Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Speaking of Lunch 2.0, I ran into Douglas Welch, a local blogger/podcaster who runs Career Opportunities there. Douglas has written for such magazines as LAN Magazine, Network World, MacWorld, and Wired, among others. He’s got some pictures from Lunch 2.0 posted on his blog.

There’s been an ongoing debate both on and off the net, on whether bloggers are journalists. Given the debate about how to classify the blog world, I read with interest this recent  post by a venture capitalist, Rick Segal, complaining about a pitch he received from a Silicon Valley PR firm. Rick complains that the PR firm offered to have their CEO talk with him about their company; and didn’t realize that his firm has an investment in a direct competitor.

It’s an interesting problem–and one which apparently has some PR firms confused–which is determining which bloggers are providing unbiased opinions, and which ones are simply shilling for companies which they have invested in, which they are running, or who are posting because someone paid them to.

Mark Cuban–no stranger to controversy, on and off the net–thinks the Internet is dead… and VC blogger Fred Wilson does not.

Here’s a great example of blog reach overkill: Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing — which, according to their open stats — gets more than 2.5M unique visitors a month, and 22M pageviews a month (Alexa rank: 2,311) – just posted his garage sale in Silverlake on the blog. I sure hope everyone doesn’t show up at once…

Jared Reitzin, founder and CEO over at email marketing firm mobileStorm, has launched a blog at www.jaredreitzin.com covering bootstrapping your business and other entrepreneurial topics. He recently covered the importance of branding, and hopefully will be adding to the Southern California entrepreneurial knowledge pool. I spoke with Jared on his firm back in May.

It  looks like the first move Google is making at Feedburner (which it acquired earlier this year), is making their PRO level services free to users. Which I think is really long due, and a smart move.

A year or two ago, VC Brad Feld had referred me to Dick Costello, the CEO of Feedburner, about using Feedburner.com for our web sites. I told Dick I’d pass, because I didn’t like the idea of using a Feedburner URL and giving ownership of the feed location to his company. For those not familiar with Feedburner, it’s a service that (in exchange for pointing all of your users to Feedburner’s version of your feed) provides deep statistics, advertising, and other services around your RSS feed. However, in order to use the service, you had to point all of your RSS users to Feedburner’s domains (ie instead of going to socaltech.com, you’d have to go to feedburner.com to see our RSS feeds).

Back when I first started socaltech.com (as a lowly hand-copied, email CC list to a dozen or so people), I initially started using a third party email message list service.  I quickly figured out I should host the mailing list myself, because of the issues of control–in this case, the company I was using wouldn’t allow you to place advertising in your mailing list, they got to insert their own advertising at the bottom of every email, and otherwise had a lock on your users. The issue I had with Feedburner was similar; what happened if the company were acquired? How about if they decided to suddenly charge per subscriber? Or if they went out of business? It’s never good when you’re running a business  (or even a personal project) where someone else “owns” your customer list.

Eventually, Feedburner added their PRO service, and specifically their MyBrand service, which allowed more sophisticated RSS feed owners to have your own domain as the feed you were pointing users at, i.e. instead of feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedhere, feeds.socaltech.com/yourfeedhere. They used to charge a monthly fee to give “own” your own feed using MyBrand, but with this move it’s now free. It’s a really smart move; there are a lot of feed owners (myself include) who would NEVER move their feed pointers to someone else’s domain, no matter what kinds of services they offered.

Maybe it’s just a strange coincidence, but I was amused today reading yesterday’s post from Michael Arrington about TechCrunch’s second birthday, and the same day, Rafat Ali’s post about how he started his blog site, PaidContent June 12th, five years ago. If you’re in the market to create a popular, technology/business focused blog, looks like June 12th is a good day to pick.

Mazen Araabi, a venture capitalist at First Round Capital, has just put up a new blog. Until recently, Mazen was an MBA student at UCLA Anderson. He was also part of the founding team at MySpace, at ResponseBase, and was an early employee at Xdrive.com. He’s now up in the Bay Area (we’ll forgive him) but his blog should be an interesting read.