Ars Technicareported late last night that the Free Flow of Information Act, which would grant protection of sources and documents at a federal level to journalists, including professional bloggers, easily passed the US House of Representatives by a vote of 398-21. The bill, which was cosponsored by Reps. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Mike Pence (R-IN), still may never become a law should it reach President Bush's desk.According to Ars, the Bush administration views the FFIA "as carte blanche to leak government information without penalty," and released a statement yesterday in opposition citing the "overriding imperative to protect national security," as a reason for their objection to the measure.As Ars Technica notes, though the FFIA would would extend coverage to professional bloggers as journalists, the definition of "journalist" would likely be debated at length in court. Ars writer Nate Anderson recalls Apple's lawsuit against AppleInsider and PowerPage a few years ago over a product breach, in which case Apple claimed that bloggers were not journalists. What makes a journalist and what makes a professional blogger are finer points of the bill that would be up to the courts to interpret.It should certainly be noted, though, that most major mainstream news organizations now employ full time bloggers and have detailed blogging strategies implemented on their web sites. Further, top news organizations like USA Today, Reuters and Fox are licensing blog content through BlogBurstfor their publications. So it follows that at least some bloggers are firmly operating in the realm of traditional journalists and should enjoy the same shield protection.The Senate will be considering a similar bill.What do you think? Should bloggers be treated as journalists? Should any journalists have shield protection to allow them to keep their sources and notes private? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

  After the YouTube/CNN US Presidential candidates debates received huge attention and the Yahoo! Candidate Mashup saw near record numbers of visitors to its site, you might wonder - what more could be done with online video around the upcoming election?10 Questionsis an honestly innovative project that combines user voting with the open-ended time format that online video can offer far better than TV. It's backed by a list of 40 media heavyweights, from the New York Times to Talking Points Memo to Michelle Malkin and TechRepublican. The project was put together by the folks at TechPresident and David Colarusso of Community Counts. Community Counts was a site put up in response to the YouTube/CNN debate, focused on viewer voting. If the media sponsors push this subsequent project through their channels - 10 Questions is probably going to be very big.Details and video after the fold.Here's how it works: users upload questions on either YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, or Blip.tv and tag the videos "10Questions." The 10 Questions crew will grab those videos and put them up on the site for viewers to vote on. After four weeks of voting, ending November 14th, the 10 questions with the most votes will be sent to all the candidates.The candidates will then have 4 weeks to record their answers. There will be no time limit on their answers, which really is significant. The leading candidates will, unfortunately, probably record the shortest replies possible. Long shot candidates will offer interesting, detailed replies. Maybe, just maybe, this format could break that pattern.Their answers will be posted to 10 Questions, and presumably many sponsor sites, where viewers will be able to vote on whether they think the questions were answered to their satisfaction. This part will undoubtedly become a popularity contest and Ron Paul will likely be the winner (he's got nothing to lose by answering in greatest detail!) but it's still got some potential to be really interesting.While other online video question events like this did offer some interesting questions to the candidates - this one is going to be fundamentally different. The unique format combined with the incredible backing make 10 Questions an effort worth watching.

  This week has been an exciting one in mobile and voice news, here's three important stories you don't want to miss.iPhone to Open to Outside AppsSteve Jobs posted to the Apple Hot News pagetoday that a software development kit for the iPhone and iPod touch will be released in February. I'll be curious to see what kind of reactions emerge around this news in a few hours, after everyone sobers up from the announcement. I bought a futon couch on iPhone weekend (a purchase the whole family could enjoy, brick and price drop free) but our crew over at Last100has an in-depth analysis of the SDK news.GoogleDocs Goes MobileA new mobile version of Google Docshas been released and it's a whole lot better than nothing. That's about all it's better than, though - it's view only. Maybe I'd change my tune if I was viewing Google Docs Mobile on an iPhone, as Chris Messinais in the image here.On my BlackJack (great phone by the way) and IE mobile you can't edit any docs, you can't invite new collaborators or viewers, you can't do much at all in fact. Doc view is great and I'm thankful for that but spreadsheet view in HTML is barely usable and Presentations can't be viewed at all. It's a good start and I can imagine using it, but I sure hope it's only the beginning. MySpace Ads Skype CallingStarting next month, MySpace users will have Skype voice calling integrated into their IM clients. Both Skype In and Out will be available. That's a big score for Skype but why not team with Gizmoor another open standards based VOIP client so that developers can leverage that too in the forthcoming "MySpace platform." That's a rhetorical question. I'd love to see the business details on this deal.Some days the mobile and voice worlds are really interesting to pay attention to. I'd say today is one of those days. It's hard to think of a set of technologies likely to be more important in the future.

  Jerry Yang, founder and CEO of Yahoo!, the world's third most trafficked collection of web sites, yesterday laid out his plan to investors (and in a blog post) to revitalize the company. Yang wants Yahoo! to become the "starting point" for consumers on the Internet -- or in other words, return to the portal strategy that made it the most popular starting place for web surfers in the 90s.Yahoo! talked about creating the "sites that help you better manage your life and connect you to what matters most to you." According to the New York TimesYahoo! is rapidly losing ground to Google as the sort of web starting point that they want to become."What [Yang's] fighting against is how much Google has usurped the role of the portal... Google is increasingly winning loyalty for its other services too. It claims iGoogle -- its customized home page -- is its fastest-growing product. And many sites now say they are getting more traffic from iGoogle than the pioneering My Yahoo service. Gmail, while smaller than Yahoo Mail, is growing faster." -- New York TimesMany think the key for Yahoo! is social networking. I think social networking is something that will exist on the horizon for Yahoo!, but they first need to get their platform strategy in order. As we wrote in July, the platform is the killer appof today's web and Yahoo! needs to get on board. Words yesterday from Yang indicated that they will be doing just that, opening up more APIs and creating a platform that allows third-party developers to plug into their "starting point" properties."We have phenomenal technology platforms and data infrastructure, and it’s time to share. Besides building on open API for critical platforms, we’re looking at many different ways to open Yahoo!," wrote Yang. "We’re excited about what could happen when a motivated community of publishers and developers starts plugging into our most popular services."That echoes the sentiment we expressed last July, when we said that a Yahoo! platform "should be a major part of their plans going forward." After the platform, social networking is the next step (this is obviously a reverse approach than the one that sites that were social networks first, such as Facebook, have taken). Yahoo! wants to connect people to what matters most to them -- these days that means they will have to figure out how to connect people to one another.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/SharePoint_Goes_Web_2_0_Microsoft_Partners_with_Atlassian_Newsgator';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Today Microsoft is announcing two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassianand RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft's SharePointproduct with Atlassian's wiki collaboration product Confluenceand a new offering from Newsgatorcalled 'NewsGator Social Sites', a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and "social computing" capabilities (Microsoft's term for 'web 2.0', according to this pageon Microsoft's website).The aim of the partnerships is to add more "social computing platform" capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an "enterprise productivity platform". In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator. I sat down with Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes yesterday in San Francisco, to discuss their partnership with Microsoft. Essentially it involves Atlassian integrating Confluence, their enterprise wiki, into Microsoft SharePoint (and vice versa). According to Cannon-Brookes, their customers frequently ask them how Confluence can be used alongside SharePoint - e.g. how content can be shared or searched between the two products. It's important to point out that SharePoint already has wiki and blog functionality, but they are generally considered to be rather basic compared to more sophisticated enterprise wiki solutions such as Atlassian's Confluence or SocialText.SharePoint has a huge user base, so it's easy to see the attraction of this partnership for Atlassian. Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers.This isn't just another 'we promise to work together' type announcement - there is a new product being released today by Atlassian at http://www.atlassian.com/SharePoint, called the 'SharePoint Connector for Confluence'. It's a plugin that will be available for download on Atlassian's website later today. This plug-in pulls content from SharePoint to Confluence and vice versa. Cannon-Brookes explained that there were 4 main parts to the plug-in:1) Single search; Confluence is mainly used for "agile documentation", said Mike, which he defined as "in-between content" such as minutes to a meeting. For example, content that is more formal than an email, but not something you'd enter into Word. So the ability to search for wiki content using SharePoint (and vice versa) is being enabled by the plug-in. Cannon-Brookes said that this was the number 1 feature request for the plug-in.2) Single sign-on with security; every SharePoint user gets a personal space, including wiki and blog.3) Content Sharing; this means embedding content from Confluence into SharePoint, as a "web part".4) Linking; Within Confluence, users can access SharePoint document facilities. By including SharePoint lists and content within Confluence, users can (in a single click) edit Microsoft Office documents.In summary, Cannon-Brookes told me that the aim was to put as much of Confluence into SharePoint as possible; and the other way round too. For example SharePoint has great office integration (MS Office), so you can now have lists of Word documents in Confluence and effectively edit them inside the wiki product - or at least without having to switch programs.I asked Cannon-Brookes how Atlassian and Microsoft will promote the partnership. He wasn't sure how Microsoft will promote it, but from Atlassian's point of view they'll use their existing partner and consultancy connections - particularly those who are already customers of both companies - to promote the hybrid.What's in it for Microsoft? As is well known, Microsoft is a huge company that can be very slow to provide upgrades to its products. Microsoft probably can't iterate fast enough to keep up with agile startups in the wiki space, so they've decided that partnering is their option to keep up.ConclusionThis is another great example of big vendors partnering with more agile, and smarter, startups to create better Web Office functionality in their products. It's win-win for both companies, although it's worth pointing out that Atlassian is a Java shop. So perhaps in this case the partnership won't lead to an outright acquisition. Also Confluence is just half of Atlassian - they also run a development tools business (again Java based). Still, the deal will be great for Atlassian's business. By their own account Atlassian is the leading enterprise wiki vendor - and judging by their customer numbers this seems to be the case - so this will only cement that position in that market. For Microsoft, they get a 'best of breed' Web Office app to beef up their hugely profitable SharePoint product.

  Krugle, the eponymous code search engine launched by Ken Krugler in June 2006, is announcing today a partnership with Amazon to provide enterprise code search for Amazon's Web Services developer network. Krugle has recently announced similar alliances with IBM developerWorks, Collab.net, SourceForge.net, and Yahoo! Developer Network.Krugle's search engine now searches 2.5 billion lines of code -- up from 1 billion at launch just over a year ago -- and reaches one third of all developers world wide, according to the company. The Krugle DevNetwork Edition being deployed for Amazon will allow developers to search for AWS code examples and other resources across Amazon's sites and outside resource sites defined by the company from a single location."Search is driving significant changes in software development," said Steve Larsen, CEO and co-founder, Krugle on the need for code search. "Developers are looking for ways to get their work done faster, allowing them to spend less time finding code and more time doing interesting and innovative development." Krugle calls this method "search driven development."The site has built parsers for 42 different languages, allowing it, for example, to tell the difference between functions and classes -- more than I can say personally! Krugle delivers related results culled from places like forums, white papers, API documentation, blog posts, and other related projects alongside its code search results.Krugle thinks that their search driven development idea is essential for software developers in the future. More and more free, reusable code and development information is being put online, but there is so much of it that it becomes overwhelming for developers to wade through. When Krugle announced its search partnership with SourceForge.net in April, the site hosted 145,000 projects, for example. Today, just a few months later, that number has grown to around 160,000 projects. Before Krugle's code search was available on the site, finding relevant code meant downloading projects and slogging through them by hand -- now developers can search before they have to download anything.Krugle appears to be beating its chief rivals in the code search vertical, such as Google. Though I have no hard numbers to back that assertion up, anecdotal evidence like the sheer number of LOCs indexed and the partnerships that Krugle is entering into with major enterprise code repositories like those run by Amazon, Yahoo! and IBM would suggest that their technology is performing well against or even outperforming rivals.For more information on Krugle, check out this post at AltSearchEnginesfrom last month.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/programming/The_Future_of_Software_Development';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management calledThe Mythical Man-Month.In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster.The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication.Five years before Brooks' book, a software development methodology called the Waterfall Modelwas coined.This approach applied the insights from mature engineering disciplines (mechanical, civil, etc.) to software.The idea was to construct systems by first gathering requirements, then doing the design, then implementing it,then testing, and finally getting it out the door in one linear sequence.We have come a long way since then and learned a lot about making software. The Waterfall Model is now considered a flawed method because it is so rigid and unrealistic. In the real world, software projects have ill-defined and constantly evolvingrequirements, making it impossible to think everything through at once. Instead, the best software today is created and evolved using agilemethods. These techniques allow engineers to continuously re-align software with business and customer needs.With the advent of modern programminglanguages (Java, PHP, Python and Ruby), rich libraries, and unprecedented infrastructure services like those from Amazon, we are arrivingat yet another evolutionary step. Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube and other poster children of the new web era were developed by just a handfulof programmers. To build software today all you need is a few good men (or women!). In this post we trace how we got hereand where we are heading next.Why The Waterfall Model FailedNon-technical people tend to think that software is softor easily changeable.Since there are no visible nuts and bolts and no hood to open people think that software can be tweaked and re-wired on a whim.Of course, this is not the case. Software, like any mechanical system, has a design and the structure; it is not as soft as it seems.Yet the accelerating pace of business requires constant changes to software. Older development methods completely failto address business needs. Using the Waterfall Model, these changes were impossible, the development cycle was too long, systems wereover engineered and ended up costing a fortune, and often did not work right.The problem was that the Waterfall Model wasarrogant. The arrogance came from the fact that we believed that we could always engineer the perfect system on the first try.The second problem with it was that in nature, dynamic systems are not engineered, they evolve. It is the evolutionary idea that lead to the development of agile methods.Agile Methods - Evolving SoftwareIn the early nineties a number of agile software development methodsemerged. While they differed in details, they agreed at large that software development needed a major rethinking. First, software has to embrace change.Today's assumptions and requirements may change tomorrow, and software needs to respond to changes quickly.To meet the challenge, agile approaches advocate focusing on simplicity. Make the simplest possible systemthat satisfies today's requirements and when tomorrow comes, be ready to adapt.Two techniques pioneered by agile methods are worth particular attention - refactoring and developer testing.Refactoring, elegantly described by Martin Fowler in his classic bookis the idea of improving the design of the existing code without changing how it works.Refactoring is what allows agile systems to embrace change, while remaining elegant and free from rot.Like an interior decorator continuously changes and improves the layout of your furniture, agile developers move code around to improve the product as a whole. Code is constantly changed to make sure we end up with the simplest, and best possible system that reflects our current needs.To make sure that changes do not break the code, agile methods introduced unit tests. As each agile projectunfolds, it grows the base of unit tests. Each test is focused on a single component of the system and acts asan insurance that the component works as expected. Typically, the tests are run continuously against the codeand require immediate fixes in case of a failure.The software systems created using agile methods are much more successful because they are evolved and adapted to the problem.Like living organisms, these systems are continuously reshaped to fit the dynamic landscape of changing requirements. Withouta doubt, agile methods made a major impact on how we think about building software today - dynamically and continuously.It's The Libraries, Stupid!While we discovered better way of making software, we also discovered better programming languages.C was replaced with C++, then came Java. Perl was great, but PHP and Python took its lessons further.More recently came Ruby, which has become very popular because of its natural way of expressing code. Because of this evolution,today we have a number of excellent, and virtually equivalent programming languages.While the choice of programming language is typically a sensitive subject, the truth is that it is not the language,but the libraries that come with it that make a difference. C++ never had the standard libraries that Java has. Yes, Javais the simpler language, but people used C++ for a decade just fine. What gives Java the edge is its rich set of reusablelibraries. The story is similar with PHP. It has been the language of choice for web developers precisely because it comes withsuch rich support for web and database processing.In addition to the libraries that come with modern languages, the open source movement has alsocontributed a wealth of code towards global software infrastructure. Notably, just the Apache foundation on its own hascreated a huge amount of high quality reusable code. We have now arrived at an age where we have a strong foundationfor building complex software systems. We know the methods and we have the tools, so what does that mean?The Future of Software Development: Just a Few Good MenSince early days of software development people struggled to build good systems. More and more peoplewhere thrown at the problem, making matters worse. But with the recent explosion of social web we've witnessed a new and interestingphenomenon: a handful of developers are now able to build systems that are used by millions of people. How can this be?The secret is that as with any good endeavor it only takes a few good men (and/or women!). With a bit of discipline and a ton of passion, high quality engineers are able to put together systems of great complexity on their own.Equipped with a modern programming language, great libraries, and agile methods, a couple of smart guys in the garage can get things done much better andfaster than an army of mediocre developers.We are likely to see a few changes over the coming years:High-quality, passionate software engineers will be in very high demand and will make substantially more money.The developers who do not have great programming skills are going to have to look for jobs elsewhere.The changes that we are witnessing today in the social software market are going to reach the enterprise level.Software off shoring will make less and less economical sense.Computer science is going to remain a highly competitive and prestigious field.ConclusionIronically, we are coming full circle with the mythical man-month. What was true twenty years ago is true of course today,but for a whole new set of reasons. An awesome array of programming languages and infrastructure libraries combined withagile methods has allowed us to break free of old software development dogmas. Just a handful of great engineers can now successfullybuild systems of great complexity. Craftsmanship has finally come to software engineering!

  Another year, another iteration of Napster. The pioneering file sharing program that has existed the past couple of years as a music subscription service will relaunch with a web-based client, according to our network blog last100:"In yet another attempt to return to glory, Napster will rely less on its desktop client in favor of a Web-based approach as it hopes to attract more paying subscribers.Napster seeks to make its platform more flexible and compatible with any Internet-enabled device with the release of Version 4.0. The move will allow Napster’s 770,000 subscribers to play their music from any computer without having to download additional software. Before today, Napster subscribers could only listen to their music after downloading the desktop client to their personal computers, although the Napster software is still required to transfer music from the service to compatible devices."Napster COO Chris Allen said during a press conference that he expects the music industry to be free of DRM by the end of next year. That's an odd thing for Allen to say given that Napster runs a subscription service that relies on DRM to work. If Napster is really getting ready for a DRM-free world, they will have to change their business model. For more, check out the post at last100.

  One of the knocks on Yahoo! has long been that although it has a fairly large second place stake in the search market, it has never been able to monetize search effectively. A new study from SearchIgniteand RBC Capital Markets indicates that Yahoo! is making progress on rectifying that, however.According to the study, even though Google's share of impressions rose dramatically between August and September, and Yahoo!'s fell at about the same clip, Yahoo! beat Google on eCPM for the first time since February. Google's eCPM was down due to falling click-through rates, while Yahoo!'s was up due to higher CPC figures -- Yahoo!'s CTR has stayed more or less the same since May. Is this the much vaunted Panama advertising platform finally paying off?Yahoo! saw the percentage of the total ad spend on its search properties raise in July and August and fall in September, Google saw an opposite trend -- ad spending fell over the summer and jumped in September. The spending trends appeared to coincide with the back-to-school bump in search volume and paid search impressions that Google felt, which resulted in a near equal but opposite dip in search market share for Yahoo!. In the third quarter as a whole, however, overall spending increased 7.8% over the previous quarter for Yahoo!, while Google saw an increase of just 0.8% for the same period.In July we took a look at Yahoo!'s Panama initiative 6 months in, and found no real concrete evidence to make a determination about whether it was or wasn't working. One study we looked at in that post noted that campaign conversion was actually down since the launch of Panama. Regardless, advertisers spent more per click for the same CTR this summer on Yahoo! search ads. Could that suggest improved conversion rates from Yahoo! ads?Modest gains aside, Yahoo! still has a long way to go to catch Google. The latest comScore numbershave Yahoo! still well behind Google in terms of market share, and as the chart above shows, in spite of spending gains, Yahoo! still has a long uphill battle to catch Google. But that Yahoo! is beginning to see more dollars being spent on their search ads is a good sign for the company. My rudimentary knowledge of search marketing suggests to me that gains in eCPM based on higher CTRs would be better than gains based on higher CPCs, but that advertisers are will to spend more per click is good news for Yahoo!.Via GigaOm.

  The BBC has announced a dealwith Wi-Fi hotspot vendor The Cloud to offer free public access to the BBC website and media player at thousands of London locations. The Cloud operates at 7,500 McDonald's, coffee shops and airports around the UK. The companies said in their release today that they expect to offer mobile access soon, as well. See also our coverage yesterday of the new BBC iPlayer. It's a fascinating deal that I feel very ambivalent about. I can't help but wonder - is this the future of the web? Sponsored access to a walled garden of content seems legitimate, perhaps even a good idea, but it also raises questions of the commercialization of public discourse and Net Neutrality. (Update: Resident smart guy Steve O'Hearpoints me to PaidContent coverageindicating that the BBC is in fact not paying The Cloud in the deal, The Cloud is seeing this as a promotion to drive paid customers. Fair enough.)I suppose if you want to access the whole world of interlinked content online, with diverse points of view and interactive communication - then you can just pay for it. Nothing new there, but there's something about a sponsored and very limited web that I feel wary about. How long until US web users can go online for free, as long as it's Fox News they're watching?Do our UK readers have any thoughts on this from the particular perspective of the BBC as a more-or-less public utility?

  Last week Read/WriteWeb editor Richard MacManus interviewed Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and CEO. The result is a 30 minute podcast available on Read/WriteTalk(transcript included). The following post is highlights from the discussion, which focused on Zimbra's journey from October 2005 Web 2.0 Conference launch to September 2007 acquisition by Yahoo! for $350M.In September 2007 Web Office startup Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo!for $350M. As I noted at the time, it seems like only yesterday that Zimbra was the buzz of the 2005 Web Conference (which incidentally was the first Silicon Valley conference I attended). Yet in just under 2 years from launching, Zimbra went from Web Office poster child (one of them at any rate) to a company worth $350 million. How did it happen? What lessons can aspiring entrepreneurs learn from Zimbra, as they attempt to create a multi-million dollar business too? For me there was only one way to find out: interview Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and CEO.The entire interview is up on our podcast show, Read/WriteWeb. Here are some of my favorite bits:Question: who came up with the idea for Zimbra and when did that happen?Satish: "While we were brainstorming on ideas - and we cycled through a lot of them - we always kept coming back to: What are the big things that people do on a computer? Well, they search and they web browse and they read email. We started believing that people spend more time on email than search or web browsing, and so we said, 'Man, that's huge.' It seems so evident but that was basically the genesis. Well Google is tackling search and, obviously, Firefox and IE are tackling the web browsing issue, and then we have Outlook or Thunderbird or Entourage for email. Well, that seems really broken. [...]Then at the same time, we were thinking about technologies and how the web browser is becoming the predominant platform of modern day computing. Do we really need to have a desktop app and can we do everything on the server side? That's something to break into."Question: [...] What was the initial reaction to the product when you launched in October of 2005?Satish: "Peoples reactions to it was unanimously: 'I can't believe this is a web browser. I can't believe that this can be done all inside of Ajax and all with a server that's not hosted or with data that resided remotely.' Our goal was to basically blow the pants away of Outlook or any other client in terms of user interactivity, even though it was inside of a web browser. I think when we launched, we successfully got that kind of a reaction from people who were just totally wowed with it. They were all extremely excited that somebody was putting up such a huge and competitive product in the mail landscape which people had thought had been written off.Then, for us, we knew in our hearts, and we didn't want to be a web 2.0 company that's just all hype and glam. We knew that we had planned all of this carefully with our board. We had always wanted to start making money. It has happened. As soon as we launched in October, back before we started making money, before we sold to Yahoo, we were handsomely cash flow positive. So we're always proud of what we went through as a company: got a lot of bugs, got a great product but at the end of the day, we were making money. That was basically the difference that set us apart."Question: One thing that web 2.0 critics often derive about the current generation of web apps is that they are features and not businesses. Also, the web 2.0 startups have too large a reliance on M&A as the end goal. This is something we constantly hear from critics of web 2.0. Zimbra was obviously a very successful buyout. Was that your plan from the start or did you start out with the aim of being a viable standalone business? Back in October of 2005, what was your end goal for Zimbra at that point?Satish: "Honestly, I can say this. We set out to build a great company with a real business behind it. That's what I think people should do when they start a business. They [have] got to think about: How do I make this an independently successful cash flow self-sustaining business? Then, there'll be very interesting M&A opportunities that will come and knock on the door. If instead we started a company thinking that there is going to be a quick flip, [in] 90% of the cases that does not work out because no one is interested in buying - or they want to buy you off really cheap. We were not thinking of an ideal nor were we thinking of an M&A. We were just thinking: Let's go and create a compelling product and create somereal business in specific markets. That's what we started out to do and that's what we did."Listen to the full podcastfor more insight into the growth of Zimbra and some of the tactics they employed to build their ultimately successful web 2.0 business.

  Vimeo, one of the classiest players in the online video world, is now offering High Definition transcodingfor user uploaded video. At 4 times the industry standard bitrate, the new videos look really nice. Unfortunately, the HD quality videos can only be viewed on the Vimeo site and cannot be embedded in HD elsewhere. I hope that will change.Owned by IAC, Vimeo can afford the extra costs incurred and its community of artists is sure to appreciate the option. The new service will presumably pay for itself as an increasingly competitive high-end video ad unit, something Vimeo has been put to use for in some cases already. It also appears that the HD vids are being sponsored at launch.The new Vimeo videos look great full-screen and the ability for viewers to toggle between HD and standard resolution depending on their bandwidth is a very nice touch.The other online video service that's worked hardest on its encoding quality is probably Brightcove- but its usability is challenging enough and its business strategy confused enough that there's likely little overlap between Vimeo users and the Brightcove community.I heard about the Vimeo HD first via Scott Beale's Laughing Squid blog, a great place to learn about all thing artistic and online. For more on Vimeo see also CenterNetwork's in-depth comparative reviewof Vimeo and competitor Viddlerlast week. Viddler has offered HD for some time but is earlier in the development of its community.

  It's been a very busy Monday on Read/WriteWeb - so here's a recap of the day's posts, plus Network highlights:Top News- Attention - NewsGator and Bloglines Join APML Workgroup(Marshall)- Discovery Purchasing HowStuffWorks for $250 Million(Josh)- AdBrite: Full Page "Skip This Ad" Units Now Available for Everyone(Marshall)- On Copyright: YouTube Punts(Marshall); related: YouTube’s new video identification system places burden on copyright holders(last100)- Adobe Partners with BBC on Streaming Video(Josh); related: BBC partners with Adobe to add iPlayer streaming option; Mac and Linux will be supported(last100)- HypeMachine Readies a Relaunch of Its Popular MP3 Service(Marshall)- Pew: Most Kids Online Not Threatened by Strangers(Marshall)Blog Action Day- The Top 35 Environmental Blogs(Josh)- BadBuster Helps You Identify the Greenest Companies(Josh)- Five environmental Internet TV offerings(last100)Mobile 2.0Richard was at he Mobile 2.0 event today in San Francisco. Here are his posts:- Mobile 2.0 - The 7th Mass Media &Business Opportunities- Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 1- Mobile 2.0 Launch Pad Part 2- Taptu Launches New Type of Mobile SearchAltSearchEngines is also on the conference circuit this week - ASE editor Charles Knight is in NYC for the Search Marketing Expo- SMX.

  The MP3 blog aggregator HypeMachineis set to relaunch with a whole new website once 10,000 people have the site's splash page open simultaneously. When they reach that number, I expect the relaunch to be very well received. At "press/blog time" there are just over 3,000 people waiting, but major music sites will likely cover it soon and put that number over the edge. (Update: It appears the new site has launched.)A new design, lots of smart social networking features and a DRM-free emphasis are the key points of the relaunch. Details and screen shots below.HypeMachine was launched in 2005 by Anthony Volodkin but gained increased visibility in the Web 2.0 world when it won best in show at the third annual Mashup Campand has since expanded its team. The site tracks and makes available music posted on MP3 music review blogs all around the web. It's always been a great site but the new HypeMachine is better than ever. If you're new to the world of MP3 blogs, or tired of waiting for HypeM to relaunch, check out Elbo.ws(correction: Elbo.ws is an aggregator as well, see comments section) and Aurgasm.us, two popular MP3 blogs that feed HypeMachine.The new site is beautifully redesigned by new addition to the team Taylor McKnight, a former Gawker artist and co-founder of the eye-catching video aggregator Chime.tv.Users can now create profile pages with lots of information about themselves, including their favorite songs, bands, searches, blogs and other users. The social networking component is very nicely put together and includes acronym-free tracking of the RSS feeds of your friends' favorites, your favorited blogs and new results in persistent searches.Search results pages highlight buying options via DRM free music stores above all else. Video results are available in the very nice Chime.tv player (see screenshot below).There's very handy Twitter integration, you can tell HypeM to send a tweet any time you favorite a new song, blog or search. I've been doing this manually for awhile when wanting to share music with friends.There's no longer a Flash pop-up player, which is a shame, but you can still play all the songs on a page continuously and if you want to change pages without the music stopping you can just open links in a new tab.In total, I think it's a very nice relaunch and I expect to use the service more now than ever before. As soon as 10,000 people amass, we should be able to see how well it scales and leverages the network effects of a mass user-base. Hype Machineis certainly a widely loved service, I expect that will only grow to be more the case in the future.