(Why am I in the water? See Jumping Ship.)

After week one, I’m still thrilled with the new MacBook Pro. Careful chronologers will note that just four days after UPS dropped off my laptop, Apple released its upgraded MacBook Pro line with Core 2 Duos and bigger disks - and FireWire 800, if I ever needed to plug in a big disk array? But no matter, I’m feeling good with my now just-barely-obsolete laptop.

And now to revisit a favorite topic for probably every PC-to-Mac-switching blogger: essential Mac applications, with a developer’s bias.

• Quicksilver

- A mind-reading application launcher and so much more. Get it, seriously.

• Firefox

- The new 2.0 theme looks great next to native OS X apps.

• Mail.app

- Whaa?! No Thunderbird? Not for now. Mail.app is just smoother. We’ll see if it lasts.

• Adium

- Great cross-service IM.

• TextMate

- For single file editing or more involved projects, I’ve been very impressed with TextMate. We’ll see if I find the need for something heavier like Eclipse.

• VirtueDesktops

- Smooth and pretty multiple desktop manager.

• Parallels

- Keeps Debian and Windows XP running in the background. Watch out though, VMWare for Mac is coming.

• iTerm

- The standard OS X terminal is good, but when you’ve got lots of shells open, tabs are a big help.

On Friday, I said goodbye to my five-year-old IBM ThinkPad A22P and hello to a new MacBook Pro.

Yes, five years.

I’ve been putting this off for a while.

Now, the ThinkPad was a good laptop - great, maybe - and it did everything I asked of it and more. I’d guess 15,000 to 20,000 hours of use, a number of trips around the globe, and more than two drop-kicks in the office parking lot. My daily routine centered around Firefox, Thunderbird, SecureCRT, VMWare (debian), and lately, FeedDemon under Windows XP. It was the only computer I used both at home and at work.

But time had taken its toll. A few days before the three year warrantee expired, the motherboard failed. IBM was happy to replace nearly everything in the system except the screen and hard drive, which I swapped out for a faster model. But after that, the speakers starting failing, suspending or hibernating XP became a gamble, and the built-in ethernet went south. In the end, though, Javascript was the laptop’s undoing. When the web was just a pile of HTML and images with a sprinking of code, my old laptop did great. When trying to parse and execute a few hundred KB of Javascript code every time I fired up GMail, my laptop ground to a halt.

I toyed with the idea of getting a Dell (”dude…”), but fell for the seductive simplicity, fast hardware, and BSD-backing of a MacBook Pro: 2 GHz Core Duo, 2GB RAM. Two days in, I think I’ve made the right choice. QuickSilver is waiting to read my mind, I’ve got Darwin Ports building the latest PHP5, Firefox is snappy, Parallels has a fresh install of debian, and everthing feels right, a feeling I’ve long missed in the land of Windows.

Yesterday, Brad Fitzpatrick and SixApart hosted the second MogileFS Summit at SixApart’s offices in San Francisco. The initial response on the mailing list suggested a handful of local users would attend, but in the end more than twenty people showed up from a wide range of companies. In addition to a few folks from Danga / SixApart, there was a small group from Guba, two guys from Bloglines, Matt from Wordpress, and developers from lots of other sites both large (in some cases, massive) and small.

MogileFS, for the unanointed, is a specialized distributed filesystem originally built to power LiveJournal. Like its siblings memcached and perlbal, Mogile is open source software. True distributed filesystems are unweildy and complex; Mogile makes a number of assumptions and simplifications that make it easy to deploy, fast, and developer-friendly. Mogile doesn’t mount like a traditional UNIX filesystem (though in the summit, we saw a demo of a FUSE+webdav mount hack) and stores files based on a flat domain / key structure. It’s up to the application using Mogile to add files via a simple API, enforce permissions, map keys to filenames if needed, and query for and cache the locations of stored files. Where Mogile shines is replicating files across pools of cheap, usually non-RAID disk arrays and handling drive and device failures, some level of capacity balancing, and future growth. Mogile really nails a sweet spot for the kind of storage problems many websites face. At Wikispaces, we’ve got millions of files in Mogile and it has been rock-solid since day one.

We spent the majority of the summit talking about what’s coming in Mogile 2 - which is already partially running in production for LiveJournal - and what’s on people’s minds for future releases. Aside from a number of code cleanup and performance enhancements, big changes in Mogile 2 include a new plugin architecture and pluggable replication rules. In Mogile 1.x, replication was controlled by a “mindevcount” setting, the minimum number of devices that a file had to be stored on. In Mogile 2, you can write a replication ruleset that mandates files span racks, datacenters, a certain number of fast systems, etc. Best of all, Mogile 2 is API-compatible with Mogile 1.x, so we can drop it in on the fly.

To Brad, Junior, and everyone from SixApart who’s hacking on Mogile, memcached, and friends - thanks! It was an awesome summit.

I’ve been quiet lately here in blogland, but I’ve got two great excuses: the summer sailing season in San Francisco and all the things we’ve been working on at Wikispaces.

Today we’re thrilled to announce a program to give away 100,000 wikis (usually $5/month) for use in K-12 education. For free. No strings attached.

We’re doing this after hearing amazing stories of teachers trying wikis in their classrooms over the last year. There’s a huge demand for simple technology in education, not bloated and complex software that scares away teachers and students alike. Better still, we don’t want to put price pressure on educators - too many teachers already have to make impossible choices about the tools they can afford to bring into their classrooms.

For a small company, 100,000 is a big number - and we need your help. Help in telling teachers, journalists, school staff, and educational technologists about what we’re trying to do. Email them our blog post, post one of our progress trackers on your blog or website (like the thermometer to the right of this post), or just share our story with a friend. With any luck, we’ll look back at 100,000 as just the beginning.

This past Christmas, I was lucky to get a BlackBerry 7105t under the tree. This was, I thought, a great phone. Nice and small, good bright screen, and a well-designed address book with Outlook syncing. SureType is nothing short of magic and email via a cheap T-Mobile account worked pretty well.

Four months later, the 7105t met a watery grave at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay after a nighttime sailing mishap. I got sad. Then I got an 8700g.

Now I understand crackberry addiction. The full keyboard is a big part - SureType is very good, but just doesn’t compare. Whatever Intel xScale processor they crammed into this thing is fast, far faster than the 7105t. Web pages scream via EDGE and T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan price is right - $19 a month. But with both the 7105t and 8700g I struggled to figure out what apps I needed to get, what my best option was for setting up email forwarding, and what tricks I could use to be more productive. I read forums, I read blogs, I scoured search engines, and I came up with only a few answers.

What’s still missing on the web is a great reference site for all things BlackBerry. BlackBerry Forums is the closest thing - a great discussion site, but reference information is lost in a sea of comments and sticky posts.

So I’ve started a wiki over at Wikispaces to gather links, pictures, tips, and anything else BlackBerry users deem important in one easy-to-edit spot.

Got a BlackBerry? Join in.

This week over at Wikispaces we launched support for embedded media. This means you can put YouTube videos, Google Calendars, Odeo podcasts, Flickr slideshows, and just about anything else you can imagine in your wiki page.

Now you might be thinking: “well, duh - I can do that with any wiki that supports HTML.” But we chose to do embedded media in a smarter way.

If you’re just pasting HTML in your wiki page, you’ll see something like this when editing your page:

<embed
style=”width:400px; height:326px;”
id=”VideoPlayback”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8224040487342942414″>

Not so pretty, and really confusing for other people who might be editing your page. Put ten of these on a page, and you’ve got a real mess.

Here’s what the same embed looks like on Wikispaces:

[[media type=”google” key=”-8224040487342942414″]]

YouTube?

[[media type=”youtube” key=”UnFV-fvgOu0″]]

Nice and clean. Paste in a URL instead of the embedded HTML code and we’ll convert it automatically into the correct tag. Paste in something we don’t yet understand and we’ll add it to our database for the future.

Long-time Wikispaces user Sean FitzGerald has a great demo page showing what happens when you unleash media on wiki pages. Awesome!

A few months back, Alex Bosworth asked a good question: with millions of active users, why was LinkedIn’s Alexa traffic graph so low?

I suggested in a comment that the issue might be LinkedIn’s exclusive use of SSL, where Alexa doesn’t track impressions. A few months later I noticed that the SSL had gone away, and LinkedIn’s Alexa traffic has gone from a dribble to a torrent:

I thought of this today as I read a pretty hyperbolic Hitwise headline: “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites“. By any reasonable definition of “MySpace”, “Yahoo”, and “internet site”, this just isn’t so. Jeremy Zawodny calls it “Apples and Oranges“. I’ll go with lies, damn lies, and web traffic statistics.

If you said Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube, flickr, and digg (in that order), nice work.

The takeaway is that website traffic follows a power law distribution. The top 4 or so sites on the web do orders of magnitude more traffic than the next 40, who do orders of magnitude more traffic than the next 400, and so on. By just about any measure, Digg and flickr are enormously successful sites - but you wouldn’t know it if you took a quick look at a graph of them compared to MySpace. So next time you look at Alexa, remember, it’s all relative.

This is part two of my ‘Tale of the Tape’ series, a periodic look at Alexa stats that catch my eye.

I mentioned in my Tale of the Tape intro that it’s a bad idea to take Alexa stats out of context. Here’s a great reminder. I’m going to show you five sites’ Alexa reach plotted over a two year period. Three have a classic hockey-stick growth curve, one just in the last few months. Two don’t look so hot, nearly flat over this time period.

Your challenge: name these five sites.

To make things interesting, I’ve blanked out the Y-axis scale. But just so that we’re not too mean, here are a few clues:

1. If you’ve heard of one of these sites, you’ve almost certainly heard of all five. Household “Web 2.0″ names.
2. Sites one and two are among the top 20 sites on the web.
3. It’s all relative.

This is part one of my ‘Tale of the Tape’ series, a periodic look at Alexa stats that catch my eye.

Squidoo is just coming up on six months of being in the wild - first as part of a wide private beta, then as a public property opening its doors in December 2005. Squidoo gives individuals the power to publish ‘lenses’ on topics they’re passionate about using fast and easy publishing shortcuts. From Sudoku to Blackberry, the site has a huge range of members contributing lens content in the form of news, RSS feeds, Amazon listings, etc. Monitization from Google ads and Amazon Associate kickbacks are split by Squidoo and lensmasters, with options to offer proceeds to charities. Seth Godin is one of the founders (Chief Squid?) and has given Squidoo a monster shot of buzz.

After a big hop on launch day, Squidoo is now in the top ~5000 sites on the web with a reach of around 200-300 - solid traffic. But this graph is not the kind of up-and-to-the-right ramp that young web companies strive for. Three features of this graph catch my eye:

First, 2006 is flat.

Second, the spike-lull during beta looks a lot like the spike-lull after launch.

Third, holidays dampen momentum. I think Squidoo took a risk launching in December - unless you’re Amazon, the second half of the month is a black hole.

So what’s Squidoo to do? I’ll bet prognosticators will soon start blogging that a big strategy shift is in order, that Squidoo needs to see a big hockey stick growth graph or perish. Maybe turn Squidoo into a full blown wiki, add podcasting tools, or start giving away XBox 360s in exchange for giveaway-of-the-month traffic. Surely they’d do better if there was a Squidoo-branded AJAX home page?

The fact is that even with Seth Godin’s internet marketing oomph, growing a brand new service is hard. Worse still for all of the Web 2.0 dreamers out there, growth comes from unflagging attention to detail and ruthless execution. The chances of starting a novel site and achieving YouTubian growth are worse than the lottery.

So for my prediction: Squidooers are hard at work on the incremental improvements that can only be discovered from daily operation of the site and piles of user feedback. We’ll start to see changes before summer, and they won’t be radical departures from the site’s original purpose. Certainly more powerful tools for lensmasters, probably better methods for lensmasters and interested third parties to carry a more potent viral message, and search engine optimizations to build all-important pagerank and pull new members to the site. Since Squidoo focuses attention to drive an economic engine, maybe we’ll see affiliate-style reward system or other incentives outside the scope of a single lensmaster.

Squidoo has a lot of dials to turn, and I’m betting that small changes will yield big results. Time will tell, followed closely by Alexa graphs.

Update TechCrunch on the ‘Purple Albatross’: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/09/squidoo-seth-godins-purple-albatross/

Update 2 Seth Godin Responds: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/05/overnight_succe.html