Shot taken today. Techmeme pointing to a February post from Tim O’Reilly. Coincidence that I linked to it at TechCrunch the same time that a couple of others did. Was third highest story until magically disappearing: I sense the hand of human intervention.
Red Herring reported Friday that Mig33, a company originally based in Perth(Western Australia) but now on the West Coast took $10m in funding Accel Partners and RedPoint Ventures with Technology Venture Partners in for good measure.
Mig33 offers mobile phone users voice over Internet Protocol, instant messaging, SMS-based text messaging, and social-networking services. Mig33 rolls all of its services into one mobile ?¢‚Ǩ?ìcommunity.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù
According to the report, Mig33?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s parent company, Project Goth, is based in WA based but relocating to Burlingame.
Of course from a pure economic viewpoint, moving makes total sense. Serious Web 2.0 startups need to be where it’s all happening.
And yet from a purely parochial view point I can’t help but feel sad, sad that the Federal Government (and indeed the Opposition as well) continues to ignore the massive potential Web 2.0 has for Australia as an industry that is well placed to pick up much of the nations growth once the mining boom eventually ends.
In an ideal world, our leaders would create a climate that would encourage Web 2.0 startups to stay in Australia, keeping their IP and potential profits within our shores.
And yet today, our brightest and smartest continue to flood overseas whilst our leaders remain obsessed with mining and finding as many ways as possible of restricting internet growth in Australia.
Why can’t the lucky country become the lucky country for web development? Why can’t our children go through school knowing that the web provides a wealth of opportunity on top of the obvious benefits our mineral wealth provides.
I’m still cold on voting Liberal at this years election for reasons I’ve previously written about, and yet the ALP just isn’t doing it for me either. Surely there must be some politician out there somewhere that gets it (although preferably one without a pile of leftist baggage)?
New review up at TechCrunch covering Twitbin. Mixed results in terms of comments, some people love it, some think it shouldn’t have been reviewed.
I’m a conviction writer, if I write about something I’ll do so for two reasons: 1. because it’s topical, and in the case of TechCrunch because it’s in the scope of the sites coverage or 2. because I like it. The later is an interesting one because there’s a smorgasboard of Web 2.0 related products I could be covering: the number of clones and variations on a theme is insane. Of course the way things are covered is a little bit more formal at TC than here, so I couldn’t really say what I’m about to say now.
Twitbin is cool.
It’s not perfect (opening links on a new page is annoying) but I was borderline in terms of giving up on Twitter, I just didn’t have the time nor inclination to be continually flicking back and forwards to it, now it’s inline in Firefox (the 22″ monitor helps) it’s no longer a burden or pain to use.
Top of the front page at News.com.au, Australia’s leading News site, being the combined homepage for all of News Corp’s Australian Newspapers:
Interesting that Digg becomes the No. 1 story in a world full of wars, death and destruction. No front page coverage from the SMH or ABC at this stage.
Something amazing happened today on Digg. After a long time ignoring the complaints of users, indeed even alienating many top contributors, the folks running Digg, in particular Kevin Rose actually listened, and responded. True, it was only after banning users and stories about the HD DVD key that the decision was made, but it’s still notable none the less. Will the Digg Revolt of 2007 result in a renaissance in listening to users? maybe, and hopefully it will at Digg, but others should also take note: corporate arrogance towards the user base shouldn’t have a place in Web 2.0, and companies that continue to act in this old fashioned way can now look at a case study of what collectively users can say and do when you won’t listen to them.
In the mean time: get across to Digg and joining in the Digging fury…I’ve never seen stories with that many votes on the front page 🙂
For at least the last 3 hours:
Nik Cubrilovic has the details @ TechCrunch: short version, despite its obsession with being non-commercial, and more recently punishing good webmasters everywhere by putting nofollow tags on the end of outgoing links, it looks like Jimbo Wales isn’t nofollowing links to his for profit Wikia sites.
I’m not sure what the total wash up is in relation to the nofollow tags, but I’ve seen a lot of big sites (and small ones, including duncanriley.com) lose pagerank in the PR update currently underway; but seriously, how is it that Wikipedia continues to be held on a dais as the pinnacle of all things good with Web 2.0 and citizen generated media when we all know that it’s nothing more than a conduit for Jimbo Wales’ commercial ambitions with Wikia? If it smells funny and links funny, then it’s usually a sign that it’s not the clean not for profit deity of Web 2.0 that everyone thinks it is.
Spot Question: how long till Wikipedia and Wikia start doing porn scantily clad pics?
Tris Hussey on some folk waking up today and discovering what I’ve been saying for 6-9 months: we’ve reached a peak in blog growth, at least in the Western World, although oddly enough they’re calling it a plateau.
Yawn.
Technorati now reckons there is only 15.5 million active blogs.
BS.
Double BS even.
Technorati has NEVER tracked all blogs and they never will. They hardly even touch the surface on MySpace, they are woefully under represented in Asia with the exception of Japan, and even figures I was doing 2 years ago, using figures in some cases DIRECTLY from blog hosts showed that there was a whole pile of blogs out there that ain’t in Technorati.
But back to the meme at hand: that there’s some sort of plateau. Yawn again. It’s talk about something that doesn’t exist because the number is BS, that and do they really think that active blogs will continue at the same rate (or even know what a plateau is?): is it therefore is talk about nothing, and if you talk about nothing, doesn’t that talk become nothing itself?
Dave Winer gets its right: “Look for individuals who are changing things using blogs, that’s what’s important.” Mind you, counting them was worthwhile once upon a time, back when we will still trying to prove the worth of blogs and blogging, but we’ve passed that point.
Via Ben Barren, Twitter is no longer supporting SMS in Australia. They’ve since updated the original post to say:
“To clarify, we’re getting a new access number for Australia?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùas soon as we get the number, sms service will be back in action. We’re working on it right now and it’s a high priority.”
But 99 million dollar question: why cut the service off before putting in place the alternative?
For the record I don’t use Twitter on my mobile, when I was the damn thing never stopped beeping, but I know a lot of people who were using it on their phones, a lot of people who little doubt will be pretty pissed about this.