Ever since I started to read his blog I got intrigued by Loic‘s thought processes, hightened when I met him some time back. He is not the most inventive guy, I mean Joi introduced him to blogging, but when it comes to innovation, connecting ideas and their potential effects, especially in the business world, he stands tall. He is also an amazing communicator, a true entrepreneur. Now he added another post in his series about founding a company and I have to say that it’s a must read for all those that think business is about not making mistakes (read here for my view on that one) and for those feeling that blogging is just a fad (see here for my article on wireless blogging from 2002).
So for all those doubters: Loic Le Meur Blog: Start a business – 7: Entrepreneurs do make mistakes, learn from them and react. PR and blogs and how your Company should deal with them.
Monthly Archives: July 2004
Blogging, PR, Mistakes and Entrepreneurship
SkypeOut kicks!
Yesterday I tried out Skype for real finally and I actually put some money on my SkypeOut account, allowing me to call landline phones. The quality is really very good. I do like it. Mobile phones is not something you want to be calling really but landline is very cool. I mean 1.4 cents per minute to call the USA is nice. These people will rule the world, at least partly, if they take it up the right way now. And calling Skype users is even free from PC to PC, of course. Contact me if you want my username. You can also get it if you link in via OpenBC.
GOOG
Ok, Google has announced their price (thanks for the link Heiko). It’s simply funny, nothing more to say there really. I got a valuation close to $38 Billion some time back in my own calculation, but it was based on the most positive scenario. Somebody wants to make some serious money there. Oh the downfall will be fun. At that valuation Google is valued at about the same amount as Yahoo! and only 10 Billion USD below eBay and both of these have a real business model, especially eBay! I still want to see the Google business model because AdWords can’t be it.
ChangeThis
Joi made me aware of ChangeThis, which is starting something that I do really like. The thing is that blogs just publish short bursts of thoughts but do not provide detailed analysis. If you post detailed analysis it is often not even fully read because it doesn’t fit the short bursts mentality. Now with ChangeThis, the founders are providing a platform for serious thought that builds on the Creative Commons idea in that I can republish the document. It’s like getting great authors without a platform and a platform without authors together. NY Times without the backend. It’s be interesting, but I feel like there is still more to be done with leveraging RSS and Blogs. We need a way to interconnect all the different blogs and voices to make a bigger picture automatically via the many voices that we can find. Maybe autosummaries like possible on any text document on the Mac, coupled with Technorati and subject searches, might enable that.
The RSS Bandwagon
Anyone who wants to be among the first to get in on the RSS bandwagon, might be too late now. WSJ and NYTimes now have RSS feeds. We are starting to jump the next trip people! 
The Democratic Power of Blogging
Lawrence Lessig has a wonderful post that to me shows the power that is available within the idea of blogging with the help of RSS. Somebody with a great voice can now get the message out that somebody some TV Channel or rather TV Channel Host does is not right and he gets people thinking. Yes, the right and left wing of the political spectrum will always have a voice on the internet. Radicals always get their voice heard, and if only because they are louder than the rest. But now there will be a very easy counter-voice that anyone can have. We just need to make sure that this blogging thing will have an interconnectedness that will help readers take in the diversity that is out there.
MT just got way cooler
This is a very nice post on TypePost (German), giving some details on MovableType 3.1. The most interesting, beyond sub-categories, which is very nice, is that it will have a DynamicEngine, meaning that you can decide to not rebuild the site but have it be rendered live. Very cool indeed that is. On top of that, you can just include PHP modules, which is something I already did in my previous installation though. You can just make MT publish PHP code without a problem. What is likely improved is the potential to get some extra hooks into your PHP code that makes it interact with the MT installation. Very nice indeed. Possibly a result from the WordPress – Six Apart meetup, but that’s full speculation on my part. 
Update: Nice additional info from Scot’s post about it from no one else than Anil Dash:
We’ll be explaining more on this soon, but the PHP integration in MT3.1 makes use of Smarty, so the caching of dynamic templates is pretty smart.
This came as a reply to a question by Erwin about only scanning templates for PHP code once and then not doing this until they are changed again. This is really what Smarty does so Anil’s comment does make some sense.
Microsoft Opening Up
Fast Company Now has a very nice post as a summary from BlogOn talking about business transparency. It starts with the good side, in the sense that Microsoft is currently opening up and they are making huge progress with Channel 9. This site has over 700k visitors a month. It’s huge. It has endless amounts of videos of Microsoft workers (great example), from within Campus, the Wiki of the IETeam is on there, lots of great stuff. But there is also a bad side, seen in the MovableType pricing wars as well as in this thread of comments on the IE Team blog (thanks Jeremy). As always there is an upside and a downside. It’s your decision to make it work or leave it be. I’d always be for the big hairy audacious goal, so I’d try to make it work.
Thinking Apple
Check out the folling on MacCentral: Long lines await iPod mini’s Tokyo debut.
This is why I am suddenly starting to think that buying Apple stock isn’t such a bad idea really. They have done well in the last few months but their P/E is now amazingly high. Still. There is some music in the business, and there likely is some music in the stock too. I am not the last one to recognize that though, which makes it a bit unlikely that this is the investment of the century.
IEBlog and Wiki
Microsoft is really opening up and I do love it. See it as very good marketing if you don’t want to acknowledge the basic power of working like this. So check out the IEBlog and even more amazing the IE Wiki! Edit away people! I really hate this but I had big talks about Wikis, Blogging and resulting changes in the media landscape at lunch just now. This stuff always gets me all excited. I need to calm down again now
