hello there! if you're new here and like what you read, you may want to grab the rss feed so you can always be up to date. thanks for visiting!

i completely agree, the a-list bloggers are slacking off, stealing your ideas and reposting them as their own content, they don’t deserve the attention or the money, blah blah blah blah blah… what the hell are the b-list bloggers doing about it? apart from bitching and moaning about the a-list bloggers i mean.

dare obasanjo makes a half-decent point (so does mike), but whining about it isn’t going to solve anything. unsubscribe from the feeds you think are useless and stop patronizing their blogs. even though i think it’s a bit extreme to say that a-list bloggers are full of it, if you think that’s the case, why don’t i see you writing the content you think is missing rather than just complaining about it? every a-list blogger had to start somewhere; most of them weren’t born with a silver spoon - and if you stop wasting your time with this whining, who knows, this time next year someone might be whining about you not ‘getting it’.

as for the later half of your list of gripes, here’s what i have to say about it ‘pure rubbish’ (well almost pure, you got the part about pownce largely being a twitter knock-off right). and you’re right, techmeme isn’t perfect, for some reason they felt that it would be useful to feature your post.

i was doing some research for an article earlier today and had to log into mybloglog to check something. this was the first time in over 6 months (maybe more) that i logged into the service that i have come to find well-conceived but poorly implemented.

as if the service’s ongoing battle with spammers wasn’t enough of a headache, mybloglog has decided to pride itself on its stupidity. this is an email i got from them today:

Hi Muhammad!

Part of what makes MyBlogLog so special is our ability to automatically add you to communities in which you have shown a repeated interest. We have just added you to the following communities:

1) MyBlogLog

http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/mybloglog/

Bonus — The “Hot in My Communities” box on your My Home page will keep getting better and better with each community you join.

Note: If you decide one or more of these communities is not for you, simply visit that community’s page on MyBlogLog and click the “Leave Community” button.

Rock on,
MyBlogLog

now wait a minute! part of what makes you special is that you can go into my account and without my knowledge or permission add me to communities that you think i’m interested in? you’ve got to be kidding me. it’s been so long since the last time i logged into the service that i don’t even remember. and you are telling me that i have showed a repeated interesting in a community and therefore you are going to make the decision on my behalf and add me to that community?

and as for the “if you decide one or more of these communities is not for you…” part, how about not making the decision for me to begin with and letting me add myself to the communities that i want? that way i won’t have to go remove myself from every community you arbitrarily add me to.

tony has been pondering a stupid question: when will having a business plan matter? he’s talking, of course, about new web startups that are getting funding without a business plan. actually the question isn’t a stupid one at all, rather it’s one that investors are simply not concerned with. should they be? most definitely. why aren’t they then? too much money, too much faith, too much optimism, take your pick.

the guilty parties include not only venture capital firms funding the projects (like Union Square Ventures that funded twitter) but also include companies like google (youtube) and yahoo (del.icio.us) that ultimately acquire these projects.

The question everyone asks is “What is the business model?” To be completely and totally honest, we don’t yet know.

the venture capital firms that invest in the companies do so without having any idea of how the services will be monetized but hope that at some point in the future a corporate giant will swallow the service up and dish a handsome payout to the venture firm, making monetization its own worry. union square, for example, is investing in twitter and hoping to get lucky the way they did with their investment in del.icio.us when it was bought out by yahoo.

the company that ends up acquiring the startup ultimately does so thinking that they will buy it while its hot and help it grow and deal with monetizing it later. it is more a purchase of internet users’ attention (time and page views) than anything else. from google’s point of view it probably made sense to purchase the attention of 64% of the online video-watching audience and worry about squeezing them for money at a later date.

it doesn’t necessarily make sense, and i don’t see it as the best way to go about investments and acquisitions but when you have that kind of money, you’re probably not thinking like me. for now, both the venture capital firms and the companies making the purchases are just blowing bubbles. we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

josh bernoff’s wrote some rather juvenile commentary a couple days ago on why he is sick of the term “users” and i think its only appropriate that i take a stand for all you users out there. he argues that since everyone is a user we should stop calling them users and ‘backs up’ the argument with the following ironclad logic:

Nobody talks about users of dishwashers, or users of retail stores, or users of telephones. So why are we talking about “users” of computers, browsers, and software?

it only makes sense that i use bernoffian logic to make my counterargument. how about this: since we call people who drive cars, drivers and people who prepare food, cooks, and people who write software, programmers, we should call people who use a particular service or application, users of that service or application.

for some communities there are specific terms, such as digger (for digg), twit (for twitter), but for many others the generic term “user” is used as a synonym for “community member”. you can be a facebooker, a member of the facebook community, or a facebook user. they’re all the same except for the fact that,

1. facebooker - makes you sound like a moron.
2. facebook community member - is unnecessarily cumbersome.
3. facebook user - is familiar and immediately understandable

i’m a user, you’re a user, duncan is definitely a user, and so are millions of others. don’t try to take that away from us.

it’s just one more appalling display of mainstream media’s dismally poor understanding of the tech world. the nytimes has an incredibly fanboyishly written article on pownce, kevin rose’s new startup. take one look and it becomes clear that it is more a plea for traffic from digg than anything else.

jason’s description of pownce as “the hottest startup in Silicon Valley — minutely examined by bloggers, panted after by investors…” couldn’t be far from the truth. yes, there are some that like the service, but many find it to be a twitter-clone with added functionality that e-mail or other services can perform much better, and ultimately the service fails to live up to the hype. as for the investors, the only reason they want to invest is because they don’t want to miss the boat on adventure number 3 (after digg and revision3) and are willing to gamble. i.e. the investors panting is indicative of nothing more than the fact that they have too much money and are willing to throw it away (do i hear bubble?).

he goes on to talk about a purported mystique that was injected into pownce because it is invite only. sure, i can’t disagree much here (i wanted an invite asap too), but come on, most startups nowadays launch in private alpha/beta, and not for the sake of mystique but to fix what’s broken before the site is opened to the masses.

after the initial few paragraphs, the article starts to make more sense as the author concedes that most of the site’s functionality is available elsewhere, but this doesn’t last for long. soon after, the article goes into pownce’s “potential to be powerfully distruptive” because apparently file-sharing on pownce would be hard to police. at this point i started to look hard for any signs of sarcasms or hints at humor because no one in their right mind (or with even the faintest idea of how social networking sites work) would make such an absolutely idiotic remark.

all in all the article is shameful. you really have to start worrying when valleywag is more accurate than a site like nytimes. now i don’t claim to have all the answers but how about this: let mainstream media cover mainstream news, and we will handle the niches?

great news at netscape this week. we have signed up more than 300,000 community members who have contributed more than 500,000 submissions to the site.

the netscape community has reached 200,000 users. the 100,000 milestone was passed on december 24, 2006. the 200,000 milestone was achieved relatively quicker; 50,000 users have been added since march alone (possibly due to the rebirth of my.netscape).

the 200,000th user was babymagicmd22.

in a disappointing display of shoddy journalism, lee gomes published an article in the wall street journal today, with factual inaccuracies and baseless remarks about netscape.com.

but netscape customers apparently were happy to let editors do those chores for them. when they voted, it was with their feet. since september, when netscape made other changes that affected readership, traffic at netscape.com has dropped 28%, reports hitwise.

jason calacanis who was in charge of the team when netscape made the shift to the social media model has a fiery rebuttal to mr. gomes’ claims.

what lee leaves out is that aol moved the netscape email off of the netcape.com domain at the same exact time of the launch and that the email users were exactly 35-40% of the usage at netscape.com.

If you take out that fact netscape’s traffic is actually up. Additionally, we lose the browser bundle deals (hp, etc), and those were +10% of the traffic.

add to that fact that netscape was losing traffic for three straight years and you are left with that fact that the new site stopped the three year slide almost instantly… and started growing the traffic!

assignment zero has finally launched, and i am excited to be a part of the project!

this project offers any willing contributor the chance to do the work of a reporter, writer, researcher or editor in a joint investigation by wired and newassignment.net. when assignment zero ends, newassignment.net will publish the results — articles, interviews and assorted data. wired magazine contributing editor jeff howe will write a feature-length article that will run on wired news.

Check it out.