How not to quit your job
2007-07-28 15:26:24
We often have disagreements with management or bosses, or just about anyone who has an undue influence over the general health and wellness that we feel when we are working at a company. To resign your position through while giving your keynote address at OSCON is a bit much.
OSCON A splash of drama hit OSCON this morning, as the COO of software maker Fotango resigned from the company during his keynote, protesting a decision not to open source the Zimki utility computing platform. “Zimki was going to be an open source utility computing engine with a JavaScript framework,” Simon Wardley, Fotango’s now ex-COO, said during the keynote. “A few weeks ago, my parent company decided we were not going to open source the technology.” Source: The Register
Got to give the man points for taking a highly public way of letting things happen, but he might have wanted to tell his bosses first rather than making a public and messy way of getting out of a job.
Splashy a
Blu Ray does Porn
2007-08-01 12:38:41
In what is sure to advance the adoption of the Blu-Ray format, Japanese porn resellers have found a maker in Taiwan that is willing to press Blu-Ray format disks, and ship the goods back to Japan for sale in Japanese Shops. While in other countries, porn has advanced the adoption of HD-DVD.
“In Japan, there are some problems. Companies cannot press Blu-ray discs because they cannot touch adult-related contracts,” Kiyotaka Konno, director of administration at Assist, a Japanese company that authors and replicates DVDs for the adult industry in Japan, told IDG News.
“So we asked some makers in Taiwan to do the work, and then we import the discs back to Japan. The Taiwanese company was able to obtain a pressing machine from Sony and will start mass production in August.” Source: VUNet
While the loophole exists, and the format “wars” continue on, most people believe that it was porn that drove the adoption of VHS over Beta Max for the same reason. People buy
Your Rights and Fair Use
2007-08-01 09:20:40
In a bit of good news, Google, Microsoft and others from the Computer and Communications Industry Association plan on lodging a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about fair use, and the ever increasing demands of companies that own those copyrights.
When you have something as stupid as a dancing baby pulled down because of a complaint, or the host of other associated ills, maybe this complaint actually do some good, but we are also not counting on it.
The key to knowing your ability to make parodies, or fair use of copyrighted material rests in section 107 and 108 of the United States copyright act. Knowing this is good, but then the average person on the street doing a podcast with music playing in the background as they record their missive might not really know this. Knowing what a person can and can not do is very important if web 2.0 is going to stop being mired down in lawsuits, that in many cases are meant to disrupt business (by claiming false copyright to something
Read more: Rights
Podcast and new Media Expo
2007-08-01 08:30:55
In case you find yourself in Ontario Canada between September 28th and September 30th, you might want to go check out the Podcast
and New Media Expo. This is only the 3rd time that the expo has happened, and when we checked it out last year it was pretty cool. Meet all the folks that are burning bandwidth, delivering their comments, and videos to countless unsuspecting people. Subversion at its best.
Not really subversion, but if you are familiar with Blogger and Podcaster, feedburner (pre Google days, we still don’t know if anything is going to change), IProng, and all the generalized media partners anyone would want to have, the blogging live from the floor should be extensive and interesting.
The web site is here
The expos media wags state:
The Expo is a “prosumer” and corporate event that brings together influential digital media creators, podcasters and content developers to cover the complete range of creation techniques, business objectives and future trends. T
Visit Hitachi get a free lunch
2007-08-01 08:10:59
Silicon Valley has some interesting ways of getting people together to meet and greet, one of them is the Lunch 2.0 program where companies open up their doors, invite everyone who is working in the valley to come in and see what is happening at various companies. This might be similar to the Wednesday morning coffee break in Eastlake in Seattle.
September 12th is the day that Hitachi
opens up its doors according to Lunch 2.0, which might be a place to watch in case anyone is interested in going and visiting Hitachi.
If Hitachi is not your bag, there will be Topix, Box, Pandora, Plaxo, Podtech, Riya, Simply Hired, Zazzle, Zooomer and Zvents also at the lunch.
You can get more info here
It looks like it will be interesting, of course we will be no where near Santa Clara, nor the Valley, rather we will be mired hip deep in something over here in Seattle doing our own thing, and otherwise enjoying the life of a startup. Maybe having coffee at Louisa’s on Eastlake Ave, listening to th
Read more: free lunch
Download Squad finds Blog Pirates
2007-07-31 18:06:22
Download squad touches on a raw nerve in the blogosphere, the idea of people taking your blog entries, stripping out everything that points back to you, and then passing it off as your own work. The are not the only ones, even groups like IT Toolbox see the same thing, it just all depends on how aware bloggers are when it comes down to this.
Not everyone writes under creative commons licenses, techwag is definitely for profit, we work hard to bust out these articles, and to build up an audience share. But then knowing how slow things can happen, like getting a ranking in Google, or showing up in a search engine at times, the relative merit of what download squad calls blog piracy makes some sense.
Sure they have an Adsense “infested” site, but with the relative click through rates of less than 1%, the only way to really do this is to spread that kind of wealth across multiple blogs, and multiple sites, which will then get nailed by Google bringing everyone’s page ranks down. T
Read more: Download
, Squad
, Pirates
Music Piracy on the rise in England
2007-07-31 16:49:44
Well so much for making a dent in illegal file downloading. The Digital Music
Survey was done in the UK which you can get here (directly, and is a PDF) shows that illegal file downloading has picked up in the last year. With all the lawsuits, all the silly counter measures (AKA Harry Potters 20 million dollar protection bill that was killed off by one person and a camera), and all the trauma or drama that has entailed, the copyright owners still loose.
Although social networking sites such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com help increase music awareness, a reluctance to purchase legal music constrained by digital rights management, reduced fear of being prosecuted for downloading illegally and falling CD retail prices have fuelled the growth in piracy, according to Entertainment Media Research, a London-based research firm and Olswang, a United Kingdom-based entertainment law firm. Source: The Globe and Mail
How do you compete with Free? Torrent freak points out that reasons to not dow
Read more: England
And now for the rest of the Apple Story
2007-07-31 16:32:02
Apple stock sank today after a wild ride once the apple IPhone was released, along with solid gains in market share on the PC side, and the always available with the ITunes store and ITunes devices. The IPhone put a sparkle of the stock because the massive marketing hype that happened before it was available, with lines reaching around the block. None of this stopped the bad news concerning the Apple IPhone from rolling in this morning.
Reports of batteries not being user replaceable (this is a basic functionality issue, surprised on this one) as well as cutbacks in production hit Apple into a 6.84% slide, or down 9 Dollars and 67 cents, although after market activity showed that the stock was back up 1.17% or up 1.54 a share negating a good chunk of today’s losses.
Apple will bounce back from this one, but with state consumer Protection Board in NY State interested in the product, the ability now to unlock and totally own the phone, and the security issues that have been discovered
Read more: Apple
Tradeshows eschew web 2 dot 0
2007-08-03 17:40:18
In a way too funny view point on the world, B2B on line reports that many event producers are not using web 2.0 tools. So if you really want to know about that trade show and its relative merits, then odds are most likely you are going to be stuck with positive buzz from some marketing machine. Not the view point of last years attendees unless they thought it was the greatest thing they have ever done.
To test our theory, we look a look at the gomedex site, and sure enough, a conference that is all about bloggers, has the usual broken links (discussion list), a community explorer that is closed off to anyone not attending the conference, there is a blog, but not just anyone can leave a comment, its all closed down to attendees. And there is about no information coming from the web site about why you need to go.
The more amusing part is that the web site for the web 2.0 expo, this years, next years and the one in Berlin also pretty much so stank at having any kind of web 2.0 anything,
To Gphone or not to Gphone
2007-08-03 17:07:01
This is another one of those makes sense kind of things, that may or may not happen, yet the tons of bits and bytes released on the idea of a “gphone” or Google phone since the WSJ article yesterday has really caused quite the stir.
Some love the idea, some hate the idea, but in a world where market share is king, and the advances of Google in the datacenter, e-mail, video delivery, advertising, and other spaces, adding mobile support even if not under a specially branded phone makes sense. We already think that Google is poised to be the nations ISP as we discussed here, so adding mobile to its long list of service rounds out the companies offerings.
As they develop expertise in the mobile space by offering bits of their programming, like GMail via mobile phone or PDA, they will be building up the expertise, and learning how to render data for the small screen.
We still think that Google wants to be, or at least is making concrete steps in being the next AOL, MSN, or Yahoo as a
Yahoo brings on Hadoop
2007-08-03 15:35:23
In case you did not know about Hadoop, it is time to take a look at the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) as an alternative to the Google file system. With Yahoo
working on the project, the HDFS might actually stand a chance of getting bigger, and better able to scale over a large term project.
We first learned of Hadoop when we were looking at Nutch 3 years ago in the idea of building out a vertical search engine. While our project was eventually abandoned because of various issues (one of them being a very early version of Hadoop), the adoption of Hadoop by Yahoo makes us want to go back and start our project again.
When you are dealing with super massive data sets, ones that expand over hundreds of systems, the processing and management overhead are huge. While Google uses Map Reduce to do this, hadoop worked on an analogous version of map reduce, and have gotten the system running on a scalable grid-computing node of 1000 systems at the Yahoo research lab. If you have a large
How many projects can the Pirate Bay do?
2007-08-02 18:52:18
From tributes to Berman, to streaming TV, to the pirate bay, the group that annoys copyright enforcer’s worldwide is starting two more projects according to torrent freak. The relaunch of Suprnova and a forum system suprbay.
For those old school Bittorrent boffins, SuprNova was the first (I am sure we be debated on that one) best dumpsite for torrent files before it was taken out in a copyright raid. The domain has been fallow for years, but kept by the original owner, who according to torrent freak donated the domain to the pirate bay.
The interesting part is the way that the pirate bay is expanding their empire. While we made the observation here that Bittorrent, sites were either developing their own streaming TV sites (like Mininova here although it is lame) or the pirate bay version of the system here. The idea of moving away from Bittorrent and expanding the empire to include images, streaming video, and other ways of increasing the footprint of information sharing is fairly
Read more: Pirate
Facebook caught up in sex offender probe
2007-08-02 10:48:21
If things were not bad enough for social networking sites, Facebook
is now caught up in the sex offender using social networking row that has plagued MySpace. Authorities are reporting that they have found inappropriate content and images on Facebook.
NEW YORK - Connecticut investigators are looking into “three or more” cases of convicted sex offenders who had registered on Facebook, a fast-growing social networking Web site, the New York Times reported on Monday. State investigators had “also found inappropriate images and content” on the service, the Times reported, citing Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. Source: MSNBC
Times are getting hard for social networking sites, and their users. It is bad enough that you can stumble over content that is not what you were looking for, and stuff that can get you thrown in jail. Or download the Simpsons movie only to find out it is not really the Simpsons movie, or anything else that relies on a user uploading content
Bubble on the Brain
2007-08-02 10:22:40
If you listen to Dvorak and Marshall this morning, the pissing contest over if Web 2.0 is going to implode or not implode is part of this morning’s breakfast news. It is entertaining, in a shallow sort of way on the Dvorak side, it is at least presented well on the Marshall side of the argument. We are leaning a lot towards the idea that even though Web 2.0 might implode because too many companies chasing too few people is something that we are all dealing with. Niches in social networking have proven to be successful; the problem comes in when there are 40 different social networking sites that cover the topic of termites eat wood.
The argument is over the concept of web 2.0 collapsing in a firestorm of layoffs, companies closing, and bread lines in the valley. It might, that is not the real argument, the idea that we are in a highly creative time period, where new technology is evolving into standards (even if you hate myspace or not, it is the standard for a social networking si
Read more: Bubble
, Brain
The Aussies answer to Silicon Valley
2007-08-06 19:39:15
The good part is that while Europe is working hard in the web 2.0 space, the Aussies
have taken the concept and have developed an incubator service much like the Americans have with Angel and VC funding of companies. The LLC in place, Internet Property development Group, has been funding groups and sites, with their first release this month.
On that news we were really excited about it because the USA, Asia and Europe are working very hard on web 2.0, and coming up with some great stuff. In reading the PR flash below, we thought it would be way too cool.
New Web 2.0 Internet Incubator, Internet Property Development Group LLC (IPDG), launches in Silicon
Valley
with backing from Australian listed company Photon LTD (ASX:PGA), with goal of launching new web 2.0 consumer innovations from around the world in to the US market. IPDG’s first product http://www.Wookah.com will launch in the USA on 1st of August at the Always On conference at Stanford University showcasing the new navig
Read more: answer
, Silicon Valley
Unionized Blogging
2007-08-06 07:23:34
Just what you need on a Monday morning is the press, Techcrunch, wall street journal and others talking about unionizing bloggers because. Pick your reason; pick your method, the idea of unionizing bloggers should be a wake up calls that blogging is defiantly changing. While the idea of raising quality is a good thing, everyone could stand a bit more quality including our groupings of blogs.
We would love to hire bloggers, so the only way that we can do this is to essentially do piece work, just like how stringers work. Stringers is a journalistic phrase for folks who write stuff and pray it gets on AP, or independently roam the planet trying to get the good stuff, good video and turn around and sell it to the local, national, or international press corps. It is a long cherished tradition in formal journalism.
The idea of unionized blogging is something altogether though. With people coming and going from the field, blogging groups like Live Journal, Spaces and Blogger where it is yo
Read more: Blogging
Dateline Busted at Defcon
2007-08-05 08:38:00
In a rare moment of humor for the folks attending Defcon in Las Vegas, a Dateline
reporter was busted by the Defcon crowd, and fled the scene rather than face the music. What the reporters credit rating looks like this morning we can only guess. The problem is that the reporter showed up and took hidden camera video with an agenda to tie the FBI to cyber criminals, only to find out that she was the one that was ratted out.
Defcon A rare moment of drama came to Defcon when a woman fled the conference after being identified in front of hundreds of other attendees as an undercover television reporter on a crusade to expose collusion between cyber criminals and federal agents.
The woman, identified by conference organizers as a producer for Dateline NBC, bolted a few minutes after a panel called Spot the Fed began. After being tipped off about the covert operation - and knowing the producer was in the audience - organizers announced to the standing-room only crowd that the contest was be
Read more: Busted
Xbox Mod Chip Raid the personal story
2007-08-05 08:11:39
If you have ever wondered what it would be like to have the FBI raid your house or business, smuggle you off to be “processed” and then turned you loose, then you have to read the post raid story
from Xbox
Scene. Mod Chip manufactures are facing the heat and ire of the big 3 console makers, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. The FBI raid last week is nothing new, what is new is that one of the mod chip sellers has come forward with their own story, and it is compelling.
HSD - Hours before the raids were news and broadcast across the net and the mass media, an XS member (FallsInc) tried to warn those of us in the inner circle that the noose was about to tighten around US Modchip shops. In all honesty many amongst us didn’t give too much credence to the tip. Those of us running this site aren’t running Modchip shops. To our Utter shock and dismay, hours later we watched as one shop after another in the US market either went down, stopped answering the phones and stopped taki
Germany gets P2P right
2007-08-04 09:17:46
Marking P2P as a civil issue rather than a criminal issue, Germany
decides to tell the IFPI that they need to figure out another way of prosecuting file sharers and file sharing systems without resorting to using the cops.
On the grounds of “obvious disproportionateness” the Local Court (AG) in Offenburg had on July 20 prohibited the local public prosecutor’s office from requesting that a provider reveal the personal data that match the IP addresses of alleged P2P network users. Offering a few copyright-protected music tracks via a P2P network client was “a petty offense,” the court declared. Source: Heise.de
The humorous part is the way that the entire complaint hy Schutt-Waetke was dismissed as “baseless” and that the court doubted if the company was really interested in proceeding to criminal court, and that the case was not in the “public interest” nor had file sharers “disturbed law and order beyond the sphere of life of the client”. P2
Why social networking pays off
2007-08-09 13:24:47
If you are a blogger, and odds are most likely with 75 million bloggers out there, that someone is going to be a blogger, you need to start using social networking
. Without plugging your own work on sites like netscape, and yasvs, that have no rules against self posting, and using Digg, Stumbled Upon and others (because they do have rules that need to be observed about self posting) you are missing out on a lot of ways of increasing your page rank.
Even if the social networking sites you post at are either too new to be ranked, or carry a low rank, the good way to generate links back to your site, in lieu of various other ways that are tainted right now like link selling, link farming, and other things that will reduce your page rank. The use of social networking sites is something you can not afford to pass up when promoting your blog.
The best two sites that have no rules against posting your own stuff are netscape and yasvs. Netscape is always good, as they are a good name, and ha
Google Deletes own Blog as Spam
2007-08-09 10:19:41
In a lighter note, Google
’s system decided to delete the Custom Search engine blog from its rankings, and called it spam. This does not bode well for the vast majority of folks waiting on their Google page rank patiently, especially if the system can delete its own property as a splog.
Readers of Google Inc.’s Custom Search Blog were handed a bit of a surprise Tuesday when the Web site was temporarily removed from the blogosphere and hijacked by someone unaffiliated with the company. The problem? Google had mistakenly identified its own blog as a spammer’s site and handed it over to another person. Source: Yahoo news
While most of us would find this funny that they deleted their own blog from the googledex without even pausing, then losing control of the blog to someone else, should make many legitimate blog owners, and legitimate blog writers pause for a moment. Who is to say that something arbitrary will not happen to them? While Google makes best effort to notify so
Google and Privacy PSA
2007-08-09 09:56:15
In a good transparent move, the official Google
blog discusses the idea of Google and privacy. One thing though that any user of any system, no matter if it is Google, Microsoft, yahoo, any Web 2.0 web site, or otherwise is that they want to know how their customers use the web site.
They not only want to understand their customers better, in effect by using their web site, we make it easier for them to learn about their customers. Businesses work best when they know what to give to any particular customer based on previous habits, and while full blow prediction is not quite available yet, the wealth of knowledge we give businesses as we surf their web sites, is something that we should all be aware of.
. But they’re not always easy for non-techies to understand. Google is committed to being transparent about our privacy practices. We’ve been thinking about different ways to help people understand the technical aspects of online privacy, to improve transparency, and to e
Read more: Privacy
Charter Bus America
2007-08-08 14:16:12
Just when the travel industry looked safe to venture back into, a web site called Charter
Bus America
promises to do for the bus industry what Travelocity, Hotelreservations.com and others have done for the regular travel industry. This should do a lot of folks a lot of good who travel by bus. Groups like rock bands, large families, and others who need a charter bus can now negotiate and work out the best deal on that charter, and maybe save a bit of money along the way.
The cool part, is that you can also specify the amenities, like CD and DVD players, television, bathrooms, sizes, drivers lodging, and answers a lot of questions about how the whole charter bus system works. So if you are ignorant of the system like we are, then this is a great resource. For those that are familiar with the system, then this is going to be great for them as well, they can pick and choose.
When you get the while trip worked out, you get to pick out which one has the best amenities, best price, and oth
WetPaint DIY Wiki
2007-08-08 14:02:32
WetPaint is a hot startup that basically is a Do It Yourself (DIY) wiki system for anyone to make their own wiki on their site, and just have a good time doing the whole knowledge management process.
Wetpaint powers websites that tap the power of collaborative thinking. The heart of the Wetpaint advantage is its ability to allow anyone — especially those without technical skill — to create and contribute to websites written for and by those who share a passion or interest. To do this, Wetpaint combines the best aspects of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks so anyone can click and type on the web. Source: WetPaint
The interesting part too is that like most startups they are sharing knowledge via their blog, like the best places to find a job, you will notice that Monster and Dice are not on their journal entry here. Which makes us wonder how well the Web 1.0 job boards are doing in the web 2.0 world. The idea too is that jobs and wiki’s go great together, umm, this might b
Read more: Wiki
Spock Launches
2007-08-08 07:53:27
Let’s hope they have enough bandwidth, otherwise they are going to be intermittent today as people test drive Spock
, the people search engine. Since they launched late last night, trying to get to the site is a disaster, it is very slow, but then many people are going to be pounding the site for the next 48 hours as they check it out.
You can get to Spock right here (warning, we are seeing the sight being slow today).
The first things we checked were our names, at least some of us are not in the system, and that is ok. Otherwise, they had two of us that we know of; it is very freaky to have one of us working for Google who looks like them. No pictures though, in a small way that is very handy and convenient. Then we went hunting for our usual bad girls of Hollywood, Paris, Brittany, and Lindsay. Not too bad, but nothing racy either.
Many MySpace profiles, so it looks like they combed the social networks looking for folks along the way, which makes sense, but also makes it easier f
Google tries user comments
2007-08-08 07:35:20
This should be interesting; Google
announced late last night that they were going to try out a new system on their news page that would allow the participants of the news article their opportunity to chime in on the article. Later on they will add regular user comments, which given that other news organizations have basically shut this down because some people are potty mouths, or brain dead to the point that they ramble on about any old thing and not the news article, should be an interesting experiment in trying to herd cats.
Technically, we think this is a great idea, and given the success that the consumerist has had with having folks from companies respond to their articles, like Dell and Best Buy, this might not be too bad. Then of course, at some point they are going to have to edit the articles, because no one wants to see trashy off color comments about people we love to hate.
We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: th
Read more: tries
Blogger Flame War Calacanis and Winer
2007-08-12 10:34:45
In probably one of the more silly things, the flame war between Jason Calacanis
and Dave Winer heated up this morning with Techmeme following along the many blogs warping out and taking sites like a war against the Borg and the Federation.
While both sides make good points, the thing about blogging, and the thing about opinion, even if it is backed up with fact is that we are making a statement, we then back up our statements with many people saying the same thing that support our statement, then we all go out for a beer to two. Unless you are Linux or Microsoft fan boys, they just have fun spinning everything in to a flame war no, even if there are calls for peace across no mans land.
So, depending on how you feel about Mahalo, and user assisted search, then that will really determine which side you are going to take. Did Mahalo let everyone down? Or is it still working out the problems and gains in fits and starts. In the longer run will Mahalo even matter, or is Ms. Dewey tons coo
Read more: Blogger
Unix Copyrights Belong to Novel
2007-08-11 10:43:13
Lots of good news here in relationship to Novel this morning in that a US Judge in federal court has determined that Unix Patents really belong to Novel, the question is going to be is will Microsoft keep on harping on patent infringement now in regards to their relationship with Novel. Or will Microsoft then rather than suing the whole Unix eco-system and go after Novel for patent infringement.
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 10 — In a decision that may finally settle one of the most bitter legal battles surrounding software widely used in corporate data centers, a federal district court judge in Utah ruled Friday afternoon that Novell, not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system. In the 102-page ruling, the judge, Dale A. Kimball, also said Novell could force SCO to abandon its claims against I.B.M., which SCO had sued. Judge Kimball’s decision in favor of Novell could almost entirely undermine SCO’s 2003 lawsuit against I.B.M. Source: NY
Read more: Copyrights
Technorati and splogs
2007-08-11 09:43:54
Looks like the sploggers are winning over at technocrati this morning, and over the last few months. Lots of material that is one line blog entries, pornographic, single entry blogs that use the key words we search on, or are only meant to build out affiliation clicks to some of the other smaller social networking sites. While we love Technorati
, and we use it a lot, in many ways we are starting to wonder about the relevance of systems like Technorati, Tailrank, and others because of the inundation of splogs, and data that just does not make sense.
Techcrunch pointed out that in July Tailrank was featuring where to buy Viagra on line, as the sole entry, earlier we had pointed out that Tailrank was DOA by using a lot of screen caps. Moreover, while we talked to Kevin Burton about it, (thanks for the interview, sorry about the Valleywag reaction) it seems that many of the blog aggregators, search engines, and the rest are having a harder time telling splogs from the good stuff.
That me
Who is monitoring your blog Techrigy
2007-08-10 07:39:08
Interesting site we came across today called techrigy, that monitors the blogosphere looking for information about companies, who is talking about whom, and what blogs are mentioning your company. They take it on two prongs, to find employees yakking about your company, and outsiders who are talking about your company. This is something that many companies should be doing; it is interesting that a company is doing this as a business model.
The basic premise is that employees blog about companies, often they blog about their own company. We have been involved in this kind of stuff, both positive experiences and negative experiences since 2002. Usually companies will do a quick Google search looking for their company name, or head on over to Technorati, but it takes a person who is very familiar with the blogosphere to do this kind of work, and it is not for everyone. People will stuff porn into everything, plus some ads are not safe for work, people also have a hard time taking all tho
Read more: monitoring
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