Speakers in the News »

2/17/06
PETER ROJAS

Peter Rojas

Think that being an A-list blogger is all glory all the time? No way. Despite the glitz and glamor, life at the top is harder than you might think. In a cover story for New York Magazine titled "Blogs to Riches: The Haves and the Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom", Clive Thompson covers the challenges of rising to the top of the personal publishing world: "To see just precisely how rich blogging can make you, it’s worth visiting Peter Rojas, the cheerful, skate-punk-like editor of Engadget—and the best-compensated blogger in history. When I meet him one December evening in his bachelor pad on the Lower East Side, he’s sitting at an Ikea desk bedecked with three flat-panel screens and looking relatively fresh, considering he’s just come off another eleven-hour blogging jag. Like most A-list bloggers, he hit his keyboard before dawn and posted straight through until dinner. 'Anyone can start a blog, and anyone can make it grow,' he says, sipping a glass of water. 'But to keep it there? It’s fucking hard work, man. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Eighty-hour weeks since I started.' For Rojas, the toil paid off handsomely. Last fall, AOL bought Jason Calacanis’s company Weblogs, Inc., which includes Engadget, for $25 million. Rojas himself didn’t disclose the precise amount he got from the deal, but he had a good deal of equity in the company and says that, technically, he doesn’t need to work anymore. Nonetheless, he's still slogging away at Engadget because he's obsessed with cool new technology." Rojas (pictured above) will talk more about this obsession at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, where he is schedule to speak on the "How to Develop for (Convergent) Personal Devices" panel.

12:06am CST | +

2/16/06
RUBY SINREICH

Yes, many of us in Texas are as appalled as the rest of the nation by the recent hunting mis-adventures of Vice President Dick Cheney. This commentary from Ruby Sinreich does a good job of expressing our reaction to this entire sordid episode: "I can’t imagine how excruciatingly painful it must be to be shot in the face, neck, and chest with a shotgun. My deepest sypathies to Mr. Whittington, and I wish him a speedy recovery. That said… how perfect is this whole Cheney shooting debacle! It’s a great microcosm for this administration: Cheney is ruthless and violent, Bush is out of the loop, the press secretary is even more so. This administration can’t even look open and honest when they actually have nothing to hide. Plus they were hunting without the proper lisence - these are the people who supposed to uphold our laws? This looks so bad even the GOP is pissed off." Sinreich, who is the web maven at Netcentric Campaigns and the founder of OrangePolitics, will be part of the "Revenge of the Blogs: Election 2008" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

12:25am CST | +

2/15/06
JEFFREY VEEN

Congrats to the folks at Adaptive Path, who yesterday sold Measure Map to Google. As Jeffrey Veen explains on his new Google blog, this new application gives personal publishers more power to gauge the impact of their writing, "Our goal has been to use the power of web analytics to help bloggers feel that same sense of connection with their audience. Today, as the Measure Map team joins Google, our mission remains the same: to build the best possible user experience so people can understand and appreciate the effect their blogs - their words and ideas - can have. I have to admit I'm addicted now. I bet I check my stats a half-dozen times a day, anxious to see if anyone has linked to me or see what posts are most popular today. Our users agree -- whether their audience is just friends and family or thousands of readers -- they're having more and more fun with their blogs and investing more time in them. And that means content across the web is getting better." A frequent speaker at SXSW Interactive, Veen will lead the appropriately-titled "Developing the Next Generation of Web Applications" panel at this year's event.

12:24am CST | +

2/14/06
TIM WESTERGREN

Tim Westergren

When it comes to listening to music you like, one of the coolest new applications out there is Pandora. As Toronto Star reporter Christopher Hutsul gushes in a February 13 report: "It's a simple, Web-based streaming audio program that facilitates the discovery of new music. Similar to an online dating service, Pandora.com learns the users interests, and introduces new music accordingly. The process begins with Pandora asking the user to name a favourite artist. That triggers a crisp-sounding broadcast of a track performed by that artist. When that song is through, the broadcast moves on to a track that Pandora's underlying software has deemed similar to your initial selection based on attributes such as vocal harmony, rhythmic syncopation, and key tonality (not to mention the other 400 musical aspects that are indexed for each track). By adding artists to your radio station, the range of music is broadened. By telling Pandora whether you're enjoying the songs it produces, it learns your tastes. With minimal tinkering, you've created a personalized radio station that draws from a vast and surprisingly edgy collection of 400,000 tracks that date to the early 20th century." Learn more about this innovative application from its founder Tim Westergren (pictured above), who will be part of the "Future of Radio" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

12:02am CST | +

2/13/06
JENEANE SESSUM

Christmas is still another ten months away, but Jeneane Sessum knows what she wants the Geek Santa to bring: "I'm exhausted from trying to research some stuff--in annual report writing hell as we speak--which has me thinking that there's another wall that needs to come down, and it's the wall separating me from the stats I need to write effectively. The major analyst firms either need to offer a price/platform for indies and new media folks, OR new media folks need to start indie analyst gropus of their own, offering their findings at a price that's at least sort of affordable, which is not $3K for a report. Or even better, a wikipedia version of research and analysis compilations." Sessum will be part of the "Bloggers in Love: Intimacy, Technology and Mask-Making" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.