week 24, 2005 archives
blo.gs has been acquired by yahoo!
the sale of blo.gs has been completed, and i'm proud to announce that yahoo! has acquired the service. as of right now, give or take a few minutes, yahoo! is running blo.gs.
this is the sort of good home that i was looking for — yahoo! obviously has the resources to run and improve blo.gs in pace with the incredible growth of blogs (and syndication in general), and in talking with them it was also clear that we had some of the same vision for the future of the service and the ping/notification infrastructure.
for users of the website and the cloud interface, nothing much is changing. the service will continue to be completely open, and both yahoo! and i hope you continue to use it and help it grow.
even though i’ll no longer be operating blo.gs, i'm not going to disappear from the community. i’m still very interested in blogging and syndication, and believe that blo.gs will continue to have a major impact as a key player in the evolving ping and blogging infrastructure.
some people have asked about the privacy policy during the transition. yahoo! is keeping the blo.gs privacy policy. the data collected on blo.gs will continue to be subject to that privacy policy and you will be given the opportunity to consent to future changes.
thanks
i owe some thanks.
to don, shane, scott, paul, lev, jeremy, and all the other yahoos that made this happen. they really made clear that they got the service from the beginning, and are a great trajectory for the future.
the other prospective buyers, who made the final decision a lot tougher than it could have been. there are a lot of great people and companies out there in this space, and it was good to know that i had options.
albert at happygofun for the most recent redesign of the site.
matt, dunstan, simon, and all of the other users of blo.gs who helped prod me into making things better. and reminded me to keep it simple: not everyone wants an aggregator.
bob of pubsub for jumping on the feedmesh bandwagon with both feet, even if he wasn’t invited to foo camp.
dave and dan for weblogs.com and blogtracker, respectively, for providing the original inspiration (and data feed) for blo.gs.
and finally, my mom and dad for raising me right.
coverage of the blo.gs purchase
i think the dialpad acquisition stole my thunder. (that’s not a bad thing.)
assault on precinct 13 is basically a zombie western set in 1970s los angeles. the gang members making the assault have a thin motive and not much of a strategy or a sense for self-preservation. the pacing of the film is pretty slow, but it holds up pretty well — amazingly well considering its budget. it certainly rose above its potential.
assault on precinct 13 is a more typical action movie. it has been relocated from los angeles to detroit, and the biggest problem with moving the setting to the modern era is waved away with a cellphone-jamming magic wand. the bad police officers making the assault are developed somewhat as characters, and aren’t nearly as self-destructive. although the remake/reimagining looks better and has better actors and acting, it doesn’t even rise to meet that potential.
more music
- “we used to be friends,” by the dandy warhols: the theme song from veronica mars, and a catchy song
- “blackbird,” by eros: one of two remixes of beatles songs from beatles regrooved
- “let it be,” by eros: the other beatles remix, and the better of the two
- “somewhere over the rainbow / what a wonderful world,” by israel kamakawiwo'ole: you’ve heard this before in some movie or commercial, and it’s probably one of the most beautiful songs ever
- “kung fu fighting (rob smith mix),” by carl douglas: part of a whole album of “kung fu fighting” remixes, this version isn’t a whole lot different from the original — still a classic, if goofy, song from a one-hit wonder
- “hotel california (spanish mix),” by gipsy kings: an awesome spanish version of the eagles’ “hotel california”
- “rhapsody in blue,” by george gershwin: another incredible piece of music, and the soundtrack to the best segment of disney’s fantasia 2000
tomorrow (saturday) at 10:30am is the annual meeting of the los angeles conservancy at the cineramadome at arclight hollywood, and it will include a slide presentation about looking at los angeles, a collection of photographs of los angeles. it’s open to the public, not just conservancy members.
paypal now has a all-in-one payment processing interface, which means you can handle credit cards without even bouncing to the paypal website. i’m amazed this didn’t happen ten years ago — the existing schemes with distinct merchant accounts and gateways has always been dodgy.
you do have to use their express checkout thing (which does bounce to them, and lets users use their paypal account directly) in order to use the direct payment api. it’s $20/month and 2.2-2.9% + 30¢ per credit card transaction or 1.9% + 30¢ per paypal payment.
the best part may be that paypal is a company that seems to know where its towel is. what i’ve often heard from people working with existing providers is that they’re either morons or crooks. (or in the case of verisign, both.)
tony pierce’s story about jury duty is brilliant. the disappointing part is that he didn’t make it on a jury — imagine the stories if he had.
breathing room
okay, one more little blo.gs tidbit: the effect of being rid of the service on the bandwidth usage of my server.
the final little spike in outgoing bandwidth (the blue line) is when the final dump of the data was downloaded by the yahoo folks.
the current bandwidth usage is in the 30kbits/sec range. it was generally over 1Mbits/sec before, or at least that’s how it looks from the graphs. (it may have been higher — it appears to get sort of flattened out over time in rrdtool.)
slack: getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency by tom demarco is a book that evan williams, one of the founders of blogger, recommended recently. to briefly and perhaps badly reformulate it, the main lesson of the book is that there is an efficiency vs. efficacy trade-off that needs to be acknowledged, and something that can increase efficacy (even if it decreases short-term efficiency) is to leave some slack. that’s not to say you should work 20% less, but that you may want to spend some percentage of time not working directly towards your main goal.
you can see this reflected, obviously, in google’s 20% time, where employees are free to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want. but there’s a lot more to the book, and i don’t want you to get the idea that it is just a validation of the idea of google’s 20% time or anything like that.
like most good business books, it is a fairly quick read and at the end of it you’re left with the vague feeling that you knew, or should have known, all of what you just read.
here’s a quote that struck me as noteworthy: “it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.”
i sometimes feel a little silly about reading management books like this since i’m not management, and don’t particularly aspire to be. but that quote puts in perspective why i read them anyway. and although i don’t aspire to management, it is still a subject that fascinates me. i guess the role i aspire to is consigliere. at least when sinecure isn’t available.
even more new music
- hotel by moby
- bleed like me by garbage
- electrified by dressy bessy
- the sound of music by pizzicato five
- take off your shoes and dance like a monkey by chin chin
the last was a bit of clearance-bin randomness. with a cover and title like that, how could i not buy it?
this is part of an ad that is on the wall at the pershing square station of the metro red line, and it always cracks me up. photographs of david hasselhoff are just always funny.
something i’ve thought about doing is a letters from a nut-style (or the lazlo letters-style) experiment in which i would send letters to various celebrities praising them for really silly and relatively obscure things they have done (“dear steven spielberg, i really enjoyed your acting in blues brothers, when can we expect to see you on the big screen again? i haven’t really seen much of you since then.”) and ask for a signed picture of them in return for the signed picture of myself i have enclosed — but the picture would be david hasselhoff with my name signed to it (or whatever fake name i used).
the other idea is more recent: a spoof of the huffington post called the hasselhoff post. it almost writes itself.
a few resources
here’s a few resources that someone may find helpful:
- php’s htmlspecialchars() function, useful for encoding user input that may contain characters like <
- php’s addslashes() function, useful for escaping user input for putting into an sql query (even better is to use a parameter-based query api)
- a list of the top ten php security vulnerabilities
and don’t forget that in php, variables like $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] are user input.
i saw something on the gold line yesterday that was funny — a sheriff got on at one of the stops, and started walking towards the front of the car (where he turned around and started checking tickets). as he was walking up to the front, a guy hopped out of his seat right after he passed by, and ran out of the train.
it cracked up all of the passengers that saw him take off, and what made it a little bit funnier is that the guy looked perfectly normal, even respectable. the two skate punks who took his seat looked more like the type you would expect to be riding without a ticket.
i think it is a little amazing how crash fails in spite of its shortcomings. a lot of the situations it sets up are pretty hackneyed (a latina lashing out because she’s been called mexican and really has puerto rican and el salvadoran parents? so not new). but the film pulls them together in an interesting way. and there’s a few scenes that really propel the film to great heights.
another los angeles moment
when i came back from seeing crash, they were shooting a movie near my building — but they were shooting it with a camera mounted on a remote-control helicopter. so there was a car driving around the block, followed by the helicopter, followed by a truck with a camera operator standing on the back of it with a big remote control.
and i thought the shoot up the street from that was interesting — they had cartoon-looking cars with winding keys mounted on them.
