DISQUS

Hey, that reminds me of something from way back in 2002-2003 ;-)

Dave

Fred, tell me how this is different than a company actually going public? Would the purchasers of the stock only be allowed from an accredited pool? Aside from that I don't see how this is much different than the OTC market - wouldn't companies have to disclose things like their financial statements to prospective stock purchasers, and if not, why wouldn't this be a secondary market that is rife with fraud?

Maybe the better question is, shouldn't Facebook go public if they want to get liquidity? I agree with you that there's a larger issue here - that Sarbanes Oxley has created some serious problems with running a small growth-oriented public company and has helped to effectively shot down the public markets, but I'm not sure I see why a secondary private market, if successful, wouldn't end up with huge abuses given the lack of transparancy...

Great post, Dave.

Paul,

You're totally going about this the right way. Great post.

Ah, ok. Well, congrats. Glad it is working for you.

Dave,

You may find that the issue is that the mail server that is accepting (or rejecting, in this case) email from your EC2-based servers is doing it because it doesn't have those IP addresses listed as valid relays for your domain. Here's a couple of hints:

1) Get a static IP address from Amazon for the machine(s) you're going to be sending mail from
2) Set up those IPs with legitimate A records in your DNS
3) Set up a simple SPF record in your DNS with those IPs. You can check out the SPF record that offbeatguides.com uses - this enables our mail to be relayed successfully by all the major ISPs and not be marked as spam or rejected.
4) Set up your mail server to send mail to your relay!

If that doesn't work, you might want to set up an account with someone like GMail. Then you set up your rogram to log into your Gmail account with a valid user/pass, and send email through them. More of a PITA, and you're limited to sending something like 500 messages per day, but if these messages are all going out to a mailing list, that might be enough for you.

Here's Offbeat Guides' SPF record:

TXT "v=spf1 a mx ip4:216.239.32.0/19 ip4:64.233.160.0/19 ip4:66.249.80.0/20 ip4:72.14.192.0/18 ip4:209.85.128.0/17 ip4:66.102.0.0/20 ip4:74.125.0.0/16 ip4:64.18.0.0/20 ip4:207.126.144.0/20 -all"

Basically that tells people that any of the IPs matching our A or MX records are ok to send mail from, and we also include a couple of subnets as valid as well. Make sure to have a "-all" in there at the end to make sure that other IPs can't spoof your domain...

Good luck!

Dave

Congratulations!!!

Dave

Hang in there, Loic!

Great post Roger. Very well put. I'm with you on the advertising sector - unless you're already big with an established name, I think it is going to be really tough to succeed in hard times with an advertising model as the core model, unless you have LOTS of funding and a very very viral and marketable niche (gadgets, mortgages, etc).

But I think there's a WHOLE lot of companies that are going to do very well by filling needs that entrenched businesses can't or won't support, and companies that invest in downtimes will be the ones who break out when the good times return...

Dave

Chris,

CONGRATULATIONS on making it to the top 100! I see you there as #90 right now:

http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/?page=9

Apologies for the delay in you showing up on the list, there was a bug in the system, but the folks over at Technorati took care of it. If I had your number, I'd call you up to shoot the breeze, but you can always call me at 415 846-0232, happy to chat and answer any questions you might have! :-)

Dave

P.S. Woo hoo! Congratulations!

Robert,

Come up and visit us in San Francisco this week - having gone through a LOT of scalability issues with the growth of Technorati, I can give you lots of grounding on the basics, so you won't feel uncomfortable with these very smart guys. There's a set of basic rules and principles that help out in building scalable systems - but it'd take an entire book to really talk about them all in detail. Come on up and visit - and if you want, I'll give you a sneak peek into the depths of Offbeat Guides, and how we're building to scale as well... :-)

You've got my number/email, drop me a line. It'd be great to catch up as well!!!

Dave

Very cool! Glad the entire experience worked so well for you. We're getting very close to releasing a new site and set of books that should fix the bug with getting your custom chapters included...

Don't forget Offbeat Guides http://www.offbeatguides.com/ to get your personalized travel guides, Robert. We're still in private beta, and there's a pretty big update coming soon. Hoping to pull the wraps off of things soon as we're getting great feedback from our beta testers. :-)

Dave

Holy Crap! Glad you're OK!!!

Dave

hey, I've been on vacation this week, no fair! :-)

Dave

Totally fair, Dave! In fact, we've been exploring some ways that hard working guides can leverage their expertise in the places they know, and make extra money and promote themselves to boot! More to come, and thanks for the great feedback!

Dave

Robert, thanks for the kind words. So glad that we can finally talk about all the stuff we've been doing for the last 6 months!

Vinnie, thanks for the tip! I just ordered the book at Amazon.

Lisa, so glad that the guide worked out well for you! Keep coming back :-)

Adrian, I just bought my first Kindle and I have the same idea as you. Stay tuned!

Dave

Kudos Loic. Of course Seesmic will be a success, you've done a fantastic job making it happen. At first I didn't really understand it, but it really has grown and blossomed and I see the potential and what it is becoming. Congratulations!

Dave

Actually it looks like at least one person answered already...

http://www.hoosgot.com/index.php/2007/12/31/job...

Thanks for the kind words! Remember, it only works if you work it, so it's not just about posting queries to hoosgot - subscribe to the RSS feed, and answer questions (or find a great project to create!) that others pose..

Happy new year!

Dave

Hm, I tried writing an earlier comment here, but it doesn't seem to have gotten through, so here goes again:

You may be right that the time for a service such as this has long since passed - I really have no idea, we'll just have to see how it develops.

This isn't some big grand idea, it's a hack I built in a total elapsed time of about 48 hours over the holiday weekend in order to scratch my personal itch. Now it's out there, and I like it. I hope some other people get some benefit from it as well. It's all a big experiment, we'll see what happens.

Thanks for Mashable, it is a great site, and thanks for your thoughts on hoosgot (BTW, these silly names are only necessary because the more understandable ones are all taken, defunct, or held by squatters!)

Keep up the great work! :-)

Dave

New bug report: The link from http://static.flickrfan.org/misc/pingers.html for me leads to a 404 on Flickr. The correct link to my photos is http://flickr.com/photos/dsifry and the RSS feed (wouldn't it be great to have a 1-click-subscribe capability? heh) is http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_pub...

Dave

Looks like I did something wrong when I thought I had uninstalled it - I did it again, and now everything works! So far so good.

Hmmm, I just reinstalled (I quit the OPML editor, redownloaded the dmg, then mounted it, accepted the EULA, and dragged the OPML folder into my Applications folder), I said yes, when it asked me if I wanted to replace everything. Then I reran the app, put in the correct username (the app likes it if I use dsifry@technorati.com as my username) but I still get the 500 server error when I go to http://127.0.0.1:5337/photoFan/feeds

Am I reinstaling the app incorrectly?

Hi Dave, congratulations on FlickrFan! Looks like it's going to be a great app. Unfortunately I'm having some problems. It started when I put in my flickr username (dsifry) and it didn't recognize it. It responded: "The server, api.flickr.com, returned error code 1: User not found.". I did some sleuthing, tried various email addresses, and it then said it found it - my username is "David Sifry". However, when I went to the feeds URL at http://127.0.0.1:5337/photoFan/feeds , it responded: "500 error cont: CanÕt evaluate the expression because the name ÒtypeÓ hasnÕt been defined."

Now I can't see my photo feed in FlickrFan, or in the screensaver folder that I defined (all according to the instructions on the localhost web server), but I can see the AP photo feeds.

Any clues on what's going wrong?