It was inevitable, given the sheer ubiquitousness, that .sex is under consideration for use by ICANN for domains.

“You can almost guarantee the most highly sought-after one will, unfortunately, probably be dot-sex,” said Bryan Glick of Computing Magazine.

“All the meaningful words and meaningful names in the English language have been bought up already,” Glick said.

True. While some companies have been clever in branding their organizations with a quirky name so they can have a unique domain, it’s become a little difficult to identify a company with it’s product or service because of its deliberately misspelled or derivative name (Google being the glaring exception, obviously).

As the article states, it will create a new gold rush for prime Internet real estate for anyone with the time and money to scoop up as many words as possible… quickly.

I suspect that most of the best words will be gone in the blink of an eye and be worth a fortune. Still, with even a little imagination, there’s a lot o’ words in the dictionary.

From Macworld:

Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia is placing his bets on an online office productivity suite that aims to compete with similar offerings from Microsoft and Google.

Instant Collaboration Software Technologies (InstaColl), a Bangalore company co-founded by Bhatia, unveiled Live Documents on Wednesday, an online service that allows users to access and edit documents using a Web browser, and collaborate and share documents with others.

Based on the review, this service looks promising. While, as of this writing, it’s not available yet (but will be offered for free for individuals and fee-based for corporate users when launched), it is poised to offer Google more competition, as well as challenge Microsoft’s off-the-shelf Office Suite (although the article says that “Even power-users of Microsoft Office can use our service”). Read the rest of this entry »

I was thinking about all the blogs out there — all 106 million of them — and how there seems to be an in-crowd of powerful “A-listers” and hordes of second- or third-tier authors who, while they may write great content and have even, perhaps, attracted a respectably-sized audience and number of backlinks, they just can’t get admission to this exclusive club of people who are the titans of the blogosphere.

Sometimes blogging can feel like waiting in line, hoping to get into the coolest new nightspot: a limo pulls up, the bouncer opens the ropes to admit the dapper passengers to the club — and everyone else goes back to trying to catch the bouncer’s eye.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I came across a blog post entitled “How Not To Hire Someone Via Craiglist” and, while the post is talking about an ad on Craiglist, I feel like I’ve been reading this ad every day:

This job posting is fundamentally flawed. It casts far too big a net, so it will intimidate or exasperate the little fish (ie, people starting their careers), and the big fish (ie, people who truly qualified) either aren’t reading Craigslist or will smell a rat: “Compensation: Commensurate with experience.”

In particular, take a look at the requirements and expectations in the ad; while I am highly skilled in just about all the software mentioned and have some programming skills, I’m a graphic designer. This means that, while being adept at using the tools of the trade (in this case, software) to accomplish my goals is important, typing code at breakneck speed is not the defining characteristic of a talented designer. And, as far as I know, despite the plethora of WYSIWYG software out there, there isn’t one package that compensates for lack of imagination, poor production skills or originality.
Read the rest of this entry »

According to D5, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have not appeared together in a joint interview since 1984. And despite the prevailing view that the two companies have always been at odds with each other, the interview revealed that the two computer titans had praise for each other’s companies:

Steve Jobs: “Bill built the first software company in the industry and I think he built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was, except for these guys. And that was huge. That was really huge. And the business model that they ended up pursuing turned out to be the one that worked really well, you know, for the industry. I think the biggest thing was, Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software.”

Bill Gates: “What Steve’s done is quite phenomenal, and if you look back to 1977, that Apple II computer, the idea that it would be a mass-market machine, you know, the bet that was made there by Apple uniquely–there were other people with products, but the idea that this could be an incredible empowering phenomenon, Apple pursued that dream.” Read the rest of this entry »

In what is now the largest acquisition in the company’s history, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of rival juggernaut, Google, by purchasing aQuantive Inc., a leader in Internet ad services.

Google already offers a growing number of online services and applications; it would seem that their goal is to provide quick and easy access to virtually all information that can be found on any computer, anywhere, while allowing users to utilize tools online that once had to be bought in a box at the computer store. Read the rest of this entry »