Wednesday, July 12, 2006

A fantastic guest post on BuzzMachine from Fred Graver. Like Jeff Jarvis I'm rooting for both Amanda and Andrew, and now Joanne too, and for all the video bloggers who are pouring their hearts into this new medium. Me, I feel like an uncle. I was where these kids are now, when I was their age, a long time ago. Now I can help by helping them get the support they need, looking for ways out of tight corners. I spoke with Andrew very briefly today, told him how blown away I was by today's Rocketboom. So beautifully executed, by the seat of the pants.  

Amanda: "Best wishes to both Andrew and Joanne." 

Amazon: "There are now over 800 million discrete objects stored in S3." 

Screen shot of the Amazon S3 folder on my desktop. 

Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels, has an RSS feed. 

Paul Gibler: "No RSS feed? You're fired!"  

Nielsen: Podcasts More Popular than Blogging. 

Lifehacker question about repeating items in an RSS feed. In all cases, we need to see the feed itself to see what's going on. It's possible that they're spamming you (i.e. doing it deliberately), it's also possible that there is a technical error of some kind. The only way to tell is to have the URL of the feed. 

Patrick Fitzgerald sheds some light. 

Yesterday I subscribed to a mega-feed from podcast.com of all the podcasts from the BBC. This morning, I have 17 news casts from Britain. Good show.  

Rocketboom 2.0 beta 

New Rocketboom is up. Nicely done! Don't everyone rush to download it at the same time.

Joanne is smart, lovely, mysterious, irreverent, and self-deprecating.

The bit with Andrew on the floor twirling his hair with a vacant stare was the best.

The RB attitude is still alive, and nice use of all the standard bits.

The corner has been turned.

Most important it's so great they're having fun with it.

Amyloo: "The kick is up, the kick is good!"

Bravo!

Blogger investing 

Phil Jones: "Why doesn't Google invest in Blogger?"

Phil, I think Google does invest in Blogger, but only in certain ways. They're fighting a huge battle with spammers. I could see that from my vantage point when I was operating weblogs.com. I couldn't keep up with the battle, that's one of the reasons I sold. It's a huge expensive fight that never goes away.

They're fighting the tough battle, and not doing the fun stuff, adding features that make real users happy. It's kind of frozen in time. And it's not helping the blogging tools market develop, having a big free competitor in the middle of the market, removed the incentive for others to invest in new features. But now in 2006 they are not the only ones doing that, MSN is as well.