The best of 2006

I wrote a lot of drivel in 2006. Here’s the things that are less crappy than the rest.

• Ning’s Marc Andreessen joked that he took down the sign to Ning’s office (Feb 5) because a customer stopped by. I organized a small group of people to drop by their office (Feb 5). A Ning employee reads my blog, so they were ready for us when we arrived (Feb 15). We even made the TV news (Feb 21).

• I explored how best to handle changes in a web services API (Feb 14). Specific solutions and ideas were presented in Versioning REST and Why Web Services Versioning is Important (Feb 17).

• I called Wells Fargo out for "helpfully" canceling my ATM card (Mar 3) and sending me a new one. Months later I had more trouble with Wells Fargo (Sept 6); this time they couldn’t manage to get a card to me. A couple of dozen comments from others reveals lots of pain. Is Wells Fargo listening?

• Tired of having to trek to the Bay Area to spend time with like minded folks, Scott Hildebrand and I organized the first in a series of dinners (Mar 13). About 5 people came, most of them Scott’s friends from college. Our latest dinner attracted nearly 20 local entrepreneurs and technologists. Look for some big things to grow out of this in 2007.

• My son sold candy bars to raise money for Little League and he asked for your help. You responded by buying 40 candy bars (April 21) which were then donated to the local food bank to give out as treats to disadvantaged kids.

• Why does anything Starbucks touch turn to gold? Why’s their coffee so popular? The product isn’t that good, but the brand is hot (May 25).

• How social networks actually work (June 28) in the offline world and why none of the social web apps are there yet.

• The problem with waiting for click fraud to sort itself out (July 11) is that the benefit to the advertiser approaches zero much faster than the benefit to the fraudster.

• Mark Cuban wants to revolutionize how films are marketed and I gave him some tips (July 25). Either they weren’t that good or he never read it. That job offer from Mark never came.

• In August I shut down Tagyu and launched Feed Crier three days later.

• I often gripe about poor customer service, but Jabra did things right (August 18).

• My kids had their annual popcorn sale for Scouts, complete with an ecommerce site. I reflected back upon what they’d learned over the last few years (Sept 6).

• NBC announced a YouTube competitor, but just for NBC content. But they’re still approaching it like a TV network (Sept 13) and not taking advantage of what made YouTube popular.

• A spammer who thinks he’s noble because he’s helping kids was given an education (Nov 1). He keeps coming back to defend his actions and point out his worthy causes and popularity. But he doesn’t seem to understand that he’s still just a spammer. If it walks like a duck....

• An experience with old vinyl converted to MP3 got me thinking how DRM will make this impossible (Nov 22). When my kids are grown, will they still have access to the music of their youth?

• Sun announced lower prices for startup companies but wouldn’t post those prices online (Nov 13). I joined the program and published the pricing to the web (Nov 28), getting links from several Sun blogs, including CEO Jonathan Schwartz (Nov 29).

• Content scrapers steal my (and many other blogger’s) content. What can be done about them (Dec 4)? And do I really want to stop it, or is this just another way of getting traffic?

• Dave Winer was shocked to find out about JSON and dismayed that it didn’t take advantage of technologies he’d already created. Sounded like his reaction to RSS 1.0, so I created a JSON copy of his feed (Dec 20) and declared it to be RSS 3.0.