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Wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher's BlogWeblog for Mark Fletcher |
The other week I had the pleasure of having dinner with Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten in Amsterdam. I had met Boris last October, when I keynoted the E-Day conference. Boris is currently working on a new startup and he's also putting together a conference. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it due to a previous commitment, but the European Next Web Conference looks like a lot of fun. If you're in the area, I suggest checking it out.
Next Monday, May 15th, I'll be speaking at SDForum's Startup SIG. Then, on Monday, June 5th, I'll be the subject of one of SVASE's Legend dinners. I'll be talking about some of the mistakes I've made and lessons I've learned while starting two Internet companies. I hope to see you there.
[Update]: I had a lot of fun Monday night at the Startup SIG event. This is the slide deck that was the basis of the talk. Niall Kennedy was kind enough to record the talk and have it transcribed.
This Saturday, I'll be speaking at Y Combinator's Startup School at Stanford. I'll be talking about some of the mistakes I've made and things I've learned over the past 8 years or so with ONElist and more recently with Bloglines. I really enjoy talking about this stuff, and the other speakers look great. I'm looking forward to it!
I'll be making the trek out to New York City tomorrow morning to attend the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference. I'll be on the Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines panel on February 28th, along with Adam Hertz (Technorati), Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo), Chris Redlitz (Feedster), and Chris Tolles (Topix.net):
A chance to hear directly from representatives who operate major blog and feed (RSS/Atom) search engines about how they operate. Plenty of time to ask questions after a short presentation.
I'm also really looking forward to the Ask SES Party Monday evening. For someone who owns a MAME cabinet, when I hear the words "vintage arcade games," my ears perk up and my tail starts to wag. It's open to anyone with a SES badge. I hope to see you there.
I'm a bit late with this post, but I wanted to thank the organizers of Eday for the opportunity to speak in Amsterdam a few weeks back. I had a great time and even managed to squeeze in a few days of vacation in Tuscany afterwards (my first vacation in a few years).
Also, this is a reminder that I'm speaking tonight at the Building and Launching a Consumer Company session of the IBD Network. I hope to see you there.
[Updated]: Added the Webmaster World panel.
Here's some coverage of my talk:
Tomorrow morning I'll be flying down to San Diego to attend ETech. I'm also giving a presentation Thursday afternoon, titled "From the Garage: Lessons Learned Birthing and Building Web Start-Ups". I'm still putting together the slide deck, but I'm looking forward to it. This is the first time I'll be giving a technical presentation, and I think it'll be more fun than the normal "business" presentations I'm used to giving. Plus there's the bonus of being in San Diego again, which is one of my favorite cities.
One of the great things about San Diego is the restaraunts. I hope to have dinner at Spices Thai Restaraunt, which has the best Thai food I've ever had. But due to the lack of time, I'll probably only get to make it to Pizza Port, a terrific microbrewery/pizza place. I most likely won't get to eat at Cass St Bar and Grill, even though it has terrific specials every day. And one can't forget the great Mexican restaraunts all over town.
Anyways, hope to see you there.
I'll be attending the BloggerCon conference this Saturday. I'll also be at the dinner at Mings on Friday night, and the Aggregators dinner at the Fish Market on Saturday. It promises to be a full weekend. Bloglines is pleased to help support BloggerCon, and I'm looking forward to the conference. If you're attending one of these events, please say hi. I always enjoy talking with Bloglines users, and I'm always looking for feedback and suggestions for how we can improve the service.
I just got back from Foo Camp up in Sebastopol. I had a blast, and want to thank Tim O'Reilly and Marc Hedlund for the invite. The intellectual firepower there was amazing, and everyone was really friendly and open. Here are some pictures of the weekend by Mark Frauenfelder. I always love meeting Bloglines users and getting their feedback, and I was pleased to find that many of the attendees were indeed already Bloglines users.
Unlike many conferences, we actually got stuff done. Two things, in fact. First is the Feed Mesh idea, which is basically a federation of large RSS companies sharing blog update pings. The idea is to reduce the need for someone like Bloglines to poll a given feed on a regular basis. If we can reliably get notifications of when a given feed has been updated, we won't need to poll it constantly. This will reduce the server/bandwidth load on feed providers.
The second idea that we came up with is the Vary ETag proposal. When an aggregator requests a feed, generally either the entire feed (usually 15 items) is returned, or nothing is returned (if the feed hasn't changed). Generally, one item is added or updated in a feed, so when all 15 are returned, it's a waste of bandwidth. This proposal introduces a way for servers to implement a change that would allow them to only serve up the new or updated items. And here's the most important part of this proposal: the servers can do this with no changes required on the client side. If Blogger were to implement this, for example, they'd see an immediate savings in bandwidth. Same with any of the other large blog hosting sites. There have been other proposals, but they all require changes on the client side, which I consider to be a non-starter.
Later, there was a session on designing the next-generation feed reader. Of course feed readers haven't been around long enough to start talking about a 'next-generation', but several good ideas came out of this session as well. The session ended up being a bit Bloglines-specific, but I'm certainly not complaining. :)
Finally, this was the first time I've slept in a cubical since probably 1998. But this time it was for fun and not for work. And this time I had a comfortable inflatable bed.
What a fantastic weekend.