Venture Chronicles

Kanoodle Partners with Moreover; Monetizes RSS Feeds - The RSS Weblog - rss.weblogsinc.com

RSS, it's a changin. Moreover is one of Ed's investments, I say we get some guys and some torches and go over to his house to have a word with him! Actually I'm just joking, besides it's snowing in NYC. This is a development that has to happen in order to the broader publishing world to adopt RSS en masse. It doesn't mean that free content will forever go away, it simple means that publishers will have the option of monetizing.

Link: Kanoodle Partners with Moreover; Monetizes RSS Feeds - The RSS Weblog - rss.weblogsinc.com.

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Sadagopan's weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld

color me underwhelmed by subscription pricing models. Whether or not you take a large upfront license fee and a 20% maintenance agreement, or combine the license and the maintenance and spread it ratably over 3 years... it's all the same thing. For a lot of this stuff the switching costs are still prohibitively high, and for others you would have to question the relative value being created. It's definitely a trend, and a good one because it aligns the software vendor and the customer in a shared risk model and certainly makes customers feel better about the budgets they are allocating to IT. The tech media likes to zero in on the subscription pricing as simply a monthly bill for your software service, but that misses the point. The tech media also confuses on-demand with subscription models, they are not one in the same.

Link: Sadagopan's weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld.

InfoWorld: Software industry struggles to survive in an open source world: March 02, 2005: By Paul Krill : PLATFORMS

I'll reserve comment to a later post...

Link: InfoWorld: Software industry struggles to survive in an open source world: March 02, 2005: By Paul Krill : PLATFORMS.

Silicon Valley Sleuth: No more security through obscurity for Firefox

So this is why Mac users have been relatively virus free!

Link: Silicon Valley Sleuth: No more security through obscurity for Firefox.

Blogger News

Scientists warn of global warming dumbing.  Folks, this is a serious problem that we can't avoid any longer, the world's population is increasingly dumb. I propose a global treaty, we can call it the "Einstein Protocol", whereby individual nations can buy and sell "IQ Credits" in a global "marketplace" with those countries that have a surplus or a deficit. This would encourage individual countries to invest in their education systems.

Link: Blogger News.

Steve Shu's Blog: In Search of Better Ways to Measure the ROI of Blogging

I agree with Steve on this (damn, I'm agreeable today... must be the sunshine). Just like you couldn't measure the ROI of websites in the early days, they went from being a gimmick to a must-have, and today if you don't have a website you are conspicuous in your absence. Blogging may or may not be like that, but it's tracking that way in terms of growth.

Link: Steve Shu's Blog: In Search of Better Ways to Measure the ROI of Blogging.

Is The Slashdot Effect Going Away?

Agree. The critical component of Metcalfe's Law is the number of nodes and I just can't imagine that Slashdot is growing. Slashdot's failure to upgrade their visual presentation certainly makes it a little stale, a bigger drawback is that the comments are overzealously biased against certain aspects of the software business, namely that it is a BUSINESS. The anti-Microsoft rants get a little old as well. What Mike has done with TechDirt is fantastic, I read it everyday while I read /. about once a week. The blogs that TJ is hosting are super for enterprise content (although he is branching out with his digital home blog), and of course engadget and gizmodo for gear. There are just so many more options.

Link: Is The Slashdot Effect Going Away?.

In an article that was clearly designed to test its own theories out by getting linked from Slashdot, BusinessWeek Online is asking if the Slashdot Effect is fading? The evidence certainly suggests so. Many sites claim that the impact of getting linked from Slashdot is no longer what it used to be. There are fewer visitors and they seem to come only for an hour or two after the post. Our own experience here at Techdirt shows a similar result. Getting linked from Slashdot these days doesn't seem to have the same kind of kick it used to. However, the reasoning in the Business Week article doesn't make that much sense. Basically, the reporter suggests that because Slashdot links to a wider variety of sites, fewer people are clicking through to them. This doesn't seem to follow logically. Why should the number of sites that Slashdot links to impact how many people click through? You could argue that if Slashdot was posting more stories, people would pick and choose more carefully which to click through -- but that has nothing to do with the diversity in sources. There can be many more reasons for the dampening of the