Make Your Desktop Programs PortableJohn Haller first made Portable Firefox which lets you run Firefox from a USB drive or from any desktop without installing. Portable Firefox was a great success and John seems to be on the roll now - he has just launched PortableApps.com which promises to make all your favorite desktop programs portable. Well, not all of them - just the good ones. "Your computer, without the computer" (TM).
If you really need to use Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint but don't really want to spend a fortune buying them, the solution is here. Portable OpenOffice is free, small (just 70 MB), does not need install, works just like MS products, and you can save all files in your preferred MS format.
John Haller has some interesting quotes on his website: "You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive." The logical conclusion is that you are (or at least you should be) much more than that.
Y.ah.oo Bought Del.icio.us, the Most Popular Social Bookmarking Site
Yahoo is not interested in Del.icio.us technology but in its 300,000 users who have millions of bookmarks. Yahoo reportedly paid $ 30M which comes down to roughly $ 100 per user.
InsideGoogle writes:
"Look at it this way: Yahoo owns the social web (Flickr + Del.icio.us), Google owns the information web, and Microsoft is slowly working to own RSS. The winner will be the one that holds onto their piece and makes it the most important piece on the board."
Blogger Celebrities Take the Front Row
There are now thousands (if not millions) of tech blogs and only a small percentage of them matter. Some bloggers are forming an elite group that is increasingly courted at news events.
"Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers", writes WSJ.
"It's not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles."
How has the news world changed in just a few years...
References:
Tech Blogs Produce New Elite to Help Track The Industry's Issues - WSJ
23 Things to Do With a Thumb Drive from the February 2006 issue of PC World magazine
Download of the Day: Portable Apps Suite. Lifehacker.com
Portable apps get a thumbs-up. Newsday.com
List of portable applications from Wikipedia
Portable Apps. White Coat Rants, 2010.