After taking off about a week to be with my new son, I’m now back at work. Give me a little time for active posts to resume on the Werblog, since I’ve got a whole lotta catching up to do.

I think Eli must be the youngest person in the world to have his own Weblog.

Born: May 6, 2002, 2:42pm8 lbs., 7 oz. Mom, dad and son are all doing fine. Stay tuned for more details soon, including the Little W Weblog!

Thank goodness Radio (which I use to manage this Weblog) is a network-enabled desktop application, rather than a hosted Web-based one. Userland has been experiencing a major outage for the past two days, but it hasn’t affected me at all.

This chart shows the daily closing price of the AMEX Internet Index since I joined EDventure Holdings in April 1998. At the time, I suspected we were at the end of the Internet boom, which started with the 1995 Netscape IPO. I thought that as stock mania subsided, energy would shift to figuring out what had changed and how to build real businesses. If you look closely at the chart, ...

CyberAtlas: According to a Jupiter Media Metrix study, experienced users of P2P file-trading services are 41 percent more likely than the average online music fan to have increased their music spending levels. Still more evidence that, contrary to what the recording industry says, Napster and its ilk actually stimulate spending on CDs.

Netflix is a new addition to my dotcom survivor list. (Thanks Dave Hyndman!)

I’m starting a list of dotcoms that seem to have weathered the crash of the past two years. These are Internet startups that are venture-funded, consumer-oriented, not yet public, enjoying healthy growth and profitable or nearly so. Conventional wisdom is that such a creature doesn’t exist. Off the top of my head, the initial list is: Google Keen.com (though its recent management shakeup is worrisome) LinkShare Gator (see earlier post) ...

Digital television was a big topic of discussion in the early ’90s. There were grim warnings that we were falling behind Japan in the high-definition race, and that if the US government didn’t give digital TV spectrum to broadcasters, free over-the-air television was doomed. Everyone involved knew that the plan that eventually emerged — a gradual transition to digital broadcasting through 2006, at which point the broadcasters would return their ...

The surprising thing about this chart from a story on News.com is that Gator is the #2 digital wallet service, with 9.3 million registered users. (Actually, it’s probably more than that. Gator claimed 10 million users back in December.) Gator hasn’t made as much noise as other digital identity vendors, but it has become a gorilla in the space. The company isn’t public, so I don’t know its financial situation, ...