Jul
22
So Wordpress has finally released a native iPhone application. Not only do you get to try out how good you can type on the virtual keyboard, but you can also check which version of WP you are using, as it need at least version 2.5.1.
Update: cool - worked just like advertised.
Jul
1
Here is an exceedingly dumb article from the Time Magazine website. You might want to read it in all its glory, but I will just give you the last paragraph:
If Apple ever does decide to let all iPhone apps be free, it would be a radical departure from its typical way of doing business. To switch to an ad-supported model, it would have to partner with a company that already has a huge inventory of interactive ads. Google would be the most obvious choice, but the search giant is already poised to be Apple’s top rival in the mobile arena once its Android handsets go on sale this fall. Such an alliance might be a little too close for comfort.
So - dear Time writer – in the time you researched this article, where did you miss the part where developers could chose the price of their iPhone apps (including FREE!)?
Jul
1
Silicon Alley Insider argued that Twitter might be worth over a billion dollars in a year. Sure – and I might be worth over a billion dollars by the end of this year as well…
Let’s face it – Twitter hasn’t worked at all lately. Every time you want to log in, it kicks you back the Fail Whale, a white page, or if you are really lucky, your login page – just don’t expect the next page to load up.
More and more folks are moving away from Twitter over to Friendfeed now. Some people are still holding on, arguing that all their followers are worth oh so much to them… But those followers are worth absolutely nothing right now, because Twitter simply doesn’t work anymore.
I give Twitter another week or two – after that, I think it will have reached its point of no return…
Jun
23
As some of you might have noticed already, updates here have been a bit sparse lately. There is a good reason for that. After a whirlwind of activity last week, I started posting on ReadWriteWeb today and officially joined the most dangerous profession of all.
This will keep me busy and off the streets for a while. My responsibility over at RWW is to post news and reviews during the weekday mornings and with doing my graduate work during the afternoons, my spare time has suddenly become a bit more limited (in a very good way!).
While my friend Steven Hodson has been saying that I would sooner or later start writing for one of the bigger blogs, I didn’t really think that was going to happen, and I sure didn’t think it was a blog I respect as much as ReadWriteWeb. However, when I saw that ReadWriteWeb’s editor Richard MacManus post saying that they were looking for writers last Monday, I jumped on the chance and send him my application. The rest, as the old cliche says, is history.
One of the greatest things about RWW is that I get to work with great bloggers like Richard MacManus, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Sarah Perez, Alex Iskold, Bernard Lunn, and Corvida. Everybody over at RWW has been extremely supportive as I stumble with RWW’s publishing system and try to adapt to the RWW style of doing things. With Marshall also being here in Portland, I guess RWW is now indeed a bit of a Portland blog as some have been pointing out.
This is definitely a case of turning your hobby in a job – and even though that can often be dangerous, I can already see how the crew over at RWW will keep me grounded and provide a great support network.
So what’s next for the Last Podcast?
Things will be a bit quiet here over the next few weeks. Once I get into a bit more of a rhythm, I will start posting here more often again. As RWW has a very specific focus as to what kind of news and reviews I will post there, there will be plenty of material left for me to write about. Also, as I focus on news and reviews there, all my rants will still appear here for the foreseeable future.
Until then, my future looks something like this (just kidding!):
Jun
20
Google has decided to jump into the Web Traffic comparison business by releasing a new layer to Google Trends names Google Trends for Websites.
Very few people these days take the data from publicly available website traffic comparison tools like Alexa and Compete too seriously. At best, both can be used to analyze trends, as their exact numbers for traffic often vary widely. The major problem with any traffic comparison tool is that there are very few trustworthy sources for that data. Alexa uses data from a toolbar plugin, while Compete relies on data from 2 Million Internet users it gathers from ISPs, ASPs, Opt-in Panels and the Compete toolbar.
How is Google Trends different?
Google of course sits on a wellspring of data and they are using it to power Google Trends for Websites. According to the FAQ, Google gets its data from,
“aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.”
With this, Google might be able to get a slight edge on both Alexa and Compete in terms of quality of data, though ‘third-party market research’ casts a very wide net and could include pretty much all of the sources Compete also uses.
Like Compete, the user can easily filter the data by country and dates, but the only metric available is ‘Daily Unique Visitors.’ This is quite similar to Alexa’s rather limited and confusing ‘Reach’ and ‘Page Views’ data, but Compete displays a wider array of engagement data such as average length of stay and visits per month.
One area where Google’s data is most likely going to be far more trustworthy than any of its competitors is in displaying search trends for a particular site.
What’s Not to Like?
Like all Google tools, Trends for Websites follows Google’s minimalist design philosophy, yet its overall feature set is also quite minimalist. It is not possible to embed a graph or export data, for example.
Also, while Trends for Websites displays data for up to five different sites, it is limited in its abilities to actually compare them beyond number of unique visits.
Right now, the data Google displays also doesn’t seem to go back in time very far. Even for a site like CNN, the longest time period Trends will display is from June 2007 to today – for sites that have been around for a long time, that’s not a lot of information and obviously doesn’t display any longterm trends.
Verdict
Google Trends for Websites still feels a bit limited, but it is a Google Labs product and I would expect them to start adding more features soon. Right now, if anything, it is good to see more competition in the analytics market as this might drive the other players to start innovating and becoming more reliable as well.
Jun
18
According to a bunch of so called experts interviewed by ABC News, using a GPS will make you dumb and will herald the end of human communication (or at least our ability to ask for and give directions):
“There is a social function of being lost,” Slavin said. “And that social function of being lost will itself be lost. Think about how many times in the last month or so you have asked somebody for directions, or somebody has asked you for directions. That bit of social communication, in which a stranger and native meet at some point, will slowly ebb away. The question is: Will we feel ourselves to be natives everywhere, or to be strangers everywhere?”
But soon, people may not need to have any sense of direction whatsoever. The GPS on the iPhone allows a person to search for a type of place, such as a Chinese restaurant, eliminating search time for places people don’t yet know exist, but also ending that human impulse to explore.
These arguments are so ludicrous, they are almost not worth discussing, but they are also part of a historical pattern: maps made us lose our internal compass; spell checkers were supposed to ruin our ability to write; the typewriter ruined our ability to write; the book ruined our ability to memorize and so on…
Sure, we all used to be able to memorize phone numbers better than before we had cell-phones – but we also had a lot fewer numbers to remember.
Unless you have a strange fetish for wasting time on getting lost, a GPS is a god-send (and besides – how many people do you know who have a horrible sense of direction already?).
Are we going to lose our “human impulse to explore”? Of course not – it just means we get to the places we want to explore quicker!
Jun
18
Social news site Reddit, which on many fronts competes directly with Digg, has opened up the source code of its service and licensed it under the Common Public Attribution License. The license stipulates that any changes to the code must be made public if they are used on a public site and that any site running the code must make this clear for its users.
The only parts Reddit isn’t going to open up are the anti-spam and anti-cheating portions of their code. I can understand why they are holding these back, but it would have been nice to see them go all the way and release the complete code base.
As the reddit founders point out in their own blog post about this, the fact that the reddit audience is highly tech-savvy makes opening up the code is a natural fit:
Reddit is unique in the social news scene in that we have a huge community of developers. It seems only natural that we give you all in that community a chance to contribute back to reddit and make it a better place for everyone. We know reddit’s success has less to do with our technology than it does with you, our community, and now we want to let our community improve our technology.
This move towards openness, as MG Siegler also writes, has to be at least partly inspired by the accusations against Digg for having secret and shady algorithms (or employees) that bury certain stories by default.
Reddit is built by a team of only five developers – having its users help in the development process is a smart business move. The team itself has released a number of new features over the last few months, including a UI re-design and the addition of user created sub-reddits (like our l33t reddit).
I am not sure how much this is going to help reddit in gaining ground against Digg, but with the right set of new or enhanced features, as well as its passionate user base, there is really no way of telling where they might take reddit next.
Jun
17
Update: I contacted Robert Cox and he says the MBA has about 1000 members, including people like Glenn Reynolds, John Amato, Liza Sabater, James Joyner, Oliver Willis and many others.
During the whole ruckus around the confrontation between the AP and the Drudge Retort, I constantly see references to the Media Bloggers Association. Apparently, this is the group that will spearhead talks with the AP on behalf of bloggers.
But who/what is the ‘Media Bloggers Association’ (MBA)? Who are its members?
The homepage has a nice mission statement, but the only contact information is for a Alex Yuriev (who seems to be the webmaster) and a Robert Cox, who seems speak on behalf of the Media Bloggers Association.
To have a group of bloggers speak on behalf of other blogges might not be a bad idea – but the MBA homepage has no listing of its members and, if you go to the membership page, you come to realize that they won’t even be taking in members until ‘Summer 2008.’
The first references I find to the ‘Media Bloggers Association’ date back to January 2005. Wouldn’t it seem that opening up for membership should have happened in those last three and a half years?
For an association that is meant to represent bloggers, I would hope to see a little bit more openness. Right now, what I see from them makes me feel suspicious about them – especially because the only activity they seem to be planning for now is to provide/sell ‘media liability insurance’ to bloggers.
Jun
16
(Hat tip to Louis Gray for bringing this service to my attention)
After a long phase of private alpha testing, Edwin Khodabakchian today released an open beta of Feedly, a “more social and magazine-like start page for Firefox 3.” It’s release is, it would seem, timed perfectly in synch with the release of the final version of Firefox 3 tomorrow.
What Does It (and Doesn’t It) Do?
At its most basic core, Feedly is an RSS reader that lives locally in your Firefox browser as an extension (sorry – no other browsers are supported at this time). As its tag line promises, this feed reader functionality is implemented in a very stylish, magazine like layout by default. If you wish to do so, however, you can switch to a more traditional full-feed or summary view of your feeds, as well as an image only mode. Just like in Google Reader, you can skip forward and backwards using the now standard ‘j’ and ‘k’ keyboard shortcuts.
Feedly is highly integrated into the Google universe. Feedly synchronizes directly with Google Reader (in both ways) and imports contacts and sends messages from and through Gmail. From Google Reader, it also picks up your friend’s Shared Items. You can also send recommendations directly to your Twitter feed. Other options are to save items for later, and recommend items to friends (not specific friends, just your whole crew).
Besides the Google services and Twitter, Feedly also imports contacts and feeds from My Yahoo, FriendFeed, Yahoo Mail, Netvibes, Bloglines and your Firefox bookmarks.
Besides being an RSS reader and Twitter client, Feedly is also a recommendation engine, not unlike Toluu. In my tests, I have found it to work very well. All the feeds it suggested turned out to be quite relevant and interesting.
One very cool feature is the option to annotate items (see screenshot on the left). It allows for collaborative commenting on specific sections of an items.
Alana Taylor over on Mashable described it as competing with iGoogle and Netvibes. I’m not sure I fully agree there. As of right now, both iGoogle and Netvibes are far more flexible in what they can do with their widget platforms and the layout of their homepages. Feedly is – as the name suggests – completely focused on RSS feeds right now.
While you can import your friends from GMail, Feedly does not show you your inbox (though I wouldn’t be surprised if that was implemented in a later version).
But What About Comment Fragmentation and Advertising Revenue?
As for comments themselves – the Feedly developers did a very smart thing and completely offloaded them to the original site – thereby circumventing the dreaded ‘distributed commenting’ discussion. It should theoretically display the comments already on the post and then take you to the site to comment youself, but right now, it only worked about half the time and when it worked, it only displayed trackbacks (things seem to be working fine now).
The Feedly team also smartly left a section on the top of your feed’s page open for you to feature your own advertisers. I think this is a very smart move, though it doesn’t work with Google’s AdSense, which most bloggers probably use. Instead, it would work best if a blogger has a private advertising deal or two running on his blog. Still – I think this shows that the Feedly team has taken a lot of the recent criticism of similar products to heart and is thinking about ways to help out bloggers – something I applaud them for doing.
Verdict
Feedly makes for a great homepage – especially if you already live a very feed-centric online life. There are some things I would like it to do, such as allowing for a more river-of-news style of reading feeds, but overall, I think this is a killer product. It’s fast, pretty, and makes for a great way to quickly scan your feeds in the morning. It doesn’t rival Google Reader or desktop feed readers like FeedDemon just yet, but it’s going to be more Firefox homepage for the foreseeable future.
Jun
16
This week’s Elite Tech News Podcast featured Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, Art Lindsey, Steven Hodson and myself along with Jason Kaneshiro and MG Siegler manning the chat room (though MG made a brief appearance to talk about the WWDC in the middle of the show).
With only a small crew on board this week, this episode had a strong back-to-basic feel to it – no special guests, no gimmicks – just a lot of fun talk about tech and the people that write about it.
This week’s topics
- Disqus
- Very little Twitter but some FriendFeed.
- Secret super-copyright treaties
- Apple’s WWDC and using FriendFeed for live-blogging during big events
- Net neutrality and Google’s role in it
You can download the directly show from here or:
Subscribe to the Elite Tech News podcast here or: 
Add directly to iTunes here (or give us a rating) 
Add directly to your Zune here.
Jun
15
Fred Wilson started a discussion about blog comments today. Here is the final paragraph of his post which pretty much sums up his thoughts:
What’s the difference between a great comment and a great blog post? Nothing. What’s the difference between a great commenter and a great blogger? Nothing. At least in theory. It’s time for practice to meet theory.
I don’t buy this for a second. There is no difference between a blog post and a comment? Fred goes so far as saying that Techmeme should track comments just as it does blog posts (which of course also means that Fred doesn’t quite understand how Techmeme works).
The difference between a blog post and a comment is very simple: a blog post is meant to spark discussion - a comment is part of that discussion. Bloggers spend a long time thinking about what they write and maybe edit and rewrite their posts once or twice. Comments, on the other hand, are written within a few minutes and while they themselves can often spark new posts, they are definitely in a different category from blog posts.
Don’t get me wrong - I love comments - I try to write lots of them and few things in blogging make me happier than when my posts spark a conversations in the comments here, on FriendFeed, or anywhere else. There is lots of value in them and in the relationships they can create.
Comments and blog posts are symbiotic - without a blog posts - there can be no blog comments and both have their own kind of value.
Sure - a Twitter tweet, a Flickr photo, or even a change in your Google Talk status can spark a discussion on FriendFeed these days and Steven Hodson would probably rightly say that this is an example of the ever changing landscape of blogging.
However, I think there is a qualitative difference between a well-thought out blog post and a 140 character tweet, just as there is a major difference between a full-scale blog posts and a comment.
Update: Just moments after I post this, a post by Alexander van Elsas shows up in my RSS reader - looks like his thoughts about this are quite similar to mine:
But at the same time I also feel that commenting is easy. Easy, not because the stuff that is written down is obvious in any way. But easy because the original blog writer triggered a commenter to think and react. And that is what Blogging is all about. Some are in it for the money, some are in it for the fun. But a great blog post, no matter what it is about, makes the reader think. And that is what is so hard about blogging.
Jun
13
Technorati, the has-been blog search engine founded in 2002, just got another round of financing through Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital, and FG Incubation. With the $7.5 million they got this time, they have now received a total of $29.1 million.
The real question I have about this is: why? As Duncan Riley points out (though he is less down on Technorati overall than I am), Technorati is a broken system. As a blog search engine, it’s not exactly trustworthy and has long been eclipsed by Google’s Blog Search.
At the beginning of the your, Technorati announced that it was going to shift its focus away from search towards becoming a blog advertising company – however, like that has happened so far.
Overall, today’s Technorati is the same unfocused mess that it was when its old CEO David Sifry left last August. None of the new products stuck – and most of them were either clones of already existing services or completely bland ideas anyway.
Even bloggers barely pay attention to Technorati anymore – and that is no suprise, given that it seems as if Technorati only indexes posts on its own schedule. It can take days before links appear in Technorati, while Google often indexes within minutes; and Technorati’s index is still overflowing with spam – a problem Technorati never got under control.
Overall, the service feels like a shadow of the promise it once held. I don’t know what drove the investors to put more money into it. Even if the mythical advertising network appears at some point, it will face so much competition that it’s unlikely to be highly successful, as Technorati’s name doesn’t exactly have a ring of trustworthiness to it anymore and hence isn’t going to attract most bloggers.
Jun
12
The last few days have seen the release of major milestone for all the major browsers but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Firefox 3 is now at RC3, which should be the last testing version before its release. Apple’s first built of Safari 4 was just released to developers (but you can find it easily all over the web already); and Opera just released Version 9.5 yesterday.
All the major browsers are trying to distinguish themselves from the others by speed at this point. I ran the SunSpider Benchmark on all three browsers (on an Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700 Vista machine running at 3GHz with 3GB RAM).
Here are the results:
| Firefox | 2463.4ms |
| Safari 4 | 2337.4ms |
| Opera | 3405.4ms |
This test mainly gives you an idea how fast AJAX heavy pages will be rendered and is not by all means comprehensive – but it does give a good indication of how well a certain browser will do with today’s complex pages.
However, the performance data really isn’t all the interesting – in many ways, the way users perceive performance is far more important (just like most users don’t care if a browser passes the Acid Test). Firefox and Opera seem to be faster at displaying something to the user – which gives the perception of speed, while on Safari, it often takes a bit longer to start seeing something on the page, which makes it feel slower. And Opera, while it doesn’t do well in the benchmarks, does often feel a lot faster in rendering a page than both Firefox and Safari do.
But speed isn’t everything anyway – all three browsers are perfectly fine for surfing the web. They all render the CNN homepage in a second or two. They all have very well designed interfaces.
So who do I prefer? It’s still Firefox – and probably for the same reason I would prefer having an iPhone over any other phone. Firefox simply has more developers behind it. The sheer amount of extensions and plugins for it simply give it an edge over the other contenders. Besides that, it’s far easier to mold the interface of Firefox to your own preferences. I can move various taskbars around and combine them in Firefox – in Opera, I am stuck with the layout as it is (and I hate to devote screen-estate to menus I never use).
Safari’s interface is clean and minimalist – but it’s also the least interesting browser. At least Opera is doing some interesting stuff with its speed-dial pages and voice activation.
So for now – Firefox will remain the #1 browser on my machine, just as it has in the last few years. But I’m happy there is competition – browsers are complex pieces of software and the four main contenders are pushing each other to constantly challenge the status quo.
Jun
12
I between Steven Hodson’s post from this morning about (barley) eing able to pay his bills to stay online and my own thoughts (and the subsequent discussion about them) yesterday about whether a solo blogger can make a living out of doing this in the tech blogosphere, I started thinking about how privileged most of us are for being able to actually participate in these conversations.
Here is what Steven said this morning:
For me it doesn’t matter how much I want to be able to contribute to the conversation I am constantly limited by the reality of the technological divide. While advocates of openness and a web for all chatter on about their newest laptop or some other such toy I listen to the clicking of a failing hard drive. While others wouldn’t blink at slapping down a couple hundred for the newest and coolest replacement drive I have to figure out which bills don’t get paid this month.
Even more basic than that though is the tenuous line that connects me to the world wide conversation. While the discussions about ubiquitous broadband access for everyone float around the blogosphere I look at an empty PayPal and bank account and wonder if I can talk my uncaring service provider into giving me an extension on the disconnection notice that is in front of me. Chances are though that real life will step in come Monday morning and slap me back into my proper position on the other side of the technological divide.
In my post yesterday, I wondered if it is even possible for a solo blogger to make a living doing this, and Steven’s situation seems to come out clearly on the negative side of this. And Steven isn’t a nobody in this world – he writes consistently good articles a couple of times a day, he has been in the Techmeme Top 100, he has plenty of RSS subscribers and reader, his Technorati ranking is in the top 10.000 – yet he can’t make enough money of it to keep his internet connection going.
Simply put: that’s quite a downer – and not just because I consider Steven to be a friend.
However, on a positive note, Steven also gives us a healthy slap in the face here – I’m really pretty privileged to be in a situation where I have the time and money to write here. I’m too frugal and don’t make enough money to go out and buy the latest gadgets the moment they come out, but I’m sitting in front of three screens here (two big ones and one laptop), sipping coffee, and when I’m not teaching, I spend my time reading and writing – and I don’t even need to worry about our Internet and cell-phone bills, as my wife’s company picks up the tab for those.
Now that’s a privileged position.
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