Frank Gruber posted a review of the online feed readers last night at TechCrunch and, as expected, there’s plenty of controversy in the comments. Thanks, Frank, for taking the time to do this research and review. Come back anytime. 
By the way, Frank’s analysis left Newsgator’s online product looking fairly bad. We had a discussion with CTO Greg Reinacker this morning and Frank updated the chart based on that conversation. I will say that personally I am now a user of NetNewsWire for my Mac and it’s flawless. Perfect. And I’m happy to pay the $20 for it.
Ouriel broke the news on Typepad’s new widgets feature to easily add functionality to websites. He also compares Typepad’s widgests to WordPress.com’s recent similar offering.
I’m all for anything that makes blogging easier for the masses, and Typepad and WordPress are leading the charge here. Widgets, which are bundles of functionality and require zero developer skills to integrate, are important features to give these masses the tools they need to publish professional looking sites.
Just give this a try when you have a few moments to laugh:
blogfinder (beta) is an experimental web 2.0 hub that connects influential early-opinion-leaders via a transparent, ajax-founded, tagging/detagging framework that is entirely based on documented hyper-neural, multi-threaded, semantic progression algorithms, collective global intelligence, and existing, conversation-led, social-media folksonomies.
Nice one, Valleywag.
My friend Richard MacManus has been at this whole blogging thing for 4 years – since March 22, 2002. How he can stay so prolific, and keep the quality so high, after such a long time is beyond me. He must love what he does, I guess. Keep it up, Richard!
Steve says some nice things about me and then proceeds to use me as a club that he hits Microsoft over the head with. Thanks, Steve?
Bored wasn’t the right word at all to describe my lunch with Bill Gates last week. Rather, I think we failed to engage his interest on a very deep level. He didn’t know much about us, we were too much in shock to ask real questions. Given time, I think the conversation would have improved.
A company that I’ve written about on TechCrunch sent me an email requesting help with a new project they are working on. Details are below. The company is willing to pay a fee for time.
We are about to release a large scale system that is pushing a major mySQL 5 cluster (500k hits a sec) – and basically we are looking for a guru that has some experience in mySQL 5 clustering that can validate our method – I thought one of your web2.0 companies might have some experience with this that we could run some questions by! Email schoettle@gmail.com if you might have any interest in checking it out!
Steve and I recorded a three part Gillmor Daily the other day after my Mix 06 experience. He wastes no time saying I’ve been “Boned by the Borg” (meaning I love Microsoft too much), and tries unsucessfully to defend his attacks against my brilliant discourse. Part 1 is here. Parts 2 and 3 to come.
I attended Mix ’06 this week and had a pretty damn good time, too. Dave Winer says that the conference didn’t make much of an impression in the blogosphere, and that Microsoft only “went with safe bloggers” at the event.
Yes, I take offense at this. I don’t think of myself as a safe blogger. I’m an unpredictable, sometimes shocking, occasionally intimidating and basically completely out-of-control blogger. Yeah, I’m a blogger on the edge. Who knows what I’ll say next, it could be anything. (ok, kidding, but seriously, calling me a safe blogger is like a girl saying you’re a “really good friend” – it sucks).
So Dave, why didn’t you just go? You could have taught us softies a lesson in real blogging.
iTunes made our new TalkCrunch weekly podcast a “new and notable” podcast today, and it’s risen to #21 on the Technology Top 100 list after two episodes. The format seems to work, and we are having a hell of a lot of fun bringing on startup founders and other insiders and recording these shows each week. We recorded the third episode this morning with the Amazon S3 Grid Storage guys, and it’ll be up in the next couple of days. If you’d like to subscribe to the feed, it’s feeds.feedburner.com/Talkcrunch.
Robert Scoble gave me a huge present today (he writes about it here) – lunch with Bill Gates at Mix 06. All Robert told me (and two others – Albert Lai and Lynda Weinman) was to show up at a certain room at noon for a cool lunch. I was a bit preoccupied with a panel I was speaking on at 1:30 on business models for web 2.0 companies, and so didn’t give it much thought.
I knew something was up when I arrived because there was very heavy security, and then I was told that Bill Gates would be joining us. I asked a few questions, specifically about what Microsoft’s plans are around an online version of Office. Bill responded at length without really giving an answer. He did say that he thought people were too infatuated with the thought of an online version of Office, but that they were really focused on the idea of cloud storage for office files. This fits right in with their strategies around Office Live, of course (my posts on Office Live are here).
There were three pictures of me with Bill – which I’ve put up on flickr. Ok, yes, I was starstruck. Thank you very much Robert for putting this together!
Congratulations to Garry Wiseman and the rest of the Live.com Expo team on the New York Times story today.
Nice picture, Garry. My TechCrunchposts on Expo are here.
What’s a good way to get a story onto the home page of Digg? Write a story about Digg.
But in all seriousness, Digg IS driving a ton of traffic. What a model.
It’s funny that Martin Wells of Tangler brought up the idea of a TechCrunch Web 2.0 Award Party. I’ve been planning on doing this some time, probably about mid year.
This will be a great event, and an opportunity to really celebrate all of the wonderful innovations created by web 2.0 companies that have made our lives better on the Internet.
We’ll need a bigger and better venue than my house for this, and I have some good ideas.
Details to follow.
UPDATE: Supr.c.ilio.us has a number of suggestions for award categories (very funny):
* Best private Beta waiting list
* Best Google Maps mashup we never really needed
* Best del.icio.us clone
* Best remake of a Web 1.0 .com
* Best launch party
* Best rumored Google feature
* Best Web 2.0 name
* And, of course, the special achievement awards for the Fastest Flip and Longest Running Acquisition Rumors.
Steve Gillmor just pointed this out on the Gillmor Gang (recording now, up later): The New York Times is linking to Dave Winer’s blog at the end of an New York Times op-ed piece written by Esther Dyson.
As far as I know this is the first time that the NYT has added related blog links below a story.
This is an interesting development, and timely given Murdoch’s recent statements about the future of traditional media.
Wow, Nick Bradbury took a post right out of my head – he wrote exactly what I was thinking. I have nothing to add except complete agreement (ok, well I do have something to add, see the end of this post). Dave and Steve are my friends and I always stick by my friends.
Nick’s post:
Sticking up for my friends
I normally try to avoid getting into public battles, but today I need to make an exception. Yesterday Rogers Cadenhead blogged about a letter sent to him by Dave Winer’s attorney, which caused a bit of an uproar in RSS circles. I honestly have no idea who is right or wrong in this case, and I’ve never had a reason to distrust Rogers, so I’m not going to take sides in this issue. But I was truly bothered by the number of comments made before Dave had given his side of the story. How can anyone possibly take sides when only one side has made their case? The mob mentality shown here, in a word, sucks, and shows why the blog world is no better than mainstream media when it comes to fact-checking.
Also, Steve Gillmor has recently made a couple of rambling posts that suggest he’s not exactly happy with the goings-on in the world of attention. For the record, Steve, you’re the person who introduced me (and certainly countless others) to the idea of attention, and I’ll always give you credit for your pioneering role, no matter how cranky you get.
The only thing I will add is that I was part of the weblogs.com transaction and was also very dissapointed with Rogers Cadenhead’s performance. I have no information on the second part of the dispute.
Hey John, congratulations on raising $5.5 million in your Series A round. A year ago we were just talking about all of this Web 2.0 stuff, now you are leading the pack. Well done!
My Friend Steve Gillmor will be moderating an excellent panel on attention on Thursday 3/16. Steve is the co-founder of the AttentionTrust and co-creator of the original Attention.xml specification. For information on the event and registration, see Jeff Clavier’s post. The event is being held at AOL’s silicon valley headquarters in Mountain View.
I am happy to announce the launch of a new podcast blog – TalkCrunch. Each week we’ll be posting a new episode, featuring founders of companies we’ve written about the previous week.
For our inagural episode, we invite Ethan Stock, Founder of Zvents and Narendra Rocherolle, Founder of 30boxes, to discuss Google’s new Calendar product, to be called “CL2″. We also talk about how Zvents and 30Boxes will (somehow) find a way to compete as the big guys enter the space with next generation calendar and event search products. Also participating are Nik Cubrilovic and Keith Teare, who will be regulars on the show. I’m also hoping to get Jeff Clavier to occasionally sit in.
We are hosting the podcast files on PodServe, which I wrote about here. The site design for TalkCrunch was done by Rachel Cunliffe, the founder of cre8d design, a web studio which focuses on blog design and community websites.
The feed for TalkCrunch is feeds.feedburner.com/Talkcrunch.
More on Memeorandum.
Steve Rubel sent this to the web 2.0 workgroup. I scored a 35…some of them are actually quite hard.
