May
13
Taking some time off is always a good way to reassess the current state of things. Being half-way through my almost two week long blog hiatus (thanks to some conference travel and vacation), I have started thinking about what to do next once I come back (besides switching hosts).
The blog has grown beyond any of my expectations this year (including having some headlines on TechMeme, joining Grand Effect and the l33t redditt, having more subscribers and hits to the blog than ever before), but right now, it’s starting to feel a bit stagnant to me.
Maybe it’s just the fact that the news cycle is heading for its summer slow-down, or maybe I really need that vacation coming next week.
But I think to keep the blog growing beyond where it is right now, I will need to make some changes.
Sometimes I wonder if I need to start getting more focused in the topics I cover, but then I enjoy just writing about whatever I feel I have something interesting to say about - and I’m definitely not going to hold back on what I’m passionate about - and I’m definitely not going to be left out on a good bitchmeme, no matter the topic.
I have also thought abut starting a second blog about a slightly different subject - still tech oriented, but with a very specific angle that really wouldn’t fit in here. But then, my time is limited and I’m not sure I can take on writing and promoting a second blog at this point (though I have the name registered).
Or maybe I will just continue doing things as I do today. As you can see, I’m not quite sure yet…
May
12
I’ve been out for a few days and just home for one more before I take off for yet another week.
From what I can see, I didn’t miss anything too crazy (though Scoble is crying tonight, I assume).
I liked MG Siegler’s thoughts on giving attribution to fellow bloggers - it’s definitely something I have seen a few times myself. MG singles out Ars Technica, but let’s just say it’s not just one blog that does this.
Also, Steven Hodson’s piece on Setting Your Brand Free is a good summary and analysis of the current trend of content and the discussion about it moving away from your blog and the consequences of that (and thanks to Steven for his daily wrap-up posts - they are a great way for catching up).
However, besides maybe the discussions around Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, and some more chatter around Twitter, it seems I didn’t miss anything too crazy.
I hope something interesting happens tomorrow before I’m out for yet another week 
May
6
Just a quick programming note: I’ll be traveling for most of the time during the next two weeks, so updates will be few and in between, starting tomorrow.
I will be checking in now and then and if something really interesting happens, I’m sure I won’t be able to stop myself from writing about it, but in general, I will laying low for a while.
That said, some of my friends will be filling in for me with a guest post or two while I will hanging out in places that for the first few days will look very much like this:
For the second week, though, I will replace that with places that look more like this:
Guess which one I’m looking forward to more
Pictures from Flickr courtesy of VoxPhoto and rexb
May
6
As you know, I have been a member of the Grand Effect blog network for a while now and today, I am happy to report that my cranky friend Steven Hodson from WinExtra, Mark Evans from MarkEvansTech, and U.K. blogger Joe Anderson from Webby’s World have joined the Grand Effect blog network:
Joe Anderson (Webby’s World) is a tech blogger from the U.K. who’s been doing the blog thing for a long time, having kept up his current site since 2005. He has a lot of loyal readers and a decidedly unique Anglo-European stance on his articles.
Steven Hodson (WinExtra) is a self-described “cranky old fart” whose commentary and analysis on tech happenings and new media is always fresh and interesting.
Mark Evans (Mark Evans Tech) focuses on Internet and technology trends and news. He also writes for a number of other blogs, including All About Nortel and is one of the organizers of the mesh conference in Toronto.
All of them are great bloggers I have been reading for a while (if you don’t, I recommend you do) and I couldn’t be more happy with them joining Grand Effect.
The idea behind Grand Effect is to create a small network of dedicated technology bloggers that will not only help us sell advertising but also to create a support network for solo bloggers.
With the addition of these three new blogs, I’m feeling very confident that we are going in the right direction.
May
5
The fact that Google Reader now allows you to share any webpage in Google Reader through a bookmarklet (how many bookmarklets do you have installed already, btw?) and with the revolutionary feature of adding notes to that is, in too many ways, yet another example of Google reinventing wheels it already has (and just adding functionality that had been hacked into it already anyway).
Google already has a note-taking application and it is far superior: Google Notebook. It does a million things better than Google Reader for sharing notes. You can share the notebooks, other users can comment on items, you can add pictures and tags, it has RSS feeds you can subscribe to (and hence add to your shared feeds if you are so inclined), there is a Firefox extension that gives you direct access to your notes from a small pop-up.
The Google Reader notes function is simply another example of what happens far too often with Google products these days (and not just at Google, I might add). Already existing apps linger while another group reinvents the wheel instead of integrating these different apps with each other (think Google Talk and GrandCentral).
Besides that, the fact that these posts shared through the bookmarklet are not de-duplicated (as Robert Scoble has already pointed out to anybody who would listen), isn’t really helping keeping noise down at all.
May
5
Once again, the Elite Tech Podcast crew (aka the “Rat Pack of Blogging”) got together for another fun filled Sunday afternoon to discuss the latest and greatest stories according to the votes on the l33t reddit.
This week the show once again features our regular core group of talkers, including our moderator Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, our producer Art Lindsey, Louis Gray, Steven Hodson, and myself.
New this week: intro music and editing courtesy of Art Lindsay, as well as bleeped out swearing.
Some of the topics we discussed this time:
- Why can’t some Mac fans understand that not everyone wants a Mac? - a Mac vs. PC discussion that was almost bordering on friendly and reasonable.
- Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails - is Twitter’s problem really Ruby on Rails?
- Early adopter angst
- Robert Scoble
- Second Life and Giant Typewriters
- Microsoft and Yahoo - what self-respecting tech podcast would manage not to talk about this?
You can play the show right here with the player below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.
Get the Elite Tech News podcast here.
Add directly to iTunes here (or give us a rating).
Add directly to your Zune here.
May
4
I didn’t bother writing about the Microsoft/Yahoo non-deal yesterday - there are others more qualified to take apart the minutia of this event.
What was interesting to me yesterday, though (and apparently also to Robert Scoble), was that the conversation on FriendFeed was so much more interesting, in-depth, faster and interactive than anything I was seeing on my Twitter feed at the same time.
I think there are a few reasons for this:
- no time delay before posts appear
- friends of friends feature exposes discussions you wouldn’t see otherwise but that your friends are involved in
- the full discussion is exposed - not just one side you follow on Twitter and it is formatted in an easy to read format
- everybody is now on FriendFeed - I can barely think of any of my Twitter friends who are not also on FriendFeed just as often
Even the discussion of items originally posted on Twitter is usually better on FriendFeed than on Twitter itself.
What can Twitter do?
Loic Le Meur has announced that Twhirl is going to switch to XMPP - which is going to make Twitter much more interactive as posts appear in real-time. For the discussion of breaking-news items and to have a real discussion, that’s a must.
Twitter should also focus more on its mobile offerings. The group SMS service it was conceived as has been forgotten a bit as Twitter was turned into a chat room through 3rd party clients.
Sidenote: it’s interesting that the innovation is mostly coming from outside developers and not from Twitter itself.
May
2
The Grand Effect blog network of which I am a proud member (see banner on the top of the page) has just relaunched its new website, courtesy of the design work of David Peralty of Xfep and programmer Andrew McCloud.
The current Grand Effect members are founder Sarah Perez of Sarah in Tampa, Corvida from SheGeeks, MG Siegler of ParisLemon, David Peralty of Xfep, and Martin Brinkmann from gHacks.
Over time, we will roll more bloggers into the network, but the general idea is to stay small and focused.
What’s New?
You can subscribe to a master feed for all members and short member bios are also now online.
Advertise with us
If you’re interested in reaching the Grand Effects audience of tech enthusiasts, bloggers, webmasters, and business owners, you can contact us through e-mail at advertising@grandeffect.com or jump on over to our Advertising pagefor more details.
More coverage: Mark Hopkins at Mashable
May
2
I find myself partly agreeing with Randall C. Kennedy over at Infoworld when he says that what he calls a “Streaming Office Suite” will eventually kill the pure online office suites (see his post for a full definition of a streaming app - it’s basically a chopped up version of software that is downloaded and cached onto a computer on demand).
Faced with a decision between a watered-down, limited, web-dependent pseudo-suite and the full power and richness of Microsoft Office, users will flock to the Microsoft camp - especially if the company prices a “pay as you go” Office aggressively. And then it will be “game over” for Google Apps and its ilk.
Sridhar Vembu from Zoho doesn’t quite agree with this (no real surprise there, I guess):
Let me make a bold prediction of my own: streaming office will fail. Note that I am not talking about MS office per se here - I am suggesting that the streaming incarnation of it will fail. Web suites, including Zoho, will succeed in carving out serious market share. Within that space, our own goal is sustainable, profitable market share, that keeps us vibrant and innovative. With our breadth and depth of applications, we are well on our way.
I think this is an interesting question that really stabs into the heart of how our computing experience will look like five years from now - but I don’t think this is an either/or question. Web apps, desktop apps and ’streaming apps’ (if they ever become a reality) can happily live together and all of them have distinctive advantages over the others.
Web office suites right now are highly limited in their functionality. None of the apps out right now have the capabilities to even barely rival MS Office 2007 or OpenOffice. Over time, of course, that could change and with more of the web suites allowing local caching, at least you don’t have to be online all the time anymore to use them and they are lighweight - but their functionality is very limited.
As you can see, I’m not a big fan of the current breed of web office suites - they just don’t do the things I need them to do my work just yet. However, they are improving quickly and today’s versions will look quite antiquated just a year from now.
Sure, as Sridhar points out, a web suite is light on local computing resources, allowing it to run acceptably on even old machines - but with computing power still following Moore’s law and most desktop suites not really needing a lot of computing power, I’m not sure that is really important to most users right now and will be even less in the future. Also, I just opened a 50 page Word document and Word is taking up about 50 megabytes of memory, while Firefox is using up 70 megabytes with three tabs open.
Right now, I’m using Office 2007 together with the Office Live Workspace, which gives me online storage for my documents, check-in/check-out functionality and the full power of my desktop office suite. Combined with an online backup solution, it’s really the best of both worlds. Over time, I assume Microsoft is going to integrate a lot of this with the Mesh architecture and integrating some editing functions as well.
Maybe desktop apps are just a stop-gap solution for now, but for the time being, I simply see a lot more future in web-enabled desktop office suites than pure online suites right now, but I would be more than happy if the online suite crowd proved me wrong over time. In the end, I simply want the best tool for my work and I’m agnostic to how that is delivered to me.
May
1
Early Adopters:
Last night’s post on the growing rift between early adopters and mainstream users lingered through the night, but picked up quite some steam in the morning with a great discussion in the comments here, on FriendFeed and on Robert Scoble’s blog post about Early Adopter Angst (also in response to Alexander van Elsas’ post about the Tech Elite - funny sidenote: Robert got both Alexander’s and my name wrong…).
In his blog post, Robert says:
Early adopters DO matter. Anyone who says that they don’t needs to go back to business school.
This is why I follow 20,000 Twitterers. I want to study what early adopters are doing and thinking. Twitter is the best place — by far — to do that.
I don’t disagree there, but what I did wonder about in my original post was if a lot of the new Web 2.0 services aren’t catering exclusively to early adopters and only solve the problems of early adopters, thereby pricing themselves out of a mainstream market.
Disqus:
I finally took the plunge and installed Disqus here for comments. Setting it up took literally five minutes.
I hear good things about their customer service and as more and more people start switching to it, it is going to make commenting easier for a lot more people.
Apr
30
I have been thinking a bit more about the chances for the recent crop of Web 2.0 social media darlings like FriendFeed and Twitter to go mainstream and especially why FriendFeed has gone from zero to being the default social media aggregator for most folks in the tech blogosphere within just a few months while staying pretty much unknown outside of the early adopter tech world. In doing so, I kept wondering if the gap between early adopters and mainstream users isn’t expanding more and more and what that means for services that cater mostly to early adopters.
Corvida from SheGeeks also has some thoughts about the mainstreaming of FriendFeed, Twitter and RSS and at the end, she concludes:
Maybe the masses aren’t ready for these platforms. Still, these are early adopter tools, regardless of the growth that one may be seeing. They all have the potential to go mainstream, but there’s a lot of work to be done. We’re still in our own bubble. Or are we?
I think we are indeed in our own bubble and in some ways, FriendFeed is the natural result of living in that bubble.
Let me backtrack for a moment here:
For any web app (or any product for that matter) to become successful with mainstream, non über-techie users, it first and foremost has to solve a problem. FriendFeed doesn’t really solve a problem for most mainstream users. It’s great for us geeks who have friends scattered all over the Internet, all of whom use Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr, blogs, reddit, delicious, last.fm etc.
Just have a look at the ‘everyone‘ stream on FriendFeed and you quickly get a feeling for who the current users are. Hint: it’s not people sharing photos with their grandparents.
It’s the same reason a lot of people don’t see too much use in using an RSS Reader - you don’t need one if you only browse to five different sites everyday for your news.
I have a feeling that the gap between early adopters and mainstream users isn’t getting any smaller, but rather expanding. A lot of the new services cater mostly towards early adopters, but don’t really solve a problem for mainstream web users.
Maybe if there is a bubble that’s going to pop one of these days it’s going to be VCs realizing that they are better off investing in companies that are serving more mainstream problems (like Mint does for managing finances) and start shying away from more edgy, cutting edge early adopter oriented services
Apr
30
77% of Internet Users Read Blogs - or do they?
April 30, 2008 | 2 Comments
A new report from Universal McCann seems to be, at first glance, full good news for bloggers:
Globablly 73% of internet users are reading blogs with 48% including these (sic!) consumer-generated content in their weekly media diet.
The latest survey from media agency Universal McCann shows no signs of a pause in the explosive growth of social media. Video clips, blogs, podcasts, social networks and RSS are all essential components of the online media diet.
South Korea leads the pack here with 77% of internet users reading blogs once a week. Interestingly, in South Korea, only 58% of users read the mainstream press.
The question here, of course, is the old “what is a blog?” McCann doesn’t give us access to the full report, but to assume that everything published in a blog-style format is consumer-generated content is a bit of a stretch. There is no need to further chew on that question, but it does throw the data from this report into question.
I have no doubt that more and more people are reading blogs in some form or another, but 73% seems to be quite a stretch…
Apr
30
What do I owe you?
April 30, 2008 | 8 Comments
Steven Hodson asked an interesting question today: What do I owe my readers? This lead to a number of interesting responses.
Sidenote: What struck me in the responses to Steven’s post was that they often revolved around the meaning of the term ‘blogger.’ Indeed, ‘blogger’ can be a confusing term. I can think of at least three or four different types of bloggers (right now I’m mostly thinking in terms of ‘professionalism,’ but there are lots of other shades as well), all of which have different motivations, expectations and aspirations. While they probably all consider themselves to be bloggers, the term probably ends up being a disservice to all of them. But let’s get back to what I owe you.
I think Steven got it quite right - I basically owe you honesty. I don’t owe you three posts a day and I don’t owe you an opinion on every new meme that pops up. Maybe ‘honesty’ isn’t even the right word - maybe ‘respect’ catches more of what I want to say.
If you take the time to read what I write, then I owe you that I give you my honest opinion - unfiltered by paybacks or other bribes. I can’t help that I don’t know everything, haven’t read everything and might get it wrong sometimes. But if I do, I owe you to correct myself.
Just like Steven - if I’m interested in something, I will write about it.
I do feel I owe you a response when you leave a comment (unless you are disrespectful - then I don’t owe you anything…). If you take the time to write a comment, I owe you a response. If you ask me a question, it’s only respectful of me to answer it. (Update: as Andy rightly points out in the comments - not every comment necessitates a response - I was mostly thinking in terms of questions and comments where the writer wants to engage in a discussion)
I think bloggers, if they take what they do seriously, are participants in an unwritten social contract and that contract is simply based on mutual respect. No more - no less.
That’s why I rile against PayPerPost and similar schemes whenever I get a chance - bloggers who willingly engage in convert marketing campaigns like that simply don’t respect their readers (that doesn’t mean that we can’t get swept up in somebody’s ’social media campaign’ as well, but I think that’s a separate issue).
Apr
29
Not too much news yet today and lots of deadlines to meet for yours truly, but I do have a few thoughts about the little news that did trickle through the blogosphere today:
AT&T to subsidize iPhone: I always said I was going to buy the 2nd gen iPhone the day it comes out. If AT&T really subsidizes the new iPhone, then I will probably buy one for me and one for my wife. There was really never any good reason not to subsidize the iPhone. Hope this turns out to be true.
Advertising in RSS feeds: Not sure why exactly this is news today, besides that Google is going to start integrating FeedBurner into its Google Accounts system for authentication. I have been running ads in my feed through FeedBurner for a very long time already - so there really isn’t anything new here - but I’m sure it will get people talking about advertising in feeds once again. I gather Google is going to offer some tighter integration between the two services, but besides that, there is really nothing new here.
Only Twitter has the real Twitter numbers: Apparently Twitter usage via the web interface is up 8x compared to last year (don’t get me started if that means it is mainstream or not…). Those numbers, of course, mean absolutely nothing (as even Mike Arrington points out). The web interface is probably the worst way of interacting with Twitter and looking at my feed right now, maybe 1 out of 20 people in my list post from the web. So let’s stop worrying about what Twitter is, how to use it, who uses it and just use it (when it’s up).
Looks like Microsoft botched the XP SP3 release. I actually installed in on my old laptop without any trouble, but I guess MS found a last-minute issue with its own retail management system. Not exactly good advertising for MS, but I gather bringing down a retailer with a software upgrade wasn’t an option either…
Subscribe
