The Slakinski Log

As seen in the below video Mahalo now supports the Wiki Auto-Discovery button. Which is a button that indicates to you quickly and easily that you can also contribute to this page!

I’ve installed the WordPress plugin for Seesmic, which allows you now to post Video comments to this blog! all you need is flash, a webcam and a microphone… oh and a seesmic account

We are hiring once again at Mahalo! We are looking for that person that can help us scale as our usage keeps going up, up, and up, especially compared to those other guys! So if your looking a new gig then I’d urge you to read Jason’s post “Systems Engineer, Los
Angeles” to get the full job description.

Before we start, lets first start with a picture:

This shows sales over a 4 year period. The 3rd blip right at the end was iPodderX going away and was suppose to turn into Transistr.

When iTunes 4.9 was announced, August and I were right there for the announcement. Later we went on TWiT to talk about it, we did our best to stay positive, hiding our fear in talk about fish cheeks

We already moved iPodderX from Podcatching client to into a standard RSS reader for feed reading and podcasting. But when we decided that, we put ourselves right into the mix with NetNewsWire and NewsFire which where very popular applications that did podcasting and RSS reading very well as well. It was easy for those applications to add good enough Podcasting support. From what I know, no one ended up using iPodderX to read news feeds.

As sales were dropping like a rock, day jobs were becoming demanding, and stress on august and I’s friendship also became very strained. We decided to stop working on it and move on to other things for a bit. August has been doing great work with his FoggyNoggin software creating very useful mac utilities, and I moved over to the web,  now working full time with Mahalo.com!

I’d like to also note now the RSS application space on the desktop has changed drastically. NewsFire and NetNewsWire are now free, RSS is now in the browser (the browser itself and web apps like google reader and bloglines) and all handle RSS enclosures (what makes podcasting possible)

One last thing to leave on, iPodder (not releated to iPodderX) who is now known as Juice hasn’t been updated in eons and no other development has been made with any of the other podcatchers. We were not the only casuality.

If you have questions feel free to comment and I’ll be happy to answer them.

 Check out what August has to say regarding all of this.

Update: Talked with Andrew Grumet who now works for PodShow and this downloads chart looks very similar to ours.

Great job Veronica and everyone else on the Mahalo Daily Team!

I was working on an RSS feed generator for something at Mahalo and whenever I do such things I go through the RSS 2.0 Spec again to see what elements I should add to make the feed as useful as can be for 3rd party developers. I noticed a little used item called which is to link to where people can post comments to the item. Sounds simple, but no RSS reader that I’ve ever come across will use this so I asked Dave Winer why via twitter and then 2 things happened

1) Oddly enough eariler in the day before any prompting from me, Dave added to Scripting News’s RSS Feed 2) He replied to my question with this flickr link: http://flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/1876196880/ and he couldn’t have been more correct.

Come on guys, if your going to support a spec, support ALL of it!

I’m just playing with the blogging bundle in textmate, using the markdown markup tags to assist in editing. Its very wiki-like in nature which is good and bad all at the same time. With all these markup languages I’m going to start to forget how to hand code HTML.

As a blogger I hate SEO, they ruin the web. When I search for something I don’t want some stupid sales link at the top of my serp (search engine results page) I want what I searched for! Its becoming more and more common that my search results are getting cluttered with utter crap. Google, Yahoo! or anyone for that matter needs to do something about this.

One thing that will help is that more blogs and social bookmarking sites need to implement nofollow which will hurt these guys! Since its blogs and social bookmarking/news sites that these guys target.

If you want to see how slimy these guys are, watch a “promo” vid for SEO.

The guy that did the above video — Gary Ruplinger — Is taken to task by Anti-SEO Jason Calacanis (Formerly of AOL and founder of Weblogs Inc.)

Way to go Gary… go ahead and piss in the town well (i.e. digg, netscape, google’s index, etc). I mean, finding a bathroom to relieve yourself would take too much work. Forget about the fact that the rest of us drink from that well…. you go ahead and piss in it.

So I was talking to Kevin Rose (of digg, techtv, twit fame) last night, just seeing what each other have been up to for the past little bit… which was nice, being an internet bigwig has not changed him a bit. But then something haappened today, I saw the new GoDaddy commercial and who did I see in it? Mr. Rose! You’d think he’d mention that to me? So I decided to hit the net and do a quick search and it just turns out that I need to read my RSS feeds more often Anyways congrats Kevin and Alex!

So when will we see an digg ad on the superbowl?

BTW: My wife’s comments as I rewind and pause on Kevin’s image during the ad. “How did you see him among all the girls?” Erm, my only defense was he was the odd person out in the group, so how could you miss him!

As per that theme song the other day, I’m going to take a new road and if all goes well, never look back! Yesterday I quit my day job to join up with a new startup company that oddly enough isn’t podcast related. I’m not sure what this means for Transistr, but I do know that PopCurrent.com will remain running and be well maintainted still (aka It’s not going anywhere, so keep on popping) but it does mean that I’m going to try something new and fun this year!

Wish me luck!