Author: fioritto

The Gillmor Gang: August 20, 2004

Steve Gillmor and Technorati’s David L. Sifry have been working on something called Attention.xml for nearly a year, and this week they discuss the concept with the rest of The Gang. What is it? It’s a specification for tracking, prioritizing and sharing what people are reading, looking at or listenting to in RSS and elsewhere.

Hyperlocal Online Journalism Can Work

Students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism have been conducting a terrific experiment in what some are calling “hyperlocal citizens; media.” As I reported in my book, they set up a site called “goskokie” (“news for the people, by the people”) to cover the Chicago suburb of Skokie. Working with local people, they’ve created something valuable. Now they’ve written…

The Back Door

There are only two ways into the technology market, the front door and the back door. Some examples that came in through the front door: ERP, mainframes, and Lotus Notes. Back-door arrivals: personal computers, Unix, and Dynamic Languages (Perl, Python, and so on). You can build a business both ways. And, now that I ve been here at Sun for…

Videoblogs on TV

lately I’ve been obsessing about where videoblogging is going. Then, Peter sent this little piece of insight: “So I just realized this: once videoblogging becomes couchable, politics will follow. Drazen said politics happens on the couch. Lucas says videoblogging should happen on the couch.” Then I remembered something that Alan from Demand Media wrote: “Lucas’ blog post has the general…

Innovation, Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com

BusinessWeek Online recently published an interview with Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, in which he reflects on the innovative nature of the company’s culture, his plans for accelerating innovation at Amazon.com and the worldwide climate for innovation. Here are some of the more notable quotes from this fascinating conversation with one of the world’s most creative businesspeople.

Don’t imitate — innovate!

There’s an excellent column by Jeffrey Pfeffer in the September issue of Business 2.0 magazine that encourages companies to trust their own insights about their customers’ needs and say no to conventional wisdom and management gurus, as a strategy to succeed in even the worst industries. In other words, your best bet is to dare to be different!

Ludicorp’s new photo Organizr looks hot

Stewart Butterfield, founder of Ludicorp, announces Organizr for digital photos. I’m speechless. The same folks who brought us Flickr, a photo sharing service. I just watched the videos, but in talking with Stewart, I know this rocks. I’ll try it out over the weekend. Anyone already using it?

Bricklin: What is RSS?

I forgot how great this page Dan Bricklin wrote about RSS is — especially for non-techy people. It explains RSS newsfeeds simply, talks about what he’s doing with ListGarden, mentions Feedster. Don’t miss it.