Category Archives: blogs

Webmaster World Pubcon – Digg’s Owen Byrne, Niall K, Feedburner, Topix

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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!

Widgets (aka Gadgets) and the Web

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Last week’s widgets conference in Silicon Valley would have been fun to attend but I’d just returned to Oregon from Startup Camp and my mom is already giving me a hard time about the Las Vegas trip tomorrow.    I give her credit though for asking what does this trip add to your company’s bottom line?     The obvious answer “Free microbrews and fried wings at the Google engineer event”  won’t impress her, but there are some tough jobs that just need to be done!

However I think Widgets (aka Gadgets) are clearly where the web is going, and perhaps more interesting is that fact that I don’t think this is well understood by many “internet outsiders” yet, and poorly understood by many internet insiders.

The impact of Gadgets  This will start to become clearer as Vista environments merge the browser, desktop, internet, and applications using gadgets for navigation, information, and advertising.     Standard page view and website metrics will break down quickly and we’ll see that publishers will seek to promote even more cluttered, busy, and interactive gadget filled computer screens in an effort to boost revenues.     The future isn’t pretty, but’s it’s sure going to be interesting.

I also need to add Niall Kennedy to the blogroll – he’s one of those folks you really need to pay attention to if you want to see where thing are going to be in a few years.

Let Freedom, and our precious Advertocracy, Ring! Cha-CHING!

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As a general rule I’m optimistic about the intentions of those who govern because I think in general good people go into politics with the sincere intention of making things better. That said, I favor the type of small government intended by the founders, who roll over in their graves which each election, staggered by the scale and sweep of modern governments here and in other “democracies” around the world.

Power was supposed to rest in the hearts and minds of an informed populace, yet we the people have chosen to distance ourselves from government to the degree it’s become an abstraction for most of us at the local, state, and national levels.

The outcome of this election clearly “proves” our system really does allow for significant and peaceful change. Yet it also suggests that our choices are confined to only two — and to my mind somewhat equally inadequate — visions of how we should step into our uncertain American future. Why can’t the pendulum swing sideways for a change rather than back and forth between these two inadequate visions of the right path for America?

Is “democracy” the best word to describe the American political experience? I thought I’d coined the term “Advertocracy” but found a nice Canadian article here about the concept back in 2004.

Clearly our elections, the outcomes of which seem increasingly to depend on razor thin margins, are best described as marketing productions rather than the product of a well-informed citizenry acting on democratic principles.  I’m not as alarmed by this as many “anti-advertising” people who fail to see that we all practice forms of advertising in one way or another whether we are telling a fish story about a life experience, beefing up a resume, talking up our favorite movie, or buying time on TV to say “Vote for Me!”. If you blog for your favorite candidate is that advertising? Of course it is.

Communication categories are breaking down quickly, I hope in favor of transparency. Transparent, full disclosure is a better way to measure integrity than “commercialization”, which we all practice to varying degrees of success.

Yet the fact remains that our election results are largely the product of last minute activity by those least concerned about the outcome based on their perceptions of last minute “sound bites” and largely negative ads. There has GOT to be a better way but in the meantime …

God Bless America, and God Bless Advertising.

Election Math 101

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CNN’s election coverage was, in my opinion, a technological masterpiece combining superb graphics and charts with excellent TV journalism. As I flipped channels last night it was clear that those in charge of the CNN information environment had done an exceptional job of providing lots of information in a good format. Nonetheless it was the quick insights of Democratic strategist Carville who alerted us to importance of the six close senate races and certain congressional districts as key metrics.

One disappointing aspect of CNN TV coverage was the CNN “blog party”. To me it seemed like a good idea gone stupid. The blogger comments were, for the most part, uninspired. TV and blogging don’t really mix which is one reason why blogs are taking over the news space. An active reader can scan many opinions very quickly rather than “waiting” for the TV camera or venue to switch to their items of interest.

I’m not much of a partisan, believing that those in high office are generally sincere and hard working people who differ in ideology rather than virtue. One can only hope that the new composition of American government will bring more innovation to the table while seeking solutions to the pressing problems in Iraq, Sudan, and the world at large.

Blogs vs Mainstream Media. Guess who’s catching up?

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Dave Sifry at Technorati has compiled a wonderful list and report about blogs and mainstream media.   It’s the “State of the Blogosphere” and supports the obvious – blogs are increasing dramatically both in number and in influence.     I think the data supports the notion that we’ll see an information landscape that is driven increasingly by niche interest groups and collaborative online communities.    The traditional models for news and information dissemination — TV, Newspapers, and Magazines — will play roles of decreasing importance.     

At some point in the decline of traditional media there may be a sort of “tipping point” where advertising simply can’t sustain the efforts and we’ll see a mass extinction but I doubt that.  Rather I’d predict (wildly and without a lot of thought) that we’ll see print and TV die very slow, laborious deaths as they struggle to bring online content and online viewers into their spheres of influence and reduce some of the spending patterns (and unfortunately much of the quality, in depth reporting) that has come from the high barriers to entry which kept every Tom, Dick, and Harry news producer out of the space.    Blogs reduce the participation barrier to “literacy” (marginaly literacy at that)  and therefore will change information and news … forever.

Compete.com: Use Caution in providing any personal information or downloading software!?

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One of the most frustrating things “Verification” sites do is make bogus and ridiculous assumptions about websites and offer pathways to remove them if you pony up cash.

When I read about Compete over at Battelle’s I tried it and noted that one of my 10 year old travel sites with a long history and good contact information had a Compete.com “warning”.   Naturally this pissed me off but I assumed a server change last year may have been the problem. 

I felt better when Matt Cutts , whose name appears on no less than the Google Patent documents, pointed out that Compete is questioning his blog’s veracity (see snapshot below).

Adding opportunistic insult to injury, the Compete explanations imply (indirectly) that a legitimate site can get rid of the warning by subscribing to a website service called GeoTrust.     Prices seem to vary depending on the site, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a relationship here, making compete look somewhat more like an extortion racket than a good new online resource.

SnapShot
Use caution in providing any personal information or downloading software on mattcutts.com.

Komarnitsky’s Halloween Webcams – amazing..

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REVISED AGAIN:

Alek informs me that he really is up to amazing X10 cam tricks with lights and inflating Homers despite the fact that it was a hoax back in 2002. It really is amazing then.
REVISED:
Alek Komarnitsky has (not!?) set up a remarkable use of remote online control at his house for Halloween, with 3 webcams, light switches, and inflatables controlled by the viewers. Amazing. NOT Amazing.

Amazing!