Archive for January, 2006
FireFox is cool and all but I always liked the Mozilla application suite…. I also like the design of Mozilla and I never really liked FireFox.
This is slightly political but highly related to the tech industry.The EFF is suing AT&T for illegally helping the NSA spy on American citizens…. has opened its key telecommunications facilities and databases to direct access by the NSA and/or other government agencies, thereby disclosing to the government the contents of its customers’ communications as well as detailed communications records about millions of its customers, including the lawsuit’s class members.
Dave says:Microsoft used to ask us to events like this, Google and Apple never have (except briefly while Amelio was in charge, but that went nowhere)…. They don’t have the usual arrogance, they’re more inquisitive like the old Microsoft was.
More cool feedback for TailRank.Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo) says it’s one of the top 4 sites he visits daily.Tom Conrad (CTO of Pandora) says it’s his new home page:After a few days spent playing with blogosphere favorite tech.memeorandum, I started to realize that most of what was showing up there was already in my feed reader. Then I remembered that Kevin Burton’s TailRank has been evolving a good bit lately.
I’ve now heard from two sources close to Yahoo which tell me that Yahoo is going to be buying Digg for nearly $30M. I haven’t yet heard from anyone working for Yahoo that this is 100% but I’d be surprised if we didn’t hear an announcement by early next week.
Tonight (5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern), Tim and I will have Kevin Burton of TailRank and Rojo fame on the air for an hour-long conversation on WebmasterRadio.fm. If you’ve got questions you’d like us to ask or stuff to talk about, drop a comment here and I’ll see what we can do.
Just point your Registrar (godaddy in my case) to ZoneEdit and they have a nice and easy interface for managing your DNS.I’d like something similar for network monitoring. I use Nagios for internal monitoring but if my machines have any critical problems I’d never find out about it.
It’s called ‘Whois This Person’ and it’s a simple little right-click menu item which will query any name you’ve highlighted against LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Technorati, GoogleNews, Yahoo Person Search, TailRank as well as some family and address sites. It’s not gonna change the world, but it may save some seconds here and there.And it has TailRank support…
Rumor has it that Yahoo has an offer to buy Digg for $35M. This seems like a great way to get traffic to your blog though.
Just a quick post to announce two open source snapshots I’m releasing.The first is a fork/branch of the Jakarta FeedParser. While at Rojo we tried to work with the Apache Software Foundation but found the beaurocracy to be less than enjoyable.
So Bram wrote a cool piece of sophisticated software…. Bram’s real genius is the fact that hey managed to raise $8.5M in VC for a warez site and somehow managed to get the MPAA’s approval.
Adam pointed me to a post he wrote about CPC RSS ads today which is a bit shocking.Turn out Yahoo’s (and probably Google’s) mechanism for serving ads is fundamentally broken…. This cookie is then stored in your aggregator and requested when you click the link.If the user doesn’t have the cookie then you don’t get paid.
I just added a new ‘feature’ to TailRank which allows members to buy sponsored ‘feed’ listings…. This is a killer way to advertise a blog or service since instead of a single click you potentially have a long term relationship with that user (since they now subscribe to your feed).
Looks TailRank was lucky enough to get an invitation to the Under The Radar conference.
TroutGirl was nice enough to remind me why stealth mode is a dumb idea.24 Hour Laundry should be held up as a good example.If you think your idea is valuable you’re wrong. If you think you’re the only one smart enough to come up with this idea you’re deluding yourself.Ideas are a dime a dozen.
Ever since last week when I found out that the Blog Herald had been sold for $72k I’ve been thinking about selling this blog.Of course I don’t know how serious I am. This blog has become my identity and if it was gone it would not be cool.
Last week I was lucky enough to take part in a podcast talking discussing RSS attention with Nick Bradbury and Alex Barnett:I asked two of the RSS industry’s leading lights to join me for a call and share their perspective on the question of where Attention is going with respect to RSS feedreaders and aggregators: Nick Bradburycreator FeedDemon, part of Newsgator (Nick also developed Homesite (sold to Macromedia) and Topstyle) and Kevin Burton of Tailrank (also co-founder Rojo).
Let the grand experiment begin.I just pushed a version of TailRank which has editorial control enabled for all existing users.Initially I pushed this out and only enabled editorial control for a select few TailRank members.
One thing I wish I had said to Om, so we could have developed the idea (or perhaps he might have disagreed) is my belief that RSS did not come from the tech industry as so many assume — it came from the publishing industry…. As many have pointed out, ad nauseum, CDF had some of them, and as you can see in this post from Mary Hodder, there’s no doubt something like it would have come along eventually even if we hadn’t promoted it so aggressively in the late 90s and early 00s.But it wouldn’t (and didn’t).If the MSM was left to their own will there would never be feeds.
Personally at least.I want to import my existing OPML file into TailRank, get back a filter, then subscribe to that feed in my aggregator…. Then I want to seriously cut back the feeds that I read to just friends.
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Spinn3r News- Spinn3r Hiring Five new Engineers (and growing rapidly)
- Spinn3r Hiring Support Engineer
- NYTimes, on Memetracker, and Spinn3r
- Spinn3r at Real Time Stream Crunchup, RSS Speedups, and Startup Discounts
- Spinn3r Hiring Crawl Engineer
- Spinn3r 3.1 - Now with Twitter Support and Social Media Ranking
- Blogfa.com (Iranian Blog Network) Down Due to Iranian Protests and Civil Unrest?
- Papers using Spinn3r Data from ICWSM 2009
- Spinn3r talk from ICWSM 2009
- Spinn3r 3.0: New Features, New Architecture, New APIs - More Goodness
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