Marc Hedlund

Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter teamed up to create a totally interesting project for the political season: a way to immediately visualize the links from political blogs on Memeorandum based on how they tend to link -- to more conservative (shown with red tint) or more liberal (shown with blue tint) blogs. They write:

...we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases.

I love the idea of getting a quick, visual indicator of a blogs' social peers (in the link sense). Check it out.

Several years ago, my friend Upendra Shardanand tried to get me to join him in starting a company that would remake the way news is created and understood -- overturning the worst, ambulance-chasing tendencies of modern journalism, and building tools to help people track and understand the topics and people that shape their lives. I begged off in order to pursue my own startup, but it was the hardest "no" at which to arrive, since I respect Upendra so much and so admire what he was looking to build. Though we've chosen to pursue different topics, we have in common a desire to make the world better through entrepreneurial projects, and Upendra's effort definitely would have won me over had I not already started down my own road.

Happily, Upendra has built and launched a company, Daylife, around his ideas about the news industry, and I'm proud to be a Daylife advisor. There's an excellent article about Daylife in the current issue of BusinessWeek, talking about some of their early successes.

This month, Daylife is sponsoring a developer contest around its API, which provides a rich programming interface around news topics, people, and places. I'm one of the judges for the contest, along with Brian Behlendorf, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, and others. It makes me very happy to see some of the API samples, many of which remind me of ideas I heard kicked around back when Google News first launched. (Coincidentally, there's an interesting article about the stagnation of Google News in today's New York Times.) Daylife has also put together a list of Lazyweb ideas for the contest, my favorite of which is this design for a tracker of news about evil dictators.

I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with for the contest, and I'd encourage you to check it out and submit a project. I started playing around tonight and quickly came up with three ideas for Daylife API projects that would help my startup. It won't take too many people doing the same before Upendra's idea of changing the way news works starts to take shape in the world.

Mark Jacobsen from O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures asked me to post this announcement about Startup Camp:

We received an overwhelming response to our call for participants in the first annual OATV Startup Camp which will be held prior to this year's Foo Camp. There were so many great submissions that cutting the list to seven startups was extremely difficult. The companies selected include:

• Collective Knowledge
• EduFire
• LReady
• Neo Technology
• Reductive Labs
• Replicator
• Stonewall

If your company is listed above, you should have received an email from us with a formal invitation to the OATV Startup Camp and Foo Camp. If you applied and are not listed above, we thank you for your application. There were too many good proposals and we simply did not have enough room to invite more.

We also want to thank the following startup veterans who have agreed to lead various sessions at the OATV Startup Camp:

• Michael Arrington: founder of TechCrunch; co-founder of Achex, Zip.ca and Pool.com
• Dale Dougherty: co-founder of O’Reilly Media & GNN; publisher, MAKE magazine
• Esther Dyson: founder of EDventure Holdings, PC Forum, Release 1.0
• Mark Fletcher: founder of Bloglines and ONElist
• Marc Hedlund: co-founder of Popular Power and Wesabe
• Dave McClure: founder of Startup2Startup, conference chair for Graphing Social Patterns and Web 2.0 Expo
• Howard Morgan: founding investor of Idealab; partner at First Round Capital
• Tim O’Reilly: founder of O’Reilly Media
• Kathy Sierra: co-creator of the Head First series of books
• Evan Williams: co-founder of Pyra Labs (blogger.com), Odeo, Obvious Corp and Twitter

Andy Baio strikes again:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, private emails, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made. For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It's just too good. So let's start with the most notorious — Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes.

Man. Disclosure: I know and like Andy a lot, and I've already linked to him once this week. But come on. This is awesome.

What I like most about what he's doing with the Waxy.org site is that he's creating an interesting kind of online journalism. In an earlier entry this week he headlined a scoop "Exclusive:" and I told him I liked that -- it signaled that he wasn't just echoing things found on other blogs (what I'm doing now). "Well," he said, "I should put that on every headline, then, since none of my posts are echoes." That's fantastic, and I'm really happy to see him, and support him, pursuing whatever it is he's doing.

Andy Baio posts what might be a response to Tim's concerns about Google App Engine. Interesting!

I loved Daring Fireball's one-line description: “So much for the lock-in argument.” There's definitely still a concern if/when people find themselves addicted to the services Google provides beyond simple app hosting – as Andy writes:

The App Engine SDK doesn't use BigTable for its datastore, instead relying on a simple flat file on a single server. This means issues with performance and no scalabity to speak of, but for apps with limited resource needs, something as simple as AppDrop would work fine.

Seems to me that this is where Google should head: getting developers addicted to all the services Google engineers already enjoy. They've started down that road and that seems to be the best approach for making App Engine competitively distinct.