• Your blog represents you.
• Your blog is serious business.
• Your blog is an archive.
• Your blog isn’t the only mirror of your life.
• Your blog is your unedited version of yourself.

I have been blogging for a couple of years (Texas Startup Blog) and it has been a very interesting exercise.   I have lost track of the number of job offers or inquires I have received as a direct result of my online writing.  Adam explains:

Blogging is the perfect way for a candidate to give an employer a more detailed sales pitch—to show they can “talk the talk” (as opposed to just fill a resume with buzzwords). I can’t think of a reason for any serious tech professional to not have a blog. Not only does it serve as an excellent notebook for storing ideas and links, but it can come in handy in a job hunt where what interviewers really want to just know what, professionally (and somewhat personally), engages you on a day to day basis. How often do you look at a resume and wonder what exactly the person’s role on a project was? Well, if the person blogged about it then you would have a better idea—and you would know if the role would fit in with your team.

Good stuff… 

Lots more to say about the new mothership we’re creating called Spur, but the first new thing you’ll notice is the focus of Alexander Muse’s blog, now dubbed the Texas Startup Blog.  We like starting companies more than investing in them, so we’re focused on area startups, general discussions of innovation & entrepreneurship, and, of course, who’s investing in what.

Check it out.  Lots more routine publishing of company profiles, interviews with entrepreneurs & VCs and much, much more.  Big plans.

Then Alex and I did an Inside the Net interview (mp3) with Amber & Leo, all about Big in Japan and the building block ecosystem of newer Web apps.

Technorati Tags: alex+muse, amber macarthur, biginjapan, brian oberkirch, commandn, inside+the+net, leo+laporte

The podcall feature is getting play in the media and from potential clients. Frank Barnako @ Marketwatch said this:

Your podcast is calling
PodServe.com, a quick way to create standard, social or public podcasts is working on technology that you might call "going retail, door-to-door." Brian Oberkirch and Alexander Muse, founders of Podserve, said their free hosting service for podcasts is going to offer production tools, too.
One of them will let you type your phone number on a Web page and Podserve will call and allow you to record. Podserve will then create and upload the file to the Web.
"I am so frustrated with these stupid microphones and Skype and Audacity and Gizmo … if I could just pick up a phone and make a podcast, that's what I want to do," Muse said.
Oberkirch and Muse talked about Podserve, and their other free software applications, on a recent "Inside the Net" podcast. Listen to it.

Plus we're talking with two large companies about doing OEM installs of PodServe, primarily because of the ability to integrate VoIP telephony into a corporate podcasting program.

What is PodCall? It's a new feature where you give us a phone number and PodServe will call you at that number, let you walk through a simple phone tree and record a podcast just like you would leave a voicemail. PodServe will then automatically drop that sound file into the right podcast stream for you, within minutes of completing the call.

Also, we've secretly added the ability to add .mov and .mp4 files to your PodServe podcasts, so you can vlog as well with the service. We'll limit the files to 100MB right now.

Technorati Tags: biginjapan, podcast, podserve, youtube

Technorati Tags: brian oberkirch, charles+ribaudo, jambo, jim+young, refreshdallas, vlog, Weblogs+Work, Weblogs+Worknotes

So, Sphere. Sphere's basic premise is that everyday folks want to get right at the good stuff. They don't need a zillion features that would interest power bloggers — they want to find good posts about topics they care about. In other words, give me fewer results that are more relevant to my search. Give me less to wade through. Filter for me, don't just find. The focus is on simple search & introduction to other blogs and other media discussions related to these search terms.

Sphere builds its index three ways: link structure (which T'rati prioritizes), analysis of meta data and semantic analysis of the post content. Sphere then lets you review its results and use them as a jumping off point in a number of ways. First, you can use its blog search results filtered by relevance (the default) or recency:

You can also use sliders to customize the date range you want to search for something — around a certain event, say.

Once you've identified a relevant link, you can easily find out a bit more about the blog itself by hitting the profile button.

(More is coming on these blog profiles. They'll add descriptor text to this initial bit of information.)

Then you can move off into discovering other relevant blogs for certain search terms by using the Featured Blogs. Sphere CEO Tony Conrad said that Sphere can generate dynamic featured blog lists for about 15,000 terms today.

Here are the featured blogs you get when you search for 'podcasting'. You can also suggest other blogs to include, and I expect the results to improve as time goes on and more users help groom the system.

You can also see how the conversation is being carried out in other media, using Sphere's Related Media link.

Here you can see that a search for 'blogging' gives us Webshot photos using that tag, Yahoo news stories that are related, as well as books and podcast listings.

The cool thing is: Sphere is creating links between relevant content where none previously existed.

The most whiz bang example of this is using the Sphere bookmarklet — Sphere It!. You install the bookmarklet in your browser toolbar, and click it when you want to see what relevant blogs are saying about any Web content that you are reading. Let's say we're reading yesterday's story about Apple's song pricing. Sphere It returns the following results:

Again, Sphere has created these connections through metadata and semantic analysis, so I can follow blog discussion about the topic, even if the blog in question hasn't actually linked to the article I want to use as the basis of my search. Kind of like having a memeorandum engine in your browser, aimed at whatever topic is important to you at the time.

There is a great deal of discussion out there today about Sphere. Check out the tech.memeorandum conversation.

Mike Arrington has a thorough review and a podcast with Tony Conrad & Toni Schneider about the launch.

Om has a rundown the initial investment for Sphere.

Sphere is one of the first companies involved in Adapative Path's New Ventures program, and Ryan Freitas has an extensive essay detailing the design and development process for the service. The whiz kids at Mule Design also lent their handiwork.

Technorati Tags: adaptive+path, mule design, new+ventures, sphere, toni+schneider, tony+conrad

The latest addition to the Weblogs Worknotes podcast is a chat with Lane Becker, one of the founding members of Adaptive Path. Lane is heading up a new line of business at AP, where the user experience gurus will offer their services to start-ups in exchange for equity. Other topics include how AP helped Princess Cruise Lines rethink their entire consumer booking process, how technology companies can improve their product development processes and why South Park, SF is, once again, the hip hop happening spot for all things Web.

Dig it.

Play the podcast at the Weblogs Worknotes page using the Flash player. Download it here (~65 MB mp3). Or subscribe to the feed for Weblogs Worknotes.

Technorati Tags: adaptive path, lane becker, podcast, south park, user experience, web development, Weblogs Work, Weblogs+Worknotes

Full disclosure: Dogster is huge in the Oberkirch household. Olivia is a hardcore Dogster user and we have taken copious amounts of swag from Ted & Co. To whom, we can heartily say about this new from Jeff: woof, woof.

Technorati Tags: dogster, jeff clavier, Weblogs+Work

Second, PodServe also allows “social podcasts”. A channel can be created that allows a number of podcasters to submit files, and all will be included in the feed. The third notable feature is really interesting. Users can create full public podcast channels that anyone can add their content to. Two great examples are Brian’s Naked Conversations Discussion (podcasts discussing Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s new book) and Alexander Muse’s Elevator Pitch Podcast, which is a podcast that any company can use to submit an elevator pitch. I’m considering using the service to create something similar to the Elevator Pitch Podcast for use by TechCrunch readers.

You can read more about Big in Japan on Alex Muse’s blog. Alex is the brain behind Big in Japan, and he’s done some really great work on it. Rodrigo Franco is the lead developer. Scott Ryan has helped immensely. Dan Cederholm did the design work. Merlin Mann contributed some really great ideas that we can’t wait to implement as the project develops.

Technorati Tags: alex+muse, barcampaustin, biginjapan, dan+cederholm, merlinmann, mikearrington, podserve, rodrigo+franco, scott+ryan, simplebits, techcrunch

Technorati Tags: edgeio