Feb 29 2004
New Version of SharpReader
Sharpreader is what I use for blogging. New version out today. Adds Atom support, which is a very good thing.
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Feb 28 2004
Yahoo’s Fraud Department
Bad experiences? Yeah, we’ve all had them. I swear mine takes the cake though. Yahoo mistakenly charges a CC in my Yahoo Wallet, for a service I never asked for, and never received, but can’t issue a refund because the service is “non-refundable”.
Give me a break.
They said to take it up with my CC company. Except that a case like this is a case of fraud in the CC company’s eyes. I asked if they were sure that’s what they wanted. They hung up.
Wonderful service.
Feb 27 2004
Damn… Tucows Acquires BlogRolling
DAMN!
Hello!
You may have already read that Tucows Inc. has acquired
Blogrolling.com. As a Blogrolling.com subscriber, I thought it was
appropriate to drop you a quick note introducing myself and Tucows. I
also want to provide you with a brief overview of our future plans for
Blogrolling.com.Important things first – Tucows is planning to run Blogrolling.com *as
is* for the foreseeable future. We will continue to evolve the service
and ensure that it gets the care and feeding our subscribers deserve.
We will *not* limit or disable the service in any way or prevent users
of specific weblog/website management tools from continuing to use or
access the service.Our immediate priority is to take care of a few small housekeeping
items and then turn to start building out the service in a way that
really leverages the uniqueness and utility of Blogrolling.com’s
tools. Stay tuned to http://www.blogrolling.com/news.phtml for details
as they develop.As for me – I’m here for you. If you have any questions, comments or
concerns about Blogrolling.com, Tucows or life in general, don’t
hesitate to drop me a line (especially if you are a Blogrolling.com
“Gold” subscriber). For Blogrolling.com support, please continue to
use the Blogrolling.com website support tool at
http://www.blogrolling.com/contact.phtmlThanks for allowing me this brief interruption – I now return you to
your regularly scheduled weblogging.Take care and have a great weekend!
–Warm regards,
-rwr
“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions.
All life is an experiment.
The more experiments you make the better.”
- Ralph Waldo EmersonGot Blog? http://www.blogware.com
My Blogware: http://www.byte.org
This wouldn’t be so bad, if …
Nevermind, there’s no way it could be better. A small, homegrown service I’ve grown to love, written by a decent programmer and guy gets bought out… Wait a minute, that means he got big bucks! Good for him! Congrats!
That said, I don’t buy much of this for a minute.
Of course things will change. Of course they’ll be scaled back. It happens. Tucows is a big company who needs to balance out the cost of acquisition somehow. Unless they got BlogRolling for a steal, that’ll likely mean “improved” services for another class of members, less services for certain classes or “phased in services” that are actually cut down versions of previous services.
Hopefully this doesn’t go the way of other, similarly small blogging services and simply die. I’d write what’s-his-name and volunteer to run BlogRolling, except that I have little confidence in Tucows ability to create, maintain or innovate anything that’s particularly useful.
:knock on wood:
Hopefully I’m wrong. I’d happily issue a retraction and become a Tucows fan if I was.
Feb 27 2004
Blog Radio?
I was going out to lunch today. Trying to find some decent music. Couldn’t. For the life of me, I couldn’t find something that clicked with the mood I was in.
So, I sat there (at an interminably long red light) trying to figure out what I was in the mood for. Sadly, and I guess this shows my social state (I’ll blame any negative facts on the stomach flu I’m still recovering from); I realised that I was interested in blogging at that very moment.
At that moment in time, I wished there was a radio show on blogging that I could listen to.
It would likely have up-to-date news on the current happenings in the blogosphere (maybe BlogRadio would be limited to tech and business news, as I’m gathering that that’s the largest audience it’d have, since it’d likely have to be net-based and who else but business folks and geeks would listen to it?):
- Scoble getting pansy-striped for cursing out designers
- Winer getting pansy-striped for being Winer
- Jay Allen getting quoted in Wired
- Google getting a 15-page spread in Wired
It could also have talk bits discussing various issues of the day:
- How much personal information is too much? (also see Scoble’s recent pansy-striping over this very issue)
- Is the expansion of MovableType bad to blogging by creating a feeding ground for exploits?
- Why is there an A-List, if there even is one?
Not sure it’d fly, but if someone would be willing to co-host, I’d be willing to give it a go, at least on a one-month demo (1 weekly show for 4 weeks).
Feb 27 2004
Yahoo-Google Placement: Visually
Last week I posted that Yahoo’s referrals were up hugely over Google’s since Yahoo launched their own engine. A few people emailed / commented / blog’d about this.
Well, here’s a tool that lets you visually view the differences in SERP’s between the two engines, for your keywords.
Thanks to John Batelle for the heads up.
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Feb 27 2004
BlogBinders.com
Ever wanted to turn your blog into a book? Sadly, I’ve considered it, though chivalry won through in the end.
Well, BlogBinders.com helps. A lot.
All it takes is a few easy steps:
* Provide information about your blog account
* Select a type style and design the covers
* Optionally write an introduction
* Review automatically generated proofIt’s that simple! In under a week, your book will arrive.
Feb 26 2004
Blogging Personals Ad by Mike
Apparently Mike feels there aren’t enough business / tech bloggers out there. At least female ones. Care to relieve his pain? Contact him directly. Please.
Feb 26 2004
Perfection Isn’t Perfect
It’s amazing how much time you have to think when you’re at home alone thinking. It’s also amazing what you have time to think and read about when you browse through your entire Blogroll reading the last month’s entries. Some blogs I hadn’t read in a while, and now regret not having read at the time.
One of these is fairly recent: Venturpreneur. The most recent post covers the topic of the recent Treo 600 release.
What really caught my attention was David’s focus on building perfection one step at a time, by making a lot of mistakes. As someone in the VC field, David’s perspective lends a lot of credence, even though it’s a great idea taken on it’s own.
For new businesses, specifically we businesses, it becomes important not to release the best product possible right away, but to release one which is functional and can be improved upon quickly and with as little pain as possible to the customer.
Similarly, I have always viewed as one of the key strengths of building a web business, the ability to rapidly evolve a product or service based upon specific, quantifiable user feedback. Successful web businesses have never sought to put out the perfect product. Rather, they have put out products that can be measured and tracked, and have been quick to revise those products based upon the direct feedback they receive. The more agile a company is in responding to that user feedback, the more likely it will ultimately build a product or service that best meets the needs of its customers.
A friend of mine was a fairly big player in the cellphone field a couple of years ago. His company conceived of something which took full advantage of this, though they never used it. They were a cellphone manufacturer, and their idea was basically to give customers a ’service’, which was the cellphone. For 10-25$/month (depending on how high end of a phone you wanted); you would get whatever upgrades happened to your line of phone.
If David had gotten a package like this with his original Treo, he would have enjoyed the new Treo’s instantly.
The idea never took off, mainly because consumers rarely pay full price on the value of a celllphone, however it gets to the core of an iterative release cycle, which is ultimately something which should benefit both the consumer as well as the producer.
Feb 26 2004
Stomach Flu
Turns out I got a really good (read: bad) case of stomach flu. Cool beans.
While I’ve been away, Mike got Scoble’d (not as big as Slashdot’d, but very cool nonetheless). His life is going really well, I can’t wait to see him on TechTV 
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