Shanti’s Dispatches

This looks interesting:

The Podcast Film Fest is an online film festival that delivers short film to any computer or handheld device via podcasting. Podcasting is the newest emerging technological trend on the internet and its growing fast. With over 14 million video ipods sold, this platform will become one of the largest content delivery channels for new media.

Link: Podcast Film Fest (2006)

My cox high-speed Internet was down over the weekend.

Talk about several hundred dollars in lost opportunity cost of working on my projects.

Luckily the cable guy came out and got it back online… only $59.95 for a new cable modem. Apparently my Internet connection had been turned off too by a cox technician. (Anyone else think this sounds a little fishy?)

O’well, I was just happy to be back online!

In unrelated news, Ruby on Rails had a very special birthday today, reaching 1.0 baby!!!

I’ve also been looking for some extra help on Niner Niner to help knock out changes to our various WordPress themes, etc.

I know that you get what you pay for… but when did $10 per hour become peanuts to do basic HTML work?

We’d love to pay $20 or $25 an hour, but what we need done just doesn’t warrant that kind of dough, even if we had it.

If you’re interested, or know of anyone, drop me a line at: shantibraford (at) gmail

Lots of big Web 2.0 M&A news these last few days.
SiliconBeat: Confirmed: Verisign buys Weblogs.com

We’re getting confirmation that the rumors about Verisign buying Dave Winer’s Weblogs.com are true. The price is $2 million. What Verisign wants with Weblogs is another matter. Weblogs was one of the first, if not the first, centralized ping servers that blogs could use to alert the world to new content.

Well, folks, it’s official.

Google has finally launched a Blog Search Engine (beta).

I’ve been saying for a while now… why would Google want to buy Technorati when a few of Google’s hotshot engineers can whip up similar functionality over a long weekend, or as one of their 20% projects?

Sure, Google’s Blog Search doesn’t have the massive index quite yet of blogs that the ‘roti has. But just give ‘em another weekend or two =)

Daniel O’Connor, a talented young programmer from the land down under (Australia, mate!), has just released a beta version of
Alcoholix, a new web app in the vein of Upcoming.org, 43 Things, etc. that allows you to find bars and network with friends…

Brilliant, simply brilliant.

Andreas of BlogsNow points me to the BlogsNow Version 2 Preview.

The top story right now on there is about an abortionist accused of eating fetuses.

BlogsNow and del.icio.us/popular are my two favorite “have to check” every day or so sites.

If you check those two sites, you’re pretty much set when it comes to checking up on the latest news / articles / links that everyone seems to be reading.

Oh yeah, Andreas also says that blo.gs just got bought by Yahoo.

What’s next, Microsoft to acquire Technorati?

Nice Kuro5hin article on who Google might buy next:

Google is the new Internet behemoth, snatching up small companies left and right. So, in this article, I ask: what tech gems are in the running for Google’s growing subsidiary menagerie? To help predict, I will first take a look at who Google has acquired in the past and what Google has done for them, and then I’ll throw out a few possibilities for Googlification and discuss where they might fit into Google’s strategy.

(via Slashdot… so uhhh, you’ve probably already seen the article! heh)

Is this for real?

Craigslist Posting in Los Angeles “writing jobs” section: / director / Producer/ film maker/writer:

I want to shoot a 90 minute feature movie from inside a SUV using a one actor and a dog driving very fast around town in LA are,The dog will be in the passenger side standing up looking out side and barking. The driving needs to be a very fast motion just like you are in a roller coaster ride , Also we will be shooting interesting scenes while driving, There will be a voice over after the movie has been shot.

In the market for a weblog network?

No, our ever so lovely Niner Niner is not for sale.

But apparently AmericanBlog.org is for sale for $975,000.

I would be real, real interested to see their Cash Flow, which is Not Disclosed on the site.

Business Summary:

AmericanBlog is selling a 50 state blog (including 50 state domain names i.e. CaliforniaBlog.org etc..) site designed to promote creative communication about what s going on in every state in the union. The state-wide BLOG sites spotlight rich topics, while the regional BLOG sites will focus on the most controversial and informative blogs. This unique network of blogs is focused on sharing ideas and information about the United States and its citizens As the Ray Charles song says, we have 50 nifty United States, and Americanblog.org provides a forum for singing the praises of each of them. The blog sites provide a venue for anyone with a yen to write about the attractions, peculiarities, political leanings or art of their state or region. Each state blog carries topics that include: Arts & Entertainment; Food; Health & Fitness; Home & Garden; News & Politics; Romance & Sex; Sports; and Travel.

I’ve been reading Chris Pirillo’s blog for a while now.

More recently, I finally grokked RSS and have been using Bloglines in a major way.

FeedDemon is great, but I browse the web on several different computers.

Bloglines makes it easy to read your feeds from anywhere with ‘Net access. The only thing I dislike, though, is that it seems to have trouble remembering which items I’ve viewed on other machines. I’m not sure if this is by design. It doesn’t make sense to me… If I’ve already viewed entries on one PC, why show them as unread on another PC?

Now, where were we…

Scoble and a few others have been bitching lately about how Chris Pirillo’s RSS feeds weren’t full-text. His site is ad supported … so his RSS feeds were just brief summaries that linked to the full posts w/ embedded AdSense ads, etc.

Well, full-text RSS feeds are back over on Chris’ blog.

I think this is a smart move on his part… Sure, you want to monetize your site. But you also want to provide a great service to your users. When full-text becomes the norm, and you’re still doing summaries, it really makes them think, “is this really worth it, that I have to click-thru and all?”

There will be a day (it may not be that far off, either), when AdSense for RSS or some other means will provide a way to monetize full-text RSS feeds.

Until then, I think it’s just one of those things that you’ll have to do (provide full-text RSS, that is), just to keep up with the proverbial Joneses. That … and to keep guys like Scoble from bitching about your summary feeds.