Posts tagged: STARTUPS

My 100x ROI as accidental domain speculator

One of the hazards of working in the web biz is impulse-buying domain names. Back in the Web 2.0 boom days, there were a lot of “social” web plays with silly names. I thought I’d satirize this by registering numbr.com and making a social site where you could “friend” the number 7 and that sort of thing. I never got around to building that site. However I did get a curious email one day from “Joe” who wanted to know if I’d sell the name.

Belated comments on Dreaming in Code

Back in February I mentioned Scott Rosenberg’s book Dreaming in Code. Somehow I never got around to posting more extended comments. Recently I was asked, by someone who had followed the Chandler project but hadn’t seen the book, to clarify why I thought the story was sad. This post is a cobbling-together of my answer to that question as well as some comments I made in the course of our group-interview on the Well.

Jabberwocky 2.0 (BETA)

‘Twas google/ig, and the odeos Did skype and quimble in engrade: All simpy were the buzzingos, And the feedpaths carbonmade. “Beware the Frapprflock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Yubnub bird, and shun The del.icio.us Offertrax!” He took his orkut sword in hand: Long time the slawesome foe he sought – So rested he by the Numsum tree, And stood awhile in thought.

Web 2.0 imitates satire

Over on the Well, in a what-is-this-web-2.0-thing-anyway topic, I posted: I’ve been thinking about starting a joke social networking/sharing site called “huester” where you can post your favorite colors, tag them, make RSS feeds of them… Within a couple hours Jeffrey had posted a link to colorcombos.com. It’s a site that lets you post your favorite color combinations, tag them, make RSS feeds of them… The only thing it’s missing is friending.

Taxonomy of Bubble 2.0

Russell Beattie has posted a rant about Web 2.0 startups. I actually disagree with much of his critique (he veers toward “640K should be enough for anyone” territory more than once), but the rough taxonomy is useful in sorting the heaps of new companies and projects.