This week the Crunchies were announced. These seem to me to compete only with Mashable. They are a set of awards from a set of blogs (TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, Giga Om et al) for “startups”. Commenters seemed generally annoyed with the lack of “startups” that were nominated. Voting is now open.

Official Site | TC Post
Mozilla launched Weave which is a new way of maintaining one browser experience across multiple devices. Apparently they just want to make the platform they have no desire to develop products for it themselves. It seems to me that this is just a repeat of Google’s Synchronised Bookmarks feature albeit broader and more open.  I’m not overly impressed.

Official Launch Post

I have terminated the Google Adsense adverts that used to run to the right hand side of this blog, and have replaced them with some Text Link Ads. You will notice that there is just one link there right now, but this is because of the way that Text Link Ads works. Sponsors actually have to buy the space on your blog. So it does take a while to build up revenue.

I will let you know how the campaign progresses - this is me optimising my blog for once, something you can expect to happen around January every year, as that is when I have to pay my hosting bill. If you think that you would like to join Text Link Ads because of reading this post then you can click on the links below. Choosing the affiliate link will benefit me, and this site through the Text Link Ads affiliate scheme, at no cost at all to you.

Benefit me by using an affiliate link: Text Link Ads
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Word Count Journal is a blogging platform focused on doing a little bit everyday. When you sign up you create a journal like you would create a project. You specify some parameters that you think you can stick to. Say - maintain output for 1 year and increase the number of words in each post by one each day for the year, starting with one word. They are the default options, and are what I signed up for.

I am strangely attracted to the concept. And the added bonus of adding a photo to each entry is really nice. It becomes much more of a photoblog, especially when you only have 1 or 2 words to describe it. So far I have stuck to the limits and produced a post every day with the right number of words. Here are some of them.

There are a few little bugs in the system, and things that I would prefer to work slightly differently. For instance the images are not put in the RSS feed and they are awkwardly resized on the page (as seen above). But I got in touch with the people behind the service and they assure me there will be improvements very soon.

For the moment I am mirroring all the content on Flickr where I can store the photos in full resolution - in this friends only photoset.

And more! All at xkcd.com.

I am reading blogs through Vienna these days. I subscribe to:

• The Dreamhost Blog. - http://blog.dreamhost.com/
• Google Blogoscoped. - http://blog.outer-court.com/
• Mashable. - http://mashable.com/
• Nik Cubrilovic. - http://nik.com.au/
• Official Google Blog. - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
• Omnidrive. - http://omnidrive.com/blog
• Pandora. - http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/
• Rocketboom. - http://rocketboom.com/vlog/
• Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger. - http://scoble.wordpress.com/
• Signs of the times. - http://sillysigns.blogspot.com/
• The Jason Calacanis Weblog. - http://www.calacanis.com/
• theshow. - http://zefrank.com/theshow

Thanks to all of them for magnificent content. All day, every day.

Just experimenting with the Quamana blogging tool. It seems like a pretty neat way to make posts. WordPress is pretty nice inside, don’t get me wrong, but I think this is a but faster and also the image uploading thing works very well. Of course, it is just what is in flock. Maybe I should go back to using that.

Update: I am not the only one either! Steve Gillmor can’t understand why Marshall is allowed to keep posting in “such a visible position” on TechCrunch. Read in Full.

Here is a brief summary of the past few months for TechCrunch:

• 12 May - New blog design launches. Much criticised.
• 8 June - Marshall Kirkpatrick starts writing on TechCrunch.
• 12 June - Blog turns one year old.

Dividing the last three months up using the 12ths of the month we get the following statistics:

1. 12 April - 11 May: 87 Posts.
2. 12 May - 11 June: 82 Posts.
3. 12 June - 11 July: 127 Posts.

So we have more or less constant values for the numbers of posts in the first two months, about 3 posts a day. Then in the final month there is a tremedous growth and the number of posts is up by about 50%. I think that is a fairly significant change.

Now there are a fair few reasons why this could have happened. Maybe web 2.0 has got even hotter in the last month and there is a need for more postsI for one have noticed that I have difficulty keeping up with all the posts, and I have found that the posts have become more petty some of them seriously lack news and that “Web 2.0″ focus that the earlier TechCrunch was so good for. More services seem to be getting reviewed and perhaps sometimes services that I don’t think would have got a review before on TechCrunch.

Some posts are complete nonsense. Why these are significant enough to merit a post on a tracking web 2.0 blog I don’t know:

• Digg v3 out of 3 week long beta
• GDrive plays whack-a-mole with bloggers
• NBC will buy Tribe.net

The idea for this post came from me thinking that the number of comments on TechCrunch posts was beginning to decrease as more people like myself found the huge number of posts difficult to deal with, and some of the content tedious. When I got the data together I found that there wasn’t much in it. The figures were:

1. 12 April - 11 May: 3886 comments, 45 per post.
2. 12 May - 11 June: 3858 comments, 47 per post.
3. 12 June - 11 July: 4777 comments, 38 per post.

The first two months bear out very similar levels of participation in terms of comments per post. I would say that the number of comments is some indication on the quality of the writing and the relevance of the post, but obviously it is also an indication of how big the stories were. If the stories had all been pretty small then you can imagine that you’d get fewer comments. The overall number of comments is also up, which will no doubt be seen as a success from the inclusion of Marshall Kirkpatrick in the regular lineup. The first two periods refer to times when almost every post was by Mike Arrington. But it is clearly at least a bit of a drop. Perhaps it is just that the finite readership’s time being spread more finely over the increased number of posts or maybe the posts really are less stimulating.

What do you think? Has TechCrunch changed?

Disclaimer: Data collection was carried out by me using techniques such that the values may be slightly wrong. It is very unlikely that the error in collection could compensate for the larger differences seen though.

Summary Amanda leaves Rocketboom after apparent dispute with ex-business partner Andrew.

As discussed all across the blogosphere today. This was the top story on almost every blog I read and of course it soared high on digg too. Here is a photomontage.

On Amanda’s Blog.

On Tara’s HorsePigCow.

On ValleyWag.

On Scoble’s Blog.

On Jason Calacanis’s Blog.

On TechCrunch.

On Mashable.

On Digg.

It is not clear as of yet exactly why this has happened. Amanda presented it very much as she had been dropped. Andrew (the other half — or slightly over half — of RocketBoom) suggested it was more of a disagreement on a location issue. One thing for certain is that she will be missed. You can email Amanda at unboomed@gmail.com.

It definately is. Even the blog itself agrees. So why do I find that on this new blog from Jamal there is Americanism after Americanism? First he talks about candy, then soccer. Oh heavens, what next.

But other than that this blog is an excellent insight into the mind of a London student who has suddenly found himself with no enough to do. So in comes blogging of course. I am not sure that I would agree with the description that he’s put forward. It reads “out of his sheer grace, Jamal will hereby enlighten all”. I think that is perhaps a bit of an oversell. You shouldn’t get too excited, each post will probably not change your life. That is not to degrade the blog, the few posts that there have been so far have certainly been worth the read, I just don’t want you complaining back to me that I am pointing to something here that perhaps misrepresents itself.

As you can see it is still getting into shape. The Blogger links are yet to be edited from the Google News/Edit Me/Edit Me classic combination, and so far we are only at three posts. But it is promising stuff, so play along with me: spot the americanism. Here is the feed.

TechCrunch have now got Zoho as a sponsor of the blog. This is a big commitment from the company since the spot costs $10,000 per month and there is a minimum term of 2 months (although I am sure that Omnidrive somehow slipped away before this). I love Zoho. I don’t use their products regularly at all but I used them briefly to write a review in which I found that their services were the most usable out there.

And not only that the unique (or at least near unique) thing about Zoho is that they are offering multiple services. In what could become a complete solution to your online office system. They need to tie them all together and make the UI’s really consistent, make it a single logon for all of them and then: bingo! Who needs Microsoft Office? Ok. Maybe the usability that Zoho can provide at this stage doesn’t quite match that of Office but it is improving and the convience of having yor documents stored online is immense. The only other companies that look set to do something like this are Google and Microsoft. But the fact of the matter is simple: Right now Zoho has everything but a slideshow tool, Google has one application up and only in limited test form and Microsoft has nothing. One up to Zoho.