Islands in the clickstream, that is what we are:
- Open Source at Nokia–Nokia releasing the first of many open source projects. I wonder what the tension between product, research, and platform is within Nokia–how are each of these projects considered for open source release and what expectations are upon each of them to determine their “success”. Of interest, Sofia-SIP, an open source SIP library.
- Britain’s Underground City–I don’t know what to be more astonished about: that it’s not being shored up for tourism, or that there’s a bottle of sherry from 1666 still extant.
- The Hit Factory–how MySpace became the MTV of the new generation. The band activity around MySpace is phenomenal. We’ve talked for a while about how in a post-label age the discovery of bands will be an electronic phenomenon, and MySpace is living it. It’s an amazing effort to scale personal contact, which is a fantastic marketing device but very scarce. Part of Bela’s success is that he hangs around after every gig and chats to fans from the stage as the equipment is being torn down and packed up. MySpace shows us that even the illusion of contact creates fans.
- Teaching the Startup Mentality–I’ve been trying to figure out how to make entrepreneurial work part of a university CS degree. Something else to follow up when I hit New Zealand.
- Cream Of The Young Crop–young entrepreneurs and their businesses.
- Tremor Buzz Marketing–interesting discussion of how Proctor & Gamble’s buzz marketing works. Mentions the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, whose guidelines are a minimum requirement for integrity in buzz marketing. Compare this article on buzz marketing on campus.
- IMeem uses Mono–software to create private networks of blogs, profiles, file sharing, etc. Nice to see another success for the Mono project.
- Matt Biddulph Has The Best Job Ever–holy crap, he gets to write the software to make the BBC Archive’s catalog browsable. Matt’s part of the crew behind the Program Information Pages, a majestic feat of information architecture, so you know the archive’s pages will be extremely functional. This is going to rock! Matt also wrote an article called REST on Rails that was just published on the O’Reilly Network.
- Pew Internet Report on Teen Content Creators and Consumers–findings include that 57% of internet-using teens have posted content. 19% of teens have a blog, 38% read them (exactly double!), older girls (age 15-17) are the group most likely to blog, and most teen downloaders think that getting free music is easy and it’s unrealistic to expect people not to do it. Great stuff.
- iSquint–video iPod file conversion tool. Clever name, though I will continue to use ffmpegX for all my video conversion needs.
- RMail–subscribe to RSS feeds via email. RSS readers are a crappy universal inbox, but email readers aren’t much better. I know at least one person who reads all his feeds through Mail.app.
- Microsoft’s Competition–lovely breakdown from Om.
- Webstock–web conference in New Zealand. Cool!
- Notes from What Teens Want West–“Brand for real”. Good grief.
- Open Source Investment Bubble–interesting thoughts from Stephen Walli about the new spate of open source companies. You could replace “open source” with “Web 2.0” or “search” or whatever has had the most recent success and has thus spawned a flood of imitators.
- Teen Sex and the Linux Desktop–Nat Friedman runs the numbers for us.
- Google donates to Oregon Universities–in support of the open source programs at OSU and PSU. OSU’s servers delivered a lot of Firefox’s 1000M+ downloads.
- Web 2.0 Needs Business Model 2.0–hear hear. [via]