Marc's Voice

Feb. 1st, 2007 links

1,000,000 MySpaces.

Looks like I’ll be speaking on more than one panel at Mix 07. Its nice to find people who remember the panels I’ve done in the past and appreciate the value of engaged conversation and enlightened responses I get whenever I speak. This is something folks like Kevin Werbach, Rael Dornfest, Hugh Forrest, Tony Perkins tend to forget. But not Jeff Sandquist, Doug Gold, David Berlind or John Battelle!

For years I’ve wondered why some of the greatest Sci-Fi books (like Snowcrash, Footfall, Ender’s Game, Islands on the Net) haven’t been put to film. Well now it looks like George Clooney is gonna do Diamond Age. And i won’t just be a movie, but a six hour mini-series. I can’t wait to see who they cast as the three young girls - who take over the world - at the end.

Diamond Age is one the great classics of cyberpunk. The human being behind the avatar teacher taught me that we’ll NEVER have true, full AI - that humans will always have to be in the mix - somewhere along the way.

Meanwhile CNet is announcing their first APIs.

Arrington insists that he only has the highest integrity and purpose behind starting a new conference with Jason Calacanis. I sure hope so.

Speaking of which, Dave Winer has been asked to help with this new TechCrunch20. He mentions the original DEMO and Stewart Alsop. Funny cause as I seem to recall it was my company - MacroMind - that was at the FIRST DEMO. BEFORE you had to pay to participate.

BTW Josh Koppelman thinks DEMO is a great place for VCs like him to launch companies by paying $18,500 for each company to appear there.

You can register for econSM now.

It doesn’t surprise me that the current owners of Ziff-Davis (what’s left of it) are asking too much - when trying to sell the company. When we were developing 1UP.com (I designed it) management was making stupid decisions everyday.

Chris Law gives some background as to how and why he and Paul Martino started ‘Aggregate Knowledge’. BTW They used some of that VC money they got from John and KP to pay to demo at DEMO. That doesn’t mean I don’t love them or anything, and they got thie great writeup in Venture Beat. And from Dan Farber - too. Go for it dudes!

MyDesignIn, MySpace Notifier,

Kevin Burton gets an exclusive leak from Dave Sifry on future Technorati products (technologies.)

OMG Google actually integrated YouTube into Orkut. STOP THE PRESSES! Google starts to Integrate. Next thing you know they’ll announce a DLA OS.

FanNation sells out to Sports Illustrated for $20M+ Not for many people, but for the technology. Hmmmmmmmm

MyBlogLog walks the company line.

220,000 developers are using Amazon Web Services. Yet Amazon’s margins are eroding and shrinking.

Turns out TroutGirl - Joyce Park went to the U of Chicago - which is where I was born and raised. My father went to school there - and was on the Dean’s List.

Congrats to Scott Beale for getting a photo of John Edwards into Time magazine.

Ted Leung talks about Scott Rosenberg’s new book ‘Dreaming in Code’ and how Chandler is still not shipping. I was disappointed in Scott’s book as I think he let a number of dilettantes and hot air generation - get away with spending a lot of Mitch Kapor’s money. Its not that Mitch can’t afford it - but boy I sure can think of some better usage of that money - then how it was and still is - being spent. Oh well.

Fotolog surpasses Flickr!

Phil Windley is starting to grok some underlying notions of the meshed together distributed conversations. And social networks.