23 Musings

Have to agree wholeheartedly with Mike Arrington of Techcrunch. The Onion is genius!!

Entire Blogosphere Stunned By Blogger's Special Weekend Post

NEW YORK—In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday.

The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was linked to by several thousand sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, and The New York Times.

"Wow, what a special treat this was for all of us," said Talking Points Memo head blogger Joshua Micah Marshal, who, along with all other bloggers, checks Tiedemann's site every day just in case something monumental occurs. "I thought I was going to have to wait until Monday to find out if Ben decided to put [the shelf] in his bedroom or the living room. The pictures were great, too."

Within two hours of going live, Tiedemann's 15-word post received 34,634,897 comments.

Great post on Techcrunch showing that even Google's not infallible when it comes to what shows on their websites.

It's always a risk when you spider content and display automatically that one day you will pick something up that is not quite suitable for your service. In this case Google has displayed a story about President Bush's trip to the doctor as top story. Problem is they've taken it from a news service which is more humour than real news. Post on Techcrunch here, shot of the offending story on Google News homepage below.

Techcrunch has a great article describing some really good services offering users the ability to mash up data and web services to come up with something new. Well worth a read!

Since the Techcrunch fall out there's been a lack of insight for those of us interested in the UK market. Glad to report Sam Sethi and Mike Butcher are back at Vecosys blogging as before with all their insightful glimpses into what's happening in the UK for startups and Web 2.0 companies!

A real shame to read the posts on Techcrunch UK and Crunchnotes this morning, and the comments aren't much better...

The whole debacle could have been handled a little better! No one would disagree with Sam Sethi's opinion of LeWeb3 (everyone I've spoken with has said the same) and it does feel like the initial reply by the organiser has inflamed something unnecessarily. The comments by Sam regarding events he was planning was probably better had between him and Mike behind closed doors. Those events could have been really good (knowing the circles Sam associates with) and would have been of benefit to Techcrunch. Instead this whole situation is at risk of damaging the reputation of Techcrunch which would be a huge shame as it's a fantastic blog and Mike Arrington a great editor. Techcrunch UK was building a great following and Sam was doing sterling work getting it off the ground, what a pity if this was the death of it.

Best of luck to Sam, I'm sure he'll bounce back under another guise...