The Chromium Blog: WebP, a new image format for the Web: a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images....Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today.
The engineering accomplishment might be the easy part. Adoption might be the hard part. There still are people whose ISP is AOL. Most people who use IE use some primitive version.
Slate: The Other Social Network:That spring, Goldberg started instant messaging with Mark Zuckerberg. In March, he met with Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and early Facebook investor, at a Starbucks on 96th Street. According to Goldberg, Parker tried to persuade Zuckerberg to acquire CU Community. Zuckerberg didn't tip his hand, but Goldberg says they kept in touch. In June, he says, Zuckerberg invited him to Palo Alto, Calif., where the Facebook crew had moved to work on the site. Goldberg flew out and stayed with Zuckerberg and pals for two weeks. "I think we went to one Stanford party," he says. There was "no crazy partying or drinking," Goldberg says, despite what The Social Network may suggest...... One factor was that Zuckerberg's site had the financial means to expand. Goldberg says he turned down advertisers, including MTV, and didn't seek out venture capital .... He started writing a food blog
The dude should have joined the Facebook team at the earliest possible date. Capitalism.
The Official Google Blog: What does the future of display advertising look like?: “Display 2015: Smart and Sexy.” ...... Display advertising really is at the heart of what we’re doing at Google these days. 99 percent of our top 1,000 clients are now running campaigns on the Google Display Network. And last year, they increased their spending on display advertising by over 75 percent. .... in five years, there will be five metrics that advertisers commonly regard as more important than the click ... Watch
Google probably feels "stuck" with its traditional revenue source, the ads that show up with search results, the spartan text ads. Unless it goes into mobile, into display, its market value is not going to compete with Apple. This new push for display ads is Google's idea of an iPad. It is a new thing to do. But it is not like Google is going into display ads, something it so avoided when starting out. Google's display ads will be a new, interactive, social kind. Google intends to reinvent display advertising on the web.
With this push Google is looking for its next big growth. This is no one trick pony.
In The News
Wall Street Journal: Digits: Google Wants to Make Online Display Ads ‘Sexy’: “On television, [networks] generally made more money by showing more ads,” said Shishir Mehrotra, a YouTube executive. “Online video will reverse that trend.” .... display advertising would be one of his company’s next $10 billion-plus businesses.
New York Times Backs News-Aggregation Software Company: Ongo describes itself as providing “computer and telecommunications software for use in aggregating and viewing news and syndication feeds.” ..... News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal, has been talking to media companies about creating a cable TV-type business for news, allowing consumers to set up one bill to access digital content from multiple media companies.
New York Time: Bits: By the Numbers: Apple, Microsoft, Dell, H.P.: $49.53 billion — That’s the gap separating Apple and Microsoft .... on the back of strong iPhone sales and rising interest in the iPad. ..... $52.47 billion — That’s the gap between Apple’s value and that of Exxon Mobil ... Dell .. can claim more patents than Apple
Amazon Introduces Kindle for the Web: lets digital book buyers read books on the Web and also offers the ability to embed book samples on blogs or other Web sites, similar to the function offered with video clips on YouTube.
New York Times: Media Decoder: Google Predicts More Social, and Profitable, Display Ads: a Web where the ads are more social, mobile and real-time — and a lot more profitable..... cellphone screens would be the No. 1 screen for viewing the Web by 2015..... “Static banner ads will become a thing of the past.” ..... a “meta media phenomenon.” .... Display advertising will grow to be a $50 billion market. .... companies would have more time to focus on the creative aspects of their marketing campaigns. “The technology should just work”
Gizmodo: The Plans For Steve Jobs' New House: more of a small, private retreat than any towering glass-and-steel tech chapel or totem of wealth. ..... Jobs intends to populate the 6 acres with an assortment of indigenous flora; a simple three-car garage; a modest 5 bedroom home with plenty of windows and decks; a network of lighted stone walkways; and even a private vegetable garden. Everything is neat, tight, pragmatic, and in its place. ..... No chauffeur's cottage, no cook's cottage, and no tennis courts. In fact, when compared something like Larry Ellison's $70 million feudal Japan themed estate located right up the road, Jobs' new digs seem downright monkish—if not Buffettian..... almost Zen ..... At a time when architect and design firms are just starting to apply to Apple's design principles to the building of homes (clean, tight, nothing unnecessary), Steve Jobs has gone and designed the iPhone of houses. ..... the home was clearly built for a man (there's a distinct lack of a woman's touch here) who likes privacy, a natural setting, and working. Especially working...... a person whose life if very internal. He does not want what is going on outside to interfere with what is going on inside
Image via WikipediaMike Arrington was recently in news for days for what was termed Angelgate. Now he is in news for selling TechCrunch to AOL. Arrington turned TechCrunch into the leading tech blog in the world. That is no small achievement. He has personally remained controversial. He makes it sound like that is the nature of the job. I still don't know how much TechCrunch was sold for, but it might be close to $40 million. Looks like Arrington finally, finally became a dot com millionaire. Quoting from this article below might be relevant at this point.
Inc: The Way I Work: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: started as a hobby .... was researching Silicon Valley start-ups and decided to post his findings online ..... 9.2 million visitors a month and boasts annual revenue of about $10 million ..... 25 full-time employees ..... still spends much of his time reporting and writing. On most days, he works remotely from his home near Seattle, in a cavelike home office. From morning until night, Arrington sits in darkness in front of his computer—blasting music, working his contacts, and focusing on what he loves best: breaking big stories. ....... We break more big stories than everyone else combined in tech ...... I’d work until I passed out, and wake up eight or nine hours later, which might be 4 p.m. or 3 a.m. Then I’d work again until I passed out. That was my life for four years ...... Negotiating with companies over how news breaks is a big part of what we do. ...... I usually spend about half my day talking to sources, either on the phone or on IM. ..... There are very few people in Silicon Valley—or in tech, in general—whom I don’t know pretty well. Chasing down stories is my favorite part of my job. ....... I truly love entrepreneurs. They’re my rock stars. I’ve always been fascinated by entrepreneurs. ...... . Most of them could go out and get a perfectly reasonable job as an accountant or a lawyer. Instead, they risk everything for almost certain failure. ...... I also use Skype a lot. The video quality is great. When you go full screen, it’s like the other person is in the room. ...... I don’t want to chitchat about your family, because I don’t know you. ...... When I first started TechCrunch, I would post several times a day. ...... By the third day of writing, I got my first comment from somebody who wasn’t my mom. ...... people started subscribing to my RSS feed. Every day, that number would go up—10, 13, 100. That constant feedback is my reward. I still scan for comments on my posts. ....... an event every month ..... I wrote a blog post inviting people to a party—10 people came. I made hamburgers. We drank beer and stayed up until 4 a.m. drinking Scotch by the fire. Two weeks later, I had another party, and 20 people showed up. About 100 people came to the next one, then 200. ....... because I’m introverted—I like being alone— ....... In 2008, somebody spit on me at a conference in Germany. Before that, I had a death-threat incident—I had to hire private security 24/7 to protect me and my parents. ...... I have never been very good at managing. I want to be writing, and it’s hard to be a coach and a player at the same time. Plus, I’m moody. .... We have never had an executive meeting. Instead, we use this program called Yammer to make sure everyone at TechCrunch is on the same page. ...... After dinner, I’m usually back at the computer. That’s when I do thought and opinion pieces. I’ll spend two or three hours on one post. ..... I like working late at night. There are no interruptions. I usually listen to music when I write. I like hard music that is not happy music—Metallica, Eminem, Rage Against the Machine.
You can see the vultures now circling Mashable.
Arrington is a former lawyer. His parents were happier when he was a lawyer than when he quit lawyering and became a blogger. Blogger what? Today there are more bloggers than lawyers and software programmers in America. Blogging can make you money. Ask Arrington. It has made him a millionaire.
9.2 million visitors, wow. This blog - Netizen - gets 30,000 plus visitors monthly. Used to be worse. The best day has been 3,000 visits. On good days I will get 1500 these days. Those numbers are known to go up over time.
Image via Wikipedia
