Remember my first article on Spotplex? And the second one? Well, unfortunately, they didn’t wake up: Spotplex is offline and I doubt it’s ever coming back.
This is also a wake-up call for anyone that thinks that getting a wildly positive review on Techcrunch is enough to reach stardom. Spotplex, simply, had done many things wrong, and they definitely weren’t the next Digg; they had a chance and the spotlight for a while, but it wasn’t enough to catch on. Better luck next time, folks.
Ultraedit, Notepad, Joe, Textpad: all those editors are created for people who can’t handle Vi. Give it to a normal user, and you can bet that there’s absolutely no way they’re going to find its functions by simply using trial and error. A diehard Vi fan, however, will rather die than admit that Vi is not the best text editor ever created.
I don’t plan to take sides here, since I don’t want to be abducted and interrogated in an old warehouse by a bunch of Vi fanatics; instead, I’ll merely point to jsvi, an online, Javascript version of Vi.
jsvi is actually rather old, but DownloadSquad just dug it out from somewhere; I haven’t seen it before, and hopefully you haven’t either, so there you go.
I did not expect Microsoft to withdraw the offer, but that’s what they did. I’m relieved that the first season of this soap opera is at an end, as I was getting bored out of my mind with all the speculations regarding the issue. But, I’m afraid that the story simply cannot end now.
Microsoft gave up, but they have another business (actually, a multitude of them) to run. They will probably try to buy themselves a different big entrance into the online ad business, although their options aren’t that great.
It will be interesting, however, to see what Yahoo does next. Having been drawn into this mess against their will, they were forced to do a lot of decisions they normally wouldn’t have done. They also explored almost all viable merger/acquisition/partnership options they have. Will they just go back to business as usual, or will they act on any of it? For example, what happens with the Google ad deal, which was - according to both companies - going so well in its testing phase? Will they just pretend it never happened?
Oh no, this cannot end now. Microsoft has ruffled too many feathers with this one, and now both companies need to do something about it, unless they want to sit at the same table in two years, negotiating the same deal under even worse circumstances for both of them. Interesting times are ahead.
The answer: this. Marc Andreessen is not in it for the money; he’s not trying to be a journalist, and he certainly doesn’t care about posting frequency too much. But, he knows a lot about certain topics (in this case, he gives a very thorough MSFT-YHOO analysis, a must-read if you’re interested in the subject) and he writes about them with ease and authority that very few journalists can hope to achieve.
What’s the secret? It’s simple: a good blog is a guy/girl writing about a topic he/she knows a lot about. The value of such a blog is in the fact that no general-purpose (or even specialized) journalist can come close to the level of knowledge, depth and passion a blogger can reach. Of course, not all bloggers are that good; in fact, most aren’t. But if you want an example of a really, really good blog, in the purest sense of the word, you’ve got one right here.
In a sense, a good blog relates to a bigger media publication in a similar way as a small, specialized IT magazine relates to a daily - it doesn’t cover everything, but it focuses on a specific audience and goes much more in-depth. Good blogs usually deal with their topics with fanatical attention to detail, and that’s what makes them interesting. Pick a topic - any topic, however narrow - and there’s a blogger out there covering all aspects of it.
There’s also the question of what category a blog should fall into - is it a commercial site which earns money from ad revenue, just like any magazine, or must it stay a non-profit affair, with the blogger offering his/her content freely and forgetting about making any money off it? I say: if the blog is great, who cares? I remember a recent article by Louis Gray who says that most bloggers don’t deserve any ad revenue. I agree with some of his points, but some of his economic logic is flawed. If I were an advertiser with a $10.000 budget, I’d rather have my ad shown on 100 small blogs than once on NYTimes. In this sense, bloggers - good ones - deserve not only respect for going deeper than anyone else, but they also deserve some ad revenue.
What Louis aims at, though, although he’s not quite clear about it, are the blogs written by people who don’t have anything to say. I agree: there’s a lot of those, and they all suck. But keep an eye on the ones that are good; they’re definitely worth your time, if you’re a reader, and money, if you’re an advertiser.
The debate on whether printed newspapers and magazines are going to die out or not comes up fairly often. I’m not going to into pro or con mode right now, but I will share a thought that comes to me every time I write an article for a paper mag (I do, now less than before, write for Croatia’s leading IT magazine Bug).
I’ve written thousands of articles (most not in English, mind you) for paper media in the 6 years I’m in this business, and frankly, it feels like wasted time. Unless you’re an avid collector of these magazines, which most people aren’t these days, you can’t read these articles anymore. They’re lost in dusty basements, and forgotten archives, and most of them are - for all practical purposes - non existant.
By contrast, the stuff I’ve written on this blog, however casual, is available for everyone to read, indexed by search engines, saved on social media sites such as Digg and Delicious, linked to by other blogs - in short, it’s there.
And I won’t even go into the financial implications; the articles that went out in print, well, I got paid for them once, and that was it. With the small amount of advertising I have on this blog, my old thoughts are still making me money. We’re not talking huge amounts of money here, but it’s enough for all my monthly coffee needs. Whenever I drink coffee, from now to forever, it’s been paid by this blog.
It’s funny that many of my colleagues and business associates still value the stuff I’ve done for print mags more than the stuff I’ve written online. Many of them don’t even know I have a blog. Little do they know that in fact, if I had started, 6 years ago, to spend my energy entirely on my online endeavors, I’d probably have done better for myself.
I still love print magazines, I always did. I love having that shiny copy of Wired in my hands, even though it’s 90% ads and 10% articles. Today, most printed publications also archive most, if not all, of their stuff online. But let’s face it; today, if it’s not online, it’s dead. Print is just an afterthought, and - unless we see some real breakthroughs in e-paper soon - I expect most of it to fall into the same category as vinyl records and wrist watches; a bit of cool, a dash of retro, a pinch of exclusivity, but not really a necessity.
Back in the day I wrote a review of online photo editors, and my biggest concern with all of them was the lack of some web-oriented options, most notably Photoshop’s brilliant ability to have an image resized and scaled to a certain (exact) size while cropping. It’s an extremely valuable option if you’re working for the web, where you usually need a photo in a certain size (on this site, I usually want photos that are 490 pixel wide).
A friend just told me that one of the best photo editors out there, Picnik, has added a lot of new features. I went to take a look, and lo and behold, Picnik now has the aforementioned option! Now, it definitely gets my recommendation as an online photo editor; if you haven’t, try it out.
Here’s a new, painfully simple way to create mixtapes - well, not real mixtapes, but lists of MP3s which can be played directly in a web browser. Which is pretty much the next best thing. The service is called Muxtape and it has literally no options, which is sometimes a good thing.
Here’s an example of a Muxtape. I don’t have one near, but I bet it’s optimized for the iPhone.
And for all you kids who never knew cassettes and don’t know what the big deal with mixtapes is, Wikipedia offers a very thorough explanation.
I’ve noticed recently that I simply cannot keep up with all the e-mail I receive, both here and on Mashable where I’m the features editor. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of you who wrote to me and I didn’t reply, but unfortunately my e-mail overload is getting bigger and bigger and I doubt this situation will get better.
I have, however, become a lot more active on social sites like Twitter and Pownce. Since I’m blogging when the USA is asleep, I’m quite a lonely blogger, and it feels good to have this stream of info from other bloggers, readers, developers, designers and tech aficionados. Furthermore, if you send me something over these networks, I’m actually more likely to notice than if you send me an e-mail - especially since Gmail’s spam filters have become somewhat less effective. Therefore, I’d like to call everyone to join me on various social networks I’m actively using. Here’s the list:
Twitter: twitter.com/franticnews
Pownce: pownce.com/frantic
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stanschroeder
FriendFeed: friendfeed.com/frantic
Digg: digg.com/users/frant1c
Mixx: www.mixx.com/users/frantic
Last.FM: www.last.fm/user/mahniti/
I look forward to meeting you!
Franticindustries.com got hacked over the weekend with the usual result of nasty keywords appearing in the posts. After a couple hours of tinkering, hopefully I’ve now patched most of Wordpress’ many security holes; but the blame is ultimately on me for not keeping Wordpress up to date.
In short: lame wannabe hackers: not cool. Not keeping your Wordpress up to date: dumb. Spending half of the weekend hardening Wordpress’ feeble security: priceless.
There’s a blogger fight going on this weekend, with a little lifestreaming application by the name of FriendFeed at its centre. FriendFeed lets you see your and your friends’ activity across various web services in a simple feed, and it also adds the ability to comment and tag any individual item. For some reason, several prominent bloggers decided that FriendFeed is the next Twitter; while I agree that connecting and organizing all of your web activity in one place might be the next big thing, I don’t see FriendFeed being exceptionally good at it.
You can see the latest batch of (some unnecessarily harsh) blogger comments in the discussion over at Techmeme.
I’ve tried out FriendFeed briefly before, and let’s just say I wasn’t overwhelmed with what it can do (you can see my feed here.) Similar services abound: see Profilactic (my coverage here, my profile here), SocialThing, or Correlate.us as examples.
All of these services do more or less the same thing. Louis Gray seems to think that the big difference between FriendFeed and everything else is the fact that you can comment on items or “love” them, but I don’t see what, exactly, are the benefits of these options. I can barely find time to comment on blog posts; why the hell would I comment on bits and pieces of my (or someone else’s) online activity? The fact that the option is there doesn’t exactly hurt, but at best I consider it a very minor advantage.
To be honest, I’m a little bit biased about the entire concept of lifestreaming. I have on my hard drive the outline of a project that would - in my opinion - do much more with this idea, but I haven’t had the time or the manpower to start it. In brief, I think that all the apps I’ve mentioned above, as well as others like them, don’t really help you organize your online life well enough; they’re just spewing it all out in a long, hard-to-follow string of events which are only interesting as a “what’s this guy up to right now” kind of thing, but quite pointless in the long run. Thus, no, I don’t think that FriendFeed is in any way revolutionary: it’s a nice application and it’s popular because it’s a little bit better than most of its competition, but I don’t see any disruptive capacity in it just yet.
Guy Kawasaki (of Truemors fame) launched a new cheapass (10000 bucks) startup: Alltop. The only problem is: it’s not a startup. It’s nothing more than an extended version of Popurls (they admit it in the upper right corner where it says “Inspired by Popurls), which is in turn a nice enough RSS aggregator simply because it came early, but let’s face it, it’s a static version of Netvibes.
So, where does that leave Alltop? Nowhere, really. Absolutely no one would report on this one if Guy Kawasaki wasn’t behind it, and next time, they probably won’t.
Now, the interesting thing about this story is not the site itself, but the fact that this is one of those situations where you think to yourself: what the hell were they thinking? What was Guy thinking when he announced Alltop? What is he hoping for; how does he hope to gain readership for this thing, how does he plan to make money off it, and the like?
Luckily, you actually can learn what Guy was thinking in Kristen’s video interview with Guy, embedded below.
My interpretation is that Guy is thinking that RSS is a concept that the majority of internet users don’t understand (which is correct,) that folks who are new to RSS don’t want to bother to find all the feeds that they might be interested in (also correct,) however, everyone wants to be able to read a lot of information from various sources in a very simple way (partly true), and this is what Alltop provides. Another very positive thing about this project is that it was very, very cheap, and therefore, even if it fails, who cares? You got to congratulate Guy on that one.
There are also problems. One problem is that you cannot just copy a site (Popurls), add some non-essential improvements (more feeds) and think that you’ll achieve the same level of success as the original. It just doesn’t work that way, and it’s hard to explain why, but it just doesn’t.
And even if it did, a company like Netvibes can simply publish a customized page which would show the exact same feeds, only with all the benefits that Netvibes have. In other words, Alltop is replaceable. Easily.
BTW, if you’re interested in something like Alltop, only much better and with much nicer options, check out DailyRotation. They’ve been doing it for years, although the site is focused only on technology.
Secondly, he’s understimating his users. People do care about customization. MySpace users, which are for the most part kids that don’t know much about computers, customize their pages to an extreme extent. Alltop doesn’t even let you see more stories for a particular feed, and that’s the first thing people are gonna miss. Popurls is better with that regard - it gives you some basic customization options.
All in all, I think I know what Guy was thinking when he created Alltop; the idea isn’t all that bad, but the actualization of it is just not good enough.
I know the iPhone has been tested, tried, cracked, and tampered with in all possible ways, but I don’t often see anyone talking about a serious issue that stabbed my eyes practically from day one I’ve had the device: multitasking.
Now, these problems are reiterated by a find from TechCrunch, which points out certain flaws and limitations in the iPhone SDK, namely:
“Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)”
Now, as all of you iPhone users know, the iPhone supports multitasking - up to a certain degree. For example, if you open a page in your web browser, it’ll remember it even if you close Safari, open something else and then open Safari again. However, it does this by running all sorts of services in the background (that’s also why the iPhone is so blazingly fast compared to other cellphones.)
But iPhone applications can’t do everything in the background - sometimes the application just stops what it was doing when you quit. Furthermore, there’s no intelligent or easy to use interface to switch between (running) applications. Having to close one to open another isn’t really how I imagine multitasking. My Sony Ericsson P1i, for example, has a task manager for easy task switching.
According to the “iPhone Human Interface Guidelines” third party applications will be even more limited. They won’t even be allowed to run in the background. Perhaps I’m not the most common type of user, but I don’t look forward to silly games and Facebook-style timewasters from this SDK deal; I’m into really useful, robust apps that’ll continue to work, if needed, even if I switch to something else.
For me, this is a deal breaker. The iPhone is a very powerful gadget, but if you’re gonna limit it and the third party applications written for it left and right then it’s always going to remain what most people perceive it to be today: a fun, slick, trendy smartphone that can’t keep up with the “real” smartphones like Nokia N96 or Sony Ericsson P1i when it comes to real business.
[image source: www.techtreak.com]
Archive for Stan Schroeder.
Stan Schroeder is a professional IT journalist and editor from Zagreb, Croatia. On franticindustries he's devoted to being on the forefront of what's happening on the web and in IT.
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