A conversation with Joel Spolsky. Joel Spolsky is the programmer’s programmer.
He started Fog Creek Software, Stack Exchange and has been a famous blogger for over 10 years. I sat down with him at his New York office to talk about the early days of blogging, how small teams are having a big impact in the world, a new product that Fog Creek just released, and a host of other topics. “We’re the old school bloggers from the past,” explains Spolsky. “When I started blogging, I didn’t want to say I was a blogger, because I didn’t think I was doing the official blog thing, which was to link to something that someone else has [written]…and say, ‘Here’s an interesting thing, and then here’s my perspective on that.’ I didn’t want to do that.” Blogging has, of course, exploded over the last 10 years, and it’s one of many ways that small teams can have a big impact—a theme I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Spolsky has a theory regarding why smaller teams work so well, at least in regards to software development teams.
Make stories - storify.com. There Are Stories Out There On Twitter, Flickr, YouTube — Build Them With Storify. The main reason I love services like Tumblr and Posterous is that they make personal blogging simple.
While you certainly still can write long-winded pieces about whatever you want, you can also just use a bookmarklet or email to send in individual pieces of content quickly. Storify seems like it could be the next step in that evolution. The new services, launching today in beta at TechCrunch Disrupt, is all about content curation from other social networking sites. Say there’s a tweet you see and want to build a story around (we do it quite a bit), with the click of a button, you can drag it into your Storify story. Maybe there’s a Flickr picture about the same topic — same idea, just drag it is.
We appear to be on the verge of a new wave of content curation. And the service’s approach to spreading this content is smart. How do you monetize this? Someone will undoubtedly be able to use Storify to build a killer story about this Disrupt conference, get to it and send us a link. Still Surging, Tumblr Rockets Past A Billion Posts. Last month, we gave an update on the state of Tumblr that included some pretty impressive stats: over 6 million users, 1.5 billion pageviews a month, and 4.5 million new posts a day.
Throw those all out the window. The blogging/microblogging/ social/whateveryouwanttocallit network has just crossed 1 billion total posts today. You can tell by looking at the number after the “/post/” area in each Tumblr blog URL. Sometime a couple hours ago, it passed 1 billion — and the broken counter on the Tumblr About page confirms this (it was only set to got up to 999,999,999). Aside from the massive billion number, Tumblr now stands at 7.2 million users.
Yes, the network is still surging. [thanks Andrew]