Posts with tag "Duncan Riley"

What’s Duncan Riley got up his sleeve now?

I like looking through the different sections of the stats plugin I use here at WinExtra as I sometimes come across some interesting info. Like tonight err … how about this morning … as I was looking through and saw another URL that looked familar but it had a sub domain prefix I hadn’t seen before.

The main domain address was inquisitr.com which most of us knows if Duncan Riley’s new blogging effort but this URL address had an iq sub domain attached to it. So being the nosey bugger that I am I clicked through to it and this is what showed up in the browser

Inquisitr iQ - click for larger view

So … Duncan …. what are you up to bud?

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Duncan Riley – the 2.0 version

Duncan Riley The blogging world has many personalities some of which we like and others that constantly rub us the wrong way. Some might be uhm.. shall we say .. egotistical and others are willing to give of their time. Of all the personalities out there Duncan Riley is probably best known for his time spent writing for TechCrunch where I once suggested that he was like the bad cop of the old fashion Good Cop – Bad Cop routine.

While Duncan might have been better known for his easy to provoke attitude he was also responsible for many excellent posts but unfortunately his rather public dust-ups; whether on TechCrunch or his personal blog, are what remained in the minds of most folks. Then one day not long ago he surprised everyone by leaving the TechCrunch fold to head out on his own.

No sooner than he had put his last post on TechCrunch to bed than his venture The Inquisitr was introduced to the blogosphere. I will admit that I wasn’t sure what style of writing he would take on the blog. Would the bombastic and sometime user of cuss words prevail or would we see something different was the question I think a lot of spectators and blogging pundits were waiting to see.

I don’t think I was alone in being pleasantly surprised when Duncan began experimenting with the very things like FriendFeed and Disqus that had lead to some extremely heated posts just prior to him leaving TechCrunch. There was even a public meet-up of sorts via his blog between himself and Louis Gray; who had been the object of one of his more vitriolic posts, where they talked about FriendFeed.

However I have been far more impressed by some of his more current posts regarding the rising discussion about the evolution of blogging. In his series of posts about Blogging 2.0 he has written what I consider some of his best and most balanced pieces yet. Gone is the easy to ruffle writing and replaced with well thought out and interesting posts.

While I still think that the old take no prisoners Duncan style of writing is still there I think that the move to starting up The Inquisitr was the best things he could have done for himself; and given the quality of posts the best thing for us his readers as well.

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Who will walk in the footsteps of Duncan Riley?

techcrunch As most of you have heard by now Duncan Riley has written his last post on TechCrunch after being with the blog owned by Michael Arrington for almost a year to the day. Right now I’m listening to the podcast that Duncan did with Matt Craven that got posted today as well which is being billed as an exclusive interview.

While I am sure that much will be written whether it be from the Valleywag style to more staid bloggers I am more interested in who Michael will be looking to replace Duncan with – if he does. So with a little bit of wishful thinking these are the people that I could see being able to step into Duncan’s shoes

- Louis Gray – Louis has proven over the last year that he is a good solid blogger with a strong analytical look at things.

- Mathew Ingram – Mathew has some good journalistic background as being a journalist with The Globe & Mail which would be an advantage for TechCrunch

- Alexander van Elsas – while most won’t know him Alexander has an excellent blog and he also has an excellent technology background that could prove to be handy.

That’s my selection but at the same time I wish Duncan all the best in his new ventures whatever they may be.

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Is that another nail in the coffin?

WTF are you doing? Imagine for one second if you were told that Encyclopedia Britannica was going to remove any information older than a year; or how about if Google was to send out a press release saying that they were going to ditch anything older than six months from their index. I can just hear the howls of WTF! echoing throughout the Internet and heads would be rolling at emergency board meetings.

Well this is in effect what Technorati is apparently doing according to an email from Ian Kallen at Technorati to Zoli Erdos who first noticed that anything older than six months was missing from Technorati’s index. While Ian shrugs off some minor economization, performance fixes with a suggestion that most people won’t notice the missing data one has to really shake their heads at such a move.

Even as Duncan Riley at TechCrunch points out that most people may not care because they have already switched to using Google’s BlogSearch the fact that Technorati seems ready to cut its data throat sure doesn’t instill much confidence in the company’s desire to be the main blogging reference site.

I realize that one of the things that Technorati may have been wanting to do is to clean up its index of things like splogs and other such index pollutants, however isn’t this just a bit of over kill?.


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Sorry Duncan but that headline irritated me

Bad taste is still bad taste In a day and age of checkmark friends on some acceptance web page I realize that words and ideas may not hold the same value or power to mean something; but do we really think that we can just toss out words that in of themselves are potent and rich in meaning as if they are another marketing term.

In the mish mash of posts that followed after the news of Google’s PageRank update that saw more than a few top blogs as well as link farms see their ranking reduced Duncan Riley had his say in a post titled Google Declares Jihad on Blog Link Farms.

Now I am not a politically correct type of person to the point I think that most of it is nothing but garbage but to use a word like Jihad as part of some post about Google throwing its weight around was in my cranky opinion – stupid.

The idea of using a religious term of war as part of a descriptive headline doesn’t even come close to being in good taste considering that US soldiers and soldiers of other countries are in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting against those who would make it more than some word in a tech post headline.

I like Duncan’s writing both at TechCrunch and on his personal blog but I do think a boundary was crossed with today’s headline.


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Is Microsoft the new Dark Horse?

  • Category: Technology
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  • Posted 2134 days ago

Dark horses can surprises you Sure Microsoft is still the big money earner in the software world and yes it constantly takes hits regarding everything from lousy support for web standards to proprietary data formats to lock its users in a closed cycle of software. That said with the constant looking over its shoulder at Google and the now meteoric rise of Facebook as the new darling of folks like Robert Scoble and the shiny new thing chasers one has to wonder if Microsoft is the new Dark Horse of Web 2.0.

After all as Robert’s data gets sucked into the black hole of Facebook he writes off Microsoft as any force to be reckoned with in this brave new shiny world of widgets and freshly bricked data walls. It is this closed data that has Duncan Riley wondering if Facebook will be the next Microsoft of the Web OS world.

Throughout all this is the impending trial date for the Facebook lawsuit that no-one really wants to talk about except maybe in hushed tones of backroom IPO meetings; which as Grant Robertson at Download Squad points out could change everything. On top of this the natural ebb and flow of the internet and the lifecycle of cool no longer guarantees longevity.

Just look to Google - the company that embodies do no evil and is the darling of anyone in the open anything movements who now faces disappointed Wall Street and questions about its intentions like never before. Then we have Facebook who embodies everything closed platform; regardless of their F8 openness, following in the footsteps of the world’s monolith of software.

While Microsoft maybe discounted as a contender by some I don’t think it would be a wise move to keep that attitude. Even though I will be the first one to call Microsoft out on some of the things it does or the software it releases I’ve also been around long enough to know that Dark Horses can sometimes surprise the hell out of you and it isn’t wise to bet against them all the time.

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Got 20 bucks? – Yank TechCrunch’s chain

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  • Posted 2249 days ago

Stumbling around in the dark I just had to laugh when I read over at Duncan Riley’s blog about this apparent pulling the wool over the eyes of TechCrunch and LifeHacker by a site call Popuri. It turns out that both these news sites got taken in by a guy with a script you can by for $20.00 that displays your site’s rankings via a variety of web sources.

Granted neither TechCrunch nor LifeHacker said anywhere that this was a business but in the case of TechCrunch one would think that being the supposed voice of Web 2.0 startups a little checking would have been in order.

Duncan got a pretty good laugh out of it as well calling it a dupe of two pro’s

Here’s the thing, there is NOTHING special about Popuri at all, accept that they’ve given the site a trendy sounding Web 2.0 URL and a lite lick of Web 2.0 paint, the script that runs the site isn’t unique, indeed I regularly see sites running the same/ similar script come up for sale at DigitalPoint for $20, sometimes even less. Juan Xavier Larea of Florida, who ever you are, 100 pts for pure genius because you’ve duped Michael Arrington + LifeHacker, and that’s some pretty serious people to dupe.

Guess it must have been a slow news day in Web 2.0 land :)

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