Josh Kopelman has a very interesting post (more than a month old) called 53,651. This is the number of feed subscribers (as of 5/12/06, when Josh authored the post) to Mike Arrington’s Tech Crunch blog. Right now the number is 79,175!
If something gets reviewed, the site gets Tech Crunch’ed and gets easy 10-15 thousand subscribers who jump on it to try that “thing” out. These users then slowly fade away in oblivion and become irrelevant. However, it has become very important for any Web 2.0 “startup” or initiative to be Tech Crunch’ed to get noticed in front of investors, employees, future partners, etc. Here’s my take on it (illustrations by Ali):
Mike is waiting for yet another Web2.0 company…
…and the 800 or so Web2.0 startups vying to get their share of beta-users from TechCrunch feed-base
Archive for June, 2006
Cartoon Poking Fun at TechCrunch 53,651
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006Bar Camping at San Francisco
Sunday, June 25th, 2006About 150 geeks got together this weekend at Microsoft’s San Francisco office for sleeping bagging. Free food, drinks, plenty of booze and schwag. This was a free event (not even a single dime!). I was able to have better offline discussions with peers than I had at ETech. The food, drinks, booze etc. were quietly delivered by the sponsors without a single marketing pitch. Remember those blah-blah sessions from the sponsors of the “paid” events!
Nima Dilmaghani who is a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft was the host of the event. Hats off to him for standing up and getting this place for us! I’m impressed; Microsoft allowing 150 unknown people, with unknown “police” credentials, to use their facilities, conference rooms, showers, etc. etc. for 48 hours.
Left-to-Right: Chris Bauman of Sproutit.com, Indus(me) and Nima at Microsoft during BarCamp
Tag: BarCampSF, BarCamp
Bill Gates, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Winner?
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006Global Health Programs $5.8 billion dollars, Education $2.6 billion dollars.
Imagine the huge impact of this money; Not just grants to spend on basic life support, but money being used for fundamental research. What if an AIDS Vaccine comes out of one of the labs using the grants. The education grants also go a long way in improving the literacy ratio. What if a research comes out in 5 years that a country’s literacy rate went up as a result of the grants.
Why 2011? 3 years after Gates’ transition from Microsoft in 2008 and 5 years from now, Gates Foundation will have enought time to see it’s philanthropy bring results.
I’m not the first one to think about this, David Coursey originally enivisioned this in a 2001 article. David Coursey envisions further that someday a “Gates Prize” will be awarded to leading humanitatians of the world.
Web 2.0: What’s in a name?
Tuesday, June 13th, 2006“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.”
–From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)
I finally managed to catch-up on the tail-end of the brouhaha which started during the long weekend a few weeks ago over the Web 2.0 copyright issue.
Tim’s reply was right in it’s own right. Tom Raftery has a right to be upset too. The crux of the matter — bloggers and geeks have high expectations from O’Reilly media, the sanity of which was restored to a certain extent after Tim’s response. Moreover, the way people waited for Tim to respond was equivalent to union workers only willing to talk to senior executives of a company and nobody else. Funny, isn’t it? Where is the collective intelligence?
Reading the whole chatter looked like viewing a chain of private e-mail traffic, acerbic at times. Can’t really make a judgment why the blogosphere (nice name!) was created?
Ask.com’s Blog Search Engine: Never too late for the fight
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006Ask.com finally rolled out it’s search engine for Blogs and joined the race with Technorati, Feedster, Sphere, Google, PubSub, Yahoo and at least 10 other upcoming search services for blogs. While Feedster’s demise has been predicted by Jeremy Z., Ask.com’s offering is a nice refresh.
There are actually two separate announcements — Ask.com Blog search and enhancement of Bloglines’. Some obvious enhancements on Bloglines’ search interface, including the ability to view the full posts.
Yahoo Map Bug: Displays Lat-Long in starting location
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006Was planning to go from somewhere to somewhere using Yahoo Maps and managed to capture an interesting bug where Yahoo Map replaces the starting location with latitude and longitude.
Yes, I still use Yahoo Maps and that too the classical version — I only use the satellite imagery when I need to look at the top of the buildings.:D)
In case, you happen to be from Yahoo Maps developer group and still wondering, drop me a comment and I’ll let you know the exact date and time of this occurence.
Tag: Yahoo Maps
Just wanted to know are you Orkut?
Thursday, June 1st, 2006… No, I’m LinkedIn!