I saw this post by Owen Thomas over at Venturebeat: “Open-standards advocate Monica Keller leaves Facebook, joins Socialcast.” Facebook’s efforts to raise its reputation for technological openness suffered a blow with the departure of Monica Keller, a well-regarded program manager for open Web standards whose career at the company proved short-lived. It’s just one of very many recent departures...

I was playing around on my XBox, trying out different plugins for PlayOn, a service which allows you to watch podcasts on your TV via your XBox. I was watching an interview Kevin Rose did with Marissa Mayer.  The first question Kevin asked was whether or not any of the search terms that comes through the system ever shocks her. Of course, her answer dodged the question, and she played up the fact...

I’ve talked briefly about my feelings on location based social networks (here, here and here). Louis Gray tackled this topic at length. This is a pithy post that will be a public demonstration of just how sedentary my lifestyle is. I’ve added a new feature to the front page of rizzn.com.  I’ve turned on Google Latitude (screenshotted to the right). How do I feel so secure constantly sharing...

I did a little mini-doc containing my thoughts around Location Based Social Networks (entitled “The Great LBS Wars of 2010”). Full description and post is up at SiliconANGLE. This is a non autoplaying version of the embed, so feel free to share it around for those of you who hated the other version. From my post at SA: Jeff Pulver and Justin Kownacki have been advancing a conversation last week...

I’ve seen some puzzling messages from Google Voice’s transcription, but this attempt to translate an automated reminder to pay my cable bill left me really scratching my head. After listening to the message (embedded below), it turns out it was attempting to transcribe in English what the automated attendant was saying in Spanish. The puzzling text excerpt: Hello, this is Time Warner your cable...

In my personal blog's web stats, I've been consistently (for the last month and a half) getting five times as much drop-in traffic from MSN Live search users than from Google. Why do you suppose that is? That's completely up-side-down from how it's ever been in my experience.

I saw a note on FriendFeed from Duncan Riley earlier today indicating he'd posted on OmniDrive, the back-up solutions company that's had an uncertain future for quite some time. Duncan and Nik Cubrilovic, both of which who have history at TechCrunch, also have history with each other. I know exactly what it's like to have piss-poor relations with someone in the Web 2.0 world and subsequently blog...

Steve Rubel just twittered an article from today's International Herald Tribune entitled "Google shows vulnerability in Advertising." It's almost a completely ridiculous article, but for the small weaknesses that Google does have in its ad platform. Of course, because the Time Magazine, Digg and Facebook havedecided to go with other ad partners other than Google, it isn't necessarily spelling the...

Hey Rizzn-ites, Have you ever played 20 Questions with a computer or small orb? If so, you know that computers and technology, are very capable of predicting what we'll say and what we're thinking. How does it do it? Greg Blonder, who we interviewed on the show about a month ago, posted on Internet Evolution today not asking how it does it, but noting how it doesn't, and posing a work-a-round for...

Hey Rizzn-ites and gPhone Hounds, Last week I picked up a stray bit from a LiveJournaler about there being 30 rumored pre-beta gPhones wandering around in Mountain View California. Blogger Michael Bazeley recounts an experience he had in an Emeryville Apple store several days ago: So I’m standing in the Emeryville Apple store today trying to troubleshoot a problem with a sales rep when a young woman...