When Nick Denton leaves Valleywag tomorrow, to focus on his forthcoming book I will miss one thing. Not that much Denton as Valleywag editor, but the hunt for Narcissus or all the pokery at Robert Scoble, the most overrated blogger around.

I just almost felt out of my comfy desk chair when Scoble’s most recent entry popped up in my Google reader.

Today at the party we’ll have a bunch of non cult members over (ie, those who think it’s idiotic to wait in line for two days to buy a device).

Did I miss a memo or did Scoble become an Apple fan boy over night, because he has just spent 34 hours outside under the burning Palo Alto sun, together with a bunch of other idiots he knows since years, waiting in line to be one of the first ones to have an iPhone. Actually Scoble even didn’t have the money to buy an iPhone for himself, but this narcissistic phenomena bought one for his wife and his son, Patrick, had more savings than his dad and also got himself an iPhone.

When did Narcissus become a Microsoft hater? Or is he just riding the waves of popularity.
IMNSHO, it is moronic to cue 36 hours outside, for an electronic gadget, especially if only some hours later you can just walk into the store and get one. Without having to stand in the line.

I wonder what Nick Denton Fake Steve Jobs thinks about Scoble declaring himself iCult. Without even owning an iPhone.

Yesterday’s cat fight between Nick Denton and Robert Scoble seems to have deeper foundations. Although The Scobleizer denied that he’s looking for a new job, this seems to become the biggest public secret.
Why would anyone otherwise suddenly remind the whole blogosphere plus his wife of all the social networks he is present at? With a bonus mention to LinkedIn as well

No, I still don’t do LinkedIn or Plaxo and I rarely use Skype anymore. I’m going to Plaxo on Tuesday to look at a new version coming out. But LinkedIn is close to getting me back.

LinkedIn only because he really tries to ignore all those platforms???

Damn, it seems like everyone in the world wants me to join it. I try to ignore these things, I really do.

I guess the Zooomr flirt with Sun didn’t work out for Scoble and the team around Zoho are an experienced bunch and already have an evangelist.
Certainly no blogger who forgets his work in favor to read feeds. If only I could find that entry I read yesterday, where Scoble mentions he is addicted to feeds. 31000/month isn’t it, Robert?

It must be sad if you’ve already blogged for half the technical blogosphere, gotten presents from Intel (I still wonder what happened to disclosure and the Intel notebooks!) and your content really isn’t that compelling.
I wished I just knew as many people.

Nevertheless Robert, I’m sure you’ll find something appropriate for your needs and if not… there’s always PPP.

Sincerest,

Franky.

We bashed Truemors earlier last month, but I was surprised to learn this from Guy Kawasaki himself: Truemors doesn’t even have a business model.

0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

Sure, it’s okay for startups and Web 2.0 companies to run just because of raw passion for the medium and for the technology. But coming from a venture capitalist himself, it sounds like Truemors was one big (or small?) experiment. I would agree that if an entrepreneur presented a plan without a business model, then most likely Guy the VC would boot that guy out of his office.

And Guy even admitted that it was a stupid idea.

In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

Hey Guy, you can even do it for less!

But then it got me thinking, Guy’s an entrepreneur, and also a capitalist. He’s one of those people who can afford to lose money. As long as he learns from the experience, then he ends up richer in the long term (money and experience wise).

Here’s the bottom line: Whether Truemors succeeds or not, I learned a helluva lot. One thing is for sure: no entrepreneur can tell me that he needs $1 million, four programmers, and six months to launch this kind of company. With products like WordPress, MySQL, and Salesforce platform, things are a whole lot cheaper and easier these days.

Suddenly, Truemors doesn’t sound so silly to me.

[via Wired]

Recently, there were rumors that Google plans to buy FeedBurner for $100 million. And even more recently, TechCrunch has posted that an insider confirmed the acquisition.

Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

My first thought when I read this: What? Only $100 mil?

I’m thinking a hundred million buckaroos might be too small an amount for such a web app that’s big in the blogging community as FeedBurner. Sure, FeedBurner is mostly a silent player when it comes to blog software. It’s not a blogging package itself, and it even works behind the scenes, burning your feeds for your readers, and then giving you statistics when you need ‘em. But it’s this ubiquitousness that I think makes FeedBurner valuable. It’s the data that they are able to gather about blogs and bloggers that is powerful. Sure, Google can index your blog, and Google can even track your searches. But FeedBurner can track which blogs are popular (by the subscription metric), and which topics are popular (by the number of clicks on an item).

So it’s not just the potential Feedvertising business and traffic that Google is buying into. As usual, they’re buying into the rich warehouse of information they can mine later on.

At any rate, my congratulations go to all who are involved. It’s not as big an acquisition as, say, YouTube. But it’s big enough.

What’s next? WordPress?

I didn’t notice this until I checked out the Blogging Times just recently. It seems the Times is sporting an even newer look. And pretty much everything else has changed, too.

Scandalicious headlines? Check. Scandalicious images? Check. Looks like everything’s in place. What used to be the Blogging Times has turned itself into an online tabloid of sorts. Gone is the newsy, level-headed analysis by its former writers. Now it’s all just talk and less sense.

But then again, the copyright statement says it all:

The Blogging Times is a news blog. Copyright © The Blogging Times, All Rights Reserved.

A news blog, eh? Seriously?

Oh, who am I to nitpick? Maybe the Blogging Times has become too strong for my taste. JOAB is getting softer as the days go by, and pretty soon we’d probably be the same boring old stuff, just like 99% of the blogs out there. Count on the Blogging Times to try to grab attention while it still can.

I wonder what erstwhile TBT owner and editor Minic Rivera is thinking.

It is said, the bigger they are the harder they fall. And this is just what happens in the world of social media. The bigger one site gets to be, it’s also a bigger target, and there are more threats than if it’s just one piddling site or blog that doesn’t really matter.

Here’s a threat faced by Wikipedia. They’re probably relying too much on traffic from the search engines. Google, after all, is probably considered to be the research tool of today. And Wikipedia, meanwhile, is the resource and reference of today. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t trust everything that Google and Wikipedia tell me. But fact is, Wikipedia is already the top external domain that Google directs users to from its search page.

And this could be over with a flick of a switch, so to speak. Google may as well be holding Wikipedia hostage.

With the flick of a switch over at the Googleplex Wikipedia’s traffic could be impacted with an absolute killer-blow. Given Google’s absolute dominance in the search space, such referrals cannot easily be replaced from another source, and Wikipedia may well be a sitting duck.

Compounding this is the belief that Google is applying additional weight to Wikipedia’s domain over and above what would normally be expected.

This all beggars the question ‘why?’.

What does Google plan for Wikipedia?

Then again, Google probably has everyone hostage. In my personal experience, about 70% to 80% of traffic on my personal blogs come from Google. I can probably say the same for most other blogs and sites out there. But my blogs aren’t as big as Wikipedia, and I don’t run the risk of losing a relatively large amount of traffic (and maybe money) if I suddenly disappear from Google.

Or perhaps Google has plans for eventually gobbling up Wikipedia, too, sometime soon. It’s always a possibility, especially given that Wikipedia seems to be looking for a more sustainable business model.

I learned this from experience. Whenever I talk to journalist friends about current events and important issues, I always make it a point to explicitly clarify whether something I’m saying is supposed to be off the record. Otherwise, I know that whatever I say can and probably will be quoted and published if the information is juicy enough.

It’s the same with bloggers. Last night, I had a chat with a colleague in the blog network industry, and he told me how some friends have criticized him for blogging about juicy insider information that they had shared with him. His response: they should be cautious about sharing such information with a blogger!

True enough, bloggers today are more potent than the gossip columns of old. Gossip is best spread by word of mouth. But when it becomes word-of-blog, it gets a larger audience. And it gets a worldwide audience.

And we’ve read about it all too often: trade secrets, politicians’ nasty antics, unfair business practices—all published on blogs. And it’s great that the public gets to learn about the bad stuff that goes about. But imagine you’re in the position of the whistleblower, so to speak. More likely than not, whatever gets published online could be attributed to people who have insider information. And especially if you’re the only person who is likely to have known and shared that juicy piece of information—it’s easy to pinpoint it’s you! There could be repercussions. You could get fired from your job. You could get sued. Or worse.

So be careful. One of the good ideas I’ve picked up from my blogger friends over the years is to add a line in my email signature: a check-box, whether that particular email is:

• Bloggable
• Not bloggable
• Ask first.

This defaults to “ask first,” because I don’t often send emails with secrets. But when I send something that’s supposed to be private, I tick “not bloggable.” When I send something I would like people to blog about, I tick “bloggable” (sometimes works as a subtle hint!).

Be careful what you tell a blogger. That person could just blog about it!

Google has been very active in the last year with acquisitions and new applications for its users. And no one knows what we can expect this year. Gdrive (or Project Platypus)?

No. Too narrow.

It will be even better, bigger and more sensational.
The almighty ever expanding monster Google will get into hosting. Free hosting.

Reading Khaled’s Best of the Net 2006 today I was surprised. A quote about 9rules struck me.

While I know it wasn’t fun for any of the 9rulers out there to see our network’s name dragged into the mud, it made for interesting reading to be included in the internet gossip pages.

Khaled, an early and long time 9rules member, expresses perfectly the difference between a professionally run network like b5media and a fun board such as 9rules.

And I thought ScrivsTyme was gossip.

@ Network Director : Can someone please get rid of the excerpt on the main page?