Here at Webmaster World Pubcon in Las Vegas:

Gred Niland introduced the feedmaster formerly of Technorati and Microsoft –
Niall Kennedy who discussed some technical aspects.

Rick from Feedburner:

Feedburner sends 25 million feeds per day and this is just the beginning. With IE7 RSS feed reader integrated, RSS will explode to mainstream [yes! a critical point!]. Auto discovery must be well-configured.

Feed publishing is diversifying. More podcasters than radio stations.

MEME sites like Techmeme.com are processing the RSS more deeply, looking at linking relationships. Add links if you want to be ‘seen’ at Techmeme. Edgeio as another example of RSS facilitating info movement. Sphere.

Owen Byrne – Digg co-founder: We were not the Guy Kawasaki “sweet spot” startup of Standford PhD students jumping the curve, rather Kevin Rose Screensavers hackin’ dude and Owen webmaster from Nova Scotia.

Owen question: How are people using Digg for marketing? Owen: “Digg this buttons”, “good content” is the best way to get on front page. Also, participating in the community will help.

Kevin’s inspirations: Wisdom of crowds – user driven news. Could not break into Slashdot – frustrating.

Paris Hilton Cell phone scandal spiked Digg into the big time Feb 2005. Major optimization ensued. July 2005 – seed money. July 2006 -more capitalization?

500k ACTIVE contributing users. 20 million monthly uniques(!). [Wow, that’s sure higher than other reports, but Owen’s got the logs so I doubt he’d mislead on this. I had a chance to ask him about this after and he’s very confident (obviously) of the number. I also asked why Comscore’s numbers diverge so greatly from Digg’s but promised I wouldn’t quote his answer – sorry.

Owen’s Bio over at Digg

My (Joe’s)  personal view of Comscore is that they are starting to suffer greatly from measuring things like RSS and gadget activity. We are certainly close to needed new metrics to take gadgets, pops, and scripting activity into account as well as what Scoble calls “engagement”, which is hard to measure but an important notion of how users react to websites.

Rick at TOPIX.net – local is the last mile on the internet. Connecting local to the big corporate sites and companies is where a lot of money is going. RSS feeds are 1/3 of clicks through the service. 20 million story clicks to sites per month. USE Rss to increase distribution. Add comments.

digg it!