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Heading to PC Forum

Next stop in the Technorati speaking tour: PC Forum.

I'll be presenting the company on Monday afternoon - a real honor (go to the bottom of the page). We've got some fun new stuff to show off, and I'm tremendously excited to meet the stellar list of attendees Esther and Daphne always bring in. The big news this year is that that CNET has acquired Edventure Holdings, the company that puts on PC Forum - kudos to Esther, Daphne, Christina, and the team, and my hat goes off to Shelby and the folks at CNET - smart move! (Full disclosure: Esther Dyson is an investor in Technorati)

Golf, anyone?

I'll be heading out to Scottsdale this afternoon, so drop me a line at dsifry at technorati dot com if you are going to be in Scottsdale and are interested in hooking up for a late dinner tonight or golf Sunday morning. I'm not a great golfer, but I'm not a complete duffer - so anyone who enjoys a nice walk on a big manicured lawn along with some interesting conversation, send an email or leave a message at my room at the hotel.

Speaking at the Bay Area Future Salon (Palo Alto)

I'm doing the speaking circuit!

Tomorrow night, I'll be in Palo Alto at the Bay Area Future Salon in Palo Alto, giving a modified version of my ETech Technorati Hacks presentation. There's more information on the Future Salon site, including driving directions to SAP Labs.

Should be a fun time. And those of you who make it just might get a sneak peek at some new stuff we've been working on...

SXSW Update

Due to a family emergency, I've got to cancel out on South by Southwest this year. I'm really bummed, because the folks at the I2 institute have got a great Wireless program going on in conjunction with SXSW, and there's a teriffic set of blog and other social software panels and talks as well. Joi Ito, our new VP of International Business will be there, and you can reach him via email: joi AT technorati.com. He's going to be filling in for me on the Ridiculously Easy Group Forming talk on Monday afternoon as well.

Sputnik puts new AP in Orbit

My good friends over at Sputnik have been very busy. At $185, their new AP 160 (buy it) is probably the least expensive centrally managed hotspot access point in the world. It's got a built-in four-port router so that you can hook up 3rd party wireless access points and manage those, too. And a replaceable antenna, so you can add that higher-gain omni or directional antenna to get long-range wireless coverage.

They also have a new, $195 Plug-In for Pre-Paid Cards that works with Sputnik Control Center so hotspot venues can attract and reward paying customers, and cut off bandwidth hogs.

Sputnik Control Center, the Sputnik AP 120 (buy) and the new AP 160 were built with a simple philosophy in mind: (1) give customers enterprise-class wireless management for commodity-class access points, and (2) keep the technology open and flexible so that customers can test, build, and grow wireless networks in ways that best fit their unique business models.

  • Want to offer free wireless? Sputnik is the least expensive way to go, and you get all the management tools and captive portal capabilities to brand your wireless offering.
  • Want to charge for wireless access? Sputnik handles all user authentication and tracking, and provides open APIs that let you connect Sputnik Control Center with your preferred billing system.
  • Want to offer a mix of open and secure/restricted wireless access at your workplace or school? Sputnik gives you security, control and flexibility.

Sputnik's founding philosophy is paying off: Sputnik boasts nearly 200 paying customers and the list is growing daily.

As Mike Landman, CEO of 3rd Wave, a leading hotspot provider in Atlanta, puts it:

"We looked at a lot of options, but settled on Sputnik because their technology is the most cost-effective and the easiest to deploy--just drop off an access point at the hotspot, plug it into broadband, and you're up and running."

Where else can you build a centrally managed 20-AP hotspot, or unwire a small city, for less than $5,000? Kudos to Sputnik for giving hotspot providers the easiest, most cost-effective, and most flexible tools for building wireless networks. And may a thousand flowers bloom...

Steven Johnson's coming to town!

Celebrated author Steven Johnson is coming to the San Francisco Bay area this week! He's doing a couple of appearances -- Stacy's in town tomorrow (Monday) at 12:30, and Keppler's in Menlo Park on Tuesday at 7:30. For those of you who have been living under a rock, Johnson wrote Mind Wide Open, Interface Culture, and Emergence, along with loads of Magazine and Newspaper articles, inclusing one on Technorati's Breaking News service for Discover Magazine. Steven has a total knack for explaining and describing complicated science and theory in simple terms, while never losing the beauty and art of the idea or technology in the metaphor. I'll be doing everything I can to make it over to Stecey's for lunch...

Live at Demo

I'm here at the Demo 2004 conference, getting ready for the "Blog Nation" panel this morning. I just noticed that the folks at Six Apart have set up a Demo weblog, which looks pretty cool. To help show off the power of understanding the conversations going on around a topic of interest, I put up a page at demo2004.technorati.com showing aggregated information around what people are saying about the Demo conference itself. As people comment on Demo or write about topics related to the conference, the page is updated in near-realtime; the median time from posting to live index is 7 minutes. It is going to be very interesting to watch the commentary come in throughout the day.

I've been giving a lot of thought to Tim Oren's succinct comments that links are a new kind of social gesture, too. I think that's the most succint way of describing the phenomenon that we're tracking at Technorati - behind every link, behind every post, behind every weblog is a person (sometimes more than one), and that person is making decisions on what to post and who to link to, and the linking process itself is not just a proxy for attention (as the Google guys understood) but it is a new form of social gesture - definitely something conversational, more public than email, more accountable than BBSes or Usenet News, more transparent than writing a letter to the editor. I'm still noodling over this, what the underlying metaphor is that we're discussing, more to come as I think this through further...

Quick analytics hack: Most popular products being discussed today

ETCon is great. There's lots of smart people here and a great conversation can be had by just bumping off the walls and running into people. I got into lots of conversations with people who were using the improvements we announced yesterday, and got some great feedback. One intriguing conversation was with John Battelle, who used to run The Industry Standard, is now at Berkeley and is writing a great weblog on the topic of search.

We got onto my fascination with Amazon.com's link cosmos - watching it refresh is like looking at what people around the world are buying and talking about. John challeneged me to make that more easy to understand. So, I put my thinking cap on last night and decided to build an example Technorati Hack - Most popular products people are talking about today. This uses the Technorati API combined with the Amazon API to get aggregate information on the products people are linking to on Amazon, in real-time, and then showing a combined view of the product picture along with the context from the most authoritative blogger who has posted about the product in the last 24 hours.

It is updated hourly. Props to John for the inspiration!