In November 1999, I left a very secure job with Big Media for a startup technology company that I was pretty sure would be bankrupt within six months. Why would a 41-year-old father of three take a $25,000 pay cut to work with a bunch of guys who still got carded when they ordered beer with their pizza? It’s a long story, but one I now have lots of time to tell. This blog is partly about that, but mostly about what happened during the following five years and three months, while I served as Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google.
This is how the first post of Xooglers begins. It is a new blog written by Doug Edwards, who was Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google until recently. As the tag line says, Xooglers pretends to be “A gathering spot for ex-Googlers to reminisce and comment on the latest developments in search”. It might actually be an interesting read, specially if some ex-googlers join the conversation.
(via John Batelle’s Searchblog)
One of the (thousands of) reasons why posting is being irregular on this blog is that I’ve been spending some time setting up Planeta Teleco, together with Chema from Las Penas del Agente Smith.
Planeta Teleco is a planet-style aggregator for blogs related to one of my two alma maters, ETSIT UPM.
Although there is some polishing left to do, Planeta Teleco is now officialy up & running :: cheers ::. If you are somehow related to the ETSIT, and you want your blog syndicated on the Planeta, just send an e-mail to Chema or to me (details on the planet’s main page).
Scoble writes that his 11-year-old son Patrick has started a blog, which he nameds Mini Scobleizer. The tag line of Patrick’s blog is “I’m the son of a 40 year old blogger you can check his blog at scobleizer.wordpress.com/”.
Just the tag line just gives me a lot to think about. And not just the tag line.
A 11-year-old describing himself as the son of a famous blogger? Bragging in the first post that ‘my dad didn’t help me at all on this one’? Getting 29 comments (at the time of this writing) on your second post, probably just because your dad linked to you?
Interesting stuff. Never occurred to me to call myself Mini-Ulin. But then, I am 1,56m tall, so the ‘mini’ goes without saying, I suppose…
Over at business2blog I read that Jon ‘Neverdie’ Jacobs buys a space station in Project Entropia for $100.000. Clive Thompson explains why it makes sense:
Because it’s just like owning the Mall of America — it’s a place to conduct business and make real-world cash. Indeed, Project Entropia currently has 236,000 registered accounts, and the game allows you to use Earth money to buy in-game currency, which makes it spectacular place for any entrepreneur to set up business, really.
Not only does it makes sense (to me, anyway), but it feels as the all those futuristic novels where people lived and transacted in virtual worlds as much as in the ‘real’ world are coming true. And really, why not? If you do some work and provide some services in-game, why not be paid for it with ‘real’ money?
Trying to think about the implications of this is making me dizzy. I’ll better go grab a tea. Talk to you later.
A little over two weeks ago I got an invite to beta-test TailRank, a site which promises to give you recommendations on blogs and other web content based on your personal interests. I suppose the idea is to turn it into something like Last.fm for blogs.
As soon as I got the invite I registered, and share a couple of links. But I found it difficult to understand how was I supposed to use the site, and what should I do in order to get better recommendations. Also, it seemed to me at most recommended items had been shared by Kevin Burton, the creator of TailRank himself, who seems to be the most active user, as well. It didn’t seem too interesting to read items shared by the same person, so seeing no clear value in spending more time playing around, I decided to wait a bit and try it some time later.
This morning I decided to give it another try. First, I couldn’t log in because I couldn’t remember the username I had chosen. So I used the ‘remind password’ form, twice, but with no luck: no e-mail came, and no message on the site. Frustrated, I registered again, with same e-mail and different handle. So now I have two accounts, but the profiles seem to be somehow mixed up, presumably because of the identical e-mails. Clearly something that needs fixing. At least now I have two working TailRank accounts.
Next I explored the site a bit more again. To my great surprise, one of the links I shared in my first round of the site now appears as shared by Burton, and not as shared by me. Weird.
Then I tried to upload the OPML from my Bloglines subscription, but no luck. Got a Java error. Thrice.
I tried to get some recommendations, but once more, the content seems to be monopolized by Burton, and the recommendations don’t seem enticing.
The idea behind the site is a good one, but it still needs some work. There seem to be a few bugs, and the interface could use some refining. For example, there is no clear link to update your profile, and the ‘logout’ link does not appear on all pages, just on some.
In general, I would enjoy a cleaner interface that made it easier to use the site. As I see it now, it is difficult to understand what is going on and how are you supposed to use it. And the ‘home’ page is way too overloaded with text; it makes my brain ache when I look at it. A logo would be cool as well.
It would also be nice if TailRank incorporated some kind of ‘automatic’ harvesting of what a user is interested in, so that you don’t need to go through the tedious process of inputing links manually. For example, it would be nice if TailRank could pick up automagically my del.icio.us subscriptions and ’share’ them in my TailRank account. It would be something like an Audioscrobbler plugin, but for web-surfing instead of for music. That would be great.
A very nice feature of TailRank is the possibility of include in your own website the results of TailRank recommendation. I suppose that can be a very cool thing to have, say, on the sidebar of a group blog that keeps a TailRank account.
Summarizing, I think that the TailRank idea is cool, but it still needs some polishing (but hey, that is what a beta is about, isn’t it?). I think it has lots of potential, if only it would become a bit more user-friendly. Keep up the good work!
UPDATE 2005/10/25 The OPML bug seems to be fixed, but for some reason TailRank only imported 37 feeds from my 63-feed OPML. No reasons given. I am still finding it difficult to understand how to use the site. For example, it took me a lot of clicking around to find out how could I tag the feeds I just imported. Read Kevin’s comment below for some more information about TailRank development. If TailRank is the result of just five weeks of work, I am impressed! 
