SCOBLEIZER — I didn’t write about the big location war at SXSW (between location-based apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, and others). Why not? Because, well, MG Siegler at Techcrunch has been. But I did participate, and took notes and now I’m looking at what’s next...

SCOBLEIZER — When Rob La Gesse, Graham Weston, and Lew Moorman hired me at Rackspace (the world’s largest web hosting company) they said they expected me to challenge them to do new things. I haven’t done enough of that, but last week sitting in the audience listening to Twitter’s API Chief Ryan Sarver got me excited and that’s what this post is about (I haven’t talked with anyone inside Rackspace about this yet, so this is NOT something Rackspace is officially doing — it’s just something I would love to see them do and, because Twitter is a public service I figured it’d be interesting to have a conversation about this idea out in public rather than try to keep it behind closed doors). What did he do? He announced that Twitter was going to make the real time firehose available to everyone (you can watch video of his speech here). That was the biggest news at LeWeb, even though most people didn’t understand the impact...

Seagate (maker of hard drives and storage devices) has been getting slammed on forums and blogs the past couple of days. Partly because they had a bad batch of hard drives and didn’t properly recognize or fix the problem quickly. Partly because they removed a few anti-Seagate threads from its forums...

I’ve noticed a trend lately (actually I noticed it back when I worked at Microsoft and my bosses kept refusing to buy booths at conferences, saying they didn’t return the ROI, but that trend has grown and grown big time). Big companies are throwing their own parties to get news out inside of going to big trade shows. Last night I was at Facebook’s party, where they told everyone they had just passed 140 million users. That deserves a blog post of its own, but we’re here to discuss the trade show crunch...

Matt Mullenweg is the guy who runs Automattic, which makes WordPress and hosts this blog. Since they are about to come out with version 2.7, I wanted to have a conversation with Matt and pick his brain about the future of the blog. It’s long, but this is one of my favorite interviews, hope you enjoy it too...