Connecting the dots ...
Google purchased the 1,900 sq.ft. home in Menlo Park where founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago to start the business. The rent back then was $1,700 a month. Yes, you read it right, $1,700, and it’s not the entire home, just the garage!
In comparison, HP co-founder William Hewlett rented the garage where HP was started for $45 per month.
Only in California ….
A long-forgotten, dormant blog came back to life today: Burnham’s Beat. Bill Burnham explains his long silence: it was due to his lawyers’ advice while setting up his new hedge fund, Inductive Capital. He’s back online and plans to blog on.
Burnham’s Beat was one of my early picks as a favorite blog: Bill did not post every day, but quite regularly on software, startup, VC subjects, and whenever he did, it was worth reading. Here are a few of his “golden oldies”, in no particular order:
For the Love of God People, Enterprise Software Is Not Dead
Software’s Top 10 2005 Trends: #3 Software As A Service
Is Open Source Becoming Over-Sourced?
Honey I Bought The Wrong Company!
Back when Burnham’s Beat was still alive there was a good conversation on Dead Blogs Walking, the essence of which was:
“So I say this to these bloggers, treat your blog like a startup – don’t let your labor of love become labor of lame. Update more frequently or shut it down completely.”
The return of Burnham’s Beat proves the above wrong. I could easily list several other blogs, that for some reason or other are dormant:
The list could go on … are these dead blogs? Who knows… I’m not about to “delete” them. The key is to use a feed reader that has the capability of displaying only the blogs with new posts. You can have hundreds of dormant blogs in your opml, they don’t waste space, don’t consume resources, won’t clobber yor screen. The are sleepers. Some of them will wake up, and when they do, they are worth reading again.
Like I’ve said before, I’m (almost) eating my previous words, and recognize that Windows Live Writer is a pretty good tool. There are two more things I forgot to mention in the previous post:
Writer still leaves turd in your blog… and in your feed. So this morning I could clearly see how of my favorite bloggers downloaded the new release. This Technorati search currently finds 4682 instances of “turd”. Google Blog Search finds over 14K occurences. How come Microsoft still did not find a way to detect stylesheets without this mess? (incidentally the detection still fails on my blog system)
There’s another kind of turd … or is it more? Every time you use the new “Insert Tags” feature, it inserts a cryptic line like this, along with your tags:
0757417C-982D-2b12-91E1-4F057A8CCCA8:c712360d-e4e6-4711-831a-05fdf7d8a894
The part before the “:” is constant (for your installation I suppose), the second part varies post by post. What is this? Is Big Brother watching us again? Call me paranoid, but in the wake of the HP Scandal I wouldn’t be so surprised….
Update (9/29): OK, I’ve cooled off. I don’t think this is Big Brother in action… after all it’s so easily detectable, and Microsoft has enough trouble in this are to know better. But then, WTF is this? Why do I need a unique ID in my blog posts?
My initial reaction to the first release of Windows Live Writer (geez, what a name….) was a big yawn. Yes, a nice offline blog-editor, but we already have Ecto, Blogjet, Qumana, Zoundry, w.Bloggar … etc. so unless the new one is significantly better than the existing solutions, why change?
A few smaller glitches aside the showstopper for me was the lack of any support for Technorati tagging. “Bloggers do tags. An editor without tagging is not a Blog Editor. It’s that simple.” Users came to the rescue and he Tag4Writer and Flickr4Writer plug-ins by Tim made Writer a lot more useable; so I gave in and tried it.
Today there is a new release and for the second time in a row I’m seeing that Microsoft actually listens: they’ve added tagging support, fixed a bunch of bugs, and even made startup faster – oh, and now I can insert emoticons 
. I’m starting to like it, and using it now – that is when I’m not posting entirely online, using Zoho Writer.
It’s still not perfect though: Writer failed to download the standard template associated with my blog, so right away there goes the “WYSIWYG in your blog’s style” – about the only differentiator this thingie would have, if only it worked.
Most importantly, although this is now a pretty good editor, the key question from my previous post still stands:
“Why a separate product again? Has it occurred to anyone that blogging is NOT a separate activity from anything else: it’s all about writing content, that ends up published in a particular form. A large part of blogging is reading, note-taking… see where I am heading? Microsoft already has a pretty good (albeit expensive) overall notetaker, OneNote. Why not just blog-enable OneNote and release it free? That would have been a pretty good move.
Of course that still leaves us with a few other Microsoft editors: Word and Wordpad. Here’s where this should be heading: 90% of Word users don’t need the sophisticated features, so let them have a decent, relatively simple editor/notetaker (Writer/Wordpad/OneNote combined) for free, while anyone else who needs fancy editing can buy Word.
Watch my word: the market is heading that direction, whether Microsoft recognizes it or not. And if they don’t, the folks behind Zoho Writer and Writely certainly do.
Wow, this was a fast JUMP to $. 
Three months ago at the second Techdirt Greenhouse event I had a lot of fun co-moderating the Media discussion with Keith Teare. Prior to the discussion we saw a 5-minute presentation by JumpCut’s Byron Dumbrill, and I definitely wasn’t the only one who felt blown away. As much as I am a fan of “moving to the Cloud“, I thought the last applications to stay on the PC are photo and especially video processing, due to the resource requirements. Most of us there were amazed to see how much video-editing 3-month-old Jumpcut could do all online…
Fast forward (pun intended) 3 months, and see Jumpcut being acquired buy Yahoo.
Congratulations to the Jumpcut Team! 
Tags: Jumpcut, Yahoo, acquisition, startups, startup+exit, startup+acquisition, video+editing, online+video, online+video+editing
Bill Clinton leads the pack – well, at least at the Zoho Poll set up to rate potential 2008 Presidential Candidates, even those who can’t be elected, like Bill Clinton or the Pope. Incidentally, the Pope has better rating then George W. Bush. Vote now!
Tags: politics, elections, presidential+elections, presidential+candidates, humor, zoho+polls
After Vaporware, here comes VaporStream! OK, let’s get serious:
“E-mail has a problem – it creates a permanent, time-stamped record that is out of our control” – starts the intro to VaporStream, just launched at DemoFall.
Am I hearing reading right? Is this really a problem? I’m having a hard time thinking of legitimate reasons why a business would need to send email that’s not really email but a self-destructing image, without header information and generally untraceable.
Then again, some businesses may just welcome this. Too bad.
“The study published in the Journal of Labor Research Thursday concluded that drinkers earn 10 to 14 percent more than teetotalers, and that men who drink socially bring home an additional seven percent in pay.
“Social drinking builds social capital,” said Edward Stringham, an economics professor at San Jose State University and co-author of the study with fellow researcher Bethany Peters.” (full article here)
What can I say … I surrender:-) Want to do even better? Forget beer, drink red wine, for the health benefits. Oh, and to support the local economy – at least us, Californians
Tags: social+drinking, drinking+study, compensation, compensation+study, networking, beer, wine
Publisher / Editor of CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars.
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