Tatum and Denim blog

If little Mena and the Six Apart team think for one minute that Typepad users and account holders will be mollified by explanations for outages that include excuses like, “power Outages at our data center”, they have another thing coming.

If the Six Apart Data Center subcontractors can’t provide reliable, 24.7.365 power and hot standby, they are out of step with the professional hosting industry that has indeed become coin of the realm.

Six Apart’s weak-assed ‘power outage excuses’ are not acceptable to me, a professional account holder, who has had a fraction of the down-time on a free Wordpress.com account.

It ma be time to give Mena and the gang their walking papers.

About a week ago there were only about 200 of my Facebook friends who were sharing feeds on Google Reader. Today about 900 are, out of about 3,600 total. You know what changed.

This app has already helped me find some great new feeds. It’s interesting to see what you all are reading and sharing through Google Reader.

That app has gotten a lot better in the past week too, so I wonder what the numbers will be a week from now?

By the way, I’ve removed some apps from my Facebook Profile to make my profile even more useful to you.

What makes Facebook more useful than other social networks? The application platform and you have to look no further than the Google Reader Shared Items Application to see why.

UPDATE: hmmm, now I know why Microsoft was rumored to be buying Facebook. Turns out there’s already more than 17,000 employees on Facebook (that’s out of 70,000 employees).

Funny shot of Dave McClure from Jeremiah Owyang’s Flickr stream.

I don’t often mention George Kelly. He’s a great guy who shows up in my life once in a while. He’s one of the people I subscribe to simply because they are interesting and do interesting things. Turns out a bunch of bloggers, including George, went to the San Francisco symphony yesterday and they say they had a great time. See, you can get bloggers to get some culture!

Recently Daniel Appleman (old-school Windows programmer, heheh, I never thought I’d say that about him) gave me a ride in his new Prius. He showed me how the car was training him to drive slower: it was like driving a video game. On the dashboard was a guage which showed how much gas the car was using. Speed up, gas milage went down. Drive slower, it goes up.

This display inside Prius’s and other cars, along with an increased focus on saving fuel for money reasons and environmental reasons, is leading to a new kind of driver behavior: hypermiling. Matt Kelly has an interesting podcast with several guys who hypermile.

Ahh, this is funny. Fake Steve has been attacking bloggers, including me, for months. It’s funny. I loved it. But now Fake Steve is angry that people are trying to figure out who he is and is angry at Valleywag for attacking him. Ahh, as the gossip mags turn. The drama is fun. Maybe Dave Slusher would rather read all this entertaining copy than discover a new tool that might help make him some more friends? Me? I think it’s funny they are now attacking each other.

Dave Slusher says he unsubscribed from my blog and is getting off the hunt for new shiny things.

I guess he will definitely want to stay away from my link blog, then. I read hundreds of blogs looking for the best blog posts out there and put them on my link blog. Often those are posts about “new shiny things.”

Latest shiny thing post? Lifehacker has 10 cool things for Gmail.

Interesting to see the anti-shiny-thing backlash, though. Don’t know what I should do about it. Maybe I should write about printing presses. Antiques. Railroads. Or corded telephones. Or dead-tree media.

Nah…

OK, I keep seeing notes from people who are tired of my iPhone and Facebook yammering.

So, it’s time to put up or shut up.

What is more important happening right now? I’m looking at TechMeme and other feeds. I just met with a ton of VCs, execs, journalists like Wired’s Fred Vogelstein, etc (that’s him in the photo on this post) and there’s nothing that excites/generates conversation like Facebook and iPhone. Nothing.

If you got something that is exciting you more, I’d sure like to hear about it.

Oh, don’t take Fred’s picture as an anti-Facebook statement. He’s working on an article for Wired about Facebook.

Kara Swisher, tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal, told me at dinner (and I see she told everyone on her blog) that today she met with Facebook’s “money guy” and that she came away impressed.

Translation: Expect to hear a lot more Facebook news. Unless you got something more interesting for us all to pay attention to. Microsoft? Google? Yahoo? Helllllllloooooooo.

UPDATE: Dave McClure has a good post about all that’s happening in Facebook land.

Chris Pirillo is a great friend. So, take this post with a grain of salt.

But, here’s why I love Gnomedex:

1) Every attendee uses a laptop computer during the event. It still is one of the few events where I’ve seen that happen.
2) No press passes.
3) I haven’t been asked to speak since 2001. Heh. Not quite true, cause I was on a Gillmor Gang panel last year, but I don’t count that as speaking.
4) It’s geeky, but not developer geeky. User geeky.
5) It’s not over your head or over your pay grade like TED or PopTech.
6) It’s in Seattle in one of their two sunny months.
7) Ponzi. Ponzi. Ponzi.

I’m not speaking. But I’m going to do something fun in the lobby. Facebook fun. Pownce fun. Twitter fun. Jaiku fun. More to come.

UPDATE: maybe I’ll be wearing my iPhone Name Tag.

I’m getting tons of abuse for comments I made about Jakob Nielsen. Now, usually I’d wonder if I really did something more lame than I usually do. But the comments are almost all from anonymous people who’ve never posted here before and the contain flames of the quality that usually come from Digg.

So, what’s up?

Well, Digg did link today. But that’s to the Google Reader thing and the comments are fairly erudite. For Digg’ers.

Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood linked to me and told me off, but his readers are usually the kind that don’t get in the gutter with personal attacks.

So, not sure what’s up, but that post sure brought out the 14-year-old anonymous trolls in droves.

Anyway, because Jeff Atwood told me off, that tells me I went over the top with that post.

I’m sorry. Can someone pull off the 14-year-old attack dogs?

Maybe that’s what Jakob meant: write long, meaty posts, if you don’t want the trolls to come and visit you.

Oh, back to the Google Reader Shared Items Facebook application. It just got another major update. Now shows tags, and shows who linked to each post. It’s “Digg for the smart people.” About time.

UPDATE: that Digg link was worth about 21,000 views today. Interesting that Digg’s audience hasn’t grown much in the past year.

I’ve been watching my friends and they have just been copying and pasting their messages between their various accounts. I don’t like that trend, cause it just means more noise. I must admit I’ve done it a few times when I wanted everyone to know about something.

At some point I’d like to go through my membership on all the above and see how many people are members of all of these (and add in Facebook for good measure). Based on a very cursory look there’s a LOT of overlap.

Anyway, Stan Schroeder shows how to post to all the above automatically.

I guess this is bound to happen because there’s so many of these new tools popping up.

What would really be great is if all of these had an API so we could use the tools themselves to decide where to send messages to.

Mike Arrington is right, (so is Duncan Riley) the Wall Street Journal got blogging’s history wrong. Dave Winer had a blog long before Jorn Barger started blogging or came up with the name “blog.” In fact, if I remember my history right Jorn was using software developed by Dave Winer to do his blog.

Dave Winer was certainly at the center of the kind of blogging I was involved in. It’s sad that so many journalists get the history wrong. It’s also amazing that very few (I don’t see evidence that ANY were interviewed, actually) of the pre-2001 bloggers were interviewed for this article.

I thought mainstream journalists were supposed to get it right and leave the inaccuracies and all that to us bloggers…

Marc Andreessen wrote an interesting post about his first five weeks blogging. He was the founder of Netscape, for those of you who are new to the Internet.

Anyway, he says he doesn’t have open comments anymore cause he couldn’t keep up and keep them clean enough.

I say “outsource what you hate.” I’m definitely working to outsource my email, for instance.

There’s lots of bloggers who are trying to figure out how to make money from blogging out there and cry that they never get linked to. Imagine what would happen if you could say “I run Marc Andreessen’s comments!” I bet that PR people would start calling you. Steve Jobs might even answer your phone calls. Heck, the maître d’ at Junnoon (Silicon Valley’s best place to spot a venture capitalist — it’s right next to Facebook too so you could probably make up some good stories for Valleywag there) would probably give you the best table and would impress your significant other with “special deserts from the chef.”

Heck, I used to help run the chat room for Leo Laporte (really, I did, back when he was on KGO radio and before he helped invent Kevin Rose). That alone was good enough to get a tour around Fry’s Electronics from the co-founder of that (true story, it was the opening day of the Sunnyvale store and he gave a bunch of us “Laporteans” a tour).

So, I’ll appoint myself to be temporary keeper of Marc’s comments until he figures out there are lots of people who would LOVE to keep his comment area free of people like Nick Denton. If you want to say something to Marc without having your own blog, just say it here. For now.

John Furrier theorizes that getting on the Scoble Show is worth some bank.

Shel Israel is scared by Ning’s valuations.

They are mighty lofty, that’s for sure! I think someone on Sand Hill Road has been drinking the Facebook juice!

I wish I were still in Seattle (just got back to Half Moon Bay from Seattle) but tomorrow if you’re there you should drop by Zillow for lunch tomorrow. They have the best view of any startup I’ve been to (and I’ve been to a lot). You’ll meet these guys, if you go.

Tonight, if you’re in Seattle, you should drop by the Seattle Ignite event where you’ll meet the Adobe AIR team, among others. My friend Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords will be there too.

Bad Sinatra starts out with a walk into Marc Benioff’s office (CEO of Salesforce.com) and goes downhill from there. How far downhill? Let’s watch…

After Benioff’s office, the video rolls into a conversation with Dan Farber, ZDNet’s head blogger.
Then to Doc Searls talking with Salim Ismael.

Now he’s arguing with Dan Farber. Hmmm, now you get to see what San Francisco parties are like. Ahh, “Office is Dead” already comes up.

Mike Arrington shows up. Calls Gillmor “a dick.”

Ahh, I’m in the Bad Sinatra I video too. Gillmor is too lazy to pan on me. Dang, that tape is old, I wondered when Steve would use it.

Slightly not office safe. Or is that “slightly not Microsoft Office ™ safe?” Heheh. It’s not really that explicit, just a four-letter word or two.

Finally, Marc Benioff’s face at the end when Steve asks him about the iPhone is priceless. I bet Fake Steve Jobs will hate this cause of what he says about the iPhone.

As the description says, “it’s not the Gillmor Gang, but who cares.”

Can’t wait to see #2.

Jakob Nielsen’s Web 1.0 post today sends lots of gestures:

1. Don’t do quick posts like Scoble.
2. Don’t risk being an idiot like Scoble.
3. Don’t put comments on your idiocy like Scoble.
4. Don’t link to other idiots like Scoble.
5. If you want to seem like you know something, unlike Scoble, write long ass white papers with lots of charts.
6. Don’t have fun like that idiot Scoble.
7. Don’t you dare put pictures of cats or babies or other personal details up like Scoble does.
8. Don’t add Web 2.0 mechanisms to your Web site like Scoble does. Definitely no “del.icio.us” or “Digg” voting graphics.
9. Don’t get caught dead inside an Apple store like Scoble does.
10. Don’t give Fake Steve or Valleywag a reason to deride you like Scoble does.
11. Definitely don’t get close to Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce/Facebook like Scoble does. If you can say it in 140 characters you shouldn’t say it at all.

OK, he didn’t quite say all of those things on his Web site today.

Well, I wish I could tell you the truth about Jacob (he worked for me back in the 1990s at one of our conferences — we never hired him again) but Steve Wozniak taught me to never say anything if I can’t say something nice about someone.

Yes, I am a sucker for good link bait. Sorry. Guilty as charged. I’m not the only one.

I will say this, it’s amazing that we’re listening to a guy who has an uglier Web site than I do.

Oh, wait, he just wrote a post worthy of Valleywag or Fake Steve except he doesn’t have comments, doesn’t have trackbacks, and used about 2,000 words to say something a better writer would say in about 300 words.

Heh!

Yo, Kent Newsome, didn’t you get the memo? Gillmor Gang is dead. More dead than Office is. More dead than links are. That said tomorrow some new gestures from Steve Gillmor are coming. It’ll be interesting to see what they are. He hasn’t shown me the show yet (is that a gesture of its own?), but it should be interesting. It just won’t be the Gillmor Gang.

I’ve been looking at a lot of blogs. Usually just in Google Reader. But when new blogs come along I have to visit them in a Web browser. Blognation, over in the UK, caught my eye. Nice simple design. I hate the small font, though, but I don’t really care about the fonts anymore. If a new blog catches my eye I instantly subscribe to it and never visit the Web page again.

That brings me to a point. It’s time to redesign my blog. Mark Lucovsky at Google was making fun of my “ugly” design recently. I said it was scientifically designed to get people to subscribe and put it into Google Reader. I was just trying to be funny, but I do admit that my blog is looking a bit “old school” now when compared to things like GigaOm and Blognation.

Mark was threatening to get Google’s designers to redesign my blog. That might be interesting, especially since Google’s custom search engine is getting better now that it lets me search not only the words on my blog, but every blog I’ve linked to.

Of course I’ve gotta bug Mark for not updating his own blog since May of last year. Heck, that’s so long ago that I was still working at Microsoft then.

What do you think? Should I redesign? What’s your favorite blog design and/or designer out there?

Sigh, I had one quote taken out of context and now even Shel Israel is having to clarify what I said.

What I meant was that my friends who blog who are NOT A listers are seeing their traffic go down — even Maryam has noticed this. I theorized that was due to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce’s rise. Most of the non-A-list bloggers have been showing up on those places in droves. After all, if you are only writing a blog to tell your family what your new kid is doing then something like Facebook is a lot better for that.

But, I didn’t mean this to be a comment on A list bloggers at all. Most of the A listers are seeing their traffic go up. Myself included. Why? Because search engines are getting more traffic and because people are still looking for communities and people who give out interesting information and also because the mainstream press continues writing about the A list. For instance, if I want to know about what’s happening in video, I need to go to Om Malik’s site. I haven’t found anyone who covers the video space as well. I’m sure he’s showing up in tons of searches, too.

Something is happening over on Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce, though. That’s where the action is. Does it take away from blogging? No because IT IS blogging. Albeit 140 characters at a time.

I left some gestures for you on my link blog.

Jamie does another one of his C9Park cartoon strips where he explains all of Microsoft’s strategies in one short read. Hillarious.

I’m looking at the Microsoft Live Earth concert site (they have concerts playing right now, and will be for the next 24 hours) but I must be missing something. Is there a damn schedule? I can’t find it. Oh, and I’m not the only one who is having problems finding the schedule, either. David in Chicago called me and asked me the same thing.

Tony Macdonell has a good comment: Adding Friends is a Full Time Job, and I’m Tired of It.

Someone will solve this. Someday. The pain is just starting to come into sharp focus for lots of us.

Facebook: this is your chance to radically solve this for everyone. Explode YOUR identity system before someone else does.

I started Google Reader to see what the bloggers are yakking about and Ed Bott was the first poster I saw. He’s complaining that A-list bloggers don’t get it right and don’t correct their posts. What caused him to write this? A story that’s at the top of Techmeme that announces that Skinkers and Microsoft announce a live, streaming content venture. But the problem with Ed’s whine is that I see three headlines on TechMeme, one from “One Microsoft Way;” another from “TechCrunch”; and another from Don Dodge who works at Microsoft. That’s it. And all three stories don’t have the problems that Ed is going on and on about. So, not sure who the “A listers” who got it wrong are. Ahh, I see, Long Zheng wrote a post that details it.

Interesting that I saw both of these guys’ posts before I saw any of the offending ones. Maybe that’s why I like reading feeds more than I like reading TechMeme lately.

But it’s also why I’m at least partially off of the “break the news first” bus. That business is getting a LOT more competitive and I find I’d rather sit back and read everyone’s feeds and pick the best post out of the bunch for my link blog.

One other thing, I told an audience recently that I don’t believe anything on the blogs for the first 24-hours. So I guess I actually agree with Ed’s thesis. If it doesn’t get refuted by someone who is actually involved then it probably is true. Except over on sites like Valleywag and Fake Steve. There they don’t even try to get the facts right and are TOTALLY for entertainment value. I read those things just for a laugh and don’t try to refute every little post they make about me (which seems like every few hours lately which is funny cause Nick Douglas of Valleywag, about a month ago, wrote a post saying I was irrelevant. If I’m irrelevant and they are writing about me what does that make them? Heheh).

Anyway, onward. I’d rather work with mainstream press than take potshots at them. Same with bloggers. We all can do a better job.

UPDATE: Of course it’s not just bloggers who don’t get things right. Here’s a Dow Jones refutation of a professional news outlet’s claim that Dow Jones has been acquired.

Translation: be skeptical! And distrust things that don’t have open comments.

Damn, since Pownce opened up just a week or so ago I’ve been getting a steady stream of people who want to be my friends. Twitter is still ahead, but growing far slower. Just today I added another 120 friends to Pownce for a total of 839. More than 4,400 on Twitter and more than 1,200 on Facebook. Here’s an interesting interview about how Pownce came about.

All four of the social networks I’m on, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce are VERY active. How we’ll keep up with all of these I have absolutely no idea.

It’s been a long time since I’ve last listened to Adam Curry, founder of PodShow. I think it’s cause I got rid of my Sirius satellite radio. Anyway, his show is really interesting and I think he’s getting back the voice that I missed from the early days. PodTech could learn a lot from listening here and noticing how he works in his community into his content. That always is what interested me about Podcasting and all this new stuff. The medium is two-way. At PodTech we’ve been working too hard to optimize our one-way video.

You’ll start seeing PodTech turn to be a better listening company. Just today Jeremiah Owyang opened up a Facebook group for PodTech. You know how to find that, right? Add me as a friend on Facebook and you’ll see it on my profile.

Thanks Adam for the inspiration.

It’s real interesting that many of the blogs are playing up Skinkers and Microsoft’s new P2P video distribution system as a “Joost killer” or, more humorously, a “Slingbox killer.” My Slingbox has a tuner. I don’t remember seeing a tuner in my Media Center box upstairs so how could a piece of software kill my Slingbox? I don’t get that.

These things have another problem: the Web is a better video distribution network cause we don’t have to leave our browsers where we all feel comfortable.

Why else? Cause the Web can be fixed. The Web can be added to. The Web can be participated in. AOL-style clients lock us in, can’t be updated on our timetable. And how do we get our own content into Joost? Anyone know? I don’t.

I look at how my son uses media. He dives in and through various Web sites snacking on media along the way. A YouTube video here. A New York Times video there. A PodTech video next. A Kyte.TV video later. Now he’s already using his camera to upload photos from the street. He’s joined the media creation revolution. Can’t wait until Apple turns on the video camera on the iPhone. Wait until he sees that Facebook has a video feature. THAT is the thing everyone in the video industry should be worried about and focused on. Anyone notice that you can upload video to my Kyte.tv

Why would he start up another environment just to watch video? Especially when many of these let him participate by throwing comments up, or chatting, or doing other things?

I just am not a big believer in yet another AOL-style client. I think the Web is far more interesting. Don’t miss what Facebook is doing with video, though. It’s totally not sexy. Not wrapped in a pretty client. No big deals with Viacom, etc. But I bet that in two years it’ll be something that changes the industry. Joost? Skinner? I don’t think so.

What do you think?

Oh, and don’t forget about the iPhone. Heheh.

Thank you to all those who fought to get our independence. Why? So I could say to Google’s Reader Team “your server is down.” It’s been down since yesterday, so you can’t see my link blog.

Have fun with your families and if you’re not in the USA back to work!

UPDATE: I posted new items to my link blog and it started working again. Very strange.

So, back to Nik’s point that Twitter is better because of the API.

Absolutely correct. But when we were standing in line last week for our iPhones Pownce’s lead developer, Leah Culver joined us and we talked at length about where Pownce is going. She said that she’ll expand on Pownce’s feature set, but wasn’t ready to commit to an API yet. Already, though, Pownce is available on Facebook and there’s an Adobe Integrated Runtime version of Pownce, so she is keeping up with some of the kinds of apps that Twitter has seen developed for it.

She has biased Pownce’s feature set toward scalability rather than sheer features or wide-open invitations (you can only use Pownce if you get an invite from someone on it already and those invites are limited based on how able Pownce’s datacenter is to keep up with it). Pownce has been faster than Twitter’s Web page to come up because of this bias.

Its interesting, I see many of the same people in my friends list on Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, and now Pownce. Pownce is growing faster than the other ones right now, though. 728 people have already added me on Pownce.

I can’t take many more social networks. These are worse than email and that’s just the “are you a friend?” requests.

But, anyway, I still like Twitter the best. Why? No complications. It does only one thing. I find that on my cell phone I go back to Twitter before I go back to any of the others. It’s lightweight.

So, why is Pownce taking off? Better UI. Kevin Rose. Better UI. Kevin Rose. Heheh. Just kidding. But not really too far off. The designer who worked on Pownce is awesome. Love the look of Pownce and little touches like little ads in between messages. I also like that I can send messages just to my friends, or to the public.

Translation: I don’t get how all of these are going to survive. People will tend to go with the one that their friends are on and most of my friends are on Twitter or Facebook.

What do you think? Which one is going to end up being the most popular? If you’re on one of these, what feature would get you to switch? If you aren’t using any of these yet, why not?

Will Leah’s bias of scalability over APIs and features pay off? Or will Twitter’s decisions pay off for it?

So, check out that last post. I did all those mini reviews in less than five minutes.

Using my Nokia N95 cell phone, and TwitterGram. I have a phone number to call, hear a beep, and can record. Then I take a photo and upload that automatically to Flickr. Finally I get back to my computer, write a blog post, copy and paste some HTML, and we have a nice set of reviews.

Imagine if we were at a news event, like, say, a fire. I could quickly gather people’s impressions. Give my own. Take some pictures. And then stitch together a blog page with all of the important info.

If you have a video ready phone you can even upload video (my Nokia N95 does that, sorry, iPhones don’t yet do video).

Thanks to Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey for Twitter. To Stewart Butterfield and Catrina Fake for Flickr. And Dave Winer for TwitterGram.

I’ve been playing with Dave Winer’s TwitterGram, which is coming tomorrow — as soon as it’s up I’ll link to it. It’s a cool way to record an audio message for your Twitter fans from your cell phone. This is going to be killer for me because I am driving so much between interviews. This way I can do a short report from my cell phone after doing an interview like the one I did with Kongregate’s founders this afternoon.

Read my comments on my post yesterday.

The Nokia trolls are here. They are almost as annoying as Apple trolls back in the 1990s.

It’s always interesting behavior when you piss off someone’s “product religion.”

One thing that happened in the line on Thursday and Friday is that we all met two real-world trolls. There were two kids, who were about 14 years old. They were unbelieveably rude and there really was nothing anyone could do about them.

They’d come right in your face and taunt you. They were trying to get attention. They would interrupt conversations. I was talking with Dave Winer and they got right in between both of us and started trying to take over the conversation. I’d never met a person who trolled face-to-face before. I assumed that these people required anonymity to do their work. They don’t.

When Apple’s security guards kept them from coming into the store the entire crowd cheered. We had all been bothered by these kids. Where were their parents? They were allowed to stay on the street until 11 p.m. at night.

But, anyway, I am getting old. Remember, I don’t get it. But I learned some things in line. I found that the ONLY way to deal with real-world trolls is to band together. When we created a line that they couldn’t break through they got frustrated and went to another part of the line where their poison could still get them the attention they desired.

The problem is that online you can’t band together against trolling behavior. So, our other option is to ignore the trolls and not give them what they wanted. It was interesting watching these kids interact with people. Many people didn’t know they were trolls when they first came up, so would give them the attention they desired. But quickly the kids went over the line with each person and you could see the frustration levels rise. We had never met kids so rude.

Anyway, that’s my real-world troll story. Seems there’s a bunch of people who are unhappy with me for saying the iPhone is better than the Nokia N95. But it is. Sorry. And if that gets me called a “moron” like one troll just called me, so be it.

Have a good day! Ignore the trolls.