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September 20, 2005
Des Moines Marathon/Half Marathon
On Sunday, we ran the Des Moines Half Marathon.
The race started at 7am, with approximately 2600 runners. At the starting gun, the temperature was warm, in the 70's, with about 50% humidity. (Being from the cool, low humidity Bay Area, I consider 50% humidity difficult to run in :-))
We ran through downtown, past the new Wells Fargo Arena (Green Day played the night before the race, which garnered a lot of press in Des Moines) and up the hill (yes Virgina, there are hills in Iowa. Don't let anyone tell you it is flat!) to the state Capitol. After a quick run through town, we went south through the beautiful Water Works Park and then back north to the downtown finish.
Overall, here's how the run rates in my book:
Organization - The race was very well organized - clearly marked and staffed. Grade: A
Course - Southern end of the run through the Water Park was great, parts of downtown were quite scenic also. Grade: B
Aid-stations - Located as billed - each had water and Powerade. Gu available at mile 10. Grade: A
Swag - Short-sleeve shirt, nice Finisher's medal. Grade: B
Posted by davehod at 08:14 AM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2005
Miguel de Icaza at PDC
At the PDC this week and none other than Miguel de Icaza walks by. Pretty amazing guy - he is the creator of Ximian, Gnome and Mono. Quite a crowd gathered around him, asking him lots of questions about how the open source model for Mono works, etc. Some folks are skeptical - seems like they haven't dug into the Open Source model yet :-)
Posted by davehod at 04:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 09, 2005
Exclusive Pings for Technorati
The Wall Street Journal reports that Technorati is cutting deals that provide some time-based exclusivity on pings. Essentially, Technorati has made agreements whereby they receive pings before any other service. This allows Technorati to have the most up-to-date information relative to its' competitors.
David Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, says his company gets an edge from exclusive deals in which some blog-hosting companies ping Technorati before anyone else.
Business Week mentions it also.
On the Feedmesh list, Bob Wyman posted some thoughts about time-based exclusivity for pings and suffice to say he doesn't like it.
...this means that we’ll see barriers to entry that will remove any hope of new entrants into the space – they won’t be able to afford to buy the pings. Also, we’ll see that whoever is able to buy the most or fastest pings will end up “winning” in the marketplace even if the technical services they provide are inferior. This is not a good thing.
I have no idea how prevalent this practice is with Technorati. One can hardly blame them for trying to get an edge over competing services. However, I am surprised that anyone would agree to such a deal. Technorati's performance has degraded so terribly that the site is now unreliable. One example -- while I was at Barcamp, I noticed my posts would take literally 6 or more hours to show up (yes, I was pinging them and my tags were done correctly). It is more likely that the time-based exclusivity is actually slowing down the distribution of a blog's content, which is not good for any publisher.
The idea of a Feedmesh has always seemed Utopian to me; items like this confirm that theory.
I don't see any responses from Technorati, Dave Sifry (or Niall Kennedy) on this yet.
Tags: technorati, feedmesh
Posted by davehod at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)