Brave Tech World

November 21, 2006

TUE 21 NOV 2006

A Startup without a blog! By Marcelo

 

     No, I'm not kinding, I found many (dozens) of startups in Seattle that don't have a blog! [gasp]

 

    And this is not the worst part. These are technology startups! [double gasp]

 

    Well, it is much easier to hire a VP of Marketing that will hire a PR firm, to charge a few thousand dollars to write and distribute a press release to try to get in some print or online media to try to see if they can reach your customer or partners. Much easier than having a blog (and faster too, uh?).

 

    There is more.... VCs in Seattle... So far, there are the total amount of 1 (one) VC from Seattle that writes a blog -- Steve Hall's Nortwest VC -- and, on the last 6 months he wrote a total of 5 (five) posts!

 

    Fluke, Frazier, Ignition, Madrona, OVP, Second Avenue, Voyager, Vulcan... Nope, no blogs. To be fair, Ignition claims that it has a few VCs that are bloggers, but if you don't write a post in about a year I don't think it counts.

 

    Rich Tong from Ignition Partners is almost a professional blogger, but his blog is not about VCs, Investments, or Ignition. It is about him, so that doesn't count.

 

   

   

TUE 21 NOV 2006

Seattle Startup Blogs list By Marcelo

 

    We have 30 blogs already (up from 20 yesterday night). I know there are many more companies and entrepreneurs blogging in Seattle.

 

    Special thanks to Adam Phillabaum for a few excellent suggestions.

   

 

TUE 21 NOV 2006

Display the Seattle blog list on your site. By Marcelo

 

    Heck, we are on the age of sharing, mashups and syndication, so why not do the same with the Seattle Startups Blogs list?

 

    Here is two ways how you can add this list to your site.

 

1) Use the OPML file and a Widget (easier)

 

    The OPML file is located at this address:

http://sampa.com/seattle-blogs/seattle-startups-blogs.xml

    There are Widgets that you can use on your blog (I found one for Wordpress) that you can set to display this list. [Reader: if you know other Widgets for Blogger, Typepad, MovableType, MySpace, let me know]

 

 

2) Use the HTML version of the OPML (requires programming)

 

    You can fetch the raw HTML from http://sampa.com/Seattle-Blogs/bloglist.aspx and insert in the middle of your page. The only thing that you'll need is to define the CSS to make it fit your site design. The HTML is quite straight forward. (Please, remember to cache the results for at least 15 minutes)

 

 

3) Parse the OPML result (advanced)

 

    If you want you can retrieve the OPML, parse its content and display on your site whatever way you want.

   

 

TUE 21 NOV 2006

Firefox overtakes IE By Marcelo

 

    Holly ****! I can't believe my eyes. This month, Firefox has surpassed IE in numbers of visits to Sampa.com. 

 

    Just 2 years ago there was "no" competition for IE, it dominated the market with 90+% market share and then... Firefox happened.

 

    I'm sure this is not what the people in MSN (Windows Live, whatever) are seeing because they have a more "low-end crowd". People that come to Sampa are a notch above on technology expertise.

 

    Here is the data for Sampa.com for the month of November and in parenthesis the month of October:

 

• Firefox: 47.79% (38.98%)
• IE: 45.66% (54.93%)
• Safari: 2.98% (3.22%)
• Opera: 2.33% (1.81%)
• Mozilla: 0.48% (0.41%)
• Netscape: 0.27% (0.18%)
• Camino: 0.14% (0.26%)
• Konqueror: 0.14% (0.09%)

    I wonder if what happened to IE could happen to Windows as well? Linux is not going to be it because it requires too many paradigms shift for users and developers. But if somebody could create a descent OS (even if built on top of Linux) and a decent compat Win32 layer.... Boy, MS would be in deep trouble.