So Digg just rolled out a new design. Good for them.

They also changed the URL structure. Good for them again.

What they didn’t do is transfer their old URLs to new URLs properly. What the hell?

I usually visit Digg to read their world business area. The URL: http://digg.com/view/world_business
If you type that URL in now, you end up at: http://digg.com/var/www/digg.com/html/news/world_business (page not found)
It should be sending me to: http://digg.com/news/world_business

I would imagine with all their employees at least one would occasionally type in a direct link / know how to properly forward a URL.

[b]UPDATE:[/b] Digg employee commented, they’ve fixed it.

So Gnomedex was fun.

Interesting truth - I had never met Jacob before. We’ve been doing business for years, we are about a two hour flight away, and yet we had never met up. Something always got in the way - so it was nice to finally meet him.

Coming from an outsider, I felt that Gnomedex was relatively cliquey. This was most evident during the retarded Calacanis / Dave Winer spat (more on that later). Still, most everyone was friendly - more than most other places. So cliquey yet more friendly - wrap that in your head if you can

Anyway - the talks were relatively interesting. The keynote ranted and raved - basically the government is messed up, and it needs to be open sourced (there was plenty of fodder in there for later discussion). The husband/wife duo at GeekBrief.tv struggled (I don’t want to be mean - but it didn’t seem like they had practiced at all. Plus finishing each others sentences while on stage is annoying). Guy Kawasaki pulled out a canned speech, but he commanded space and attention that truly was fascinating.

There were other talks too, but the best one was definitely Ignite Seattle. Everyone had only positive things to stay - basically 5 minutes, 15 seconds a slide, and GO! People talked about art, iphones, social networking, and having fun - it was extremely captivating.

The big ’story’ was the Calacanis / Dave Winer spat. It basically came across like this - Calacanis goes up and says spam is poisoning the internet, including Search. And then he talked about how great Mahalo was. A few people didn’t like it, and yelled at him for spamming the conference. One of them was Dave Winer. Calacanis’ feelings were hurted, and like any real man, he whined about it on his blog. And so forth and so forth.

The reality was that he didn’t offer any real solutions on the spam situation. He didn’t talk about the ‘war of escalation’ the search engines are playing vs the spammers. How linkbait (through the participation of blogs) is being used to stuff in spam content. Nope - just Mahalo this, Mahalo that.

Outside of the place, I hung out with some fellows Jacob had met up from last year. They were all terrific mellow people, with extremely interesting stories on how they ended up where they were today. None of that corporate ladder nonsense - real adventures.

Overall I had a blast. The people were unique (yes, best way to describe them) in a way no other conference I’ve been to can claim.

Nothing makes you miss home more than the grind of conferencing. I’ll post my thoughts on both soon. Once I get some sleep.

In my previous post, I had said you are not a company. The issue was simple - if the business falls apart without you (ie single-employee situations), then that isn’t a company. It is more freelancing.

The same should apply to ‘companies’ that rely purely on widgets.

I read today on TechCrunch on how JS-Kit just secured $1.2 million. It boggled my mind when you look at their stats:

• 1 CEO
• 12 engineers (what in God’s name!)
• 5,000 sites using their widgets
• 1,000 adding each month (but no mention of how many stop using - unless 1000 is net)

First off - what does JS-Kit do that requires 12 employees? I’ve talked about Blog Flux scaling issues, and we were able to solve that with a rotating 1.5 man programming team. Back then we were doing 20 million Apache requests a day - that number is far higher.

But even more depressing is 5,000 users. That is absolutely horrible. Hell iBegin Weather has over two thousand sites using the widget and it was just launched on May 10 (< 3 months).

So really - 5,000 sites isn't impressive. 1,000 a month isn't impressive. 12 engineers begs the question - "wtf are they doing?"

At the end of the day, it is the entire business case that blows my mind. $40 a month. How many people do they honestly believe are going to pay $40 a month? Even with 1,000 paying customers, that means $40,000 in revenue. Is that suppoused to pay for 13 employees? And dropping ads into the widget? Sure you may make some money, but expect a lot of users to drop you like a hot potato - most serious professionals (which is who they want) would rather take the time to find a new widget/install a new widget than to have ads cropping up into a simple rating widget.

And this 5,000 is with TechCrunch having mentioned them before - imagine if they had gone TC-less.

As I alluded to in my previous post (MadKast is stupid), a viable company is not what passes around for ‘entrepreneurship’ these days.

It is sad. Any Joe Blow with a computer and blogging software starts to blog. Good for him. He then starts to make money - even enough money to quit his day job and work on blogging fulltime. Good for him. But that is not a company. I would mark it as freelance work (you write stuff, people read it, and ‘pay’ you back in the form of clicking on ads). If you stop blogging, your company goes down the toilet in half a second flat.

If your ‘company’ does nothing while you go on a two week vacation - it isn’t a company then. Right now I can go away on a two week vacation. Sure I will have a lot of emails and work piled up while I am gone, but everything should hum along. My server admin will ensure the servers stay up (and check to make sure they are up). My managers will ensure every division is humming along, making progress (and money at the same time).

To me - a company can survive the loss of any one person (I have safeguards that if I was to die tomorrow, Enthropia Inc would still hum along). Sure, their might be a bit of a transition period, but my people know what is to be done. This post on entrepenurship by Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin is completely spot on. Nothing describes me better as point number one.

So think about it - are you really a company?

Been busy moving. Since 2001 I have not lived in any single residence for 12 months. Latest place lasted 8 months. Current place is planned for 1 to 12 months - hoping to move to Vancouver next.

But everything is set, and ready to go.

So - was going through my feeds, and I read that the first TechStars ‘company’ launched. This isn’t a company. It is a feature. Think Kiko (calendar ‘company’ sold on eBay), except 100x simpler.

I’ll copy what TC says:

With the widget, you can easily let visitors share your entire blog posts via email, mobile MMS, or through any of the social bookmarking services. The widget also maintains a list of emails and phone numbers you’ve contacted in the past to make sending new links to friends really easy. AddThis (which we use) has a similar widget, but focuses on an exhaustive list of social bookmarking services.

MadKast’s widget also offers an analytics package that tracks which posts are shared most often and what other blogs your readers are visit.

Huh? Sharing blog posts via a line of javascript is a company? No - its a bloody tool. Furthermore, the ‘analytics package’ that tracks which posts are shared most is so easy it belongs in the realm of captain obvious. And what other blogs your readers visit? That is pretty damn close to invasive when it comes to privacy (but also not all that complicated). In fact - how much data are they tracking?

What passes as a ‘company’ these days amazes me.