Thursday, March 09, 2006

Amyloo on the organization of the OPML Editor user community. She's sorting things out.  

Essay: A rambler on flaming in the blogosphere. 

Nick Carr mis-states my point of view in his piece today about the value of meme-trackers, but I don't disagree with his basic premise. That's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to hearing Markoff talk about elitism in the blogosphere on the 19th. Too often critics of amateur media think we all buy into all that everyone with a blog says. Of course that's a fallacy since many of the blog critics use blogs to be criticial of blogs. Hey even I've noted that the blogosphere can be a more rabid pack of hunting hyenas than the pros are -- it happens -- all too frequently. People are people. The new media has potential to make things better, a potential that hasn't been realized yet.  

Forbes Magazine list of billionaires. Bill Gates is #1 with $50 billion. 

Today is the last day in Knight-Ridder's auction, which will determine the selling price for the second largest chain of newspapers in the US. 

Google acquired Writely, a browser-based word processor. 

Scott Karp: "If search only represents 5% of online media time, it shouldn't have 40% of the dollars." 

Kevin Burton at TailRank has already implemented the meme-search function I was asking about on Tuesday.  

Last night's talk was good, off the top of my head, two things were memorable. The guy who designed OpenSearch at A9 was there, a product that at first I didn't get (and said so) and then got and liked (and also said so). Everyone likes to talk about the calls they got right, but unless you make mistakes, you never took a risk, so I prefer to make them, and then correct them, and I think this is a good practice. The second thing is the name of a company that a guy told me about after the talk. MediaMelon. Now that's a good name, and I don't know why. I guess I felt like eating some melon when I heard the name. Melon is juicy and sweet, but not too sweet. It's healthy and fresh, not something you eat every day. I suggested that as his company grew there would be people who would urge him to change the name, but I said he shouldn't. It's a fun name. Melons are cool. You don't hear about companies named after melons every day.