IE 7 says Scobleizer “not secure”

Juha Saarinen notices that IE 7 says that my blog is not secure. Is it my bad breath? My egotistical rantings? My attempt at defining the undefinable. Speaking of which a bird has been leaving a blog on my windshield lately. How do I know it’s a blog? It’s in reverse-chronilogical order (newest “post” is on top of the older “post”). Oh, and it is even publicly-discoverable. I can even permalink to it, if I had a Flickr photo of it. It must be a blog, right?

But, back to IE 7, not sure why I’m not secure. I’ll try to fix something on my side, if there’s something I’m doing wrong.

Interesting comparison of video game sales

Todd Bishop, in the Seattle PI, compares sales of Xbox 360, PS2, and GameCube sales, both before Xbox 360 came out and after. That reminds me, I gotta get our Xbox back from Patrick so Maryam can play Pacman this weekend. Heheh.

Update: TDavid talks about wading through Seattle’s “Maddeniacs” last night. I love the smile on his son’s face too! Can’t wait to hear the review.

Moving into the Zillow API

Lots of movement on the new Zillow API (130 new sites). The Zillowblog has the details and a list of cool mashups.

Tech Podcasting from Ireland

I love listening to Tom Raftery speak about podcasting and tech. Makes me pine for a pint of Murphy’s stout (local drink in Cork, Ireland). Tom runs the IT@Cork conference and talks about what’s happening in the tech industry in Ireland. Oh, and one of Automattic’s developers, Donncha O Caoimh, lives in Ireland (Automattic makes Wordpress, which is how I publish my blog). I like their “about page.” This interview was done by John Furrier, who gets interviewed by Tom halfway through the interview too and shares a bit about what he’s thinking about for PodTech.

Investing in blogging, part II

Don Dodge answered back my earlier post with another post. Who said blogs aren’t conversational?

He said something interesting: “Advertising is the game, and you need HUGE numbers to make that work.”

Wrong!

I know of a conference that charges $10,000 (or more) to get on stage to talk to about 700 people. Not a huge audience. But they always seem to have a full deck of sessions. That’s an advertising model.

In fact, didn’t the Search Engine Strategies conference sell for tens of millions of dollars? For a tiny audience! And some conferences, like the defunct Comdex (which had an audience smaller than we had at Channel 9) sold for hundreds of millions. Right?

In fact, didn’t 7,000 people come to Microsoft’s conference and they paid more than a grand a piece to be there? Not a huge audience and advertisers paid big bucks to get in front of that audience.

Some blogs (not me, yesterday I had 17,818 HTML views and 30,575 RSS subscribers) already are seeing millions of visitors per day (hello Boing Boing!)

Not to mention that Huffington Post, which is what got the $5 million in funding, is obviously not a single-person blog.

I remember working for a company with a magazine that had tens of millions in revenues and only around 100,000 subscribers.

Translation: get the right audience and you can make things happen.

But, political sites are seeing nice trend lines up and wait until the next Presidential Election!

Speaking of which, most plays of any kind are not bankable. Just ask Bill Gates to take you out to the product graveyard out by building 16 up in Redmond. There are hundreds of products listed there and I can only remember a handful making money. Most aren’t even around anymore.

Something is happening in media and the VCs just want to be involved.

Or, did you miss that Digg has built an audience somewhere around a million per day and it’s not even two years old? Kevin Rose, last week at the TechCrunch party, told me that just their podcast, Diggnation, gets 250,000 downloads per show.

Would you invest in Kevin Rose? I sure would.

There will be more Kevin’s. And Om’s. And Michaels.

Who’s next?

Calling Paul Matteucci

Paul is our VC. He lives upstairs above us in PodTech’s temporary headquarters inside USVP’s headquarters on Sand Hill Road (aka: the money bubble). I’ve just sent him this video from BetterBadNews that calls on Venture Capitalists to compete for their business. Hell, I’m gonna beat him to it. I just called the number and left a message.

Anyway, I love this line from the video: “ScccSssscccoble was going tell everybody about it.” Heheh, I should charge for THAT, if I had any business sense. After all, I just told all my competitors about this cool video show that, if I had any freaking business sense, I should keep as quiet as possible about.

But what fun would that be?

I bet that Venture Capitalists Rick Segal or Fred Wilson or Brad Feld or Jeff Clavier or David Hornick already called them.

The first 60 days of PopCurrent

Take Digg + Ruby on Rails + Entertainment Weekly and add them all up and you get PopCurrent, which is just about 60 days old now. This is site that copies Digg’s look and feel but that focuses on entertainment media rather than tech stories. Lots of entertaining video and podcasts rated here.

I was just talking with master developer Ray Slakinski (he did one of the first podcasting aggregators, iPodderX) and he was showing me around PopCurrent and explaining to me the challenges of running a Web 2.0 business that’s less than two months old.

He says most of his traffic comes from MySpace.

Not much traffic comes from traditional search engines yet, but he notices that he’s seeing growth there. He says he is getting tens of thousands of unique visitors per day. The bands there, he tells me, are always trying to find new ways to get noticed and so they talk up when they are high on PopCurrent. Also, people who have podcasts who might have 500 to 1,000 listeners talk it up as well.

Two programmers, who live in Toronto, did this site in Ruby on Rails. It’s been open since June.

One of his favorite video shows that gets featured on PopCurrent? HopeIsEmo, which is a show done by a goth girl. A sad goth girl. But, it’s funny. Thanks Ray for letting me know about that!

Community + Search = Evaal?

What makes eBay special? To me it’s not the technology, although that’s pretty damn impressive, especially now. But what sets eBay apart is the community of buyer’s and sellers. I was wondering when we’d see a search engine that’d add both a community of recommenders with an indexer like the one Google has and I just saw what could become just that in Evaal.

It’s very raw, and very early, but I like the impulse of Timothy Anyasi, founder of Idpact, Inc. who makes Evaal, a search engine that matches the power of an indexer , along with the community power which makes a better search experience (in theory).

He called me and asked what I thought. Here’s the scenario. You want to search for a Rolodex Watch. Go to Google and instantly get lost. Too many choices. There’s no way for you to pick out who is good, credible, or who won’t steal your money.

So, instead you go to Evaal. Here’s a search on Evaal for “watches.”

Why won’t someone game this and send me to their brother instead of sending me to a good retailer who’ll treat me well? Well, same way you can tell eBay sellers who are good or not. The community rates them.

The problem? There aren’t enough community members. So, most pages don’t have experts to ask.

The other problem with Evaal? The base index isn’t nearly good enough for me to take it seriously and the UI isn’t good enough to get my recommendation (I HATE frames, for instance, and it doesn’t have the polish that a modern Web site requires for a mass audience — they need to hire a designer who can at least get them up to parity with, say, Digg’s UI).

But, this is an interesting idea and one I’d like to see explored.

The advantage for you to get involved early is that if they fix the UI and index issues they’ll start getting an audience and if you’re the first “recommender” on a page you’ll have a lot of power to help refer search users elsewhere.

Why is that important? Well, say you refer someone to a realtor. Did you know that many realtors will pay a referral fee? Same with Amazon. Same with hosting companies and a whole host of businesses.

Interesting idea! I wonder why anyone hasn’t put an eBay style community onto a search engine before?

Content plays; bad investment?

Don Dodge doesn’t understand why anyone would invest $5 million in a blogger.

Here’s a question for Don: would you have invested $5 million in Howard Stern? How about Oprah Winfrey? Martha Stewart? Rush Limbaugh? Jon Stewart? Back when those five people were nobodies?

I would have. Oprah alone is worth more than a billion. Not too shabby of a return. Don’t think any bloggers could become worth that much?

Well, I remember when Rush Limbaugh was a ”nobody” only on one radio station in Sacramento, CA.

Jot updates its wiki service to pass “Blink” test

Why did I like WetPaint and PBWiki? Because they were drop-dead simple to get in and setup. Just enter a URL. I didn’t like Jot because they forced you to look at too many choices before you got to that stage. But, Jot just shipped a new version and WOW it’s a lot better and once you get in it has a ton of features too. I like how it shows a normal, non-geeky user, what’s possible once inside too.

What wiki tool passes your “Blink” test? What is important to you in a wiki tool?

SJSU offers podcasting class (SJ blogger meetup Thursday)

Interesting, my former boss, Steve Sloan, is offering a podcasting class as part of the journalism department at San Jose State University.

I wonder if it would have been better to offer a “multimedia journalism class” instead (which is what this really is)? But that sounds so “old school.”

The skills journalists will need in the future are going to be a lot more varied than just churning out good text. The better journalists are going to understand how to do that, create illustrations (or at least rough drawings that an artist will be able to take and fill out), capture audio, photos, and video, and edit all that together to tell a compelling story on the Web.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you have two journalists of the same quality. One can only do text. But the other one can capture more media. Which one do you expect will get on DIGG?

Anyway, if I were a student I’d be in this class. Why? Because it would help me expand my portfolio that I could show employers. There are VERY FEW journalism jobs available (we keep hearing about newspapers that are laying off journalists) so if you want to be considered for one of those jobs you have to have a better portfolio than the next person. Especially if you want to work online (TechCrunch, Om Malik, and Huffington Post are all hiring).

One of the things we’re working to do with our audio journalists at Podtech is to get them to do text, photos, and a little bit of video so that their stories are more likely to get noticed.

So, who’ll get hired into “new journalism” outfits? Let’s say Digg was going to hire some professional journalists. Don’t you think they’d be more likely to hire someone who could do more media? I do.

Oh, there’s a San Jose blogger meetup on Thursday. I don’t think I’ll be able to get there, unfortunately, had something else going on that evening already.

One difference between Seattle and Silicon Valley? There are a TON more events. It’s amazing how many more things there are to do here at night.

Another difference? When you enter Freeway 280 doing close to 80 mph and a cop passes you at around 90 mph, you know something is different here. In Washington no one drives over 60 (it seems) and if you do you will get a ticket. Not in Silly Valley.

Microsoft helping Firefox team?

There’s a minor dustup because it’s been reported that the Firefox team was invited to visit Microsoft up in Redmond. Lots of conspiracy theories.

But this demonstrates that the religious don’t understand how Microsoft works and why it got big.

I remember visiting with developers from all of Microsoft’s fiercest competitors at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. Google. Oracle. Sun. Apple.

This isn’t the first trip that members of the Firefox team have made to Microsoft, either. I remember being in some top secret and high-level meetings that I wish I could tell you more about — but my NDA still holds.

Anyway, the reason Microsoft does this? Because by helping its competitors it helps itself. Think about this: if Windows is the best place to run Firefox, won’t you be more likely to use Windows?

And, for the Firefox team (or any team, really) they get some deep technical help from people who really understand Windows, plus they can go visit the developers who work on Windows and build relationships that are invaluable to understanding things.

Oh, and Firefox team members can even work with IE team members to help make sure that both products work the same, which makes our lives better.

Thomas Hawk’s photos from last night

The video camera in these photos gave away a little bit of what Thomas Hawk and I were doing. I was videoing him as he made photos. And, boy, was the night perfect for making a bunch of great images!

Hopefully my video comes out as well too. This will be part of PodTech’s new tech-oriented video show that’ll start sometime in September, not quite sure of the starting date yet.

You can see the originals here on Zooomr and he gives more details on the evening over on his blog.

New York Times for your mobile phone

I love Dave Winer’s trend of turning sites into mobile phone friendly sites for me — a few minutes ago he turned on the New York Times. I’m not sure why I like this better than a full blown aggregator, but I do. I’ve been playing with this for a few days and it instantly became part of my reading behavior. When I was in the hospital room with Maryam’s mom I could just go to the New York Times and it came down fast and in a readable form.

Microsoft fights for its reputation, where’s Apple and Google?

OK, despite what you think of me for being a mondo butthead on Sunday, I noticed one thing: Microsofties are quite willing to engage and fight for their product/service’s reputation. It’s quite interesting that Microsoft is one of the only tech companies (Sun and/or Yahoo are also pretty engaging) where employees are really willing to come out and have real conversations. I might not always agree with them, nor they with me, but I do respect the fact that they are here and are willing to get into the mud to defend their product.

So, why do we give Google and Apple such great reputations when they don’t engage with bloggers (and, actually, the “professional” journalists tell me that Apple and Google are harder to deal with too)?

Is it better for a company to play aloof and stay above it all and not engage in the conversation? After all, why do Google and Apple have such great reputations, especially with bloggers? (Go to a blogger conference and you’ll see more Google and Apple products used by bloggers than are used in the mainstream world).

Thanks Don for the nice words!

Been taking a lot of crap for my egotistical elitist dreck on Sunday so it was nice to see what Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug said about what he thought of me after spending an hour or so with Jeremy Wright and me on Saturday.

John posted his Second Life “training” video

I talked about the meeting I had with John Hartman yesterday and how he’s using machinima to build corporate training experiences. He just posted a short video that gives you some idea of what he’s able to do.

Stanford hospital invaded by “smart” cows

I was over at Stanford University Hospital today visiting Maryam’s mom, who had knee surgery. Anyway, two weeks ago they computerized their patient records. They have these portable data systems, all hooked in via wifi, all running Windows XP. They call them “cows.” Each one has a unique name. A nurse uses them to track patient data. Doctors can dial into the “cow” from his/her desk. Pretty cool stuff happening in hospitals lately.

Here Daisy Martinez, nurse at the hospital, shows off her “cow.”

Join us at Lunch 2.0, September 12 at Hitachi Data Systems in SJ

If you’re in Silicon Valley, this should be a more manageable and geeky event than last Friday’s big TechCrunch party. Hope to see you there.

Photo walking with Thomas Hawk

I’m spending the evening with Thomas Hawk learning about the photo world. He’s one of the most talented photographers I’ve seen, so wanted to follow him around as he took photos. Tonight we spent a few hours underneath the Golden Gate bridge. He’ll have some of the photos up later.

He’s the kind of evangelist I hoped I would be: an authority on everything photo. Including all of his competitors like Flickr, Picasa, Smug Mug, Riya, Tabblo, Vizrea, Web Shots, Photo Bucket, FotoLog, and others.

He works for Zooomr (three “o”s), but his regularly posts photos to Flickr and other sites. He knows, for instance, that photographers will get more traffic from Google Images than other image search sites (he tries to get his photos listed on them all).

We started talking about Zooomr, which is developed by a single person (Kristopher Tate) and I asked him why he joined up with Kristopher. The answer: because Kristopher added a feature (trackbacks) in one hour when other photo sharing sites wouldn’t do it after months of begging (they still don’t have trackbacks).

Their latest feature? Photo portal notes. Coming tomorrow. Thomas tells me that feature didn’t exist on any planning board before last Friday (Kristopher thought it up on the way to the TechCrunch party last Friday).

Anyway, Thomas told me that he knows developers at all the photo sharing sites and that they tell him that their main problems are keeping up with the huge increases in traffic (doubling small numbers isn’t that hard to keep up with, but when you double millions of users that’s a HUGE problem to work around).

So, it’s very easy right now for Kristopher to add new features, but he hasn’t hit that scaling wall that’ll keep him busy adding servers and building a team to deal with data centers.

Anyway, thanks Thomas for the great photo walk and an insight into your creative process.