Last year, we pulled the plug on MySchoolAlert.com, a system that was to be a text message alert system for schools.  The reason we pulled the plug on the project was:

High growth startups are particularly prone to bad news. One big question is how will social media respond.  LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman (who owns several other social startups) says LinkedIn is good to go:

This election is one of the most polarized elections in history, until you look at it with the eyes of a 12 year old. It's no longer about dubious policy promises and outrageous claims about how bad the opposing candidate is. It's suddenly a war hero, a single dad, a black man and a mom from a small town. The best part is that all of the candidates are the kind of people I would want my children to meet. The story is amazing when you look at it that way. And it's amazing that we are guaranteed that something extraordinary and historic will happen in the near future:

Why is it that sometimes the splat of a business failure is louder than it's launch? Witness Wallop - a social network built to compete with the likes of MySpace and Facebook. Wallop was built and incubated by none other than Microsoft - and the first I've heard of it was it's tombstone page:

I wasn't very old when I got started with computers. Ten years old to be exact. I took a BASIC programming class at Ball State University that used TRS-80 Model III computers. By today's standards, the Model III would have a hard time competing with a $30 graphing scientific calculator. It didn't matter. I loved it. And because of that, the small private school I attended got some Apple II computers and started teaching some literally BASIC skills.

Yesterday, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. There are several important changes in the browser, the most significant being that pages designed for older versions of Internet Explorer may break in IE8. That is because IE8 defaults to a more standards compliant rendering mode:

IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Now Available

I have four daughters and really struggle with how much time they spend inside. The lifestyle we make our kids live is nothing like what it was when I grew up, and when our parents grew up. Gone are long periods of free time outdoors. In today's LA Times, Rosa Brooks has published an absolute gem of an article that gets to the root cause of the problem:

This is interesting: MoFuse has made their product free.  MoFuse takes your site's RSS feed (or feeds) and republishes them.  They'll split AdSense revenue 50-50 with you or for a $20 fee will let you make 100% on it.  Not a bad way to take you blog, Joomla,  Plone or WordPress site mobile overnight! 

The value of blogging is something that is very difficult to calculate.  Most of the problem comes from the transient nature of a blog (articles expire or get archived) content and the effect that RSS has on diffusing page views: it's very difficult to see who has read your article - especially when it's mixed into a post like I'm doing with Rohit Bhargava's blog right now.