Tuesday, July 8, 2003

Pad as a new term for Blog? Steve IM'ed me the other night with questions and concerns about the term blog in the name BloggerJack. His points are valid (summary = blog is an ugly word), but I countered that the term blog is being used everywhere, and as a new company, we would serve ourselves well to leverage the meme. Now, just days later, Jack Mottram suggested a term that I kinda like... pad. ...Also, I'm sure that Pad is destined become a standard synonym for Weblog. This is a good thing on two counts: firstly, since it means both 'home' and 'place to write,' Pad reflects the evolution of personal publishing beyond simply logging the web; secondly, it doesn't sound completely bloody stupid when spoken, which Blog undoubtedly does. The dual meaning is very nice. The downside is that, in the context of weblogs, it would then have three meanings. For good or bad, "weblog" and "blog" catch the listener's ear or the reader's eye, and establish a clear context, in a way that "pad" might not. 3:26:10 PM

SELL out to Symantec a second time? Something is about to happen to Dave Winer's company UserLand. Ground is shaking in UserLand. John Robb's abrupt departure and blog disappearance smells bad. Dave is hinting at a bigger change that should be "net-net good news for Manila and Radio users and for the weblog community." While going open source is a possibility, "We weren't ready to announce, John surprised us" seems to point to a buyout. My list of suspects with recent news about AOL's entry into BlogLand are: Yahoo Adobe Symantec Macromedia Intriguing drama unfolding... [Don Park's Daily Habit] Dave sold his company - Living Videotext - to Symantec back in 1988 - so that would be really weird for him to do that - again. And it's just not clear that the Userland technology would scale very well - but that doesn't mean it's not worth A WHOLE LOT to somebody. Macromedia could certainly use it. [Marc's Voice] I don't *think* Macromedia would be interested in Userland's technology...? Unless they hoped to rewrite it all in ColdFusion...? But then all you have left is the customer base, and I don't think its that big. While this is all wild speculation, it is clear that UserLand will change next week. Yahoo is the most likely to make a big move into the blogosphere, in answer to Google/Blogger and AOL. 3:11:08 PM