The Big Reveal

Now that the conference is over, it's finally safe to talk about what we've been laboring over in secret these three long months. Geoff and I left Clarium to found Udorse, a new kind of web application Geoff calls a 'visual endorsement engine'. The core idea is pretty simple - we give you a platform to tag interesting stuff in your pictures and link those tags anywhere on the web. To the extent you tag something that has a partnership agreement with us, a link there becomes a referral that generates a couple of cents every time someone clicks through or a couple of bucks every time someone buys something. Then whenever Udorse gets paid, users get paid. Your tags (we call them 'udorsements') function just like micro-sized endorsement deals, from the stuff you are already sharing online.

We applied to and were accepted as finalists at this year's TechCrunch50 conference, so we had to keep our plans secret so as not to spoil the big reveal at the show. But that's all over now, and you can see video of Geoff's riveting stage performance above.

Since this is like the sixth or seventh time I've taken this blog out of semi-retirement, you'd think I wouldn't make a big deal about but you would be WRONG, mister.

It's On With Alexa Chung

The office is actually full of enormous televisions, but Big Hedge Fund has them tuned to the financial news all day, so I hadn't seen of MTV's new show until today. Isn't it only like a month old? Because Chung is a complete natural. Someone at MTV deserves a gold star for hiring her.

Is it like racist against the UK to compare this to Craig Furgeson's start on the Late Late Show?

Ganstagrass

Their severs are crawling under the load from Boing Boing, but I can't really complain since that's how I found them too. Head over to Ganstagrass.com, where the self-titled hip-hop-slash-bluegrass album is available for free download. A few seconds into the first track and you'll know – these guys are doing something right.

Knocked Up

When Kevin Smith goes to sleep at night, he dreams of making movies like Judd Apatow.

Close to Greatness

A source tells me that a girl I kissed once holds the American record in a swimming event. That is, at some point she swam a race faster than any American woman that has ever lived. The best ever. "You must feel pretty good about yourself, hearing that," my source teasingly prompts.

She's right. I kinda do.

Baby Barista

Going a week or two without updates is pretty common in these here parts, but it feels especially barren when I do come back and there's a link in the comments to the positively verbose Baby Barista, who appears to write more good gossip in a day than I hear in a week. And in British!

Mean Girl

So this show 30 Rock is like Tina Fey's secret plan to make me fall in love with her, right? Because it's totally working.

iCovet

Damn. I know what I'm spending the first $600 of my summer salary on.