Congrats to Ross and Elliot!

Grok Headline matches for Congrats to Ross and Elliot!

Congrats to Ross et al - keep going!

Congrats to Ross et al - keep going! 04/24/2004 03:25 AM

And as if (on cue) Ross was waiting for the official battles to commence, here comes Blogware with....

Busy Week in Blogware-land.

It has been an extremely busy week on Blogwareland. The project is really firing on all cyclinders and I'm starting to get pretty excited about the upcoming release. Most of my time has been devoted to staff training. We took 30 or so staffers through hands-on with the service in a lab environment and the feedback has been great. I really enjoyed taking everyone through the in's and out's of Blogware and the weblog market and it is great to see the rest of the team over here finally starting to understand why I'm so excited by Blogware and the weblog opportunity. The blogosphere can be a tough thing to grok for one person - getting 150 people on the same page is even harder ;)

I finally got the nerve up to steal a page out of Doc Searls playbook and go outside of the "bullet-snore-click-snore" structure that Powerpoint forces on Office users. I've had the pleasure of seeing Doc "present" a few times and he's really taught me that 60 slides in 60 minutes is only bad if the content is bad...

The dev team is also totally in the zone. A bunch of new features coming out this week and a few bug fixes as well. I can see v1.0 just over the horizon...

Something old, something new, something boring and nothing blue...

 Something Old...

Comment Notifications v2.0! Weblog publishers getting comment notifications is old hat. Now, authenticated readers can also choose to receive comment notifications on a per article, per category or on a site-wide basis. Publishers also get to choose whether or not this feature is even available to their readers.

Something New...

Import/Export. Publishers can now get the important content out of their old weblogs and into their shiny new Blogware weblog. Also, the Export feature makes your Blogware content just that much more portable - great peace of mind. Import initially supports only MT imports with support for the Blogger, Radio and other formats shortly.

Something Boring...

Bug fixes. Yawn. ;) Publishers will notice that the webstats are much snappier now - we realized a ton of performance increases with some of these new fixes.

Nothing Blue...

No, I meant it - there was nothing blue. Well, just this. Literally.

So what's the big take away? It has been impossible for me to keep up with my email this week. If you've sent me a message and I haven't gotten back to you, rest assured, I still love you - its just that I'm currently 300 messages behind where I should be - and that's after 4 hours of catch up. Problem is, I'm not going to get through it all today - marketing needs sign-off on virtually everything that they've been working on for Blogware this afternoon and unless I wade into it, they are going to hunt me down and kill me - probably with a bad PowerPoint presentation or something ;)

[Random Bytes]

Crap. Goodbye Elliot.

Crap. Goodbye Elliot. 10/28/2003 11:07 PM

Elliot Smith killed himself today. I downloaded a few songs of his back in the Napster heyday and ended up buying a few CDs. I had the opportunity to see him live a few times in SF, but never went.

Crap, I really liked his stuff.

It's a little weird, in a life-imitates-art sort of way, to realize his song was used in a suicide scene (in The Royal Tennenbaums), and now he's gone and done that himself.

Elliot Smith CD Released Year After
Death (AP)

Elliot Smith CD Released Year After
Death (AP) 09/24/2004 02:04 PM
AP - It's been almost a year since singer-songwriter Elliott Smith committed suicide, and fans and friends will be looking for answers as the posthumous "From a Basement on the Hill" is released.

Right on to Ross!

Right on to Ross! 05/19/2004 01:22 AM

Is it a coincidence that as soon as Ross Rader starts accusing me of "whacky charts and diagrams" - he starts to do them himself?

:-)

Here's Ross' response to some 'sceptic'. I inserted comments in maroon.

An Open Letter to Blog Sceptic.

Dear Blog Sceptic;

You raise some great points and they haven't gone unnoticed over here. I wanted to respond with something sooner, but last week was nuts and I'm just digging out now...

To recap, you recommend that we;

1. Ditch the reseller route. 
2. Launch a branded hosting service* that competes head-on with Typepad, offering more features at a slightly lower cost. Leverage your robust scalability. MT's home-brew Perl implementation is probably hurting them right now.
3. Offer Blogware to institutions at a reasonable price that undercuts MT 3.0 significantly. Every company has an intranet. Run it on Blogware.
4. Add friends/ communities for user lock-in through social means. 
5. Promote it! Why on earth was there no announcement on Boingboing when Blogware was launched? You need a marketing guy. Hire somebody like Jason Kottke to spread the word online. Or Cory Doctorow. Actually Doctorow would be ideal because he travels a lot and has a high profile.
6. Hire some professional designers. Add some curves, some shading, some oomph. Right now it looks like a bunch of geeks cooked something up. This will make a BIG difference in standing out.

Let me peg these off in semi-reverse order...

6. Designers. Tucows has always needed some of that oomph. Point well taken. We will improve as time passes. I would say that we are more interested in function than form right now. Not to the point of creating an insuffereable user experience but rather that the function of the application needs to be driven by useful features and not pretty widgets. Pretty widgets can be built over time as we iterate on the UI. You think this looks like it was designed by a bunch of geeks? Boy do I wish that I had screen caps of our first alpha ;)

I actually think of all the 'anti-design, Kottke school or thought, bow down to Jakob Nielsen lo-fi UI's out there - Blogware is the best.  But I'm a broadband sort fo guy and believe in color, shape and form.  Maybe one day we'll get away from straw sipping, dial-up mentality.

4. Social networking stuff. We recently implemented the start of this. Its not fully baked, nor am I happy with it fully yet. But the start is there. Now it just needs some care, feeding and weeding to make it really sing. You can sign up and check it out at http://www.blogware.com/users I'd love to get your feedback and suggestions for improvements.

This is my greatest area of concern.  Wer'e dealing with similar situations with Drupal, Word Press and Typepad - how much social network is 'enough' for Blog tools. Many people ask me this question.

Blogware supports a formal concept of a friend, while TypePad has turned blogroll associations into friends.  Anil tells me Typepad is going through some changes here - so we'll have to see what comes out.  Not sure what Matt Mullenweg is doing for friends, but I know he's putting in FOAF.

So what do I think is the right level fo 'friendship' to put into blogging tools?

Well first of all - all blog tools and all software in general should adopt basic FOAF 'About me' pages, which not only display basic profile info to viewers, but also enable simple export of that profile.  The real issue is whether or not teh blogging tool supports importing FOAF and friends - at all.

I say What software ISN'T about people?  Why WOULDN'T you want a built-in, on-line comunity to support themselves, to help you promote your tool, to keep your customers happy?

Just so we're clear on my view.  :-)

5/3/2/1. Ditch the resellers/launch a hosted version/offer to specific verticals/promote it...

Never gonna happen.

I knew he was gonna say this - and he's brilliant in his explanation fo it - read on.....

Here's why: Internet services providers represent the most powerful distribution channel on the internet. No single company can compete with the marketing muscle of 30,000 ISPs** who sit right in front of end-users and assist them in making critical technology choices and guide them as they dive into the internet - usually for the first time. No other channel can put you in front of individuals and the Fortune 500 simultaneously and no channel can better address the fickle needs of their local markets in a more appropriate fashion.

To get a better sense of this, take a look at our track record with domain names. In 1997, we were (according to the most liberal definitions) #85 in the domain name registration market. Today we are solidly #2 and we've been there for a couple of years. How did we get here? We dealt exclusively with internet services providers to the exclusion of all other market opportunities and we nailed their service requirements. By choosing and sticking to our distribution model very early in the game (some would argue that it chose us) we were able to focus on very specific attributes of our products and processes and build some truly excellent structures around everything. In other words, because we weren't trying to be all things to all customers, we were able to do some very amazing things with some very specific customer segments. And they responded in spades.

Our resellers kick serious ass in the market place. This because the Tucows way of doing things gives them  the luxury of being able to focus on very specific and important things. Think of every other blogging company out there. They each have to a) be technical experts, b) be sales experts and c) be marketing experts just to one unit to a customer. Now take a look at the symbiotic nature of the relationship between Tucows and its direct customers. Our resellers have to be sales & marketing experts and develop strong customer service skills and Tucows has to focus on maintaining world-class technical services. Who would you bet on, the jack-of-all-trades or the team of specialists?

The downside to this approach is that it lacks the glitz and glam that retail oriented services employ. You will never see a full out PR blitz from Tucows and Blogware will never be a household name.  All wasted money. Remember, we're not the marketing brains in this relationship. We're the technical muscle.

I actually slightly disagree here - but only in scope and target audience.  It's important to build the Tucows brand with the insider crowd - so when someone says "gee I'd love to private label and brand my own blogging tool" - they go to Tucows.

Does that mean that our resellers are idly sitting by doing nothing? Nope. Right now, they are working on developing the right messages to direct at very specific markets - some are doing the institutional angle, some are going after telecommunications firms, others are targetting specific home-user verticals and others still looking to make quick wins at the expense of those with existing market share... And what I've seen so far looks great. Think of this as true "end-to-end marketing" Marketing at the edges. Clue-train compatible distribution. Teamwork. Focus. Whatever you call it, it works.

For us, this isn't a question of strategy. We're fully committed to our wholesale distribution model and we're fully committed to the blogging market. More importantly, Tucows is fully committed to winning in this market and we are doing what we need to do to make it happen. Heads-down, block-and-tackle, stick-on-the-ice, wholly tactical execution. Execution of our plan to give our resellers what they need to continue to kick ass in their chosen commercial pursuits. When they win, we've won.

What Ross isn't saying is that Tucows has been and will continue to support open standards and help make new ones happen.

There's also some other exciting news about Tucows - which we'll be disclosing within a month or so.  These guys are major players in our world - be nice to them!

*Blogware is a hosted application, not a standalone tool. "Branded", well that's another matter entirely. We chose the name "Blogware" because it is the most generic expression that could be used to describe "weblog management tool". Is that our brand? Nah. It's just a convenient label we use to refer to the product. The first thing our resellers do is rip this tag off and replace it with their own....

**(For the sake of this entry, ISPs should be read as "ISPs/Web hosting companies". I use the term "internet services providers" in its truest sense - those companies that provide internet services...)

[Random Bytes]

Is Ross Unzipped?

Is Ross Unzipped? 05/19/2004 04:23 PM
Higher costs and inventory problems plague the off-price retailer.

Ross is at Red Herring Conference

Ross is at Red Herring Conference 12/10/2003 04:35 AM

Ross Mayfield is blogging from the Red Herring Conference. Sounds like VCs are coming back. Not sure yet that's a good thing. There's a paradigm shift coming (heck, even if you don't believe in Microsoft's vision, look at Sun's or Apple's -- all computing platforms are going to see rapid innovation over the next few years. Yet the VCs don't seem to care and don't seem to be building companies to take advantage of the coming shifts.

Here, ask yourself, do you see anything about RSS in his notes? Anything about the Tablet PC? Anything about new 3D OS's (how about new kinds of video games, new kinds of business apps? Is PowerPoint and Excel really going to be how business is done 20 years from now? Those are three things that are seeing huge changes right now. Today. Not five years from now. Yet the VCs are off funding Friendster.

Any wonder why there's tons of empty buildings in downtown Palo Alto?

Dell'olio set for Ross interview

Dell'olio set for Ross interview 06/04/2004 05:45 AM
Ananova Jun 4 2004 9:46AM GMT

Diana Ross gets two days in jail

Diana Ross gets two days in jail 02/10/2004 02:55 AM
Singer Diana Ross receives a brief jail term after pleading "no contest" to a drink driving charge.

Ross on Family Tech Support

Ross on Family Tech Support 12/28/2004 03:40 PM
Ross provides his simple recommendations for the annual family tech support ritual otherwise known as the end of year holidays. In summary: Get 'em a Mac with OS X on it Get 'em broadband: it's fast and nearly always on Get 'em Firefox, 'cause IE is bad for your security Get 'em a good start page like My Yahoo or Google Get 'em on Web Mail like Yahoo Mail or GMail Get 'em on Flickr if they want to share...

DAVID GEST + DIANA ROSS?

DAVID GEST + DIANA ROSS? 02/19/2004 06:10 PM
I am picturing an MJ sandwich on wedding night, if you know what i'm saying, and i think you do

MoviePod: Geoff Ross Is High

MoviePod: Geoff Ross Is High 05/13/2004 07:55 AM
http://www.geoffrossisfamous.com/infodump/index.php">Ah, youth. It's big thinking, like the meandering, centerless kind NYU film student Geoff Ross has done about a method for digital music distribution called MoviePod MovieBox, that makes a great case for why college kids should stop smoking pot. Geoff wants to build a digital film distribution system...

Ross and Rachel Together in 'Friends'
Finale

Ross and Rachel Together in 'Friends'
Finale 05/07/2004 12:45 AM
Ross and Rachel, together again as "Friends" fades into history. Were you expecting anything different?

SocialText and Ross reaps the benefits

SocialText and Ross reaps the benefits 06/03/2004 09:38 PM

Ross Mayfield has written up some results from our usage of Socialtext's Wiki during our 1UP.com development process.

I was the main guy using the thing, so I got to put Socialtext's product and services through the paces.  In fact at this point - I'm working with five SocialText workspaces.

So all you knowledge management, workgroup wonks out there (Ray Ozzie eat your heart out) take a read.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross dies

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross dies 08/27/2004 01:37 PM
I interviewed Dr. Kübler-Ross some time in the mid 1970s for an article for Maclean's in Canada. At the time, she had gone beyond her "five stages of dying" meme and was fully into proving that there's life after death by documenting weird coincidences and poorly substantiated tales. I was disappointed because, although I am agnostic about life after death, her methodology was anecdotal and seemed to me to be aiming at supporting a position she merely wanted to believe. And yet, she did something remarkable. Deeply impressed by her work helping Nazi refugees and by a visit to the...

SCANDAL Doc reports Gates plagarized
Ross!

SCANDAL Doc reports Gates plagarized
Ross! 05/21/2004 07:01 PM
Raising the bra.

That's the headline that comes to mind when I read Bill Gates' most famous recent speech. It's like, blah blah networking blah blah storage blah blah tablets, blah blah RFID, blah blah templates, blah blah RSS, blah blah spam, blah blah MSDN... Huh? wtf? Rewind....

That RSS item launches the longest section of the speech: seven paragraphs that read to me like they were ghosted by Ross Mayfield. I just went to Ross's blog and he quote s five of those same 'graphs. Coincidence?

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Right after 9/11, Berg's Head and Oil prices - comes this latest scandal - hot on the Technorati wirewatch.

Ross Mayfield's Webl0g: Media Value
Unchained

Ross Mayfield's Webl0g: Media Value
Unchained 09/19/2004 11:01 PM
Yin is to wikis as Yang is to blogs .. riffs

ross.typepad.com/blog/2004/09/media_value_unc.html
track this site | 2 links

Collector's Collections Gallery: Ross
Williams

Collector's Collections Gallery: Ross
Williams 09/03/2004 12:58 AM
Today's Collector's Collections update features and update to the the collection of Ross Williams from UK.

Collector's Collections Gallery: Ross E
Lockhart

Collector's Collections Gallery: Ross E
Lockhart 04/01/2005 02:08 AM
Today's Collector's Collections update features the collection of Ross E Lockhart from Petaluma,California, USA.

'The Guardian' Interviews Blake Ross

'The Guardian' Interviews Blake Ross 04/07/2005 12:52 PM

Spiegel Online Interviews Blake Ross

Spiegel Online Interviews Blake Ross 04/14/2005 09:52 AM

Congrats Jay!

Congrats Jay! 07/25/2004 11:08 PM
About 10 months ago, I posted a lazyweb request for a blacklist-based comment-spam solution. Only 2 days later, Jay Allen posted a solution that pretty much did exactly what I (and many others) needed. Ever since, he's been adding more and more features to aid in the fight against comment spam and even started maintaining a master blacklist people could... (156 words)

Congrats to...

Congrats to... 01/22/2004 04:31 AM
Congratulations to the Kerry supporters. Edwards', too. See you in New Hampshire :)...

Alex Ross (New Yorker music critic) has
a bl0g

Alex Ross (New Yorker music critic) has
a bl0g 06/28/2004 04:38 PM
goooo, typepad!

Ross Mayfield Talks about VC Funding of
Social Software

Ross Mayfield Talks about VC Funding of
Social Software 11/18/2003 04:40 AM

Ross Mayfield, who is trying to get a business started around social software, talks about the latest VC-funding of social software.

Personally the whole market is missing the boat -- Microsoft included.

The money is in corporate knowledge management systems. Microsoft's is Sharepoint. But, let's look at social software. Weblogging has succeeded for five very specific reasons:

1) It's easy to publish a weblog. OK, Sharepoint has that.

2) Weblogs are discoverable. Just visit weblogs.com and discover some that were published minutes ago. Sharepoint doesn't have that.

3) Weblogs are social. Most weblog software has a public referer log (here's mine). That's important for two reasons. a) Cause I can see who is talking about me and b) a newcomer to my sphere of influence can instantly see who is talking about me and how much traffic they are sending me (ie they can see who the "big fish" are in my neighborhood). Sharepoint doesn't do this.

4) Weblogs let me point to specific microcontent. Translation: permalinks. Sharepoint doesn't do that.

5) Good Weblog tools build syndication, er RSS, feeds automatically. Sharepoint doesn't do that (although someone built an add-on tool to do that).

One tool nailed all this stuff: UserLand's Manila. But, let's be honest. How many companies are gonna convert all their intranet data over to a system from a company with a couple of employees? I was director of marketing and tried fighting that fight.

But, I am totally convinced of the need for a new kind of knowledge management system (er, corporate weblogging tool) for corporations. Yet the VCs and Microsoft's own execs aren't funding major research into this stuff. Sharepoint is the evidence.

Keep in mind: I'm a hard-core Sharepoint user now. It's a good product. Its team just doesn't know that it's only missing three things before it's a great one.

Ross Mayfield's Webl0g: Books Banned on
Flights?

Ross Mayfield's Webl0g: Books Banned on
Flights? 04/18/2005 02:26 AM
notes

ross.typepad.com/blog/2005/04/books_banned_on.html
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Ross-Simons harnesses the web as it
adopts a new marketing strategy

Ross-Simons harnesses the web as it
adopts a new marketing strategy 04/17/2005 02:37 PM
InternetRetailer.com Apr 17 2005 4:53PM GMT

Bloomberg Article on Blake Ross and
Mozilla Firefox

Bloomberg Article on Blake Ross and
Mozilla Firefox 04/09/2005 09:58 AM

Congrats to Justin

Congrats to Justin 05/11/2004 01:43 PM

Congrats to BookSlut!

Congrats to BookSlut! 03/11/2003 10:45 AM

Winners of the 2003 Bloggies have been announced, and BookSlut won for "Best Topical Category!"

Congrats to Mikel!

Congrats to Mikel! 09/13/2004 07:01 AM

One of my favorite peeps is Mikel Maron - how moved to the South of England to go be a college student - again.

But it looks liek it paid off. Along the way Mikel has been doing plenty of contributing - still.

Unfortunately Mikel is there and I'm here - and it doesn't look like I'll get back to SF in time for a Sept. 17th dinner in SF - maybe a week later?

Here's Mikel's post.....

My dissertation is complete! An Ecological Approach to the Evolution of Complexity

Two weeks ago I completed an intense summer of work and sumbitted my dissertation for the MSc in Evolutionaty and Adaptive Systems. If all goes to plan, and there's no reason why not, I will have my degree within the next month. The research turned out well, and may lead to some future developments. Here I'm publishing the text (minus the code appendix) and the abstract, for easier reading flavor. Enjoy! (I am for sure).

An Ecological Approach to the Evolution of Complexity

How evolution led to complex life is one of the great questions. This paper describes simulations that investigate the role of ecological interactions in the evolution of complexity. Webworld is a robust model of evolution in food webs. It is extended for variability of organism complexity under evolution. Statistical and network analysis indicates a clear tendency for complexification within the model, led by adaptations that initially disconnect the species from trophic interactions. This suggests a process where short term fitness is increased by less connection to the ecosystem, but long term fitness is insured by incorporation within the ecosystem. Certainly it suggests a greater role for ecosystems in the evolution of complexity.

[Mikel Maron]

Congrats to Ted Shelton

Congrats to Ted Shelton 02/01/2005 08:42 PM

Ted Shelton is at Orb Networks - coolio.

Congrats to Cory

Congrats to Cory 03/20/2003 04:23 PM

How nuts is it that Cory' s book was reviewed by Jeff Bezos and Harriet Klausner, Amazon's #1 reviewer? And speaking of, how on earth does someone review 4605 products (almost all books) in just a few years? I'm seeing 4-5 lengthy book reviews per day in some of her history, how on earth does someone do such a thing?

Congrats to Jonas on getting a job!

Congrats to Jonas on getting a job! 06/09/2004 05:54 AM
Does that mean I have to wear pants, again?.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's with not inconsiderable pleasure, that I announce my re-entry into the world of the bi-monthly paycheck. Starting today I will be getting paid to lend what little of expertise I have to offer and use it to play with and work on some cool Open Source collaboration things. Psyched.

[a preponderance of evidence blogs]

Collabnet is very lucky to get Jonas to work for them.

Congrats to Rafat!

Congrats to Rafat! 12/17/2004 06:28 PM

Turns out Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org got married in South Africa and is taking some time off.

The guy's a monster!

His new wife better appreicate the time she's getting.

Congrats To The Meyers!

Congrats To The Meyers! 12/10/2003 05:47 AM
Carolyn Maxwell Meyer .. new arrival: Carolyn .. meyerweb .. carolyn

meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/200312.html#t20031208
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Congrats Rusty

Congrats Rusty 03/08/2004 11:27 PM
It looks like Rusty has gotten a daytime gig as an Internet big cheese. I notice that the sidebar blurb of Armstrong Zúniga LLC (a web consulting shop for political campaigns) now says: Rusty Foster joined Armstrong Zúniga in February of 2004 as CTO. Rusty created the Scoop software platform in 1999 and founded Kuro5hin.org the same year. Kuro5hin is widely recognized as a pioneering project in collaborative media, and Rusty has written and spoken extensively about the potential of the internet as a medium for collaboration and grassroots organizing. More...

Congrats to Justin!

Congrats to Justin! 03/06/2004 01:49 AM
Just In Tokyo Released to the Waiting Web.

Just In Tokyo Released to the Waiting Web

Congrats to Om for being Slashdotted

Congrats to Om for being Slashdotted 05/08/2004 11:04 PM
The SlashDot Effect.

I had only read about the SlashDot Effect, popularly known as Slashdotted. I had never experienced it first hand. While I was away in Los Angeles, this story about the Linksys gateway, which did the rounds in the blogsphere via Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing Boing , Broadband Reports and a couple of other sites, was picked up by SlashDot. (Broke the Blogdex top 50 for the first time as well.)I had no idea that my innocuous little post could stir up such reaction. Oh well … power of the Internet first hand.

Next thing I know (rather I did not know) the traffic to the website went crazy, and quickly site was “off the air.” Apparently, the number of hits to the page created log files which tipped me over the available disk space on the server, and the index page became unavailable. Well managed to fix this problem, but it is becoming increasingly evident that it is time to go for a higher end web hosting company. Which is a problem because that is going to cost money, and well given that GigaOM is more of a hobby, I am wondering out aloud about what to do next. Suggestions and ideas are always welcome.

[Om Malik on Broadband]

=====

Speaking of Clay Shirky - we got Shirkydotted last Septemeber when he mentioned the PeopleAggregator. I had dropped a subtle hint of it's existence and he immediately picked up on it.

But that was nothing like the real Slashdottin g we received when Richard McManus' article/interview of me went live, and first Doc and Xeni/BoingBoing picked it up and then within an hour - BAM.

Down on our knees begging for forgiveness for days.

Congrats to Rojo

Congrats to Rojo 02/07/2005 01:51 AM

Even though we know they got their money long ago - I guess Rojo got even more money today (or recently.)

So congrats to Chris and Kevin - and let's not forget Mark Graham - either!

Go daddies go!

Maybe one day even YOU can get bought by a search engine company.

Grok Description matches for Congrats to Ross and Elliot!
GrokA matches for Congrats to Ross and Elliot!

Congrats to Ross and Elliot!

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: