ReadWriteWeb

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

Yobongo, the iPhone app that "makes it super fun and easy to chat with people nearby," has finally gone live in the iTunes App Store. After a month in beta testing, Yobongo has shown itself to be a well-designed, functional mobile chat room.

Now, just one thing remains to be seen - can it deliver on its promise of "ambient real-time communication"?

Over the next two days at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs, California, more than 50 companies will take the stage and introduce their product in six minutes flat. It's a format that has become an industry standard, with conferences like TechCrunch 50, TechCrunch Disrupt and LAUNCH following in its footsteps.

A continual criticism of DEMO over the years, however, has been that the price of entry is simply too high. At nearly $20,000, the cost of getting on stage at one of the world's pre-eminent tech conferences can be prohibitive to say the least, so we decided to take a look at how funding broke down for the $1,000,000 in presentations we're seeing over the 48-hours.

Imagine getting points in an online game each time you drink more water, floss your teeth or take a step toward some other healthy lifestyle goal. That's the promise of Green Goose, a company that uses tiny sensors and accelerometers on stickers or credit cards to track everyday behavior and record it online.

The company demonstrated today how its technology, which is currently in pre-production in China, lets a user put a sticker containing a tiny sensor and a year's worth of battery power, on the handle of a toothbrush, for example. The motion of the toothbrush sends a message to the Green Goose base station which then publishes a record of the activity online. A wide range of everyday activities can be tracked and the whole system was a big crowd pleaser at Jason Calacanis's Launch conference. Two members of the panel of investor judges put $100,000 into the startup on the spot while the company was still on stage. A third, Bill Warner, had already invested. "It's amazing and there's so much more you haven't even heard," he said about the company.

Testing your website is crucial, but far too often, it simply doesn't happen. The reasons can include cost, convenience, tech resources - you name it. But a company onstage today at LAUNCH wants to take away those excuses and make website testing - and, of course, website optimization - incredibly easy.

Overstat has a number of competitors in the optimization space, including the Y Combinator alum Optimizely. But Overstat's presentation today at LAUNCH made it look like it had a simple installation (just some JavaScript) and interface for both identifying problems and making updates.

We've written before about the importance of having a Web presence for your startup, even if you aren't prepared to launch. But a team at this weekend's Startup Weekend in Philadelphia has taken this idea one step further, designing a product that will help startups build viral launch pages: LaunchRock.

LaunchRock is one of those incredibly simple but incredibly awesome ideas. Built by Jameson Detweiler, Dave Drager, and Stephen Gill over the three days of Startup Weekend, LaunchRock makes it incredibly simple to get interested users signed up for your startup service or product, pre-launch.

A little over six weeks out and already everybody's talking about what company will break out at this year's SXSW Interactive. There's been a lot of talk about apps like GroupMe, Beluga and Fast Society, which all make group communication quick and easy, but what about talking to people who you don't already know?

Enter Yobongo, the iPhone app that "makes it super fun and easy to chat with people nearby." Today, the company is launching into private beta and ReadWriteWeb readers will get priority access after the jump.

As you prepare to launch your product, there are a number of things you can do in order to make sure things go as smoothly as possible. We've written before about the steps you can take, for example, to make sure that your website is ready even if your startup isn't.

The blog Bootstrapping Independence recently posted a very thorough list of some additional resources and reminders for building a detailed launch plan. The suggestions include a number of other great posts for background reading, including ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on product launch promotion.

Even if you're not quite ready to show the public your product, you can still create a good website and a solid online presence for your startup. I want to sidestep the argument about whether or not it's good to be "stealth" or not, and work with the assumption that if you've purchased the domain name, you're going to put up some sort of website.

So here are a few of the things you should consider when building your startup's site: