Following are links to interviews of popular bloggers in which they describe what they do–worth a scan if you’re thinking of starting your own blog.

• Jason Kottke. Among other things, Jason was asked if his weblog has led to other opportunities. His reply: “Yeah, between kottke.org and my previous site 0sil8, I’ve gotten jobs, job offers, speaking gigs, made lots of friends, and met my wife. So a strong “yes” on this question, I’d say.”
• Guy Kawasaki. “[My blog is] like crack–though I’ve never tried crack. I spend two to four hours a day on my blog. It’s an even worse addiction than email.”

Blogging | 1 Comment »

For the early adopter crowd: Microsoft has released browser-based trial versions of Office 2007 (including Word, Powerpoint, Access, Excel, etc). Unfortunately, the demos won’t allow you to save documents to a local hard drive, but they’re still interesting if you’re looking to see what functional and GUI changes/improvements are in store (Jensen Harris, lead program manager for Office’s “user experience” team, maintains a fairly active blog with more background info).

My take is that this is a smart move for Microsoft as they get free feedback. Of course, one could ask how relevant Office will be going forward as free web-based alternatives continue to improve, but that’s another topic…

Enterprise software, Business Models | 1 Comment »

I’m a fan of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory–recent controversey notwithstanding. Still, I was surprised by the following chart from Wikipedia’s statistics page:

The chart shows that 416,139 “wikipedians” have made 29,580,205 edits to various articles (there are currently 1,306,883 articles in total). That’s a lot of edits, but what’s more interesting is how an extremely small number of people account for the overwhelming majority of edit activity: just 5 individuals were responsible for more than 850,000 edits, and only 5.7% of all active users provided 88.5% of all completed edits.

Clearly, there are interesting implications for so-called user-generated content sites. In particular, capturing and retaining the interest of the most-hyperactive editors/contributers is key (at least it is for Wikipedia).

Update: Christopher points out that some of the most active “wikipedians” are, in fact, bots (automated or semi-automated accounts for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually). Important clarification…

Business Models | 3 Comments »

The recent news that AOL released a log file containing more than 20 million search requests from more than 650,000 subscribers is frightening for many obvious reasons (see here for examples of inane and sometimes downright creepy queries). I’m not sure if AOL violated any legal agreements with their user community (see the AOL.com privacy policy here), but there’s little doubt that their brand will suffer.

The most interesting analysis I’ve yet seen on the fallout is from Markus Frind, CEO of Plentyoffish.com. His recent blog posts raise a number of questions and issues, including:

• Is MySpace.com’s traffic growth organic or a result of search engine spam? (apparently MySpace is optimized for search engines far more than any other social network)
• How MySpace is killing internet dating sites (a topic Markus watches carefully as plentyoffish.com is an ad-supported dating site)
• How spammers will benefit from the released AOL data (by creating sites containing frequently used keywords and pasting AdSense ads liberally)

Check it out here.

Update (8/8/06): The NYTimes has more–they actually matched one user’s searches to her real identity (and interviewed her).

Security, Policy | 6 Comments »

Numbers of the day: 9 years ago, there were 2 million pay phones throughout the US.

Today, mainly thanks to cell phones (though neglect is also a factor), there are only about 1 million working pay phones (source: Newsweek).

What’s the next industry ready to be disrupted? It’s already well underway in TV, real estate, and even ice cream…

Web 2.0, Startup Ideas | 2 Comments »