Archive for July, 2008

We had a fantastic Topics on Fire podcast last night on TalkShoe discussing the poverty gap and the internet and how social media could help bridge it. Because the audio recording had feedback issues, I'm doing a recap here in case we can't get that fixed. The conversation lasted an hour and will go into part two this coming Sunday, August the 3rd (and yes, I have enlisted the help of a tech for a backup recording of the next [...]

As someone who constantly faces the necessity of learning and improving one's English, I have a fascination with tools that help people learn new languages online. And today one of such tools, the Germany-based Babbel.com raised "significant VC funding" by Kizoo and VC Fonds Berlin and also announced a new feature to improve the users' leaning experience.
I actually have a problem with this announcement - I don't understand why companies choose to announce the new funding round and [...]

Yesterday evening a new search engine was launched by a group of search experts (including two ex-Googlers) - Cuil is the name and the blogosphere is abuzz about weather it will kill Google. Honestly, I can never understand why we constantly expect every single new product to kill something that is strong in the particular niche already. Normally I hate that type of post titles - they sound to me like BMW is a Mercedes killer. And [...]

I have read a post by Fred Wilson on his blog initiating a new discussion about what Techmeme sources should be and why Techmeme should include blog comments into account instead of focusing on blog posts (and articles on mainstream media websites) only. Fred not only encourages Gabe Rivera to include comments in the sources but he actually puts the question as "When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?". So it's not even [...]

Though I would hardly call it a vice nowadays, gaming is very much an active hobby of mine. For some time, the golden tubes that carry our internet have been clogged with nothing but praises for Nintendo's dream console, the game machine that is helping all demographics realize their inner "casual" gamers. Maybe I'm just a skeptic, but I'm failing to realize how that little angular piece of whiteness that is selling for outrageous prices both on eBay [...]

The latest trend in the Twitterverse seems to be one of rules, rules, rules. This trend toward a kind of social media home owner's association is driven in part by ego and part by a desire for control and power, and it goes against the grain of social media.
Social media and the internet it plays on is organic by nature. Organic concepts scare the pants off of people and companies, especially big enterprise. After so many decades of an economy [...]

Drama 2.0 stole a topic from me that I've been thinking about for a while; I don't believe I have a personal brand. A friend joking referred to me as "always being a gun for hire" in the tech blogosphere, and I'm totally fine with that. I'm hired (and paid) to do a job, and that's build a brand for the company I'm working for, whether it's here at Profy or at The Industry Standard, or anywhere else that I've [...]

Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks reports that Amazon has published an announcement regarding last weekend's outage of Amazon S3 services. For those of you who were neither affected, nor cared, I'd want to remind that S3 is Amazon's service that provides hosting and storage for web applications - to a certain extent for free. And last weekend the service experienced an outage of the whole 8 hours - and that with very poor communication on behalf of the [...]

We do seem to be talking too much about women in technology lately but given the latest Playboy poll and the BlogHer conference I think it is not surprising. So ReadWriteWeb came up with a list of favorite female bloggers compiled by its bloggers. Obviously, it was a pleasure to have two Profy bloggers included in the list. After that Orli Yakuel (who was obviously on the list as well) created a slideshow of 50 blogs written [...]