One of the big advantages to living in the city/valley, and working at SOMA is that you get to mingle with all the other people who are working on new web stuff, or are writing about it. Almost every night there’s a different party or event. On Thursday, I attended two: an AOL launch of their new fantasy football site, and the monthly Mashable event. Here’s my name tag from the Mashable party:

The Mashable party was far better attended, and it even had better bouncers.

Hope everyone (all 7 of you) enjoys the new blog theme. It was designed by Marc, the most talented web designer I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Here’s his explanation of the design. Any differences between his design and my actual blog are all my fault, obviously.

If you are interested in personalization, then another great blog is Geeking with Greg. This blog is by Greg Linden, who did a lot of the personalization work at Amazon. Later, he founded Findory, a personalized news service. The only complaint I could possibly make about this blog is that he doesn’t post enough.

If you are as fascinated about the relationships between data as I am, here’s a great blog for you: Datawocky.

CNET Networks was bought by CBS today. It is all over the web, but here’s a straight story. One of the weird things about acquisitions like this,  is that they give rise to a bunch of stories like this one at Wired. Why do reporters even bother talking to anonymous employees? I can guarantee you that none of the employees interviewed have any idea what CBS’s plans for CNET are.

If TechMeme stats were money, then CNET Networks would be wildly profitable. Statbot did a study of all-time posts on Techmeme, and once again the CNET Networks’ properties (News.com and ZDNET) were way ahead of the other contributors. Check the study out at Statbot.

Just read the mission statement:

“Our mission is to deliver the essential suite of software and services for individuals around the world, designed to help them stay connected (browse, create, manage, and share with the people they choose, on any device) and protected (provide safety and security for their information, their families, and their devices), built on the leading platform for developers, merchants, and advertisers.”

There’s no way anyone can succeed with that broad and vague a mission. Why not just say “We will build something incredibly cool!” It’s just as grandiose. For more on Windows 7 and Live Mesh see Mary Jo.

A while ago, Techmeme was abuzz with Michael Arrington’s plan to crush CNET. So, using the Techmeme leaderboard, I decided to look at the relative influence of the two brands. On the surface, TechCrunch is in the lead with a 7.01% presence to News.com’s 4.44%. However, if you add up all the CNET entries and compare them to the combination of TechCrunch and CrunchGear, you will see that CNET is in the lead with a 10.54% presence versus TC/CG’s 7.21%. Now, that’s still pretty good for TechCrunch, but I think it’s a good indication that CNET is nowhere near as irrelevant to conversation on the web as a lot of people like to think. For reference, here’s all the CNET properties that made the leaderboard, and their presence percentage:

• News.com 4.44%
• Webware 0.93%
• Between The Lines 0.86%
• The Social 0.71%
• Beyond Binary 0.57%
• All about Microsoft 0.56%
• Outside the Lines 0.5%
• One More Thing 0.46%
• Geek Gestalt 0.31%
• Crave 0.3%
• Googling Google 0.3%
• Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report 0.21%
• Zero Day 0.21%
• ZDNet 0.18%

In a post on TechCrunch about bloggers raising money, Michael Arrington urges these bloggers to forgo raising money in favor of banding together and crushing a medium-size media company by somehow attaining less than half it’s revenue:

Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business. . . . What I’d like to see, and even be a part of, is the blogger equivalent to the 1992 U.S. Mens Basketball Dream Team. That team could take CNET apart in a year, hire the best of the survivors there, and then move on to bigger prey.

This vision is on a weird borderline between crazy and unambitious. It’s unambitious, because if you want to crush a web media company, why pick CNET? There are far larger companies you could shoot to surpass. It’s a little crazy, because it depends upon combining a large number of blogs (and, more importantly, bloggers) together. Just ignoring the potential audience overlap, doing all of those deals is going to be very, very hard. And, at the end, you still are half the size of CNET, assuming CNET doesn’t grow. Personally, I think Henry Blodgett’s comments are right on target. After expressing interest in the idea, he notes that “we would secretly hope that we could find more interesting things to do” than killing CNET.

So, Michael, if you are going to dream of world domination, pick a bigger world!

I need to buy a new laptop, so Mark Evan’s post on Are MacBooks Just Trendy? really resonated with me. I think the answer is yes they are trendy, but also they are good.