As a pilot, I found myself in aviation heaven, and spent about 3 hours wandering around taking snapshots with my new Canon G10. Here’s my favorite shot, of the space shuttle Enterprise…

and here’s the entire set of 71 photos.

UPDATE: Hmmmm, still broken on Safari and Webkit, but good on Firefox. Something more interesting going on, probably with latest build of Webkit or my iPhone upgrade today. Weird.

Deliciously ironic, no? Mind Valley indeed. But perhaps they’re on to something here — put three grammatical errors in one AdWord ad that touts your AdWords expertise, and get free attention from bloggers! Let’s see the landing page:

Sigh. Doesn’t anyone care about copy these days?

The 100th Day is a traditional milestone in Japanese culture, marking both the lucky number 100 and the age at which infants are taken out into public. For a few more pictures, see the photo set on Flickr.

The two companies use slightly different representations of data on their respective graphs–Compete shows monthly unique visitors on the Y axis, while Quantcast shows daily uniques. They differ also in the color scheme, unfortunately, with Compete using blue, red and green for the first, second and third domain, and Quantcast using blue, green and red. It’d be nice to have some config options for these items, but the comparisons are still useful I think.

If a domain is a “quantified publisher” on Quantcast, you’ll see a breakdown of U.S. and Global traffic on the Quantcast chart, and you can trust those numbers more since they’re a direct measurement of site traffic. Otherwise, Quantcast numbers are U.S. only.

Statsaholic still gets crazy traffic, currently over 1 million page views from 550,000 uniques/month and rising. Funny how little hobby sites can just take off.

Here’s Colson with his big sis Lydia:

and with his eyes open as far as he can manage at the age of one day:

Mom is recovering nicely, and Colson is healthy and happy. We should be coming home from the hospital on Wednesday. It’s been almost 13 years since I last had a baby to take care of, and I’m thrilled that the adventure is beginning again. I’m certain there’s more to follow…

Bezos takes the stage. Intro remarks: all about Amazon Web Services, which is exhibiting here. The roster includes SQS, Mechanical Turk, S3, EC2. I still like Amazon for books. Is that so wrong? His gist: you can use web services to scale backend operations like hosting at a fraction of the cost of building it yourself. And ultimately, what Bezos is reminding us is that Amazon’s a software company, not an online retailer. But do you want to be #1 in online retail, or another web services company competing with Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP, etc? Yet Bezos aims to make the case that his take on web services isn’t just like any other company. Time will tell.

Interesting question from Tim O’Reilly: What’s up with the controversy over Alexaholic, especially now that it’s Statsaholic?

Bezos: Alexaholic’s domain still is there, but it redirects to the new site. [Actually, it hasn't redirected for a couple of weeks now. -R.]

Tim: You should all get along.

Bezos: There’s no open API for Alexa graphs. [True, but I've offered to pay anyway. Alexa can easily shut off the hotlinking of their graphs to the world, but they don't, and most likely won't -- I'm guessing they see the marketing value of having their graphs (now with large watermarked logos) spread all over the web. -R.]

Tim: That was true for Google Maps at first. Come on, kiss and make up. Play nice, kids. Everyone loves Statsholic.

Bezos: This is a business decision. We’ve got trademarks to protect. Talk to the hand, and talk to the lawyer. So there.

[Note: those were not exact quotes]

Props to Tim for calling me earlier today to get my side of the story, and for broaching the subject with Jeff, but his answers certainly douse what little hope I was clinging to that Jeff Bezos, champion of Web 2.0 services, was willing to direct his subsidiary towards an amicable resolution. I met Jeff at FooCamp last summer and had a nice, cordial conversation that included Alexaholic and BookCrossing. This was right during the time Alexa was letting my fledgling Alexaholic website grow, with their blessing.

Ah, those were the days.

A lot of good things happened, innovation blossomed, but now we are entering a more pragmatic phase, where the large players like Google and Amazon who distributed the API elixir are taking control back.

Google My Maps is a case in point, where the company is competing with its “users.” Don’t worry – it won’t be the last time you will see Mountain View adopt tactics that in the past were associated with Microsoft. Keeping that $145 billion market capitalization intact is a bitch!

Google is not alone, as one of my readers points out. Michael Arrington has been following the feud between Amazon-owned Alexa.com and Alexaholic (or whatever it is being called this week.) In the end Alexaholic/Statsaholic features ended up becoming part of Alexa.com offering. Why let a little seemingly parasitic service live if you can make ad dollars off those page views?

See the full article at Web 2.0: End of Innocence. This whole ordeal certainly has erased whatever innocence I had about mashups, APIs, and the seemingly benign nature of large web companies.