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Our take on the Seattle P-IToday

Hearst announced today that it's putting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer up for sale. If no buyer is found in 60 days, the newspaper will either cease operations or move entirely online. Whatever happens, it looks like a lot of good journalists will be losing jobs.

It's a sad day for us here at TechFlash. As many of you know, Todd and I spent a good portion of our careers at the P-I. We still have many friends in the newsroom and plenty of good memories of the place. (Ask us some time about the party at Buckley's tavern.)

The story of the P-I is one that is becoming all too familiar as the media landscape rapidly transforms. It's a story driven primarily by younger readers who are more comfortable consuming news on a variety of high-tech gadgets than they are in printed form. Craigslist also has something to do with it.

But what's surprising to us -- and to some of our reporter friends who work under the globe -- is that Hearst decided to make the move when it did. After all, The Seattle Times -- which is in a complex joint operating agreement with the P-I -- is sitting on unstable ground.

The view of many P-I staffers over the years -- one shared by us -- is that Hearst was simply playing a waiting game as it positioned itself to buy The Times. The newspaper giant had done much the same thing in San Francisco and, with its deep pockets, it could weather an economic do

The Net Effect of being on the Friend Feed people to followToday

Image via CrunchBaseI have been busy over the last couple of days looking at the net effect of being on Louis and Mikes 10 people to follow on Friend Feed for December 2008. While there was not a net effect in traffic coming the site (part of it is that it was the Christmas break and I did not write that much), but more of a net increase in influence or connections, being linked by other blogs or other personalities on the internet. This is including some very interesting good and bad conversations along the way.

The overall net effect in traffic was not that much, again though circumstances, holidays, and wanting to take time off played largely on that number as well. If anything towards the end of the year as typical (seen in 2006, 2007, and now 2008) the last week of the year has traditionally been my slowest week in getting people to come to the blog. I usually float on long tail traffic during the last week, and given issues with Google lately, the long tail was disappointing.

What was interesting was seeing the increase in Technorati numbers; I gained a near 50% in

Apple, Microsoft: Best frenemiesToday

Two hours before Microsoft’s Mac software group announced an online collaboration tool for Mac Office users this week, it got a surprise: Apple had been working on something very similar for its own Mac word-processing and spreadsheet programs.

And Apple was unveiling its tool first.

Welcome to one of the tech industry’s most complicated relationships. Despite the intense rivalry between Macs and Windows PCs, and increasing competition in Mac productivity software, the new head of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit said this week that he feels good about his group’s bond with Apple.

“I think it’s stronger than it’s ever been,” said Eric Wilfrid, a veteran of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit who took over in October as general manager. “There’s this huge mutual interest in taking care of our customers who choose a Mac for their desktop or laptop, and Office for their productivity software. That lets us really focus and work together really well.”

It looks quite different from the outside. Most notably, Apple in recent years has rolled out its own productivity suite, iWork, as a competitor to Office for Mac. It includes the Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheet program and Keynote presentation software.

But the dominance of Word, Excel and other Office programs made by Microsoft still makes them critical software applications for most Mac users. For example, Microsoft said this week that more than three-quarters

Blogger in 140 characters or lessToday

Shared by louisgray
Blogger joins Twitter!

http://www.twitter.com/blogger (What took so long?) With several Twitter fans on the Blogger team (not to mention a number of Blogger alumni work at Twitter), it seemed only natural that we set up shop on Twitter ourselves. We will be posting status updates, major feature announcements, and pointers to cool uses of Blogger will all show up in our Twitter account. We will do our best to keep an eye on replies to @blogger as well, but our Help Center and Blogger Discussion Group remain the best places for help from fellow users as well as the Blogger support team.

Don't Blame the Geeks!Today

Photo by Thomas Hawk.

This week Facebook announced on their company blog, "If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria." While Twitter is nowhere near that scale, we no longer see significant increases in overall traffic during events like Macworld or CES. Yes, those events generate huge amounts of tweets but now that we've got a diverse set of folks from all over the world using Twitter it takes global events like the Presidential Election, the Mumbai Attacks, or massively shared events like the upcoming Inauguration and Superbowl to create dramatic peaks in our charts. For example, we saw tweets-per-second (yes, we have internal TPS reports at Twitter) jump to 10x their normal amount during the 2008 Presidential Election and we sustained 5x normal throughout the day.

So, What's with the Delays?

Over the last few days, Twitter has been