The front page of CNN currently reads:

"Bush: Kerry owes troops an apology".

At first glance, I read it as:

"Kerry: Bush owes troops an apology."

This mod re-write strategy seems to fall into the 'duh why didn't I think of that' category of really simple but perfect solutions.

People use mod rewrites to trick google into indexing stuff create pretty urls.

Rails and a bunch of other frameworks force a grammar for links based upon actions and data when really most of the time there is no distinction made, there are just name/value pairs passed to the url. e.g. color=red is no different from colorit=red.

The strategy below loops through name/value pairs as url query string parameters and actually spits out the name and the value in the url:

site.com/name1/value1/name2/value2.

There are some potential problems with null values and ordering, but I like the idea.

Create Dynamic URLs With Mod_Rewrite and PHP Functions by www.Shadow-Fox.net

The greening of The Valley, why sustainable companies matter.

Evan williams and Biz Stone have taken back Odeo from its backers to form part of a company focused on innovation through multiple products, rather than exit. It's like a tech. startup version of the recent trend for private equity takeovers of public companies. But it could point to a better model for Internet startups - the model of normal companies like corner stores. Here's why.

[update: The sustainable model is not new, it is the way that almost all companies outside of the bubble-prone technology world work, however, sometimes the bleeding obvious is worth pointing out. Venture backing should be for the exception - for the exceptionally rapidly growing.]

The Exit Model

Every venture funded tech company is predicated on the idea of 'exit', the point where the company is sold to a bigger one or has an IPO, so that the investors see a return and move on.

This time round, in the 2.0 boom, there are almost no IPOs, and the exceptions, like Vonage, have been a disaster.

That leaves the second option, selling the company to a bigger one. Unlike during the dotcom boom, the big galaxies, Google, Yahoo, Ebay etc. are properly formed, and surely ready to suck in more stars.

This expectation has been fueled by three large success-story acquisitions, Myspace, Skype and YouTube.

However, only one of these companies is in the Valley, and 1 does not make a trend.

In addition, these are all-or-nothing plays. In a parallel universe, all three companies could have folded, leaving them in the same position as their numerous competitors. Their success was not planned and was very high risk. They are species that survived in a particular evolutionary niche that opened up, they were not 'intelligently designed'.

If there is no trend for large acquisitions, this still leaves the smaller ones. Business week recently ran a headline about 'Yahoo's spending spree', a spending spree of such wild abandon that it includes a single sub $10M acquisition in a year.

Many so-called acquisitions are glorified signing bonuses. They are the result of a finite employment pool where the galaxies have to compete with each other for stars, where the stars are the people not the product.

If the stars are the product, then, just like real galaxies, the Internet galaxies, are really good star factories. In fact the dirty little secret is that they are sometimes better positioned for product development than the startups. A single bowel movement from Google and out pops Google Calendar, wiping out the hopes of a multitude of Internet Calendaring startups like Trumba, in an instant.

Back to Yahoo's one acquisition. Again, 1 does not make a trend.

If you can't IPO or sell then what alternative is there?

The Sustainable Model

The alternative is to question the whole notion of exit and to build a real company.

When I was an architect, you didn't set up a practice on your own to 'exit', you setup to build a company that made a profit and made products that made the environment a better place along the way - a sustainable enterprise. The whole idea of 'exit' in the context of building an architecture firm, or a legal or medical practice is preposterous.

The reason why tech. companies have fallen into the mindset of raise money and exit, 'live fast and sell young' is that they traditionally needed large amounts of capital, both to bootstrap and later to fuel growth. They needed to gain 'market share' dictated by quantitative things like price rather than intangibles such as good design . But that has changed.

What we are seeing now is the second phase of the Internet, what some people call web 2.0. In this phase the infrastructure and 'platforms' are in place, the freeways and toll bridges and shopping malls are there but there is an opportunity to build retail outlets that go in the malls. Some of these outlets may be JCPenney, and others may be Prada. The 'exit' model favors Penney over Prada.

The recent trend has been to keep the model of 'exit', but to raise less money. Wherever you turn now, there are flocks of 'Angels', from VCs that are downgrading to people with a few bucks extra after refinancing their real estate gain. But this is all still predicated on the idea of 'exit' - which just isn't there.

The correct model for web 2.0 should be sustainable growth, its the Obvious Corp.

When you describe the Obvious Corp - as Evan Williams has, it sounds a bit like an incubator - you work on multiple projects and some may even get spun off, who knows. But this is not an incubator - incubators do not work for the founders, they work for the owners. Founders like to feel ownership of their ideas, and as much of their equity as they can keep.

Most importantly, incubators are still based upon the premiss of exiting. Apple Computer and Gawker Media produce multiple products but they are certainly not incubators, they are both sustainable - i.e. profit making companies that are based upon innovation rather than exit.

As the technology market matures, value added qualitative aspects such as good design will become more important, allowing mini versions of Apple to thrive - companies based upon product design and innovation rather than spreadsheets and MBAs.

I have started Venture backed companies, worked at an incubator and started non-venture backed companies. I have had more fun, produced more and made more money from the latter.

What is wrong with your exit model may be the model of exit itself, and a sustainable [i.e. normal] company like the Obvious Corp. may be the answer that is - obvious.

evhead: The Birth of Obvious Corp.

The Richard Dawkins foundation is accepting donations.

If you are a tolerant, reasonable person that opposes religious persecution, perhaps you might accept that:

1. Faith, the opposite of reason - is unreasonable.

2. Tolerating the intolerance which exists in all major religions - is intolerant.

3. Allowing a child to be automatically given its parents' religion (often irreversably reducing the capacity for freedom of thought, religious or otherwise, as an adult) - is religious persecution.

In which case I recommend you give this 'reason based initiative' lots of tax deductable money.

You will be contributing to truly reasonable and tolerant cause, making a stand against religious persecution - in a way that only atheists can.

(At last RDF means something useful!)

RichardDawkins.net - The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science

Iraqi blogs make for depressing reading these days. The war appears to be all but lost.

Zeyad says:

"Another close friend of mine has been killed in Baghdad. We had lunch together in Baghdad just days before I left.

I can't concentrate on anything any more. I should not be here in New York running around a stupid neighbourhood, asking people about their 'issues'.

I now officially regret supporting this war back in 2003. The guilt is too much for me to handle."

Healing Iraq

And nothing short of a revolt has happened over some pretty weird comments by the increasingly deranged 'Iraq the Model'.

Iraqi Konfused Kollege Kid: Iraqi Bloggers Discuss Lancet Study, Iraq The Model

If the most stupid thing ever said about the Internet was Ted Stevens' infamous "the Internet is a series of Tubes" speech, Andy Kessler's pieces about the Internet as a series of pipes must rank amongst the most intelligent.

If you can create a 'virtual pipe' between the service and the customer, where the the customer cannot exit, and you can hold on to it, and broaden your base - you win.

But there are all sorts of pipes, and nothing special about the material the pipe is made of, what matters is where is links to and from, in the multi dimensional phase space that defines a market.

Unlike the days of mainframe and frame relay, there is nothing special about the technology of the pipe itself - there are lots of pipes, a road network rather than a railroad system, and you can try building them anywhere.

In many ways this is a decription of a natural ecosystem where there is no need for 'intelligently designed' infrastructure, but self emergent relationships based upon environmental niches.

Go read Kessler - its worth it.

Andy Kessler

The latest Wists shopping blog, Popgloss launches today.

Popgloss covers womens clothing and accessories, an eclectic mix of quirky and fun or innovative design - fashion without the attitude.

It has a similar feel to Cribcandy, lots of pictures few words, updated dozens of times a day and with the ability to save pictures and links to anything you like with one click.

After luring in the Bush Administration with two tame prequels, the world's most famous journalist delivers a devastating blow.

The Age summarizes the Woodward stance. Imagine for one second, while reading it, that there is no God, or that, less contraversially, there is no God that matches the sect within a sect within a sect that is Mr. Bush's god.

With that single supposition, you leave the United States as the worlds most powerful vessel, rudderless, drifting aimlessly, its captain asleep at the wheel. A giant aircraft-carrier Mary Celeste bristling with nuclear materiel.

Woodward's conclusion is a serious as it gets - the United States is leaderless.

"Mr Bush emerges as a man who not only lacks intellectual curiosity but is untroubled by self-doubt, a man who constantly tells his aides that as commander-in-chief his job is to exude confidence in his decisions. He is, according to Woodward, a man of deep faith, who prays regularly for guidance and believes his prayers are answered."

Bush battens down for hurricane Woodward - World - theage.com.au