Short bits
- This one’s kinda fun. Rand Fishkin was in town, so we invited him over to the Googleplex. We arranged on a simple trade: we’d feed him if he’d give a talk about search/SEO from his perspective. I think everyone benefited. 
You can read his trip write-up.
- Mitchell Baker is asking for suggestions on how Thunderbird should be organized going forward. It’s true that Firefox gets a lot more attention/3rd party development than Thunderbird. I’m torn, because on one hand I think I’ll be using web mail from now on. The idea of locking my data/email into one computer is too fraught with problems for me now. On the other hand, I still think email is nowhere near where it should be. There are so many archival formats (qmail/maildir, mbox and all its many flavors), yet I haven’t seen that many tools that let you distill email into insights. I can look at my server log traffic in an easy graphical view; why can’t I graph my email volume by day-of-the-week? Or take my history of routing emails and auto-suggest “This email should be routed to this team” or “Historically, this other person is an expert on this subject”?
- It looks like Steve from Feedburner is jumping in with both feet at Google:
So far, it’s been a blast. I’ve always kind of been a tech junkie and Google is tech junkie’s heaven, so there you go. More than that, it’s hard to find a work environment anywhere with such a collection of intelligent, talented people. It’s a big company, so of course there are elements of a big company creeping into the culture, but I have to say it’s less like a bigco than any other bigco at which I’ve ever worked.
….Part of that has been a full dive into using Google tools. Personally, I don’t know how I lived without Apps before this. Anyone with a small company should definitely look at using this internally.
I’m really excited that Feedburner has joined Google. Feedburner is one of those rare companies where I emailed a bizdev person to say “I don’t know if we’re talking to this company, but every experience I’ve had with them has been really positive, they make a great product, and they seem very cool to boot.” (I harbor absolutely no illusions that my email made any difference, but I felt like I needed to chime in because I was actually paying Feedburner money each month and felt like I was getting a great service.)
- My wife has just handed me Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after finishing it herself, so I may be scarce for a few days.