Susan Crawford: “How did the ICANN meeting go? Progress. Definite progress. We had a good public discussion about transparency….” ICANN is important. And I know a number of people involved with it (Susan, Joi, Esther, Vint, Elliot) who are well-intentioned, thoughtful, and committed to making it work the way it should. I have nothing but respect for their efforts. Yet I can’t get this thought out of my mind. It ...

Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels pushses back on blogging advocates Shel Israel and Robert Scoble. As Werner makes clear, Amazon is one company that shouldn’t have to defend its commitment to heeding customer feedback. So if he thinks the case for blogging in the enterprise doesn’t have enough data or concrete arguments behind it, the rest of us should listen. I’m a huge blogging fan, but I agree that warm fuzzies ...

Knowledge@Wharton has posted the first Supernova 2006 podcast, What Makes an Online Community Tick? Knowledge@Wharton is the online business journal of The Wharton School, read by over half a million subscribers worldwide. The interview is a conversation with Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist.org), Julie Herendeen (VP of Network Products at Yahoo!), and Bill Flitter (CMO of Pheedo). The podcast explores how to facilitate, nurture, and benefit from online communities, which ...

To answer Halley’s question, yes, of course we have a first life. It’s called World of Warcraft.

Plaxo CEO Ben Golub is apologizing on his blog for his company’s practices: To everyone who hated getting Plaxo update messages, felt we were generating acquaintance spam, or otherwise were harmed by the service, I personally apologize on behalf of all of the people at Plaxo. Believe me, I despise spam. I live in email, so I feel the loss of productivity acutely. Yet I also realize that (1) there ...

Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web has joined Vint Cerf, co-creator of the Internet Protocol, in speaking out against telcos’ plans to violate network neutrality. As I suspected, though, the telcos are winning on the battlefield that matters.

I’m with Catrina. The good time to start a company was when she and Stewart started Game Neverending, which became Flickr — otherwise known as the depths of the crash. That’s when I started Supernova, and when most of the other Web 2.0 darlings (Technorati, Six Apart, Weblogs Inc., etc.) got off the ground. It’s also, by the way, when Google went from good to **INSANELY HUGE**. Sure, you can ...

If, as Scoble suggests, Second Life is an OS, then it’s MacOS, to World of Warcraft’s Windows.

Don Park: “What I have seen glimpse of in the game world is the next generation of groupware.” I agree wholeheartedly. Of course, I would, given that Don is a guild-mate of mine in World of Warcraft!

A couple weeks ago, I judged a Wharton business case competition to develop strategic initiatives for Lucent. Well, it looks like the company has chosen a road none of the students proposed — merging with Alcatel. It’s not easy being a telecom equipment vendor in this market.