alltop: "all topics, all the time"... almost

Catching up on my bloated inbox after a couple weeks of vacation, I found this solicitation from none other than Guy Kawasaki. We've never spoken, but we did share a plane ride together once. Ergo, I became eligible for this email:

I’d like to show you my latest project: Alltop. Alltop is a website that functions as an “online magazine rack” with the latest from a wide variety of news sources and blogs covering “all topics.” Many of the Alltop sites are very useful to entrepreneurs, investors, and everyone else in the high-tech community:

I'd just finished watching my beloved DC football team upset our arch-rivals, the Cowboys and could use a nice aggregation of Skins news since sports.reddit doesn't quite have my obsessive narrowmindedness. I'm also very web-lazy, so when I got to Alltop, I gave search a try.

And on a search for "redskins" I got 0 results. Alltop could find no topics.

I decided to push on and click through Sports/ProFootball and finally came to a page that looked strikingly similar to popurls - except it was just a collection of "all the top football news," which was exactly what I didn't want. I just need a collection of the best news about a specific topic, the Washington Redskins. Guess I'm going to stick with Chris Cooley's blog...

Sorry, Guy, your newest project isn't quite mixing my Gatorade, so to speak. But Thomas of popurls ought to be feeling quite flattered.

cow porn on every virgin america flight

I was reminded of this on Monday when I settled down in my seat for this afternoon's Virgin America flight back to SF. They've got a "welcome to this airplane, here's how it works" video that's actually tolerable. In fact, it's the best I've seen thanks to a creative hand-drawn style and a good sense of humor.

To that latter point, check out what the bull sitting beside the matador is reading.


See that? It's a magazine with OLE on the cover and a cow udder on the back.


That's right, it's a bovine titty magazine.

The artist probably didn't expect anyone to notice it, but I guess I was just that interested in my pre-flight movie. Kudos, Virgin America. Somehow I feel like an American carrier would find this little gag too raunchy.

Point this out to the person beside you on your next VA flight and you'll look really observant... or odd.

business of software conference was a great success - pierre even took home a macbook air

I can't thank Joel Spolsky and Neil Davidson enough for putting on such a great conference. Granted, I was only able to stay for the first day of it, but if that was any indication, day two could have been presented entirely in Coptic and it still would have been interesting.

Be sure to catch up on what you missed on the Business of Software wiki and keep your eye on Neil's blog for video and future updates. I do hope you two will do this again next year.

I should also divulge that I'm a bit biased, as this was the first conference I came back from with a prize. Well, I didn't win it, exactly, but Pierre Francois did. Admittedly, whereas the rest of the presenters opted for intelligent, helpful presentations, I chose something much less useful.

Pierre Francois (of 74 Signals) gave a Pecha Kucha presentation (that's 20 slides with only 20 seconds a slide - also not pronounced like you think) entitled Keeping it Real: Starting, Running, and Selling a Web 2.0 Startup. A number of folks asked me to put it online, so you can find it all at 74 Signals, including the very first Pierre talk from 2006. I'll blog about the video of this most recent presentation once it goes live. I've also been advised to create t-shirts. We'll see...

The audience voted it the winner and Pierre walked away with a brand new MacBook Air that he loves almost as much as he loves himself, which is saying a lot.

a hot, new (and frothy) reddit called cappuccino

Meet Cappuccino. No relation to the drink I'm effetely sipping right now.

There's a new web framework in town with all the sex appeal of your favorite Apple apps, but for producing those desktop-caliber apps in your browser. The YC team behind 280North stopped by the reddit office to give us a sneak peek and we were all quite impressed.

They launched it last week to much fanfare, which you can find here on their reddit. It'll be fun watching this project evolve.


Don't worry, they're not eligible for our Raise a reddit competition. But you probably are -- there's $7,500 in prizes up for grabs, so lay off the Spore a bit and get to growing your reddit.