Reddit to Wired

The wallets are out today!

Hours after the JotSpot deal was confirmed the news wire tells us that Reddit is now part of the Condé Nast family, i.e. Wired. More here.

Congrats to Paul Graham and YCombinator.

Google buys JotSpot - The puzzle is complete

JotSpot is now part of Google. Co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus announced it about 1 hour ago.

Why this is a perfect deal for Google - Wikis are the only missing piece of the puzzle: Blogger, Writely, Google Spreadsheets. And now JotSpot. Or is that Google Wiki?

More from CNET News.
Update: More on Joe Kraus from VentureBeat

5 lines

I send and receive quite a few tidbits via email every day. Usually it's something I thought of with regards to a project, or some really useful ideas for tracking communications with one of the people I work with. Sometimes it is just an interesting observation. You name it, it gets emailed. Unfortunately once it has been consumed it's gone.

The people at Google have come up with a good idea to prolong the life span of all the smart things their employees think of. According to this post at WWD Google encourages its employees to write a five line note and submit it to a searchable database.

Talk about well and truly acknowledging that great ideas can come from anyone at any time. Smart move.

The new .Mac mail and what .Mac should be

The new .Mac mail in all its Web 2.0 inspired glory is now live and public. There have been quite a few reviews (TUAW, Om, Steve Rubel, and others) listing the pros and cons. As a non Dot Mac user I'm lured by the IMAP support, which is not mentioned in any of the reviews. My fav webmail Gmail doesn't do IMAP so that's an area where .Mac certainly has the upper hand. Is it worth $100 per year? Not on its own.

In a perfect world however Dot Mac becomes an integral part of Apple's iPhone offering, linking iCal, Address book, file storage (including music and video) etc. Then I'd pay $100 for the whole .Mac suite. Fingers crossed.

SF WiFi and the "nut jobs"

Frequent readers of this blog know that I am strangely obsessed (here, and here) with San Francisco's free WiFi project. It's probably because some day I want to move back and have WiFi everywhere.

David Freeberg has a long and interesting post (with several good comments) on some of the issues, and the "nut jobs", that are potentially "derailing" the whole darn thing.

Worth a read to 1) get up to date on why the the most tech savvy city in the country is so un un-wired and 2) learn what local SF politics can be like from time to time.


Soon to be unwired?

The Tucows Blog

I'm not a Tucows Blog regular, but it strikes me how nice and calm their pages look these days. When did this happen? A job very well done.

The main TC site how ever is still pretty...intense.

New and shiny

It certainly took longer than expected, but the new and much improved look of Orvet Digital is finally in place.

The person behind it all is Andreas Carlsson of Nofont who listened to all my ideas and requirements and created something far better than I could have wished for. Thank you.

As of 9.24 am ET 8 people have commented on the new look. 5 people like it ("very cool", "strong", "you stand out in the best way", "punkish"), 2 dislike it ("dissjointed"), and one person liked the new color red in the OD logo. Keep the feedback coming via email or Skype.

Uppsala is where it's at

I grew up (mostly) in Uppsala, a city just north of the Swedish capital Stockholm. The university, founded in 1477, and the pharmaceutical giant Pharmacia were the big kahunas. Everything revolved around them.

I did what most kids with dreams and ambitions seemed to do - counted the days until I could get out of town. In my case the destination was Stockholm, where I was under the impression that the "action" was (boy was it ever... and it still is - love that place!). Life, love and work then took me to London, San Francisco, Phoenix and now Washington DC.

When I look back at life in Uppsala I have mostly fond memories. Overall the city hasn't changed since I left eons ago. However, what strikes me is the amount of successful and high profile tech/tech related companies that have started there.

The MySQL people are in Uppsala, as are the gaming gurus at Starbreeze Studios. Apparently one of the worlds top online casino technology companies is also operating there, founded by a local family.

For most of us it can be hard to find a link back to the hometowns we left. As friends and relatives move or pass on, the connections fade even more.

Realizing that these companies are based in Uppsala make me look at the city in a new way. Not just as a part of my past, but as a place that suddenly has things going for it that I'm interested in today.

I like that. Go Uppsala.

Update: Seat24 is also based in Uppsala.

minimal design

A whole week has passed and as you might have noticed my post count stands at zero. Must do better! But hey, it's been a very productive week: I've done lots of work for my main client, me and my wife have finalized moving in to our new place, etc etc.

As the new site is going up I've also been looking at design more than ever these past days and weeks, and I wanted to share two nuggets of minimalist design with you:

www.fellowdesigners.se (thank you Andreas) and www.theveniceproject.com (the latest project from the Kazaa/Skype boys).

Weekend sign off: YouTube + LEGO ice cubes

Pop a few off these funky cubes in your drink tonight while you ponder if Google might actually acquire YouTube or not.

Have a fab weekend. See you next week.



LEGO Ice Cube Tray

Improving the feed reader

I keep a list of ideas for improving the feed reader. Not that I have any plans to build one, it's just something I like to do. You never know when an idea like that becomes usefull.

Anyways, I spoke with Casey about readers today and mentioned my memory of one (in development) that displayed a small thumbnail in one of its three panes. This, in theory, gives a quick view of the overall presentation of the blog. Pretty nifty.

How else can the reader be improved I wonder?

SlideShare disruptive? You bet!

What is truly disruptive? Something like Blurb (post by Pepe) fits the bill.

On a smaller scale, so does SlideShare. In short, they put your slide shows online, viewable from any computer. Smart.

What does it disrupt? Hey, I'm glad you asked!
It disrupts several things, including one of my pet hates - the digital projector business, and the fiddliness/bad image quality/fan noise/etc that goes with it.

Sure it's handy at big gatherings, and sometimes I wouldn't go in to a meeting without one. But with more and more meet's happening over Skype, video chat etc - i.e. with the attendees each having a screen of their own - this is a brilliant tool.

Plus in my experience, even at face to face meets, most people bring their laptop anyway, so this is also a good solution to the "Gee it's to bright, let's look at these slides later"-issue.

Found at TechCrunch

More on SF's free WiFi

SF is getting its free WiFi coverage... but slowly. Last nights community meeting provided more insight in to the process. And according to Katie Fehrenbacher over at GigaOm it's still about 18 months away.

read more | digg story


My April 20 post on the topic

Philosophy of man

My good friend Per Håkansson writes a very intelligent and highly enjoyable blog about "critical thinking, problem solving and vibe evolving". This includes posts on life and all it entails - food, wine, work, tech, economics etc - and you should read it.

The main reason to add it to your daily digest is that Per does the things many of us wish we could do more of. Enjoying food, contemplating travel experiences, taking a 11 month hiatus (mine was 6 month and it was the best thing I ever did, apart from proposing to Tiff), even thinking about what the financial markets are actually doing.

It's a stand out blog.

I'm staying

After hopping around a bit and trying out different blogging tools I've decided to stay right here.

It's fun to try new solutions and tweak them, push them to their limit and see what they are really made of. Sometimes they turn out to be less than what you expected. Sometimes you fall madly in love. But ultimately it comes down to ease of use and convenience. If you manage to tick all the "I want/I need" boxes with your current tool there's no need to get rid of it.

But in case you or your business are looking for a new blog set up, here are my two cent:

WordPress.org - Superior in every aspect. Matt M knows what he is doing.
WordPress.com - Good, but limited in many ways including template editing, even with the $15 annual credit.
TypePad - Nah. To many issues. Expensive.
MT - Tricky and fidgety.
Blogger - Not terribly exciting but runs smoothly. But make sure you host it yourself.
TextPattern - Very good, but slightly limited. Unless you like plugins.