Friday, April 30, 2004

Ron Parsons of Yahoo sends a note with news of more feeds, centered around business, stock markets, the economy, earnings etc.  

A piece of data for Americans about Europe and their media. No one here seems to know about the Dean Scream. It's not part of the folklore. Ask an educated European why Dean isn't the nominee of the Democratic Party and they turn the question back at you. There's more to it than the scream and the huge amount of play it got on the networks. Dean raised lots of money because he had support in the northeast and west coast. But the first primaries were in Iowa and New Hampshire.  

Ole Eichorn found a new reason to love the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. 

Wired: "What happens when everyone discovers the power of aggregators? Will the Web be able to handle it? In Internet boom-speak, will it scale?" 

We should get some kind of group of aggregator developers to talk about the issue raised in Wired's article. So many distractions in RSS-space, the concern they raise is real, we should have some kind of roadmap for managing change-percolation in a world where polling is too expensive to do the simple way. Could we come up with something like BitTorrent for aggregators? Sure.  

Michael Gartenberg: "Unless someone can come up with something and order of magnitude better than what Google offers it's likely we're going to see Google increase in importance over time and not decrease." 

Boston Globe: "Google's distinct culture is a great competitive advantage, but its obsession with control and secrecy is not." 

John Robb: "Their quest for money and power is Adam's pain." 

John Battelle: " I can only imagine the eyes rolling at Kleiner Perkins, Morgan Stanley, and the rest of the veterans as the founders insisted on this." 

One year ago today: Citizen bloggers in NH? 

It's looking like I won't get as far as Barcelona. I'm going to stay another day in Geneva. My flight back to Boston is on Tuesday from Amsterdam, that's the basic constraint. But I can fly to Amsterdam if need-be.  

I see indications that people are switching to WordPress. Perhaps it would be better to take the focus off the bad that some people are doing to weblog interchange formats and APIs, and focus on making sure WordPress is doing a good job. Is there a summary page somewhere about the formats and protocols that WordPress supports, and some examples? I found this discussion thread that sheds some light. Their feeds actually look pretty good, from what I've seen so far. I'd like to see the guids be permalinks, if it's at all possible, and would prefer that the full content be included in each item's description. But on the whole, it's quite digestible, and close enough to prior art.  

NY Times: "Google explicitly warns investors not to buy the offering in the hope of making a short-term profit by flipping their shares." 

NY Times: "Google is not an icebreaker for other companies to follow," said John Shoch, a partner at Alloy Ventures. "It's a polka-dotted zebra."