Crusty Mark Twain gets his own Google Doodle as does Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

If you’d like to know more, here is Vatornews’ take.

I bought the domain name danperlman.com several years ago with the idea of writing a personal blog.  That never really happened.  Now this domain is becoming the heir to my web writing. 

Among other online toys and personas, I’ve used Techgolem and had planned to write  a blog about tech startups focusing on marketing as techgolem.com.  That never really happened.  So I’m pointing techgolem.com here, so if you’re one of the 3 – 5 people who landed on that site in a day and wonder how the hell you got here – now you know.

For the last year, I’ve written about technology and tools on enquiringmimes.com (I have an unfortunate weakness for stupid domain names). 

Moving forward, the plan will be to still write enquiringmimes.com.  There I’ll continue to cover the kinds of technology and tools that fascinate me and are supposed to make me more productive.

danperlman.com will cover startups, marketing, some technology and probably a little food and the occasional personal stuff. 

I’m also parking previous techgolem and enquiringmime posts here just because.

For awhile the additions were coming hot and heavy, lately we haven’t seen much new — until today.  Gmail added two new ones – “Got the Wrong Bob?” and “Don’t forget Bob” .

• Got the wrong Bob? – Gmail checks to make sure the “Bob” you’re including in your email is the right one based on who you email most often.  When I send to Mark, I mean my brother, not some guy I worked with in a former life.  Addressing email to the wrong person can, of course, be more embarrassing that my example.
• Don’t forget Bob – With “Don’t forget Bob,” you can start composing an email to a group of people, and Gmail will suggest other contacts you might want to include.

To enable either or both,  go to the labs icon in the upper right of your Gmail screen, click it, find the Bob’s and enable them.

Since it is Google, wouldn’t “Got the wrong Sergey” have been catchier?

• Get enough sleep
• Get some exercise — a 15 minute walk is better than no exercise

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Gretchen has promised me an interview for this site after her up-coming book is released in December.  I’m looking forward to it.

What do you have to do to live?

“Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they’re probably going to live.”

It’s true, in my career with startups, I’ve done both.  There was DASCOM – get rich; RoverLive – die.

Unfortunately for snaptalent.com, a Y Combinator portfolio company – they’ve just announced that they have died due to “market conditions”.  They had tried a couple of strategies in the job recruitment market – not a good place to have been in the last 2 years.

Read the Slate article.

See that happy smile.  He’s Trader Joe‘s biggest fan.

The story as told over at BoomTown is that Ning wasn’t looking for funding, but Lightspeed Venture Partners wanted to participate in Ning’s funding because of Ning’s amazing growth and Ning was okay with it because they liked the idea of getting dough from a high profile VC like Lightspeed.

Win-Win.

Please take our money, we know it’s only $15 million but please take it.  Okay for you, we’ll take it.  We don’t really need it, you know.

The new $15M investment brings to $119M total funding taken by Ning — remember the founders of Ning are Marc “Mosaic – Netscape” Andreesen and CEO Gina Bianchi.

Who says the bubble has burst?  The new funding round makes Ning’s valuation a whopping $750M.

So far for Ning, monetization has meant advertising — they’ve been using Google’s platform, but are working on their own.  They also charge some modest usage fees for customizations like using your own domain name for you Ning network.

He’s the editor of Wired Magazine and  has written a just released book called Free that makes the argument that the ever reducing cost of technology has made it possible to be successful by giving away products and making your money on some aspect of the popularity of the free product.  That would be how Google gives away search so that they can sell targeted ads on the search results page.  The book was based on a Wired Magazine article by Anderson published last year.

A minor firestorm over Free started when the well-respected writer Malcolm Gladwell wrote a review critical of the new book in the New Yorker.

Prompting Seth Godin, marketing guru, to write in his blog

Malcolm is wrong

I’ve never written those three words before, but he’s never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go.

Godin makes the point that like it or not Free is the world we already live in.

Then, John Gruber, the well known tech blogger in appreciation of the Gladwell review wrote

“I’ll preface my recommendation of this book review by telling you that I’m a big Gladwell fan, and that I think Chris Anderson is a hypocritical blowhard who tells you to give your work away for free while he earns enormous sums selling decidedly-not-free books.”

Which Anderson answered online by stating that he may be a “blowhard”  but not a hypocritical one and Free would be available free as both a text version and a full audiobook.  I’ve posted the text of the book below and a link to the audiobook.  Read/listen for yourself and decide whether you buy the argument.

Chris Anderson’s first article on Free in Wired Magazine

Malcolm Gladwell Review of Free in The New Yorker

Seth Godin’s Malcolm is Wrong piece

John Gruber in Daring Fireball calling Anderson names.

Go here to download full free audiobook of Free.

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson