As we should all remember, the service was put on the blocks back in December.  Afterwards there was a lively bidding process and it appears the bidding is over.

No confirmation from Yahoo nor Delicious yet.

More on this at The Next Web.

Here is a video showing what is to come.

WordPress.com was hit today with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.  WordPress stated it was the largest in its history.

Because of the attack, a number of blogs, including those which are part of its VIP service suffered connectivity issues.

Matt Mullenweg said in an email to CNET, “the attack had affected three of the company’s data centers, and was the largest its seen in the company’s six-year history.”

Mullenweg went on to say the attack, “may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs.”

It would appear that WordPress.com is back to normal.  They stated they will continue to monitor the situation and post updates as needed.

More on this can be found at CNET News.

WordPress 3.0.4 security fix

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is advising all self-hosted WordPress users to apply the update to 3.0.4 immediately.

In a statement, Mullenweg says:

[This] is a very important update to apply to your sites as soon as possible because it fixes a core security bug in our HTML sanitation library, called KSES. I would rate this release as “critical.”

Bloggers using WordPress.com hosted blogs will automatically have this update applied and need take no further action.  However, if you use a self hosted version of WordPress, it’s highly recommended that you upgrade to 3.0.4 as soon as you can.

As always, make sure you back-up your blog’s files before you apply the update.  You can download the WordPress update here.

The original lawsuit was rejected, when it was determined that Allen’s action was too vague.  It is based around a number of what Allen believes are infringements, relating to (amongst other things) the way that websites generate “related content”.  An example of this is the way that sites like amazon, will offer you a related purchase, when you buy something.

Google, as well as Google properties such as YouTube and Android, have been specifically names in this suit, causing many to speculate that this is an attack on Microsoft’s closest rivals, rather than being financially motivated.  Allen is already extremely wealthy.

Whatever the motivation, it remains to be seen if the new suit will be more effective than the previous one.  For more depth on this story and a pdf copy of the filing, check out Brier Dudley’s superb post in The Seattle Times.

Following some poorly handled announcements, it seems that Yahoo Buzz and delicious.com are being axed, scaled back or sold (depending on which announcement you heard.)

Bartz was brought in by Yahoo share holders as chief executive and paid $47,000,000 (yes that’s 47 million dollars), in her first year.  Her job was/is to try and transform the ailing giant’s fortunes, however, it’s still unclear what real progress Yahoo is making.  Having sacked hundreds of people and cut back on the number of Internet properties they own, it’s clear that Bartz is seeking to make Yahoo a leaner business.  Is it likely to unseat Google in search or email?  Is it likely to even gain significant ground?

The big question that remains unclear, following the latest round of sackings and cuts is this:

Is Yahoo a sleeping giant, waiting to be brought back from the brink by the brilliance of Bartz, or an ailing giant about to become acquired by a former competitor?

What say you?

They basically all wrote the same post: They listed the announcement, quoted from Williams’ post and that’s pretty-much it!  That’s because at the time of the announcement, Williams’ blog post was all there was to actually write about or quote from.

This was treated like every big announcement in the tech industry.  It was a race to write the same story, first.

Only after a few hours, did we start to see a few posts written with anything new.  That was when journalists / bloggers started speaking with insiders and uncovering what the announcement ACTUALLY MEANT for Twitter and Twitter’s users.  Those posts were about capturing the reader’s attention, by offering some news on the subject.

People may say that I am confusing news with analysis.  That’s simply because as news consumers, we have become accustomed to everything being reported before there is any real fact finding.

The need for speed

Remember the balloon boy hoax?  Hundreds of US news outlets wasted hours, filming a balloon, assuming there was a boy inside – Before anyone checked the story out.  That kind of balloon could not travel that high, with that weight inside.  It was a clear hoax, by a guy who wanted to be on TV.  The need for speed is what got that non-event televised to millions. Had they spoken with a balloon expert first, the story would never have been broadcast.  That’s not analysis, it’s simply good reporting practice.

One of the few advantages of old school newspaper reporting, was that reporters had deadlines to get news out, which were often measured in hours, rather than minutes.  Now, it seems to be more about who can write anything with a catchy title, first! In the fight for page views, it’s starting to feel like we are missing something.  The old model relied on the quality of the reporting – not the speed.  The new model allows us both speed AND quality.

The question is, who’s going to sacrifice speed for quality, when an extra couple of hours may lose them valuable page views?

Ten, twenty – Maybe a hundred?

OK, what if you were Leo Laporte, one of the best known and most respected people in your field with hundreds of thousands of followers and fans?

The answer might surprise you!

Leo Laporte & Google Buzz: It’s complicated

Yesterday, Leo Laporte was checking his Google Buzz account when he noticed that a recent post had not been published.  He looked again and saw that in fact, not one of his posts for the past 2 weeks had been published.  Moreover, according to Leo, no one even noticed he wasn’t posting to Buzz!

Now, Leo has hundreds of thousands of listeners and viewers to his various Internet TV shows and his nationwide radio show.  He also has a following on Twitter (at time of writing), of almost a quarter of a million people (including me.)  Ironically, he is also one of the most followed people on Google Buzz, with over 17,000 followers there.

Leo’s missing.  Why didn’t anyone notice?

The general belief is that Leo primarily uses social media to broadcast, so there was a complete communication breakdown.  The suggestion seems to be that he either wasn’t listening or when people saw he wasn’t posting, they assumed there was no point telling him, as he’d be highly unlikely to respond to them.  This, by the way, is based on an incorrect assumption – Leo DOES connect (more on that in a moment.)

However, I can understand where this suggestion comes from.

It did, after all, take Leo 2 weeks before he realised that 50% of his “communication” stream was broken (the broadcast part).  Had he been listening, he would have heard the defining silence and immediately noticed the drop in conversations with him on Buzz.  Ironically, Leo does communicate a great deal with his followers.  His challenge is that he is active on a number of social networks and between them all, he has hundreds of thousands of people sending messages to him, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  In other words, I believe his error was that he spread himself too thinly, across too many networks, to effectively communicate.

Is it even possible to communicate with that many followers?

I only have 16,000 followers on Twitter, but hundreds of thousands of followers must make 2-way communication almost impossible.  I have personally “chatted” many times with Leo on Friendfeed and equally, I have also had many messages ignored!  However, the same can be said of any “tech celeb” with a large following.  I’m guessing Leo’s Twitter stream looks like The Matrix, because HE IS seen by his followers as approachable and interested.

Clearly, if you follow someone with a massive following like Leo (or Veronica Belmont, Pete Cashmore etc), you need to accept that the way they connect via social networks will be very different from the average user, with a more manageable network of contacts.

Further reading

I found 2 really good posts on this subject:

• This post by Brad McCarty on The Next Web makes some excellent points about social media’s strengths and weaknesses.
• This post on Techcrunch, by Paul Parr is also well worth a read.  It widens the discussion to look at where to, and not to, post our content.

Photo Credit: Leo Laporte

So, why did Google announce yesterday that they were ceasing development of Google Wave?

The simple answer from Google, was that “we have not seen the level of adoption we would have liked.”  In other words, it attracted very few regular users.

The bigger question, and one that I believe a lesson can be gained from, is why did so few people use such a powerful, free service?

The Google Wave demo video was over an hour long!

Google Wave, like Google Buzz, came out of the blocks with a problem, which lost it a huge amount of early traction.  The initial Google Wave demo video, ran for over an hour – which was stupid.  People wanted to see something that showed them how to get started with Wave quickly, yet they had to wade through a shockingly poor, over long presentation instead.

By the time the problem was fixed, and the dumb-ass video replaced with something more appropriate, Wave had already lost millions of early adopters.

These early adopters (people like you and me) are the one’s who typically open new online services up to the non-geeks.

Google Wave User Interface was poor

The initial user interface was also far from instinctive, making it a lot harder to get things done, than needed to be the case.  In fact, lifehacker co-founder Gina Trapani was so frustrated by the lack of user information available, that she wrote a very useful book; The Complete Google Wave Guide – Which I’m guessing you will be able to get at a very reduced rate soon!

The worst part about the demise of Google Wave, is that it genuinely was a very good tool, which failed largely because of piss-poor launch marketing and a badly designed user interface.

Natali is host of Loaded; CNET’s popular daily tectnology newscast.  The former techcrunch journalist and regular contributor to the CBS Early Show, made her announcement in true geek fashion, via Twitter.

Everyone here would like to wish Natali and her little boy all the very best!

Photo credit: Natali Del Conte