Travel day

by on February 17, 2006

We’re about to leave Colorado’s ski country for Silicon Valley, where Michael Arrington is putting final preparations together for tonight’s massive Tech Crunch/Naked Conversations launch party. I have no idea how we’ll fit so many people into his house, but it should be fun either way! Unfortunately there’s a chance of rain tonight and it looks like it’ll be pretty cold (we have a tent and heaters, but it still will make tonight’s party very crowded — sorry we can’t let anyone else into the party, we’re WAY overbooked as it is).

Just one last note about skiing. What a fantastic day yesterday. Blue skies and powder. Thank you so much to the teams from Copper Mountain Resort, Keystone, and the Colorado Ski Country (yes, they paid our way, so earned those links, but they didn’t do anything for us that they don’t do for other travel-oriented journalists and, anyway, they can’t fake a good experience). The room they put us up in is stunning. I’m looking over the mountain right now, sad that we have to leave. My friends have always said that Colorado has the best skiing and I’m now sold.

One knock against Copper, though. They charge for the wifi here. So, I pulled out my Cingular Edge card and connected that way. It’s my goal never to pay for wifi again. Look at it this way. If I wanted to connect to the Internet today via Wifi, I’d need to pay $10 here. $7 at the Denver airport (or was it $10? I forget). And another $7 at Oakland. And that’s if I could find a wifi connection at the gates we’ll be hanging out in. Instead, I pay $80 a month and am on anytime.

  • PodTech will be there recording candid podcasts for everyone who can't be there as we know the Techcrunch and PodTech audience is global. We'll bring some sounds of Techcrunch out to you. Maybe later in the night when people have gotten "naked" we'll get some sound bites.
  • Agreed on the Wifi. Keystone had free Wifi everywhere, Copper is great, a fantastic experience and they could make it that much better with Wifi.
  • It is going to be very cold, and I heard in the news last night that it was even snowing in certain parts of the Bay Area that are above 2,000 ft. Thank God Mike's house is not.
    See you in a bit!
  • Denver is $10, it only works in parts of Concourse A and a good section of B. If you're flying on Delta, NWA, or some other airline out of C, forget it.
  • can actually FON fix that?
  • Andy
    That's right Robert. Speaking as a Vancouverite, keep telling people something other than Whistler/Blackcomb is the best skiing. :)
  • More results of a 2-day experiment" using "brrreeeport" as a tag and post traffic building device by a blogger.
  • Christopher Coulter
    Rich, rich irony in having the Web 2.0 nutters, sponsoring your Book Launches. And why do I have a feeling that your Launches will last 6 months or more, sort like Cher's 5th Annual Farewell Tours.

    Instead of "Naked Conversations" being branded with "Blogging" and "Big Biz", it's going to be culled in the whole vaporware Web 2.0 games, already seeing that indicator on the press listservs. As anything Michael Arringtonish, is but the next VCish and Enronish Bubble Nucleus HQ.

    You know, Mark Cuban should take his HD-Net cameras down there and just film all the high-life, for a great pull-back docudrama when it all burns out. Hey, Cuban, (in all seriousness) if you do more Enron-like Doc's, to whom do I send my resume? :)
  • Mike Sanlon
    "they didn’t do anything for us that they don’t do for other travel-oriented journalists" - Since when the hell were you a journalist? Never mind a travel oriented one. You're getting very close to the line Robert. One of the things that made what you said worth reading was that you were one of us. A regular Joe, who drives a Ford Focus and is trying to put a human face on a big company. In becoming an A-list blogger, some of that message is getting diluted. It's getting harder to know if you genuinely like a product/company/service because it is genuinely great ...or because they have greased your palm with freebies.
  • Dmad
    now you are a journalist? sez who? You? Just cuz you have some self created forum doesn't make you a journalist. If you are, you are a poor one at best. I'd ask for my money back from SJS.
  • good blog is always nice to see

    want to learn seduction tips and trick download our free ebook
  • hi Mr. Scolbe:

    You probably know that blogs hosted on Wordpress.com are blocked in Mainland China, just like those hosted on Blogger and some other major BSPs.

    As a blogger located in that part of the world, I'm frustrated by this fact, since these BSPs (Blogger, Wordpress, etc.) have a large user base which makes a considerable portion of the blogosphere. The fact that it's much easier to have your blog hosted by an established BSPs than to, say, download a Wordpress program and host on your own server has caused those non-geek bloggers living in censor-free areas to preferably build their blogs on Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress.com and others.

    Blogger has long been blocked in China, Typepad is currently accessible but has been blocked at least 3 times in the past (I was once a Typepad user), now Wordpress.com blogs are blocked too. To read those blogs, we need to use RSS readers like Bloglines, which somehow caches the blog posts on its own server, so as long as Bloglines is accessible, we still have a way to all the RSS-supported blocked sites.

    However, some bloggers have chosen to show only "summaries" of their blog posts in the RSS feeds, in this case, if a Bloglines user want to read the whole thing, he/she would have to click on the link of the original post. So if a summaries-only blog is being blocked, we'll have to use proxy to read it, which is a major drawback to the browsing experience.

    Unfortunately, Scobleizer - a must-read blog for many China-based bloggers - is such a blog.

    I would be appreciated if all the bloggers out there set their blogs as to display the complete post in RSS feeds. I do believe that there will be others who share this view of mine. (Of course there is the contradiction between page view and complete entry display, but you get scarce page view from the censored area anyway.)
  • Oops! Sorry, I just double-checked your feed, it turned out that it's possible to show complete entries of Scobleizer on Bloglines.

    However, the above suggestion might still be of relevance to other bloggers.
  • Food for Thought...and one new blog I am tapping into.

    Web 2.0 - The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It's worse than you think.

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/15/opini...
    http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Ar...
    http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/
  • Jake
    Gadfly replaces Microsoft Geek Blogger.

    Time for Microsoft to find another face.
  • Just testing co-comment...
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