Can’t seem to get this song out of my head so I am paying it forward.

Dooot doo de doo doo…

Somehow I landed on the amazon.com job site and saw that they have a "2 Pizza Team Leader" (2PTL) position open in Bangalore, India.  At the risk of sounding culturally insensitive [disclosure: while I have an Indian first name, I am not, in fact, Indian], I am wondering if their HR department needs to internationalize the jobs section.

Maybe, "4 Dosa Team Leader" (4DTL).

I found this amusing post from 2003 about pizza in Bangalore.

I admit to being outspokenly on the fence about the utility of tags. Others are also asking the question.  Recently, I was the first victim of a nascent Social Media Mob and found my entire work space "tagged" (see photo).

Adobe got consumers attempting this new paradigm with Photoshop Album (unfortunately v.1.0 was so rife with bugs, I gave up on it). And, there is clearly money chasing the phenomenon (see flickr, del.icio.us, et al.) but in 12 months will the echochamber (aka blogosphere) simply be reminiscing about that flurry of activity around tags that amounted to just a bit of serendipitous fun?

Metadata is critical to improving our ability to find things. I think tags are quite useful in context (search within my 1000 photos to find "mom") or perhaps within an ontology as a point of refinement. Once upon a time the Web was directory driven, but now 99% of people are being trained and honing their skills with a search box.  It seems hard to believe that the population at large desperately needs a navigation scheme that they haven’t yet found.

But hey, a lot of smart people think they do. Well, at least now I can easily find my phone (see photo).

In an unusual twist FOX is trying to start a grass-roots movement to save its Arrested Development.

This is definitely the funniest show currently on television.

Amidst all of the hustle and bustle of our overstimulated world, it is refreshing to look up and find individuals making extraordinary gestures. It is heartwarming when those individuals are people you know, now all grown up.

Vicki Noble is a friend from college and a physician in Boston who went to Banda Aceh to help tsunami victims. She ended up saving a young boy’s life by bringing (and housing) him and his parents to the United States for a critical surgery.

Coverage from the Boston paper. A follow-up article.

It is one thing to act when confronted head on, it is quite another to reach out.

It seems that Robert Scoble’s post on the HeyPix acquisition has sparked a small (and amusing) debate about Webshots v. Flickr.

[Disclosure: I am a founder of Webshots, a former CEO, and now contributer as part of CNET Networks, Inc.]

As someone who has watched and helped Webshots grow from a single web server to portal class, I wanted to clarify/make few points.

First, we are fans of Flickr! As an entrepreneur, I appreciate the great job they have done designing a product, building a community, generating loads of press, and selling a business. Their innovations, along with several other of the newer crop of photo-sharing/social media sites (e.g. buzznet, fotolog.net) have made this space exciting again and that is good for everyone involved.

For the record, Webshots is committed to open API’s, open social networks, citizen journalism, and navigation/presentation that makes use of rich metadata.  We have a lot of work to do! The acquisition of HeyPix is just one of many aspects of our product strategy designed to lay the foundation for a more open and intuitive experience.

Second, I thought a brief history of Webshots might be in order as it seems even Scoble didn’t know very much about us! The company was started in 1995 (when people had scanners and not digital cameras) and our software was used to collect and share photos visually. In fact, in 1996, we had to make a custom screensaver of Bill Gates’ first child that was to be a Christmas present from his brother-in-law. The company was bought by Excite@Home in 1999, bought back by the founders at the end of 2001, and finally acquired by CNET in 2004.

We were pioneers in album sharing, photo messaging, photo blogging, and image search, launched a social network long before Friendster, and have built the world’s largest public archive of photos. We grew up on LAMP (before it was an acronym) and have prided ourselves on running the leanest operation per page view. Along the way we built a very popular service and a highly profitable media business where many others failed.

Finally, Webshots was "cool" back in 1996, we have a lot of buzz on college campuses in 2005. We take pride in having built one of the few Internet brands that is approaching a ten-year anniversary, and having scaled a business that continues to grow at an incredible rate week over week.  I appreciate Frank Boosman’s Flickr zeal (he has every right to be excited) but the graph he references is a change in Alexa ranking and it is one thing to climb into the top 1000 and quite another to scale higher than the 40′s (to keep climbing we would have to start dislodging the likes of eBay and Amazon.com!)

I still care a great deal about Webshots and that is why I have weathered and stuck by through two acquisitions.  In many ways the opportunities are really just beginning. With innovations in user interface, content aggregation, search, and tools for making social connections, a variety of players (Webshots, Flickr, heck even Kodak EasyShare Gallery) have a great chance to have a collaborative open network that facilitates both discovery and rich applications.

I am officially embarrased to call San Francisco home. It appears that the home crowd gave Barry a standing ovation on opening day.

There is a wealth of circumstantial evidence that he is a drug cheat with no respect for the game of baseball.  One of the more damning articles over the last year referenced audio of Bonds’ personal trainer bragging about being able to beat the tests.

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A bolder and more expense move into user-generated content. It will be fun to watch how this develops.  News.com reports

After griping about Gmail, I have to say the keyhole satellite feature for Google Maps is absolutely slick!

CNET offices downtown San Francisco.

Well, technically it is a CNET acquisition, but bringing the HeyPix guys on board is the first time (in any incarnation of Webshots) that we have bought another company and we are very excited.

The Webshots Desktop software has been downloaded more than 100 million times and we now have a client software team that can drive further innovation in the photo sharing space.

Jeff Clavier could moonlight as a detective and Rafat was again ahead of the game.