Monday, October 17, 2005

Mike Graves on the (now announced) VeriSign acquisition of Moreover. He also posted tech notes on the switch to their server for weblogs.com which will take place on Thursday (it's still running on one of my servers). A must-read for developers who ping. 

PaidContent's Staci Kramer interviewed execs from VeriSign and Moreover.  

Fortune profile of BitTorrent's Bram Cohen.  

Doc Searls says we've got a monoculture problem, and we need to look beyond Google to solve the link-spam problem. But which Google? The one that's the source of the link-spam or the destination? Even if it doesn't have their full attention yet, it will when (what Steve Gillmor cleverly calls) Brin-rank stops working. The first destinations that broke aren't Google's. But they're the goal of the spammers who probably don't care very much about Feedster or PubSub. The prize is Google. 

I need to do a podcast to explain in more detail how Google has spent the last five years walking out on a very long plank, one that has certainly generated many billions of 20th Century style dollars, by monetizing eyeballs, and how precarious their position is. An empire based on the sanctity of the link. Intrusive ads, the ones that Google sells, are so so tired. Feeds containing commercial information people want, are wired. 

Cristian Vidmar on OPML reading list scenarios. 

OFGN gets a mention on Ben Barren's. 

Julian Bond did an OPML browser in PHP. Here's how it displays the Scripting News directory in the box in the right margin, which of course, is an OPML file. 

Mike Arrington, Fred Oliveira and Brian Benzinger on OPML reading lists. 

Worse is Better : "One way to do something, no matter how flawed that way is, is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is." 

Four years ago today I won the Wired tech geek of the year award for SOAP. This DaveNet piece, written in July 1998, contained the germ of the idea. A lot of what people call Web 2.0 today is in this piece written over seven years ago at the beginning of the previous bubble. 

Did you know there was even a mascot for this stuff? Seriously. (Well, actually not seriously.)