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Quite a few people are experiencing an extended downtime on their Google Apps accounts, according to sporadic reports that have landed in my inbox. Some folks are not able to get their e-mails while others have not been able to get hold of their documents. It is not clear how many people have been impacted, Go to site
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- » Memo To Comcast: Show Me The Meter For Metered Broadband
- Comcast is out telling defending its bandwidth caps and how they are not bad. And how 250 GB transfer is plenty and enough to do whatever we want to do. Of course, in today’s terms that is more than enough, but what happens in the future. Nevertheless, If they are going to put caps,
- » Do You Samsung Instinct?
- As part of my get-well regimen, I spend a lot of time at the local gym. The upside (or the downside) of being on the treadmill or the stair-master is that you spend a lot of time watching lots of basic cable television. Switching channels, I found running across advertisements of Sprint touting Samsung Instinct,
- » “Family Guy” Creator’s Web Show “Cavalcade” Launches Sept. 10
- Love “Family Guy”? Get ready for “Cavalcade,” Seth MacFarlane’s new web series. Over at NewTeeVee we’ve got the scoop on the show’s release plans, and we also got our paws on the show’s trailer. It autoplays, so we embedded it after the jump. The multimillion-dollar-budgeted cartoon variety show is to be distributed through Google AdSense
- » Microsoft vs Adobe: The Rivalry Heats Up
- Want to watch a great boxing match? Just take a seat and watch the back-and-forth between Adobe Systems and Microsoft. I wrote about this is fight without an end last year, but now it seems the punches being thrown with more intensity.No surprise - like two aging gladiators, the two software companies that have
- » OpenTape: An Open Source Muxtape
- RIAA now will have to contend with an open source version of Muxtape. Download and try this software and make your own mixes.
- » What Obama’s Text Message Campaign Reveals
- Barack Obama’s now-famous text-message announcement of his VP pick reveals something about the candidate that should really worry the Republicans. What it reveals is not that he’s a smart technologist. If he was, he would have known that sending 10 million SMS messages at the same time is pretty much guaranteed not to work; it’s
- » Future Win: Three VCs On Top Trends In Gaming
- Want to get a good idea of where the gaming business is headed? Follow the money — or better yet, follow the trends the folks with money are looking at. With that in mind, I recently contacted three top venture capitalists in the gaming space to get their take. What interests them
- » Lessons from a Startup Acquisition
- Founders are notorious for falling in love with their visions. How else could we survive 18-hour workdays or a multitude of setbacks with our optimism still intact? The problem with this is that it’s impossible to predict what the future holds. So, to be successful, you’ll have to grow comfortable with transforming that vision you’ve
- » Rogers Launches Blackberry Bold: More Anticipated Than the iPhone, Eh?
- Building on a 10-year relationship with Research In Motion, Rogers Wireless, the pioneering (and initial) Blackberry carrier partner, launched the new Blackberry Bold at a media event at Rogers headquarters in Toronto this morning.
- » In India, Either Buy iPhones or Get a Family Car
- OK, now I know I have your attention! In India, the 3G iPhone goes on sales today and people are lining up to buy a device that is seriously, and I mean seriously, expensive. Bharti Airtel and Vodafone (India) are the two carriers who are selling the device in India.On the Bharti Airtel network, the
- » Facebook Pokes Dell, Jilts Rackable?
- For past few days we have been getting pinged by the press folks from Dell who want to attend a joint event next week with Facebook, to announce a new cloud-computing project. That Round Rock, Texas-based Dell and Facebook of Palo Alto, Calif. are getting cozier shouldn’t come as a surprise. Facebook is seriously “server
- » Even Moms Love Mobile Data Cards
- Okay that is a bit over the top! Nielsen Mobile came out a report that points out that there were 13 million mobile data cards in the US at the end of June 2008. Not a big surprise, since wireless carriers in the US are having a blockbuster year as far as mobile Internet revenues
- » Who Wins: Verizon FiOS vs AT&T U-Verse
- Who Wins: AT&T U-Verse or Verizon FiOS AT&T U-Verse Verizon FiOS Neither. Cable will still beat themVerizon recently launched its FiOS TV & fiber-based broadband service in New York City, The New York Times is taking stock of the service which seems to be doing well. Verizon’s $23 billion investment into wasn’t viewed kindly and
- » How Lijit Plans to Make Money
- Lijit, a blog-search widget maker is planning to launch an advertising network that will show ads against the result of blog searches.
- » Open Thread: Are You Happy With Apple Support?
- Are you happy with Apple support? Absolutely! It is allright, nothing to write home about. It is quite terrible. I don't have Apple Products Earlier this evening, Apple sent out an email to Mobile Me subscribers, giving us free 60-days of service in lieu of outages and poor performance that had plagued the service earlier
- » Meet GigaLogue, Roll Your Own NewsFeeds
- A few days ago, I wrote about blogs needing to be more social and embracing new personal web services and acting as hubs for our increasingly digital lives. This week, we're launching a WordPress template and plug-in set called GigaLogue, which can help turn your blog into a newsfeed and enable users to instantly create groups or communities around a variety of different content sources.
- » Can Optic Cables Predict Economic Shifts?
- Undersea cables might be snooze-inducing and not as exciting as, say, Google, but they also foretell a rise in economic activity — and often a boom. Continue Reading.
- » Attention UK SMS Twitter Users….
- Quite a few people are complaining about Twitter’s decision to stop updates via SMS in the UK because it was proving to be too costly. (Actually it is a decision that impacts everyone who is not in US, Canada or India.) Sarah Lacy says they should stop whining. Instead they should check out this new service, Zygotweet, that will allow you to buy credits (between 4-to-5 p per message), and get your tweets to your mobiles.
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- » Why Blogs Need To Be Social
Earlier this week, San Francisco-based web publishing software company Six Apart released the newest version of its flagship product, Moveable Type, and pushed the blogging community into taking the first step toward a very social future. It is not a new concept — since their early days blogs were all about sociability. Late last year, we backed Chris Messina’s wild idea that WordPress, the open-source blogging software that we use to power majority of our network blogs, could be become the underpinning for a social network. In January, Automattic, the company behind WordPress and the free hosted blogging service WordPress.com, bought BuddyPress to help bring sociability to blogs. (Disclosure: Automattic was started by Matt Mullenweg, a close friend of mine. We share True Ventures as an investor.)Our friends at ReadWriteWeb theorize that in order for blogging to evolve, the blogging systems need to embrace the newly popular life-streaming services such as Twitter and FriendFeed, along with a growing panoply of personal web services (including the most fabulous, Dopplr). The team at Six Apart has combined the above-mentioned ideas to create Moveable Type Pro, a blog-publishing system with extremely social DNA. (Check out the Six Apart blog for details.)Blogging Needs To EvolveSix Apart is making the right move, for it is time for blogging to evolve. Many of us have forgotten that blogging is not just an act of publishing but also a communal activity. It is more than leaving comments; it is about creating connections. For instance, through comments I met folks like Robert Young, who in turn wrote for the blog, and then in the process became a friend. It is time to re-embrace and extend that philosophy.Establishing those kinds of relationships becomes an even bigger challenge as newer tools emerge, enabling new kinds of sharing. Whether it is Friendfeed or Dopplr, videos or photos, we are constantly figuring out ways to share information about us on the web. In other words, our digital life is spreading out across the web.Blog = Digital Life AggregatorWe have two choices in order to consolidate these — either opt for all-purpose services such as Facebook (as tens of millions have done) or use our blogs as the aggregation point or hub for all these various services. Facebook, for instance allows you to share photos, aggregate your digital droppings, share comments with friends and exchange messages, but it doesn’t give you a unique identity on the web. In contrast, blogs with social features could allow you to do exactly that.Marc Canter has been talking about this digital aggregator forever and has been ahead of the curve, though now pieces have started to fall in place. Robert Scoble is a good example of how and where things might be headed. He uses multiple services, and they are all easily consumable on his blog, where he writes longer, more engaging posts. His short conversational posts of yesteryear have migrated to FriendFeed, his video has bifurcated into long-form or live, short-form videos. I know Scoble is an outlier of this trend, but he was also ahead of the curve six years ago as far as blogging is concerned.The Demographic ShiftAs a society, we are entering an increasingly narcissistic phase, enabled by web technologies — a theory that is articulated in Wired’s recent cover story. As the Wired writer quips, “Like it or not, we are all public figures now ??? famous, as the new clich?? goes, for 15 people.”The evolution of blogging platforms needs to match these societal and demographic changes. I think folks who are blogging now (no, not just tech bloggers) are different from some of us early bloggers — they use different tools and services and have different views of sharing. In many ways MySpace and Facebook have changed what is OK, and what is not OK online.With that as a sub-text, it is good to see the blogging systems start to evolve. Kudos to Six Apart for making the first major move. Suddenly, blogging tools are more fun — and social.Open Question: How will you build the next-generation blogging system? I am going to be discussing this question with various attendees of WordCamp 2008 that is being held in San Francisco this weekend. I am speaking at the camp and have a exciting announcement as well.PS: Get ready for BlogActionDay.org by registering your blogs, watch the new video, and become part of the movement that is about blogs making a change in our world.
- » How Do You Rate NBC’s Olympics?
- How would you rate NBC's coverage of Olympics A... Excellent Work B... Okay, But Not Great C... Crap Olympics? Is it a new Web 2.0 company? Warning: This story is meant for our U.S. readers only. As many of you already know, I am giving Olympics the miss and perhaps that is why I am