sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged Jason
Jason Shellen Returns With Plinky
On Friday I caught up with Jason Shellen, one of the members of the original Blogger team. Following Google’s February 2003 acquisition of PyraLabs, the company behind Blogger, Shellen joined the search engine giant, working first on Blogger and later on other projects, including Google Reader.
In July 2007, he became a member of the ex-Googler club, joining Six Apart spinoff LiveJournal for a brief stint as VP of product development. He has since left that gig and is now focused on a new startup, Plinky, which doesn’t have a web site just yet. (Now there’s a Web 2.0 name if there ever was one!)
Shellen has co-founded Plinky with CTO Simeon Simeonov, formerly chief architect of both Macromedia and Allaire, but now a partner with Polaris Ventures in Boston. Polaris has invested $1.5 million in the company; a handful of angel investors are looking to join this investment round as well, Shellen said. The company currently has four employees, though it plans to hire a whole slew of engineers as soon as it finds permanent digs in Berkeley.
“I think a lot of attention is being paid to the aggregation and new kinds of social media tools but not enough attention (has been paid) to creation (of the social media),” he said. “When blogging was getting going, there were lot of interesting ideas, and now the technology has progressed enough that we can try out those ideas.” So what’s the plan? Shellen wouldn’t offer any details other than to say that he’s working on “content encouragement.” In other words, they’re building something aimed at getting people who aren’t bloggers or content creators to participate and create.
How? I don’t really know, and he wouldn’t say. One thing I do know: Shellen is a smart guy and having known him for a long time, I trust that he has something interesting up his sleeve. I guess we’ll have to wait and find out when the company launches its first offering this fall.
Internet Archive and just my timing " Rube Goldberg machines for libraries
Microsoft Predicted to Back Away from Vista
When it comes to technology debacles, every major company has a few (remember the Newton?), but right now one of the top spots has to go to Windows Vista, Microsoft’s clunky operating system that has IT shops and consumers desperately clutching at XP for as long as they can.
Jason Hiner over at Tech Republic thinks there may be a light at the end of the Vista tunnel; he predicts IT shops and consumers will have a chance within the next year to upgrade to a cleaner, more modular version of Windows Vista under the Windows 7 moniker. It won’t be a completely new OS but rather a more streamlined version of Vista. He also suggests the pricing for consumers will be lower in an effort to win back those who are turning to Macs.
This could be another step by Microsoft toward shedding cumbersome release cycles and creating software that can be updated every year or so via a subscription model. Hiner lays out a nice case, and as a consumer who once was stuck with a laptop running Windows ME, I have to hope that before the third strike (Vista being the second), Microsoft can score a hit.
FreedomSpeaks So Politicians Listen
Plenty of people get politically active during election years, but the issues don’t go away once the hanging chads have been punched and the Diebold source code is no longer being hacked. Aside from voting (or donating thousands to a campaign) the most powerful way to make your voice heard is to write your Congressman. We all know this, but a new site called FreedomSpeaks makes it easy (and digital).
You can sign on to existing letters, write your own and store them, and have enlightened political discussion with fellow site members. The site needs to add local government representative information and could probably integrate well with an organization like Project Vote Smart, but founder Jason Kiesel has his heart in the right place. He’s a freelance coder who put the site together in his spare timing hoping to create a social network for politically minded people. I’ll forgive him for the social network jargon and hope that anyone and everyone might join. After all, it is your country.
Of interest: Sun, MySQL, and the US government
Jason Hull of OpenSource Connections, a company in my town, posted an article on what Sun's acquisition of MySQL means for the US government. I thought Planet MySQL readers might appreciate a different angle on the issue than many of the Planet MySQL posts, which are often focused on business or community more than government. (I'm just passing the link along, not agreeing or disagreeing).