Ask Jeeves' acquisition of Bloglines became official at the stroke of midnight this morning, with a press release and FAQ posted to the Bloglines site. No financial data was released. Here's the meat of a letter to subscribers from Bloglines founder (now an AskJeeves VP) Mark Fletcher:
We want to assure you that the Bloglines service will continue to grow and thrive. Like other companies in the Ask Jeeves portfolio, we will operate as a standalone, separate service -- the Bloglines name will remain, as will our URL, www.bloglines.com. We will support our current features and services, so please continue to log in to Bloglines to search, subscribe, publish and share RSS news feeds and blogs. All users will continue to be governed by the Terms of Service you agreed to when you registered for Bloglines.
We have a great roadmap on how to integrate some of the many innovative technologies of Ask Jeeves, including its Teoma algorithmic search technology. As always, we will share news of our progress on our blog, Bloglines News. And we encourage you to participate in the conversation. Our users have been amazing help in guiding the evolution of Bloglines, and we hope you will continue to give us input so we can remain the gold standard in blogging, search, and news aggregation.
via Blog Herald
dk0851
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BLOG. It's an awful word. Clunky and unsexy, for me it conjures up images from the '50s sci-fi film The Blob. The Blog is coming to get you, or maybe it's a blog monster clamoring up a slick green slope . . .
We'll have to get used to it. THE BLOG is here to stay, and if you believe what you read (yes, here and elsewhere) it will revolutionize online communications to the point of affecting the very core of our social fabric.
Dresdner Keinvort Wassstein, a German bank, has 120 internal blogs (as first reported in the Financial Times).
A new Forrester study entitled "Blogging: Bubble or Big Deal?" concludes, among other things, that the new direction of employee relations dictates that all employees run their own blog.
Even more startling: Neville thinks the report's 18 pages are well worth their $350 price tag! Clearly, something big is brewing.
Andy Lark, a big man in many ways, gave a provocative and entertaining keynote address entitled "Participatory Communications Revolution, or 'The Really Wicked Blog Revolution That Killed the Media and Changed Everything.'"
To emphasize the point, he opened with EPIC, a 1984-type video that tracks the trajectory of media development to 2014, a year in teh NYT becomes a print-only newsletters available for only the elite and elderly*. His core message was that blogs are a social movement that demonstrate the higher value of conversation, over just publishing information.
I agree with him when he says, "we have become appalling at communications, though excellent at talking." And that the blogosphere, with its democratic means of disseminating information, will kill the hype and BS “so inherent in media as a business."
Instead, we have the powerful notion of media as community, as bloggers become advocates for many causes.
*This reminds me of the blue sky sessions I had the privilege to sit in on with Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Bill Atkinson, and other very smart media people back in the heady early days of multimedia.
I was the project manager of the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog -- we excitedly discussed how hyperlinks would change how people would view and gather information, and how the printed book would become rare. Come to think of it, it seems many of us now display symptoms of ADD as a result of being able to jump all over the place by hyperlinks . . .and I heard a recent stat that less people are reading literature than ever before.
LINKS
Neville Hobson's Weblog
Executive Summary of
Fewer People Make Time for Literature, NEA Study Shows
rk1934
If you want to see why blogs really are the future of journalism, head on over to The Daily Kos, where you can see distributed journalism in action. The story in question is who is "Jeff Gannon" and what is the "Talon News Agency." It was Gannon, you see, who was the sole reporter with access to the memo exposing Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent.
]]> Enter bloggers. Daily KOS is contributors are fanning out across net researching who Jeff Gannon and Talon are, why they were leaked the document, and what connections they have with other conservative information bureaus. Here's a look at how the work is being spread around:
- Tomatoobserver is researching Time of Grace Ministries
- Mnemosyne is checking and running phone numbers
- conntexdem is researching Bruce Eberle
- baltimoretim is researching precisely what the process is for obtaining a White House press credential
- fauxreal and ladydawg are researching morning gaggles here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/29/215946/913
- sean mykael is looking into Free Speech Foundation. Myrkury has graciously stepped in to advise on legalities of non-profit status (thank God). We may need people in a couple different states to physically pull paperwork soon. (Diary here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/30/14024/9923)
- mlk and Marisa are constructing a sort of visual database "family tree" of relations, groups and individuals. This is a big project and someone might want to volunteer on that diary: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/30/152558/079. Additionally, Marisa is asking for data entry help.
- spiderleaf is creating a timeline about the CIA memo leak/Novak/who knew what when, references to it in press, and analysis (Diary here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/31/122222/689)
- NYBri is preparing to start the FOIA request process and could use some volunteers (diary here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/31/153513/309)
- Louise volunteers to match timeline of Gannon at press briefings with his written "scoops"
- Radically Bitter is compiling very, very useful DNS data
- KansasNate is making sure important stuff is getting fed into dkospedia
- Nonemptysubsets (gotta love that handle) is downloading web sites since they're disappearing so fast. Requests taken.
- Sidinny will set up a diary called "Altered Realities" that will keep track of what's been changed on the visited sites, what's been scrubbed and what it all means. However, he's on kidwatch and can't do much more than set the diary up, so needs help with volunteers who will do the analysis.
- London Yank is looking into any connection with NORTHCOM/Psyops
There's also this intriguing statement from the project editor: "Jeff Gannon IS a pseudonym. I'm absolutely certain of this and when we're done with this whole thing I'll explain how and why I'm certain. For now, please just take my word for it."
These folks may or may not turn anything up, but it's a fascinating display of what distributed journalism looks like, and is quite possibly scratching the tip of a rather fishy iceberg.
Reach Richard Koman at rkoman (at) gmail (dot) com. Personal blog: richardkoman.typepad.com
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Three very human stories illustrate the economic disparities that characterize Silicon Valley as the region struggles to bounce back, in today's San Jose Mercury News.
]]> Chris O'Brien writes:Ask K.B. Chandrasekhar, 44, about the Silicon Valley dream, and he'll tell you it's alive and well.Since arriving from India in 1992 with almost nothing, he is now on his third start-up, Jamcracker. His company is growing. His venture capital investments in India are going strong. It may not be the boom, but the view from the seven-bedroom house he built in Saratoga still looks good.
Ask Doroteo Garcia, 40, and he'll tell you the dream of prosperity is further out of reach than ever. Nine years after arriving from Mexico, Garcia spends his days cleaning the Stanford University art museum before pedaling his bike to a part-time job washing dishes. From the studio apartment he shares with his son in East Palo Alto, he laments that he has less money to send home since he lost his second full-time janitorial job.
Ask Steve Clough, 39, a former technical support worker who fell from Chandrasekhar's world to Garcia's during the tech bust, and he'll tell you the transition is jarring. Since losing his job in 2003, Clough has struggled to pay bills while piling up debt. From his part-time job as a high school math teacher, Clough wonders if the doors to high-tech prosperity have closed for good.
All three men are right. By the numbers, the economy is getting better and worse -- depending on who you are. Silicon Valley has developed two separate economies that have drifted further apart ever since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.
In the valley's technology economy, profits, revenues and average pay are up dramatically. But fewer people are sharing in the good fortune because tech companies are doing more with less -- they have cut tens of thousands of jobs and continue to do so, boosting the productivity of their remaining workers....
Links:
A tale of two valleys: Three workers' stories illustrate widening economic gap in area by Chris O'Brien, San Jose Mercury News, 30 January 2005
What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
The average Silicon Valley man is fatter and pays less attention to what he eats than his female counterparts, Associated Press reports
I could have told them that.
]]> "At least three out of five men in Santa Clara County are considered overweight or obese, compared with two out of five women, according to a telephone survey of 2,645 residents," the AP reports.And what are we going to do about it?
Nothing much, it seems. Quoting the AP again, "Despite the extra pounds that men are packing, researchers found that they're much less likely to diet - or even to try to maintain their current weight - than women."
But it can't be that bad. This is California, everybody eats lots of fresh, healthy food.
"According to the survey, only 18 percent of men in Santa Clara County eat two pieces of fruit a day," says the AP.
Guilty as charged.
Links:
Silicon Valley men are fatter than women, survey finds, Associated Press (in San Jose Mercury News), 28 January 2005
What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
The must-attend party in Greater Silicon Valley this coming weekend... here's the invite as I received it (with the addition of links to the web pages mentioned):
The Fascist Party
Saturday, January 29 2005
Though we don't approve of Fascism as the preferred route our Government is taking, we cannot deny the Fascist sense of style...
Polish your boots and metal and attend the ball as if it were Nuremberg 1933. You might run into our despised dictator celebrating at the martini bar and discussing Laibach.
9:00 pm Gallery of Video art by propaganda visionaries:
VJ Culture, Videojon, Romeo Alpha, Marlon McKenney
Complimentary wine served.
10:00 pm Performances by:
Infinite Kaos
Extra Sensory Projection (Live Audio/Video)
http://www.extrasensoryprojection.com
11:00 pm The Dictator Fascion Show.
Designs by:
FierceCouture - www.fiercecouture.com
Laura Dawson - www.lauradawson.com
Jason Evege - www.evegestudio.com
Appearances by your favorite dictators and the unveiling of the latest
must-have Fascist accessory!
Presented by The Princess Kennedy
12:00 am Party with DJs:
- IKAMYO [Infinite Kaos]
- Adnan [Lush]
- Alaric [Video Salon]
- Electro/Breaks and a dose of German Industrial]
www.fascistparty.us
---
What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
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While Tom and Candida are out digging up the latest Silicon Valley news live, up close, and personal, let's take a trip down Silicon Valley's Memory Lane and check out the collection of Homebrew Computer Club Newsletters (and more) at the online DigiBarn Computer Museum.
The DigiBarn site also has newsletters from People's Computer Company, a non-profit foundation based in Menlo Park, California. The PCC newsletter morphed into Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, with the tag line "running light without overbyte". (On a personal note, DDJ is where I began my career in technology business publishing, in the very early 1980s - but this old codger will refrain from telling any bedtime stories of the Golden Age of Microcomputing right this minute.)
The site also offers some images from Ted Nelson's groundbreaking 1974 book, Computer Lib. Nelson is a true cyberculture pioneer, credited as the inventor of the hypertext concept which he first published in 1963. DigiBarn links to Nelson's legendary Project Xanadu, described at the Project Xanadu History page as "the explicit inspiration for the World Wide Web (see Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web), for Lotus Notes (as freely acknowledged by its creator, Ray Ozzie) and for HyperCard (acknowledged by its developer, Bill Atkinson); as well as less-well-known systems, including Microcosm and Hyperwave."
Links:
Homebrew Computer Club Newsletters (at DigiBarn Computer Museum)
People's Computer Company & People's Computers Newsletters
Computer Lib/Dream Machines Retrospective
The History and Philosophy of Doctor Dobb's Journal
Thanks to Boing Boing for the heads-up
What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
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Do the Internet-based voice and multimedia communications technologies developed in the Greater Silicon Valley really bring us closer together? One wired world guru argues yes and tells a beautiful story that illustrates how.
The bottom line is this: they reached at random out into the Datacloud and found a real friend. And I feel like I have been graced with a real friend in both of them. Given the fact that I've been getting interesting messages from distant strangers since 1985, why do I think the big deal? Why is this different? Because these strangers have voices. There's a lot more emotional bandwidth in the human voice. I'm always surprised by the Meatspace version of someone I've only encountered in ASCII. I'm rarely surprised by someone I've only met on the phone. But one doesn't get random phone calls from Viet Nam or China, or at least one never could before.Skype changes all that. Now anybody can talk to anybody, anywhere. At zero cost. This changes everything. When we can talk, really talk, to one another, we can connect at the heart.
Barlow tells a heart-warming techno-tale that shows how Internet telephone technology can make the global village a more intimate place.
More communication is generally a good thing, but I still have my doubts. Even in a best-case scenario as Barlow describes, won't we still wind up in front of our computer screens, talking into the aether, isolated?
Links:
The Intimate Planet, BarlowFriendz, 24 January 2005
What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
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Silicon Valley gets a thumbs up, thumbs down in a regional report that Gary Rivlin elevates to national attention in the New York Times.
Venture capital is on the rise, and once again Silicon Valley is growing thick with startups. Research and development funding in the Valley has hit new highs and corporate profits at area firms are generally robust.And yet, despite an environment in which entrepreneurship is strong and established firms are by and large healthy, the Silicon Valley job market remains stagnant. Household income in the area is down, and troubling disparities persist in the areas of health care, education and housing.
Those are among the findings of a report, "2005 Silicon Valley Index," released today by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a nonprofit organization that assesses the region's economic health each year.
....The study found that the region lost an estimated 1.3 percent of its jobs between mid-2003 and mid-2004, and average pay fell by 1 percent. That drop came on the heels of the 200,000 jobs that were lost earlier in the decade - representing nearly 20 percent of the work force - when the San Jose metropolitan area, which includes much of Silicon Valley, suffered the worst collapse of any metropolitan area in the United States since the Great Depression, surpassing even Detroit in the early 1980's, which lost 13 percent of its jobs.
Links:
Mixed Report on Silicon Valley by Gary Rivlin, New York Times, 23 January 2004
Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network
What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
Social networking specialist, Friendster, gets the spotlight at the New York Times today in a profile that takes away more than it gives.
Fifteen months ago, Friendster enjoyed the kind of enviable status that Silicon Valley start-ups dream of: A-list investors and millions of users flocking to its Web site to browse profiles posted by friends and friends' friends, in search of dates or playmates.So great was the buzz surrounding the company in the second half of 2003 that Friendster, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., helped define a hot new facet of the Internet dubbed "social networking."
People are again buzzing about Friendster. But that is because the company, which endured three chief executives during 2004, has seen a spate of senior executives depart in recent weeks. Just as troubling, a younger, flashier rival called MySpace has eclipsed Friendster, at least in the United States, among those in the most highly coveted 18 to 29 demographic. And Friendster loyalists have groused that the company has done almost nothing to enliven its site.
Piling on is Mark J. Pincus, described by Rivlin as "an investor in Friendster and the founder of Tribe Networks, a budding social networking Web site that hopes to capture some of the print classified advertising market."
"I think Friendster really missed their big opportunity," Pincus told Rivlin.
Rivlin's article casts doubt on the viability of the social networking category in general, and raises the prospect that Friendster's history may scare away the venture capital that has only recently begun creeping into Silicon Valley again.
Rivlin's article also touts several Friendster competitors, including MySpace (which gets very favorable treatment in the story, as Rivlin contrasts MySpace's lead over Friendster in page views and number of unique visitors), the above-mentioned Tribe Networks, and Google's Orkut.
Links:
Friendster, Love and Money by Gary Rivlin, New York Times, 24 January 2004
What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
]]>Marketers are expecting the Silicon Valley elite to promote their products in exchange for free stuff.
]]> According to Brad Stone in a Newsweek article called The Connected Get More Connected: Seeking buzz, companies will funnel free new products to Silicon Valley’s elite:Connector marketing is coming to the heart of California’s high-tech zone, in the form of a new effort called the Silicon Valley 100.This month, 100 of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, bloggers and promoters will begin receiving cool new stuff for free, delivered straight to their homes and offices. In return, these movers and shakers promise to sample the products and offer feedback to the their manufacturers. The companies hope that, if the mood strikes, the Silicon Valley 100 will chat up, blog on, or just plain recommend the products to friends and colleagues, generating that most invaluable of currencies: buzz.
The brainchild behind the Silicon Valley 100 is 31-year-old entrepreneur—and Connector—Auren Hoffman, founder of San Francisco marketing firm The Stonebrick Group. He hopes to turn the Silicon Valley 100 into a profitable enterprise. Companies will pay a fee for the privilege of gifting products to its elite members.
....It took three months on the phone, but the result of Hoffman’s detective work is a quirky, wide-ranging list of some of the Valley’s brightest lights, largest wallets and biggest mouths. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen is on the list. Venture capitalists Tim Draper, Stewart Alsop, Aileen Lee, Igor Sill, Bill Gurley and Ron Conway are too. Yahoo vice president Katie Mitic, Siebel Systems cofounder Pat House and Electronic Arts senior vice president Rusty Rueff are among the 100. So are technology-event promoters Esther Dyson, Tim O’Reilly, Tiffany Shlain and Chris Shipley. A local radio personality nicknamed Hooman appears, as does a young San Francisco club promoter named Trevor Hewitt. Sean Parker, one of the cofounders of Napster, also made the cut.
Hoffman says he avoided adding career bloggers or journalists to the list. “Those people have a different standard and shouldn’t be keeping free products,” he says (journalists are typically required to return products they sample for review). But many Valley execs who maintain well-read blogs are in the group, such as entrepreneurs Ross Mayfield, Brad Templeton, Joi Ito and Zaw Thet.
Silicon Valley 100 member Joi Ito speaks:
I think it is almost like an opt-in focus group. The obvious criticism would be these companies are trying to buy "buzz". The difference between this and some buzz creation companies is 1) it's not stealth 2) they don't tell you what to say. I checked with Auren and he says that we can write whatever we want about the products. When I get a product from Silicon Valley 100, I will state this clearly in any blog post that refers to it and will say what I think. I realize that the fact that we probably get to keep most of the products makes it a bit like bribery, but if it's crap, I'm sure most people will throw it away. I would be most interested in products that are still not on the market where our feedback could be incorporated in the product design. Then our feedback could be more constructive...
Links:
The Connected Get More Connected: Seeking buzz, companies will funnel free new products to Silicon Valley’s elite by Brad Stone, Newsweek, 21 January 2005
Silicon Valley 100, by Joi Ito, 22 January 2005
What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
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Silicon Valley bloggers who aspire to be journalists, beware. It's bad for your health.
Checks of 1,182 reporters in Beijing conducted by the Chinese Physician's Association on Sunday showed that only 28, or 2.4% of them, were healthy.Stomach problems were the most common ailments of the tested journalists, all of whom were under 60 years old.
Results of the checks point the finger for the reporters' poor health at occupational stress. Among the people examined, 84.2% said they sufferd from chronic exhaustion, 72.1% complained of high work pressure, 62% said they did not get regular sleep, half had bad eyesight and nearly the same number were in chronic pain.
However, over 60% of them admitted it was the first time they had undergone a full-body physical test.
The 659 female journalists checked fared poorly. More than 290 suffered breast disease and over 30% had gynecological conditions, mostly the result of high pressure, nervous tension and unbalanced living patterns. The majority of the women were unaware of their health problems before the examinations.
Liang Wannian, vice director general of the Beijing Health Bureau advised all local journalists to regularly receive health examinations and build personal "health archives."
Reporters should also pay attention to their psychological health, get regular exercise, avoid foods hard to dist, minimize smoking and drinking and take vacations when they felt overwhelmed by work, Liang said.
Links:
Study shows journalism bad for health, Beijing Today via ChinaDaily.com
What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
]]>In a move that shows how much Google is fully embracing their role as the biggest competition to conventional marketing efforts ever conceived, Google plans to give away their AdWords API to advertisers. This would allow advertisers to control variables such as times ads are served, IP addresses served to, price limits for target time slots, etc. They will not be offering the same advantage to publishers, i.e., those that use the AdSense campaign. Stay tuned . . .
]]>As this is being writtten, about 1800 Google marketing people from its offices around the world are at an internal sales conference at a secret location in San Francisco, being briefed on a completely revamped Google Adwords/Adsense program and other new features.
Adwords and Adsense are what make Google such an incredible cash machine. The Adwords and Adsense programs deliver paid text ad links. Adwords delivers paid text ads to users of its search services and the ads are matched to the search term.
Adsense delivers text ads to readers of a web page and they are matched to the content of a page. Virtually anybody with a web page can become a member of the Adsense network and host Google ads and receive a cut of the ad revenue.
The text ads business is crucial to maintaining Google’s pace of growth and its share price, which reflects high expectations for the dominant search giant. But Google offers few tools to advertisers to let them control where their ads appear and on which web sites. Similarly, web site publishers have virtually no control over what types of ads Google sends their way. This has caused some shifting to competitors such as Kanoodle that offer such controls.
That's why the revamped Adwords/Adsense will provide a suite of tools that provide greater control, management and monitoring data to advertisers, to better target their sales messages.
It’s interesting to note that executives from Kanoodle hit town earlier this week, right when the secret Google internal unveiling is taking place. I haven’t had a chance to ask them about whether they timed it because they knew about the Adwords relaunch or if it was a coincidence.
There are 18 coaches standing by to whisk the visiting Googlers off to Tahoe this weekend. If you are in Tahoe this weekend, look out for them on the slopes and in the bars, especially the bars. If you pick up any juicy tidbits, ping me!
]]>Dan Farber, long-time Silicon Valley watcher, and a veteran journalist, has been around this industry for a long time. Dan kindly provided a report on the Churchill Club event I missed and dropped it into the comments section of the story.
Dan’s piece is a great example of online journalism, or rather, the new kind of online journalism that is emerging and made possible by this blogging phenomenon. It allows journalists to communicate ideas and tell a story much more efficiently than ever before.
]]> Most online news stories currently mirror print stories in many ways —- they both look very similar except that there are some web links in the digital version. But journalists, even if they write for print and online, are often asked to write to a specific length. For example, news stories might all have a uniform length of 450 words, while a news analysis is 1200 words. That is clearly a legacy from the print business model.Online, if you can tell a news story in 150 words why stretch it 400? If it’s a 50 word story—that’s fine. Yet a lot journalists are quite good at filling up space, because most started in print journalism. I need another 50 or 100 words, our desk editors might demand, because they redesigned their pages and the deadline is minutes away. So you quickly bash out words to fill the space, background info, a share price, a couple of sentences about what happened last week. It doesn’t take the story on further. It is just words taking up space, and that, IMHO, is unfair to readers.
But within the blogging format, journalists can be succinct and use their own voice. Dan demonstrates one of the core values an experienced journalist brings to this world of online information -— the ability to tell a complex story in very few words. That’s a skill that should be highly valued in today’s information overload society. And it would be, if it were scalable…!