Jan
1
Happy New Year
January 1, 2009 | Comments
I’m not blogging today, but just wanted to wish everybody a Happy New Year.
I’ve got some new things planned for this blog, which pretty much went into hibernation after I started blogging for ReadWriteWeb, so stay tuned for that!
As always: thanks for reading and subscribing! Without my readers and commenters here, I surely wouldn’t be where I am right now and I’m deeply grateful for that!
Dec
27
We Don’t Need Authority on Twitter
December 27, 2008 | Comments
There is an interesting discussion about Twitter search on Techmeme right now, but as much as I would like to see some innovative Twitter search, the proposed solution of creating an authority-based system feels completely wrong to me.
One of the great features of new social services like Twitter and Friendfeed is that they are completely democratic. When I put a hashtag in a tweet, people will see it. If I like an item on Friendfeed, it will bubble up to the top. It doesn’t matter if I’m a newbie or have more than 500 (or 15.000) followers.
There is a place for authority-based algorithms – as Dave Winer points out, these work great on Techmeme and Memeorandum – but Twitter is a different beast, even if I can’t quite put my finger on it. If ‘authority’ means ‘number of followers,’ then this seems too much like high school to me.
Instead, I would love to have the option to see results from my own friends (or those who I have communicated with through @replies) bubble up to the top. I’m sure, just like the authority search, some third-party developer is already working on this. Twitter itself should rather use its energy to stabilize its core functions and work on a comment feature.
Dec
13
Five Web Apps that Deserved More Attention in 2008
December 13, 2008 | Comments
Even though 2008 isn’t exactly ending on a high note, we have definitely seen our fair share of interesting new web apps and online services this year. Some of those, however, never quite caught on, even though they are really interesting and cool. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why these things happen – could be because of the day they launched (or even the time of day they launched); could be that people didn’t quite get the purpose of the app (yep – lots of bad marketing around); or maybe I’m just an idiot for liking these services…
Here are the five services that I though deserved a bit more attention in 2008 (in no particular order):
Pixelpipe
I wrote about these guys on RWW in August. Pixelpipe is basically ping.fm for media files. It lets you forward your pictures, videos, and audio files to lots of different social media sites and photo or video sharing services like FriendFeed, Flickr, brightkite, kyte, bebo, Twitter, or Facebook. This week, they also announced a cool new mobile site and I use their iPhone app almost daily.
Blogrize
Blogrize is a mix of Digg, Techmeme, and ReadBurner. It’s mission is to create a community of readers around blogs but giving them a place to share and vote on everybody’s shared RSS feeds. Every blog gets its own community and hence the recommended items tend to be very focused, as readers tend to self-select. It’s still a small site (and was gone for a good part of the year), but it’s off to a good re-launch this month (and they just started importing FriendFeed ‘likes’).hopefully we will see more of it next year.
Mufin for iTunes
Mufin’s website and web app is crap – no way around it. But its iTunes plugin (Windows only) that uses Mufin’s algorithms to categorize your music collection based purely on the sound and rhythm of the song – not on what other people liked. It’s become a constant companion for us while listening to music and in many ways, it’s better than Apple’s own Genius feature, as it simply scans and analyzes your songs without any regard for how the files are tagged or whether they are available in Apple’s library. Great way to discover music you didn’t even know you had.
Feedly
Feedly is set as my homepage and is the first thing I see every morning. It’s a magazine style RSS reader that draws from your Google Reader subscriptions. It’s a Firefox plugin with a lot of cool social features, but even though it started out with a lot of hype earlier this year, we haven’t heard much about it lately, which is really a shame. Feedly’s roadmap for 2009 looks great however and we hope a few of you will check it out.
Mento
In many ways, Mento is the PixelPipe of social bookmarking services. It allows you to easily send your bookmarks to sites like FriendFeed or other bookmarking services like Delicious. Mento is also a great bookmarking service in its own right (especially because it allows you to clip images from the sites you are bookmarking) and it has some cool social features. Even if you already use Delicious, Mento is a good alternative, as it still saves your bookmarks to Delicious as well.
A few more:
For good measure, here are a few other companies that we hope will have a breakout year in 2009: OtherInbox (still in private beta, but it’s changed the way I give out my email to sign up for services), Browzmi (social web surfing and cool use of XMPP – surprisingly fun and really well put together), and Qitera (just launched, but is a cool bookmarking service).
Who did we miss?
Surely we have missed out on a few services in this list. If you have your own overlooked favorites, let us know in the comments.
Jul
22
Testing Wordpress on the iPhone
July 22, 2008 | Comments
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
To Pay or Not to Pay for iPhone Apps?
July 1, 2008 | Comments
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
Twitter Ain’t Worth Anything Right Now
July 1, 2008 | Comments
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
Moving Along and Posting on RWW
June 23, 2008 | Comments
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 Adds Website Traffic Comparison to Trends
June 20, 2008 | Comments
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
GPS Will Turn Us All Into Idiots
June 18, 2008 | Comments
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
Reddit Opens Up the Source
June 18, 2008 | Comments
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
Feedly: Bring Your Feeds Home
June 16, 2008 | Comments
(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
Elite Tech News Podcast #11 - Hot Coffee Pod
June 16, 2008 | Comments
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
Comments are not blog posts
June 15, 2008 | Comments
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.
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