King  Gary 

Looks like Dave Winer of Scripting.com fame is going to be releasing the ‘Twitter for audio’ soon, called TwitterGram. It’s basically like Twitter, but instead of sending short quips of text, you’re sending audio files that are 200 kb or smaller in size.

This isn’t going to be nearly as big as Twitter; not even a quarter of the popularity. Audio is just not as easy to glance over than text.

Podcasting, for example, has gotten relatively big, but blogs are still massive compared to podcasting, which is partially why podcasting startups such as Odeo didn’t do nearly as well as they would have hoped for. I would imagine that podcasts take up less than 5% of all existing blogs. The same will go for TwitterGram.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Looks like LinkedIn is finally beginning to open up their vast amount of content to developers through an API of sorts over the next few months.

People have been saying that this is in response to Facebook, but in my opinion, if done properly, an application could be developed that would merge the best of both worlds from Facebook and LinkedIn to create a hybrid of sorts. Now THAT could be potentially a very useful application to many people, including myself!

Popularity: 11% [?]

We’ve all heard of all the great news about Facebook Platform, but are there any major issues that come along with it? Well, indeed there are.

When you’ve got the audience that Facebook has (20 million unique users each and every month, and counting) and you give them all access to your application, which is hosted on your own servers, then something has got to give if your application becomes even mildly popular.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Business 2.0 has opened up voting to invite people to “vote for the businesspeople who inspire, inform and infuriate you, from CEOs to entrepreneurs to media stars.”

Kevin Rose of Digg and Revision3/Diggnation fame is leading the pack in terms of number of votes by an extremely large margin, with 293,422 (the runner-up is Mel Karmazin, the CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio, with 90,229 votes.) Even with the large number of votes, Kevin is only in 9th place in terms of his rating, whereas Mel is 5th.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

There’s some chatter going on with regards to Guy Kawasaki’s latest web venture, Truemors, a “rumor reporting site. Users text, email or call in a rumor and other users vote on it. Popular rumors make it to the home page.” (from from TechCrunch) and how Guy mentions that it (only) costs him $12,000 for the entire website to go from an idea to reality.

There’s already been quite a bit of criticism about this, most recently from Mathew Ingram, who’s post is entitled “Kawasaki: How I wasted $12,107 on Truemors“. In my opinion, he’s pretty much gotten it spot on; I agree that Truemors is a pretty pointless endeavor, once you look past the fact that it’s founded by Guy. (The multiple TechCrunch posts increased the site’s exposure to me, more than anything else. Those gave it way more hype than it deserved.)

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Popularity: 22% [?]

Running a blog network with nearly 200 blogs is no easy task, and when you’ve got the same item being downloaded a few thousand times every second, it can put quite the strain on a server. That’s why the b5media blogroll (an example is shown to the right of this post) can pretty much kill a server if people love our blogs too much, and if the blogroll isn’t as optimized as it could have been. We needed to fix the blogroll so that we could use it without straining our servers nearly as much as it once did, so I jumped in and optimized it so that it would be nice and speedy.

The good thing was that whenever the blogroll was requested by a website, the same data would always be sent (in XML format - what else?). The reason that the blogroll may look different on several websites is because each website parses the XML file differently. This enabled us to cache the blogroll XML data that is returned, since it is not dynamic; it only changes if we add/modify/remove a channel or a blog.

Average load times

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Popularity: 14% [?]

The b5media meetups have concluded. We’ve posted some of the photos from the events on Flickr. There are also some photos of the b5media public meetup, courtesy of Babak. I’ve had a great time meeting the guys from b5, especially Aaron Brazell, Christina Jones, and Darren Rowse, all for the first time.

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Popularity: 19% [?]

I intended on making this post last Monday but was busy with other things. I blame the lateness on the fact that I enjoy working at b5media far too much!

Like the CEO of b5media says, I am the newest addition to the b5media team! I really look forward to working with everyone there, and I intend to learn a lot during my employment.

Now, first off, here’s a bit of background information and other spiel on b5media, straight from its website:

b5media (www.b5media.com) is a global new media network featuring more than 150 blogs on a wide variety of subjects ranging from entertainment and news to technology and sports. With content written by passionate people from all over the world and visited by more than two million unique visitors a month, b5media is among the world’s largest online new media networks. b5media is based in Toronto.

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Popularity: 38% [?]

This is according to a press release from Microsoft. It seems like even he doesn’t get his life fulfilled by Microsoft anymore, and is looking for a better way for self-fulfillment. He’s going to be working at his Gates Foundation full-time after his 2 year transition away from Microsoft.

Popularity: 9% [?]