I’m a little torn here, so I’m in need of some good comment-based advice — it’s regarding my impending purchase of a laptop, or should I say, a palm-top. I work from home, however I do travel 3-4 times per year to conferences and whatnot, and when I’m there I end up needing something to 1) surf the internet, 2) blog with, and 3) check Bloglines. I normally don’t do any real work at conferences besides soaking up all the information and rehashing it into weblog entries, so I used to own a bottom of the line, small, iBook G4, and that was perfect. The problem was, I never used any applications on it besides Safari or Mail, so the ~$1,000 purchase seemed like a bit of a waste to me. SXSW is coming up fast and since I sold that iBook a few months back, I’m now in the market for “something” to surf the web and blog with. And therein lies the dilemma 😉
The Use And Misuse of RSS
It seems that my entry on Top Ten Sources sparked some nice debate around the blogosphere. Everyone from Susan Mernit to Dave Winer has been brought into the shuffle. I discussed Top Ten Sources with John Palfrey via email, and he let me know that the company is alerting writers of the impending aggregation, however Kevin and Michael commented on my entry saying they received no such notification.
I’ve left comments at other blogs defending my position against people who see nothing wrong with republishing RSS content sans-permission, and I thought it time to write my viewpoint out as a full entry.
New 9rules Community Director
I’m very pleased to announce that the 9rules team and I have brought on the brilliant Tyme White to be our new Community Director. As many of you know, 9rules has been growing more rapidly the past month or so (we’re now at around 150 members) and our private 9rules member forums are now reaching 100+ posts per day, so with the rest of our responsibilities it was just very difficult to keep up with the goings on inside 9rules, and that’s where Tyme White comes in.
We’re very excited to have her aboard, not only because she has given us some great business advice in the past, but also because she successfully ran an extremely large online gaming community a few years back so she knows precisely what she’s talking about. Welcome Tyme!
The Next Web
Jeffrey Zeldman just wrote a fantastic piece on this “web 2.0” stuff over at A List Apart.
Many people have tried to define “web 2.0” as social networking, or technology-infused user experiences, or whatever, but to me, “web 2.0” is this:
While the dotcommers were making really cool stuff in the late 90s, younger people like me (middle school, high school) were idolizing them and aspiring to run dotcom companies once we got a bit older. Now that we are older (19-25 or so), and have witnessed the demise of the dotcom era, we’ve vowed to make even better dotcom companies that kick way more ass than our idols ever kicked.