Archive for May, 2008

Being able to watch television programming on the internet is a wonderful thing. Many of the big networks like ABC, NBC, Fox, etc. have already started uploading television content directly to the internet for users who don't mind watching programming on their computer screens. Of course, that puts cable providers in a bit of a pickle; if users can go directly to the source on the internet and cut out the middle men, what good will cable providers [...]

It may seem like I'm awfully negative about Web 2.0, which isn't the case. I'm generally very excited about a lot of apps and a lot of companies, but lately, it's been the dumb things that really bother me enough to write about. Today, it's the realization that the entire set-up is killing the software development process.
Sure, it's been almost 10 years since I did any serious development other than poking around in things, but I know that the main [...]

Google is still the reigning champion of monetizing the internet. With it's firm hold on the search advertising niche and ever increasing variety of keyword based ad content types, the search giant looks like it will hold the crown for a while. Cementing that theory is today's announcement that its popular Adsense revenue program will now be offered in your RSS feeds, a service that has been touted as "on its way" on the Feedburner site for months.
I can [...]

I watched the bitchmeme today float over the blogs and Techmeme with a wry grin and a shake of my head. Twitter has had a horrible week: the downtime and missing features continue. The users are revolting, posting blog posts and FriendFeed items threatening defection at every new development. The first complaints were that the folks at Twitter didn't communicate enough, and now the problem is that the communication is that of developers on the defensive, with a different reason [...]

For the last few days the conversation at the forefront of the social web has been scalability, expecially as it applies to popular social site Twitter. Twitter is a simple application built on the Ruby on Rails programming framework, but it can't seem to keep up with its popularity. With every new Twitter activity flurry and new third party Twitter application there comes the inevitable Twitter downtime.
Twitter is not the only social media site that grew too fast. Scalability [...]

Though I am free of any major ailments that might require medicinal drugs at this point in time, I can say that the price of drugs is high, even with insurance.  The few times I have needed prescription medication, I have been very grateful that insurance has been willing to foot most of the bill.  However, buying prescription medications in pharmacies carries a hefty price tag, and many consumers are turning to web-based drug retailers based inside and outside the [...]

Before the proliferation of social media, the role of a product evangelist was limited to the amount of traditional media exposure you could get for a product, either in the press or at industry conferences. With social media, evangelists have the opportunity to take their message directly to end users, but how do they do it?
A lot of attention is being paid to the idea of a personal brand, but for the evangelist, the goal is the product brand awareness, [...]

In a rare case of actual advance financial planning on the web, Google has announced the price structure for its Google App Engine offering.  Granted Google is not necessarily the best example of financial planning in an online company, since they are all about the Benjamins with their AdWords, AdSense and other monetization strategies. It's just that it is so rare to see any company with a business plan online it stands out when it happens, like Sasquatch sightings.
What [...]

Was it only last month that we got news that Yahoo's BrowserPlus had risen from the dead? It seems like it was ages ago, but what with the ongoing MicroHoo tug-of-war and all the other rally-the-troops look-we've-still-got-it developments this year (Yahoo Buzz, Shine), they are all starting to run together.
At any rate, Yahoo must have felt jealous over all the attention being given to all the other cool releases and conference news being broadcast, and decided to give us a [...]