I live in Palo Alto, which is in the middle of Silicon Valley, about 40 miles south of San Francisco. Just a few miles from my house are Google, Yahoo, eBay, Apple and many other cutting edge technology companies. Plus there is Sandhill Road, also know as Venture Capital Central, and Stanford University, which provides a lot of the raw materials (aka brains) to fuel the innovations in the Valley.

It was exciting living here during the boom years between 1997 and 2001, where everyone was involved in startups and VC's were lining up to fund them. Recently there's been a resurgence in startups around here. My evidence is anecdotal, and includes job listings, conversations and billboards along the 101 Highway.

I came across 3 interesting startups in the past month:

certainly competitive at $1/DVD, could it be the new Netflix?

Peerflix - tagline: Trade DVDs, don't rent them! For $1 you can trade a DVD in your collection for someone else's DVD. The trade is permanent, so no late fees. I don't know if it will work but it makes perfect sense on paper.

gotvmail - allows you to outsource a complete phone answering system. It can forward phone calls to home offices or cell phones, and you can receive voicemail as email attachments. Thanks Nancy for the hat tip. (I would have included their logo but their site is a little Flash heavy, so there were no readily accessible images to grab).

Cellknight

CellKnight - tagline: Track cell phone minutes usage and STOP paying cell phone minutes overage fines
Basically it sends you an alert of how many minutes you have left in your cellphone's monthly plan, so that you can manage it better and avoid going over. You can see it's a real startup from the use of Clipart in the logo.

The Wikipedia is a free web-based encyclopedia with content written by an army of volunteers. It's a fabulous resource and gives me hope for humanity. Wired magazine reports:

In 2005, the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.

Wow. This is the modern equivalent to barn raising. Since anyone can contribute, I thought it would be neat to post a new entry just to see how it works. I went to the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga article and noticed that there was no article on a style of yoga I teach, Mysore style. So I wrote one and posted it (with 3 year old twins, this counted as an exciting Friday night for me). There was no need to register, login, enter my email or anything. You just create an entry and post it, almost as if it is your own blog.

21st Century version of Diderot's Encyclopédie

Given how easy it is to contribute, it sounds like it's a recipe for anarchy and chaos. On the contrary, it's turning out to be one of the world's most democratic institutions. The group of contributors is self-policing, and even the rules are collaboratively drawn up and amended over time.

Such an open culture is vulnerable to abuse and vandalism. One way they have found to reduce this problem is that you can watch a page and be notified as soon as anyone modifies it, in effect becoming it's guardian. Certain controversial pages (like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entry which has an extensive discussion subpage) get “edited” several times a day sometimes. Its guardians usually act within minutes of any offending corrections.

Both the contents and the inner workings of the Wikipedia are fascinating. Here's a great article in Wired to find out more.

There's an easy way to find out which pages of your site that have been indexed by the big 3 Search Engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN). Search for site:www.yoursite.com. If the number of search results don't match your website's total number of pages, it means some pages may not be listed. Some pages are invisible to Search Engines, such as Flash-only, image-only, and complex database generated pages. More on those later.

Xenu, a piece of software or an alien galactic ruler?

This begs the question: how can I find out how many pages there are on my website? This is often hard to answer, especially if you have a blog with many entries. The simplest way to find out is to download Xenu and run it on your computer. Not only will it give your site's number of pages but will also list all your broken links. Over the years I found found this little piece of software incredibly useful. Thank you Tilman Hausherr!

On a side note, Xenu's creator is an anti-scientologist, which is the reason he called this software Xenu.

I read a post the other day on Slashdot (News for Geeks, Stuff that Matters), still the web's most popular blog as of March 2005. Slashdot is about technology news, and they had a discussion about whether Google was still clearly superior to Yahoo and MSN as a Search Engine.

Inspired by that thread I conducted my own research. I searched for why are rain clouds grey? (without the quotes) in the big 3 Search Engines and followed the first 3 links. Here are the results (note that these search results may very well change if you perform the same search since these engines constantly tweak their pages):

Google Search:

1. ANSWER
2. ANSWER
3. ANSWER

Yahoo Search:

1. ONLINE NOVEL
2. KID'S SITE
3. FANTASY SITE

MSN Search:

1. DAILY DIARY BLOG
2. RAP SONG
3. SCIENCE EXPERIMENT

Conclusion: I'll stick to Google for now.

grey clouds, courtesy of cohdra from morgueFile

And by the way, from Google's first link result, rain clouds are grey because

they are often large, grey clouds and appear dark because they are so large and full of water that sunlight cannot get through them. The heaviest rain falls from the deepest, darkest clouds which are high enough for the raindrops to develop properly.

I already talked about how you can keep track of blog updates by using bloglines.com in a previous post, How to read blogs. Apart from reading blogs, there is another powerful way to keep track of news on a topic which is often faster.

This is done through search feeds and news alerts. I first discovered search feeds through eBay. Imagine you are looking for something specific which is not currently listed on the site. I really enjoy typing on ergonomic keyboards, and went through a period where I would regularly spill some green tea on my keyboard, rendering it useless (I really like green tea too). So I resorted to eBay for finding a replacement, and started using what they call favorite searches, which sent me an email every time someone posted an ergonomic keyboard for sale. I went through 4 or 5 keyboards during my spillage period, and this feature saved me from having to go to the eBay site to check if anything new had come up. Happily the epidemic has abated.

Here's my favorite keyboard! About $12 if you're lucky on eBay.

Other sites have similar services. Bloglines (they call it a search feed) and Technorati (keyword watchlist) allows you subscribe to searches for words which appear on new entries on blogs. Google News calls it news alert and sends you an email as it happens, and Yahoo News allows you to create your own RSS feed with your keywords of choice. With PubSub, you have a subscription stack, and you can download their toolbar to be alerted straight away in your browser of a match to your search keywords.

Services such as PubSub's are called persistent-search; they like to describe themselves as prospective, or geared to the future, rather than retrospective which is how search services such as Google are described. And they can make their users money. Here's a Wall Street Journal article with an example of an investor acting on persistent search tip.

If you are working to be the recognized expert in your field, this way of tracking news allows you to always know what is going on.

You may have seen spam email or ads on the web promising to submit your site to hundreds, if not thousands of search engines. That may be very well, but 3 search engines have 96% of the market (as of December 2004): Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Search Engines: the Big Three

AOL, which comprised 9% of all searches, is absent from the pie chart because its results are fed by Google. So if you want to optimize your site for search engines, it makes sense to focus on these exclusively. Making efforts to rank highly on search engines such as Ask, Excite or LookSmart is not worth it.

There was a special small business section in Thursday Feb 22 NYTimes, with an article about how to make your (small) business have the external appearance of being at least middle-sized. I can't link to it because the NYTimes charges for articles more than a week old, so I'll give you a summary right here.

For logos, gotlogos.com creates one for you for $25. I checked them out and they are pretty decent.

UPDATE: More on logos in the post How to Get a Cheap Logo for your Business

For business cards, Vistaprint charges $40 for 500. I've used them in the past and would recommend them.

For colleague communication (the virtual water cooler), there is office.com. I don't have any personal experience with them, but they do have a free trial with collaborative calendars, reminders, address books and the like.

For a professional-sounding phone system, the $695 TalkSwitch 24 PBX from Centerpoint Technologies is recommended. This strikes me as the kind of thing which costs thousands not so long ago.

Finally, there was no web design recommendation, so I thought I'd add my one. There is a company called no diamonds web services which apparently does pretty good work…

Blogging is perhaps the most effective marketing tool a small business or consultant has. Here's why:

- search engines love blogs and they immediately increase traffic to the website (100% increases within month is common)

- you can establish a reputation as an authority in your field

- blogs allow for instant feedback through the conversations with readers made possible via the commenting system

From a Wall Street Journal article of March 1 '05:

blogs with character are seen as more effective than some more traditional online-marketing strategies, such as static, brochurelike Web sites and electronic newsletters that may get blocked by spam filters

And from Lee Lefever of commoncraft (the blog of a Social Design Consultant):

Businesses are finding that the most effective way to communicate to the market is by giving employees and customers the opportunity to interact informally on the web [...] businesses are learning to communicate like people instead of businesses

Stoneyfield Farms is a nice example of a business adopting blogs. And it's good yogurt too, my kids love it. Here's their blog The Bovine Bugle, which chronicles daily life on a family farm in Franklin, Vermont, one of the company's organic milk suppliers.

Here’s one “old” way to read blogs:

1. Find a blog you like
2. Bookmark the page
3. Frequently remember to check that bookmark to read the new entries

If the blog which interests you has an email subscription box (see top right for this blog right here), you may be able to enter your email. In which case, every time there is a new post, an email will be sent to you which you will ignore because you are already getting too much email.

When you start to track dozens of blogs, neither way works well.

Here’s the “new” way to read blogs:

1. Go to bloglines.com
2. Create an account (believe you me, it’ll be one of the most useful websites you’ll ever find)
3. “Subscribe” to the blog(s) which you want to keep up with. You can create folders to categorize them.

Advantages:

1. No more email inbox clutter
2. It becomes much easier to track many blogs, as next to each of the blogs there is a number which lets you know how many new entries there have been since your last visit.
3. Very efficient: by scanning the summary of the listed blog entries, you only need to go to the actual blog page if you want to read the full entry.

When I am not in front of a computer screen I also do a lot of Ashtanga yoga - both practicing and teaching. I have been doing yoga since 1995 and it's one of my life's passions.

A few months ago a yoga student of mine and fine professional photographer, Michael Winokur, asked me if I wanted to take part in a yoga photoshoot in an office setting. Here's the result…

Navasana, also known as the boat

Bhujapidasana, translated as the “pressure on the shoulders”

Ardha Sirsasana, half headstand

Adho Mukha Vrksasana, handstand

Urdva Danurasana, the upside down wheel

Mukta Hasta Sirsasana, freehand headstand

A big thank you to Michael for taking the photos and allowing me to post them here.