Congratulations to Matt Marshall, who’s left his job as a full time journalist and writer of the popular SiliconBeat blog at the Mercury News to launch VentureBeat. The site, which was created by RubyRedLabs in San Francisco, is well designed and I can tell this will be a daily read in addition to Alarm Clock and other sites covering the venture backed startup world.

We’ll be linking to VentureBeat often at TechCrunch. Welcome to the world of independent journalism, Matt!

We just got an email from Apple regarding a YouTube video reposted on CrunchGear:

VIA E-MAIL

NOT FOR POSTING

Re: Apple Computer Copyrighted Material Illegally Disseminated by Crunchgear.com

To Whom It May Concern:
We represent Apple Computer, Inc. (”Apple”). It has come to our attention that your website, at http://crunchgear.com/2006/08/28/how-expose-works-with-spaces-in-mac-os-x-leopard/, is posting a video demonstrating certain features of Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 (aka “Leopard”). While we appreciate your interest in Leopard, it has not yet been released to the public. The software demonstrated in the video must therefore be running on a pre-release developer’s build of OS X 10.5. All such builds have been distributed to developers under strict terms of confidentiality that prohibit the dissemination of screenshots or other displays of the software. The builds are also copyrighted by Apple, and U.S. copyright law explicitly prohibits unauthorized displays of copyrighted works.

Apple therefore requests that you remove this video from your website and take steps to prevent any further distribution of videos or screenshots of Apple software without Apple’s authorization. If you are represented by counsel, please provide me with the identity of that counsel.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation,

/s/ Ian Ramage

Ian Ramage
O’Melveny & Myers LLP
Embarcadero Center West
275 Battery Street, Suite 2600
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 984-xxxx (direct)
(415) 984-xxxx (fax)
xxxx@omm.com

DMCA Certification: I hereby state, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that your activities are not authorized by Apple, that the information in this notification is accurate, and that I am authorized to act on behalf of Apple in this regard.

This message and any attached documents contain information from the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers LLP that may be confidential and/or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not read, copy, distribute, or use this information. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail and then delete this message.

Ian, it a YouTube video. That’s at www.youtube.com. Get them to take it down if it’s a violation of your IP and it will stop showing at crunchgear and the other sites.

And Ian, when you are done, please take the time to send your client, Apple, a similar email for posting basically the same material on their own site.

Noah Kagen of Entrepreneur 27 is holding a small event at my house this Thursday, August 31. I’m associated with this only in that it is at my house, but it’s going to be a fun event. Noah is bringing in some really good wine and food and will also have a wine tasting challenge.

It’s invite only, but Noah is auctioning off the last ticket on ebay. Just a couple of hours left - the auction ends at 5:30 PM PST tonight.

i’ve had this amazing feeling of calmness all weekend. I’m pretty sure the reason is that I hung out with some really smart people at Foo Camp, slept under the stars in a tent (something I haven’t done in years), and was offline and away from all the TechCrunch stress while I was there.

Getting away from my computer was good for me. I did things I don’t normally do. Like figure out how to put that damn tent together. Or when I built a USB battery powered booster under the watchful eyes of Limor Fried (pictured here). If you want to make one of these yourself, the instructions and kit are available here.

I listened to developers, designers, and entrepreneurs discuss politics, play jam sessions and hack apart Chumby’s. I spent 5 minutes talking with Jeff Bezos, and our entire conversation consisted of how much he likes TechCrunch (15 seconds) and how cool it is that you can buy fresh milk on amazon (4:45). I met dozens of people I know online but never see in person.

It was fun, interesting and peaceful. I loved it. Part of what makes Foo special is that it’s held at O’Reilly’s compound in Sebastopol, well away from the hustle of silicon valley.

Foo Camp is something incredibly special, and I want to thank Tim O’Reilly for inviting me to come. My Foo Camp pictures are here.

While reading Red Herring’s take on the job board proposals being thrown about (see my previous post and comments), I couldn’t help thinking that Om, Jason and I are negotiating through press quotes. Jason has clearly stated his intention to keep his toys to himself and play in his own space, Om’s keeping his options open and I’m just hyping this like hell to anyone who’ll listen. The fact that our job boards aren’t any of our core businesses means we can have a bit of fun with this too. For those of you who are interested, I think this is a fascinating example of “negotiating via the press”.

Update: Mini Om weighs in.

Om Malik launched a job board today. I first found out about this when I called Om a few weeks ago to tell him we were launching the CrunchBoard job board. Om congratulated me, and said he’d cover it, but I could just tell by the way he spoke to me that he had something cooking, too. A few phone calls later and it was confirmed.

One thing we want to do with CrunchBoard is create a decentralized job board for tech. Right now it’s completely centralized, other than the fact that RSS feeds are available if people want to read them in a feed reader or re-post them on a website (like we do on CrunchGear and TechCrunch UK).

I didn’t want it to be centralized, though. The first thing we did when we decided to start building CrunchBoard was ping Jason Fried at 37 Signals to talk to him about partnering with their job board. I imagined an API for entering jobs, and an API for outputting jobs, that could be displayed anywhere. Jason didn’t want to partner beyond having me post his listing on TechCrunch, so we built our own.

When I realized Om was building yet another job board I told him flat out I wanted to partner with him, offering to make CrunchBoard a new company and splitting equity with him 50/50. Hell, we could even rename it to something more neutral. Given that TechCrunch has more traffic than GigaOm right now, and that we had already built and launched the board, I thought that was a fair offer.

Om passed on my proposal, and I’m sure he has his reasons. But in my mind, this is all a very web 1.0 way of thinking. I don’t want to have my own garden, a sort of mini monster.com. I want to be a part of an ecosystem. There’s no way we can compete with the big job boards fighting individual battles. We need to partner, create a distributed system, and win virally.

To start, I think we should create a single widget that shows all of the jobs listed by 37 Signals, Om and CrunchBoard. That’s the right thing to do for the companies. We also need to allow other websites to join the network and get a fair revenue split (read: large majority) for bringing listings or potential employees to the service.

Job boards are trivially easy to build. The hard part is the network effect. Just as blogs are ripping apart big media, a decentralized approach to job listings and other businesses can win, too.

I’m in. Who’s with me?