Posted by mark.
Jul
24
Posted by mark.
Looks like my choice to use Wordpress.org on my own servers for my personal blog was a good one. Typepad has been down since 1:50pm. Unfortunately that means both Geojoey and Linebuzz corporate blogs are down.
Dear TypePad member,
The TypePad service is currently unavailable due to power issues at
our co-location facility. This means that the TypePad application and
your TypePad blog are not reachable at this time. This began at
approximately 1:50 pm Pacific Daylight Time today, Tuesday July 24
2007.
We are …
Jul
24
Posted by mark.
UPDATE: This article generated over 5,000 page views in under 24 hours, so I’ve posted a follow-up interview with Tony Wright, RescueTime’s Founder & CEO.
I’m participating in a closed Beta of Rescuetime.com and installed the software on Sunday. Yesterday sat down at my desk for 10 hours and then hit the site. Here are the results:
All I can say is, I was floored that after 10 hours I’d used less than half my time effectively.
Rescuetime lets you tag apps, …
Jul
23
Posted by mark.
Rob Malda (aka cmdrtaco), the founder of Slashdot.org has written a rather schizophrenic piece on Slashdot about Alexa. He spends most of the article beating up Alexa, but is sure to include 5 links to the website in the article – two of them specifically asking people to install the Alexa toolbar.
A while ago Digg passed Slashdot in traffic. (I’ve written about this before) An article covering the phenomenon got Dugg and thousands of Digg users clicked the link to …
Jul
23
Posted by mark.
Starting a software business? Looking for a software engineering process? You can spend a month getting your head around one of these:
Agile software development
Crystal Clear
Extreme programming
Lean software development
ISO 12207
Rational Unified Process
CMM
ISO 15504
Or.. 2 seconds learning the Nike method:
Jul
23
Posted by mark.
Don Dodge from Microsoft’s emerging business team summarizes the Patent Reform Act of 2007 that just passed the House Judiciary Committee.
Damages are limited to the value added over existing technology. This bill would require the courts to look at the “free market” value of the patent if it were licensed in an “arms length” transaction. A very small win for the little guy – now instead of paying $600 Million to settle a patent lawsuit, you only pay the value …
Jul
22
Posted by mark.
Stats since reviving my dusty old blog last week. Still no SE traffic – in fact I’m still getting traffic for pages from my old blog that don’t exist anymore. What really surprises me is the avg time on site. But I guess that’s how long I spend on most blogs – I like to think I’m a fast reader but I’m not.
Jul
22
Posted by mark.
This little guy quietly spun this masterpiece while I was snoozing on the couch below him last night – and he got me thinking about The Web and what the word really means these days. Perhaps I’ve been in the entrepreneurial game for too long now, but it’s beginning to mean:
Design
User interfaces
SEO
SEM
Traffic
Competitive analysis
Bounce rates,
Return rates,
Content optimization
etc…etc…
…when it really means one thing:
COMMUNICATION
Whether it’s buyers communicating with sellers or mining the worlds collective knowledge via search or blog trackbacks or inline …
Jul
22
Posted by mark.
I’m not a copyright nazi and I’m all for sharing. But it really pisses me off when I see people plagiarize my blog entries verbatim without even giving a link back to the source and without adding so much as a single sentence of their own content.
Add a couple of sentences of your own and you can call it a mashup or use two sources and you can call it research.
Om Malik also had a run-in with content thieves a …
Jul
21
Posted by mark.
I just put my wallet through the wash. AAAAAAAH!!
Jul
21
Posted by mark.
UPDATE: Changed the title after realizing I’m referring to a niche within startups.
John Cook, one of my favorite Seattleites, has a post on his blog about yet another home office no money startup that got bought out for a few million. There is a growing realization that getting early funding if you’re a developer building a consumer web application is a very bad idea.
You don’t need the money (hosting is cheap, your time is free, etc…)
You don’t need the pat …