Phil801 - Geek Blog

On Friday, I attend Dr. Windley’s CTO Breakfast again. Going to these is always a treat. Dr. Windley blogged about the meeting really well, so I won’t try to duplicate it, just link to his review.

One thing I found interesting, since this is a meeting of techies and tech leaders, I expected they would be aware of a lot of the stuff that’s coming out on the net right now. I brought up a few of my favorite current topics; Riya (no-one knew about it) and their blog, 37 Signals (a lot of them knew about it), Planzo (no one knew about it), and Writely (no one knew about that one either). I also brought up Chris Pirillo’s gada.be search - a few, including Dr. Windley knew about it. So I’m left wondering - are these guys reading tech blogs? Most of the info I get is through my feeds. When Dr. Windley asked what cool new technology people had been hearing about in the last month I was pretty much the only one that knew of anything, and some of this stuff is more than a month old.

So, the reason I’m bringing all that up is, it appears that if you’re not reading a lot of blogs regularly (I have about 300 feeds in NewsGator) you’re not hearing about this stuff. Is there a disconnect with ‘web 2.0′? There doesn’t seem to be much marketing going on for these guys besides word of mouth via blogs. How closed is the technology blog network? Does it bleed out very much? It would be interesting to find out what kind of PR these companies are doing, and if they even WANT lots of users/hits. I know gada.be went through some growing pains, I think those are over but could Chris handle a huge influx in traffic from good advertising? Could 37 Signals? They’ve been around a while and are pretty stable. I’ll have to ask Jamis about it next time I talk to him.