Rich Skrenta

• Skrentablog
  • The news medium has a message: "Goodbye"
  • Winner-Take-All: Google and the Third Age of Computing
  • PageRank wrecked the web
  • The Secret Source of Google's Power (topix weblog)
  • The Architecture and Ambition of Craigslist (topix weblog)
  • The joy of the hack

• Currently co-founder & CEO of a new search engine startup, Blekko.
  • The Next Google Search Challenger: Blekko (TechCrunch)

• Co-founder & former CEO, Topix.
  Topix is a top-15 news site, and is the leading news community on the web. Topix provides aggregated local news and discussion for every town in the US, as well as thousands of subjects. Topix was majority acquired in 2005 by Gannett, Tribune and Knight-Ridder.

• Co-founder & CEO, NewHoo. NewHoo was acquired by Netscape in 1998 and renamed the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ.

  The ODP's goal was to build a Yahoo-like web directory, but with an open model, relying on volunteers from the web to organize sites rather than a paid staff. The ODP is approximately 5 million sites, organized into 600,000 categories. About 75,000 volunteers have contributed over the lifetime of the project. The ODP's web driven user-generated content model was somewhat novel at the time, and helped inspire the model for Wikipedia.

  The Distributed Yahoo: 'NewHoo' (Wired)
  Netscape Acquires NewHoo (Wired)
  Google: We're down with ODP (Salon)
  'Link Different': Selling Out and Selling Up Online (Village Voice)
  

• I wrote the Elk Cloner virus for the Apple II in 1982, when I was in the 9th grade.
  Elk Cloner was apparently the first microcomputer virus. See The joy of the hack.

• VMS Monster, an old MUD for VMS systems which helped inspire TinyMUD.
  Monster was the first user-extensible online multiplayer dungeon.

• Tass threaded Usenet newsreader, ancestor of Tin.
  Tin was the most popular Unix newsreader back in the days of 80x24 character screens.

• Shadow Island Games
  I ran a commercial multiplayer simulation wargame game called Olympia from 1994-2004.

• Apple II emulator in C and some of my early programming works.

• I once tried to design a programming language with a friend.

• Developed the RingSurf webring system with Greg Lindahl. RingSurf was acquired by Quiklink Interactive.

• The oddest experience I gained at Netscape was learning how to ride a mountain unicycle. (photo 1 photo 2)

That Barnes -- he was something. She should have taken a lesson.
Puffed out her chest and walked through life -- "I want the biggest
and the best and the most of whatever you've got!"  [more]

rt