Writing

There are probably some deep sighs at Six Apart . Hopefully it stays up :).

It appears Typepad has been down for a while (since last night?). On 6/11/04, Everything Typepad! posted a “Scheduled Downtime June 12, 2004” which said the service would be down for maintenance from 12:00am to 2:00am – likely less. It’s 8:12am EST and it’s still down. Oops. In my experience, all hosted software providers experience unexpected downtime – often early as they are ramping their service. I remember Ebay’s 12 hour outage , Critical Path’s two day outage , and a variety of hosting services taking thousands of sites off-line. You can almost see the technical people staring at the computers mumbling to themselves “Oh shit – I can’t get this back up – something’s toast and I can’t figure it out – beepers going off – panic sets in – sweat – focus – the magic reboot dance and incantation – nothing – guess I’ve got to call the boss in the middle of the night and share my stress with him”. ...

I got an email from a close friend last night in response to my recent post of Stratify’s press release.. His comment – which follows – struck a chord. You’ve begun to illustrate one of the problems with blogs… now I go to your blog and half of it is stuff you’re trying to promote (e.g., your companies, WIT). So it’s already only 50% as interesting as it was when you started. Think about it — you actually are a smart guy with stuff to say, and half of what you’re doing is spam. What about people who have nothing to say but lots to sell! ...

Fred Wilson and I have been ranting about the need for better feed stats (in the category of “user analytics”) for a few weeks. We’ve both been using Feedburner and really like it, but it’s still in kindergarden. Dick Costolo at Feedburner just posted a message about Improved Statistics on the Way. Goodness.

Amy and I had dinner at Thalassa in Tribeca with Fred Wilson , Joanne Wilson , Matt Blumberg and his wife Mariquita. No – we didn’t spend the whole night talking about blogs, but we did connect the dots on a bunch of people from Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (Fred, Mariquita, and I went to MIT, Fred and Joanne met there when they were sophomores, and Amy dated a guy in the poker ring,and Matt’s dad was an MIT grad).

I spent a couple of hours hanging out with Jeff Jarvis today. I was originally introduced to Jeff by Fred Wilson a few weeks ago and have been enjoying his blog ever since. My goal for my meeting with Jeff was pretty simple – I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the Blogsphere (although this phrase appears to have been hijacked, so I guess I’ll have to call it something else). Jeff’s been a media guy for a long time and has a widely read blog. As a software / tools / data guy rather than a media / advertising guy, the more smart folks I talk to, the more of a clue I get. ...

The New York Times article on blogging (5/27) titled “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops ” is predictably shallow. Remember 1994 – 1995 and the NYT publishes an article a day on Al Gore’s Information Superhighway until it reaches the point even my mother asks me about it (“Brad, when did they stop publishing news in the newspaper?”). My philosopher wife’s comment on the article was, with disgust, “I’m tired of the word addiction being diluted to mean something that you really like to do – addiction has an element of compulsion, not simply a strong preference for the activity.” ...

One of the segments of the blogsphere that is starting to appear is analytics. I was the initial investor in NetGenesis (now owned by SPSS ) and Mobius Venture Capital was an investor in I/Pro and Andromedia (now part of Macromedia) back when we were SOFTBANK Venture Capital . So – it should be no surprise that I’m fascinated with tools to help with analytics on my site. Simple hit counters – like Site Meter – are pretty useless because of the difference between hits and feeds. I stumbled upon Feedburner a few weeks ago (May 8th to be exact) and have been watching as my stats build daily. I’ve learned a few interesting things, such as the most popular User Agent (Newsgator – followed closed by SharpReader ) and my most popular click-through (On Being the CEO – Henry V and The Cover-up.) However, I couldn’t really figure out what the actual statistics were telling me. ...

There have been a raft of Blam (blog spam) posts recently. To date, all the Blam I have seen has been in comment posts. There are lots of different approaches to this, none of them perfect, but they include efforts at IP blacklists , a MovableType blacklist plugin, and a feature in MovableType 3.0 that allows the blog manager to “accept or deny” comments. Simply turning comments off is another solution, but this seems to defeat the purpose of blogs. ...

Remember Geocities? It was one of our very successful investments (thanks Jerry Colonna and Fred Wilson ). Geocities is alive (and well?) at Yahoo!. Generally speaking, pretty scary looking stuff. But – the idea is the same as personal blogging – just v1.x (where blogging is probably up to 3.x). Interestingly, Yahoo! doesn’t appear to have anything set up on the blog front yet. There have been multiple rumors floating around since last fall including a Yahoo! Korea Blog section (since I don’t know Korean, this isn’t much help to me but the dog pictures that show up when I hit the site sure are weird). Yahoo! does have an Beta RSS feed up – you can subscribe to my feed through My Yahoo and I’ll be up top next to your Reuters and AP news (lucky you). It’s definitely beta still (it doesn’t refresh all that well) – but it shows an example of how everyone gets their own printing press. ...