Michael Boyle's weblog
I don’t read my RSS feeds as much as I used to, and there are a lot of blogs in there that I haven’t actively followed in years – mostly from the very early days of blogging. One such blog is that of Anil Dash – he doesn’t write like he used to either!
However, he published a very good piece at the beginning of October that I think bears some attention: We’re (still) not being alarmist enough about climate change.
something quite unique happened. Evan Williams (CEO of Obvious, co-creator of Blogger) put Odeo up for sale: Obviously: Looking for Odeo’s new home. He followed up with an interesting piece on his weblog about the lack of a marketplace for websites. It’s a very interesting development – Odeo isn’t a runaway success, but it’s not a failure either. It’s a marginally successful site that could, in the right hands, become a very good if not great site.
The traditional approach to unloading a property like that is to hype it beyond recognition until some big company can be goaded into buying it. But that wouldn’t serve Odeo well at all, and so Williams is charting an alternative path. As Anil Dash implies, that Williams has “Thank you” money is both refreshing to see and, ultimately, good for the web and the future of the industry.
How Matt Haughey Beat Google. I think his first conclusion is the most important one, and furthermore it’s something that a lot of people get wrong, even today. This first conclusion is that Google Answers didn’t have a healthy community to leverage – and getting a good reputation in an active community is a much better incentive for something like question-answering than money.
How to keep blogs from scaring the hell out of people. I guess the question for people trying to sell blog services to companies is whether they’re out to impress their client or actually sell something.
accomplished something quite notable today: he managed to subtly get goatse (SFW) into the New York Times. [via Boing Boing. I may be the last one to post this, but still, worthy of note…]
