John Furrier’s PodTech just announced that they had their first 2 million download month. If you don’t subscribe to John’s podcasts you should. It’s an extremely useful source of information on web 2.0 and other companies, and he’s had more than a few exclusive announcements.

Congratulations, John!

It pretty much says it all for me, too, after all of the hate mail/blogs/comments from people telling me what to write about and how to write it, on TechCrunch. Ethan Lipton: You Were Right.

Dave Winer likes the song too.

John Furrier’s timing is impeccable again – he just published the first ever podcast interview with Steve Forbes.

This goes out as the blogosphere is still exploding in anger over the Daniel Lyons article on blogs that is in the current print edition of the magazine. Shel Israel wrote an open letter to Forbes magazine yesterday that was beautifully written. In his post, Shel says:

I was embarrassed for both you and Forbes today, when I read your one-sided, fact-bashing diatribe. I would have expected this level of journalism to have come from other sources such as the New York Post or the online Guardian.

and

As far as the silliness of calling us a lynch mob, Daniel. My free advice to you is to be very grateful on a personal level that your charge is without merit.

John recorded the interview on Friday, just before the blog story broke. I would have loved to have heard Steve Forbe’s comments on the story but, alas, the timing was off by a matter of hours.

I used to write a weekly wrapup on TechCrunch. I’d bookmark interesting web 2.0 stuff during the week, and sit down on Sunday evening and write about all of it. You can see the old posts here. I’ve stopped doing it. I can now use this blog to write about interesting stuff as it happens instead of waiting until the weekend when no one really cares any more.

Plus, Richard MacManus always did a better job at it anyway. He just posted this week’s wrapup. Check it out, and subscribe to his blog if you use a reader and want to stay up to date on web 2.0 news.

The first item in his wrapup this week is the Microsoft announcement on Tuesday. I’ve heard all sorts of rumors as to what will be announced. Richard thinks it may center around hosted services, for instance. I was lucky enough to be invited, and I will be posting on it as soon as I can, hopefully even from the hotel. It starts at 10 am PST on Tuesday, Nov. 1.

Dave Winer posted a new Coffee Notes podcast. Bits of tagcamp coolness in there. Even more politics – Dave wonders when Scooter will start spilling the beans and moving this whole mess up the ladder at the White House. Near the end, Dave mentions the Microsoft press meeting on Tuesday. I’ll be there, can’t wait to hear the news.

Ken Yarmosh, a paid consultant to Blogniscient, has written an open letter criticizing me for writing such glowing reviews of Memeorandum (blogniscient is a competitor to memeorandum).

In particular, he didn’t like my post yesterday on TechCrunch comparing the Blogniscient and Memeorandum and he felt that Blogniscient deserved it’s own review. I left a comment, reprinted below.

I’d like to know people’s opinion on this issue.

Ken,

A few thoughts.

1. I apologize if I haven’t answered your emails. I’m a one man shop and I get hundreds of emails a day. I cannot read all of them. It’s something that I beat myself up over constantly because I feel that if someone takes the time to email me, I should take the time to read it and write back. I may hire someone to help out at TechCrunch, but given that it is a zero revenue site I don’t know when that will happen.

2. TechCrunch is not an objective site. It’s all about my opinions. I’ve never claimed otherwise.

3. I apologize if I did not give your client a stand alone review. To be fair, I don’t think it deserves a stand alone review and is interesting, at this time, only as part of the broader discussion of how memeorandum is changing the web. I wrote my opinion of the service, and gave what I believe is a quite favorable review. In my opinion, and I repeat, in my opinion, memeorandum is a far superior service.

4. I have an open house here in Atherton and I invite many people to stay. During the web 2.0 conference people were on the floors, on the couches, in the bedrooms. One of those people is a VC with a $30m net worth. I didn’t include him in my top VCs post. He’s pissed. He’ll get over it.

Gabe has stayed here, and he has grown to be a friend. This has developed after I’ve gotten to know memeorandum, and quite frankly one of the reasons I like hanging out with him is that he’s so damn smart. There is no nepotism in my posts on memeorandum.

I have no financial or other interest in memeorandum, nor have I been paid to write anything about memeorandum or any other company.

5. I think you should look in the mirror. You are a paid consultant to blogniscient and this wasn’t disclosed in your early posts, or in the comments you blanketed the blogospere with.

I am launching a company called edgeio in the near future. I’ve posted, once, on edgeio, and I fully disclosed that I am a founder. I also said I won’t be posting on it much, if at all, in the future.

6. If people like Robert Scoble and Dave Winer think Memeorandum is great, perhaps it is simply because it is.

7. I think you owe me an apology for this open letter, regarding your claims of a conflict of interest.

Paul Montgomery desecrated my favorite album from high school this morning. Admitedly, though, its pretty funny – my favorite picture is the one of Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum (left).

Paul has a startup launching soon called Tinfinger. Can’t wait to give my review on TechCrunch.

Here are Paul’s Lyrics to “Two Point Oh Ain’t Web Pollution”

Hey there all you media men
Throw away your fancy ties
And while you’re out there sittin’ on a hedge fund
So get off your 1.0 payout and come down here
‘Cause two point oh ain’t no riddle man
To me it makes good Google AdSense
Google AdSense! Ow! Oooh yeah!

Hundreds of podcasts are playing on my iPod
We got valuations coming up from the floor
We’re just browsing to the Flock that’s giving too much noise
Are you deaf, GEMAYA will buy us all

We’re just bloggin’ about the future
Forget about one point oh
Blodgett’ll always be with us
Meeker’s never gonna die, never gonna die

Two point oh ain’t Web pollution
Two point oh ain’t gonna die
Two point oh ain’t Web pollution
Two point oh it will be flipped

Yes it will, sh*t sh*t sh*t

I took a look inside your bedroom door
You looked so good tagging on de.licio.us
Well, I asked you if you wanted any rhythm and love
You said you wanna MySpace instead

We’re just bloggin’ about the future
Forget about one point oh
Beta’ll always be with us
AJAX’s never gonna die, never gonna die

Two point oh ain’t Web pollution
Two point oh ain’t gonna die
Two point oh ain’t Web pollution
Two point oh is just made of people

Thanks Richard for the pointer.

I enjoyed reading the NYT article on podcasting by Anne Eisenberg. Anne discusses, among other things, the cost of podcasting, which can be as high as $30,000 (I actually know people who’ve spent much more).

I know a lot of podcasters, some with very large audiences. Some have tons of recording and production equipment and software and produce a highly polished product. Some, like Dave Winer, let their content alone pull in the listeners.

Dave was interviewed for the article. He spent about $1,000 for a good microphone and related hardware, and $30 or so for audio editing software. He spends little time editing, saying “I don’t have the patience for it” and “If I had to, I would do fewer podcasts.”

As a first time podcaster earlier this evening, I can say that you can certainly produce a podcast with much less than even Dave has spent. I purchased a $40 digital recorder, downloaded Audacity (an open source audio editor), and produced the podcast in about an hour. Now that I know how to do it, it will take less time for future podcasts. The hardest part was getting the damn thing uploaded properly.

This also reminds me of a conversation I had with Steve Gillmor at Tagcamp this weekend. I asked him if he thought there was a business to be built around transcribing podcasts for publishers. The transcribing can be outsourced for about $10 an hour and can be turned around quite quickly. With an appropriate markup, it would still be quite reasonable to publishers.

His answer “Why would I transcribe my podcasts? People would stop listening.” I disagreed, arguing that he would increase his audience many times. His retort “But they wouldn’t be listening to my podcast.” I thought about it for a while. And as often is the case with Mr. Gillmor, I realized that in a round about way, he’s right. If podcasters just wanted to maximize their audience, they’d be writing, not talking.

I still think there is a business there. But Steve won’t be a customer.

Shelley Powers writes a post titled The Testosterone Meme where she states four major issues she has with memeorandum.

The second issue Shelley raises:

Second, if you’re a woman writing about technology, don’t expect to show up in the site; when you do, expect to see your weblog disappear from view quickly. This site is for the big boys only.

The problem with this particular issue is that I found her article on memeorandum. It’s a headline and it’s been up all night.

The second and final day of Tag Camp was certainly interesting. Like the first day, there were three formal channels of presentations, as well as a wide variety of informal discussions taking place in the main area.

The highlights of my day were seeing company presentations (lots to write about on TechCrunch) and the business model discussion led by Jeff Clavier.

I recorded the entire session and hope to post it at some point. Jeff gave relevant and insightful advice to attendees on the three types of business models (licensing, advertising, premium features), with examples, including metrics, of each.

About half way through the hour long session Keith Teare changed the direction of the conversation by asking for people’s thoughts on monetizing page views. Dave Winer spoke on the subject for a few minutes against advertising, at least on blogs. He says that the long tail of blogs had no chance to generate any material advertising revenue, and the more popular blogs seriously harm their core message if they include ads. A robust interaction ensued, mostly between Jeff and Dave but also with audience participation. This is a very interesting and entertaining discussion, and it is also my first podcast.

The podcast from the session is here.

All of my pictures from the event are here, and all TagCamp pictures are here. I like this one – I look almost sort of like a real blogger.

I Just got back from the first day of Tag Camp. Check out the everyone’s pictures on Flickr, including mine.

I met some great people tonight, including Barb Dybwad from Weblogs, Inc. and Stowe Boyd. Dave McClure was looking good as always.

Niall Kennedy brought a copy of the Forbes magazine with the blogging article that everyone’s been talking about today. What an incredibly wonderful piece of journalism that is.

There were some great web2.0 presentations that I’ll be writing about over at TechCrunch.

I’m heading over to TagCamp with Gabe Rivera in about an hour. I’m fired up about this “conference”. Lots of people will be there that I haven’t met yet.

I’m also looking forward to seeing CommerceNet’s offices.

A lot of people are reading the Forbes article that attacks bloggers. It’s the most written about story right now on the Meme, too.

Registration is required for the story (note Steve Rubel gives the bugmenot login/password “forbesdontbug” which also works for me).

The article is misinformed, unbalanced and sensationalist. It looks like it took about an hour to research and write it.

My favorite part:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

But besides the standard criticism that a hack job like this deserves, there is another side of this story.

I am in complete awe of what a real journalist such as Daniel Lyons, who wrote the piece, can accomplish when they put their mind to it. What a great first paragraph! (the one quoted above).

This may be the most read article on forbes.com ever. Not only has Daniel found a compelling angle to show how scary bloggers are (to get the attention of all those non-bloggers out there), but he’s also attacked a group with a huge collective voice (all screaming and pointing back to the article). Controversy breeds discussion, which in this case centers on this article.

It’s a one-two punch: scare the audience, and attack someone who can fight back (creating a discussion). Who cares about the facts!

I’m inspired.

I am starting a new blog today called CrunchNotes.

I think the best way to start this blog is to talk about another blog I write, TechCrunch. I started TechCrunch on June 11, 2005 – about four and a half months ago. The focus of TechCrunch is to profile new web 2.0 companies. There are a lot of them, way more than I can write about. I write about the companies that capture my attention or that I feel add to the overall “discussion” in some way. The web is an ecosystem and every new application, blog, picture and even email address that is added affects the whole in some way.

TechCrunch is a hobby that has grown to an obsession. I have always loved startups, from my days representing them at Wilson Sonsini (a law firm), and through my adventures as an entrepreneur. I know what drives entrepreneurs and I know how to talk to and about them. I am deeply honored every time someone takes the time to tell me about their company, their passion.

There are two people that are directly responsible for me starting TechCrunch.

The first person is Keith Teare, my business partner and longtime friend. Keith was the first person to show me a feed reader in action (it was bloglines), and pointed me to the early blog posts that shaped my thinking on what the web is up to these days. Even though I’m crazy, Keith sees some value in keeping me around, and his patience in teaching me has been extremely valuable.

The second person is Dave Winer. I’ve been reading Dave’s blog since 2001, but only met him early this year when he hired Keith and me to help him sell Weblogs.com. In a meeting in New York in the spring, Dave said something to me which he probbly quickly forgot but which really stuck with me. He said “If you are going to build a new company, go to the trouble of actually researching what other companies have already done.” He was referring to the fact that new companies are launching literally every day, and evolution is occuring so fast that people are largely unable to know what else is going on around them as they build their products. He gave a specific example – RSS readers – noting that there were so many and they were all re-inventing the same features over and over again.

I took Dave’s advice very seriously, and began to research every company I could find. I started with Technorati and Bloglines, and went from there. Within a week I realized that there was no good blog or other reference site for these companies, and that the research I was doing could be put to good use. So I started TechCrunch and started writing about the companies that I was studying.

The site grew slowly at first. I remember my excitement when I first reached a number of RSS subscribers that was higher than the number of feeds I read daily. When TechCrunch hit about 500 readers I realized the crude design was holding it back. I hired Fred Oliveira to redesign the site. Clearly, a cleaner and more usable design was a good thing. Readership continued to grow.

Another high point was when Cnet named TechCrunch a top 100 blog. Readership sure jumped that day.

So, why am I starting CrunchNotes? The main reason is that I find that sometimes, I want to talk about more than just new companies and products. Sometimes I have something to say about what’s going on in the blogosphere or the world. Sometimes I want to link to something interesting another blogger has written, but which has nothing to do with new companies. I found that doing that on TechCrunch tends to dilute the core value of that blog.

And so I am starting CrunchNotes, a companion blog to TechCrunch. It’s a place that I can write about things that interest me but that doesn’t belong on TechCrunch.