Guest post Archive

Hey, You, Get Off Of My Cloud!

This is yet another guest post by my super popular contributor and Twitter friend, Paisano. This time I asked him to do a think piece on that over-used buzz word of tech buzzwords, THE CLOUD! Enjoy!

The rumblings you hear overhead isn't thunder but everyone scrambling to setup shop in the cloud these days. The consensus is that we want to run and store all of our stuff in one centralized location online, not in several different local destinations which is a headache and time consuming. Let's focus on the cloud computing strategies for three of the biggest angels on the web these days: Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.

Assuming Twitter Is Up, What Newbies Need to Know

Time for another guest post from my Twitter friend, Paisano, who looks disturbingly like my brother Peter and wrote the hotly contested Delicious post last month. My readers are half in the tech-early adopter group and half the general business person who wants to know more about the Web and the Valley. So with this post, I’m catering to readers who are just getting into Twitter and have basically thrown up their hands in utter confusion at the unending flow of new Twitter applications. For the last few months, people have asked me which apps are best and I honestly couldn’t answer because I’ve only used a few of them, so I asked Paisano to do it for me. We went for breadth instead of depth here, so ask him any follow up questions in the comments. And of course, leave your vote for best Twitter app. For more guest posts, hit the "guest post" category. To write one, drop me a line at sarah at sarahlacy dot com.

Miranda: Me, You and Everyone We Know Need to Be Twittering

This is a guest post by my husband, photographer and designer Geoffrey Ellis. For other guest posts, hit the "guest post" tag.

I mailed a handwritten letter to Miranda July the other day. She is a film maker, writer, artist who I have a fondness for. Something about her style is very cool to me. I can't remember the last time I wrote a letter and put it in the mail, and I have never written to a celebrity. Ever. But I needed to tell her something and couldn't find an email on her site. So, I got out my pen and paper and 15 minutes later, it was in the hands of the post office.

My letter was a short plea for Miranda to sign up for Twitter. Mainly because I think she would be really good at it. I love the way she writes in small bursts with short quotes. I would love to get a sub-140 character tweet from her in the vein of her "Dear Sophie, everything I have is yours. Except my boyfriend. Love, Miranda July". Wouldn't that be great? Miranda and Twitter would be as good a combination as peanut butter and chocolate.

I'm not just being selfish here. I think Twitter would help Miranda too.

My Husband Gets Transported Back to Junior High (In a Good Way!)

(This is the second in a series of guest posts that I hope will become more frequent on sarahlacy.com-- despite the name of the site! Especially the next few days because I'm in New York absurdly pimping my book and shooting for Yahoo. This one is by my lovely husband Geoffrey Ellis, who couldn't stop gushing about this site, so I asked him to write about it.)

I was a total mixtape nerd back in the day.

Before the whole CD revolution, I was all about vinyl. I'd make at least one mixtape a week. It was a huge challenge to fit the exact amount of songs onto one side of a cassette. Not only was fitting the songs a challenge, but ordering them so they made sense was part of the fun.

Here is the ultra-geek part of it all: It was exhilarating. I lived for it - thinking about it all week, making little notes to myself. So the second I discovered muxtape.com and read the words-- "Muxtape is a service for creating mixtapes"-- I felt transported back to my days of skateboarding, working part-time in record stores and living the life of relatively low responsibility.

Once Delicious, Now Stale

[Delicious is one of the few Web 2.0 sites I've never been a heavy user of, so when I saw my Twitter friend Paisano complaining about Yahoo's handling of this much beloved property I asked him to write a post for me-- and people like me-- explaining why. As usual, I have no special insight as a part-time Yahoo employee. Hoping this will spark some debate in the comments as this is a fear all entrepreneurs face before selling!]

Yahoo's new delicious 2.0 is the best example of vaporware that exists today, not the Google phone. Ever since August 2007 we've all been teased about the fabled next release of Delicious. The comedy of errors has been well-documented on TechCrunch by Michael Arrington. Here's the exciting sneak peak of Delicious 2.0 that they gave TechCrunch in September 2007. Here's the follow-up piece on Yahoo's vaporeware A.K.A Delicious 2.0 six months later. You will sense the growing skepticism by Arrington which is shared by most of the web 2.0 community these days. Michael appears extra frustrated because like most of us he wants Delicious to succeed. As a matter of fact, he named Delicious one of the Web Apps you can't live without in 2006, but then dumped Delicious in 2007 for BlueDot (Now Faves.com) because they were surpassed when it came to features.