Thursday, February 17, 2005

How many blogs were there in 1997? 

Check this out. The NY Times bought About.com for $410 million.  

Bob Stepno amplifies Peggy Noonan's thoughts. Great stuff. 

Note: The Westin in downtown Atlanta has excellent free wifi and landed Ethernet on the second floor. It's supposed to cost something ridiculous like $10 per hour, but there's no meter, and no place to deposit the money. Enjoy it while you can.  

The next stop is Waycross, tomorrow. My grandparents took me there when I was in fifth grade and it's on the way to the beach in Florida, where rooms are hard to find until Monday, thanks to the President's Day holiday? Why didn't someone warn me? Heh. Just kidding. BTW, I got a great email from Andrew Scott who reminds of the old (communist?) slogan -- You gotta break some eggs if you want to make an omelette. Cool. Now maybe we've got a new slogan for Scripting News. "Breaking eggs since 1997." 

Four years ago: Payloads for RSS. "My company, UserLand, has a product in development called My.UserLand On The Desktop that supports both sides of this format." We shipped it shortly after I wrote that piece. Next week, Wired may give Adam Curry an award, for work that I, not he, did. I've told them this is not cool. Haven't heard yet what they plan to do about it. They offered to give me a free dinner. I'll buy my own dinner, thanks. I want credit for my work. I don't mind sharing it with Adam, because he was part of the invention. I've never been cheap with crediting Adam. But to say he is the inventor is just plain wrong. BTW, I think Adam could fix this with one email.  

Excellent cartoon, a sign of the times. A pro takes a self-deprecating shot at the pros. Bravo! Along with Peggy Noonan's piece, cracks are growing in the walls of the palace. A little light is coming in. Hmmm. 

Sylvia: "Maybe Blogland is Davos, too, my own private Davos open to everyone." 

BTW, it's great to see how many people are including Lance in the discussion about Eason Jordan and Davos. Lance is one of the most thoughtful and visionary people I know, but he speaks softly and with respect, and that manner sometimes isn't heard too well in the rough and tumble dialog of the blogosphere. He and I have spent a lot of time talking about how Davos would work if it were both physical and virtual. I've used many of those ideas in putting together BloggerCon, and some of the aggregators I've done over the years. But there's still no doubt in my mind that Davos would work better if it both eased up on confidentiality and exclusivity, and decentralized. More blogs, not one "official" blog. And deliberately bring bloggers in, to show the outside world what's going on. I would be happy to help the WEF formulate their approach to blogging.  

Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains blogging better than I've ever seen it done. Savor every word. It's a gem. 

BTW, my hotel is blocking outbound port 25, so I can receive but not send email. If you're waiting for a response, it's queued in my Outbox. Sorry.  

Also, sorry for the blackout on the purpose of my stay in Atlanta. The people I'm visiting don't want publicity for what they're doing, and I of course am respecting that.  

I don't use any toolbars, Yahoo, Google or otherwise, so I don't have any first-hand experience with the new feature in the Google Toolbar that Steve Rubel writes about, that emulates the horrific Smart Tags, that we managed to get Microsoft to retract. If what Steve writes is true, Google has gone too far, and is changing the content of the web. I agree with Steve, this is a line they must not cross. (I posted a couple of comments in re Steve's post.) 

Greg Linden: "The modifications are useful, sure, but what does it do to Mapquest to have all addresses everywhere pointing to Google Maps? What does it do to Barnes & Noble if all ISBNs point off to Amazon?"