Brian Alvey

Not the dude — the blog.

I could have called this “Too much photo and not enough Matt,” but I do enough of that.

Photomatt redesigned. His blog looks great.

Next step: convince him to use Blogsmith. Seriously!

Wow. When Jason told me he was leaving AOL, I thought he was just canceling his dial-up account. I figured he would call up AOL and a skilled representative would talk him out of his decision and he would extend his subscription another year and maybe get some free bonus hours.

Boy was I wrong: TechCrunch; NY Times; Jason’s blog.

I hope that tomorrow I don’t have to write a post called “Even more changes at AOL.”

I read this review of the Kansas City Chiefs post-Zeldman redesign a while ago when it first came out, but I re-read it today to see all of the comments it got. The blogger slams the Chiefs for replacing a happy, valid, web standards design with one built on Flash and more nested tables than you could shake a blink tag at.

I revisited it because I mentioned the Chiefs’ site the other day when summarizing the history of Blogsmith. I knew they were still using the same publishing system that Dave and I built, just with a new design that fits in more with the rest of the NFL and angering standardistas. The CMS was customizable enough to handle all kinds of designs — valid or not.

My favorite gripe in there was this one:

The homepage uses RealPlayer for the video. Who uses Real anymore? When you don’t have Real installed (does anybody?), you get a big image that says “you can’t view Chiefs TV.” Thanks, jackholes. (For added fun, when you roll over the Javascript dropdowns, the video stops working. Yay!)

Aw, you had me at “jackholes.”

I’m pretty sure that all of the NFL video is in Real format, so the Chiefs had no choice in the matter.

In the comments, they quote a really defensive email from Lance, who runs the site. That’s funny, since the Chiefs aren’t known for defense. (Zing! I couldn’t help myself.)

I know Lance and he’s a pretty good guy. I know Jeffrey and he’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever worked with.

It’s admirable that this blogger is giving the Chiefs grief for parting ways with Zeldman and for taking a giant step backwards in their standards support, but to be fair, the Chiefs won like 13 games in a row the year before they redesigned with Zeldman and then had a losing season after the switch.

I would have redesigned and ditched web standards myself.

It’s the afternoon and I probably have less to say on the CEO replacement news today than I did yesterday. Maybe that’s because I’ve answered so many people in email and IM.

It’s the circle of life. I like Jon Miller and he seemed to like me. I told one person today that I wasn’t looking forward to breaking in another CEO — that the new one might like me or he might think I’m an idiot. We’ll see.

I’m a cynic and a bit of a burnout since things haven’t slowed down from startup mode since moving to AOL a year ago, so nothing really fazes me. I’m even a little optimistic: you’d hope that a guy with three decades at a major television network wouldn’t jump to AOL if it was a lost cause.

Again, we’ll see.

Jason wrote a warm post about former AOL CEO Jon Miller, calling him a “quiet samurai” and a mentor. I’ll do something like that myself tomorrow.

My cell phone and AIM have been ringing off the hook this evening since NBC’s Randy Falco was named the new CEO of AOL.

I need to post something that gives these people my take on the situation, but I should sleep on it. I can’t start spreading all of my crazy speculation tonight. I’ll should wait until I’ve had a chance to reflect on it all. Then I can go to town.

Since the first story out there was that Valleywag one, I’ve gotten a bunch of email asking for the real Blogsmith details.

Here goes:

When Jason and I decided to create a blog network, I came up with two names: Weblogs, Inc. and Blogsmith. I registered both domains on the same day, June 15, 2003.

“Weblogs, Inc.” summed up “professional blog publishing company” really well, so Blogsmith (like blacksmith) became the name of our publishing platform. I built the first version of the platform myself in ASP, what I knew best at the time. Then I brought on a guy named Dave to help with development. We spent one summer dabbling in ASP.NET with another developer. I had high hopes for that and it seemed like the right thing to do next, but in the fourth month of a three-month project we figured out that was a disaster. Dave and I had recently built a publishing system for the Kansas City Chiefs in ASP that was scaling quite well (and still does), so we cranked out Blogsmith 2.0 in regular old ASP in time for AdJab to cover the commercials of 2005’s Super Bowl.

That Fall I hooked up with Gavin and we started building the Linux and PHP version of the platform, Blogsmith 3.0. (I think you can tell that I just skipped over a story that I’ll revisit out some other day.)

Later that Fall we sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL. They did not buy Blogsmith, which was a separate company. They bought Weblogs, which was effectively a profitable magazine company that published in blog format. If I had to guess at why they didn’t buy Blogsmith, I’d say that they must have reasoned that they only had to buy Weblogs to hire Jason. The quality of that insight and the way I was giggling when I typed it should be an indication that I can’t tell you what goes on in the mind of AOL — especially back before we were a part of it.

So Blogsmith continued to run outside of AOL and we continued to expand the team and planned for rolling it out to more customers than just Weblogs, but I became busier than ever — mainly integrating Weblogs with AOL. Jason was put in charge of Netscape in the Spring and we ended up raiding my Blogsmith team to build the new Netscape social news platform that went live in June. The Blogsmith team members we didn’t hire onto Netscape I loanedto Netscape.

At the same time, the demand for Blogsmith was heating up. We were struggling to keep up with requests for blogs as our remaining two-man team was building out features for TMZ so they could go live on Blogsmith — also in June when Netscape launched.

June sucked.

Then AOL launched two music blogs in Blogsmith: AOL Music News Blog — which is better than you’d expect from the name — and Spinner.com, an older domain reborn as a great indie music news blog. Following that they launched The Fanhouse covering NCAA football and the NFL and an elections blog which features Sam Donaldson’s Ask Sam column.

That brings us to November and Blogsmith — like Weblogs a year before it — is now owned by AOL.

Obviously AOL likes our enterprise blogging platform, but I think the quality of Blogsmith’s versatile team factored into AOL’s decision — maybe even in equal parts. I reclaimed the team members who had been on a “Netscape detour” and we’ve kicked off some major upgrades. We moved to a multi-city version of the platform. That was both the largest and smoothest server move I’ve ever been a part of. Right now my team is in Florida without me working on an overhaul of the publishing tools.

So what is AOL going to do with Blogsmith? Whatever they want to do with it.

Is AOL going to release Blogsmith to the public as a Typepad/WordPress/YouTube/Wal-Mart/Starbucks-killer or not? Yes.

I hope that clears up all of the questions surrounding AOL’s acquisition of Blogsmith and the product’s history.

If you have any more questions, leave them in the comments and I’ll reply if I can.

There’s a great recap of Lou Reed’s private Web 2.0 show on SFGate. I’m a big fan of his bass player, Rob Wasserman, having seen him play the “Bob and Rob” shows with The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir in LA and Dallas in the 80s. His Duets and Trios discs were amazing.

Lou Reed started out with some guitar warm-up noise, but it was all pretty quiet. After Life’s Good and Gassed and Stoked, people were still standing and talking in the back and sides of the room and it angered Lou. He told us we had 20 minutes and if we wanted to talk through it we could. Then he asked if we wanted him to turn it up and hurt us and soon it was too loud for anyone to talk. Next he did Dirty Boulevard, which was the one song I was looking forward to. After that was Sweet Jane and Lou ended with an unreleased song called Gravity that will be appearing in an AOL-related movie soon.

He told us that this was the moment he’d been waiting for his whole life — that sitting on St. Marks Place that he hoped someday there’d be a cyberspace and an Internet and that he’d be playing for all of us. It was touching to know that this was a dream come true for Lou Reed and that I was there for it.

Really I think he just wanted to jump off the stage and start slugging people.

The deepest coverage of the Web 2.0 Summit isn’t by Forbes, it’s by Valleywag. Maybe it’s not the deepest, but it is the most colorful.

I heard from several people yesterday afternoon that Valleywag broke the news of AOL buying Blogsmith. I didn’t know if it was a friendly post or a mean one so I didn’t know whether to thank the little bearded guy who runs Valleywag or curse him. I expected to read that “entrepreneur Calacanis sold another company to AOL,” but they had a different spin on the deal. I still think they should have worked in that thing where I own Web 2.0 Summit host John Battelle’s domain name.

One correction: Blogsmith has always been a separate company. So Weblogs, Inc. didn’t sell anything to AOL, Blogsmith did. AOL acquired Weblogs over a year ago. It would be odd if Weblogs sold them something new today.

Wag on.

[More information on Blogsmith and AOL is here.]

If you have DirecTV, you have access to a couple of dozen XM satellite radio stations. My favorite one is Flight 26. They play pretty much everything The Peak plays, but with no DJs or commercials. The rare exception is a promo for something going on live on another XM station.

We had a friend over recently and left the sound on with the screen off. She asked if it was “that Westchester station,” meaning The Peak, but our FM tuner doesn’t work so I only listen to The Peak in the car. Inside the house, we listen to Flight 26.

They play healthy doses of Evanescence, Nickelback, John Mayer, Jack Johnson, KT Tunstall, 3 Doors Down, Rob Thomas, No Doubt, the Dave Matthews Band, Fall Out Boy, Keane, Snow Patrol and the Raconteurs, but what really impresses me is that they aren’t ashamed to add Kelly Clarkson to the mix. Come on, she rocks and you know it.

Can you love a DJ-free radio station that you only listen to on your television?

I have a four-year unbroken streak of Fall San Francisco trips that was in danger of not making it to year five, but AOL came through with a Web 2.0 Conference ticket for me.

In 2002, I did one of my Meet The Makers events in SF.

In 2003, I ended up out there doing some consulting work for the company that bought Jason’s VentureReporter product. They were SF-based and wanted to move the web app out there and I was the one-man tech team who created it, so Niki and Jack got to tag along and explore while I worked in their server room.

In 2004, Jason and I took a trip to the Valley to visit Google, Yahoo and a few other places and tell them about the wonders of Weblogs, Inc. Ah…good times. I have a nice Google beach towel from that trip. I kept all the good loot for myself.

In 2005, I abandoned Gavin and Mike in the middle of a CodeJam trip in White Plains with no warning to head to the Web 2.0 Conference. AOL was announcing the Weblogs acquisition and as I was getting on the plane I IMed Gavin the link of PaidContent breaking the news and didn’t give him an indication of whether it was a rumor of the truth. For the next 6 or 8 hours our blogger mailing list was abuzz with hundreds of “is it true?” messages. Yeah, it was true.

I was afraid that I wouldn’t get to see the cold, rainy San Francisco I’ve come to know and love again this year, but AOL got me a last-minute ticket to attend and I’m heading there tomorrow. I don’t foresee any Weblogs-level surprises, but you never know. I’ve got at least one announcement I’ve been sitting on…

If you’d like to get together with me and I haven’t already emailed you, please write me — or use my contact form — so we can meet up.