Om Malik announced today he is leaving his job at Business 2.0 to setup a new business.
Robert Scoble let slip that he is leaving Microsoft to join a startup, at a bloggers dinner the other night.
Tara Hunt announced last week that she’s leaving Riya to go out on her own.
Ben Metcalf has left the BBC to start something new.
Chris Messina posted a couple of months back that he was leaving Flock to go out on his own.
I’m sure there are others I have left out.
Of course no trend would be complete without its exception - Niall Kennedy announced he was leaving startup Technorati back in February and subsequently joined Microsoft!
It seems that all over good people are on the move, primarily from (reasonably) secure jobs into the great unknown that is startupsville! Is there something in the air?
Hyperwords was released yesterday and it is a very cool extension for Firefox and Flock. It has been developed by Liquid-Information an interesting company with an advisory board that reads like a who’s who in IT (Doug Engelbart, Vint Cerf, Ted Nelson, Bruce Horn, Dave Farber, Joi Ito, etc.
What does it do? Well, the default behaviour is that, when you select text in your browser, a drop-down menu appears, giving you instantly available options of what to do with the text -
This is quite cool and allows quick and easy access to functionality you might otherwise have to go to other pages to get. The Preferences settings for the plug-in allows you to select whether the data you select opens in a new tab, or a new page, in the foreground or background. Also, all the menu options are available from the keyboard - so for the example above, I can simply type s s g and a Google Search for the highlighted term will open in a new tab (in the background in my case)!
It is also possible to turn off the menu (operate in invisible mode) and still have access to the keyboard options.
Two minor gripes I have with the extension are:
- The blog this with option only goes to Blogger and WordPress.com - it needs to allow blogging to other blog platforms like WordPress, Typepad etc.
- The drop-down menu doesn’t give a View Selection Source option - I sometimes like to view the source of a small portion of a page. In Firefox, I select that portion, right-click and select View Selection Source - this should also be possible in Hyperwords
Other than that I think this is a great plug-in.
The CEO of Hyperwords is called Frode Hegland (Frode is pronounced to rhyme with road). I interviewed Frode about this new extension and will publish that interview on PodLeaders.com as a podcast tomorrow. Frode gave me some fascinating insights into how he came up with Hyperwords and how he landed such an amazing Advisory Board!
Chris Messina is Director of Experience and Open Source Ambassador at Flock.
I will be interviewing Chris later this week for PodLeaders.com - the obvious first question I have for him is who dreamt up his job title?!
If you have any questions for Chris, feel free to leave them here in the comments and I’ll be sure to ask him.
Well, the post I made last night about the Yahoo! < -> Del.icio.us rumours was confirmed this evening when Del.icio.us made the announcement of the takeover on its blog and Yahoo! posted the news also.
All day today I was doubting my source ‘cos no-one else picked up the story but, no, it came good. It is a great feeling to scoop a story like this by about 24 hours ahead of everyone else on the Internet.
Michael Arrington and others are following up on the story now.
The real question is who does Yahoo! have in its sights next? Who would it make sense for them to acquire now that they have bought Flickr and Del.icio.us? If only there were some application which tied these two together… a browser even… pity I can’t think of any 
I recently treated myself to an Apple iMac G5 - I needed a new machine bcause of the increasing amount of podcasts I have been doing and my PowerBook’s sound board blew (replacing the sound board on a PowerBook costs over €600).
I was using Flock from time to time on the PowerBook (the PowerBook uses a G4 chip) - when I transferred over to the iMac G5, however I find that Flock crashes on start-up. I tried downloading Flock again (v 1.4.1) and re-installing but no joy.
Is anyone else having this problem with Flock and the G5 chipset?
UPDATE:
Following up on a suggestion from Mark in the comments, I deleted the Library/Application Support/Flock folder and that sorted the problem.
The latest release of Safari (v2.02) - released in Mac OS X 10.4.3 today, now passes the Acid2 test - wohoo!
Acid2 is a test page, written by the Web Standards Project, to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.
Safari is now ahead of every major browser in its support for web standards - Firefox, Flock, Opera all fail to render the Acid2 image correctly and don’t even mention Microsoft Internet Explorer!
The next version of Internet Explorer (IE7) will be released soon and what do you think are the chances that it will pass the Acid2 test?
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