Six Apart: Blogging was Born During a Recession - Interview with CEO Chris Alden

Six Apart: Blogging was Born During a Recession - Interview with CEO Chris Alden

"Blogging grew out of recession and blogging will do well during a recession," says Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart, the software company best known for its Movable Type blogging application.

Movable Type celebrates its seventh year in October 2008, created by co-founder Mena Trott, an unemployed dotcomer. The application has come a long way from its humble roots as a way for laid-off developers to write about their day. Movable Type software is now used by many mainstream media publications and also by newstream media such as Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Kottke.org (and Silicon Valley Watcher).

While Wordpress, the competing blogging platform, has taken over the "one man and his blog" market, Six Apart has moved firmly into the commercial world, providing a simple way for any organization to quickly set up a web site with many community features built-in...

Federal Court Kills Patents on Business Methods

Ed: The tEarn patent-pending is not a business process, but transformation of devices in a network.

By BRAD STONE

The decade of patents on business methods looks to be ending.

Ten years ago, in a case called State Street Bank vs. Signature Financial Group, a federal circuit court found that novel methods for doing business on computers were patentable. That opened the gates to a flood of “business method patents” of features like Amazon.com’s “1-Click” checkout and Priceline.com’s “name your own price” tools, which involve less technological ingenuity than ethereal inventiveness and legal muscle.

This year, the State Street ruling was challenged by a closely observed case that is generally known as re Bilski. On Thursday, the dozen judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled 9 to 3 to reverse the State Street ruling and end the era of business method patents.

In the ruling, the judges said that a proper test for determining patent eligibility is whether an invention is tied to a particular machine or whether it transforms a physical article. The decision will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court, but the larger question is whether the Supremes will hear Bilski or simply let business method patents die quietly. (There is some good analysis of the decision at Techdirt, Patently-O and Groklaw.)

The impact of the Bilksi decision will likely be felt most in technology circles, where business method patents have been used to build start-ups and conduct cross-licensing agreements, and by small “troll” firms to legally assault large tech companies.

The tech giants “will breathe a sigh of relief,” said Kevin G. Rivette, the former vice president for intellectual property strategy at IBM. The trolls will now have considerably weaker legal ammunition, he said.

However, start-ups might be disappointed to find that the patents in their portfolio are now worth considerably less than they thought. “A lot of the dot-coms relied on this kind of patenting and thought they could go out and get royalties on them when everything else failed,” Mr. Rivette said. “You are going to see lot of patents that were considered valuable dry up. That’s not a bad thing, but it will affect some balance sheets.”

CBS Earnings As Bad As Promised: Local Ads Kill TV, Online Ads Up 12% (CBS)

Nicholas Carlson | October 30, 2008 7:47 AM

CBS reported Q3 performance in line with it's October 10 earnings warning. (Join us for LIVE coverage beginning at 8:30 a.m. ET; refresh this page for the latest)

Interactive revenues remained a small fraction of the company's overall sales, increasing to $140.7 million from $35.9 million, due mainly to the CNET acquisition. Include CNET in last year's results and revenues grew 6% on a 12% gain in display advertising.

CBS television revenues were $2.1 billion, up 2% over the prior year. Poor ad revenues dragged on higher television license fees (thank you CSI: New York), home entertainment and affiliate revenues partially offset by lower advertising sales.

Radio revenues tanked, down 12% to $392.5 million from $445.7 million on divestitures and a weak ad market.

The company reiterated a cautious outlook amid a sharp downturn in local TV advertising which CBS expects to continue. CBS (CBS) said it expects full year operating income to decline mid-teens from the prior year.

CEO Les Moonves's canned statement: "We are focused on taking the actions necessary to place our Company on an even stronger financial footing, continuing to reduce costs across the board and exercising a very disciplined approach to investment in capital projects."...

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID, Huh?

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID

by Erick Schonfeld on October 29, 2008

You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.

By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.

Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo...

Ed: I don’t get OpenID. The RP still needs an account per user; and adds the burden to manage an alias list with multiple alias per user. The friction is higher for the user and developer. Why?

Most sites cache login information as cookies. As long as you visit once every 3 months. The login is there. Further, browsers track userid and password by site.

Is OpenID a solution in search of a problem?

Or is it a trojan horse to share information among websites. If it’s the latter, it invades personal privacy.

Can someone explain this to me?

How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS Feeds

How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS Feeds

Google's been the lone hold out among major search engines on RSS but the company quietly enabled feeds for web search results this week. The offering is pretty limited and frustrating, you have to go through Google Alerts to get an obscure RSS URL, but we offer a tutorial and some strategic advice in this post.

Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example.

How to Get the Feeds

All the other major search engines make it really easy to grab a feed for any web search, but Google is probably concerned about spammers finding bizarre and unscrupulous uses for their feeds. We're all inconvenienced as a result.

To get a feed for a Google search you have to go to the web page for Google Alerts and set up an alert for your search. You can enter most queries here. including site: queries. (site:http://readwriteweb.com semantic for example.) You should select "web" instead of the default "comprehensive" if you're just interested in tracking web search results.

"Feed" isn't an option in the initial drop down menu of delivery options, you've got to select email first. After you've done that, look at your collection of alerts and click to edit the one you want by RSS. At this point "feed" is an option in the drop down menu. Select it and you'll be shown an RSS URL. Throw that puppy in your favorite feed reader and you're ready to rock and roll.

The feed will deliver any new links that show up in the top 20 search results for your query. That's pretty limited, but most people don't look beyond the first 20 results anyway. That means that this is good for high-level reputation tracking but not very good for discovery of new, more obscure pages of interest.

The RSS URLs that Google gives you are based on an arbitrary number and don't contain the text characters of your query. That means you can't build more feeds by simply editing the URLs, you have to go back in through Alerts and repeat the proccess for every feed of interest.

More Advanced Options

Here's how we're using the new Google search feeds. We've grabbed feed URLs for searches for A. our names, B. our company name, C. our company URL and (just for fun) one for each of those three items without the other two. For example: "Richard MacManus" -readwriteweb -http://readwriteweb.com.

That gave us a small pile of feeds, which we then ran through our favorite RSS splicing and deduplication service (we used Yahoo Pipes but if you're not comfortable with Pipes then Feed.informer.com is really easy to use). We spliced all these feeds together, filtered for duplicates and then threw the resulting feed into our highest priority feed reading system.

Now we can track our high level reputations constantly, without being paranoid about it. We might do this for concept searches as well so that if someone new starts ranking really high for topics we specialize in (semantic web, RSS) then we'll know about them and never look ignorant at parties.

If we were interested in getting an RSS feed for Google web search for discovery, more than just reputation tracking, we might do an "advanced search," increase the results displayed from 10 to 100 and then use Dapper.net to scrape a feed of results from that page.

All of this is more complicated than it ought to be, but once you set up even the most basic feed options then you don't have to think about it again. Though it isn't perfect, we do appreciate Google making these feeds available.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Lead Global Initiave for Free Expression

Official Google Blog: New steps to protect free expression and privacy around the world

In a world where governments all too often censor what their citizens can see and do on the Internet, Google has from the start promoted global free expression and taken the lead in being transparent with our users. We've pressed governments around the world to stop limiting free speech and made it possible for dissidents, bloggers and others to have their voices heard.

As part of those ongoing efforts to promote free expression and protect our users' privacy, today we're announcing Google's participation as a founding company member of a new program called the Global Network Initiative.

Participants

The following organizations are participating in the Global Network Initiative. If you are interested in becoming a participant, please contact us.

• Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
  
• Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
• Boston Common Asset Management
• Calvert Group
• Center for Democracy & Technology
• Committee to Protect Journalists
• Domini Social Investments LLC
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• F&C Asset Management
• Google Inc.
• Human Rights First
• Human Rights in China
• Human Rights Watch
• International Business Leaders Forum
• Internews
  
• KLD Research & Analytics, Inc.
  
• Microsoft Corp.
• Rebecca MacKinnon, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong
  
• Research Center for Information Law, University of St. Gallen
  
• Trillium Asset Management
• United Nations Special Representative to the Secretary-General on Business & Human Rights(observer status)
• University of California, Berkeley School of Information
• World Press Freedom Committee
• Yahoo! Inc.

Motorola Betting Big On Google's Android To Take On Apple, Rivals

Ed: Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Samsung, and the Taiwan companies need to learn that the cell phone is no longer just a low-price, hardware business. 

• Companies like Apple, RIM, and Palm have converted into an integrated SaaS offering. 
• It won't be long before web 2.0 tools for social media become a necessary part of the business. 
• Microsoft will enter, when it is too late to build.

Entrepreneurs, ramp up and get sold. 

Motorola Betting Big On Google's Android To Take On Apple, Rivals

Motorola (MOT) continues to overhaul its depleted cellphone division under new CEO Sanjay Jha, who came over from Qualcomm (QCOM) this summer. Among the big changes, which the Wall Street Journal says could be detailed during the company's Q3 earnings call Thursday morning:

• Thousands of layoffs.
  
• A new mobile phone strategy that includes betting big on Google's (GOOG) Android mobile operating system.

The Journal says Motorola will stop working on several mobile operating systems (and could cancel dozens of phone designs) to focus on three platforms: Android for consumer-focused phones, Microsoft's Windows Mobile for business-focused phones, and an internal platform for lower-end phones.

This sounds smart to us. Android, while not as elegant as Apple's industry-best iPhone software, is equally as powerful -- and with some software and user interface updates, matched with good hardware, could be a strong mobile platform. (Certainly as good or better than anything else Motorola has shipped recently.) Windows Mobile needs work, but it can handle enterprise stuff pretty well, which Android doesn't yet.

One thing that could be tricky to juggle: Making Motorola's flavor of Android unique (and good) enough that its phones don't simply become a hardware commodity, while still allowing them to run apps designed for other Android phones.

What this also means: AT&T (T) and Verizon Wireless (VZ), the two biggest U.S. wireless carriers, will eventually have to suck it up and start selling Google-powered phones. So far no. 4 T-Mobile (DT) is the only U.S. carrier to sell an Android phone, while no. 3 Sprint Nextel (S) eagerly awaits theirs.

Motorola Speed Dials Cell Overhaul

New Mobile Chief Plans to Slash More Jobs, Focus on Google Software to Simplify Design and Cut Costs

By SARA SILVER

Motorola Inc.'s new cellphone chief is moving quickly to scale back the struggling division, simplifying the way it makes devices and cutting additional jobs.

Sanjay Jha, who also became Motorola's co-chief executive in August, has decided to focus on Google Inc.'s Android operating system as the software platform for Motorola's showcase phones, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Jha is expected to detail his plans -- which will likely include thousands of layoffs -- as early as Thursday when the company reports earnings, these people said.

The company has announced 10,000 job cuts since early last year. Motorola ...

Will Motorola Go All-In On Android? It Has No Other Choice.

Motorola’s new co-CEO Sanjay Jha has a plan to save the beleaguered mobile handset maker: go all-in on Google’s Android mobile operating system. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal (behind the pay wall):

Sanjay Jha, who also became Motorola’s co-chief executive in August, has decided to focus on Google Inc.’s Android operating system as the software platform for Motorola’s showcase phones, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Jha is expected to detail his plans — which will likely include thousands of layoffs — as early as Thursday when the company reports earnings, these people said.

The rumor is that Motorola will focus all of its efforts around three core operating systems for its phones, with Android becoming the central platform for “mid-tier” phones with Internet capability. The other two operating systems it will support will be Windows Mobile on the high end and its own P2K on the low end. In other words, Android phones will become its bread and butter.

Given this potential strategy, the 350-person Android team that Motorola is recruiting while it considers another massive round of layoffs elsewhere makes more sense. It’s Android-powered social networking phone looks like it will be the first of a long line of Internet-capable phones.

Betting the farm on Android would be a gutsy move, as it is still an unproven operating system. And, as Om points out, it could be too little, too late for Motorola’s cell phone business, which has not turned a profit since late 2006...

Economic downturn benefits budget travel and cruises

Ed: Luxury travel? Wait for the October report!

Economic downturn benefits budget travel and cruises

UK Internet traffic to travel websites fell by 4.6% between September 2007 and September 2008, but certain sectors are thriving despite, or in some cases because of, the squeeze on household budgets. UK Internet visits to a Hitwise custom category of budget travel firms increased by 5.3% between September 2007 and 2008. The top 10 budget travel companies in the UK accounted for 7.1% of traffic to Travel websites in September 2008, up from 6.4% the previous year.

EasyJet had the most popular budget travel website in the UK during September, accounting for 1.7% of UK Internet visits to travel websites, while Travelodge’s was the fastest growing. The hotel chain, which recently announced plans to open 22 new hotels before Christmas, experienced a 34% increase in UK Internet visits between September 2007 and 2008.

Each of the top three budget travel websites in the UK – EasyJet, Ryanair and Travelodge – has experienced at least a 20% increase in UK Internet traffic over the last 12 months. This online growth is also reflected offline; in addition to Travelodge’s expansion, both EasyJet and Ryanair announced significant increases in passenger numbers in their latest results. However, the big challenge for travel providers is to monetize these traffic increases in the face of falling prices and rising costs.

A Spot Of Trouble At Spot Runner

by Erick Schonfeld 

There is no escape from the advertising recession. Not even for hotshot TV advertising startup Spot Runner. Despite having raised more than $111 million, half of that as recently as last May, the LA-based company may be in for a major round of layoffs next week following the election (and the associated last-minute media blitz).

As many as 25 percent of its more than 300 employees may find themselves without a job come next Thursday. While the exact number has not yet been determined, I have been able to confirm that the company is currently going through a cost-reduction planning process and is looking at all options in light of the deteriorating advertising environment...

Blogger Changes Complement tEarn Exitmercial

Ed: Blogger changes that complement tEarn exitmercial, like simple comments and follower list that enable 3rd party exits; and increase your earnings. Check them out.

Publish to your Blogger blog from iGoogle

Today, we’re releasing our Blogger Post Gadget for iGoogle. Now you can edit and publish posts directly from your custom iGoogle homepage, making it even easier to share your thoughts with the world.

To get started, just click that “+ Google” button to have the Blogger Post Gadget added to your iGoogle page.

Show off your Followers

Would you like to know who enjoys reading your blog? Or stay updated with your favorite blogs right from your Blogger dashboard? You can do those things and more with Blogger’s new Following feature. 

By following your blog, your readers tell you and the world that they’re a fan of what you post. Your Dashboard now shows you how many followers each of your blogs has. With a click on the Followers icon, you can browse your followers, see what blogs they write, and read the other blogs they’re following.

Now that you know who your Followers are, you can show them off by adding the Followers gadget to your blog’s sidebar. From the“Layout | Page Elements” tab, click “Add a Gadget” and select “Followers” from the gadgets list. The Followers gadget shows the profile pictures of your followers and gives your readers a “Follow This Blog” link to join up, too.

Your followers can stay updated with your blog with the Reading List that we’ve added to the Blogger Dashboard. The Blogs I’m Following tab automatically shows the latest posts from all the blogs you follow. You can follow any blog from your reading list, even blogs that haven’t added the Followers widget or aren’t hosted on Blogger. Just click the “Add” button and type in the blog’s URL.

Commenting made easier

Today we’re bringing the embedded comment form out of Blogger in draft and making it easily available to everyone. This feature puts the comment form at the bottom of each post page, below the comments, instead of on the separate, Blogger-styled page.

The embedded comment form is more convenient for your readers because they can use it to post a comment immediately, without clicking over to a different page. It also looks better, since it matches your blog’s style and colors.

If you’re logged in to Blogger with your Google Account, you can also subscribe to comments via email by clicking the “Subscribe” link. Unlike with the full page comment form, you don’t need to post a comment to subscribe.

To enable the embedded comment form for your blog, go to the Settings > Comments page and look for the Comment Form Placement setting. Change it to Embedded below post, save your settings, and go check out a post to see the new form in action.

Welcome AOL Journals Users!

As some of you might know, AOL has recently decided to sunset its AOL Journals service. To help Journals users continue to share their thoughts online, Blogger has built a simple migration tool to move an AOL Journal to Blogger. We'd like to welcome our new Blogger users to the community and are looking forward to hearing what they have to say!

We've been hard at work here at Blogger and have added a number of new features in the past few months. If you're a Journals user who wants to explore our features, or even if you're already a Blogger user but you want to see what's new, check out our features page. Over in our user group you can share your blog with others or find new blogs to follow. If you're still hungry for more blogs, the Blogger team regularly posts interesting and noteworthy Blogger-powered blogs atBlogs of Note.