DISQUS

> there are THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of great companies that require capital, and they can't raise the money that they need

I believe that. I've never understood the VC claim that there's too much money chasing too few opportunities. I see interesting opportunities everywhere I look.

Thanks much for the writeup.

require a treacherous effort as a solo gig

Yes it would. Fortunately Blogcosm is a team effort: 1 FT and 1 PT Web developer, a Web researcher and me. We'll be hiring a blogger soon.

We have a (small) blog, but are a reference site rather than a "blog about blogs". There are plenty of others who do the latter.

Thilo: thanks for the feedback.

who claims to have been around even before Dave Winer invented blogging (which is just crazy talk)

Hey, you're supposed to be one of the good guys of the blogosphere! That's certainly not what I claimed, nor is it what Marshall wrote.

Also, I wasn't "pitching" Marshall with a set of talking points, we were just chatting at the Expo. I'm not sure that the history of how I got into blogging is all that interesting, so only a subset made it into the post. Briefly: prior to blogging, Dave Winer created great products such as ThinkTank and MORE (outlining) and Frontier (Mac scripting). I was pretty active in the Frontier community for many years ... and thus had a front-row seat to the blogging ideas and tools that Dave (and others) did before "Radio Userland" and Weblogs.com. Brent Simmons (who went on to create NetNewsWire) was also an early Frontier scripter.


talks about how he’s gunning for Gabe Rivera’s Techmeme.

Er, except that's not what I said at all! Marshall created a nice attention-getting headline, but don't let that throw you off. (With your newspaper background, surely you could teach us all a thing or two about headlines....) Please go back and read the quote.

Blogcosm launched in August with the barest subset of what we have planned. You know, "ship early and often" and all that. We continue to add more data and features in our effort to build a resource that's different than anything we've seen. Sure, Technorati and others could have done so over the years, but they haven't.

They also raised money, e.g. Google "automattic vc" (no quotes, and note the spelling: 2 t's).

Pete: great data but lousy conclusions. Surely you're aware of all the controversy over page views, and myriad problems with the Technorati 100, but every page on Mashable includes: "5 million monthly pageviews ... among the Top 100 blogs". (I have no objection at all; Mashable's rise is impressive and worth touting. But subscriber stats are also useful, even though flawed.)

More details in my post, plus followups with an interactive "long tail" chart and a first draft chart of Technorati vs. Google Reader data.

Good catch! It's nice to see someone provide some perspective.

Sites such as Facebook and DIGG should NOT require a birthday. If they want to verify "above 13", just ask. If they desperately want age for demographic info (i.e. ad revenue), ask for the year. But month and day are just invitations to identity theft IMHO.

I didn't see a trackback URL so here's a manual one. I quoted your view of Techmeme in my BuzzTracker roundup, linked to Yodel Anecdotal in support of the "hiring" theory, and excerpted a few other points I found. Sort of a manual meme track (i.e. not very scalable!).

Pete: It would be helpful to be precise. Google didn't patent anything here, they filed a patent application in 2006 that was just published a few days ago. The USPTO won't even look at it for (probably) years, and there's no assurance that anything will be granted.

Several hints: the logo at the top of the page says "Patent Application Full Text and Image Database"; the bold text on the left says "United States Patent Application", the number on the right is 2007nnnnnnn (vs. n,nnn,nnn for an issued patent).

How about: "Google attempts to patent ... a Google patent application has come to light ... the document covers ... materializes from this filing"

Cyndy: anyone can file a patent on anything. There may be plenty of examples of the USPTO "completely out of control" but this isn't one of them.

One of the most interesting views on "good enough" comes from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma book (and subsequent work). Key point: as products get better and better, they often overshoot what most users need, so something that does less (and costs less) can disrupt the market leader.