Carly: 'My time in the spotlight'

AlwaysOn: A four-part Q&A with former HP chairwoman Carly Fiorina.

Video podcast on tech from USA Today

A video podcast I just found out about called Talking Tech from Ed Baig and Jefferson Graham at USA Today:

Dec. 10: What you need to know when buying a cellphone
Dec. 7: Camcorders take next step with hard drives
Dec. 4: Backing up your digital memories
Nov. 30: Microsoft's 2007 Office and more Zune thoughts
Nov. 27: How to buy a digital camera
Nov. 20: How to buy at high-definition television
Nov. 15: Fujifilm's S6000 with 'face detection.'
Nov. 8: Microsoft's Zune and cellphone alternatives to the iPod
Nov. 1: Tiny redesigned iPod Shuffle is a big value
Oct. 25: The SanDisk Sansa and the Sony Mylo

Skype to begin charging for U.S. calls

NY Times: Skype, the Internet calling service owned by eBay, said that as of Jan. 1 it would begin charging $30 a year for unlimited calls to landline and mobile phones within the United States and Canada. Those calls had been free since last spring. The company is offering a half-price subscription to those who sign up before Jan. 31. Calls from one computer to another have been and will continue to be free.

Craigslist: No plan to run ads

Associated Press: Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster: No plan to run ads. Attitude confounds analysts at media conference.

"The impetus for everything we do comes from users,'' Buckmaster said. "No users are suggesting we run text ads.''

Good for Jim and Craig.

Arrington's 373 feeds

Want to know which RSS feeds that Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch (the sixth most linked-to blog on the Web), subscribes to? Here are the 373 feeds, according to Marshall Kirkpatrick, who's been writing for TechCrunch for the past six months. Megite just created a page displaying all the TechCrunch feeds. Says Megite's Matthew Chen: "Enjoy reading through Mike Arrington’s eyes!"

'Take Control of Your Domain Names'

Adam Engst at Take Control Books passes along word about their latest ebook, Glenn Fleishman's "Take Control of Your Domain Names." Says Adam: "It covers a topic that has perplexed even the best of us at times. Glenn demystifies the jargon, explains how domain names work behind the scenes, and gives readers the advice they need to register, configure, and manage domain names. Other sections cover using dynamic DNS, troubleshooting common DNS-related problems, changing registrars or DNS hosts, and buying or selling a domain name. Whether or not readers already have a domain name, they'll learn what's necessary to work with domain names.

The 103-page book costs $10 (more than reasonable), and you can check out a 24-page PDF sample here.

TechCrunch blog ruffling feathers

Dan Fost at SFGate: Michael Arrington, Silicon Valley's 'Mr. Web 2.0,' seeks next big thing. TechCrunch blog ruffles feathers on the Internet beat. (Chronicle photo)

Liking NetVibes

Robert Scoble says he's gobbling up new RSS feeds thanks to the new Google Reader. But I've grown tired of reading RSS feeds through an RSS reader. (And I've been writing about this stuff for years.)

My new info-gathering toy? NetVibes. It's a personalized start page that lets you add as many of your favorite sites (via their RSS feed) as you'd like. MyYahoo has 60 million users, but Netvibes -- launched in early 2006 by Paris-based Tariq Krim -- expects to have 15 million users by year's end. Wow.

With Netvibes, users can quickly change the look of their start page, select content, add RSS feeds, and custom-build features from other Netvibes users. Any email feed can be put on Netvibes. I'm liking it.

I'm also still playing with Megite. They created a page for me showing a few dozen of the feeds I subscribe to (after exporting my OPML file from Bloglines). They also have a "River of News" feed -- based on a post a few months ago by Dave Winer, I'm guessing -- that's pretty nice.

Last week I tried to set up a Google start page, but I was surprised and disappointed that Google doesn't let you couldn't figure out how to add your own RSS feeds to it. They also let you add media partners' content. (How geeky is this page talking about Subscribed Links feeds?)

One Laptop Per Child effort moves forward

NY Times: For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate. (NYT photo of MIT's Walter Bender, left, and Nicholas Negroponte) Excerpt:

The nonprofit project, One Laptop Per Child, [has won] over many skeptics over the last two and a half years. Five countries — Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand — have made tentative commitments to put the computers into the hands of millions of students, with production in Taiwan expected to begin by mid-2007.

The laptop does not come with a  Microsoft Windows operating system or even a hard drive, and the screen is small. And the cost is now closer to $150 than $100. But the price tag, even compared with low-end $500 laptops now widely available, transforms the economic equation for developing countries. ...

The idea is also that children can take on much of the responsibility for maintaining the systems, rather than relying on or creating bureaucracies to do so.

“We believe you have to leverage the kids themselves,” Ms. Jepsen said. “They’re learning machines.” As an example, she pointed to the backlight used by the laptop. Although it is designed to last five years, if it fails it can be replaced as simply as batteries are replaced in a flashlight. It is something a child can do, she said. ...

Mr. Negroponte said the manufacturing cost was now below $150 and that it would fall below $100 by the end of 2008.

Om Malik to launch two new blogs

TechEffect: Om Malik to launch two new blogs.

Do you need a Web publicist?

Christian Science Monitor: Do you need a Web publicist? 'Identity managers' act as agents, lawyers, enablers – and enforcers – for lives lived increasingly online. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

Sun's new mashup site

Sun Microsystems today launched a site called The Big Mashup: How the network is changing entertainment and news gathering in the Participation Age. Particpants include Andrew Baron, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky and others.

A blog about media and technology

From IWantMedia:

The International Herald Tribune is launching a blog called MetaMedia, focusing on the convergence of media and technology. The blog is hosted by Doreen Carvajal, a media reporter for the IHT in Paris, and Eric Pfanner, the paper's London-based media/advertising reporter.

A site for converting digital files

Chris Whyley passes along word of a new site out of the UK called Zamzar. Writes Chris:

The site offers free online file conversion for hundreds of file formats, for documents, videos, images and music. Some of the highlights include:

    * Make your PDF documents editable by converting them to MS Word
    * Convert your ITunes (aac) files to mp3
    * Upload up to 5 files at a time to convert simultaneously
    * Take advantage of over 150 different conversion types

Overall the site is a really useful tool for anyone needing to convert files in a hurry.

Email signoffs

NY Times: What's the best way to sign off your emails? ‘Yours Truly,’ the E-Variations.

Websites worth a look

Spoke by phone with my friend Gary Price the other day. He's a research librarian who founded ResourceShelf, DocuTicker (which offers a hand-picked selection of resources, reports and publications from government agencies, NGOs, think tanks and other public interest organizations) and also works for Ask.com. 

Among some cool sites that are on Gary's radar screen and worth a look:

• International Children’s Digital Library, a library for the world's children. (I'm introducing my 7-year-old to it this week.)

• Diplomacymonitor, which uses a crawler that looks for primary documents from any country that places them online, so you can get first-hand access to source materials without any filter from the mainstream media.

• Publicradiofan, a real-time guide to the programming on every public radio station. It lets you build your own favorite stations.

• WRN.org, which specializes in bringing together international broadcasts under one roof.

Great stuff.

176 newspapers to form partnership with Yahoo

NY Times: 176 Newspapers to Form a Partnership With Yahoo.

A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology, another sign that the wary newspaper business is increasingly willing to shake hands with the technology companies they once saw as a threat.

In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads.

But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo. ...

Calacanis quits AOL

My friend Jason McCabe Calacanis, whom I just interviewed at Web 2.0 last week, announced yesterday he's leaving AOL. Still don't really know the reason. (Photo from the CNET site.)

CNET: Netscape loses blog maven Calacanis

ZDNet: Calacanis’ AOL resignation: A new era of brutal candor for big companies?

NY Times: Blog Entrepreneur Leaves AOL. "“I’m not inclined to start over with a new guy,” Mr. Calacanis said in an interview on Thursday.

TechCrunch has some reader reaction.

The 3-D Web is coming

Fascinating article by Brad Stone in the Nov. 20 issue of Newsweek: New Flights of Fancy. Google and Microsoft aim to give you a 3-D world.

The sky over San Francisco is cerulean blue as you begin your descent into the city from 2,000 feet. As you pass over the southern hills, the skyline of the Financial District rises into view. On the descent into downtown, familiar skyscrapers form an urban canyon around you; you can even see the trolley tracks running down the valley formed by Market Street. But then a little pop-up box next to the Bay Bridge explains that an accident has just occurred on the western span, and a thick red line indicates the resulting traffic jam along the highway. A banner ad for Emeryville, Calif., firm ZipRealty hangs incongruously in the air over the Transamerica Pyramid. You are actually staring at your PC screen, not out an airplane window.

Virtual Earth 3D, the online service unveiled last week by Microsoft, is both incomplete (only 15 cities are depicted in 3-D) and imperfect (some of the buildings are shrouded in shadow, and you need a powerful PC running Windows XP or the new Vista to use it). But it is also the start of something potentially big: the 3-D Web. Traditional Web pages give us text, photos and video, unattached to real-world context. Now interactive mapping programs like Google Earth let us zoom around the globe on our PCs and peer down at the topography captured by satellites and aerial photographers. Both Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth are hugely popular and have been downloaded more than 100 million times each. With the upgraded Virtual Earth 3D, Microsoft has edged ahead of Google in at least one aspect of the race to bring immersive maps to the Net. It has added a missing piece—photorealistic buildings that sprout from the ground and evoke the lifelike but illusory world of "The Matrix." ...

Google is improving Google Earth in another way as well. This week the company will announce that it is adding 16 historic maps of six cities, including New York, London and Tokyo, from the collection of San Francisco map collector David Rumsey. Users exploring those cities in Google Earth will be able to click on a link and be transported more than 100 years into the past to a forgotten landscape. In other words, while Microsoft is stretching out in the third dimension, Google is leaping ahead into the fourth (time). Pay attention to this high-tech mapping race—it promises to take us all in some remarkable directions.

YouTube vs. TechCrunch

TechCrunch says it has received a cease and desist letter from an attorney representing YouTube, for posting data on how to download the site's videos to a hard drive. Blogger Michael Arrington writes: "The irony of YouTube accusing others of copyright infringement is delicious."

Meantime, from the Financial Times: Google, in closing the deal to buy YouTube, says it has set aside some $204 million to address possible copyright lawsuits over the next 12 months arising from the acquisition. CEO Eric Schmidt earlier denied reports that Google had put aside $500 million for possible lawsuits.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointers.

Website ad guidelines

Does running an ad imply a website's endorsement of the advertiser's views? Kos says no. I wholeheartedly agree.

Website usability

The NY Times has a piece on website usability, including interviews with design guru Jakob Nielsen and Vincent Flanders, a Web design consultant in the Seattle area who is the creator of Webpagesthatsuck.com, a site that analyzes why some pages do not work. Excerpt:

Studies by Mr. Nielsen’s company, the Nielsen Norman Group, an Internet design firm in Fremont, Calif., show that only 50 percent of Web visitors scroll down the screen to see what lies below the visible part on their PC monitor. ...

Besides good grammar, Mr. Nielsen suggests that companies list a physical address, include a photograph of the building and not ask potential clients to fill out a form simply to ask a question. “That immediately communicates danger,” he said. ...

[Flanders] advises business owners not to add introductory splash pages that force a viewer to watch a video or animation. ...

Google offers free Web master tools that automatically analyze a site to determine if it is being optimized by search engines ...

though the lofty and regal New York Times does not deign to provide an outside link, and I didn't immediately see it here.

Web isn't teeming with sex

San Jose Mercury News:  Study finds Web isn't teeming with sex. Analysis shows about 1 percent of all pages have explicit adult content.

Here's what the study found:

A study by a UC-Berkeley professor estimated the number of pornographic Web sites based on a random sample of sites cataloged by Google and Microsoft's MSN.

• The study found that about 1.1 percent of the sites in both search engines' indexes contained sexually explicit material.

• Various filters had mixed success -- from 8.8 percent to 60.2 percent -- in blocking sexually explicit material. In addition, much ``clean'' content -- 0.4 percent to 23.6 percent of sites blocked were free of explicit material.

• About 6 percent of search queries to Yahoo, Google and MSN return at least one sexually explicit site.

A new focus for Valleywag

More money, less sex in Valleywag's future

San Jose Merc: Valleywag, the gossip Web site, has lost its writer and is changing its focus.

Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, which launched Valleywag in February, announced Monday that writer Nick Douglas would no longer work for the company and that Denton was hiring two writers to expand the site. Denton said the focus of the site would change to ``more money, a little less sex.''

Here's Nick Douglas's goodbye note.

Sun to make Java open source

Well, this is interesting, and welcome news: Computer server and software maker Sun Microsystems said Monday that it had begun to make its Java technology an open-source software project available for free on the Internet.

Surfing the Web in 3D

I mentioned the other day that I was impressed with the virtual world capabilities of 3B during the Web 2.0 LaunchPad session. At PodTech, Irina Slutsky and Eddie Codel interview 3B's co-founder in this video interview: Surfing the Web in 3D with 3B.

Best demo at Web 2.0: Microsoft's Photosynth

From Robert Scoble at PodTech: The best demo at Web 2.0 Summit: Microsoft's Photosynth. In this 16-minute video interview, Gary Flake, an engineer at Microsoft, provides a tour around a new 3D photo experience that amazed attendees at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Web 3.0

John Markoff in the Sunday New York Times: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense.

Their [Web entrepreneurs'] goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and  Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.

But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”

Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” ...

Web2point2 unconference

I spent the afternoon at day 2 of the Web2point2 unconference, organized by Chris Heuer and Howard Greenstein of the Social Media Club and held a half mile from this week's Web 2.0 Summit. About 60 people turned out today, after 85 were here yesterday. Participated in an interesting roundtable about reputation and trust networks.

The year-old Social Media Club has taken off, with sessions being held in places like London, Phoenix, Vancouver and elsewhere. From their brochure: "Social Media Club is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media."

Final photos of Web 2.0

Here are my final photos of the Web 2.0 Summit -- 39 in all on Flickr now. That's Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet. (Web 2.0 always attracts some serious star power. Five thousand wannabe-attendees were turned away this year.)

More at Web 2.0

More from the Web 2.0 Summit:

Citizen journalism

Tuesday afternoon, Barry Diller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger shared the stage with emcee John Battelle. (Moments earlier, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt walked backstage, Diller joined him. Would have loved to have listened in on that conversation.)

I asked Sulzberger -- who's a hero in the media world for supporting some of the best journalism in the world -- why the Times doesn't showcase more rich-media citizen journalism. There are astonishing examples of user-created photos and video on sites like Flickr and Ourmedia, and sites like BBCNews.com and the Dallas Morning News showcase amateur works, and NY Times reporters can't be everywhere. When a political rally or disaster occurs, why can't we see a citizen journalism showcase on the Times?

Sulzberger said they're working on just such initiatives, and that we should see it soon. I'm looking forward to seeing the results.

Best quote of the conference so far came from Diller, who said, "It's impossible to argue against net neutrality. Who's on the other side? [AT&T's] Ed Whittaker?"

Related: Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times critcizing Diller for earning an exorbitant income last year after a mediocre year for his company: America's Laziest Man?  "Last year, Barry Diller took home a pay package worth $469 million, making him the highest-paid chief executive in America."

Open media profile

One of the event's highlights was Tuesday afternoon's appearance by Six Apart founder Ben Trott (a friend). Ben announced Vox, a way-cool new blogging platform that aggregates all your social media sites.

SixApart has managed to find a way to tap into Web services and open APIs such as Amazon's open search, Google GData, Yahoo Media RSS, Flickr's open API, etc., so that you can bring all (or many) of your online presences under one umbrella.

"We took open search as a base, extended it, and come up with an Open Media Profile" that you can take with you," Ben said. Want to get your API hooked into this service? Get the whitepaper at development at sixapart.com or contact Ben.

O'Reilly

From Tim O'Reilly on stage: "This is the start of the real disruption. ... The bubbling up of user-generated content is just the beginning of Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 of next year is going to be very different rom the Web 2.0 of this year. " Still waiting to hear how.

Photos of Web 2.0

Here are some initial photos of the Web 2.0 Summit. That's Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Coverage of Web 2.0

I’m here in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit, which has become the must-attend tech conference of the year. As customary, Day 1 is made up of workshops, with the formal conference in the grand ballroom kicking off in the mid-afternoon.

Advertising 2.0

First panel I attended was Advertising 2.0, with Rafat Ali, Founder of paidContent.org; Adam Gerber, Vice President, Ad Products & Strategy, Brightcove; Jeff Lanctot, VP and General Manager, Avenue A | Razorfish; and Michael Steib, General Manager, Strategic Ventures, NBC Universal. Some nuggets:

Gerber: “Marketers need to think about advertising as an experience. They have to stop thinking about it as exposure. It’s about delivering a compelling opportunity for users to engage the product as an experience.”

Lanctot: “Advertising 2.0 is about the activist consumer. They can shape brands, but I believe they’re not yet fully in control.”

The panelists agreed we’ll see a multiplicity of online advertising forms in the coming years, everything from short-form 5- to 10-second ads to longer-form advertising that’s integrated into a two-hour program. They also agreed the landscape will evolve slowly. Online advertising is still miniscule compared to the $67 billion annual ad spend on traditional television. “Companies are not going to dramatically change how they advertise for a 1% share of the audience,” Gerber said.

Steib: “If an ad’s irrelevant to me, two seconds is too long. On the other hand, I went out of my way to see the Mac ads on apple.com.”

55% of online ad dollars go to sites that reach 15% of the online audience.

Lanctot: “The notion of media fragmentation today will pale in comparison to how it’ll look three years from now.”

Gerber: “The majority of Youtube’s traffic is international, and a substantial amount of the content on Youtube is pirated.” In the near future, professional content will come online in large numbers. “The media companies will be part of a bigger wave than the first wave of user-generated content.”

More Gerber: “There’s no way a fragmented world scales without aggregators.”

The Mobile Discussion

Panel 2 was The Mobile Discussion, with Om Malik of GigaOm; Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist, Vodafone; and Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia, Nokia. Appelquist: “The place where we are with mobile today is where the web was in 1996-97. Look at what happened as the Web evolved. It all became about openness and consumer choice."

Vanjoki: "There is no mobile Web. It just doesn’t exist. But Web 2.0 is all about mobility."

Appelquist: “You usually get a bad user espeireince if you try to access the web on your mobile phone.” The .mobi suffix is useful because it tells consumers “this will work on your mobile phone.”

Vanjoki: “It’s a mistake to begin designing web pages for a 128 x 128 screen.”

Malik: “Do we really need to browse on our mobiles?” … “Sites like MySpace took off because they’re brain-dead simple.”

LaunchPad

Some of the more interesting startups shown off at LaunchPad:

- In the Chair lets you "perform and get real-time feedback from professional musicians." They don't say how they do this, but it looks pretty cool. They have thousands of users around the world. "It’s music performance as a video game," the CEO said.

- Instructables is a site for user-contributed collaborative learning. Some 2,000 people have contributed tutorials on how to build funky stuff. Today they're launching a feature called Collaboration that lets you work with friends, a small team or everyone.

- Pidgin Technologies has developed something called BoardTracker, which tracks forums in the Boardscape, "the blogosphere of boards," or forums. "Boards are more active today than ever, with 300 million members generating 50 billion posts." But it has been virtually impossible to communicate with people on other boards.

Solution: Klostu, a network of  boards with some social network seasoning. You can bring your Flickr, Youtube, Gmail and delicious accounts into the boards. Looks fascinating, I'll be giving it a try.

- Stikkit. From the site: It's "the way notes should work. Stikkit gives you the digital equivalent of a sticky note: the easiest thing you can grab to jot down an idea or reminder. As you type, Stikkit watches for appointments, to-dos, people, bookmarks and more, magically extracting and organizing the important details. It's like having a personal assistant following along after you."

- Sphere, which does something I considered doing two years ago. They clue in readers on blosophere conversations about an article that appears on a publication's site. So, Time or Marketwatch have buttons that readers can click on to get additional background and context on a subject.

- Adify lets you build your own ad network. "Let 1,000 networks bloom!"

- My favorite LaunchPad presentation was the 12th one, given by Nicole Morris of 3B. Using 3B, you can create a 3D walk-through experience, complete with avatar, around your digital media. (She showed off Flickr photos and MySpace pages; don’t know if it works yet with videos or other rich media.) It pulls out individual photos and creates 3D wall galleries. It looked really, really amazing. Will definitely be checking it out.

More to come, including photos later. And more coverage found on Technorati, via the Web2con site, and more photos.

Steven Johnson's audacious latest: Outside.in

Here's an audacious new Web effort by author Steven Johnson: Outside.in.

Writes George Johnson, founder of Hyperlocalmedia.com:

This time his idea is more focused...and universal. Outside.in, Johnson’s first major web site since Plastic and FEED, is “an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood.”

Recently, one of the most interesting and dynamic parts of the Web is the part dedicated to local. The increase in number and influence of hyperlocal blogs—maintained by individuals or teams to share observations, impressions, and experiences of a particular place—review sites like Yelp and Judysbook, and mainstream local media, particularly newspapers as they attempt online to hold on to audiences increasingly uninterested in print have all contributed to a “divided space”. ...

Fascinating. Can this really work?

Stephen Colbert: Don't love and leave YouTube

From Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift:

Your Guide to Wikis 

Open Letter: Stephen Colbert: Don't Love and Leave YouTube 

Another Web 2.0 deal for Google

SF Chronicle: Google buys wiki company JotSpot.

Pando goes beyond email file sharing

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch: Pando Moves Beyond Email File Sharing.

New version of Firefox

AP:  Mozilla releases new version of Firefox.

Micah on PopTech 2006

My friend Micah Sifry writes at Personal Democracy Forum about the recent PopTech conference: PopTech 2006: Dangerous Ideas, and Thinking About Networked Politics. Sorry I couldn't make PopTech this year.

Entrepreneurs start multiple start-ups

San Jose Merc: More entrepreneurs work for two or more start-ups. Like Kevin Rose of Digg.com, pictured here.

Notes from Digital Hollywood

Appeared Monday at the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, CA -- the second time I've attended (the first was a few years back with Doc Searls, who told me, "You should be up there." This time, I was.). Spoke on the citizen media panel about emerging trends in participatory media. Some random notes from the conference:

• Jason Calacanis, who heads up Netscape and Weblogs, Inc. for AOL: “If you want to be an A-list blogger, the formula is very simple. Pick the top story on TechMeme every day for 30 days and link to three other A-list bloggers who are blogging about the topic.”

Jason says Weblogs, Inc. and AOL have hired 500 bloggers in the past three years “and paid out millions,” more than any other company has ever done.

More Jason: The three main reasons why people blog (or at least bloggers he’s worked with) are, in this order: recognition (and passion), affiliation, and compensation.

And: Google’s text advertising has been “the most efficient advertising mechanism in history.”

And this final Jason nugget, which I wholly disagree with: “If you make something great, it’ll rise to the top.” I challenged Jason on this point, saying that lots and lots of quality works are lost in the cacophony today. He countered by saying that telling 10 people about it will lead them to tell 10 other people, and you’ve got a snowball effect. Well, sometimes, but not often. Ask anyone who’s written a first-rate book but can’t break through the noise of mediocrity in any bookstore’s racks.

Interestingly, Mary Hodder, CEO of Dabble, agreed with me on a later panel, saying that we’ll soon see services where your contacts will help point you to the 5 or 10 videos a day that you’ll find relevant, perhaps relying on the 10 percent of site visitors who are natural-born organizers. “People want someone who can filter interesting things for them.”

More Mary: There are 200,000 videos being uploaded every day to 270 video sharing sites.

Kevin Sladek, head of VideoEgg called Comic Life for the Mac “the last piece of software that absolutely gave me chills.” And: Quality will become increasingly important to amateur video makers because “nobody wants to make a bad movie.”

Sites mentioned during the day:

• thisnext, a social shopping site.

• Outhink and its SpinXpress p2p media collaboration application.

A look at the Nokia N91

I'm part of Nokia's bloggers program, so they occasionally send me new cell phones to try out. I did a review of the Nokia N90 and N70 here, and I still use the N90 all the time. (Just posted a video interview I conducted with the phone here.)

Lately I've been giving the N91 (pictured above) a test run. As always, there are tradeoffs between the different models.

Where the N90 is somewhat bulky and heavy, the N91 is light and can easily fit in your shirt  pocket. Where the N90 has so many options you can easily get confused, the N91 is fairly intuitive and straight-ahead. Where the N90's battery died after a day and a half, the N91 seems to last longer. Where the N90 holds only a few short video clips and a few dozen photos, the N91 holds loads more -- a thousand or more photos or 3,000 songs in its hard drive (4 GB on mine, but now bulking up to 8 GB). And where the N90 is about video and photos, the N91 is about music.

Here are some other observations about the N91's capabilities:

• The N91 is podcast-ready. Very nice.

• The music capabilities are cool. But there have been at least a dozen occasions where my N91 started playing music while tucked in my pocket. A jostle here or there can set off the player, and until you get used to the on-screen options, it's hard to figure out how to turn the dang thing off. (Beware, if you're heading into a business meeting or theatrical production.)

• I do like the stainless steel slider that reveals the keypad for dialing. Very swift.

• Because I use my cell phone more for shooting images than for making calls, I'm not fond of the N91's lack of a viewfinder -- you can't frame or compose a photo but can only guesstimate what will be in the image. But the 2 megapixel camera (same as the N90) is pretty good.

• Maybe I'm not as tech-savvy as I'd like to imagine, but I haven't been able to figure out how to use Bluetooth to download images and photos from my N91 to my new Sony Vaio desktop. (There's apparently no Bluetooth capability for the Mac.)

• The Nokia PC Suite needs some serious work. Installing the Suite for the N91 made downloading from the N90 impossible -- even on the newest versions where Nokia claims they fixed the problem.

• As on the N90, the N91's on-screen UI needs some work as well. Switching from image to video mode is more cumbersome than it needs to be. Navigating the Gallery can be a hassle (I've lost a few video clips mysteriously). And getting out of Music Hell can prove vexing.

Overall, the N91 is a solid, dependable addition to the N-series line of multimedia phones. If you like music on the go and want to pack video, images, texting and voice capability into one neat little package (albeit at a steep $550-$700 US price), check out the N91. It's a neat little phone, Nokia's programmers are upgrading the software (downloadable online) all the time, and here are some tips on how to get the best experience out of using your N91.

Adobe buys Serious Magic

Adobe buys video software tools maker Serious Magic. (story | press release)

Stanford uncovers 'Net addicts'

San Jose Mercury News:  A Stanford study uncovers 'Net addicts.'

Creative Commons + Flickr = 22 Million Sharable Photos

Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift: Creative Commons + Flickr = 22 Million Sharable Photos. Mark looks at the growing pool of sharable Creative Commons licensed photos on the photo-community site Flickr. There are now 22 million photos that are searchable by CC license, and bloggers, photo editors and journalists are now discovering it as an important resource. He talks to photographers and the creative director of Creative Commons to learn more about the explosion of CC-licensed content online and the growing acceptance of flexible copyrights online.

And he quotes me: 

“More websites are using these photos, and people are becoming aware of the power of Creative Commons to share material without feeling guilty about it,” Lasica said. “It’s a way of fine-tuning copyright. A lot of people think it’s about giving up your copyright, but it’s not. It’s fine-tuning and tailoring your copyright to your needs. The other thing is that journalists and editors are becoming aware of the power of Flickr to find some amazing, amazing photos. And you can do searches for Creative Commons photos. You know right up front that here are the ones you can use and take.”

... But the concept of giving away your artistic works in order to get paid at a vague time down the line isn’t an easy sell to everyone.

“There’s something Zen about it,” he said. “You let go and it’ll come back to you. Visibility and attention are the cornerstones of success on the web. The more people know about your work, the more you can steer them to other things that can derive income, whether it’s to drive them to your blog or creating new contacts to sell your work directly.”

Wikipedia co-founder plans to launch rival

Financial Times: Wikipedia Co-Founder Plans to Launch Rival. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is launching a rival to the collaborative Internet encyclopaedia, in an attempt to bring more order to organizing knowledge online. Volunteers will be able to become editors of the new Citizendium if they can show "minimum levels of qualification."

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

U.S. takes to texting

Associated Press: Nation takes to texting. Mobile messaging a channel for highs, lows in everyday life.

The merits of the new Webocracy

San Francisco Chronicle: Weighing the merits of the new Webocracy, with Wired editor Chris Anderson and author Andrew Keen.

What's being called Web 2.0 essentially champions the ideas of community and sharing and openness. It's an environment that champions the values of the crowd over the individual. Democracy over autocracy. How is this latest wave of technology impacting our culture?

Google tries to reassure media companies

Google boss Eric Schmidt is barnstorming New York to assure Time Warner, Viacom, CBS and other traditional media companies that the search giant's acquisition of YouTube will not turn it into a content competitor. "We are not in the content business," he insists.

Oh, yes you are.

Meantime, Time Warner chief Dick Parsons says his company will pursue copyright complaints against video-sharing site YouTube. Says Parsons: "If you let one thing ignore your rights as an owner it makes it much more difficult to defend those rights when the next guy comes along."

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointers.

At Office 2.0

Attended the reception for the first Office 2.0 conference tonight at SFMOMA. Lots of buzz about YouTube, the poster child for Web 2.0, being acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.

When I went up to the registration desk, I was handed a small package and was told, "All the conference information is on the iPod." That's right — attendees got the best schwag I've encountered yet, an iPod Nano with schedules, contact info — and space for lots of music.

Among those on hand: Julia French of Socialtext, Oren Michaels of Mashery, Steve Gillmor, Dan Farber, John Furrier, the CEO of Podtech (who said the startup's valuation has now shot up "tenfold"), Mark Crofton of SAP, author Shel Israel, Chris Heuer of Social Media Club and Silicon Valley Watcher, Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords, Stowe Boyd and many others.

I'll be attending Wednesday's sessions, but can't do Thursday because I'm leaving for a conference in Louisville, Ky.

Voice recorder for iPod video?

Had planned on buying Griffin Technologies' iTalk iPod Voice Recorder to attach to my iPod video for podcast interviews, but I'm told it works only with third- and fourth-generation iPods but not fifth generation.

Rats. What's a good alternative, then? Macworld says the Belkin isn't as good.

Earthquake map locator

Just released today at Ask.com: an Earthquake map locator.

SiteUptime: free site monitoring

For Ourmedia, we've begun using SiteUptime, a free web site monitoring service that monitors your site 24/7/365 from multiple geographic locations. When your site is unavailable, they will immediately notify you via email. Nice. Register here.

Follow a shark, or a park trail, with new Google Earth features

From today's San Jose Mercury News Business section:

Story: Follow a shark, or a park trail, with new Google Earth features.

Story: Jobs unveils iTV device, latest iPods. Product will bridge TV, computer.

Story: Consumers not ready to pay for video on cell phones.

Slide shows of news, ads and info

San Jose Mercury News: PayPal co-founder's new venture: Slide. Founded in 2004, Slide offers a deceptively simple desktop widget that, as its name suggests, displays slide shows.

Day 17 held hostage by Dreamhost

I used to host my personal website on Dreamhost a few years back and always liked the hosting service -- except for the less than stellar customer support. Unlike my current hosting provider, GoDaddy, Dreamhost doesn't offer customer support. So you need to send in an email request, hope for a turnaround within 24 to 48 hours, and then when they answer you, it takes another several hours to a day or so for a response. Didn't work for me.

At Ourmedia, we signed up with Dreamhost on Aug. 22, paying $119.40 for a one-year subscription under their Crazy Domain Insane program. The confirmation email was surprisingly devoid of details about how to get up and running.

We have a simple question: How do we get access to our account so we can start using ourmedia.org emails for our moderators and admins?

We received one cursory reply from Dreamhost on Aug. 31 and, since then, nothing, despite several attempts by both email and a voicemail number we uncovered.

That's disgraceful customer service.

How to increase your site's accessibility

Here's a 4-minute video interview I conducted with Skye Kilaen at the recent BlogHer conference about how to make your website or weblog more accessible to the disabled. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Format: MPEG-4 (iPod compatible); 10.2MB; 4:16; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: ** (out of 5)

Cross-posted to Real People Network.

New at the Learning Center

New at Ourmedia's Personal Media Learning Center:

Introduction to digital storytelling

Seven blogging tools reviewed

Blog search: Keeping track of conversations in the blogosphere

Building an audience for your blog or podcast

How can I capture great travel photos?

A guide to making and distributing digital movies

How to record Internet radio

How can I discover new music by bands I might like?

How to capture a screenshot of a video

Podcasting music: what it will cost you to stay on the safe side of the law

RSS tutorial

Color light on the cheap

Build your own lightbox

Fabrik: A YouTube for adults

Today's San Jose Mercury News: Fabrik: A YouTube for adults. San Mateo, Calif., start-up lets customers store data and share within limited group.

Web 2.Ooh finalists: Julia, Valerie, Micki

Three of my good friends are among the five Silicon Valley "hotties" in ValleyWag's Web 2.Ooh contest: from top, Julia French, Valerie Cunningham and Micki Krimmel. I've got better photos of all three than ValleyWag does. So I'll post them here. Plus, here's a bonus photo of Julia from last year and Micki from this year.

World's hottest startups and the news

Amy Gahran at Business 2.0:

On Aug. 10, Business 2.0 magazine published its list of the best Web 2.0 startups. See Where to find the world's hottest startups, by Erick Schonfeld. Click the "photo gallery" link to see their interactive presentation on each of these startups. (Note: I couldn't get that presentation to run in Firefox for the Mac, only in Safari.)

Why should news organizations care? Well, as I perused the list it occurred to me that there probably are many ways news organizations could leverage these tools to enhance the presentation of the news, broaden their audience, and engage people who are eager to collaborate.

Bloggers do their own Web 2.0 study

Mark Glaser at MediaShift: Open Source Reporting: Bloggers Gauge Web 2.0 Features for Newspaper Sites Around World.

A Web 2.0 church

At MediaShift, Mark Glaser has the word on a church in San Jose, Calif., that's going Web 2.0.

Is Al Gore stalking me?

I'm here in Aspen, Colo., at the 15th annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology, this year focusing on the Mobile Generation. It's a brilliant group of people, 25 in all, who've gathered to discuss the future of mobile technologies. I'll be writing a short report over the coming weeks.

I forgot to bring my compact flash drive reader, so can't transfer the dozens of photos I've taken to my MacBook Pro and then upload them to Flickr. But should be able to do so by Tuesday.

Terrific vignette from today. Six of us were scheduled to hike up to Maroon Bells, one of the most scenic vistas in Aspen, at 1:15 pm today. At 1 pm, a sudden downpour dampened our spirits, and most of us gave up on the idea of a hike. But one intrepid member whipped out his mobile phone, checked out a national weather site, and saw that the storm overhead was contained and was passing through quickly on Doppler radar. Thanks to him, the hike was back on, and we had a great (and dry) hike through the high country here (9,600 feet!).

Meantime, it seems that celebrities and political figures are par for the course here in Aspen. I blogged in May about meeting Al Gore at his famous presentation in San Francisco. When I attended the Cannes Film Festival later in May, who should show up on the same day but Al Gore.

Today, I spotted Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA, having lunch, and did a quick video interview with him on my Nokia N90. (Will post it soon.) A few hours later, we were about to head out to a restaurant for the last evening of the Aspen Roundtable when a limo pulled up bearing ... Al Gore and Tipper. Gore's here for an Aspen Institute summit on poverty.

Still, gotta wonder.

Later: Just exchanged greetings with Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State, who was strolling down the hallway by herself. She's a staple here at the Aspen Institute.

Photos and video from BlogHer

Here are some final photos of BlogHer in a Flickr photo set. That's a bad photo of me with Arianna Huffington at top; Halley Suitt in a smaller image.

As for videos, here are three, with more coming in mid- to late August:

From top:

• Jory des Jardins, co-founder of BlogHer, talked about the conference as it was ending Saturday — including plans for next year's BlogHer in Chicago in July — in this 4-minute video interview. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

• Elisa Camahort, co-founder of BlogHer, talked about the conference as it was winding down Saturday evening in this 5-minute video interview. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

• Adrianna Montague-Gray, a PR professional for a nonprofit in New York, assessed BlogHer from an attendee's perspective in this 3-minute video interview. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Cross-posted to the Real People Network

AlwaysOn conference: YouTube and clip culture

It's the first full day of the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit at Stanford University. There are lots of bloggers posting good coverage of the proceedings.

There's a live Webcast and chat of the event today and tomorrow.

I arrived in time for the panel, "How Far Will Consumer-Generated Media Go?" with moderator Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal; David Goldberg, Head of Yahoo! Music; Michael Robertson, CEO, MP3Tunes; Chad Hurley, CEO, YouTube; and Michael Arrieta, Senior VP, Sony Pictures.

Hurley clearly has the star power so far at the event - he was mobbed by TV reporters after the session. I asked him from the floor whether there was room for the other 240 video hosting sites out there like Ourmedia, Revver and Blip.tv, and whether they might serve different needs than YouTube does. YouTube was getting all the media attention and sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but other sites might serve targeted constituencies better, I suggested. He said yes, that YouTube wasn't trying to dominate the marketplace and that other sites can certainly serve the needs and interests of other people participating in the personal media revolution.

Michael Robertson chimed in, suggesting that all the other 239 sites will be "history" soon because of the first mover effect. That's absurd, of course, since many video bloggers and professionals are flocking to sites other than YouTube. There's room for a handful of successful video publishing sites, and I think it goes well beyond niches.

Snippets from today:

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL: “Code can never deteriorate when you open it, it can only get better.”

From his talks in front of crowds, SalesForce CEO Marc Benioff discovered, “Less than 10 percent of the general public knows what a mashup is.” (Here's an incomplete definition at Wikipedia.)

When I was at Oracle, said Benioff, “There was no trust page. There was an FU page.”

More Benioff: "Mashups are the future. That's the most exciting thing I've seen." (He's discussing the tech industry's version of mashups, not the better-known music mashups.)

Tags: AlwaysOn, AO2006, AlwaysOn2006, YouTube, citizen media, conferences, citizen journalism

Digital Universe's goal: 'Information you can trust'

From the San Jose Merc: Digital Universe's goal: 'Information you can trust.'

It's Wiki-PBS.

More than three years ago, Joe Firmage began work on Digital Universe, what could be called the anti-Wikipedia, the community-edited and controversial Internet encyclopedia. The goal is to assemble information in one place on the Web that has the up-to-date feel of Wikipedia -- but backed by expert oversight.

``Basically, our core mission is information you can trust,'' said Firmage, who has donated millions of dollars of his own wealth to the project. ...

And a related story in the Merc about the burgeoning use of wikis: Under-the-radar wiki Web sites aid collaboration.

At the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit

I'm here at the opening reception for the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit at Stanford University. Founder Tony Perkins in on stage announcing the AlwaysOn Top 100 tech innovators, led by the CEOs Blue Lithium and PhotoBucket.

This might also be called the Money Conference, with lots and lots of talk about money and venture capital and over-the-top commercialism at times. But the AlwaysOn folks want to make things interactive with the audience, and they've got a Blogers' Bullpen (half empty tonight), and an IRC backchannel that is flashed on one of the main screens in real time.

As usual, the most interesting conversations happen off stage, in the hallways and in the gardens outside. The wi-fi's not too bad for the moment.

Later: Ed Leonard, CTO, DreamWorks, gave an interesting demo of the production process for big-screen animation. He noted that when it came out, Shrek required 5 million CPU hours for computational rendering. Shrek 2 required 10 million rendering hours. And the recently released Over the Hedge took 15 million rendering hours. "Most of those 15 million hours are in the lighting and effects area."

Coming out from DreamWorks this fall: Flushed Away. Another animation coming in 2008: Kung Fu Panda.

More than a few bloggers here reporting on the summit, including Denise Howell and others.

Fallows lives on the Web for 2 weeks

For those of us involved in Web 2.0 technologies, here's an amusing, sobering piece by author James Fallows in the latest issue of Technology Review: Homo Conexus. A veteran technology commentator attempts to live entirely on the new Web for two weeks. Excerpt:

I shopped for everything except food on eBay. When working with foreign-language documents, I used translations from Babel Fish. (This worked only so well. After a Babel Fish round-trip through Italian, the preceding sentence reads, "That one has only worked therefore well.") Why use up space storing files on my own hard drive when, thanks to certain free utilities, I can store them on Gmail's servers? I saved, sorted, and browsed photos I uploaded to Flickr. I used Skype for my phone calls, decided on books using Amazon's recommendations rather than "expert" reviews, killed time with videos at YouTube, and listened to music through customizable sites like Pandora and Musicmatch. I kept my schedule on Google Calendar, my to-do list on Voo2do, and my outlines on iOutliner. I voyeured my neighborhood's home values via Zillow. I even used an online service for each stage of the production of this article, culminating in my typing right now in Writely rather than Word. ... And this is only an abbreviated list of what I did on the new Web.

On 'Cranky Geeks'

Had a good time today meeting veteran tech columnist John C. Dvorak for the first time. I was invited to appear on his 3-month-old IPTV show "Cranky Geeks." Besides head crank Dvorak and regular Sebastian Rupley, West Coast editor of PC magazine, Anil Dash, vice president of Six Apart, chimed in with consistently wise commentary.

It followed a TV-like format, a half hour long with three commercial breaks. We talked about the rise of do-it-yourself video, the power of independent media, whether video blogs present a challenge to mainstream media (yes and no), finding good stuff in all the noise, and other topics. I'll post a link when the episode airs.

Mashup Camp notes

A couple of articles I missed this week while I was in Seoul ... From the San Jose Mercury News: Mash-up `unconference' unleashes ideas.

Here's Programmable Web's Mashup Camp notes. Kaliya Hamlin's take. And a Flickr photo stream.

Switchboard's out, SuperPages is in

When I want to find a business listing (generally a phone number or street address), for years I've been visiting Switchboard.com by habit. But the site has become so overrun with irrelevant results and page after page of ads, that it has become totally useless. (And I have a high crap threshold.)

Switchboard, you are dead to me.

My new paramour is SuperPages.

Interviews with Scoble, Arrington

I have new interviews up at Real People Network with ex-Microsoft blogging legend Robert Scoble, top, and top 10 blogger Mike Arrington.

Final notes from Gnomedex

Here’s my Gnomedex photo album on Flickr.

By most accounts, this year’s Gnomedex didn’t reach the high bar set at last year’s conference. (But then, how could it?) Too many Insufferable Enormous Egos sucking the air out of the 320-seat conference hall. Brian Dear deconstructs the weekend here and here.

Still, the hallway networking was fab, as always. Good to catch up with Halley Suitt, Steve Rubel, Renee Blodgett, Chris Messina, Buzz Bruggeman, Robert Scoble, Ted Rheingold, Susan Mernit and Jon Husband, among others.

Here are a few final notes:

• The Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) inked a big deal Thursday with the Harry Fox Agency. (Details in this PDF, unfortunately.) And IODA’s Promonet, featuring music available to podcasters from indie artists, just got an overhaul.

• Check out Brian Dear’s Eventful. They’re closing in on a million event listings, I believe. Coolest feature: viral campaigns designed to bring a favorite artist to town and “force” events to happen. “To hell with the labels,” Brian declared. “It’s fans and bands working together.”

• Farecast is a cool new search engine for scouting out the lowest price for flights – not just by flight but also showing the lowest fares to a given city on a given day, week or month.

• Oddest moment: When Dave W. called this very funny Firefox Flicks spot “inappropriate” to show. The crowd loved the spot.

• The CEO of Pixsy showed off the new site, which aggregates thousands of photo and video thumbnails on the Web and organize it all, with an Ajax-like interface, into different categories.

• 30boxes lets you collaborate online with friends, colleagues or co-workers to create a seamless calendar.

• WineCamp? Now there’s a grassroots conference I could really get into.

More Gnomedex coverage here, here and here. Others’ Flickr photos here.

Tags: Gnomedex, Gnomedex6, Gnomedex 2006, tech

Google launches its own version of PayPal

Big news in the ecommerce arena today: Google launches Checkout service to compete with PayPal. See the Mercury News and SearchEngineWatch.

At Gnomedex

I'm at Gnomedex, the annual geek love fest up in Seattle. This was my favorite conference last year, and they're off to a good start on day one. Saturday they'll continue a live stream of the proceedings.

More and more familiar faces at these gatherings. Like: Buzz Bruggeman, Susan Mernit, Dave Winer, Halley Suitt, John Hartman, Eric Rice, Josh Bancroft, Derrick Oien, Doug Kaye, Brian Dear, Arieana Foley, Bre Pettis, Dave McClure, Mitch Ratcliffe, Steve Gillmor, Kathy Gill, Steve Rubel, Scott Rubel, Bob Wyman, Corey Denis, Boris Mann, Dan Farber, Kaliya Hamlin, Scott Mace and plenty of others.

The highlight of day one was former Sen. John Edwards' appearance. (Seattle P-I photo above. I'll post photos on Sunday; it's still too many steps to post my Digital Rebel XT's shots to Flickr.) I was an early supporter of Sen. Edwards' candidacy for president -- and I still think he was the best candidate running in '04. Edwards didn't give a keynote, but fielded questions and led a discussion on mostly tech-related questions, with the occasional political question thrown in.

I had a chance to praise him for his work with the OneAmerica Committee fighting poverty and putting it back on the national agenda. I asked what we in the tech community -- and the 320 smart people in this room -- could do to help spur public awareness and action to fight poverty, and how we could continue the conversation after today. Edwards said he would instruct his staff to open up a channel for that dialogue to take place.

We haven't heard anything so far, so I hope we can follow up. There were a lot of good ideas floating around the room after he left. I also had a chance to shake his hand and give him a copy of "Darknet" to get him up to speed on some of the issues facing society as we all become technology and media creators instead of passive consumers.

I'll be posting video interviews of Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble within the next week.

Other highlights

• Check out bLaugh, a new "blog humor site," featuring occasional caricatures of bloggers. The initial one -- of Steve Rubel (Rubel without a cause) -- is priceless.

Chris and Ponzi's rules for Gnomedex include: "Blog, cast, snap, stream – it’s yours. Feel free to blog, record, remix without permission. No weird licensing schemes. ... Assume your picture will be taken. ... Assume what you say will be blogged."

Good quotes:

• Kathy Gill: "Micromarkets is where it is. The mass market is dead."

• More Kathy Gill: "Geeks shouldn’t name things."

• Michael Arrington: "Jigsaw is one of the most evil venture backed companies on the Internet."

• Michael Arrington on the revamped Netscape: "It’s a frickin’ Digg clone now, it’s pathetic."

• Marc Canter: "It’s not about big or small, it’s about open or closed."

• More Marc Canter, in arguing for open APIs: "If you can suck, you can spit."

Later: Seattle Post-Intelligencer's coverage.

Tags: Gnomedex, Gnomedex 2006, tech

At Supernova

Spent the morning at Supernova, the business technology conference in San Francisco. Tomorrow I'll post Just posted to Flickr a photo of FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps (forgot my flash card connector).

I moderated this morning's opening panel, "The Rise of the VideoNet," with Jeremy Allaire (Brightcove), Jonathan Taplin (USC Annenberg Center), Mary Hodder (Dabble), and Robert Levitan (Pando). We spent a really good hour talking about the rapid rise of video sites -- 225 in all today. Mary Hodder will soon post an entry on Napsterization with a breakdown of video site traffic numbers (YouTube leads the way with 42 percent, MySpace with 24 percent, and so on).

We showed one of the best Mentos and Coke videos to kick things off.

The panel discussion will be podcast. Live audio streaming of all general sessions, as well as podcasts, blogs, and videoblogs, will be available here.

Here are some notes I took during Kopps' important talk:

"Centralized end user control is increasingly at risk. Broadband providers are increasing control over what comes into our homes over their pipes. ... Cable and DSL providers control 98% of the broadband market. We're nowhere near to seeing a ubiquitous third or fourth player to turn broadband into a vibrantly competitive market.

"If the marketplacde is truly competitive, then government should get out of the way and let a thousand flowers bloom." But currently, the bandwidth providers exercise a great deal of control over how you may use your connection.

"I’m amazed at the speed with which this issue came to the attention of the Congress, opening up a national discussion on the principles. ... The [broadband providers] want to inverse the real democratic genius of the internet. ... Entrepreneurs may have to ask permission to innovate from the owners of the broadband pipe.

"We need to change the terms of the debate. It’s not a net neutrality issue so much as an Internet freedom issue. ... Anyone who thinks the internet is going to halt media consolidationi has to understand that the internet may be heading down this very same path.

"These issues are too large to be left to a handful of broadband regulators. We desperately need your input. We need more of your input than we’ve been getting. Decisions without you are too often decisions against you."

Here's Colette Voegel blogging about today's sessions. Here are some others.

Tags: Supernova, Supernova2006, tech, conferences

Blogger gets VC funding

For those who missed it: My friend, journalist/blogger Om Malik, has left the staff of Business 2.0 magazine to try to monetize the broadband technologies space through his blog, GigaOm. He rasied "several hundred thousand dollars" to focus on building out his blog -- and presumably turning it into a business.

Valleywag broke it first. Then Om wrote about it on his blog. And today's San Jose Merc followed up.

Good luck building out that empire, Om!