News: July 17

Image via CrunchBase

ReadWriteWeb

The New Digg: What It Means For Power Users & Publishers
10 Inspiring TED Talks for Startups
Ben & Jerry's: How a Big Brand Explores Augmented Reality
Google Launches App to Let Users Share Open Parking Spots
Twitter Launching Analytics Product Soon
The Future of Tech According to Kids: Immersive, Intuitive and Surprisingly Down-to-Earth
Augmented Reality Becoming More Like the Read/Write Web
How Steve Ballmer Ruined the Cloud and the World Cup
RFID Helps Indian Company Trap Ghost Workers
Google Makes Major Semantic Web Play, Acquires Freebase Operators Metaweb
3 Deadly Mistakes made by SaaS Providers
Apple: Free Cases for All

AllThingsD

Facebook Will Announce 500 Million Users Next Week With “Facebook Stories”
Gizmodo to Cooperate With Probe Into Lost iPhone Prototype
Justin Bieber’s “Baby” the Most-Watched YouTube Video Ever, So Far
Jobs Feels Like He’s Been Through a Tear-Down
Jobs: Nobody’s Perfect (But We’re Very Close)
AMD: After Hours Gains Gone; Focus Turns To Processor Delay
Shhh! Google Buys Metaweb to Boost Search Results
Apple’s iPhone 4 Solution: Free Cases For Everyone!
Hey! Did You Know a Lot of People Used Twitter During the World Cup?
The Only Problem With Droid X Reception? Too Darn Warm.
Apple’s “Just Encase” Answer to iPhone 4 Complaints
Japanese Author Skirts Publishers With iPad Novel
The Facebook Movie Is a Money Maker for Twitter
Venture Capitalist’s New Frontier: Where Cellphones Meet Retailing
AMD Posts Sharply Higher Sales
Paul Allen, Microsoft Co-Founder, Pledges Fortune to Philanthropy

Engadget

iPhone 4 proximity sensor fix in the works
RIM co-CEOs pull no punches responding to Apple's antenna statements
Jobs: 'no one's going to buy' a big phone
iPhone 4 coming to Canada and 16 other countries July 30th
Apple: iPhone 4 drops 'less than one additional call per 100 than the 3GS'
iPhone 4 proximity sensor fix in the works
iPhone 4 sales: 3 million and counting, 1.7 percent returned
Apple affirms: no software fix for iPhone 4 antenna issue
Xbox 360 sales increase 88 percent in June, give it US console crown for the month
Google halting Nexus One official store sales after current inventory depleted
Nokia: 'we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict'
2011 Subaru Outback gains in-car WiFi option, strange Maine birds not included
Toyota and Tesla plan to bring electric RAV4 to market in 2012
Sony Alpha A390 and A290 DSLRs hands-on
Boxee's first production Box gets shown off to the world (video)

ArsTechnica

iPhone 4 antenna: unanswered questions, unearned trust
Mercury flyby maps new territory
4G data caps: not here yet, but likely to come
Ocean bacteria may create as much methane as they destroy
What happens when we run out of oil and coal?
Grades don't drop for college Facebook fiends
Funding overhaul aims at fast broadband for rural healthcare
Electric vehicle, battery makers get charge out of stimulus
Droid X first impressions: nice hardware, Motorola
iOS 4.0.1 tweaks bar display, doesn't fix signal drop
Clear Channel: Internet means we get to buy more radio stations
Users of location services worried about robberies, stalking

VentureBeat

Boxee shows off final version of its video streaming Boxee Box (video)
Facebook co-founder Moskovitz says movie has more sex, booze
Nokia kicks Apple while it’s down, says it prioritizes antenna performance over looks
Apple does have a sense of humor with “antennagate” (video)
Even during iPhone 4 damage control, Steve Jobs is a skillful onstage presenter (video)
Intel snags former Palm and Apple VP Mike Bell for smartphone plans
Google acquires MetaWeb, says Freebase will become “more open”
New report: VC investing bouncing back in Q2
Samsung strategist Omar Khan talks superphones (video)
Roundup: Firefox comes to the iPhone, MySpace gets a makeover and more
SGN launches Skies of Glory as the first cross-platform Android-iPhone game
Apple won’t recall iPhone 4 despite reception problems, WSJ says
California sues Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for blocking green energy initiative

GigaOm

Is the Difference Between MySpace and Facebook Black and White?
Four Business Tips From Apple's Steve Jobs
Why Google Launched App Inventor
The State of Open Source for the Smart Grid
Hulu Plus on the PS3: Less Content Than on the Web
Google Gets Semantic: Buys Metaweb
Surprise: World Cup Final Fails to Set Another Peak Tweeting Record
The Email Signature: From Efficient to Overkill
Google’s App Inventor: Escalating the Mobile Ad War?
Google Bows to Criticism, Changes Google News Design
When it Comes to Broadband, UK Still A Laggard
Seed-Stage Investments Jump Sharply in Q2 2010
Video: Chris Sacca Helps Founders Cash Out Shares Early
Esquire Misses the Point on Twitter and the World Cup

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Reclaiming My Twitter Account

Image via Wikipedia

I have decided to reclaim my Twitter account. What I mean by that is I am no longer going to be feeding TechCrunch, Mashable, CNet, BusinessWeek and Time into my Twitter stream like I have been doing for over a year now. They have had their free rides. Now I have a blog that intends to compete with them. I am going to link plenty to them on a near daily basis. But now the feeds into my Twitter stream are going to be only from my blogs. Most of the fed tweets will be from this blog itself because this is the most active of my blogs.

I did that feed thing because when I was desperately trying to accumulate followers on Twitter, I figured I could not fail in my attempt to create a great Twitter stream if I fed from some of my favorite blogs, news sites to visit, my favorite magazines. 

That worked for a while. It no longer works for me now that I am toying with the idea of pro blogging in a serious way. 

A spike in blog traffic can boost your self esteem. It has boosted mine. Now TechCrunch, Mashable, CNet, BusinessWeek, and Time come across as crutches, possibly even competitors. Why am I giving them all that free traffic again? 

TwitterFeed tells me the newest feed from CNet into my Twitter stream has 700 clicks. Those clicks could be mine. Those could be clicks for my blog. 

Hello people, the free lunch is over. 

I never really did the RSS thing, and I tried Google Reader but I did not become a regular. I was using Twitter for all that. But no more. Now I create my own news feeds in the form of daily blog posts that link to many news items from many different sources.

A 4 AM Traffic Peak, Mostly From Canada
Traffic: Canada Top Country, 2 AM Peak
What Just Happened? 3,000 Page Hits

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A 4 AM Traffic Peak, Mostly From Canada

Image via Wikipedia

How do you explain this? I think people in Canada sleep less. Or this is traffic from the northern parts of Canada where the sun is around many more hours of the day. Or parts where the sun never sets in summer.

Hello there. Thanks for dropping by.

The page hits for today stand at 1200, which used to be the previous peak for the longest time. And the day is still young. Looks to me like this blog's traffic is about to take off, enough that I can do this full time, if not right away then perhaps in a few months, or maybe even right away.

Blogging full time would be the best thing I could do for my startup that I expect to launch in about 15 months after I get my green card. Blogging full time would allow me to read all I want to read, to network feverishly in the New York tech ecosystem. I would explore the landscape for my startup through my blog.

If I have 1200 page hits for the day, and the top page for the day is getting only 80 of that, and that page is not a new page, but from a week back, that means I am doing well with the search engines. Traffic from search is the best kind. Otherwise sometimes you get a spike in traffic because some big shot blogger linked to you, and then all that traffic has evaporated in a day.

Search engine traffic is the good kind. It is more stable. Although Google can always tweak the algorithms and make you go away. But then that tweaking can go the other way as well. You could see another spike, spike upon spike.

If I were to treat this blog like a full time business, what would I do?

I like the blog's name: Netizen. It is a solo operation.

Every day I would put out a page of links to all the top stories from all the top tech blogs and from top news sites. A top story is what I determine a top story is. I would be making no attempt to be objective.

And I would write a few blog posts every day on topics of interest to me.

I would go to and blog about many of the key tech events in town. The two top tech events in town are:

• NY Tech MeetUp
• Digital Dumbo

I would watch and share videos from the top tech events anywhere and everywhere. You do that enough and you realize watching those videos is often better than showing up for many of those events. You can't show up for all of them anyways. And if you are going to every event on the list, your networking is not focused enough.

I would be commenting at other blogs much more. You have to be out and about, you know.

• Content
• Traffic
• Monetization 

Those are the three elements. 

As for monetization, the Google ads are back up. But Google ads only make good money if you have a ton of traffic. I wish I could dig into the NY tech ecosystem to have more companies let me do blog post ads. 

Or maybe it is too early to think of full time pro blogging. The traffic is building up but it's not there yet. But it would be nice to be able to do it full time for a year. And then I could do a $1 salary thing for my startup the way Bloomberg does for the city, he is a $1 a year Mayor. 

I should probably send out a few emails. Hey, how would you like for me to do a blog post ad for you? Letting me do a blog post ad or two for you is almost like hiring me as a business consultant. I bring along more than exposure. I bring perspectives. 

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Google's Metaweb Acquisition

This video above explains it better than the blog posts below. Metaweb is about barcoding the internet so it becomes easier to search stuff online. No wonder Google came knocking. This is also a great example of innovation happening outside a big company in a startup. If you are a big company, when you can't do it yourself, you can sometimes make up for it by being on a constant lookout, like a frog and fireflies.

TechCrunch: Google Acquires Metaweb To Make Search Smarter

Metaweb develops both semantic data storage infrastructure for the web, and Freebase,an “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge”. Freebase is a massive, collaboratively edited database of cross-linked data. The idea behind the product is to create a system for building the semantic web. Freebase allows anyone to contribute, structure, search, copy and use data.

The Official Google Blog: Deeper Understanding With Metaweb

we’ve acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world. Working together we want to improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone. .... we’re also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world.

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Tech, Women, Diversity

Image via Wikipedia

Often when Fred Wilson puts out a blog post where he links to about four different blog posts, I know it is one of those posts that is asking for a reply blog post, sometimes to echo the sentiment, sometimes to express a disagreement, often just to give further momentum to a great topic. Today is the turn of women in technology.

This whole debate reminds me of the creationism debate. My take has been religion and science deal with two different levels of reality. Religion is a belief system. Those beliefs do not have to follow the laws of physics, and many of them don't. Jesus walking on water makes sense in religion, does not make sense in science. I am not going to think you are a prude for believing that.

Religion has to be looked at in the religious realm. Science inhabits the scientific realm. And there are intersection points, like when Galileo was harassed. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, many people in Nepal did not believe. The moon is a god. The guy probably climbed some hill, and thinks he is on the moon, that was the sentiment.

Gender is as big a topic in sociology as gravity is in physics. It is big. It is all pervasive. Just because we don't think about it much does not mean gravity is not active every waking hour, and while we are down.

There are many - they tend to be white men for some reason - who argue technology is neutral to your background. You can be any gender, any cultural background, it does not matter. They are lying. Or they are ignorant. Some of them are evil. They are invested in persisting the status quo.

Even where meritocracy can be shown to exist, those with the merits and the skills and the intellect stand on centuries of favoring one kind of people over another kind of people. And that is when there are not outright sexist informal and formal structures in place.

Gender and technology: there are many intersection points.

Equality is something that has to be proactively sought. I don't think sexism is in the interests of men. A healthy male female ratio in the workplace and at the various leadership levels has to be attempted. This is not a male versus female issue. There are those - men and women - who are on the right side of history, and there are those who are on the wrong side. We should get more people to come over on to the right side. We have to constantly be evangelizing.

Fred Wilson: XX Combinator
Tereza Nemessanyi: XX Combinator
Brad Feld: The Discussion About The Lack Of Women In Tech
Eric Ries: Why Diversity Matters (The Meritocracy Business)

When you visit Fred's blog post, make sure you don't miss out on the action in the comments section.

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