Open Source Blogging

A few weeks ago I attended a press event that the San Francisco Giants and Shoretel put on. The audio isn’t that great because we’re in the server room for the San Francisco Giants baseball team. Here SF Giants’ CIO, Bill Schlough, is showing off how the Giants saved a million bucks by upgrading its telecommunications equipment.

Remember that the ballpark that the Giants is in was originally named for PacBell, the local phone company. Interesting look at how phone systems have changed in just the past 10 years.

This is a nice win for Shoretel. How often do you … Continue Reading

Gary Vaynerchuk’s dad came to the United States with nothing in his pocket. He worked for less than minimum wage and built up a business, Wine Library, that today sells $50 million a year in wine in a sizeable store in New Jersey.

Today Gary is building on top of his dad’s work and is taking the store global with a video show, Wine Library TV, that gets about 100,000 views a show. I remember when I first saw the impact he was having when I walked into a meeting at Revision 3 and the team was sitting around … Continue Reading

After we had our Building43 launch party I wanted to explore more why small groups of people are so much better for actually learning something. By the way, Michael Sean Wright put together a neat little video of our launch party. He’s the one who produces Peter Himmelman’s awesome show on Tuesday nights.

Anyway, we’ve found that if you are throwing a party, somewhere around 200 people is the right number (or fewer). I’ve been to quite a few TechCrunch parties with 800 or so, and they just aren’t as satisfying. This holds true for weddings, too. I’ve … Continue Reading

I love hearing stories about how people turned their passions into a career. Lou Mongello used to be a lawyer, but he kept going back to a childhood memory: his family kept taking the family to Walt Disney World in Orlando. He turned taking his own family there into a hobby and later quit his job as a lawyer and now has a media company that publishes books, CDs, magazines, and does a weekly radio show, er, podcast, about Walt Disney World. Very popular stuff and he is hitting a monetizable audience: traveling families who will spend lots of … Continue Reading

Steve Gillmor has been hard at work putting together an interesting day for those of us who are interested in the real time web.

The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more.

But that’s not what will make this interesting. In between all the interesting panels about APIs and search and Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Mike Arrington and I will pit our mobs against each other.

Or, more realistically, have a discussion about what he sees as a frightening trend: that mobs are being formed faster and … Continue Reading

TechCrunch and others are saying that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is adding Tweets soon.

Microsoft has finally figured out the strategy to compete with Google. Cut Google where they are weak. Keep cutting. Bing!

This strategy is winning. Google is losing market share and hasn’t yet figured out how to respond.

Hint to Google: your UI is stale. Your search results are, while getting faster (FriendFeed and Twitter posts are now getting into Google within a few minutes) still not real time and you haven’t shown any real time leadership.

But where’s Yahoo? Carol? Hello? Twitter is happening now and you … Continue Reading

It’s been just about a month now since I stepped off of the USS Nimitz. Well, was flown off, more accurately.

I took a month off to let is sink in just what I was there for. It is SO easy to hype up such a trip right after you get back. And I did over on Twitter and FriendFeed.

But I wanted to do a blog post about what I remember of the trip. Not a long one. Enough words have been written … Continue Reading

How do you improve the world if you worked at a charity? Well, in the old days you would do a lot of work just to meet people. You’d use direct mail. You’d hire phone banks of people to call and bug other people during dinner (we get those calls all the time). You’d go to conferences where rich people hang out (I meet charities all the time at Davos and other conferences). You’d work with HR directors at companies to build projects (the United Way did that with Microsoft, for instance).

But there has got to be a better way … Continue Reading

We all remember TwitPic, right? It was used to snap a picture of the airplane that crashed into the Hudson.

But there are a raft of others that are trying to get Twitterer’s to use them. These are in no particular order.

Radar.net.
Twitgoo.
Img.ly.
2tweet.
Yfrog.
Twicsy.
TweetPhoto.
Picktor.
Pikchur.
Pixim.
TwitnGo.
TwitrPix.
Brightkite.
Ourdoings. (I use this because of its strong real-time integration into FriendFeed and inclusion of location data, which I think is important when I’m using my iPhone to take pictures).
FriendFeed. … Continue Reading

Don’t know what StockTwits is? It’s a way to talk about stocks on Twitter. Is it popular? Yes! Is it popular? Yes! Will it be profitable? I believe so. (Advertisers love an audience of people who are trading stocks). Is it using Twitter in a unique way? Yes!

So, how is StockTwits doing it? Well, Rocky and I traveled to New York to find out and we met up with Howard Lindzon, founder of StockTwits, to find out the inside scoop.

Lindzon is also an investor in other businesses and now owns a stake in Twitter itself.

This video is … Continue Reading