Posts with tag aol

Blog World Expo?...

Oct 29th 2007 11:38PM | aol, blogsmith, blogworldexpo, travel, vegas, work

Anyone going? Looks like a few of us from the Blogsmith team are going to be out there next week after all. Hit me up if your going to be in Vegas. Looking forward to catching up with some peeps.
4 Comments

What I did Today Last Year...

Jun 15th 2007 1:28PM | aol, blogsmith, brianalvey, chrisfinke, cksample, gavinhall, jasoncalacanis, michaelrhing, mikepropst, netscape, oneyear, tomdrapeau, treylong, wilwheaton, work

Helped Launch Netscape.com

It was June 15th that we put the beta Netscape online. Love it or hate it, we certainly made waves ;)

It was a project I wasn't initially supposed to be involved with, at least, not to the extent that I was. When Jason and Brian took over the netscape.com domain, I was offered the opportunity to go to AOL sort of as a netscape/weblogs, inc contact for Blogsmith. Gavin, Mike and I had been working on Blogsmith for a few months and Blogsmith was a small indie startup still. Moving one of us to the "inside" made sense.

At some point last March, the three of us flew out to meet the Netscape team at the Viceroy in Santa Monica. One thing led to another, and I was asked to be the lead developer for the project through the product launch. The next couple of months were absolutely insane. Kathryn was out in California so I was left on my own in DC and pretty much worked around the clock. We launched the beta on June 15, 2006 and then spent the next month or two cleaning things up. We overloaded the servers, we got hacked, we had less functionality than we initially anticipated, we had scope creep into areas we didn't plan for -- you name it, and we dealt with it, all in a very short amount of time for a project of that size.

My reason for joining Netscape was to tackle the challenge of launching under such a tight deadline. Once things calmed down and things were humming along, Blogsmith happened to be purchased by AOL. I was able to slowly (perhaps without his full knowing/understanding) delegate most everything to Tom (suckah!), and transfer back to rejoin Gavin, Mike and by then, Celly on the Blogsmith project.

I was the first to drop off Netscape I guess, soon followed by Jason and then C.K.. The current team though is absolutely incredible and firing on all cylinders. The developers over there are top notch and working on some amazing technology that will certainly shake things up when its released.

It's been a hell of a year and a half personally, and Netscape is a big part of the story. I'll never forget someone ease dropping on our conversations out in LA, seeing it posted in the Digg comments and then everyone successfully burying it before it gained any strength. Riding segways around Venice with groups of people yelling "Freaks!!" at us and Jason, for some reason, acting like a Robot the whole time. Or discussing the merits of the Viceroy's amazingly delicious bacon with Wil Wheaton. Of course, using the then newly launched Emurse.com to staff up was enjoyable as well ;) (nod to Finke) (yea, I know, a plug.. I couldn't help myself)

I think the biggest lessons I learned was to sleep when I'm tired (oops), how to work with a boss like Jason (notoriously demanding) , script kiddies will always find a way, script kiddies don't like being called script kiddies, when talking to the press you're always on record and most importantly, anything in any amount of time is possible if you have a dedicated and focused enough team. Distance be damned.

Congrats on a successful first year for Netscape.com (the social edition). I absolutely can not wait to see the things planned for the next year. Trey and his team are men amongst men, and Tom's dedication and leadership holds great promise for the entire Netscape brand. Keep it up guys -- NETSCAPE FTW!

UPDATE: I've been quoted in the Netscape article on the same topic, "Happy Birthday, Netscape"
1 Comment

SXSW...

Mar 8th 2007 10:12PM | aol, austin, codejam, sxsw, texas, travel

Hellloooooo, Austin!

We're at a codejam out here in Austin, TX. We'll be stopping in on some of the SXSW bruhaha this week. Give me a hollah via email, cell or twitter if you're around.
1 Comment

Links...

Nov 16th 2006 12:01AM | aol, howtowriteagreatresume, jonmiller, links, meetingsconnect, payperpost, resumes, reviewme

Links:
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One year Cubeless...

Nov 11th 2006 11:22AM | aol, blogsmith, brianalvey, emurse, gavinhall, mikepropst, netscape, winstock2005, work

One year ago today, after speaking briefly with Brian twice on the phone, I quit my job as a contractor on a military project to join my business partner on a little startup project called Blogsmith. I left the office and went straight to the airport to board a plane for NYC. We were up all night coding the parts of the CMS that were slated to be demoed the next day at Winstock 2005. The next day, we streamed the UCF game in the 75 Rock boardroom while Mike passed out on the floor. I went from a government mandated 40 hour work week, to working a 30 hour day. There was no contract, no written agreements and I wasn't even sure there was going to be a paycheck. Gavin and I figured, at best, we had food on the table until February.

The past year has been a great one professionally. First Blogsmith as an independent company, then AOL for the Netscape re-launch, then back to Blogsmith as an AOL property. We wrote Emurse the July before all this started, which admittedly we had to shelve for a bit, but it too found traction. We juggled 3 major projects this year and I've spent more than 75% of the year living out of a suitcase (I just added it up...). I feel as if I haven't stopped since I boarded that plane to New York. It's been a heck of a trip.

4 Comments

My love is Deep (like a 3-d Movie)...

Nov 8th 2006 10:01AM | aol, blogsmith, codejam, links, orlando, work

We're here at the Pop Century Resort, 50's style, for another Orlando CodeJam. Celly, Gavin, Mike and myself holding down the fort the best way we know how. It's just us this time around, which for coding reasons, can be pretty nice. Not that all our AOL friends aren't missed. Just.. yea. It's got an oldschool feel to it.

Links:
1 Comment

Monday Links...

Oct 2nd 2006 12:01AM | aim, aol, links, netscape, studio60, video, youtube

Links:
  • Netscape Blog: Another thing to come out of Blogsmith CodeJam this past week was the the Netscape.com blog. Props to Craig and Andy for getting it out the gate.
  • Studio 60 online: I'm not a huge T.V. guy, but seriously.. Studio 60 is amazing, and what's cooler is that they stream it online. (hat tip, TV Squad)
  • No Frills AIM: Seriously.. About damn time. (via Calacanis.com)
  • Battle over YouTube: I know, I know -- everyone's sick of the conversation already. But seriously. We're staring down the second coming of the tech bubble.
  • Speaking of online videos: It's not hosted on YouTube, but this is the type of content we're talking about being worth $1B? Surely, nature's humor is worth something, but... (gracias, sorta, to Paikai for the send ;)
1 Comment

Nothing gold can stay...

Oct 1st 2006 12:01AM | aol, blogsmith, codejam, emurse, orlando, students, travel, web20, work

CodeJam 7 is winding down, and most everyone has already left us behind. Gavin and I are in the "office" wrapping up and preparing to check out in the morning.

Lots of discussions, lots of new people, and a little bit of new code here and there.

Good times indeed.

I'm tired as heck though, and strangely looking forward to going back to sleeping on Gavin's futon. It's probably more of the desperate need to do laundry than anything else. 8 more days until my glorious return to DC.

On the Emurse side of the coin, our friends over at SolutionWatch.com gave us a shout out on their Web 2.0 for Students round up. "One of my favorite applications of the year." -- We're flattered, and thank you for the continued support!
1 Comment

Camp Blogsmith...

Sep 29th 2006 12:01AM | aol, blogsmith, brianalvey, celly, christophkhuri, codejam, developers, florida, gavinhall, mattheerema, michaelrhing, mikepropst, orlando



Me, Mike, Gavin, and Celly at the bar outside of the Portofino. Missing from the picture is Brian Alvey, Puggles, Christoph, and all of our new AOL friends.

The world is an office. Or at least.. The bar is.
2 Comments

Engadget. 2.0.

Sep 18th 2006 1:02AM | aol, comments, engadget, hyperthreading, relaunch, web20, weblogsinc

Tags, clouds, voting OH MY!

After a fairly late night yesterday, we launched the newest incarnation of Engadget this morning. Check it out. There's still a ton of work to be done, and plenty of tweaks to be made. The idea was to get as close as we could in the time we had, and then put it out there. We'll listen to the community and build up from there.

The comment structure is a different one, in my opinion, it's kinda neat. Basically, the idea was to watch how Engadget users were using the site and kind of bring that work flow up to speed. The challenge was to try to find a hybrid approach between the flat discussion format thats used throughout the blogosphere, and the threaded conversation models present on forums. What we came up with is something Gavin affectionately calls "Hyperthreading". It's flat, but with references to the things they're in reply to. You can then choose to view these inline, you can tear the thread off into a new page (and subscribe to it via RSS), or you can continue to skim the conversation flat style like you're used to (and many seem to prefer). It's a bit different, but if you want to innovate, you have to be bold and try things.

Let us know your thoughts.. We're open and willing to adjust things (and expecting to!)
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Celly has a blog...

Sep 8th 2006 12:01AM | aol, blogsmith, celly, friends, links, michaelrhing, netscape

  • Michael Rhing has banging hair - Mike (aka "Celly") is all to often the man-behind-the-man on all of our various teams. He props us up and makes us look good, in return we yell at him and make him fetch us water. He was a huge help getting Netscape out the door and continues to be a rockstar on the Blogsmith team. It's great to see him start a blog that is "serious" enough to associate his name with ;) Let the linking begin...
1 Comment

Kick, kick, shuffle shuffle back to the Blogsmith...

Aug 20th 2006 12:01AM | aol, blogsmith, netscape, tmz, weblogsinc, work

It's been known internally for awhile now, but it's time for me to transition off of the Netscape.com project and back to Blogsmith. As some of you know, Blogsmith was the project that I worked on prior to Netscape and is something that I thoroughly enjoy. It's the CMS that powers Weblogs, Inc., TMZ, and a host of other major sites in and out of AOL.

The Netscape project has been an amazing experience and I am thankful for having had the opportunity to participate. My involvement with the project related more to redesigning things quickly and getting it out the door on time. Tom, Trey, Craig, and Andy have been amazing to work with, and if it weren't for them, there's no way we would have succeed in that. Michael Rhing and Gavin Hall were also huge key components in all that, and aren't mentioned quite as much as they should be. The entire AOL hosting team we deal with as well has just been absolutely great. Forward looking, Chris Finke has come on board and I think he's going to be a fantastic addition. Tom will be taking the lead position, which I think is a perfect fit as well.

Next week a host of new changes are coming online at Netscape. Tons of bug fixes, polish, and security fixes (ahem..;) to help give this thing some legs. Trey and Tom both have busted ass trying to get it ready and out the door. I can only hope that we can one day switch the design over to Andy's double secret uber layout.. but.. thats probably a bit further a way. I really think a fresh design, combined with finishing the feature list, will give Netscape the unique personality and identity that it needs.

Also, we have a number of open dev positions on the netscape team -- if you're interested, send me your Emurse link and I'll throw your name into the mix (alex at newnetscape.com).
5 Comments

The Netscape Effect...

Jun 30th 2006 10:12AM | aol, emurse, freeresumehelp, netscape, netscapebeta, netscapeeffect, resumes, work

"I love the free resume creation, but I still go to monster because I can search and apply to jobs through their website, but if you guys offered that, I would go stright through you guys every time!" (note: it's coming)

"Resumes constantly have to be revised and reformatted for various purposes. This seems to be the easiest way to organize the process I ever heard of. Good job."

"Allowing users to create urls to thier resumes is pretty cool. I could see how that would be a popular thing."

"I think it is great idea. Sort of like a 'myspace.com' for job seekers. Just sorry I did not think of it."

"No kidding! What a great way to post a resume! Particularly like the variety of styles that can be used. My compliments to the Chefs!"
If you can't tell these are all from Emurse.com, and not from my other project, where "PLEASE STOP VOTING ON MY eMAIL" seems to be the common theme of recent feedback (about, 7,000 times and counting...)

Celly posted our resume builder to beta.netscape.com right before the cut over. We may have been one of the first websites to truly get an idea of the "netscape effect" (as we were in the number 1 spot at the first 9am rush). Granted, netscape had some server issues that probably prevent us from taking on the full load of the PR-9 website, but dang.. For little old Emurse, it was quite a bit of traffic.

The day before Netscape, we were averaging about 4 sign ups a day. Yesterday, we had 710 sign ups (that's more than a 10% conversion rate). Today, we've had about 20 so far (it's noon, and we're no longer on the front page). Someone saw it and posted it to digg as well (by directly copying the netscape description.. nice). We're getting shout outs on different blogs around town, listed as a web2.0 service on buzz sites. Google went from finding 170 refrences to Emurse to 298 this morning (though, we did do a press release to boost our SEO not that long ago).

Granted, it's still small time, but for a sunday type of project, it's showing some great promise. Here are some tastey graphs. Unfortunately, I haven't downloaded the logs yet, so their relatively primative.



1 Comment

A peak into some of the Netscape feedback...

Jun 23rd 2006 3:33AM | aol, beta, digg, feedback, netscape, work

While the vast majority of the feedback has been extremely positive (it's easily 100:1 on postive:negative), we of course get a ton of e-mail from the ever-so-great "digg army". I thought I'd go ahead and share one of these e-mails and the response I sent back. Consider this an open reply to all the "you ripped off digg" e-mails we've gotten in the past, and will certainly continue to get for at least another week or so... ;)

E-mail (sent with "Compliments to the Team" as the subject line)
Great job on the digg copy. Did you hire some people from yigg.de? Did your design team sit around thinking up fresh new ideas or were you hoping that something like digg would come around so you could just copy? Nice job. A for unoriginality.
Response:
Hey there,

Thanks for the compliments.

When we set out to build the new Netscape, we set out to build a "people powered portal". With that, we looked at all the services online that we were fans of. Newsvine, delicious, digg, youtube, various social networks, etc.

We then discussed the pro's/con's of each and the best way to combine different elements to meet our end vision. We added in professional journalists to alleviate the problems of the "hive mindset." Our demographic being completely opposite of digg, it's a way for us to increase the trust level with folks who are used to more traditional outlets. We'll be adding in a slew of new functionality to continue down this path in the upcoming weeks/months/years.

As far as social news sites go, Digg has a very clean concept of voting and ranking. Our ranking structure is a bit different (i.e., more portal), but the general concept is founded in the same principles. This decision allowed us to focus our energies on other portions of the site. (the "Why invent the wheel?" concept)

Play around on the site, and if you have any suggestions on things we can improve, drop us a line. It's not intended to be a "digg killer" or anything else that the media outlets try to pitch it as. We all still check digg daily (as well as slashdot), and will certainly continue to do so.

Best,

Alex Rudloff
Netscape.com Developer (and fellow fan of digg)
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