining all the elements of an application and platform from cradle to grave, why not tune the whole package before, during and after development too then load the entire package as a portable cloud-supported production unit?

Now, that's a personal cloud (I prefer cloud service nodule), but with high service performance output, and far less time in cost in the total lifecycle. Higher overall quality too. What do you think?

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

Here's a really fascinating piece on the BBC about NASA programmer Don Eyles and the team behind the infamous AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer). Don was only 23 when he got the gig. Maybe it was good that he was young and naive. As he says: "I don't recall the risk and the responsibility and the fact that other people's lives were to some extent in our hands."

There are few instances in which I'm happy to be as old as I am. The fact that I got to live through and be an active observer (aka space geek!) during the Apollo program is one of those times. I still get chills reliving some of that footage.

There's a great jargon term in here, too: "LOL memory." It stands for "Little Old Lady memory" and refers to the "rope core memory" used in the AGC that required teams of (women) employees to weave meters and meters of copper wire around magnetic cores.

Weaving the way to the Moon [Thanks, Brian Jepson and Mike Loukides!]

While at an introduction to the forthcoming 550i GT two things were clear: 1) the car looks much better in real life and 2) it may pull the plug on future sport wagons for the US market.

Martin Birkmann, head of product planning for BMWNA, discussed with some members of the press that the GT may in fact decrease the number of 5 Series sports wagons sold to a level that no longer makes them a productive member of the BMW portfolio in the US.

Sales of sport wagons has never reached the success BMW had hoped and with the advantages the GT offers, buyers may opt to take that route. Obviously sales and profitability are important to the overall success of the company so we can't blame them, it just is going to be a sad day when a BMW wagon will not be a choice.

We will have a good deal more info on the 5er GT, BMW manufacturing and the X6 ///M over the next few days.

Sometimes poor typography is an honest mistake and sometimes it's bad judgement. In the same way that I love cringeworthy headline puns, you should be free to experiment as a web typographer. However, due to the limitation of web-safe fonts, the world might be missing out on your creativity.

Sponsor

The Microsoft and Apple camps simply can't agree on a catalogue of core fonts and Night Sky, Shanghai and Comic Sans do not render across all browsers without the help of a web-native font solution. For those who are unwilling to sacrifice looks for functionality, here's an explanation of 4 solutions to make your serif's sing.

1. sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement): sIFR is an open source typography solution that uses a combination of JavaScript, CSS and Flash to replace browser text with prettier web-native text. Essentially, you're playing a Flash layer on top of the original web text. SIFR co-creator Mike Davidson blogs about it as being "a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics." Critics argue that the option is slow to render in certain browsers. Nevertheless, sIFR is an extremely popular solution amongst designers and the simplified embeddable sIFR-based Font Burner is quickly gaining users.

2. @font-face: @font-face is a CSS rule where web designers reference a hosted typeface. Dave Rosenberg wrote a great piece about Firefox 3.5's addition of the rule. Some designers prefer to use @font-face as it does not require viewers to have Flash installed; however, the solution is not available across older browsers. As well, Rosenberg notes that, "As with any linked asset, there is some level of security risk if a hacker gets their hands on the font file."

3. Cufn: Cufn aims to be a sIFR alternative. Essentially, the solution allows designers to upload fonts, convert them to a proprietary format and render them using JavaScript. This solution overcomes sIFR's speed issues as it is faster to render in Internet Explorer (since it uses VML) and it does not require the use of a plug-in. It also addresses @font-face's security issues because uploaders retain control of the font files.

4. TypeKit: Judging by the fact that Evan Williams, Caterina Fake and Matt Mullenweg just invested in Small Batch Inc's upcoming TypeKit, font designers might just get the recognition (and possibly pay) they deserve. While we're unsure how this project will take shape, thanks to a TypeKit blog post, we do know that Small Batch is "working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license." Naysayers already speculate that the solution will be slow and costly to website owners, but the legal implications of this tool may open up typeface options for designers.

Former Joost CEO Mike Volpi already has a new gig lined up. He'll be a venture partner at Index Ventures, which was part of the group that pumped $45 million into the little web TV startup that could (but didn't).

Joost announced last week that it was changing focus from offering premium content in order to become (yet another) white-label video provider. As part of that strategic shift, Volpi stepped down as CEO but remains chairman of the company. Volpi has a long history with Index as he invested $10 million in the firm's first fund while he was an exec at Cisco. According to the press announcement, Volpi will be based in the London office as part of the venture team where he will lead early stage investments in the Internet, telecom/networking and media sectors and contribute to the firm's later stage growth fund.

Kara Swisher at All Things D has an interview with Volpi about the latest move, where he offers up a few more details about Joost. On the company's failure to be a premium content player, he said, At the end of the day, the consumer offering we had was not working, a lot because we did not have enough access to content we needed to build traffic. Volpi justified Joost's move into the highly competitive world of white-label video by saying, It is better to be competing in a sector that has profitable rivals than one that does not. He said Joost had discussions with possible acquirers, but those didn't pan out because of price issues. Not everyone wanted to pay a lot to own Joost, but a lot of people wanted to rent it, he said.

Hopefully, Volpi will be able to take the failure of Joost in stride and pass on his experience of what not to do as a startup to the companies Index invests in.

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Moore is part of the amateur Puckett Observatory Supernova Search Team. According to Deer Pond Observatory:

It all came about at diner with Tim Puckett & Mike Peoples after the Friday's opening of NEAIC 2008. Tim was telling us about the search team and the fact that the team had the youngest person to discover a SN. Her name was Jennifer and she was 16 ( it turns out she was 18 but Caroline did not know that until after her find ) Hearing that a 16 year old had found a supernova, she pronounced " I could beat her". Timmy said it would take a lot of work, but if you think you're up to it I'll sign you up. So at the ripe old age of 13 Caroline started her hunt

That was the beginning of a long eight months. First she had to get a new computer and install all the software then work with Mike Peoples to learn how to get the data and what to do with it.

On November 6,2008 Caroline spotted something odd in one of the data files of distant galaxy UGC 12682, located in the constellation Pegasus. The image of the object was very faint but she noticed some pixels off to one side of the galaxy that made her suspicious, Caroline did all the checks and ran it through all the data basis. "I'm going to send it in. I think it's something," she told her Dad. It took couple nights until the team could get a confirmation image and it looked like her suspicions were confirmed.

Her discovery did indeed turn out to be a supernova, but it goes against all the rules we thought we knew. For example, it's in a galaxy that's in the process of "eating itself," UGC 12682, where supernovas don't usually occur. It's also one of the least luminous supernovas ever detected, and scientists haven't found any evidence of hydrogen, which usually turns up around dimmer supernovas. Now scientists are theorizing that the lack of hydrogen may stem from the fact that this was a massive star that lost mass. Perhaps its core collapsed into a black hole without transferring any energy to the outer layers of the star. Says Stefano Valenti with Queens University Belfast:

The implications are quite important. If this is a massive star explosion, then it is the first one that might fit the theoretical models of massive stars that lose their outer layers through their huge luminosity pressure and then, perhaps, collapse to black holes with a whimper

It's pretty cool that an amateur teenager can discover something that keeps the experts guessing.

Detroit may be the archetypal down-and-out rust-belt city, but to call it dying masks a more complex reality. Greater Detroit still has three to four million residents, a world-class university next door in Ann Arbor and the bone structure of a great city, as a car-industry consultant with the ear of a poet put it over lunch one day. Why, then, the relentless focus on its failings? Nearly everyone you meet is either weary or angry at seeing their home town made the butt of jokes on late-night television and the subject of anguished political commentary. But no one denies that the region's property market is abysmal, its finances a mess and its industrial base shrinking at an alarming rate.

Instead, Michiganders, despite being self-deprecating to a fault, make a point their countrymen won't want to hear: Detroit is no longer the nation's worst-case scenario, but on its leading edge, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. It's like the rest of the country is getting to where Detroit has been, said Peter De Lorenzo, who writes the acerbic and very funny Autoextremist.com blog. That means that smug mock-horror is no longer the appropriate reaction to the frozen corpse. Instead, get ready for a shock of recognition...

Moreover, many Michiganders whose parents had been able to send them to college thanks to the middle-class salaries of assembly-line work felt the Republicans had made United Auto Workers members into hate figures on a par with the welfare queens conjured up by Reagan-era Republicans. National newspaper and television reports mostly followed rightwing Washington's cartoonishly simple version of what ails the American auto industry. Labour is totally under attack, said Mike Smith, director of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University. And who is it under attack from? The supposedly leftwing media.

Smith, a former mechanic and self-described working stiff turned librarian, is clearly an interested party, but he may have a point. In January, Ford followed GM and Chrysler in eliminating one of the UAW's most jealously guarded perks, the jobs bank, which allows workers whose services are not needed to receive pay by doing course work, community service or in some cases just showing up and watching TV. I duly recorded this in a story for this newspaper, and found myself silently cheering the move, one of the conditions of the bail-out. Then I tuned into the news on Detroit's local Channel 4 station, and listened to an auto-worker pointing out that many people at his shuttered plant were paying their grocery bills and mortgages from their jobs bank money, and did not know how they would replace the income.

(Image: Detroit Disgrace, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Extremeezine's Flickr stream, courtesy http://passionatephoto.com/

The New Pornographers - Letter From an Occupant

One of my very few regrets is that I never got a legitimate shot to have my life turned upside down by Neko Case. She seems like she could really put a hurting on a man. And, you have to respect that.

CHANGE - MSN (Thanks, Mike Sky!)

I used a darker gray on the focal wall and a lighter gray on the 3 additional walls. I tried Harmony (no-voc) by Sherwin Williams on the lighter walls and Duration (low-voc) by Sherwin Williams on the dark wall.

Both paint options are eco-friendly, but the Duration is made to be more durable, scrubable and I thought it covered well.

The Charles and Ray Eames Blicks wall decals added some fun to the walls and add a tone on tone contrast. I made 4 paper canvases from Paper Source for color and to create a focal point.

A quick update, but it's given me a place to call our own.

It's really interesting to see what people choose to use to represent them online. The simplest thing is a headshot and I suspect that's what the majority of people use when they are asked to upload a profile picture. That's what Kara Swisher chose (she's the top profile, my most recent follow).

But even with the headshot, some people go for the funny picture, adding some character to their profile. Mike Doughty (second profile) has his head on the table and some sort of box between him and the camera. Stuart Ellman (fifth profile) is dressed as the court jester (probably a halloween pic). Both of those profiles tell us a bit more about those two.

Some choose to use a photo of something or someone else. Lauren (fourth profile) seems to have chosen a family photo of some kind. Howie (sixth profile) has a photo of his friend and Springsteen's guitarist Nils Lofgren. We don't get to see these people's faces, but they are telling us something about them nonetheless.

I've been online since the early 90s and I've gone back and forth on what kind of profile I like to use. But for the past couple years, I've settled on the image that I now try to use everywhere online. It's my online brand and I stumbled on to it accidentally. I thought it might be interesting to share with all of you how that came about and what I learned from it.

In the middle of 2006, Howard Lindzon approached me about getting involved in a web video show he was going to produce called Wallstrip. In the initial incarnation of Wallstrip, there was going to be a daily video talking about the stock of the day, and then there was going to be about a dozen bloggers who would do a short post on what they thought of the stock as an investment idea.

Howard asked me to be one of those dozen bloggers. I thought about it for a while and then agreed to do it. Then, unbekownst to me, he asked an artist friend of his in Phoenix to go on the web, find photos of each of the dozen bloggers, and draw up a sketch that he could use as their Wallstrip avatar. This was mine.

From the minute I saw it, I liked it. It uses my favorite color (green) as the backdrop and the eye color (my eyes are sometimes blue and sometimes green and sometimes something else). It looks like me, but not too much.

So I began to use it a bit here and there around the web as I set up new profiles. But by no means was it the only profile picture I used. For corporate oriented services like LinkedIn, I'd use my Union Square Ventures headshot. For social nets like Facebook, I'd use a regular headshot. I used a photo of me taking a photo on Flickr for a long time.

But then I started to realize that the Wallstrip avatar was becoming my online identity. People would comment about it all the time. Around the time we sold Wallstrip, Howard had his artist friend (her name escapes me, pls Howard leave her name and a link in the comments and I'll update this post) do a real painting of it which I now have in my office at Union Square Ventures. It's a real conversation starter.

So sometime last year, I just decided to go with it everywhere. It's at the top of this blog and everywhere else I have an online identity. And I think that decision is having some important effects.

As I said earlier in this post, it's become my online brand. It's simple, small, and very recognizable. By putting it everywhere that I am online, I've used frequency and reach to power home that the avatar is me. It's become my visual handle and it's also a signature and a sign of authenticity.

But there's also a risk in standardizing on an online identity. Someone could grab that image and use it to pretend to be me. That's a concern and probably one reason why many people choose to change their profile picture/avatar on a regular basis. It hasn't happened to me yet, but I am sure it will and then I don't know what I am going to do about it.

Online identity is a big issue and a big opportunity for entrepreneurs on the web. It seems like Facebook is quickly becoming a major provider of online identity authentication and that's a smart move for them and a good thing for the web as a whole. But there is still a ton of opportunity out there to provide services in and around what Facebook and others are doing. Because online identity is powerful and becoming more intertwined with offline identity every day. My avatar is a good representation of that.

I'm having trouble seeing how Power.com violates any of these things. Power.com, like plenty of other aggregator services, lets you bring together all your different social networking profiles in one spot. That seems like it could be valuable if you use a lot of those services. It doesn't do anything fraudulently, and it does not appear to misrepresent that it is a separate service. Users have to decide whether it's worth providing their username and password to Power.com, but it's not as if Power.com tricks anyone into doing so or does so in a misleading way. There's no confusion, so it's difficult to see what the trademark problem is about. It seems like a pretty big stretch for Facebook to also claim that showing the content from a user's profile is copyright infringement as well. Computer fraud? Please. Unlawful competition? Again, it may be (slightly) competitive, but it appears to actually improve the value of Facebook, rather than diminish it.

This is a pretty weak response from Facebook. Basically, it looks like Facebook trying to exert undue control over what other websites and services can do, and it's not clear that it has any real legal basis for doing so. It's a shame that a company like Facebook is becoming a legal bully at such a young age. I would have expected better. In the end, though, if Facebook keeps up actions like this, it will only hasten the shift to other social networks that don't try to limit what their users can do. Facebook might want to take a lesson from the eventual flop of Friendster after that social network was accused of being too controlling.

A baby monitor iPhone app:

Monitor your sleeping baby with this iPhone app. Simply place the iPhone near your sleeping baby, if it detects noise, it places a phone call to the number of your choice, you can then listen in for activity from your baby. Great for when you are on the go or traveling, no need to pack your regular baby monitor. One feature that makes this application exceptional is that the monitor has unlimited range!

Even use it to monitor when older kids arrive home from school, etc. The applications are unlimited. It also will detect if your baby picks up the phone. Great for curious toddlers that wake up from their nap without making noise. A fantastic value at only 99 cents.

This is a first for video podcasts. We've been running advertisements in iTunes since last year but this is the first time we're able to serve them dynamically and offer third-party tracking.

The importance of third-party tracking cannot be overstated. Until now there's been no reliable way for advertisers to measure the success of their advertisements in podcasts. The best metric available has been downloads. The problem is that not everyone who downloads a video podcast watches it, and not everyone who watches it sticks around long enough to see the advertisements. This has meant that advertisers have been leery of spending money on podcasts. Advertisers need a way to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of their buys.

I should mention that Volomedia has a system that can do semi-dynamic insertion (insertion is done at download time) of advertisements in downloaded QuickTime. Volomedia's system can also track impressions and clicks, but only when viewers have installed their Volocast plug-in. Kiptronic can also do semi-dynamic insertion but only offers tracking of downloads, not impressions. Our implementation does not require the viewer to install any software other than iTunes or QuickTime Player, and even works in non-iTunes podcatchers like the excellent Miro.

Our system is already in production running a Puma sponsorship on Golf Girl TV (link goes to iTunes so you can see the ad in action!) and a Skype campaign on Back on Topps. The system supports prerolls, postrolls, midrolls and overlays. All ads can be clicked and clicks are tracked using DoubleClick within iTunes or QuickTime Player. Clickability is not (yet) available on devices like the iPhone because of limitations of those platforms.

We're not running any third-party ad networks in QuickTime because they don't support the environment yet, so the ads we're running in QuickTime are limited to those that we sell ourselves or that content creators sell. If you opt into run of network advertising on blip (click on Advertising from your Dashboard) we'll serve ads into your QuickTime videos as they're available. If you have your own sales force and would like to traffic your own campaigns in your QuickTime downloads you can e-mail support AT blip DOT teevee and let us know. We'd be more than happy to traffic your campaign for you (a self-service interface is coming soon!).

I can imagine that you may have some questions about this announcement. John Furrier (the former CEO of PodTech) did too. He wrote up a blog post on the subject. He seemed a little confused about what exactly we were announcing and why it was innovative. I figure that you may have many of the same questions as John, so here are some excerpts from my discussion with John in the comments on his post:

John Furrier:

thanks for commenting. are you turning on ads for all your videos or just select groups? what kind of metrics are you reporting? Views, clicks, and plays? do you guys do dynamic insertion?

Mike Hudack:

Absolutely. Any show on blip can opt into advertising from their Dashboard (http://blip.tv/prefs/). Shows that opt in receive a blend of ads from our direct sales force plus various ad networks (Google, ScanScout, YuMe, Adap.TV, VideoEgg, et cetera) for views in Flash. We have some daisy chaining and yield optimization technology that chooses the highest paying ad for any individual play.

In QuickTime we're limited to ads that we sell and ads that our content creators sell. This is because none of the ad networks that we work with can serve into QT right now. So shows that opt in will receive some ads in their QuickTime views, but we're not yet filling 100% of the inventory. Any of our 37,000 show creators can sell into their QuickTime inventory, though, and we'll traffic their ads for them.

In Flash we're reporting video views, advertisement impressions, advertisement clicks and engagement. The engagement is shown on a timeline it shows how many people viewed each second of video. This is particularly useful for brand integration and product placement (we can see exactly how many people saw the brand integration or product placement and how many times).

In QuickTime we're reporting video downloads, advertisement impressions and advertisement clicks.

In both Flash and QuickTime the metrics come from third parties (DoubleClick for ad impressions and clicks, Illumenix for engagement).

I think that the most important thing here is that, with both QuickTime and Flash, we're measuring impressions according to the IAB standard the client requests the ad, and the impression is recorded only at that time. We need no software on the client to do this. Just regular iTunes or regular QuickTime. There's no need to download anything, and the viewer doesn't have to be incented to allow measurement to take place it just works.

John Furrier:

Mike thanks for replying this is great content and thanks for basically agreeing to do an asynchronous interview Q&A here on my blog.

A few questions:
1. An you sent me a pointer or particular publisher video playing in iTunes that you can measure

2. Can you measure while iTunes is in a disconnected state? If not, then is this just streaming iTunes, and who watches video this way? Perhaps you means QT player and not iTunes?

3. Can you deal with .m4v and .mp4 files?

4. you mentioned above we're measuring impressions according to the IAB standard the client requests the ad, and the impression is recorded only at that time. - are you saying that you record an ad impression even it they don't watch it if it sits in the library of the users itunes. I'm asking to be specific between requested download, partial download, fully download, and actually watched

Mike Hudack:

You can find links to particular campaigns running in iTunes on the NewTeeVee story that you already linked to. Both are verified using DART.

We've found that between 50 and 75% (I know it's a wide delta, it varies from show to show) of iTunes views happen in iTunes while connected. Apparently *lots* of people watch video this way. For what it's worth, I do too. I subscribe to podcasts in iTunes and then watch them fullscreen on both my laptop at home and on my Mac desktop in the office. I find it to be a generally better experience for watching shows I like, rather than happening upon embeds on the Web.

Our implementation is also compatible with the standalone QuickTime player and with any software that uses the QuickTime player software (Democracy Player for example).

In terms of what file formats we work with, we deliver the videos and advertisements in a QuickTime container that's fully compatible with the entire range of Apple portable devices and with the AppleTV. We have about 37,000 active shows using blip today (they release about three new episodes a month each) and so as you can imagine we have to deal with a very wide variety of incoming video formats. Before we deliver videos we're trafficking against to iTunes we transcode them to the universally compatible QuickTime format and then modify the container to insert the pointers to DART.

In terms of recording impressions, I'm actually saying exactly the opposite. Current iTunes advertising implementations (Kiptronic, Volomedia unless you download their iTunes plugins) record impressions as soon as the video is downloaded. This is a flawed practice because not everyone who downloads the video watches it (at least not while the campaign's running and the ad is still relevant!), and not everyone who views a video actually sees all the ads. What we do is measure an impression *only when the ad is actually viewed*. This is what the IAB standards require. As far as we know no other implementation that doesn't require a download by the viewer (and I'd be curious to know what the install base is for these measurement plug-ins is) does this none of them comply with the IAB standards, and as a result they (unfortunately) overcount impressions.

It's important to note, again, that for the purposes of advertisements we're *not* counting downloads. And certainly not partial downloads. We do record those metrics, but for content creators, not to give to advertisers to measure the success of their campaigns. We are counting *impressions* - people actually seeing the advertisement. I can't stress this enough.

Continue reading The little Leopard laptop

• If there are still seats available on the uper deck don't sit on the stairway leading to the uper deck.
• Don't say you are waiting for someone and hold a seat when it is obvious you just don't want someone sitting with because of their size, gender or race. It is really obvious.
• If you are riding any sort of express train, don't put your stuff on the second seat. It's going to be needed poindexter.
• It's ok to drink a beer on the train, but note it is cheaper to buy it at a drug store near the station instead of at the station.
• Just accept the fact that sometimes the train is not going to stop in front of your part of the door clump. It does not give you the right to side shuffle into the door clump.
  

I wrote this to my email list on Saturday the 27th of 2008. Two days before the single largest drop in the history of the stock market.

Now, I promised myself I was retired from blogging to focus on my email newsletter, but I'm getting pounded with so many requests for this essay that I'm giving up and posting it here. This does not mean my retirement from blogging is off, this means I'm posting this so I don't have to respond to hundreds of emails asking for a copy. If you want future missives like this signup for Jason's List: Jason's List signup.

For background, the goal of this post was not to spread fear, but rather inspire folks at startup companies to get focused and to save as many as possible from hitting the wall. Myself? We'll I funded Mahalo for the long-term and while the market down turn isn't good for anyone, we're largely immune from it because we are building on a five year plan that we're only 18 months into.

Doesn't mean I'm not hyper focused, I am. I'm just not panicking. Great entrepreneurs build value and market-share in down markets. They go to work seven days a week and the breakout when other folks check out.

Location: CalaCompound, Brentwood, CA
Monday, September 27th, 5:15PM PST.
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(The) Startup Depression

Since stock market gyrations and the elections seem to be making
everyone rightfully nauseous and depressed, I thought I would take
this email to discuss the biggest ramifications of these challenging
times: depression.

It's my believe that the economic downturn will be much worse than it
is today, and that 50-80% of the venture-backed startups currently
operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working
on them) within the next 18 months.

Make a list of every Web 2.0 startup to raise an A or B round and
cross 80% of them off the list, because they will not make it to their
next round of funding or profitability.

Now, I could be totally wrong. No one can guess or time the markets
perfectly. However, planning for the worst is a virtuous idea, so I
encourage you to read on.

Everyone I talk to is feeling confused, paralyzed and anxiousmany
are in full-blown depression. People are scared, and they should be.
This could be the start of a very difficult time for our country and
the rest of the world.

In this email, we'll focus on the entrepreneurial and startup
depression and economic downturns/depressionsand how you can deal
with them.

Some background to get us started

Few things in the world are as exhilarating as starting a new company.
Metaphors abound, and we've all heard them: starting a company is like
having a baby, falling in love, and running a marathon. Few folks,
however, want to continue the metaphor when things go bad at a
startup. If they did, we would be having discussions about running a
startup being like divorcing your spouse, collapsing from exhaustion
in the 20th mile of the marathon, orGod forbidlosing a child.

Metaphors swing both ways.

Anxiety and depression from a failed, or failing, startup can be
intenseeven debilitating. When outside factors such as markets or
buildings collapsing are added to the mix, I've seen great
entrepreneurs just fold.

Now, I've never folded, and I don't say that as some badge of courage.
No, sometimes it's really, really stupid to keep fighting. Most
consider it especially stupid to fight when you know you're going to
lose. I don't.

The result of never folding is that I've had my ass kicked pretty bad.
Multiple times.

Depending on your DNA, getting your ass kicked is either complete
torture or deviantly rewarding. Truth be told, I like getting my ass
kicked because it makes me angry, motivated and focused. If I look
back on the couple of moments of success I've been lucky enough to
have in my life, they all seem to come after a good ass-kicking.

The darkest hour isin factright before the dawn.

Brief Disclaimer

I'd be lying if I said I understood the complexities of depression or
depressions. I'm not a psychologist nor am I an economist. I've never
suffered from clinical depression and I didn't live through the last
depression. However, I do have a BA in Psychology, have read many
books about the psychology of happiness, and I've felt the sting of
the last huge correction (2000-2002).

Consider these one (hu)man's notes on entrepreneurial depression and
anxiety. They are worth the price you've paid for them, but I hope
they are helpful to youespecially if you're suffering right now. If
you are suffering from depression or anxiety, go see a professional.

Really, it's the best thing to do. Feel free to print this out and
bring it with you and ask your newfound therapist what they think of
my observations and advice. Then email me back what they said I'm
curious where my thoughts rank.

Kurnit's Three Reasons Why Companies Fail

Scott Kurnit of the Mining Company (aka About.com) told me there are
three reasons why a business will fail: it's a bad idea, bad execution
or outside factors. If you examine your business with these three
filters right now, you can baseline where you're at: one, two or three
strikes.

His theory correlates well with the attribution theory in psychology.
The theory concerns itself with how an individual attributes the
things that happen to them (or others). For example, if you were
pulled over by a cop for speeding, you can attribute that to number of
factors, both internal and external.

Some folks might internalize the event and curse themselves for being
reckless: I should have known better! Others might blame an external
source, such as the cop or the bankrupt city they work for: Gosh darn
Los Angeles cops! They're just trying to balance the budget by
harassing us!

Kurnit's theory, as told to me, mentions two internal factors (bad
idea and execution) and one external (outside factors). When faced
with massive market uncertainty, like we are today, it's a virtuous
idea to assess each of these factors.

Right now, every single one of us has HUGE outside factors we must
consider. The market collapse is going to make the next couple of
years impossible and frustrating for many entrepreneurs. Even the
great companies - like Google, Microsoft and Apple - are going to hit
hard times.

One of the most important philosophical minds of our time summed it up
best: I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the
bat, and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn't
my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself? Yogi
Berra.

Viktor Frankl's Search for Meaning

John Brockman, my dear friend and agent (if I ever get around to
writing a book), handed me one of the most important books of my life:
Authentic Happiness by Marty Seligman. That book led me to the most
important book of my life: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor
Frankl.

Frankl was a psychologist and Holocaust survivor.

He studied how people react to horrible circumstances that are beyond
their control. He studied why some people give up and others carry on.
While few of us can understand the level of suffering of people during
the Holocaust, Nanking or the Killing Fields, Frankl put his theories
forward so that we could carry them into our daily lives.

Logotherapy was what Frankl called his theories, and their major
tenants are that we choose how to find meaning in our circumstances
and that our experiences all have meaning.

My interpretation of Frankl is that you actually get to choose how you
feel about your circumstances.

The Worst Year of my life

It's still hard for me to talk about it seven years laterand I'm not
going to talk about it in too much detail right now. In the early
months of 2001, I watched my first business, Silicon Alley Reporter,
crash from 70 employees to 12. The $20m offer I'd received to buy the
business was a distant memory, as was the $11.6m in revenue we had in
2000.

Money was evaporating from the bank account, dotcoms were going bust
and wethe dotcom kidswent from visionaries to charlatans
overnight. I went from hosting multi-million dollar conferences, doing
Charlie Rose guest spots and being featured in a 6,000 word article in
the New Yorker to not being able to meet payroll.

Many folks said I was lucky with Silicon Alley Reporter, while others
said I was fraud who had finally been found out. I was broke, no one
cared about my work, and my life really sucked.

and that was just the start.

Then, the stock market crashed and the accounting scandals set in.
Enron, Adelpia, Worldcom, and Arthur Andersen made the fallout from
the dotcom bust look like nothing.

and that was still just the start.

While lying in bed listening to the radio, I heard that a private
pilot in a small plane had accidentally crashed into the World Trade
Center. Then, I watched the second one hit. Then, I watched them come
down.

To say things went from bad to worse would be a gross understatement.
As I started in disbelief with my fellow New Yorkers, I wondered where
my brother, a NYC Firefighter, was. Then it hit me: he was probably
dead.

Due to a simple twist of fate, he wasn't deadbut many of his friends
were. It was at that time I really took a deep look inside and found
meaning in what happened that day and what happened to me when my
first business collapsed.

In my mind, I was being tested. Horrible things happen in life and I
was faced with several at the same time. From that point forward, my
goal was to not only get back to the level I was at when I was at the
top of my game, but to exceed it.

My goal was to be truly happy every day doing what I loved: running a
startup company. A year later, we started Weblogs, Inc., and 18 months
after that, we sold it. The darkest hour became the dawn, and it was
glorious.

If you're failing right now, and if you're suffering, you need to take
Kurnit's test. You need to access where you're at and you need to
fight on. You can give up, sure, but the truth is that when you give
up, you have to live with that fact for the rest of your life. For me,
living with having given up in tough times is a much worse fate than
certain failure.

If you fail, then by definition you have tried. But if you give up,
you didn't.

Step One: How are you executing

It's fairly easy to tell how well you're executing, so let's tackle
that up front. First, take a look at your plan and see where you are
in executing against it. Are you ahead, behind or on schedule? Second,
you can have everyone in your organization rank your product and its
various features on a scale of one to ten. Third, you have an outsider
rank your product and features.

If you're executing at an seven or eight or above, then you know
you're doing well, but could be doing a little bit better. If you're
executing under a seven, your problems could be execution-based. You
just may not be delivering the goods. If you were a restaurant, the
analogy would be that you've got the right ingredients and product,
but you're just not preparing them well. This means you need to focus
on making the product better.

Another way to get a handle on how you're executing is to take your
product and put it up against your two top competitors and do the
one-to-ten rating process. Rate yourself and your competitors on the
top 10 features of all three offerings. How many are you winning? If
you're winning more than three, you're ahead of the game. If you're
three or behind, then you're average or losing.

Execution is the easiest thing to fix, and you can do it one of two
ways: get the people in your organization to perform at a higher
level, or get higher-level folks into your organization.

It really is that simple: folks can either step up or step out.

Step Two: How good is your idea

Determining if you have the right idea is a little more complicated
since most great businesses do not finish where they start. Google
started as a search engine but bought Applied Semantics in order to
create their real business: text-based advertising.

Microsoft started by building programming software (Altair Basic), but
went on to make it's business in operating systems, Microsoft Office
and servers.

If you're idea is wrong, it really doesn't matter. What matters is if
the original ideas allows you to evolve into your big idea.

In order to evolve, you must think like Darwin. Ask yourself: have you
adapted to your market? Have your customers asked you for something
different than you're currently providing? Have you given it to them?
After you give them what they want, can you anticipate what they'll
ask for next? Are those items following a theme?

At Silicon Alley Reporter, we started with a magazine and people loved
it. However, they wanted to get more frequent updates and asked us to
make it weekly. We reflected on this ask and came back with
something they didn't even know they wanted: the Silicon Alley Daily
email newsletter. 40,000 folks subscribed to it in the first year and
it was a much more usable product than the magazine or the requested
weekly print newsletter that we passed on doing.

The market will tell you what it wants. You just have to really
listen. Clearly, there was a market for the DEMO conference since it's
being going on for years. However, they never listened to the ask of
the market: let the companies be selected based on merit, not their
ability to pay almost $20,000. Yes, I know it's a self-serving
example, but those are the best ones.

When Mike Arrington and I founded the TechCrunch50 event, we didn't
think it would grow to be 2-3x as large as DEMO after only one
yearbut it did. The market had MASSIVE pent up demand for a
merit-based show and we tapped it. We evolved DEMO's business model,
not our own.

Now, I'm left asking myself, if I was trying to evolve TechCrunch50,
what would I do?

Another example from personal experience with start up evolution has
been with Mahalo. When we started, we were just doing hand-curated
links. The pages had very little actual content on them. In our user
lab, folks told us they loved the links, but they kept asking for more
content.

We studied the situation and realized that we could evolve and help
our customers more by writing more content on each page. To do this,
we studied what were the 10-15 things people wanted to know when they
did a searchthen we put them on the page. Doing this drove our
traffic from 300k monthly users last year to 4.6m uniques in August (a
record month).

Bottom line: Your first idea is rarely your best.

The first step in a journey is never the best either! Most folks hit
their stride two hours into the marathon. Don't be afraid to nuke your
first idea and run with your secondor third, forth or fifth.

Evolution is the revolution.

Step Three: Outside Factors

Outside factors are the toughest to deal with because, by definition,
they are outside of your control. Despite our deepest wishes, we can't
reverse the housing bubble, put the Towers back up or reverse the
accounting scandals.

All we can do is deal with outside factors, and knowing how to deal
with them is critical.

When the market is in the middle of correcting, as I believe it is
currently doing, people tend to underestimate everything including:

a) how bad it will be
b) how quickly it will get worse
c) how long it will take to recover

Chances are the market will get worse and that will happen sooner
rather than later. Watching folks on CNBC last month talking about a
two or three quarters of down market was just sad. It takes just as
long to clean up a mess as it does to make ittypically longer.

The housing mess took two or three years to develop (2004-2006). It
will take three years to unravel (2008-2010) from what I can see.
We're gonna be dealing with a bad market for at least two years.

10 Specific things you can do

Since the outside market is out of your control, the best you can do
is focus your energy inward. Here are some things you can do after
you've assessed where you company is at.

1. Execute better: This is fairly simple, as I describe above. Rank
yourself and your performance and improve it.

2. Grow the talent you have: When the market is down, it's a great
time to get your team educated and to the next level. Invest in
training and education of your top people, because they are the ones
who will lead your company through this mess.

3. Firing the average people: Again, it's totally politically
incorrect, but I highly recommend firing anyone who is good or
average. Startups are an Olympic sport and every slot on your team is
critical. You wouldn't put a good swimmer in a relay, would you?
Don't have one in your startup. Fire the good and replace them with
the great.

4. Cut spending every where you can: Recurring costs like
connectivity, phones, rent and insurance are things that you can
easily cut. Go to each of your providers and ask for 20% relief
immediately or you're leaving. Most, not all, will give it to you.

5. Find a revenue stream and ride it: If you don't have a revenue
stream right now, you'd better find one on Monday. Seriously, by the
end of the day. Once you find this revenue stream, ride it. Put at
least 25% of your effort into bringing in revenue.

6. Focus on your profitable clients: If you have revenue, start
focusing on which clients are most profitable. Take them to lunch and
figure out how you can over-service them and sell them another product
(or more of your current product). You're gonna want to protect these
accounts because the folks reading Point Five are going to be calling
them!

7. Make your top ten 10% better: Look at the top ten aspects of your
business and come up with a plan to make each 10% better in the next
30 days. Ask everyone in your company to make suggestions for the 10%
better program and execute on the ones that will provide the most bang
for the buck. Sometimes, there are things you can do today that will
make something 10% better for freeyou just haven't brainstormed
enough.

8. Hold an optional off-site breakfast meeting on a Sunday and see who
shows up: If folks don't show up for you to grow/save the company on a
Sunday for a two hour breakfast, they probably aren't going to step up
when the sh#$%t really hits the fan. You need to know who the real
killers on your team are and you need to get close with them now.
Again, it's fine to have 9-5ers on your teamif you're the Post
Office. You can't have them at a startup company. Note: if you reading
this and saying I'm anti-family, save it. Folks don't have to work at
startups and some of the hardest working folks I've met have families
and figure out how to balance things.

9. Build marketshare: One of the best things to do in the down market
is build marketshare. Look for competitors that are going out of
business and buy them or just steal their clients and talent (i.e.
pick them up).

10. Raise money: I know I said above most folks won't be able to raise
money in the down market, but that's not because the money isn't out
thereclearly it is. The issue is that the big money out there
doesn't want to fund small ideas that are in the death spiral. Build a
plan based on revenue and taking market share and folks will consider
funding you.

What ideas do you have for winning in a down market?

How do you stay inspired in bad times?

Send me your response and if you would like it quoted in a follow up
email, attributed or not.

all the best

Jason

Look for me at the 2nd Annual Waubonsee Community College Renewable Energy Fair.
I will be presenting design examples and discussing ways to make your home a more eco-friendly place to live.

The Second Annual Renewable Energy Fair
Featuring renewable energy, organic, and green products
Waubonsee Community College, Sugar Grove Campus
Saturday, October 18, 2008 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Erickson Hall Gymnasium

From the 1976 Olympics, the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics history by Nadia Comaneci on the uneven parallel bars. This more impressive routine also earned a 10, as did this balance beam routine.

Olga Korbut's uneven parallel bars routine from the 1972 Olympics (above). Love that dismount! The skills done on the bars today are so much more athletic but Korbut's routine was a magical flowing performance. At the rate the women today are going, the uneven parallel bars will soon be replaced by the high bar used in the men's competitions...they barely use the bottom bar anymore.

My recollection of the men's 4x100m relay at the 1984 Olympics involves the US team trailing after three legs when Carl Lewis (still my favorite Olympian) seizes the baton from Calvin Smith and thunders down the last 100 meters, singlehandedly winning the race and smashing the world record. The reality was somewhat different. The American team was way ahead when Lewis got the baton but it still is amazing to watch him pull away from the rest of the field like that. Bolt-like, innit?

A similar pulling away occurred in 1996 by Michael Johnson in the 200 meters. No one even came close to threatening his world record for 12 years until the emergence of Usain Bolt.

In 1988, Greg Louganis hit his head on the board on his third-to-last dive in the preliminaries of the men's springboard. He returned to qualify for the next round and eventually won the gold medal in the event.

Bob Beamon smashed the world record in the long jump by almost two feet at the 1968 Olympics. His record stood for almost 23 years until Mike Powell broke it in 1991.

Also at the '68 Games, Dick Fosbury unveiled his unique high jumping technique, the Fosbury Flop, which became the preferred technique in this event. For comparison, here are a couple of videos showing the other techniques that were in use at the time.

Jesse Owens' 100 meter win at the 1936 Games in Berlin.

After his hamstring popped in the semifinals of the 400 meters at the 1992 Olympics, Derek Redmond, aided by his father, finished the race to roars from the crowd. Just thinking about this makes me cry.

Speaking of tear-inducing performances, Kerri Strug hobbled up to the vault runway on a bum ankle and hit a 9.712 on her final vault in the team competition at the 1996 Games, landing more or less perfectly on one foot, clinching a victory for the US team. Or so the story goes. As with all mythology, the truth is present but not entirely adhered to. As it turned out, the US team had enough of a lead on the Russian team that Strug's last vault was unnecessary. But it hardly dimishes the moment for Strug. At the time, she thought she had to do the vault for the medal and she went out there and stuck it.

And finally, Svetlana Khorkina on the uneven parallel bars at the 1996 Games. For reasons I don't fully understand, Khorkina is probably my favorite female Olympian ever.

Update: From the 1964 Games, here's a video of Billy Mills coming from behind in the 10,000 meters. I have no idea how he sprints that fast after running more than six miles. (thx, nivan)