Dow Jones MarketWatch Goes Social
The MarketWatch financial news web site is getting a fresh coat of web 2.0 paint today with the official beta release of the MarketWatch Community. The community site adds commenting, tagging, and rating to every article offered by MarketWatch. The site also ties in standard social network features, such as bios, avatars, and friends lists.

The community features will be rolled out to the MarketWatch at large site conservatively via a sidebar widget. The widget will allow any member of the community site to rate, tag, or comment on articles throughout the site. Other new features will only be available via the dedicated community area.

Fresh coat indeed. Fresh coat of incompetence. Isn’t this pleasant, ‘Exceptional’ programming.

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 This is not animated. 

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Slashdot | Microsoft Should Abandon Vista?
“An editorial written by Don Reisinger over at CNet’s News.com takes Microsoft to task for the outright failure of Vista. He suggests that Vista may be the downfall of the company as, despite years in development, Vista was delivered to market too early. His suggestion? Support those who are running it, but otherwise ditch Vista and move on. ‘Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support … With Mac OS X hot on its tail, Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around. If Microsoft continues down this path, it will be Vista that will bring the software giant to its knees–not Bill Gates’ departure.'”

I’m posting a reference to a post that references the original article with good reason. The comments on this /. post are so damn hilarious, you’ve got to read them.

How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Vista after all it has been through?

…

LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even boots you bastards! LEAVE VISTA ALONE!

…

LEAVE VISTA ALONE RIGHT NOW. I MEAN IT.

Anyone that has a problem with it you deal with me, because it is not well right now.

LEAVE IT ALONE!

Oh, and the C|Net piece hurts. Hurts bad. If I were Microsoft. Also, I think it’s probably correct; although, I’m not sure this approach would be in the best interest of Microsoft.

I was in Fremont yesterday speaking on a panel hosted by the Silicon Valley Webbuilder group on wikis and usability. Jeffrey Walker, the President of of Atlassian, was there. Jeffrey has this unusual quality. I don’t know how to describe it other than the dude’s so damn like-able you just want to give him a hug. The panel moderator was LukeW. I don’t recall his last name. He’s a usability and user experience (UeX) dude who’s currently working at Yahoo!. He seemed like he might be new to wikis, but it was clear he’s a smart dude and during his, albeit a tad long, 😉 introduction to UeX he made some really good points about web forms and usability. I actually wrote down a couple things Luke said. He has a book coming out on UeX and web form design. This is his second book. I will be buying it. Like I said, smart dude. Maybe someone can post an URL to it in the comments for all of us. Bess Ho, the organizer was a trip. Very energetic, fun, and memorably dressed. She was dressed straight out of an anime, down to the sneakers. She has a fabulously original business card that she proudly declared she had designed herself. Finally, Zoli helped Bess find speakers for the event and was in attendance. Hungarians are cool. Zoli is no exception.

I crashed the DEMO cocktail party. Steve and I presented at DEMO last year and this year I have some friends officially attending the event. It’s in town; so I stopped by. I met some “famous” people who are bloggers. Turns out some “famous” bloggers don’t like technologists who upset their world view. Who knew? Specifically, it seems I’ve angered a prominent blogger, or two, whose day-jobs are as software entrepreneurs. As a result I’ve had a few in the “famous” A-list blogger crowd turned loose on me. Dag nabbit! Periodically I bump into these guys who relish telling me that I’ve insulted their close and personal friend. ?!? How? Because we kick ass? This competitor had a three year head start and we’re squashing them. Hell, if it weren’t for the <back-handed-compliment>prominence of the head of the company no one would even know of them..</back-handed-compliment>

I was introduced to this Shel Israel dude at the party. His name sounded familiar. I wasn’t real sure who he was, but he sounded familiar. I gather he’s well known, maybe even “famous”. He asked what I did. I told him MindTouch develops the world’s greatest wiki. He said something about a competitor. I said: yes, I really appreciate his hard work <sincerely I do>. However, we’re seeing over 600 installs a day to their 20. Shel Israel then made some snide comment about my tattoo. He took the time to point out that tattoos are in violation of Jewish law. I have a tattoo in Hebrew that is sometimes visible. ?!? LOL, You should see the one on my ass, it’s a beaut! 😉 (I thought to myself) He then informed me I insulted his close and personal friend <the competitor> and politely stomped off. I’m summarizing and I’m omitting the B-list blogger who presented me with a shockingly similar exchange and who referenced Shel. Funny stuff really. Anyway, I guess Shel didn’t like the cold hard facts of our 40 to 1 adoption rate differential. Facts suck. I wish everything could be spun. Later that night I approached Shel again and I sincerely tried to make nice. He’s “famous” man! He could make me! Ok, yes my intensity _can_ be misinterpreted. I believe it was. Again the dude was, at best, curt. Indeed the woman standing with us apologized to me. I assume on his behalf.

Graeme and Marc will be covering DEMO. Keep up with the event on their respective blogs. These guys may not act like royalty, but they are class acts and good solid journos. The only insight I have to offer about company’s at te event is that while at the party I met the dudes who are doing FeedHub. Cool concept. I’m testing it out now. We’ll see how well they do this.

Anyway, crashing the party was fun. DEMO is cool. Perhaps I’ll meet you while crashing a party near you. 😉

Photo credit: Brian Solis

Cross post

Tech~Surf~Blog: MindTouch Is Kicking Wiki Butt
When I read an article recently in Information Week that compared various options for content management systems, including wikis, I thought it was strange Mindtouch wasnt included. So, I asked cofounder Aaron Fulkerson, who was equally perplexed. “Were seeing 500 too 600 installations of our software every single day, and yet many in the media dont seem to know us,” he said. Aaronfulkerson “Weve seen 2304% growth in adoption in the last year. And a 1666% growth in just the last three months.” Similar open-source companies, like SugarCRM and Zimbra, he told me, have had $20-30M in investment and drive similar adoption rates to what MindTouch has achieved with just a $3.5M investment to date. I say thats a pretty powerful entrepreneurial story. “Weve achieved the success we have so far by being open, honest, and authentic. We listen to our tribe,” said Fulkerson.

Yes, apparently MindTouch does know how to build community. I think we’ve proven this. Our company’s growth is directly attributable to our ability to build a community around our products. Personally, I’m amazed how quickly we’ve done this. We only just launched Deki Wiki July 25, 2006. We have managed to cultivate a vibrant community in one short year!

To be clear, our ability to build community is largely attributable to our product. However, all the cool community technologies in the world are useless if you’re not honest, authentic and attentive to the wishes of your tribe. We listen to our tribe. They know best.

When I say our product I want to be clear about something. Deki Wiki isn’t MindTouch’s product. It stopped being MindTouch’s product about four months ago when it “hit” big and we went from 50 downloads a day to a few hundred a day. When I say our product I’m including the extended community of users and developers in that ‘our’. In short Deki Wiki belongs to the tribe. MindTouch is only the primary implementer of the tribe’s desires and needs. This tribe has increasingly steered the development of Deki Wiki. Beyond the product road map the tribe has also dictated things like product messaging and pricing. MindTouch is only adapting to the input provided by the tribe.

I was once fond of 60 Minutes. I just watched <time-shifted> the 60 Minutes interview with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad from last Sunday (September 22, 2007) in which Scott Pelley “interviews” Ahmadinejad. What a farce. That wasn’t an interview. This was an attempt to publicly ostracize the radical Ahmadinejad. The result was making this radical anti-semitic Islamic religious nut seem like the moderate and well-reasoned of the two. Pelley you’re a moron! My God. Way to go. You smug prick. Are you working for an Iranian PR firm? You may as well be. Here is the transcript. To fully appreciate it you have to see Pelley’s condescending grin as he proudly proclaims he is “quoting George W. Bush directly for the record” whom he declares to be “without question” a very pious and learned leader. So I inserted learned bit, but it’s certainly implied. It takes a special kind of prick to make Ahmadinejad look rational. When did 60 Minutes become a propaganda mouth piece for the United States? You’ve lost my viewership Pelley. You frickin’ dong.

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