はてなブログを11月7日にベータリリースしました。 リリース以降、予想を上回る勢いでベータ版の利用申し込みを頂いており、上限を拡げるたびに、すぐに人数が上限に達する状態が続いています。 先日の500人追加応募の際は、募集開始1分で160人の応募がありました。驚くべき勢いです。 日本のブログブームが本格的に始まったのは、はてなダイアリーをリリースした2003年から。まさにはてなダイアリーが日本のブログブームのきっかけでした。 それから8年後の今、なぜ改めて今、ブログなのでしょうか。 つぶやくだけが、文章じゃない ブログには当初、「自己表現ツール」と「コミュニケーションツール」の2つの要素が含まれていました。 文章や写真を使って表現をする仕組みに加えて、コメントやトラックバック、リンク元表示などでお互いにコミュニケーションをする仕組みを内包していました。 ブログが出始めた当時、自由にテキストを

Your Facebook Friends Are Watching You—Did We Just Move Closer to 1984? George Orwell’s novel 1984 begins with Winston Smith, the main character, seeing posters saying BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.  In 2010, that could be replaced with FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU.  Or rather, YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK ARE WATCHING YOU.  You and your friends can now post where you are and share this information, if you

Paul Graham has written one of his typically worth-reading essays about why Yahoo! went from the darling of the internet world in the mid- to late-90's to whatever it is today (an also-ran's also-ran). I don't have much to say on the main point of the essay, so if you're interested in that, go read it. However, what did catch my eye, was one little aside about trying to get Yahoo to buy Google soo

Foursquare Has Been Trying (And Failing) To Trademark "Check-In" You’d be hard-pressed to find a hotter term in technology right now than “check-in.” Following Facebook’s entry into the location space with Places, it will soon be a term that hundreds of million of web users know well. But millions already do know it well thanks to Foursquare. While it seems likely that they weren’t the first to us

As we noted nearly a month ago now, Facebook has acquired social activity and ‘check-in’ service provider Hot Potato for about $10 million in cash. Facebook, fresh from announcing its entry into the location game (our ongoing coverage), and Hot Potato this morning confirmed the acquisition, which is clearly a move by the social networking juggernaut to bring in more talent rather than expanding it

We hear it all the time, whenever anyone talks about an industry being "destroyed" by new technologies: "how do we save x industry?" where "x" can stand for "recording" or "news" or "movies" or whatever. We saw it just recently when a professor wanted to "save" the newspaper industry by changing copyright law in ridiculous ways. It's also why we jokingly called our last event "Techdirt Saves* Jour