Sobering.
Lindsay Campbell and the MobLogic.tv team have done an excellent job putting this summary together. Click here for the video, if the embed below does not work.
Archive for the 'Blogging' Category
Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, won the keynote slot at EclipseCon and, as expected, gave a very entertaining keynote address. Excellent choice. Refreshingly irreverent.
Dan takes no prisoners. Every big tech company is fair game, and he calls it like he sees it. Something that he cannot do at Forbes. The Fake Steve blog now generates a nice 1 Million pageviews per month.
Some snippets that caught my funny bone:
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“Mainstream media is like the COBOL programmers…”
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“I’m a Mac fan. Here with my MacBook Air, that’s didn’t work - that’s why I love Apple. But, it’s so beautiful… and only 3 pounds!”
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Dan likens Apple to a cult rather than a product company. He says, “If the Church of Scientology made computer products, they would be Apple.”
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“You look up narcissist in the dictionary and there he (Steve Jobs) is.”
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Great photos of Uncle Ballster and Dr. Stevil (which I can’t find to link to right now).
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Lots of Sun and Jonathan Schwartz bashing (I spent 7 years at Sun Microsystems, so I could certainly relate). Such as, “There’s always some new line of bullshit from Sun.”
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On IBM: “They’re the worst company in the world to deal with as a reporter.”
Anyway. Tune into his blog for more laughs.
Technorati tags: Fake Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, Apple, Sun, IBM, Dan Lyons, Keynote, EclipseCon 2008, EclipseCon, Brian Berliner, brianberliner
Will Price announced last week that he will be leaving Hummer Winblad to join one of their portfolio companies, Widgetbox, as CEO. Techcrunch has the story.
I don’t know Will personally. But I have read his stuff. It’s good. Very good.
While every VC you will meet is generally pretty darn smart, Will is both smart and articulate. His blog articles are always well thought out, well constructed, and thought provoking. And, yes, I usually agree with him.
Anyway, the VC industry average IQ just dropped a few notches with Will’s departure. It’s unfortunate news for Hummer Winblad in particular.
As it turns out, if you’re really interested in making money (and like to be somewhat in control), you have to be an entrepreneur and build a successful company. Sure, you can increment your way to a very nice retirement as a Venture Capitalist, but very few VC’s can extract the kind of returns that a CEO will bring home from building a successful start-up.
So, Will has made Widgetbox one to seriously watch. I wish him all the success in his new gig.
Technorati tags: Will Price, Hummer Winblad, Widgetbox, Widgets, VC, Venture Capital, Entrepreneur, CEO, Blogging, Brian Berliner, brianberliner
So, I’m finally getting back to blogging. I had a very long hiatus. Sorry about that.It seems that life got in the way (if you call getting married and starting up a new company “life” - I know I do).Anyway, back to the same old blogging tools on the Mac OS X platform. Nothing really satisfied my needs. I had previously been using Qumana, and wrote some positive articles on it before. It’s unchanged in the last year, and still pretty good, but it did leave me wanting more and something that felt a bit more “solid”.Best likely candidate would be MarsEdit. I love what Daniel Jalkut is doing with this application. Great stuff. But, I am one of those types that wants a WYSIWYG-like experience. I’m quite good at flinging around markup, I just don’t want to have to do it while I’m writing - it’s just too distracting from the task at hand. MarsEdit does have some excellent image integration, and I feel that at some point it WILL be my blogging tool of choice. I’m continuing to watch.Last year, I tried Adobe Contribute 4, and even participated in the Adobe Contribute CS3 Beta test. While it is WYSIWYG, it’s just not for me. The team made significant progress in the CS3 edition, but the tool still had lots of little problems that distracted from the writing experience and the application itself was quite the resource hog.If you are seeing a theme here, it’s all about reducing distraction; reducing friction in the writing process.OK, so I decide that my new wife needs to blog about what we learned while planning our wedding. She’s a Windows user. So, I set her up on her own Wordpress blog and find her a blogging tool to use. I chose Windows Live Writer.And, you know what?Windows Live Writer rocks!Every bit of it is very well done. And, it’s FREE. I do hate to say it, but you have to give Microsoft props when they get it right. Well done WLW team!So, for now, I will be blogging with Windows Live Writer running from my VMware Fusion based version of Windows XP executing on my MacBook Pro (when on the road) or my iMac (when at home). Now, that’s a mouthful.
Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, Blogging, Tools, Software, Wordpress, Brian Berliner, brianberliner
I was out in Colorado last week.
Before departing from San Jose, I wrote a blog entry and invited folks that are reading my blog in Colroado to contact me for a face-2-face meeting.
I admit, it was a bit of a test of my readership. And, the test passed with flying colors.
From that one blog article, I was able to arrange and meet with 16 old/new colleagues/friends. And, a few schedules could not be coordinated (I’ll get you next time).
The Power of the Blog. Very cool.
Zooomr is offering 12 months of FREE Zooomr Pro account access to Bloggers. This FREE upgrade includes 4GB of photo uploads each month. Plenty for me. Thanks, Zooomr!
All you have to do is follow these instructions. I like that Zooomr support OpenID authentication and that they are implementing the Flickr API for uploading photographs to their site. And, that they are giving me some FREE photo storage. Very cool.
Here’s my first photo (required to get the FREE account):
Best of luck to the Zooomr folks.
The folks over at FeedBurner released a nice overview of how they see the web-based RSS/Feed reading market. I.e., which web-based clients are reading the most feeds/articles. Great article.
It pretty much confirms what I expected. I previously wrote about my switch to using Google Reader. Apparently, many others have as well.
Burning Questions • FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market
Notes yet again:
- Given the way Google Reader renders HTML (see here for an explanation on our Publisher Tips blog), the 59% figure is actually conservative. Since Bloglines and other clients render all HTML on a page at one time, rendered item views are likely greater than the actual number of stories “read” by their users.
- The top 4 aggregators as measured by views - Google Reader, Bloglines, NewsGator and Netvibes - account for 98% of all item views recorded.
There are still many features that I would like to see added to Google Reader. Customized search through my feeds is a big one. As well as "smart tags" which would do such a search and dynamically organize it under a tag. Maybe some day. For now, Google Reader works pretty well. And, I’m not alone in that belief.
I’m OpenID enabled. Check out the Wikipedia OpenID article for a great overview. The high points include:
When you post on a blog using OpenID, the blogger’s site asks your OpenID provider to log you in; when your provider verifies you, you are guaranteed a unique identity without maintaining an account for that blog.
On OpenID-enabled sites, Internet users do not need to register and manage a new account for every site before being granted access.
Sounds pretty good to me! Also, take a look at the Simon Willison Screencast on How to use OpenID.
The other thing I like about OpenID is that I can make my website/blog address be my OpenID. I.e., my OpenID is brianberliner.com. So, what do I get with this:
- An easy username to remember that works on multiple web sites.
- Muy OpenID maps to me, my brand.
- No need to create yet another password to forget (there’s only ONE PASSWORD) to manage.
- My very personal OpenID URI will only authenticate to me.
- I can change the back-end provider that does the actual authentication at any time, and the OpenID that the rest of the world sees does not change.
So, how did I do it?
1. Check out Simon Willison’s article on How to turn your blog into an OpenID.
I chose VeriSign Labs as my OpenID provider, since I trust the VeriSign brand. They are the one’s that will do the heavy lifting of securely authenticating me on multiple OpenID-enabled sites using my single sign-on password (yes, ONE PASSWORD!). I’m
brianberliner.pip.verisignlabs.com.
2. Configure your website/blog software to include two additional links in the header.
I edited my Wordpress 2.1 theme to add the following two lines to the <head> section:
<link rel="openid.server"
href="https://pip.verisignlabs.com/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate"
href="http://brianberliner.pip.verisignlabs.com/">
And, that’s it! Do these two steps and you too can be OpenID enabled.
I don’t listen to many podcasts. Way too time consuming, and not particularly searchable (and, they play back at a constant speed). However, from time to time, I will find one and play it in the background while I work.
And, occasionally, I hit an episode that is brilliant. I really enjoyed this 1.5-hour (yikes!) podcast with Fred Seibert of Channel Frederator.
Quoted from Venture Voice: VV Show #43 - Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios and Next New Networks:
VV Show #43 - Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios and Next New Networks
Download the MP3.
Before the rise of the Internet, cable TV was the new form of distribution remaking the entertainment business. Life-long entrepreneur and former jazz producer Fred Seibert pioneered that field, and is known in the industry for branding MTV (remember their ever-changing animated logo) and Nickelodeon (remember Nick-at-Nite). While he was figuring out what to do next, Ted Turner hired him to be president of the then-struggling Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio. Fred turned the famous studio around and kept his hand in the cable business until some friends dragged him into the Internet business. He now runs Frederator Studios which produces several cable and Internet TV shows. He also just launched a new well-funded startup called Next New Networks to create Internet TV networks.
Good storytelling. Reminds me that things sometimes work, and sometimes they don’t. In any case, you’re always learning and always moving the ball forward.
Enjoy!
Back in November 2006, I wrote the article, Google Reader: Actually Quite Good.
In that article, I noted how surprised I was that Google Reader was such a good online RSS news reader. I had been using the desktop application, NetNewsWire 2.1.1, on my Mac and was overall pretty satisfied with it (except for some scaling issues)… Then I moved up to the pre-release version of NetNewsWire 3.0 and found that things had not really improved.
I even complained that the developer, Brent Simmons, had not made much progress on NetNewsWire since the acquisition of his company, Ranchero Software, by NewsGator, over a year prior (October 2005).
The result was that I switched my RSS news/feed reading experience over to Google Reader and wrote about the switch. And, the Blogosphere responded.
Brent Simmons wrote a personal email to me to let me know that development was progressing along nicely and that he hoped to entice me back to NetNewsWire with the 3.0 official release. I thought that was awesome! In that note, Brent added:
I’m more excited about the 3.0 release than I have been about any software I’ve ever worked on.
Very cool. Brent is an excellent programmer and excited programmers can change the world.
Fast-forward. I noticed today that Brent has released a new pre-release version. I downloaded it and kicked the tires. I have to say that the performance of the Combined View and search functions were much nicer now. I may use Google Reader and NetNewsWire in parallel, or may just decide to wait for the official NetNewsWire 3.0 release to give it it’s full due.
Bottom line: Many thanks to Brent for engaging the community and continuing to make NetNewsWire great. I look forward to the official 3.0 release!
