…and in fact it’s rather enjoyable. Or who knows … it’s easier to try Zoli’s Wine Blog‘s recommendations if you live in Europe. (No relationship other than being namesakes).
Archives for 2007
I’ve Got Competition…
Posted on November 5, 2007 ·
Technorati Deletes Index, Hopes Customers Won’t Notice
Posted on November 5, 2007 ·
Just two weeks ago Technorati was praised left and right for “returning to their roots”: reinstating charts and the authority filter in search. The most telling title: Technorati Fights Off Irrelevance With Return of Charts.
Today they are back. To irrelevance. 
When I first noticed I could not find posts older than 6 months, I had doubts if I tested enough, and even if I did, was the issue system-wide, and “by design” or just a glitch. Then I got confirmation from Technorati’s Ian Kallen:
We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling that have required taking some data offline. The data is not lost but our priorities are to prefer keeping recent data online. Most people don’t notice
We’ll probably be bringing that data back online but I don’t have an ETA yet.
First of all, thank you, Ian, for responding so fast. Second, it’s a sad post comment: you just condemned Technorati to irrelevance. Your new CEO says:
The core of everything we do is in blog search – without question, we must do that very, very well
Hm… and the first step to providing quality search is to take the index offline… 6 months is not “remote past”, significant events were reported / analyzed by blogs, often better than mainstream media, and now they are nowhere to be found! Here’s the result of a search I performed for background to my next story: Technorati (0 results) and Google (83 results). I can’t use Technorati if it does not remember “yesterday”… and you don’t even have an ETA on restoring the index.
But the worst part isn’t the poor performance It’s the attitude: silently take it offline, hoping “most people don’t notice“. Yuck. In the age of transparency. I’m afraid Dennis Howlett is right:
@Ian: “We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling” – in other words – we’re totally messed up and are trying to figure out what to do next. That would be closer to the truth don’t you think?
Update: Any hopes of users not noticing are up in smoke: it’s on TechCrunch, TechMeme and a bunch of blogs including hyku | blog, TeleRead, Susan Mernit’s Blog, Deep Jive Interests, Data Mining, WinExtra, Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog, and The Last Podcast.
Salesforce (Crispy) Ideas
Posted on November 4, 2007 ·
Jeff Nolan recently discovered that CrispyIdeas, a service the Enterprise Irregulars used for a while (it got spammed after we abandoned it) was acquired by Salesforce.com:
Salesforce.com was the most prominent customer for CrispyIdeas, the service powered IdeaExchange. Not to be overlooked is the Dell IdeaStorm site, which generated more traffic than the Salesforce service even if being less well known.
It appears that Salesforce quietly acquired CrispyNews and has rebranded their offering as Salesforce.com Ideas
A few weeks later TechCrunch reports that Salesforce.com is unleashing their Digg-for-ideas, “Salesforce Ideas”.
Quite a quick turnaround! 
Technorati is Toast: Drops Older Posts from Index
Posted on November 4, 2007 ·
Technorati’s index seems to be rather forgetful: it does not find blog posts older than six months. Frankly, I don’t know if it’s a new “feature”, or it’s always been like this, and I’m just the last person to notice it.
The only time-limit I’m aware of is calculating Authority, which is based on the revolving 6-month link-counts, but I haven’t found any reference in Technorati’s FAQ to the “shelf-life” of posts in their main index. I’ve only done limited testing, but if indeed this is the case, then Technorati is toast. There’s a lot of value in old posts, and the index that finds them is not Technorati, but Google.
FeedBurner is Out of Flame Today
Posted on November 4, 2007 ·
If your see your FeedBurner subscriber count cut in half today, don’t panic, it does not means your readers “fired” you. It simply means that Google’s Feedfetcher is not reported in the total count today. Clearly a glitch – not as fun as this other one, when I picked up 50K bonus readers, but hey, I’m sure it will be fixed soon -perhaps by the time you wake up and finish coffee.
.
Update: Confirmed: Google Feedfetcher had a hangover.. it’s clearing up now.
"Dirty" Cookies and Facebook Insanity
Posted on October 30, 2007 ·
First of all, the basics: the absolutely best cookies on the face of Earth are Coach’s Oats Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies. Shame on you, Costco, for not carrying it anymore… now that you got me hooked, I have to mail order it at double cost.
But today we’re talking about different kind of cookies – those that websites place on your computer to track your browsing habits and to report back to the “mother site”. The obvious Privacy 101 principle for years has been to control cookies. We’ve seen an army of cookie-washer products, the popular browsers all offer their own privacy/cookie settings. Not being satisfied by any of the “smart options” , i.e. differentiate between third-party and on-site cookies, session-only cookies..etc, I’ve long settled on a manual solution of getting prompted every time I new cookie comes up.
In theory, this is an inconvenience only for a few days/ weeks, but after a while when you’ve seen most of your regular destinations, the defaults work quite well, the cookie-prompts fade away. Except … my old trusted system works less and less.
Quite a few sites – including blogs – will fail to load properly when seemingly unrelated, third-party cookies are blocked. Sometimes they work, but next time you come back to the site, there’s just a white, blank screen. This is ugly. Since I can’t easily figure out what blocked the site, I typically end up deleting all browser cookies as well as all cookie-rules. Then it all starts again – some of the sites / blogs take minutes to rotate through dozens of cookie-requests, literally making it impossible to read their own content. I’m about to give up: might as well just enable cookies – privacy is long gone, anyway. Besides, if I am getting ads served up, they might as well be better targeted.
How do you deal with cookies? (If you’re reading the feed, pls. click through to the poll)
As for the Insanity part, it’s all over TechMeme today: FaceBook worth $100 billion, because of those cookies? I don’t want to be an alarmist, but this is indeed bubble-talk.
Read also: Digital Daily, Adonomics Blog, PC4Media, Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab, Silicon Alley Insider, Don Dodge on The Next …, A VC, rexduffdixon.com, Read/WriteWeb, Silicon Valley Watcher, SmoothSpan Blog, WeBreakStuff (the guy who designed TechCrunch 1.0) SYNTAGMA, WinExtra, Wikinomics.
Update (10/31): Little did I know that a day after writing the above cookies become the topic du jour. Did we not have this discussion 8-9 years ago? The difference: while back then the consensus was pro-privacy, anti-cookie, today it’s obvious that privacy is a myth, and the convenience of having personalized content (including ads) outweighs the remaining privacy concerns. At least that appears to be the majority opinion:
DSLreports, eWEEK.com, Insider Chatter, Wikinomics, O’Reilly Radar, This is going to be BIG., Screenwerk, MarketingVOX, ReveNews Online Revenue …, Investor Relations Blog, Between the Lines , Web Analysis …
Technorati Tags: cookies, tracking cookies, privacy, internet advertising, facebook, bubble, zoho polls
TheLobby: What’s Wrong?
Posted on October 29, 2007 ·
More specifically, what’s wrong with this picture shot at David Hornik’s super-secret, super-elite TheLobby conference? ( I mean other than dressing like this in Hawaii)
Hm… OK, let me give you a hint:
Aaron, will you now give me a break about my shoes?
The Irony of Contextual Advertising
Posted on October 29, 2007 ·
I fully agree with Ionut: Gmail’s spam filtering is amazingly effective. I don’t really care about how they do it, as long as it works this well.
But there’s a bit of irony in his post on Google Operating System, and it comes from none other than Google: just as soon as he’s done praising Gmail, Adsense serves up ad ad from a competing service: onlymyemail.com.
Funny thing is, competitor or not, Adsense is correct: the ad is as contextual as it can get, since the article was about spam filtering.
Of course it could have been a lot worse…
(P.S. the pic is only for illustration of what I found on Ionut’s blog; I am not running ads here)
Update: Donna Bogatin found another Web Blooper.
Former SAP Exec Emerges to Deploy Grid for Electric Cars
Posted on October 29, 2007 ·
When Shai Agassi, President of the Product- Technology Group in SAP left the software giant this March, his parting line “to pursue interests in alternative energy and climate change” could very well be viewed as a fashionable update to the old cliche of “leaving to pursue other interests and to spend more time with family”.
But in hindsight it’s obvious Shai knew exactly what he wanted to do next, as laid out in his blog post on Alternative Transportation within days after his departure:
…electric vehicles will become a reality within a short time frame, and will be cheaper to operate within a short time…
The consumer needs to feel comfortable driving an electric car with a ubiquitous charging infrastructure…
The grid needs to support the new load from this moving electrical appliance…
He then goes on defining his future role:
If you followed the history of the introduction of electricity through the first appliance – the electric light bulb – you know that there were three main players in the story: Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse…
…Tesla invented most of the essentials for the common grid we know and love today. The guy who deployed it in mass scale though was Westinghouse, which is the role we need in this new electric revolution – the business guy who deploys with the highest efficiency and best business approach. If Tesla Motors are the modern day Tesla, my hope is to play the role of Westinghouse, or some small part of that role.
Half a year later Shai re-emerged, launching Project Better Place, a company funded to the tune of $200M, which intends to deploy the infrastructure needed to support electric vehicles.
Project Better Place wants to create the grid of recharge and battery exchange stations, and here comes the interesting part: they want to follow the mobile phone industry’s business model, offering subscribers to the grid subsidized cars that are “cheaper to buy and operate than today’s fuel-based cars”.
I’m sooo ready for a subsidized Tesla 
Update: Now that there’s a conversation going on about HaaS (Hardware as a Service), I’m going to declare the Shai-mobile CaaS: Car as a Service.
Update: Watch Shai on CNBC, first live in the studio, then I believe remotely. Wonder why he put on a tie for the second round…perhaps Thomas knows(?)
Gotta love this quote:
This is not a science project. This in an integration project.
Related posts: WSJ ($), Green Car Congress, New York Times, Green Wombat, Crunchgear (calling Shai “some guy”), isRealli, Earth2Tech, Business Week, alarm:clock, Between the Lines, Techdirt, Babbling VC, VentureBeat, All Tesla Motors Blogs , The Energy Blog,
SVASE Event: How To Build A Lean, Mean, Global Operation From The Get Go
Posted on October 28, 2007 ·
(reposted from SVASE)
The traditional model for startups of gaining traction in your home market and then expanding internationally is under extreme pressure. Some VCs say they only look at deals that come to them with well defined global strategies, and it’s no longer unusual for a startup to develop its technology in Israel, Finland or the UK, secure its funding in the U.S. and have its founders to be first generation immigrants from China, Europe or India.
Offshore? Onshore? Nearshore? Noshore?
VCs who once bragged about never driving more than half an hour to visit a portfolio company are jetting to Australia for optical engineers, Israel for security whizzes, India and Kazakhstan for brute software coding, South Korea for online gaming and Japan for graphics chips. And many say a global view is required just to keep pace with foreign firms quick to copy an idea.
• When does having a global strategy become a strategic imperative?
• How can cash strapped startups realistically address global markets without blowing up their limited resources?
• Is offshore product development really effective for a startup? Or is it just an endless wait for S/W that never quite works as you’d like?
• Do you really need to create different products for each international market?
• If you’re planning on operating on 4 continents, where does your management team reside?
• How important are international patents? Are they worth the time & cost?
• How do you gain traction in an unknown geography?
• What added value can the right investor bring to the party?
The Panel:
• Andrew Filev, CEO, Wrike
• Girish Gaitonde, Founder & CEO, Xoriant Corporation
• Faraz Hoodbhoy, Founder, EVP & CTO, PixSense, Inc.
• Peter Rip, General Partner, Crosslink Capital
• Sridhar Vembu, Founder and CEO, Zoho
Moderator: Peter Laanen, International Trade Director, Netherlands Business Support Office
WHEN:
Thursday, November 1
6:00 – 7:00 pm: Networking and hors d’oeuvres
7:00 – 8:15 pm: Panel discussion and Q/A
8:15 – 8:30 pm: Additional networking
LOCATION:
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR Campus), 950 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304
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