MSNBC.com has a new “visual news reader” called Spectra. You pick buckets like politics, sports, etc and it starts displaying news items as 2.5D visual blocks.
I spent some time with it — and I like it. It’s not going to change or replace any of my RSS reading, but it’s a nice change of pace — also reminds me a bit of the Digg Labs work being done.
On WordPress.com right now, and in the next release of self hosted WordPress – version 2.6 – you have a few extra settings that relate to avatars:
What’s cool is that for people who haven’t yet added an avatar, like my friend Rama, instead of the “mystery man” icon, I am now showing an Identicon.
What’s an Identicon you ask ? “An Identicon is a visual representation of a hash value, usually of the IP address, serving to identify a user of a computer system” ( source Wikipedia ). In addition, the Identicon will show the same generated avatar each time for that person without an avatar.
I’ve turned it on on my blog, and you can see it in action in this post. If you blog on WordPress.com, you can access these new option in Dashboard > Settings > Discussion.
More info posted by Matt over on the WordPress.com blog.
I first came into contact with Tony Conrad, Martin Remy and the Sphere team back when they were starting to work with TIME.com. I later worked with Sphere while at Dow Jones where we launched the Sphere widget at the 2006 Web 2.0 Launch Pad session and later did some innovative embed implementations ( which Rama Sadasivan championed ) on WSJ.com article pages and blogs.
It’s always special to see news like this for a great group of people – and Sphere has some of the most talented, and dedicated people out there who deserve this great outcome and who I’m sure will continue to do tremendous things for AOL.
When looking at this transaction it’s also clearly a smart move for AOL which gets a wealth of talent, distribution, and good blog street ‘cred.
TIME.com’s First Annual Blog Index :
From millions of blogs about nothing, we’ve selected the 25 best about something—from politics and global affairs to shopping and sports. And, yes, we’ve got a few about nothing, too
—Tom McNichol
New York Times: In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop
They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
One of my favorite WordPress projects out there has been the BuddyPress project – focused on turning WordPress MU into a full fledged social network platform ( more info here ).
Today we announced that Andy Peatling, who created BuddyPress, has joined our Automattic team. In addition, the BuddyPress project will become an Automattic project, much as we’ve done with WordPress, bbPress, Gravatar, and Akismet.
Lots of coverage tracked on techmeme.
The amazon AWS services have been extremely popular with lots of startups and has received very positive reviews. AWS is a way to leverage the Amazon infrastructure to provide lots of scalability for image hosting, CPU tasks, DB and more.
So what happens when an outage hits Amazon as we saw today ?
Impact wise, what struck me this morning, were the vast number of broken images across the web ( from sites that rely heavily on Amazon S3 ) and twitters of people agonizing about their businesses effectively being shut down.
A post on the Amazon forums is a good example:
I have to add a major ME TOO here. My business is effectively closed right now because Amazon did something wrong. I’ll have to reconsider using the service now.
For us on WordPress.com, we use S3, but only for a small portion of the image serving, and thanks to our architecture, were able to automatically deal with the outage this morning with no impact to our users. Our systems wrangler Barry has a post about it:
Currently we serve about 1500 image requests per second across WordPress.com. About 80-100 per second are served through S3; the rest being served from our local caches. When the outage occurred, our systems detected the errors and automatically sent the requests normally bound for S3 to local image servers that we use for backup and failover purposes.
Saw on paidcontent that Caligari, the makers of TrueSpace, were acquired by Microsoft:
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) buys…this time a smaller deal. It has bought Caligari, a developer of 3D modeling software, with an eye to use its technology for its Virtual Earth mapping system. No financial details were released. In December, Microsoft bought UK-based Multimap for a reported $50 million.
Calgari, founded in 1986 and based in Mountain View, CA, started by making 3D software for the Amiga.
As someone who did a bit of work around Virtual Reality Modelling/Markup Language (VRML) — a nominee for worst pronounced acronym ever — back in the mid 90s, seeing Caligari in the news instantly brought back memories of WebFX, Paper Software, and the promise of more killer Netscape plugins. Here is a link to what was hot in VRML back in September 1996.
Very cool event coming up, BarCamp New Orleans:
Let’s get a bunch of Gulf Coast geeks together and build something for someone who needs our help.
Maybe it’s time we do a BarCamp here in New Orleans. In addition to connecting digital folks, sharing what we know and what we’re working on, maybe we can pick a team project to do as well.
I’d like to find a struggling small business we could help immediately with a new site or enhanced Web services. Spend a weekend cranking as a team and launch the thing at the end of the weekend. We can get help from our friends everywhere with regard to code, design, ideas. Brains, we have them at the ready.
Date: February 16th and 17th, 2008
Where: Voodoo Ventures offices, 757 St. Charles Avenue, Suite 301
I won’t be able to attend, but the excellent Brian Oberkirch will be there. Also check out the video below for more details:
Some very exciting news tonight – we announced a $29.5M series B round of funding.
Our CEO Toni Schneider summarizes it well:
Late last year we sat down to figure out how we’d like to expand our business in 2008 and beyond. Since things are working well, we didn’t want to make any major changes. However, we did set a couple of new goals. One was to put enough money in the bank to have financial security for years to come. Another was to invest more aggressively into our “other” products and services (other than WordPress) like Akismet, Gravatar, and bbPress. Today’s financing will help us achieve both of those goals.
Lots of coverage including: wsj , GigaOM, new york times, ReadWriteWeb, toni, and matt (sporting his new ma.tt domain !).
You can also track the discussion over on techmeme.
We just announced a very big upgrade on WordPress.com
… everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.
Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.
TechCrunch weighs in on the news & feel free to digg it 🙂
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
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