File this under not communicating with your IT department about what is going on in the company.

On Monday, DVD rental service Netflix announced it was cutting its prices to better compete with Blockbuster's prices and in-store redemption service. Shortly afterwards netflix.com crashed and did not come back online until late Tuesday. It was said it was not due to the power outages in the San Francisco area, and though a specific reason was not given, it was reported the Web site was being updated to reflect the price changes.

Updating prices causes an entire network of Web servers to crash? Who wrote that software? When I worked for a publicly-traded company in the past, I was always on alert from marketing and investors’ relations whenever the company would announce earnings or have an investor’s call, as people would hit our Web site for the information or links. We had sufficient capacity with out Web servers and network, but hardware can always fail. This brings back memories of the crash of Wal-Mart’s Web site last year on “black Friday” or the busiest shopping day of the year the day after Thanksgiving.

Planning for such events and having the network, hardware and software capacity can prevent such events. Sure it may be expensive, but what price for such embarrassment?

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One feature I like about Google Reader is the ability to subscribe to podcasts and play them on the Web page. However when performing my daily routine of reading feeds and listening to podcasts as I have my first of many cups of coffee, if I click on a new entry while listening to a podcast, the podcast stops and goes away – I have to go in and change the view to read all, and then restart the podcast.

Last week I noticed a "popout" link next to the audio player. By clicking on it, a small pop-up window with just the audio player appears, and I can play the podcast and continue reading other feeds with no problem. The screenshot in this post shows the feed for The Hot Iron audio version from Odiogo with the popout window on top of some of the text – click on the screen to see a larger version.

This is a great new feature and adds more fuel to the debate over what is the best feed reader. Though Google Reader could improve its batching and sorting capabilities, allowing me to listen to The M Show while I read my other feeds is an advantage over the others.

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File this one under worlds colliding for the benefit of domain names at the expense of Hollywood disobedience.

Rob of TheRobboReport.com sent this article from TMZ.comon domain names, where it mentions that domainers with an eye towards Tinseltown have registered the domain names lohanbusted.com and lohaninjail.com back in May, prior to the rehab visit and subsequent arrest of actress Lindsay Lohan. The article even posed a challenge for someone to register britneymeltsdown.com, which was done earlier today.

TMZ.com is an entertainment gossip Web site that is somehow affiliated with AOL. If you think you may have heard of TMZ, you may have seen it featured on your favorite local newscast, as in the constant effort my local media to not cover local events, they prominently feature the escapades of celebrities... but I digress.

Domain names registered based on news events is nothing new, but the coverage of it by media sources outside of the tech world is, and is very welcome.

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This morning was the likemind coffee meetup in dozens of cities around the world. It marks one year of these coffee mornings, started by 2 gents who finally met for coffee themselves and decided to invite others.

This is the picture from the Chicago likemind, with Raza, Clay and myself. It was taken outside of Intelligentsia Coffee on Randolph at Wabash, and in the background is the Randolph L station.

By the way, Raza heard about likemind on WindyBits. Hope to see more people next month. And did I mention there is free coffee compliments of Anamoly?

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As a few people have asked me already, I thought I’d go public and say that, with regrets, I will not be at TECH cocktail 5 (or TC5) tonight at John Barleycorn – Wrigleyville in Chicago. I have a prior engagement, my improv show, and as they say... the show must go on!

Good luck to TC’s founders Frank and Eric, and thank you for starting and leading what has become Chicago’s leading networking event for the tech / online world. I am looking forward to TC6 already!

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