I have meant to post on this for a long time, so here we go: I know I am preaching to the choir when I say that the Mac, especially the PowerBook, is a fantastic blogging machine. Just take a look at the laptops facing you when you speak at a blogging conference, and you will see a sea of sleek aluminum cases with a stylized apple in the middle. As my PowerBook is rendered obsolete by the announcement of the Intel-based MacBookPro, I would still recommend it as a blogging machine. For a few additional shekels, you can get the excellent NetNewsWire and Ecto, two great pieces of software. I can’t wait for NetNewsWire to be integrated with the NewsGatorOnline back-end so that my feeds and read marks

Obviously, you might also need to run Windows in the office, access your server-based files, run Office, etc. In that case throw in a … Read more »

The MIT Advertising Lab points to this picture of a building rooftop covered by the branding of the business occupying it (in the example: Target). It turns out, reading the comments related to the post, that this Target store is located next to O’Hare airport (Chicago, IL) – the busiest airport in the country, on the path of one of the runways.

The point though is that this kind of practice might become a new advertising mechanism, sort of the billboard-equivalent of satellite photos. With GoogleMaps and MSN VirtualEarth providing high-definition photos of cities, one could figure out some way of displaying advertising/branding messages on rooftops next to popular monuments or coordinates. As to whether this would overlap Google or MSN’s own advertising plans is another story.

Create any kind of new “real estate”, advertising will be one of the first leveraging it.

[via Search Engine Roundtable]

This interview has already been picked up and commented upon (and /.’ed), but if you have not yet taken a look, I recommend reading this ACM piece on Hotmail, and what it means to manage one of the largest services of the web. Hotmail runs on 10,000 servers and involves several petabytes of storage (i.e millions of gigabytes) and serves, according to this Wikipedia article, 221M users who are operating billions of e-mail transactions daily. It is operated by 100 sysadmins, which is not that large a team.

Phil Smoot, the PM in charge of Hotmail product development out of the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus, shares a number of insights – from which I noted the following points regarding automation, versionning, capacity planning, impact analysis and QA:

QA is a challenge in the sense that mimicking Internet loads on our QA lab machines is a hard engineering problem. The production site consists of hundreds of services … Read more »

Last night I attended the Computer Hjstory Museum event featuring the founding team of Sun Microsystems – Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, Scott Mc Nealy and Vinod Khosla – with Sun’s current Chief Scientist, John Gage moderating. Scott Mc Nealy actually referred to John as the “Fifth Beattle”. If you have never visited the Museum, I *really* recommend coming down over the week-end to take a tour of the magnificent exhibits that contains a wealth of computer antiques. And if you like it, you can join as member (as I did) to support their effort.

I have tried to capture the gist of the panel’s conversation. This was pretty challenging since they changed subjects pretty often, and kept on making jokes about each others. It created a great ambiance – sort of an old school pal reunion, but a difficult context to liveblog. For a long time I have been … Read more »

I just read on TechCrunch the official announcement of the fund raising Riya has recently completed, and I must admit that I had to check the number twice: $15M is the amount the company has brought in from new investor Bay Partners. Munjal comments on the news, which was sort of pre-announced, or at least eluded to, when the Google acquisition went kapputt.

It is great news for the Riya team, and this financing round makes the company one of the largest Web 2.0 “capitalization” – $19M raised across two rounds. The amount strikes me as very large in a context of “cheap” startup build-up costs, and it can only mean two things: Munjal, who’s been around the block already once with Andale, was able to command a high valuation (one can only assume that the rumored take-out valuation range has been a useful benchmark), and Riya has some serious development ahead of them, and infrastructure to … Read more »

I am off to CES in less than 3 hours, so I’ll make it quick: Bill Burnham has a series of great posts regarding the Internet and Enterprise software sectors of the public market, particularly:

Software IPOs: 2005 Year In Review Top 10 Worst Performing Software Stocks of 2005 Software Stock Update: 2005 Year In Review The Incredibly Shrinking Software Industry

In a nutshell, and I recommend taking a look at the compilation of data points and analysis work done by Bill: 4 software IPOs in 2005, a lot of Web 1.0 software darlings are in the list of worst performers for 2005, and the aggregate valuation of the Software sector has shrunk  by 10% in 2005 – to compare with a modest 1.4% growth of the Nasdaq and a nice uplift of 14.4% of the Internet sector.

Bill lists five reasons behind this systemic decrease of the sector, which does not look … Read more »

We wish you all a happy, healthy and successful new Year!

(from Robert, Michael, Don and Jeff – taking the picture)

I was giving a crash course on blog publishing to my friend Michael, and thought I would kill two birds with one stone by posting my wishes at the same time!

As a disclaimer to this post, I should point out that I am not yet in the “Everything Online” camp in terms of productivity applications, and that’s why I still spend my life in Outlook, Office and a few other key products. Two reasons drive that choice: 1) I am not yet online 100% of the time (though I am looking with envy at one of these EVDO cards) and 2) online services have a tendency of going down a lot these days. Furthermore having had a demo of Office 12 from Scoble last night, I really like the UI work Microsoft has done for this release and am looking forward to testing it at some point (unlike the two or three last revisions of Office). That’s why I have not really reviewed a lot of online office applications, besides RSS aggregators, even if online suites like Zimbra caught my eye when they launched at the Web 2.0 … Read more »

Jupiter Research Michael Gartenberg just announced his recent decision to name the ThinkPad X41 Tablet PC “Laptop of the Year”:

It’s the first Tablet PC I’ve used where there is no penalty at all for the Tablet OS feature. It just works as a great notebook and when you need it in Tablet mode (like in that middle seat in coach on the way to CES) it’s just there for you. Still no integrated drive and the screen is still XGA. But if you need more, you might want to look at the Z60t. Take the great IBM keyboard, add in a nice DVD burner and a 15“ screen. Toss in a Pentium M and a gig of memory and a 100gb HD and you’re talking about a first class system that will keep up with most desktops. The best part is that it’s still only 5.5lbs so it’s still truly portable.

I … Read more »

A quick note to mention that I will be attending the first day of Syndicate in San Francisco – the last conference of the year for me, and I did attend a lot of them in 2005 indeed. Send me a note on jeff [dot] clavier [at] gmail [dot] com if you are also there and want to meet.

I have missed Doc Searl’s opening remarks because we were celebrating my five year old’s birthday, but Doc blogged the gist of them on ITGarage.

Tags: syndicate

I met and hung out with a ton of cool people during my trip to Paris, and one of them was Hugh MacLeod from GapingVoid fame. We had crossed each other’s path at Les Blogs 2.0 a number of times, and had a chance to chat for a while at Fon‘s Martin Varsavsky’s place. Hugh was kindly drawing some of his famous cartoons for some of the guests, and inherited this one – based on some of the topics covered during my panel.

No comment .

Also worth the read: Hugh’s thoughts on Les Blogs.

I am sure that this is a temporary bug (or even buguette), but I can’t get the new Yahoo RSS Reader to display my feeds on Internet Explorer (V6 with latest patches, both on Windows 2000 and Windows XP) whereas it works great on Firefox. I am all for Firefox but developers should at least test Internet Explorer a little bit .

                   Firefox displays RSS Feeds properly                                     No feeds in IE

Tags: sarcasm