The Map Room. Finally... something good has come from a newsfilter post! In a trackback to a recent post on something-or-other (aren't they all the same?) I discovered a gem of a site dedicated to maps.[MetaFilter] 
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TypePad is a go. My TypePad weblog is live and thanks to design help from Mena, it "feels" like this blog, but is light and clean. Let me know what you think. I'm considering making TypePad my main blog. I'll cross post for awhile, but lets keep the comments on this blog so I can keep them in one place until I do the final export. [Joi Ito's Web Lite] 
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Blog Easy. Yet another weblog hoster [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
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RSS Subscriptions Harmonizer. Dave Winer's RSS subscriptions harmonizer is an outstanding idea. I hope it sees some rapid support. As anyone who's ever played around with different aggregators knows, there is a considerable investment of time in getting all your subscriptions loaded and organized -- even if there is an import wizard. A harmonizing web service will be a major boon to RSS usage across both business and personal arenas.

Now, can we do it without the tech community turning it into a goat rodeo?

subs harmonizer. I've been tracking Dave's work on his subscriptions harmonizer. I haven't delved into all the details yet, but It seems to me this is the perfect tool for weblogs in a place of business.

If a group of people within a company synchronize their RSS subscriptions with a harmonizer, a single weblog page can be generated on the fly that represents the interests of the entire group. Powerful mojo. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

[b.cognosco] 
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Five Key Questions About Business Blogs. E-mail marketing outfit MarketingProfs.com has published an article on business blogging geared to the e-mail marketer. Little new here to those who are well-versed in the blogoshpere, but it is an interesting look into the minds of those who have, until now, relied on e-newsletters and other e-communications as their primary communications vehicles.

[...] Put it this way: scarcely 10 years ago you might have asked, [base "]Will email replace the phone, fax and postal mail as the preferred means of business communication?[per thou] Of course, we exclaim in hindsight.

So might it go with blogs. [More...]

[b.cognosco] 
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All the new kids on the blog [MSNBC] 
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The Emerging Sixth Estate.
Blogging News
An emerging sixth estate in Global governance and influence is arising - the blogosphere. In this article I argue the case for the blgosophere being an emerging sixth estate rather than being an extension of the fourth estate - mass media. Some of you are perhaps sniggering and questioning "Blogs a power? Those personal journals that contain personal thoughts, journals about looking after kids, and personal biased crap?" Yes, these personal journals are becoming a real influence in global governance. [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] 
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10,000 reasons to read Adam Curry. Adam Curry has revealed an interesting investment he made in UserLand 18 months ago: He paid $10,000 for his weblog to be included in Radio's default RSS subscriptions. Now he thinks the Echo Project's work is undoing his canny marketing:

I will again invest $10k in aggregator default placements this year, but I will spread it around, to all developers who adhere to RSS2.0. Include (N)echo and you're out of luck.

I don't understand his concern. If an aggregator can read a format, so can its users. Radio could dump RSS 2.0 for another format overnight and Curry would still get what he paid for: a built-in audience of aggregator users.

This deal is likely to take some heat because it was never disclosed to Radio users that Curry bought his way onto the list. Though I'm surprised to learn this, Web browsers have been selling positions in their default bookmarks for years. [Workbench] 
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Revolution in Iran.

A revolution is in the making in Iran tonight organized by young Iranians fighting for freedom.  Tommorrow, July 9th, is going to be a date to remember in Iranian history, hopefully start of the path to freedom.

• Tommorrow...
• This just in from Iran...

Tommorrow, we'll find out if those ellipses are blood drops for young Iranians and tear drops for rest of the world.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
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If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it - OR - I'm OK, You're OK

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change links to Joel Spolsky's month ago article on why he doesn't like the VC model. I missed commenting on it the first time, so here's my second chance:

First, if you look past some of the cant ("secretive world of VC"; "classic VC myopia"), we actually agree on a lot. Joel believes that VC is a bad fit for many software companies. I have suggested that many businesses don't fit the VC model, and specifically mentioned software businesses that don't have an organic need for a lot of capital as one class. I also describe a version of the 'make the deal bigger by throwing money at it' syndrome that Joel decries. Sometimes you can create barriers by aggressive spending; often you're just burning cash. A fund will have a 'VC crisis', if that is the only kind of deal it's doing.

Which gets on to another point of partial agreement. Joel points out that VCs are largely organized to say 'no' efficiently. Right on. I've made the same point here before. What Joel calls myopic just looks like smart business from this end, though his numbers are a bit off. It seems not to have occured to him that what we're doing may in fact be designed, in part, to reject the kind of companies that he thinks shouldn't take venture capital anyway. At least our scoresheet has several items that try to diagnose low capitalization, cash flow oriented, long or no exit companies.

Where Joel's likely off base is in some of his numbers. His counter to the aggressive growth scenario is this:

A	Probability of Success	80%
B	How rich I would get	$100,000,000
C	Expected Return (A x B)	$80,000,000

Now assuming Joel thinks he'll own the whole company under this model, and it's worth 2x revenues when he finally liquidates (or that's the present value of the profit stream), then he's suggesting that there are number of minimum $50m revenue opportunities going begging for products. Let me suggest that unless the company in question has some extremely high entry barriers, like strong IP or market segment lock in, that it will shortly have more competitors than flies on sh**, and may not have enough marketing budget to avoid a market share game. Now there are undoubtedly many fine product opportunities out there, which will support companies that make both customers and producers happy, but this is an unrealistic picture of the upside of internally funded growth.

Blog authoring tools are a good example of this effect in operation. I have no reason to believe that CityDesk is anything but a fine product, since Den Beste is not an easy reviewer. However, it's already obviously locked into a market share game with MoveableType, blogger, Radio, and soon AOL and all of your favorite software vendors and service providers. This is typical in a category where the organic barrier to entry is low, and the first mover doesn't manage to 'kill the category'. If Dave had the largest role in defining the category, he certainly hasn't managed - or perhaps wanted - to dominate it. And as for inherent barrier: Come on. I don't care how many TLA defined feeds and outputs you hang onto it. At the end of the day, a blogging system is a light weight database with a presentation layer and perhaps some authoring policy. How many man-years is that really, even if you're foolish enough to build from the ground up? Here's my bet that blogging will end up being a feature that accretes onto existing products and services in the middle to long run, though good fun and hopefully some cash flow and profits will be had along the way. If that's where Joel is really getting, I'm there already.

(The title of this post, BTW, is to be read in the voice of Edward Everett Horton.) [Due Diligence] 
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Welcome, AOL. Seriously.

The imminent arrival of AOL and its users in the blogosphere has now been widely noted. Being late to the party due to blowing off for the long weekend, I'll just toss in a few observations from my past in the online services world:

Clay Shirky's post highlights the likelihood that AOL's implementation will lean toward the community, rather than light weight publishing, side of blogging. This makes sense for a couple of reasons:

Historically, what was originally QuantumLink and later America Online grew by attracting underserved, dispersed communities such as gays and seniors, and connecting them online. While this may have been deleted from the official genesis legend, these genes may still lurk in the DNA of the big media company of today.

Pragmatically, a community approach is more likely to create switching costs for AOL's blog users. Start with the hassle of moving a tightly knit group to another service. Consider what other features might be enabled if the users are all authenticated within the AOL network. Higher switching costs translate directly to lower churn numbers for AOL subscribers, which is becoming more important to the company as the market for Internet access and aggregation saturates.

One point of marketing dissonance appears in Jeff Jarvis' otherwise excellent discussion of the AOL entry:

But AOL -- and every other online business -- also has a strategic challenge to make sure that they stay ahead of where weblogs are headed.

Wrongo. AOL's subscribers are now mid- to late-adopters. AOL is now a market follower, not leader. Evidence, from Shirky:

For example, they are calling the product "Journal," as only 18% of their audience recognizes the word weblog.

The wider blogosphere will work out the nuances of the medium. AOL will copy what fits their business model and market. [Due Diligence] 
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Vernon Chee shares, in a USA Today piece on blogs, an anecdote about how his mother began tuning in to his blog and called him to say, "Your entries just brought back a lot of memories âo[per thou] a lot of good memories, some bad memories. I'm learning a lot more about you than what I knew before." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
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Mitch Ratcliffe on media consumption: "We own our attention, but we contribute to a rich fabric of stuff--some content, some conversation, some conflagration and flame-fest. And, amazingly, we have a voice as large as any media company..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
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Rise of the blogs:
It's a strange form of legitimacy - perhaps even a coming of age - when a group of internet users are important enough to get their own version of Google. [The Sydney Morning Herald via Six Apart] 
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Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "Before posting an entry in his personal weblog, Robert Scoble always pauses and considers how he would justify its contents to three people: his boss, his wife and Steve Ballmer." What about me? [Scripting News] 
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Andrew Sullivan, in criticizing Ann Coulter: "In the ever-competitive marketplace of political ideas - in a world of blogs and talk radio and cable news - it's increasingly hard to stand out." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
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Dave Winer: "Some news: John Robb is leaving UserLand... Thanks John for all your help, and best wishes to you and your family for much continued success." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
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Blogs als Tools. Schöne PPT-Präsentation zu Blogs und dem Einsatz als Web-Tools, in diesem Fall geht es um Buch(Lese)-Zirkel. Das PPT-File ... [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
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Blogs und Unternehmenskommunikation.. Motiviert durch die Plage des internen Unternehmens-Spam etc. hab ich dieses Modell (Weblogs als E-Mail-Backup bzw. Ersatz... [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
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Howard Dean: Weblogs und Wahlkampf. Tatsächlich beachtliche Geschichte. Dean nutzt Web-Publishing und das Internet Potential des  Group-forming . :: Unbe... [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
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Buttonmania [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
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Language Barriers in BlogLand.

Phil Wolff's blog have many interesting posts about blog related stats.  Did you know there are 100,000 polish blogs of which 62% are by women?  How about those 12,000 Iranian blogs? 

Best find on my first visit today was the reference to great post by Maciej Ceglowski on measuring how high the language barriers are in BlogLand backed up with numbers provided by his crawlers.  Posts like that deserves wider distribution that what he got.  Pass it on.  To entice you, here is the lure:

"links tend not to cross language boundaries. If you look at all the outgoing links from English language blogs, only about 1.75% point to a non-English weblog. In the reverse direction, however, the figure is much higher. A full 7% of links from non-English-language weblogs point to an English site." - Maciej Ceglowski

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
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Dear Abby tackles blogging issues.

Too funny! [megnut] 
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AOL Shows Blogging Tools; What About MSN?. AOL is demoing its forthcoming blogging tools to a chosen few. What will AOL's move mean to Microsoft? Redmond has yet to announce plans to add blogging tools to its MSN platform. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley] 
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Apple bloggers.... I got asked this week who at Apple were writing blogs. I knew of a couple, but I didn't think... [Teal Sunglasses] 
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WebStatistics. WebStatistics [0xDECAFBAD] 
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Quick links.

• Teal Sunglasses: Dear Dave...
• XPath

[0xDECAFBAD] 
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BarnRaising:
My latest analogy for good community spirit. Everyone getting together to help one person out with only the expectation that, if the tables were turned, the beneficiary would do the same for anyone else. -- SunirShah [MeatballWiki] 
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WikiLog: an attempt to synthesize the best aspects of WikiWikis and WebLogs. 
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d2r: why (not)echo is important - part 2 [0xDECAFBAD] 
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WeblogWithWiki. WeblogWithWiki [0xDECAFBAD] 
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Things That Never Were. Things That Never Were is a new novel from an ex-weblogger. First it was Cory and now Matthew. Who's next and are there any other webloggers turned authors? Not the other way around. [MetaFilter] 
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Photoblog your life. Sept. 11, 2003: Photoblog your life

"I've been thinking about September 11th. I've been thinking about the United States response - The Patriot Act. Invading Afganastan & Iraq. Death. Fear. Oppression.

It seems to me that this is NOT the America I want the world to know. So I propose a blogwide Photoblog your Life day on September 11th. Take your camera with you. Take pictures. Show the world your life. Show the world your daily delights. Show the world that we choose life, happiness and freedom."

[via Big Pink Cookie] [MetaFilter] 
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Syndicating Whuffie 
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Cataclysm in 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] 
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How Google Works. There are many sites out there they can tell you how Google works. They will give you pointers and tips and facts and opinions and all of these will supposedly help you climb up the search ladder of fame. Well... [Artima Web Buzz] 
3:03:18 AM      comment []   trackback []