Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Wired interview with Gracenote co-founder and chief architect Steve Scherf.  

The stalk is gone? 

Valleywag, with a new writer, Gawker publisher Nick Denton, while missing some of the stalkiness (I know it's not a word) of the previous version (like the bathroom habits of tech industry icons), is starting to provide some hard, useful data that helps fill in some of the blanks. Over the last few days we've gotten some fresh data about Google's acquisition of Blogger, almost three years ago. And it's starting to have an opinion about things that matter. Not sure if this is intentional, or if Nick wants appreciation, but no matter, I appreciate what he's doing.

Something else Valleywag is now doing right -- disclosing conflicts of interest. It always bothered me when they went after Jason Calacanis, whose Weblogs, Inc is a direct competitor of Gawker Media. They would never disclose that fact. In this piece they do.

Note to opml.org bloggers 

Something is wrong on the server, not sure what it is. I'm going to have another look in an hour or two. I just took a quick look and couldn't immediately find the problem. Sorry for the outage.

Postscript: Found the problem, fixed it. The server had run out of disk space, and trashed some of its data as a result. Restored the damaged file from a backup.