According to a WebMasterWorld study, 75% of blogs on Google’s Blogger are spam and 68% of all sites on the .info domain are spam as well. If true, that’s kind of depressing. Meanwhile, on WordPress.com we continue to shut down spam blogs as soon as we find them.
Blog
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No more MacBook for me
Enough has gone wrong with my MacBook in the last few months that I doubt I’d ever buy another one. First I had random shut down problems. Then the built in webcam stopped working. Now I have a dead battery. All this within the first 9 months of owning it. The final straw: Apple told me to go into the store to pick up a new battery. After waiting for over an hour despite having an appointment, they confirmed that the battery was dead, then told me they were out of batteries and put me on the phone with customer support for another maddening 20 minutes to order a replacement one. Bleh.
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The new incubators seem to be working
Some of the most interesting new web projects seem to be coming out of a new breed of incubator. Obvious has released the widely heralded Twitter. Y Combinator has had several hits, including currently buzzed about companies like Scribd, Justin.TV and ImInLikeWithYou. Yahoo’s Brickhouse launched Pipes to great reviews. Another new incubator, Ooga Labs is hoping that GoodTree will be a hit (disclaimer: I’m an adviser). Seems like too many successful product launches to be a coincidence.
I’m calling the companies behind these products incubators because they work on multiple projects at once in a more experimental fashion than regular companies. However it might be a misnomer. The infamous incubators of the late 90s were VC driven and more focused around optimizing the business side of running lots of small businesses in one batch. The new incubators are more like product labs where smart product engineers and designers get to iterate quickly through new ideas without marketing people, executives or VCs breathing down their necks (actually, kind of sounds like Automattic fits this model as well). Whatever they’ll be called, they seem to be growing in popularity and they releasing very interesting products.
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Shawn’s day
Shawn has been blogging about his recovery from heart surgery. From his latest post on how he currently spends a typical day:
“Once past the self-pity phase, I usually eat breakfast and surf the web for a while, wondering how I could become so quickly bored by the largest collection of knowledge in human history.”
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A commercial!
I’m not in the habit of linking to ads from my blog, but this one is pretty fun if you’re into car racing.
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More VIPs
If our WordPress.com VIP hosting program is any indication, enterprise blogging is on an upswing. We’ve been getting a lot of interest in this program from corporate bloggers. Some recent VIPs include multiple blogs from CNN, Xerox and Carnival Cruise Lines. We also recently added famous baseball player Curt Schilling as a VIP blogger and there are lots more in the pipeline. One interesting side effect is to see how these blogs do in our blogs of the day charts compared to everyone else who is blogging on WordPress.com.
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Carver
Check out this interesting three wheeled car, they have videos, a WordPress blog and bbPress forums.
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Rinspeed concept car
AutoBlog: “Rinspeed seems to have a knack for coming up with wonderfully quirky answers to questions no one was really asking.”
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Mail + IM
The Oddpost/Yahoo Mail Beta team strikes again – check out how seamlessly they’ve integrated IM into Yahoo Mail.
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Digg this
Paul Kedrosky points out that WordPress.com has passed Digg on Alexa’s reach charts. Very cool! And Alexa doesn’t even count all of our traffic, only visits to blogs with wordpress.com in their URL (i.e. it doesn’t count WordPress.com blogs like Scobleizer or WebWorkerDaily that use their own domain names).
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The Firefox computer
Jon Callaghan has some thoughts on how easy it was for him to switch from a PC to a Mac.
This made me think about the Windows Vista launch and the inevitable OS X vs Vista comparisons, and how come I’m deeply uninterested in any of it.
I run a PC at home and a Mac on the road. Their respective operating systems just don’t get me very excited these days. The only thing I care about is that they run Firefox. That’s because my digital day is currently spent in the following apps: WordPress, Yahoo Mail, Bloglines, 30boxes and Google. And they all run perfectly well in Firefox. So as long as I can get to Firefox, I’m pretty much surrounded by everything I need for my work. The only desktop app I use regularly is an IRC client and occasionally I’ll use Open Office to edit a Word document (I bet I could move both of those to web based apps as well).
This leads me to the following conclusion: I want a Firefox computer. A nice, sleek, solid state notebook with a big screen that you open up and it just runs Firefox. I bet this could be had for a reasonable price, it could have a nice long battery life and start up almost instantly. I’d still have a PC or Mac at home to store my photos and music, but for my everyday work life the Firefox computer is all I need.
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Solar crossing
The Swiss catamaran Sun21 has become the first motorized boat to cross the Atlantic using no fuel (it’s solar powered).
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Open Source vs. Open APIs
When I helped start the Yahoo Developer Network, part of my job was to go around to all the product teams inside Yahoo and convince them that it would be good for their business to open up free web APIs. The response among technical folks was pretty universally enthusiastic. It’s just one of those ideas that make great sense to an engineer. Among business folks, the response was more mixed. They would bring up a pretty predictable series of concerns. Will it cannibalize my business? How will we prevent abuse? Do we have to go first? And the unspoken concern – how will this affect my job?
Another issue that came up – one that caught me by surprise – is that some people thought open APIs and open source were somehow the same thing. As in “if we open an API does that mean we will open source our software?”. Umm, no. Both open source and open APIs have to do with technology and both have the word “open” in them, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Yet it kept coming up. For example, when Yahoo announced an open API for Yahoo Mail someone wrote a big article on how Yahoo was open sourcing Yahoo Mail (the story has since vanished, I could only find this Digg link to it).
To help clarify open source vs. open APIs, here’s a quick overview of each:
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Abandoned amusement park
I’m loving this series of pictures of nature reclaiming an abandoned amusement park (I think it’s in Japan).