Three Computers Later

If it hadn't been such a miserable time, I would have loved to post about the misery that has been buying a new laptop. I will only say that the two Sony VAIOs that I bought and had to return made me really pissed that I hadn't bought a mail order laptop. I am now typing this from my new HP laptop that I am surprisingly happy with. I have installed my main business apps and am now starting to transfer over archived information, which is giving me a lot of food for thought about user generated content and how us digital people are creating an amazing amount of leave behind digital media. More on that later.

The Great Laptop Meltdown

A couple of weeks ago, my trusty laptop of over 2 1/2 years, began to act like a stroke victim. Nothing too serious at first. Some strange boots. Some long load times. Then some funny errors. This kept getting worse. I bought a backup drive and have been dumping on and off over the last week. I kept kidding myself that it might have gotten better.

So in the midst of heavy travel, heavy hiring, and all the normal stuff, I am doing the laptop migration. I ended up buying a Sony VAIO. I was leaning towards an IBM T43, but the deal killer for me was I needed three things, USB 2.0, Firewire, and Bluetooth. Unfortunately the T43 didn't have the Firewire which really bummed me out as those machines are tanks. The VAIO is super light and fits my overall Sony life style (Phone, Camera, DV Cam, PSP, TVs, etc.) but it has me worried about durability. I guess I will find out soon enough.

Although I am pretty uptight about the pain it will be to migrate all my stuff, I am excited about a new clean machine with no baggage to speak of. I immediately started deleting all the nonsense that comes shipped with the machine and then downloaded Firefox. Ah, very nice. I set it as my default and start to move tomorrow. I cant wait until we have a Web OS.

Platinum

Last week I received an email from American Airlines, my airline of choice, that notified me that I had made Platinum status. I didn't know if I should celebrate or cry. I am thinking cry. I can't believe that I have traveled that much this year without any international flights. Ouch.

Verizon Launches Blogging Category on Get It Now

Last night Verizon Wireless launched a blogging category on Get It Now. Its in the Get Going section and it currently includes Rabble and UPOC. I think this is the first time that a carrier has created a category like this anywhere in the world and we are excited as it is evidence that there will be more blogging options to come in the coming months. We expect that there will be similar moves from other North American carriers shortly.

Rabble and Zoto

Yesterday at BlogOn we announced our integration with Zoto here. Now you can send pictures from your Rabble Gallery to Zoto or publish pictures from Zoto to Rabble.

Rabble and Travelpod

We announced integration today between Travelpod and Rabble earlier today here. Users of Travelpod can update their blogs from Rabble and view their posts on Rabble now. Our partnerships allow people to publish content in a uni-directional or bi-directional way to allow our partners a way to mobilize their audience and to let Rabble work as a tool for existing web users. We have another announcement today at BlogOn and more to come in the following weeks.

A year later

This morning I jumped on the treadmill for a quick run. I mean a run that was slow that didn't consume too much time. Recently running has fallen off of my routine but I am resolved to get it back on track. I was listening to a podcast on the shuffle and I realized that it was this time a year ago that I created my first podcast.

It's fascinating to see how fast a new segment of self expression has grown from a handful of people to a fairly well funded segment that has also been embraced by media incumbents and a large number of people. I thought today was my one year anniversary but actually it is two days from now so I plan on getting together a special one year podcast show. Stay tuned.

Bands on Rabble

We announced today some of the bands on Rabble in a press release here. We have some deep relationships with a bunch of labels going back to MP3.com and we want to make sure that as our community develops that we find ways for fans of bands to find each other. Lots more to come but these labels got in with us early and have been great working with us.

Chance Podcast Simulcast

Tonight I sent out a special MP3 feed of my show The $250 Million Radio show. It is a live concert from the artist Chance. Go check out his site and check out the show. I haven't done this before but felt that it was really important to support what he is doing with this show. He has managed to corral 35 of us podcasters into playing the simulcast through our feeds. Very cool marketing. Definitely ground breaking in terms of clever marketing ideas for a new distribution platform. I am sure that this is only the first of many cool things to come on the podcasting and videoblogging front.

Flock

Ok, I am done for the day on this stuff. Matt told me to check out Flock a new social networking browser. Or something like that. I know the feeling. It's kind of mobile blogging meets social networking. Yeah. It's not live yet but there is a Business Week article here.

Ning

More new stuff. I want more time to play with new stuff. :-(

Ning is "A playground for building social applications". They have a framework that you can use to develop your own version of craiglist, Match, Flickr, etc. Interesting. Since I am not a developer I'll have to find someone to give me their $.02 but I'll definitely check out some of the Ning fed apps on the homepage.

Videonary

There is a new startup in San Diego that Bruce told me about called Videonary. Go check it out. There are some interesting possibilities.

BitTorrent Funding

I didn't post anything when BitTorrent was funded. I am really excited to see people putting some real cash behind this kind of technology. I don't know the founder, but my fear is that unless he is careful he runs the risk of getting sideways with the content industries. That would be unfortunate but hopefully the new investors are aware of this and will seek to find meaningful ways to work with companies who want to take advantage of this kind of distribution.

Creating Company Infrastructure

This week we brought a new person on board and I realized that we are actually a company now. I mean not just that we have people working in an office, we have evolved to the point that after sitting down with her for a couple of minutes I had to have our system administrator set her up with email, intranet access, WEP key for Wi-fi etc. I found myself laughing and later after our company meeting (I think that's funny too) I thought it might be interesting to share some of the tools we use.

Phones - VOIP. We are in this giant 14,000 sq. foot office where we have been on a month to month lease for over a year. And we get a great deal. Because we wanted to be able to move quickly if need be we started out with Vonage. I have been using them for around 3 years and have been pretty happy. Unfortunately they aren't as good for office stuff so we move over to Junction Networks for outbound VOIP and we finally broke down and installed a POTS line for fax.

PBX - For our PBX we use Switchvox where our good friends are busy cranking away making the world of IPPBX good for normal business users like us. We use softphones so far but I imagine at some point we will get some SIP phones.

Intranet - At MP3.com we had the mother of all Intranet's known as Gotham. At Intercasting we have our own little version of that intranet brought to you by some of our former/current co-workers at MP3.com. On the Intranet we have a Wiki from Media Wiki. (The same tool that powers Wikipedia) We use a calendar that nobody is really happy with yet called WebCalendar. You can tell a marketing person didn't name that tool. I want to get a client based tool that synchs with WebCalendar. I have been playing with Sunbird but it is still a bit early for that.

For stats we use Awstats but will move to a custom solution from one of our friends known as Cheeseburger in the coming months.

We also use some geeky tools like Nagios for system monitoring and Bugzilla for bugs. I am hoping we get some kind of open source contact management and project management tools in the coming months.

Blush

It was a good trip. This is typical of the response we had during demos. Lots of work to do but we feel like its been a good start.