The Changing Subscriber Definition Points to Potential Over Actual

The dust has not yet fully settled on yesterday's news that RSS feed circulation numbers around the Web spiked, thanks to a new tie-up between FeedBurner and FriendFeed that essentially counted social networking subscriptions as equal to those who signed up for your RSS feed directly. But while more and more people find their statistics up by thousands, and in some cases, orders of magnitude, the discussion has led away from what is "right" or "wrong", but instead, investigating what a real subscriber was anyway, and if we should stop thinking the way we always did.

The worlds of blogging and social networking are numbers-obsessed, and the statistics are so full of holes, most aren't even worth repeating. I may be "following" 10,000+ people on Twitter, but I rely largely on the search tool, or browse individuals' updates in Friendfeed. On FriendFeed, the story is much the same. I heavily utilize lists to categorize people I follow and make sure I don't miss the best content, but I absolutely see a small fraction of items. And don't even get me started on Facebook. Given I practically only go there to accept friend requests, play games against my family, or respond to wall comments, I certainly didn't see the photos you just posted.

The "fake follow" is absolutely in effect - even with best efforts.

But in parallel, I've treated RSS (and e-mail) differently. I believe Google Reader is the gold standard for finding information, and the link blog I produce through sharing the best items is essential for me to highlight what I find best, and for those who follow it, relying on me as a human filter. As such, while I may read quickly, and skim often, I always, always, read every story from every feed, to the tune of 100%. Similarly, I always have read every e-mail, even if I haven't made the time to respond.

But not everybody treats RSS and RSS subscriber counts with such velvet gloves as I do - which means two major things. First, total RSS subscriber counts usually far exceed total page views on most blogs, as RSS items pile up in readers around the world and go unread. Second, the religious adherence to a subscription number in RSS that I tried to have, in the face of bundling and statistics that led me astray, is easily shouted down by reason.

I used to look at subscriber counts as a good benchmark for how much influence a blog might have. A blog with 2,000 subscribers typically reaches more people than one with 200, and less than 20,000. With the addition of more horizontal social networking "followers" or "friends" in the mix, I have to look at the number as potential. For example, the new number of about 14,000 listed on my blog (up from 8,000 earlier this week and 5,000 in April) represents the maximum potential people who would see my content if everybody who subscribed to my content on RSS or FriendFeed actually kept their subscription going and active.

And it is this "potential" that is the new reality, more so than a hard and fast number you can set your watch to. But it's also a slippery slope. If we all start signing up to RSS feeds but we don't read the blogs, and we all fake follow on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and every other network out there, there's not really a whole lot of social going on - just blasting out data, friending and hoping that you're the exception rather than the rule.

To accept my new statistics, and those on other blogs impacted, the new reality requires a changed mindset. It's not saying one way is right and another is wrong, but instead, seeing the new data through the prism of our new world, where with so many information streams out there, we are all hoping that our data will catch someone's eye, not that it always will.

FriendFeed Sneaks Into My RSS Stats And Hits The Big Red Button

It's tempting to go back the age-old line of there being lies, damn lies, and statistics. On the Web, where practically everything is measured and big numbers are almost always better, counting up one's followers, friends, subscribers or authority is practically a pasttime. But with each metric comes a question of validity - how did they approach that data, and is that process consistent with the world view of what is factual?

Today, for reasons known only to their team, FriendFeed started to display subscriber counts to those FriendFeed users who are importing blog posts alongside all other subscribers, displayed in FeedBurner or any other blog analytics tool. With this change, popular FriendFeed users have seen a dramatic jump in their feed subscriber counts, even if actual traffic or readership to their sites has not changed.


BlogPerfume Shows My Stats Spiked Today
A clear beneficiary of this move, my own statistics ballooned from a possibly accurate count of just over 8,000 subscribers on this blog to more than 13,000. And in parallel, thanks to my importing my posts on my wife's blog, her count catapulted from just over 50 to more than 9,000. (For a site that gets only dozens of visits a day)


My Wife's Blog Stats Are Through the Roof
Coincidentally, my RSS subscribers had already been jumping, starting in late April, for reasons largely unbeknownst to me. In the last two months, I organically saw the subscriber counts pass the 5,000 barrier and crest to the more than 8,000, as I poked through the stats and tried to find out why - considering both Google Reader bundles and possibly a part-time inclusion on the Techmeme leaderboard as factors. But now, pointing to that growth seems silly, given FriendFeed flipped the switch and gave me a big, albeit likely false, foundation.


FriendFeed's Impact Rivals that of Google On This Site
The company's comments on this change state that "you are putting your words in front of a lot more people", so theoretically, they should be counted. But I believe it is less-intensive to follow someone on FriendFeed than it is through standard RSS, and I have no idea how this handles duplicates, though I can guess it's somewhat controlled, given my own stats jumped by a mere 5,000 when my wife went up by more than 9,000.

Rob Diana of Regular Geek clearly made his comments understood, when he said, "Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing".

Since you don't have admin access to my FeedBurner stats, you can see the jump by taking a look at Blog Perfume's Feed Analysis tool here.

So the question is - why? Did the FriendFeed team just want to extend the visibility of how much impact their service has with bloggers? This move makes them a clear rival to Google in my own statistics. Or did they really think this was a way to show, accurately, how many people you were exposed to? Either way, as I said on a thread in the site, what's done really can't be undone. I hate upward spikes as much as I hate downward spikes, as we've seen when FeedBurner and Google FeedFetcher miss each other in the night. But it's not accurate, especially when it comes to small blogs hiding on big accounts (like with my wife's blog on my ID). I just hope Twitter, Facebook and other sites don't choose to do the same thing, or we can call the whole tracking bit a wash.

Today's Real-Time Web Makes Blogging and RSS Seem "Too Slow"

Thursday evening, I had the opportunity to attend one of the semi-regular open houses held at FriendFeed headquarters in Mountain View. (See pictures from Brian Solis, who also attended) While on other occasions, I may have taken the chance to pick the brains of the small team, yesterday I ended up spending the bulk of the time talking to others in the industry, including Edelman's Steve Rubel and TechCrunch IT's Steve Gillmor on what they thought the future of communication, information discovery and blogging would be, amidst the dramatic expansion of microblogging and real-time updates and alerts. And while we all had our own viewpoints on the future of RSS, we agreed that what has been status quo for the last five to ten years is changing underneath us, moving toward a world that is faster, driven as much by what will be our preset queries and searches, rather than through subscriptions and static pages.

Gillmor famously argued earlier this month that RSS should "rest in peace". Gillmor's summary started off by saying, "It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore," and continuing onward, making a case that the immediacy of Twitter made it the source for news discovery, not tools like Google Reader, which I use to find all the data from my sources on a daily basis. As he told Steve Rubel and me yesterday evening, the post "went global" faster than anything he had ever written before, and judging by the more than 500 comments received on TechCrunch, as well as the many follow-on pieces I've seen, it stirred up a great deal of controversy - which is to be expected when making such a black and white claim.

Meanwhile, Steve Rubel, author of MicroPersuasion, who has been blogging on that site since early 2004, said that to him, blogging seemed "slow", when contrasted with the lightning fast communications seen from tools like FriendFeed and Twitter. He made the analogy that when you take the time to compose a blog post and you launch it over the wall, that readers have to look it over and make a choice as to whether they will respond, or if they will simply hit 'J' in their RSS reader and move along. In contrast, he said sending a note to Twitter was like introducing ants in someone's house, making them immediately take action.

Gillmor's unique writing style no doubt stemmed much of the confusion around his "Rest in Peace, RSS" story, which I fundamentally disagreed with the first time around and ignored. But in yesterday's discussion, it became more clear what he was trying to propose - not so much a full-fledged abandonment of RSS readers for Twitter, but instead, pushing for a reader-like tool that would follow microblogging services, decode shortened URLs on the fly, and then deliver the option to read full text of a piece.

In essence, rather than waiting the 20 to 60 minutes it can sometimes take RSS to propagate, thanks to latency from FeedBurner, for the most part, Gillmor's approach would take seconds - where a blog publisher or news distributor could post an update to Twitter or FriendFeed and have the same type of result, only a lot faster. This comes at a time when Gillmor and others are saying that referrals to blog posts are decreasing from RSS readers and increasing from microblogging sites, as readers do their link discovery outside of the reader.

Although Gillmor said we should just "switch to Twitter", he isn't even waiting for Twitter to bring back his much-beloved 'Track' to monitor keywords. Instead, he expects that FriendFeed will more quickly arrive at a tool that delivers realtime alerts to e-mail or instant messaging tools than Twitter - which makes sense as the aggregator has already set up e-mail and IM tools for lists and has delivered saved searches, two of the three components needed to make 'Track' a reality - and not just across Twitter, but across the more than 50 social sites FriendFeed supports.

As Gillmor told us both, he sees posts from louisgray.com "immediately" when I add them to FriendFeed, even if it takes much more time for them to enter Google Reader. And yes, that's because I, as a publisher, follow a specific process when posting, to author it and immediately afterward send it to Twitter and then pull it into FriendFeed, all before I manually ping FeedBurner. It's a conscious decision on my part, but one that helps his case.

RSS is not dead. Far from it. We're all using RSS every day, powering our Web portals, and helping to distribute blog and news content everywhere. But if it is about getting things discovered most quickly, and getting a response from readers very quickly, there's a reason you see people looking elsewhere, just like there's a reason I use a tool that pulls comments from FriendFeed into louisgray.com on my blog posts. I know some people will get to my content somewhere else faster. And if an enterprising software developer, like Nick Bradbury, can make a tool that turns links on Twitter into the same type of tool we see in RSS readers, maybe we'll be onto something new.

Google Reader Extends Statistics On Friends' Sharing Habits

Sharing items I find interesting in Google Reader is a major part of my social activity, as I help promote discovery of quality information to those who choose to subscribe, in a way, acting as a pro bono information filter on behalf of geeks everywhere. With streams from my Google Reader shares flowing into Socialmedian, FriendFeed, Facebook and the shared item tabulators, like ReadBurner and RSSmeme, I recognize the impact a simple mouse-click can do.

Sharing these feeds means I'm not reading my news in isolation. Friends I've connected with can make comments to my items, and should I choose, I can follow others' shared link blogs as well.


My Friends' Sharing Statistics In Google Reader
Today, the Google Reader team introduced a minor update that lets you now see just how frequently you're getting items from friends, and interestingly, you can now, for the first time in my knowledge, see how many other people are subscribed to their feed (and your own). For example, I learned today that 562 people have subscribed to my Google Reader link blog. That's still more than 5,000 behind Robert Scoble, a longtime evangelist of the practice, but only three others who I follow sport more than 100 connections.

And in case I was worried I was sharing too often, with approximately 18 shares a day, one of my connections, our friend Rob Diana, from Regular Geek, is sharing a cool 51.2 items every 24 hours, while two others are closer to me, with more than 10 shares a day.

It's almost tempting to start playing with the math to see what the downstream impact is of the shares.

If Robert Diana shares 51.2 items a day to 72 people, is that about 3,686 total views added?
If Robert Scoble shares .4 items a day to 5,889 people, does that hit 2,352 total views a day?

You get the idea.

Google Reader is trying to become more social and make the RSS reader a destination, rather than a pass-through. And I like their attempts, but it's clear more could be done. I'd like to be able to view just those feeds I subscribe to, and have the option to view friends' shares later, rather than have them combined in the same feed. I'd like to have e-mail alerts available if somebody commented on my shared items feed. I'd still like to know the most popular shared items, and most popular feeds.

But they are making good headway. Which reminds me... Didn't somebody say RSS was dead?

Know and Master Your Social Media Data Flow

This Is How My Social Media Data Flows. I'll Explain.
If you're anything like me, you are constantly creating social data. From your blog posts and your tweets, your photos and videos, bookmarks and status updates, you are creating new information, big and small. You might do so in spurts, or you might be creating new content throughout the day. But with so many different social networks out there, and friends scattered here, there and everywhere, there's always the potential you're not sending the right data to the right place. But if you start by knowing where your data is flowing now, you can make minor adjustments along the way to get the recipe right.

On March 24th, I told Harry McCracken of Technologizer that if I were to provide any Twitter user one piece of advice, it would be: "Always know where your data flows, and participate where it lands."


That simple piece of advice is a major challenge to most people. Whether they don't want to step out of their comfort zone, or they believe they only have time for one social network where they participate, most choose one or two places, while neglecting others. Others simply use services like Ping.fm to send all updates to all places at once, a scattershot process to something that probably deserves fine tuning.

My approach to this problem is to always create content while knowing its impact downstream. Here is what I have chosen to do with my data I am creating.

1. Blog Posts

Blog Posts that I create here at louisgray.com are packaged up by RSS, using FeedBurner, and end up in RSS readers. They also are published in headline form or excerpted, on FriendFeed and Socialmedian. Every day, updates in the last 24 hours are bundled up by e-mail and sent to FeedBlitz.

2. Twitter Activity

My Tweets, when posted, be they notifications of new posts (which I do manually, not automatically) or other content, are posted to Twitter and echoed both to Facebook and to FriendFeed.

3. Native FriendFeed Posts

When I post a new item directly to FriendFeed, it echoes to Twitter, which in turn, updates Facebook. Knowing this, I often author the headline using Twitter language, such as @ signs and hashtags, keeping the headline short. I can then, in FriendFeed, edit the headline to use normal language, optimizing the data for where it is consumed.

4. Delicious Bookmarks

Bookmarks I make on Delicious are shared to FriendFeed, and bounced to Twitter and Facebook. I ensure the headline and the source of the article are displayed, and now truncate that to hit Twitter's character limits.

5. Google Reader shared items

Shares I make in my RSS reader not only stick to the link blog, but they impact FriendFeed, Socialmedian, and the shared item counters, like ReadBurner, RSSmeme and now InFeeds.

6. YouTube Videos and SmugMug Photos

The YouTube and SmugMug activity I do is largely family related, so when it gets imported to FriendFeed, using RSS, it is echoed to Twitter and Facebook (like in #3).

7. FaceBook Status Updates

They stay in Facebook, period, which is why I usually just update it using Twitter.

The reason I list each of these specifically is because each stream of data has a different intent and possibly a different audience. Given much of the content flows through Twitter and FriendFeed now, I make a conscious effort to optimize the data for both services. I also recognize that when I post to both services, I just might receive comments and likes on Facebook, which is happening at an increasing pace.

Thinking about the data flow has an impact on how I behave. It is because of FeedBlitz that I prefer to have more than one post in a 24-hour period. I also know that as I am bookmarking sites that cover articles from this blog that I am getting to reward others who write about the same things I do. I recognize that by tweeting too much I could muddy my Facebook and FriendFeed, and have negative repercussions as a result. I also know that I need to make sure the headlines on my SmugMug photos and YouTube videos make sense once they hit Twitter.

It may seem regimented, but once you think about where your data is flowing, you will find a process that works with you. The good news is that RSS is not dead, despite some beliefs otherwise. In fact, it plays a bigger role than ever in terms of shuttling updates to and from services. I have set up my publishing preferences in this way for me because it matches what I believe to be the right data with its right destinations, and when activity from the community participates, I try to be there as soon as I know it has happened, through close monitoring.

And considering this is essentially my social media creation workflow, you might also be interested in the post I wrote last Spring on my own social media consumption workflow. It hasn't changed much at all since.

InFeeds the Latest Service to Calculate "Top Shared Items" Online

For more than two years, we've been talking about services that could democratically tabulate the most popular shared items on the Web, using Google Reader link blogs (like mine) as their data set. In early 2008, there was a practical explosion of such services, started by Feedheads, and rapidly followed on by ReadBurner, RSSMeme, Shared Reader and others. And while it's the earliest of days for a new service called InFeeds, developers continue to see this as a project worth tackling.


The service started gobbling up popular shared item blogs this morning (as you can see on Twitter), bills itself as a "shared items feed aggregator" and asks, "what's interesting in your feeds?"

Like the aforementioned competitors, InFeeds looks like it is going to show you items that have received the most shares from registered link blogs, sorting by 2 or more shares and 5 or more shares, for example.

If you look at its spartan "Upcoming" page, you can see that individual shared items are displayed with the original headline and author, who shared the item, and a number of tags, such as "Facebook", "iPhone" or "Google".


One Item I Shared Via InFeeds, Displaying Tags
With RSSmeme founder Ben Golub working at FriendFeed, and the ReadBurner site currently being down for repairs, there could be an opportunity for somebody like InFeeds to sneak in and be interesting. So while I may advise the ReadBurner team, I think it makes sense to hop over to InFeeds and provide your Google Reader shared links URL to give this developer a little push.

You can submit your URL here: http://infeeds.com/

Inbound Marketing Summit Video: There Is No Information Overload

Think you are getting crushed by Information Overload? Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present at the Inbound Marketing Summit, talking about how to find signal in the noise. Video is below.


Found courtesy of Justin Levy:
There Is No Information Overload - Louis Gray - Inbound Marketing Summit

Also, get the presentation from SlideShare:
There Is No Information Overload

Google Reader Limits Your RSS Article Spam Potential

As Google Reader is my main jumping off point to gather all the news of the day, it's no secret the RSS reader also plays a major role in how I help distribute the news, be it through hitting share to add items to my link blog, or by e-mailing articles out to others. In October I mentioned how e-mailing RSS pieces can help to evangelize the service, and I've continued to make it something I do, for friends or for colleagues. But of late, I've found more restrictions being added that make it seem people have maliciously mass distributed articles out of Reader, so more safeguards have been added to slow me down.


Captcha me if you can
The first and most noticeable addition is that of a captcha, which requires you to fill it out each time you e-mail an article out of Google Reader. The minor annoyance didn't use to be there until recently, and presents the opportunity to test how well you read words that are slanted and blurred every which way.


Thou shalt not e-mail your entire address book this article
The second addition, which I just ran into today, is a cap to the number of people you can send an article to. While at the office it's no rarity to forward news to a dozen or more people, Google Reader now stops you once you pass ten recipients. This means that I will have to be more selective for whom I choose to send updates, and just maybe those left off will feel left out.

Having said limits in Google Reader won't dramatically change the way I use the service, with the exception of being more picky about my recipient lists, but I have to wonder who was violating protocol so much that this became a necessity. What robots do you think were mass e-mailing articles to all of their cyber buddies?

Shyftr Introduces Extremely Versatile RSS Filtering Engine

A year into the service's head to head fight with Google Reader and others to make an advanced RSS reader, the Shyftr team has essentially thrown in the towel on their first plan, changing course to let you filter your own content and receive specific news you want to see, with less of that you don't. Their new RSS filter tool, which debuted today, lets you create any number of filters, by author, by title, or by keywords, from a wide number of preselected blogs, or those you add yourself, and roll your own RSS feeds.

Today, when you subscribe to an RSS feed, it's essentially an all or nothing bet. By subscribing to my site, for instance, you are going to get every article I write about Apple even if you love Windows. You are going to get additional posts by the other writers on the site. And you can't dodge posts on Twitter and FriendFeed, even if you're sick of hearing about them.

Shyftr is looking to help, and even comes loaded with some example filters to get you started, including: LouisGray.com Posts from Louis Gray: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/sux0ju/

Browsers (Chrome + IE + Safari + Firefox): http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/gycxxn/

TechCrunch Posts from Michael Arrington: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/4x545a/

iPhone Titled Posts: http://alpha.shyftr.com/i3qzmd

But the fun comes when you start to make your filters, such as:

Posts from Mashable and VentureBeat Without Twitter In the Title: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/qiroqp/

Posts on LouisGray.com That Were Not By Me: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/bjzbpo/

Posts that Start with "Porn": http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/al35fd/

Posts by Om Malik on GigaOM: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/dp2drb/

Posts that mention "Robert Scoble": http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/fq8dgb/


Setting Up a Filter that Avoids Twitter and Facebook
Over the last few months, Shyftr has been making significant changes, ditching the reader, and building a customized newspaper (like MeeHive), powered by your favorite topics and sources. But the new RSS filter takes personalization to a new level. You can find the new approach at http://alpha.shyftr.com and you can find the filter tool here: http://alpha.shyftr.com/filter/


Shyftr-Powered RSS Filters for LouisGray.com
And the fun doesn't stop there. The company has set up new "Publisher" accounts, targeted at multi-author and multi-site blogs, to help authors distribute personalized feeds, by author, by topic and by site. I can see mega-blog sites like Mashable, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and CenterNetworks looking into this option, as I will be, and I've been supplied with a handful of invites from those who are intrigued.

You can check out the new Shyftr at http://alpha.shyftr.com. Start your own filters here: http://alpha.shyftr.com/filter. You can also start with a set of pre-loaded tech blogs here: http://alpha.shyftr.com/filter/popular/

As FeedBurner Flails and Fails, Feedblitz Fights

A week and a half ago, FeedBlitz announced it would be taking Google head on, offering a much-needed alternative to FeedBurner in the RSS automation space. (See our initial post) At the time, they said they would "rapidly evolve", and they weren't kidding. In the ensuing ten days, amidst what seems to be yet another Web-wide statistics failure on the part of FeedBurner, the company has written how to guides on leaving FeedBurner behind, how to merge multiple feeds into one, how to keep your own domain associated with your feed, and how to migrate away from FeedBurner once and for all.

For the large part, the blogosphere has grown accustomed to FeedBurner flaking every now and again. We've grown weary of long lag times between posts hitting RSS readers after they were written, and in seeing inconsistencies in reader counts, often proudly worn as a badge on users' sites. But what we've also grown accustomed to is FeedBurner's basic nature - it sends your blog out, period.

FeedBlitz is recognizing the world has changed since FeedBurner's debut. They even offer the option to display the most recent updates from social sites, such as FriendFeed and Twitter, along side your feed. At this point, for many, their microblogging is just as full-throttle as their full-length blogging, so that makes sense.

As they have expanded their offerings, FeedBurner and Google seem to not be on speaking terms once again. It happens so often now, nobody blogs about it but not too long ago, such a miss would be ripe for the gnashing of teeth. But said miss has dropped my counts from the 4700 or so range to 1400 and 1800. Who knows why, but the number is pretty random. Even my wife's family-oriented blog dumped from almost 50 subscribers to less than 20. Ouch.

So if you're sick of FeedBurner burning you, I strongly suggest giving FeedBlitz a try. I'm working my way over to switching myself. You can see my FeedBlitzed feed here: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/lg

FeedBlitz Launches FeedBurner Alternative for RSS Automation

Since Google's acquisition of FeedBurner in mid-2007, the complaints have come hard and fast, as FeedBurner's integration saw frequent disconnects between the acquiring company and its new prize, slowness in updating feeds, and a complete lack of innovation, all amidst silence from Mountain View that had many wondering if the service would go the way of DodgeBall and other services into Google's black hole. At the end of 2008, I predicted an alternative would rise up to give bloggers an option to switch. Today, FeedBlitz, which has powered my e-mail distribution for nearly three years, has offered to do just that.

The new RSS management service, announced in a blog post, says it will offer publishers, marketers and bloggers improved branding, integrated search engine optimization, and some interesting additions, including social media marketing and metrics.

If you are already using the company's e-mail marketing services, the RSS addition is free. For all others, you can start using FeedBlitz to run your RSS feeds for as low as $1.49 a month.

Before moving my feed away from FeedBurner, which at times is tempting, I'll have to be sure existing subscribers wouldn't see any hiccups. FeedBlitz says they are eating their own dogfood, routing to the new self-hosted URL through FeedBurner itself. You can see how their "Blitzed" Feed looks here: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz

With this long-awaited alternative, it will be interesting to see if the many complaintants are willing to make a move. It's often been said that the most-popular feature of FeedBurner has been the little chiclets that show up to date subscription counts, so FeedBlitz wil have to match this capability. Given they've displayed my e-mailed RSS count since 2006, I think they will be up to the task.

So Google, you've got some competition in town - and FeedBlitz says it's not done, promising it will "rapidly evolve". That's something FeedBurner is definitely not doing.

Nobody Can Hear You Scream If Your RSS Feed Is Dead

I didn't make any blog posts on Thursday, after a full Wednesday which included a visit to Google headquarters to meet with the Google Reader team. And even though I made a few posts on Friday, the first day of the SXSW conference, many people still think I'm on a temporary hiatus, thanks to a tag-team failure between FeedBurner and Blogger, who have significantly impacted many users by zeroing out their feeds, stopping their posts from getting out of their domain. It looks like I should have spent more time in Mountain View after chatting up the Reader team, to see just what the heck is going on elsewhere on campus.

As the resurgent Kent Newsome of Newsome.org noted today, in his post, "FeedBurner & Blogger Conspire to Assassinate My Joy", the XML file that Blogger generates to distribute RSS feeds was completely wiped out - and I have been impacted as well. No matter if I had 20 or 2,000 posts historically, the file reports it has zero kilobytes, and no amount of trouble-shooting thus far has been of any help.

In this world of RSS-enabled services, a failure of this level means that my posts aren't getting out to the previously-mentioned Google Reader. They aren't populating social networking sites like FriendFeed, Socialmedian and Facebook. And that will no doubt cripple visits for those affected.

As always, I at first considered the issue was my fault. I noticed FriendFeed this morning wasn't picking up my posts, and tried to delete and add my blog six ways from Sunday, but with no success to speak of. While Kent recounts his searches for real tech support, I was in the air during much of the day, and came back to find I was not the only one hearing the silence from Google, as others assumed silence from me.

Complaints are wide-spread in Blogger's help forums - from RSS Feeds are EMPTY today when publishing via FTP. to atom.xml is empty and simply empty feeds.

I'm concerned on quite a few levels here. FeedBurner and Blogger are among the most mocked Google products because of their presumed neglect. Yet they are two of the major foundations for my blog. Also, I am concerned because we are seeing this issue as a weekend starts and a major tech conference is starting up. There's a huge chance this issue won't be resolved if Google is asleep at the wheel. There's nothing I can do except accelerate my move to Wordpress. This doesn't make me feel all that lovey-dovey with Blogger at the moment.

Google Reader Adds Comments for Social Conversations

Google Reader, the RSS feed engine that has become a major hub in my daily information gathering, pulling in feeds from the hundreds of blogs and Web sites I follow, is taking a step forward in terms of making the service more social, by integrating private conversations between friends. With today's release, every post and every share has an option to add a comment, which will be displayed to your friends who you are connected to.

Google Reader, which started out as a data silo, where you could passively read your news in isolation, has since expanded to include shared link blogs, the addition of notes, and the ability to follow friends and their items within Reader. Items from my shared link blog play a critical role in populating my profile on a variety of social services, including Socialmedian, FriendFeed and Facebook, as well as social news sites including RSSmeme and ReadBurner.

And now, you can make comments and have a conversation with friends, without having to e-mail articles out, and without having your private conversations aired in public on the original blog.


Making a comment on a shared item in Google Reader


The comment, added to a shared item in Google Reader
Last year, we saw a great deal of controversy around publishers like Shyftr, who, at the time, ran a service that displayed comments along with full feeds. In that case, many blog owners felt that Shyftr was potentially making money (through ads) on their content, and hijacking comments. The Google Reader team, who I met with today at their headquarters in Mountain View, is very keen to do the right thing, and is not confusing public, centralized, comments with the private conversations available in today's release. And, so far, there are still no ads.

If you are a Google Reader user, you can see a new item called "Comment View" below "Friends Shared Items". If friends have made comments you haven't seen, the item will be in bold. You don't yet have a parenthetical number showing how many comments are left unread, as you do with total available items. (1000+ anyone?), but you can see if conversations are happening, either on your shared items or those of your friends.

As a Google Reader junkie, I was worried that conversations happening in my shared feeds would bump them back into my "unread" items and make me have to see items more than once. But Google Reader is not doing that. Read items stay read, but are available in the "Comment View".


A Popular Comment Thread in Google Reader


The Expanded Comment Thread in Google Reader
As you make comments within the shared items of Google Reader, those comments are visible to all friends of the original person who shared the item - and you can see comments by other people on those items, even if you are not friends with them yourself, but unlike Notes, they aren't exportable to services like FriendFeed, so they stay internal to the Reader.

You can see which friends are connected to you, as their names will be links to their Google profile, and those who are not friends display only a gray avatar. And today's post by the Reader team clarifies that, at launch, this is English-only, and not yet available in the "All Items" feed. But you can probably expect those to come with time.

The new addition is yet another way that Google Reader is looking to get more social. They've come a long way since my original post two years ago now that asked them to integrate trends, recommendations and more social features. And from today's meeting, it's clear much more is coming to what is now clearly the gold standard for the online RSS experience.

Personalize Your Feeds With Feedweaver

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

As RSS makes attempts at going mainstream, pioneering services such as Yahoo! Pipes, Toluu, ReadBurner, and RSSMeme are helping the process of expanding applications' possibilities with RSS. Now, you can add Feedweaver to that list.

One thing I've always looked forward to in the space of RSS is the ability to share personalized groups' feeds. I can't wait to see the day when we all will share groups of personalized feed recommendations with friends and family. The digital age would really be in effect for me if this were to happen. So imagine my delight when I ran across Feedweaver, a web feed aggregator that helps you personalize your feeds.

Simply put, you're able to turn a group of individual feeds into one feed for sharing purposes.

What will immediately catch your eye with Feedweaver is the site's design. This is one gorgeous site to look at. The simplicity of the site's design led me to feel like there wouldn't be a learning curve for using this site, something mainstream users often struggle with.

Creating a feed is simple, but also has the potential to be taxing. Once you give your personalized feed a name, you need to start adding URLs, and this is where you have your work cut out for you. On the Web, there is really no easy or automatic solution to adding feeds unless you have an OPML file. Unfortunately, Feedweaver doesn't offer OPML file support on the site, leaving you the arduous task of typing in every RSS link one by one.

Some of you may subscribe to hundreds of feeds. I do. If you were to create a personalized feed, how many blogs would you probably add? 10? 20? 50? 100?

Leave a comment saying "I definitely don't suffer from ADD," if you're happily willing to find and type in 20 to 40 RSS feed links to create one feed. It would even be easier if you didn't need to type in the exact feed link. Why not make it easier and let users type in site links too and have Feedweaver find the exact RSS feed link for us?

Feedweaver adds filtering into the mix by allowing the users to create keyword filters for each feed link that you list. When you're done, grab the url given by Feedweaver to share with friends and colleagues. Feedweaver allows you to come back and manage your group feeds without any fuss. If you have a few feeds that you'd like to send company employees or to groups of friends, Feedweaver would be a good service to use. All in all, it's an easy to use aggregator for anyone that's not dealing with information overload.

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

Should RSS be Jettisoned On the Information Journey?

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

A Stay N' Alive piece (is there a cooler blog name than that?) by Jesse Stay called My Hiatus From RSS – Is RSS Really Necessary? made me think about my own ongoing challenge/struggle/scramble to grapple with the massive number of news stories, blog posts, comments, tweets, and on and on that might potentially be of use, interest, or service to my own work on any given day.

In other words: with so much stuff going on every second of every day, how can we best make sense of it all, and efficiently if possible?

Jesse, taking heed of advice given to him by Forrester Senior Analyst and blogger Jeremiah Owyang, is experimenting with a plan that I toyed with some months back: abandon the RSS reader completely. Now, Google Reader is such an important part of my information-devouring day that it seems somewhat radical to give it the heave ho. But it also takes a lot of time to get down to zero new items. And I must admit that at times I wonder: is it worth it?

Not so much from an existential standpoint, but from an efficiency standpoint, it's always worth examining what the best way to get the most out of culting out on online media. So here's a quick breakdown of different ways, different paths, and different strategies of absorbing information on the wild web.

RSS
I'll start with RSS as it remains such an important part of my online day. I'm continually making changes to how I have things setup though so that I can get the most out of Google Reader, and in the least time. For example, noticing a seemingly simple feature – list view as opposed to the default expanded view – has saved me an enormous amount of time in getting to the articles I'm most interested in.

I'm not a big keyboard shortcut guy for specific sites, but some people love them. Here's a big list of keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader if you want to play for super efficiency points.

Another thing I've done is to create folders to separate high volume websites and blogs from lower volume ones. For example, I have a folder called "online media – big" where I have feeds for ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, The Inquistr, and so on, whereas "online media" includes a treasure trove of blogs spanning A VC to WinExtra.

Smart people networks
I think of social media platforms like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook as "smart people networks" that allow for the sharing of relevant information from friend networks that are customized to individual preferences. Jesse seems to be on board with FriendFeed in particular:

If there was ever a better reason to be on FriendFeed, this is why you need to do it. Even if you don’t participate, make sure your blog is populating FriendFeed (I would add it to Facebook as well). This will be how I obtain my news. Now, instead of just tracking news, I’ll be tracking Twitter, Blogs, Youtube, and more through a Friends List on FriendFeed. If I was subscribed to your blog before and you’re on FriendFeed, I’m now tracking your blog via that method. I’ll be “media snacking”, as Robert Scoble calls it, and IMO, this is the future of news discovery, and takes much less time.

For a lot more talk and discussion of my feelings about Twitter and Friendfeed versus Facebook, check out this story on louisgray.com (and the comments are still kicking!).

E-mail alerts
Some number of years ago, I used e-mail alerts to scan Google Alerts notifications and RssFwd (recently shut down) to pipe RSS feeds to my e-mail account. These days, I've mostly moved my Google Alerts RSS feeds over to Google Reader for easier management.

I can see some utility in using e-mail to manage some influx of news – particularly breaking news alerts – but with a full declaration of bias I'd have to think that a solid RSS reader is going to be far more effective in handling a large volume of data.

Meme trackers and large aggregation portals
I'm talking about Techmeme, Memeorandum, and Google News mostly here, and throw in Drudge Report for kicks. I'll check out these sites during the day when I very quickly want to scan very hot news as its breaking.

Standalone sites
This is the old school approach, which probably more people (read: the non-tech elite regular folk) take part in than anything else. I know an online writer that used a system of hundreds of bookmarks for his job until very recently, for example. For some reason, I like to take this approach every now and then when I'm mobile. TechCrunch on my BlackBerry while on line at the supermarket, that kind of thing.

"Viral" / breaking news
Another category of sorts I think is the news that breaks so quickly and so hard that it's the kind of thing that everyone talks about and covers for a period of hours, days, or longer as the story unfolds. When something truly breaks above the noise, I find that I'll start getting a combination of text messages, instant messages, and e-mails on top of the typical online media layer of information. If the television happens to be on, this is a good way to get another level of coverage (cable news channels live for these kinds of stories to break). Twitter is great at picking up this level of news quickly as well as you'll see everyone start talking about the same thing at the same time.

Finally…
I must admit that it's tempting to pull the plug on one major category of the above in an effort to increase productivity, but I can't quite get there as yet, particularly when it comes to RSS and Google Reader. If anything, I'm continually trying to train myself to look for the kinds of stories that will most benefit me and suit my interests, to participate via social media tools such as Google Reader shared + note, Twitter, FriendFeed, blog comments, and so on as much as I can, and to try to waste as little time as possible during my online day.

It's not always easy!

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

How Can You Teach Intellectual Curiosity?

For me, a significant amount of time I spend using the Web is not so much about finding friends and peers, but instead about finding information. I want the newest news now. I want to have my finger on the pulse, and will use whatever mechanisms available to me to get the data faster. Whether it be through RSS, e-mail news alerts, pre-defined search strings, or relying on selections by others on news aggregation sites, I have built an array of tools that makes sure I miss very little about those things I am interested in.

Whether it's a desire to act as a knowledgeable information filter, or simply because I am a data sponge, I've made the absorption of news and trivia a big part of my daily activity, and it turns out, if I think about it, that I've been wired this way for a very long time.

For whatever reason, just shortly after I learned to read, I can remember thumbing through the children's dictionary, fascinated by the origins of the letters of the alphabet, as they evolved from the Phoenician to Greek, Egyptian and so on. Later, I was buying the Guinness Book of World Records every year, and stalking the bookstores for the next edition of the World Almanac. My favorite section? The population rankings of the top 200 cities in the United States, as ranked by the census in 1980 and 1990. To this day, I can tell you Worcester, Mass. was #200 overall, and that Baltimore had 939,000 people reported in population in 1980. When the 1990 census rolled out, seeing new cities like San Diego and Dallas, Texas enter the hallowed ranks of million-plus citizen populations, I was excited. Seriously.

And before you cry out, "NERD!", I'll nod my head, quickly agree, and move on. I loved this stuff. Luckily, it branched out to sports as well. My favorite present of all time had to be the massive 2,000+ page encyclopedia, Total Baseball, which, when released in 1989, when I was 12, had hundreds of pages of baseball stories and even more, containing all statistics of all players, ever, in the major leagues. I promise I pored over every single page - and it's made me very popular when it comes to sports trivia conversations (or unpopular if you want to go head to head).

But I have learned you can't force the issue and kindle the same passion in others. Even if I explain to you why I am excited about something, I can't get you the same way half the time. And what boggles my mind at times is when it seems the curiosity is missing altogether - especially when it's about something that could effect your making a more educated decision.

For example, a few years ago, in speaking with a friend in the industry about how the changing world of media was making blogs an increasingly-important venue, they were asked by someone else, "What blogs do you read?" And their answer: "The ones Louis sends me." It seemed they were content getting their news the way they always had, and they weren't even curious enough to want to get the data when it was available. They were comfortable knowing they could be missing out on a source of news on their industry, and turning a blind eye to what I thought was a major development in the way news was being created and disseminated.

To me, it would have been a lot more acceptable if the individual had, acknowledging they hadn't gotten into blogs yet, asked which I thought were the best ones, or if they had remembered some of the recent forwards and posts that caught their eye. But the nonchalant answer defied my expectations of intellectual curiosity, and I was frustrated about it for a long time - wondering why they weren't seeing the missed opportunity. It's the same type of frustrations I am sure parents feel when their kids don't get interested in school, or in studying to improve when you know they have the potential.

There's no question that my consumption level for news, blog posts, RSS feeds, and friends' updates on many networks is above the average. I crave the data, and am always eager to find new ways to get there faster. But I wonder if there are ways to get people to share the same enthusiasm. Is it possible to force intellectual curiosity when others just aren't wired the same way?

February's Five Voices Spreading Thought Diversity

Part Twelve In a Monthly Series

The "five new blogs to watch" series, a monthly recurring feature here on louisgray.com, has now wrapped around a full year. Starting off in March of 2008, the February 2009 list marks the 12th consecutive month we have found five blogs that, in my opinion, have a lower profile than they should, and are ones you just might find interesting.

In the last year, including today's list, we have displayed sixty different voices who are bringing their interests, news and opinion into the world of blogs in their own way, but haven't yet cracked the upper echelon of visibility. It has been fun to uncover new names every 30 days, and now that we're one year through it, we'll review and see how the feature evolves. Looking forward also to your feedback to see if this is something you would like to continue.

Each of the bloggers highlighted over this time period has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Prior months' entries can be found for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December and January.

This month's entries...

1) Sociosophy (www.sociosophy.com)

Focus: Blogging, Social Media Tools, Applications
Three Recent Posts:

• thisMoment - Beta Invites
• Trigga.me
• Chris Brogan - Blogger Week

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Damon Cortesi's Blog (www.dcortesi.com)

Focus: Coding, Security, Twitter
Three Recent Posts:

• The *Real* Top 20 Twitter Applications
• Attitude
• All ur Twitpics, in one line.

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Justin R. Levy (www.justinrlevy.com)

Focus: Public Relations, Marketing, Events
Three Recent Posts:

• Linking PR and Journalists Together via Twitter
• Are You Developing Raving Fans
• Are You Focused

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) Dawn's Plan (dawnsplan.wordpress.com)

Focus: Internet Culture, Social Networking, Capitalism
Three Recent Posts:

• Friend Limit Frustration Exposes Tech World’s Weakness in Social Science
• Take this Ad and Shove it. Then Turn Advertising Distribution over to the Members
• What FREE gets you

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Elias Bizannes (www.liako.biz)

Focus: Data Portability, Internet
Three Recent Posts:

• Social melebrities and the externality of arrogance
• Semanticising Twitter for a revenue model
• The change brought by the Internet is a correction

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

Want to be on this list? You can catch my eye by posting great information in the field of technology, social media, blogging and the Web. I'll be more likely to highlight you if you blog almost every day, and bring new stories to the table that don't repeat discussions launched elsewhere. And if you have more than 1,000 subscribers, you're probably too big for this.

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for next month's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.

Where is Your Focus: Subscribers or Traffic?

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

James Duthie of Online Marketing Banter has a really valuable post on 5 important lessons that he learned from his first year of blogging. I think everyone could agree to having learned a lot of the lessons that he listed, myself included. However, his first two lessons really inspired me to think about where my focus is when it comes to my own blog. 

Lesson 1 - Momentum disappears damn quickly.

Lesson 2 - It's not all about the traffic.

With these two lessons in mind, I think that as a blogger begins to evolve they have have to make a decision: you can work overtime to keep up traffic to continuously build momentum or you can stop worrying about the traffic and shift your focus to converting the traffic that you receive into subscribers. Some people focus on both, which can be a daunting task. Getting people to visit your site in the beginning of your blogging career is no easy task, unless you have great connections.My decision was to worry more about subscribers than traffic. I figured that with enough subscribers, you can begin to have consistently decent traffic, without worrying about the momentum that disappears all to quickly for some of us.

Know Your Goals

For me, this was an easy decision because I don't display any ads on SheGeeks, nor do I care to. Though recently I've been dabbling in sponsored links. Being aware of what you plan to do with your site can help you better understand what decision would be best for you. The answer to the aforementioned question is all so dependent upon the focus of your site and what you are attempting to achieve. I want more conversation. With more subscribers I can easily generate more conversation. This is easier for me rather than trying to generate conversation by trying to increase my traffic. And no, high subscribers doesn't necessarily mean high traffic, especially if your content is few and far in between.

Know Your Audience

On another note, I'm aware that the majority of my readers user RSS feeds to access the site. I'm also aware that the majority of my readers are probably "skimmers", meaning they don't read everything in its entirety unless it's truly worth their time. So traffic is just a moot point for me the majority of the time. What does this mean? Be aware of your audience and the tools they use. To me, the aforementioned facts reeks of a low click-through rate. So really, why bother?

What's Your Focus?

Which leads me to ask the rest of you: where is your focus when it comes to your blog: subscribers or traffic?

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

Are We Missing Something By Reading An RSS Feed?

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

People that read this blog regularly know that I am a big proponent of the conversation. I blog about what conversation may or may not be. I have written a tool to let you track where in social media people are talking about your blog post or some keyword you want to watch. I do this as a software engineer with no formal training in psychology, sociology or marketing. I do this as someone who regularly engages in conversations each day, as a normal person. In order to keep myself up to date on what other people are talking about, I use an RSS reader, specifically Google Reader.

This weekend I read a post on GrowMap.com regarding a blog review contest. Obviously, this has nothing to do with "conversation". However, there was something said earlier in the post that got me thinking:

Regular visitors to GrowMap are bound to have come across some great ideas in the comments left by Dennis Edell. Hopefully you’ve already visited his main blog DirectSalesWebMarketing.

What is so interesting about that quote? Well, I read GrowMap while within the familiar confines of my RSS reader. I rarely go to the source of a blog post unless I plan on commenting directly on the site. By doing this, I am obviously missing something. I am missing the conversation part of a blog post, the comments. Generally, I do not even know if there are comments on a post if I am within my RSS reader. Yes, I know that many feeds include feedflares that may include a comment count, but how many people look at those unless they want to email, Digg, tweet or generally take some action on the RSS item.

By missing the comments, we are missing part of the conversation. It is a large part of the conversation because it is the one part of the blog post where readers can interact. Are we shortchanging ourselves by not reading the post on the blog along with the comments? How much more intersting would your RSS reader become if it included the comments in the feed? Can somebody work on that?

See Also:
louisgray.com: The Trouble With RSS: I'm Not Involved
GeekWhat.com: RSS Readers Kill Readers’ Involvement?

Image by Photopia
Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Feedscrub: Cleanse The Dirt From Your RSS Feeds

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Last week I touched upon RSS overload and how it's starting to become a problem for a lot of people. That post mainly reflected on how to get the most out of your Google Reader in terms of organization and productivity. The overload part for many, comes down to feed management. In the past I suggested unsubscribing from feeds that bring you little value, or update with too much frequency.

That eliminates the problem, but also poses the risk that you might miss something valuable mixed in with all the clutter. I recently found a better solution, which I have been testing for about 24 hours now, it's call Feedscrub.com.

What is Feedscrub?

Feedscrub is a clever filtering system for your RSS feeds. It acts as a spam filter for your RSS feeds. With this system, you train it based on your content preferences. This application now allows me to still stay subscribed to the feeds I otherwise would have unsubscribed from ages ago. I'm always weary that I will miss something of importance if I abandon the feed completely. For instance, I'm subscribed to quite a few technology blogs, so the first thing I did with Feedscrub was train it to scrub posts that have anything to do with Apple.

The training filter is like an email filter that is based off words. I'm not an Apple consumer and quite frankly I'm overwhelmed with feed after feed pertaining to Steve Job's health or the iPhone. By scrubbing the posts in my feeds that have any mention of Apple, I'm training the system with my dislikes and hopefully I will never have to see another post relating to Apple in my Google Reader.

Getting started:

Getting started with the service is pretty straight forward. You have the ability to enter up to three feeds for scrubbing. Because the service is still in beta, and they are still working out the kinks behind the scenes, three should be suffice to get you going and to take it for a test drive. My advice for you is to test the service out with your feeds that update quite often throughout the day. This will show you the power of the filtering faster compared to feeds with less frequent updates. Don't worry,for power users they offer a PRO account which gives you unlimited feeds plus OPML import & export.


After you input your selected feed for scrubbing, they are displayed and stored under the "Manage Feeds" tab in the control panel. From here, you will also see three feed reader subscribe buttons under each feed. In order to train the system, you must subscribe to the Feedscrub feeds, replacing the original one in your feed reader. Here is what the Feedscrub feed looks like. It basically adds two buttons to the feed, one called "scrub it", the other called "save it". These are what you will use to train the system. If you like the article of content on the feed, you click save it, dislike it, click scrub it. Simple enough.

Training is not limited to the Feedscrub site:

You can train the system a variety of ways. When logged into the control panel you can click the corresponding feed. That will launch a new window with the feed as outlined in the below screen shot. The save it and scrub it buttons are located on the feed. Train away!


Power users will prefer training inside the comfort of Google Reader:

If you are using Google Reader, the feeds that you have selected for scrubbing, appear with the save it, and scrub it buttons. This is how I'm currently training the system. It's handy and convenient, and what better place for them to appear than in your RSS vehicle. This makes it even easier to train the system. Once you have your selected feeds into the Feedscrub system, you will not have to be logged into the control panel often to train and filter your feeds.


That concludes part one of a two-part post:

In order for me to give a fair review of the application, 24 hours was not enough time for me to make a full assessment of the filtering system. Feedscrub was courteous enough to supply me with a PRO account for testing purposes. I unloaded some 600+ feeds into the system last night, so it was a time consuming process. Out of the 600+ feeds, I'm selecting approx 50 of them for scrubbing. One week should be ample time to train the filters, and the data set should be rather interesting. I will share the results of my findings in about a weeks time.

Take the service for a test drive. We have beta invites!

Feedscrub graciously supplied us with 150 beta invites. These will go fast. Don't hesitate to sign up. Use invite code "louisgray" at the sign up process.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Feedly Mini Adds Buzz to Browsing, Goes Beyond Google Reader

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Feedly has announced a new feature today, the latest in a series of mostly behind-the-scenes refinements and improvements to Google Reader companion service which launched back in June. The new feature is intriguing, as it can appear on any web page that has a corresponding URL to one found in your Google Reader list.

It's called Feedly Mini. And while it's small, it's a big deal.

Technically, a feature similar to this was tested out before, in the form of a dark sidebar (mentioned here). But this new iteration is lighter, faster, and in my opinion, much cooler.

Here you can see the new mini bar in action, on a recent post here on this blog. The default configuration is for the mini bar to only appear on URLs that are also in your Google Reader blog and 'hot topics' on FriendFeed and and Digg, but you will be able to use the Feedly preferences settings to change the scope later.

As you can see, the Feedly Mini bar has three main areas:

1. A status area that shows how many times the article has been shared on Google Reader, shares on FriendFeed, and number of Diggs. And yes, that's conversations on FriendFeed, not comments. I checked.
2. An area to add a note, just like you can when sharing an article in Google Reader.
3. Action links to perform on the current article. You can share, save for later (or star), or hide the post in Feedly.

This feature reminds me a lot of the much more rudimentary feature in Google Reader where you could use a bookmarklet to navigate to the next article in your subscription list. However, Feedly Mini throws in some great buzz numbers and the ability to share with a comment.

In fact, you could probably use these two technologies together! In theory, if you use the next bookmarklet, Feedly Mini will pop up on each article, allowing additional options. Nice! You can find the next bookmarklet in the goodies tab of Google Reader's settings area.

If you're not already checking out Feedly, and you're a Firefox user, you owe it to yourself to see what Edwin and team are doing in the world of feeds and content discovery. Check out Feedly at http://www.feedly.com.

Read more by Phil Glockner at Scribkin.com.

Five Blogs to Start Off Your 2009 Feed Reading

Part Eleven In a Monthly Series

Even if you are an avid news watcher, social media addict or feed reader, your library can seem repetitive, and you can get into a rut or cliquey. I do it. We all do it. But over the last year, I've tried to keep my eyes open to new voices who have hit the blogging scene, captured my attention, or simply don't have the readership I think they should. This month is no different. And in case you think I don't stand by my picks, it's worth noting that every single author on louisgray.com was previously highlighted in this series, so when I find someone I like, I stick with it. If this is your first time running into our "Five New Blogs" series, please do check out any from the prior year.

Each of the bloggers highlighted over this time period has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Prior months' entries can be found for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December.

This month's entries...

1) Chris Charabaruk (www.coldacid.net)

Focus: Windows, Drupal, Social Media
Three Recent Posts:

• Twitter's slow suicide — will an API cap strangle the service?
• Oh no! Affiliate links!
• The real-time age is heralded in.

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) Know the Network (www.knowthenetwork.com)

Focus: Technology, Internet, Google
Three Recent Posts:

• Is there room for innovation in Email?
• Most Underhyped Apps of 2008!
• Vista Performance Tweaks

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) Andy Brudtkuhl (www.getanewbrowser.com)

Focus: Gadgets, Technology, Business, Media
Three Recent Posts:

• 11 Twitter Analytics Features I Want
• Why Your Business Needs Amazon S3
• Diigo Groups is Future of Social Bookmarking

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) 140Char (www.140char.com)

Focus: Microblogging, Twitter, Seesmic, Yammer
Three Recent Posts:

• The one essential suggestion for effective Twitter beginners and gaining followers
• A solution to the loss of trust in Twitter apps?
• Looking at linking and short urls on Twitter

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Eric Friedman (www.marketing.fm)

Focus: Google, Web services
Three Recent Posts:

• Prioritizing and Organizing Feeds in Google Reader
• Thinking about web services
• Brands talking to each other on Twitter

RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

Want to be on this list? You can catch my eye by posting great information in the field of technology, social media, blogging and the Web. I'll be more likely to highlight you if you blog almost every day, and bring new stories to the table that don't repeat discussions launched elsewhere. And if you have more than 1,000 subscribers, you're probably too big for this.

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for next month's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.

Can One's Subscription Trends Indicate Services' Momentum?

As I've mentioned several times before, I border on pack rat behavior when it comes to my e-mail. I very rarely tend to throw anything away - unless it's clearly spam or advertising from someone I don't know. For whatever reason, I save Twitter direct messages. I save responses to statuses on Facebook. I save receipts from iTunes purchases. And I definitely save e-mail confirmations from services that tell me when somebody has started to follow me online - whether that be on Facebook, Socialmedian, Twitter, FriendFeed, Strands, Disqus, or practically any one of the services I use with regularity. With an extremely active 2008 final and in the books, I thought I'd dust off my nerd-approved calculator and see what the trends looked like. If you're willing to say that a single data point indicates a trend, I found the results very interesting.

For the purpose of this navel inspection, I tracked four numbers, including new subscribers to my RSS feed, to Twitter, FriendFeed, and halfway through the year, Socialmedian. It was FriendFeed, Twitter and Socialmedian that saw the most activity for me in 2008, and cognitively, I thought I could sense when one service was spiking and another plateauing.

See the below graph:

RSS Data via BlogPerfume. Some dates to note: 1) I was a FriendFeed user prior to 2008. 2) I joined Twitter mid-way through January of 2008. 3) Socialmedian introduced the "Newsmaker" feature in mid-July of 2008.

At the end of 2007, I had approximately 200 RSS subscribers, and by the end of 2008, that number was approaching 4,000. Interestingly, the 4,000 to 5,000 number is close enough to the number of followers I ended up with on both Twitter and FriendFeed by the end of 2008, with an undoubted extremely high amount of overlap. But while the services are around the same number now, how they got there tells an interesting story.

Early 2008 was relatively quiet in social media. While MG Siegler and I had joined FriendFeed, and were cajoling others to join it, in beta, the service was lightly used prior to its opening to the public. At the same time, I was enjoying writing about newcomers to the Web, like Assetbar and ReadBurner, and, for the first time, gained notice from some strong Web junkies who helped the site gain visibility and RSS subscribers.

I joined Twitter somewhat reluctantly in January, and its growth was good,but relatively small when compared with FriendFeed's boom, especially from March to May as the service exploded onto the tech scene - including more than 1,000 subscribers in May alone. But as is common with many products, FriendFeed's initial spike settled down into a consistent level after the launch, dropping to a third of its peak, below 400 each month from August to October.

At the same time, Twitter's problems with uptime were reducing my use of the site, and others as well. I saw new followers of less than half April by June, before Twitter too settled in at a level almost equal that of FriendFeed.

In July, Socialmedian added a Newsmaker feature, which saw anywhere from 100 to 300 new followers through the end of the year, not quite the level of Twitter of FriendFeed, but respectable.

After a stable Fall, November and December saw a resurgence across all metrics, likely the result of more posts on louisgray.com, as I added additional writers and expanded the posts' reach. But while FriendFeed's climb was gradual, Twitter has exploded - delivering more than 1,300 new followers in December after almost 700 in November, and January 2009 is on track for even more.

Oh! And I barely mentioned RSS. While my aggregate number was much higher by the end of 2008 than the end of 2007, you can see much of the momentum I had was gained in the first half of this year. It could have been due to their being a limited number of tech geeks in the echo chamber. It could have been due to a higher profile on Techmeme, which decreased significantly in the second half. And it's always possible I overweighted social media versus the blog in the second half of the year once the twins were born. Not sure. But what I do know is that with the broader team in place, we are reaching new people, so if I couldn't get any bigger on my own, now I've got help.

So, navel gazing aside... does this show that FriendFeed's spike and then reduced profile is set to grow further again, as the trend from October shows? Is Twitter breaking into the mainstream, as November and December suggest? And will Socialmedian ever trump either of those two? Are you nuts enough to keep all this data like I have, and have you seen the same trends?

RSS Overload: Don't Complain, Do Something About It

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

There seems to be a trend lately of posts regarding RSS overload. A lot of people are complaining about being overwhelmed with their Google Reader, and some are even advising for you to stop using your RSS reader altogether. I say, hogwash. Do something about it and take back your Google Reader. Now is the time to reclaim it.

Some suggest to use Twitter and FriendFeed as the alternative. If your scope is limited to one or two particular subject matters, this may be fine. You can easily follow the relevant news sources by following them on Twitter and FriendFeed. The imaginary friend feature on FriendFeed was basically intended for this purpose.

The beauty of the imaginary friend feature is that you do not have to follow that person on FriendFeed. Chances are that person might not even be on FriendFeed, instead all you need is the blog's RSS feed and your set. You could follow that particular news maker/blog on Twitter, but you would be sorting through an already noisy feed of updates from the rest of the people you are following. Yes you could always set up a second Twitter account for just that reason, or you could directly go to that person's Twitter feed for the latest updates. That to me seems like too much work though, and is unnecessary.

Google Reader, for me, is the most effective power tool in my social media arsenal. Why? Simply because I don't have to visit hundreds of websites per day to get the information I seek. It's a competitive advantage when it is used right. Less time spent on numerous websites equals higher productivity. It enables me to work smarter not harder. I consume information at an increasingly high rate, maybe higher than some other people. To get the most of your Google Reader, it requires periodic maintenance. Just as your car requires an oil change every 3,000-5,000 miles, Google Reader is no different. That's the discovery aspect of it. Do I need to even go into the distribution aspect of it, sharing? Perhaps that's a topic for another post.

There is no need to feel overwhelmed by the unread count:

This is just an application. Why are we letting it get the best of us? We feel overwhelmed with the amount of bills we need to pay every month, or the amount of emails we may need to reply to in a timely manner. These things are overwhelming at times. An application that was built to discover and distribute information is a blessing, not our enemy. We see the unread count of 1,000+ items, and automatically anxiety kicks in. We feel like it's game over, we lost, and there is no turning back. The feed reader has won. Without going deep into the human psyche, there is a solution. The solution is called "hide unread counts", a feature that was recently integrated into the recent Google Reader overhaul.

Garbage in equals garbage out:

I'm subscribed to about 800 feeds in Google Reader. Without RSS, I would have never known the existence of these sites, or much less have the time to visit these sites on a daily basis. RSS has enabled me to broaden my horizons like no application has ever done before. Knowledge is power, RSS makes me smarter every single day. Do I really need to be subscribed to all of these feeds, of course not. Initially I would subscribe to every blog I visited that gave me some sort of value. I could easily trim my subscriptions down to 200-300 feeds and get the same value out of my Google Reader. A lot of these feeds are content clones, they simply regurgitate the same breaking news as the next site. At most I need a handful of these sites, primarily 2-3 is enough. I don't mind seeing another site's angle on the same story, and often they will contain more info that was missed or left out from the first site which is breaking the news. It's never a bad idea to get different perspectives on a story.

This is why I have begun to start going through my feeds and deleting the ones who are strictly content clones.

I'm an avid reader of both ReadWriteWeb and Mashable, but for the most part they are both content clones. I check RWW first, as it's a higher caliber of quality and writing, and, sure enough, the same regurgitated content appears on Mashable, and 50 other sites. I have since unsubscribed from Mashable and the other 50 content clones. Nothing personal, it just does not give me any value anymore. Remove the clutter from your Google Reader, there is no reason why you should not. I mention it's good to get different perspectives on a news item. It's often the lesser-known blogs who will give this to me, not the 100 pound gorillas who are competing for pageviews just to get a story published every five minutes. I want quality content, not headlines and 200-300 words of text that equates to a press release with some type of spin put on it.

Productive reading means organization:

Google Reader also allows you to set up folders. Take advantage of this. Create folders and set up a tiering system. Dumping all of your feeds into Google Reader without the use of folders, makes it clutter central. Set up folders for must reads, or folders based on topical interest. You could create a folder system for "daily”, “important”, and “other”. Only you know what will work and what will not work for you. This makes consuming RSS a breeze, and probably will give you a better Google Reader experience as well. If you must keep the clutter, put it into a folder, so that it is out of sight until you are ready for it.

Use what the power readers use, keyboard shortcuts:

This feature is a plus for productivity, especially for those of you with larger amounts of feed subscriptions. Save precious time by quickly exploring your reading list without moving your hand back and forth between your keyboard and mouse. The full list of Google Reader keyboard shortcuts is located here.

Keep a backup OPML file:

I use a site called Toluu just for this purpose. Toluu is a powerful feed discovery service, but it's also good tool for storing rss feeds. I keep my must read feeds only stored at Toluu. When I come across a feed that I must subscribe to, I input it into Toluu first, second comes Google Reader.

When all else fails, reclaim your Google Reader and start from scratch.

In order to do this, you need to have an OPML copy of your RSS feeds. If you already have a Toluu account you are ahead of the game. If not, sign up for their service and start inputting your must read feeds only. Remember to leave the garbage out, there is no need to start from scratch with the same garbage that overwhelmed your Google Reader in the first place. When you have your OPML file, head over to Google Reader and delete everything, so that you have a blank slate. Now you can import your OPML file into Google Reader, and presto you have just reclaimed your Google Reader. From this point on make sure you are using folders, tagging when necessary and most importantly cautious about what you add to Google Reader. Ask yourself is this feed really worth subscribing to, if so, add it to Toluu first, then into the appropriate folder in your Google Reader. Keeping a pristine and productive Google Reader is not easy, even a power Google Reader like myself needs to do a complete cleansing from time to time. I get to this point every 5-6 months or so. Since I have been using folders and organizing my Google Reader, I probably wont need to cleanse it as often, once a year should be suffice. It's all relevant to the amount of information you consume and digest. I tend to be on the excessive side.

If anyone would like an invite to try Toluu, please leave a note in the comments along with your email address, either Louis or myself would be glad to send you an invite.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

I'm Getting So Tired Of The Non-Instant Web

Tap... Tap... Is this thing on? (Reloads)

At the end of 2008, my #1 prediction for 2009 in the world of tech was that the real-time Web was going to grow in awareness and importance - and that a growing number of early adopters and fast followers were going to turn to sites that delivered instant updates, without waiting for filtered analysis. But there are other aspects of the Web that seemingly should be instant, and are nothing but. Brick and mortar institutions that have moved to the Web still have the delays common with their offline institutions. Pure online plays can't manage to update their data as months and years change. And the result is frustrating. As I find some services doing a fantastic job of updating instantly, it's those that lag that drive me absolutely nuts.

Back in 2006, when this blog had maybe three total readers, myself being counted twice, I encountered an issue where eTrade took seemingly ages to send from my account to a third party bank. As the two posts on the matter, from August 20, 2006 and August 24, 2006, show, a simple process of selling stock, converting it to cash and shipping it to Bank of America, that should have happened practically immediately, took about a week. While at the time I was mostly just annoyed, near the end of the year, in what looked like an instant replay, I actually bounced checks for this very reason.

As I've written about a few times on the blog, I opened up a checking account with eTrade near the end of 2007. Given the crisis at many financial institutions in 2008, it seemed a good move to have some of my cash at Wells Fargo and some at eTrade, in case one had issues. But at the end of 2007, I had to write a check that exceeded the amount of my holdings at either bank, but was less than the total amount between the two. So, planning ahead, or so I thought, I transfered money from Wells Fargo to eTrade. Days later, I wrote the check, knowing I had enough cash to cover it. But days later, I got notification my check had bounced, and eTrade did me the favor of charging me a $25 overdraft fee.

Meanwhile, I substituted the old check with a new one for the same amount, and resubmitted, as the deposit made its way through. But instead of the second one going through, and the first begin canceled, eTrade billed me a second overdraft charge, saying now that the first check had passed through, and the second had bounced. Freakin' brilliant.

So... we're dealing with that. Meanwhile, with my eTrade bank account in a thinned-state, the mortgage came due, automatically debiting from my wife's B of A account (we're working on closing that out). I wrote her a check to cover the amount, while at the same time, selling stock on eTrade's brokerage side to transfer to the checking side to give the appropriate cushion. That was done at the end of last week, but only just tonight did I get the chance to transfer the funds to the right place. Annoying. The last thing I wanted to do was bounce, yes, a third check, and then have my wife bounce her own account and have us in trouble with the mortgage company, when in fact, we did have the money, but just didn't have access to it.

I know financial institutions have these old-fashioned rules that allow a certain number of business days to make funds available, and that things aren't as easy as simply dragging and dropping money from one account to another, but given the seeming simplicity of the Web, I've got to believe there is a better way. Why should I have had to check in with eTrade first thing every morning, multiple times during the day and again at night to see if their system would let me have access to my own money? The Web should remove the restrictions not just of physical limitations, but of time as well. Just get it done.

Which gets me to my next item...

It's January 7th, right? So why, oh why, is there any reason that Compete.com's data still stops at November of 2008? Are they still waiting for those year-end reports to trickle in from December? It makes absolutely no sense. At 12:01 a.m. on January 1st, I could have given you the exact statistics for this site. Sitemeter just checks in with real-time data, and it keeps going. But Compete.com, the Web's easy way out when it comes to getting comparative traffic stats, is asleep. Call Alexa all the names you want, but at least they show December and the first part of January. Ridiculous.

But those services aren't alone...

Web digerati from Steve Gillmor to Gabe Rivera have been slamming FeedBurner's slow pickup of news and translation to RSS. RSS is practically the lifebood of today's connected, always updated, mobile content world, and the Google-owned property has put innovation on hold by hitting the snooze button.

I've seen this many times myself, as I go through Google Reader, seeing posts that took place hours and hours ago. I used to blame Google Reader for the issue... (See: Warning: Google Reader Congestion of Up to Five Hours) but now it's clear the offender is FeedBurner. If FeedBurner is destroying the capability of the real-time Web, there needs to be an alternative. There's really no good reason with so much technology at Google, and on the Web in general, that we can't find a real real-time solution.

I could keep going... but I am going to reward those services and companies that get the real-time instant Web right. There's no reason I should have to wait for my money, my data, my feeds, or any of that. I'm done with waiting.

RSS Has Practically Eliminated My Need for Browser Bookmarks

People use Web browser bookmarks in vastly different ways. All of us have no doubt encountered people who bookmark just about everything, and don't organize them into folders, leaving the poor user to scroll through page after page to find the bookmark they are trying to find. Others don't bookmark anything and rely on Google to find the desired page, through the search engine. On the opposite spectrum, others have tidy folders, while a small percentage of them are so focused as to have their bookmarks sorted alphabetically in nested folders.

That last example would be me. Not only do I have all of my bookmarks sorted in folders, but each of the folders is alphabetically ordered in my Bookmarks toolbar in Safari. Many of the folders have subfolders, and believe it or not, the bookmarks are alphabetized in each of those folders. If only I were this organized everywhere else!


My Safari Bookmark List Just Got a Lot Smaller...
Best of all, these bookmarks are synchronized to my iPhone, meaning I have them with me on the go, practically anywhere.

But these days, it really doesn't matter how organized I am, because I so rarely encounter my bookmarks - and many have not been clicked in a very long time. In fact, this afternoon, I went and cleaned up my bookmarks for the first time in a while, going on a deletion spree.

Why the change? Because practically all the important sites I used to visit on a regular basis have transitioned to my Google Reader, thanks to RSS. There's no need to have TechCrunch and Scobleizer bookmarked. There's no need to check in on MacRumors and AppleInsider every day. Instead, they come to me. Even the dozens of saved search strings I had for work to scour Google and all the industry trade rags are no longer necessary because each of those can spit off an RSS feed into my reader.

At this point, practically the only bookmarks I need are the portals, such as iGoogle and My Yahoo!, which are themselves RSS-powered, sites where my own action is required to make them useful, from retail sites like Amazon.com, or transactional sites, such as Wells Fargo and eTrade, and the occasional sports-related site that has instant scores, like ESPN.com or Yahoo! Sports.

The old ways of visiting each site one by one, or even to open every bookmark in a folder at once, as Safari lets you do, are no longer necessary. With the inclusion of auto-complete features in practically every browser, the rapid growth of RSS and precision of Google search, browser bookmarks are an archaic breed. There even may come a time when I go back into my bookmarks and start removing entire folders.

What about you? You've likely got a start page. It's no secret mine is FriendFeed, as it has been all year. I am also a regular visitor to Google Reader and Twitter to round out my news gathering, but what next? Are there still sites that are so necessary to visit frequently that they warrant bookmarking?

Five New Blogs to Round Out the Year's Finds

Part Ten In a Monthly Series

We may be heading into the holidays, and soon will come the end of 2008, with an eye toward 2009, and all the change that comes with it. But before the year is up, I thought it made sense to highlight five blogs that I've recently discovered that you may not know. On louisgray.com, it's not all about me. It's about finding new services, new ways to share information, new authors, and new opinions. That's why you're seeing some outstanding posts from our new writers, and why each month, I highlight five new blogs that are not in the A-List, and very likely haven't yet crossed your radar.

Each of the bloggers highlighted over this time period has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Prior months' entries can be found for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October and November.

This month's entries...

1) GrowMap.com (www.growmap.com)

Focus: Social Networking, Twitter, E-Commerce, Blogging
Recent Highlight:
Where Or Where Is What Your Visitors Seek? The Importance Of Site Search
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

2) GeekLad (www.geeklad.com)

Focus: Google, SEO, Social Media
Recent Highlight: Chris Brogan’s Advice to Me
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

3) The Future Buzz (www.thefuturebuzz.com)

Focus: Web, Media, Blogging
Recent Highlight:
FriendFeed And Twitter Have *Not* Killed Blogging
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

4) TechPulse360 (www.techpulse360.com)

Focus: Technology, Silicon Valley, Business, Innovation
Recent Highlight:
Cisco Will Do A One Time Massive Layoff If Downturn Persists
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

5) Above and Beyond KM (aboveandbeyondkm.blogspot.com)

Focus: Knowledge Management, Business, Metrics
Recent Highlight:
Being a Cost Center in Difficult Economic Times
RSS Feed: Subscribe Now

Want to be on this list? You can catch my eye by posting great information in the field of technology, social media, blogging and the Web. I'll be more likely to highlight you if you blog almost every day, and bring new stories to the table that don't repeat discussions launched elsewhere. And if you have more than 1,000 subscribers, you're probably too big for this.

To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for November's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com and I'll get that set up right away.

Blogosphere on Holiday: Thanksgiving Drops Posting by Half

Web site traffic and activity follows a fairly regular flow. Any administrator or stat junkie can tell you that the vast majority of sites see much more activity on the weekday than the weekend, and businesses tend to see Sunday traffic higher than that of Saturday, as people start to gear up for the coming workweek. Times of holiday, whether worldwide or just in the United States, also impact the activity, reducing traffic, and seeing a slowdown across the board when it comes to publishing. This year, Google Reader hints the slowdown is as much as fifty percent.

As I've mentioned a number of times previously on the site, Google Reader is my go-to RSS reader. It tracks the 400 feeds I view, when they publish, and how quickly I get to the new items. You can even look at the last 30 days and see just how many items were read versus the number posted.


My last 30 days, according to Google Reader
According to those stats, in a typical seven-day week, I take in about 4,800 new items, ranging from about 700 to more than 900 individual items from Monday through Friday, and between 200 and 300 on the weekend.

In the preceding three Thursday and Friday combinations, Google Reader offered approximately 1,600 items in each two-day set. But in this most recent week, with Thanksgiving coming on Thursday, that number plummeted to under 700 total items, a drop of greater than fifty percent. In fact, you could start to see a slowdown as the week progressed, with Tuesday showing fewer items than Monday, Wednesday fewer than Tuesday, and so on.

In fact, the decrease in posting on the two-day Thanksgiving holiday was so low, it barely eclipsed a standard weekend, eking above that number by about 10 percent, despite the fact the holiday is so US-centric, and we assume that the Web is worldwide. So if you were feeling a bit sluggish after the Thursday feast, and couldn't get out of the tryptophan haze to put a post up, you weren't alone.

And this trend is not new. You can also see a similar note I posted back in May of 2007: Blogosphere On Holiday Drops RSS Feeds by 40%

We've Only Just Begun to Syndicate Our Content

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

It wasn't too long ago that blogging and pull technology, including RSS, first became popular. If you published new Web site content, and wanted the world to know about it in real time, your delivery and distribution options were very limited.

Publishing content updates was pretty much the same as it is today. You would upload your new pages to the server and hope to see some decent search engine traffic. But you relied more on bookmark traffic, and other means of marketing, such as e-mail, to get people to your site. Important as it is to get new traffic, retention is equally as vital. Quality content, useful products, affordable prices and great customer service, are all factors in keeping people coming back to your site.

The early days of the wild, wild, Web.

In the early days, before Google, search engines took days, and often weeks, to crawl and index new content. There were a lot of hoops to jump through to get listed, and you could be waiting weeks to months for a manual review of your site for inclusion. If you didn't have the patience to wait that long, you always had the option of paying a nice fee for an express review, to get your site approved. But the days when Altavista, Lycos,Yahoo, and a few others reigned supreme were also the days the spammers dominated search results.

Therefore, if you were lucky enough to get indexed in a timely fashion, chances are some spam-related bottom feeder had already beaten you out, leaving your pages buried back in the search results. Because spam was so bad and such a problem, a lot of Webmasters adopted the " If you can't beat them join them " mentality. As a result, the search engines almost became rendered useless for a period of time, because they were filled with nothing but spam, mainly in part due to black hat SEO tactics.

E-mail was the name of the game, and it actually worked.

Newsletters are something I, and many other Webmasters, heavily used to inform our user base of new Web site updates/product offerings and so forth. This was as real time as it got back then. Composing daily and weekly e-mails got to be quite a chore, but proved to be very effective. This of course did not last long.Spammers eventually discovered, and killed e-mail marketing for the rest of us. How many of you have received or reported spam e-mail, or even what you perceived to smell like spam to Spamhaus or Spamcop? Even with these most opt-in compliant e-mail lists, you still have frequent headaches with people reporting your legitimate e-mail as spam. The spam reports are also e-mailed to your Web host, and usually to their abuse dept, which causes more unneeded headaches. For non commercial uses such as notifying small or close groups of people, e-mail is still effective and has its place. And nowadays, marketers who use commerce e-mailing must ensure their lists are opt-in/out, and that their compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. It also takes a significant amount of more e-mail addresses to click and convert. Besides, people are a lot more reluctant to submit their e-mail addresses today than they once were. Even if they do, the chances of them actually seeing the message diminishes greatly thanks to spam filtering, and disposable e-mail addresses.

We have come a long way in a short period of time.

Today we publish and consume more content faster than ever before. WordPress has become the new FrontPage. Web sites are now blogs. e-mail and newsletters have been replaced by RSS. Micro-blogging applications such as Twitter have filled the void in between. Today when new content is created and published, it's usually done on a blog, and syndicated automatically thanks to RSS and the blogging application used. Today when you publish a blog post, it's distributed and found instantly in RSS readers within minutes of being written. Google and other search engines love blogs, because they are constantly publishing new content. Blogs that update frequently often will have more influence and higher rankings in search. Blogs and traditional Web sites get indexed in search engines, but that's where the similarities end, in terms of real time publishing and real time distribution. Blogs are indexed within minutes, but Web sites often take longer, with a lower probability for achieving higher in the search results.

So just what happens after you click the publish button on a blog post?

When you click publish, your blogging software automatically sends a ping alert to special servers maintained by Google Blog Search, Yahoo, VeriSign and others. The ping lets them know that you have recently published new content. Ping servers then alert aggregators, search engines and others to send out bots to crawl the blog for updates. The ping also alerts data miners and text miners that you have updated. Data miners are in the business of metrics, and this data is often sold to and used by corporations. Text miners are the true bottom scrapers, also commonly referred to as "splogs". Splog is short for "spam blog" and is used to describe an auto updating blog, setup to scrape feeds at regular intervals and post them. They exist for the sole purpose of either displaying ads, such as Google’s Adsense or for the purpose of creating search engine traffic, which in turn is used to promote other splogs. Splogs are automatically generated, and there is not much you can do about them nowadays other than report them to the search engines. The next step in the process, which is set in motion seconds after you press publish, is sending the new blog post to aggregators such as feed readers like Google Reader, and sites that pull RSS feeds, such as alltop.com etc. The human redistribution process (sharing, bookmarking, etc) then takes over and the cycle is started all over again. Compared to the old days, all this happens within minutes.

In Closing

Publishers today do not have to worry or spend as much time with the distribution of their content as they did way back when. Time is now spent focusing on producing quality content. Gone are the days of the wild wild Web. We are now using smarter, and more effective tools and publishing methods to get the word out faster than ever before. What's next on the horizon for content syndication?

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Sharing, Self Promotion Always a Two-Way Street

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Last month, I touched upon 35 tips for getting started with social media. Today I want to expand a little more on that, and focus on one key area for success, sharing and self promotion.

You just wrote a good piece of quality content, you are proud, and you want the world to know. The next step in the process, a topic that frequently comes up, mainly from beginners who are just getting started in social media, is deciding whether or not to self promote/share your own content. Social media is all about getting the message out there, and one of the easiest and fastest mechanisms for doing this is blogging. One can instantly create and publish content, but if no one is reading it at the other end, frustration sets in. It's time to change and learn new tactics. This is okay in the early stages because beginners make mistakes,and it's expected. What really matters is how you learn and grow from your mistakes. Some people feel as if promoting your own content is taboo, or there is some golden rule set in place forbidding this practice. I say go for it. You should absolutely promote your own content. Of course there is a right and wrong way to do this. Otherwise you come across as nothing more than a person with one agenda, your own. The last thing you want to do is come across as a desperate person spamming for clicks. Sharing and promoting are basically the same thing, there are just different tools and level variations used to achieve the same results, traffic.

One of the core fundamentals of social media is giving more than you get. Once you understand this principle, you will not have to rely on self promotion completely, you will have your network assisting you. Remember, sharing is caring. It's always a two way relationship and never one way.

Just starting out?

Self promote as often as possible, express restraint and etiquette on how you self promote. If you don't take the first step of informing the world that your blog exists, no one else will. Don't be fooled, nothing comes easy. You must crawl first before you walk. There is nothing wrong with broadcasting on Twitter, or sharing your content via Google Reader. Do it in a respectful manner, avoid luring people in under false pretenses, an example is using linkbait. Be honest and genuine in your approach, this means being yourself. People are willing, and do help other people. It's hard to believe in this day in age, but yes it's true. If you are new to this, let people know and ask questions, most of all have patience. Need a post dugg, stumbled, retweeted ? Just ask someone. Myself and many others will go out of our way to help a newbie just starting out, as long as you are sincere in your approaches, and are willing to learn and most importantly listen.

Self promotion starts with promoting others first.

Promoting your brand (you) and your content is the first step to getting noticed. This is easier said than done. You can use megaphones such as Twitter and Google Reader all day long to broadcast your message, but if no one is listening, you are wasting your time. The tools are facilitators only, not the final outcome. In the beginning stages these tools are more essential than ever. These are the primary instruments among many that you will use to promote others. The right to self promote, I believe, is earned to some degree. By promoting others first, you have earned this right, and you can expect the same in return, in due time.

Find, establish and continually grow your network.

Building your network is not about adding as many followers on Twitter and Facebook as humanly possible. All that equates to is building a meaningless numbers list. Building your network is about networking and establishing real relationships with the relevant people who are in your field. If your blog is about social media, then that is what your core network should be comprised of. Find the social media bloggers you read on Twitter. and subscribe to them. Retweet, and promote their content using other methods such as, bookmarking, Google Reader, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. If it's a post you really like, be sure to let them know on Twitter or by leaving a comment on their blog. Take it a step further, write a blog post and positively link to them.This is how you establish and build an online network from nothing, and if chances permit, possible new offline relationships. Not everyone will take notice and reciprocate back, that's okay, it's to be expected. There are plenty of fish in the sea, reel in the line and recast.

Your network is a family and team, treat them as such.

Your core network online should be treated as a family. Always keep them on your radar, and be informed of their activities. Online this means being a support system. Sharing and promoting your network's content is only one dynamic for maintaining a healthy team. There might be times when members in your network need emotional support, or support for charitable reasons. Make sure when possible, you make an attempt to reach out and offer assistance. Families are teams, they stick together. Your success online, depending on how you want to measure it, relies heavily on your network and their reach.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

When starting out, make sure to promote your best content only. People's first impressions need to be reserved only for your home-runs. Wow people the first time, and there is a good chance they will be back. Content that is not home-run worthy, should be picked up naturally.

Use the best tools possible to facilitate promotion for self and others.

Sharing starts with RSS. Google Reader is the main workhorse for sharing your content. It is also the place where your networks, team members content resides and gets promoted. Besides being the most easiest and common way to share content, it also takes it a step further by allowing you to add notes onto the content you share out. Notes are a great way to add to the conversation, give an opinion, give a recommendation, or directly solicit conversation or feedback. Try to make an effort to use notes on the content you create and share. This makes your content stand out more, and adds a little depth and clarity about the subject matter. Don't forget to note your friend's content as well. Lastly, it is worth mentioning the power that lies behind the public linkblog Google Reader generates for the content you share.

Twitter is another fire starter. It's a quick and powerful tool to broadcast a message in real time. The power is in the listeners and responders in your network. For maximum reach your social profiles need to be established and maintained on the relevant sites. Twitter is one of these sites, do not rule it out. There is a reason you will find that most, if not all of your team members use Twitter for communications and promotion. New content also breaks first on Twitter, so listen and retweet as often as possible.

FriendFeed is the glue that keeps it all together. FriendFeed has become one of the most powerful tools for aggregation, promotion by far. Its sole purpose is to aggregate the content you generate from any of the 49 different types of services it supports into one central location. What knocks it out of the park is the simplicity, growing community and social features. You can instantly share any type of content, and often within seconds have a seal of approval on your shares in the form of a vote, which is called a "like" on FriendFeed. The more votes an item gets, the more you are looking at a home run. Voting is an added bonus, the real power is the ability to comment on shared items in real time. You can also post images and messages directly on FriendFeed. Remember we talked a little about asking? Like any other site, spend the time, look around and start to actively participate. Establish and maintain a strong following here, and you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Image by Padawan under Creative Commons license.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

How to Discover New Content

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

The quest for finding new content to read is neverending. Gone are the days of visiting numerous websites to get the latest news. Increased RSS adoption, both for publishers and consumers has significantly enhanced the discovery and distribution process. Content is being published faster then ever before, and we are discovering and sharing it as fast as it is published. This happens within minutes, giving "hot off the press" a whole new meaning.

As recent as 3-4 years ago, I checked no more then 5-10 websites per day for my tech related news. I relied on a portal, mainly Yahoo for headlines, local and sport news. There was so much more information accessible to me, but I had no real mechanism to harness it. I discovered new blogs back then by doing Google searches and following links from blogrolls. When I found a new blog, I would bookmark it locally in Firefox. This process, over time made my bookmarking folders a junkyard of lost links. With the exception of a few, most would never see a single mouse click ever again. While the mechanisms (RSS readers) were in place then, it was not until Google launched Google Reader in October of 2005, that I really took notice and began to understand what that funny looking orange icon I saw on every blog was about. It would change the ways we create, discover, distribute and publish media on the internet.

Today, I'm currently subscribed to 638 various social media and technology blogs. I can go through several hundred of these feeds in a matter of minutes. Reading, notating and sharing in the process seamlessly and effortlessly, thanks to RSS and Google Reader.

This post outlines some of the methods and tools I use to discover new voices.

1) Google Blog Search

This is one of the easiest ways for finding new content. Google Blog Search is great for finding the most relevant blogs on any particular subject. It updates and crawls extremely fast. Posts will show up in the search results rather quickly. You can also search and sort published blog posts by the last hour, last day, past week, past month or any date range. I use this in combination with a number of Google Alerts, that I have set up to monitor specific keywords of interest. If a blog is publicly publishing and has RSS enabled correctly, it should show up in the results.

2) Blogs/Blogrolls

Follow the links. Bloggers will almost always reference and link back to the source of their subject. Bloggers often feed off of each other. The source usually goes back to another blog or blogger which provoked or inspired the link in the first place. I discover a lot of new blogs this way. Bloggers often guest post on other blogs, these are usually voices that are in demand and are a great source for discovery. Blogrolls, besides being an overlooked sidebar widget, are actually good for discovering new blogs as well.

3) Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites are great for discovery. Bookmarks are usually niche targeted/tagged and for the most part represent quality content. Sites like Delicious and Diigo are both great resources to tap into. I prefer Diigo for discovery because it offers more social aspects to it compared to Delicious.

4) Twitter

Twitter is an excellent tool for discovery. Twitter goes hand in hand with blogging. If it's on a blog, the chances are extremely high it's been broadcast on Twitter. Twitter is as real time as it gets. The first platform bloggers use almost immediately to broadcast their new content is guess where, yep Twitter. Use Twitter Search to find exactly what you are looking for. You can also narrow your results down further using search operators or advanced search. Pay attention to re-tweets as they will also point you in new directions for discovery.

5) Toluu

Toluu is in the business of discovery. Toluu, with mathematical precision matches you to new feeds and the members that shared them. Follow members with the same relevant feed interests. Toluu has numerous features such as feed suggestions and tagging that ultimately leads to the discovery of more targeted feeds. The deeper you drill down in the system, the better it gets. My favorite feature is the activity feed pictured above. I can see and get suggestions throughout the day about the new blogs that my friends are discovering and sharing.

6) Share and discover with friends through Google Reader.

Consider subscribing to your friend's Google Reader. If your friends read, share and have similar interests, there is a good chance that they are discovering obscure blogs you may or may not know about. I check my friend's Google Reader as often as I check my own for new content.

7) FriendFeed has become a reliable and necessary tool on so many levels. On FriendFeed, the most obvious way to find the content that is relative to you, is from your subscriptions. If you are looking for blogs, and or technology related content, find and subscribe to the members who are producing and sharing this material. These members often associate and follow in groups on FriendFeed. It's easy to find them. Try taking advantage of the advanced search function. This not only allows you to search your friend's content, but FriendFeeds entire user base, including rooms. FriendFeed is aggregating data from over 48 web services, so you should have a pretty high hit rate for finding whatever it is you are searching for. I will also scan the FriendFeed Google Reader shared public url for a complete random snapshot of what's being shared at any given time. Last but not least, you can join the Share your Google Reader room to find new content.

These are just a few examples of how I find new content. How do you discover new voices?

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Is Social Media Keeping You Out Of Touch With Reality?

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

For me, social media is one of the greatest things to hit the web since RSS. I love using tools and services like Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Brightkite, Toluu, Disqus, Tweetburner, ReadBurner, RSSMeme, and tons more. The vast amount of connections I've been able to make since March would not have taken place had these social media tools and services never existed. They've made connecting with others across the globe so easy and simple. They've also landed me numerous jobs and job offers. However, when I decided to use social media to get off the computer and out of my house I began to wonder if social media was keeping me out of touch with reality.

For one, because of LinkedIn, I've yet to update my resume. Honestly, my resume is months behind my LinkedIn profile at this point and I dread updating it. I dread it because it's so much easier and much more flexible to update my LinkedIn profile. Resumes have too many rules and restrictions. I find it hard to show my personality in my resume. This is quite the opposite for me when using LinkedIn.

However, I began to realize that if LinkedIn disappeared off the face of the web, I'd have to do some serious thinking about how I would update my resume now. Also, I love the recommendations feature of LinkedIn and I've accumulated numerous recommendations. Unfortunately, I can't drag these over to my resume. Who's really going to read them in the corporate world? When I set back and thought about all of this, I felt so out of touch with reality. If there ever came a day where I needed to get a job offline, I'd probably be devasted because all of the work that I've put into my accomplishments are available online and I have no desire to pull them offline. "Real people" would think I've lost my mind.

Secondly, I'm beginning to become irritated with my offline friends that have no clue about the tools that I use. They come to me with questions and problems and I can't help but wonder what the heck do they do online? How could you not know about the vast array of tools available that can help you accomplish just about any task. This irritations progresses everytime I log into my online class. Unfortunately, the school has no type of social media offerings that I know could make things a lot easier for me. Give me a calendar or an RSS feed! Send me a tweet or something. We use forums for our group projects and I feel like they're out of touch with "my world" and I'm some type of alien. Meebo chat anyone?

Unfortunately it gets worse, but I won't elaborate on how. Instead, I'd like to ask you what are some ways that you feel social media is keeping you out of touch with reality? What are you doing to bridge the gap? Tell your story in the comments section or on FriendFeed!

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

30 Different Uses for RSS

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


I'm making an effort to become less reliant on visiting websites for the data I need. Spending a majority of my time in Google Reader, I decided RSS could help me accomplish this task. I no longer have to visit Yahoo to read my horoscopes or sports scores. I now track my Ebay auctions from Google Reader. These are some of the ways I started to recently use and rediscover RSS.

This post touches on 30 different ways RSS can be used.

1) Tabbloid is a "hatchling" project that comes to us from Hewlett-Packard. It's a very simple and useful utility that turns your RSS feeds into a personal magazine via PDF format. You can generate your PDF files on the website, or have them emailed to you.

2) Track deals for hotel and airline fares at Expedia,Travelocity,Orbitz and Kayak.

3) iTunes music store RSS generator allows you to set up notifications based on your genre for new releases, top songs, top albums, featured albums and exclusives.

4) Track your favorite sports team news and game scores at Yahoo Sports. Basketball | Baseball | NFL | Hockey

5) Simpletracking.com lets you view the latest tracking information from all the major US shipping carriers. No need to go directly to the carrier's website anymore. Get notified when your package tracking information has changed directly from your feed reader.

6) Create customized news feeds and track specific keywords. You can get a feed for any search you do on Google News. First do any search on Google News, then simply use the Atom or RSS link on the left-hand side of your search results page to generate the feed. Here is what my FriendFeed Google news feed looks like.

7) Track your favorite online comics strips. Tapestry Comics maintains an RSS directory of comic strip feeds. Dilbert, xkcd and several hundred more feeds can be found here.

8) Create customized Ebay auction search feeds. Keep track of Ebay auctions with ease.

9) Set up custom feeds for job searches using the Indeed job search engine. As with Google News, the process is the same. RSS job feeds are automatically generated on the search results pages.

10) Get real time reports about current traffic incidents in your area. Traffic.com delivers RSS feeds of traffic information for most major U.S. cities.

11) Be notified of severe weather warnings and advisories for the United States, issued by the National Weather Service.

12) Get notified of the latest movie and dvd releases courtesy of Movies.com.

13) Get notified of current airport delay courtesy of Flightstats.com.

14) Listen to the President of the United States radio addresses.

15) Get the latest NASA news articles and press releases.

16) Read your Daily Horoscopes.

17) Send RSS feeds to Twitter using TwitterFeed.TwitterFeed is a simple utility that will check an RSS feed for updates and send them to Twitter accordingly.

18) Get notified of RSS feed updates via SMS messages sent to your phone.

19) Convert RSS feeds to audio recordings. You can also subscribe to them as podcasts via iTunes, and download your recordings as an mp3 file.

20) View the latest public pictures being uploaded to Flickr. You can also generate custom RSS feeds based on a multitude of parameters detailed here.

21) Generate custom Picasa RSS feeds for your family pictures. You can also generate feeds from public pictures. All search result pages will generate an RSS feed for that keyword. Here is one I set up for "Dogs."

22) View the real time public Twitter time line. You can also get your Twitter account time line by going to your Twitter profile page. Scroll to the bottom right of your profile page and you will see an RSS link located there.

23) Keep track of your recently played Last.fm tracks. Replace mfruchter with your Last.fm user name. ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/mfruchter/recenttracks.rss

24) Keep track of what you and your friends are bookmarking. If you wanted to find out what Louis Gray has bookmarked recently, you could go to his FriendFeed or Delicious url. Better yet you could check your Google Reader. To find yours or a specific Delicious user's RSS feed, simply goto their Delicious profile page and scroll to the bottom right of the page where you will see an RSS icon. You can also generate custom RSS for specific keywords/tags. All tag search result pages will have a corresponding RSS feed option. Here is one I set up to track of all recent public bookmarks tagged "twitter."

25) Watch the most viewed YouTube videos of the day. You can also customize this to your liking based on this criteria.

26) Keep track of new products on Amazon.com. Never miss when new items become available. You can generate an RSS feed for just about any product category Amazon has to offer.

27) Try an RSS feed matching service to find new feeds based on your interests. One that comes to mind is Toluu. Toluu allows you to upload your existing OPML file to their service, they in-turn will match you to new feeds and members who share similar preferences in feeds.

28) View all of your publicly shared RSS items on one web page. This is a great built in feature of Google Reader. Any item you star or share is automatically saved on a public html page that Google generates for you. Here is what my shared page looks like. To see the public page containing your shared items, click the "Shared items" link in your Google Reader. You'll see a list of everything you've chosen to share, along with a link to the page where they are displayed.

29) Use Google Reader as a new tool for microblogging. With the ability to “share” or “share with note" option in Google Reader, you can leave comments and invite conversation on posts you publicly share. Aggregate Google Shared items into a site like FriendFriend, so others can voice their thoughts as well.

30) Get the best of FriendFeed without ever going to the actual site. FriendFeed generates RSS feeds for almost every user function of the site. You can view your mainfeed as well as your, comments and like feeds in Google Reader. Have you created any topical lists? You can get RSS feeds for your lists too. I have found this function particularly useful as I can now track my "social media whales" list in RSS. Often I spend more time in Google Reader then I do on FriendFeed. RSS gives me a backup and safety net, so nothing goes under the radar.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

My 9 a.m. Morning News Trumps Your Evening News

I am an information glutton. I want to know all the news, and get it as it happens, preferably before everyone else. By the time it's discussed in the afternoon, I want to already have seen it, dissected it and reacted to it. It's this demand for a real-time news firehose that has me turning to Twitter for real-time events instead of Google News, and what has had me looking to Google Reader and FriendFeed before mainstream news sites or Web portals for just about everything else.


Google Reader Tells Me 9 a.m. is the Primetime News Hour
As Google Reader's Trends statistics show, I read every single item that flows through my RSS reader, even if it's just for a second. But the time you're most likely to catch me, unblinking, in front of my RSS reader is around 9 each morning. The statistics show I'm parked on Google Reader most often at 9 a.m. with other spikes around 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., and on those days when I start earlier, 8 a.m.

Assuming a typical workday, I have probably taken in between 800 and 1,000 new items from RSS before the evening news comes on. By the time the news networks have selected what they'll focus on for 30 minutes, with each story getting maybe a minute's worth of attention, interrupted by commercials, I've likely seen the news break and get spun by multiple people whose opinions I trust. By 11 p.m., when the late night news comes on, I've more than moved on. And you can forget about waiting around for the next morning's paper.

By the time your papers are hitting the driveways of people across the country, much of the news is 24 hours old. That's why you've seen a rise of 24-hour news networks, headline news, and new ways to get the news shoveled ever quicker. I may not be a morning person, and the twins certainly aren't helping there... but I know to get the news early. Google Reader and other tools enable you to pick who your information filters are, and when you want to get your news. Don't wait for the networks or the paper to choose when you should get it. Just go get it already.

Combine Friends and Google Reader for Best News Filtering

By Chris Miller of TheSocialNetworker (Twitter/FriendFeed)

For those of you that truly digest RSS, it has become more than a super-sized meal. You are gorging yourself to keep up. Each day you find yourself discovering new feeds through links and sites like Toluu. I slowly dug through hundreds of feeds a day, mastering the Google Reader keyboard shortcuts as I utilized it more. I found myself making folders, sorting feeds, importing more OPML and watching the unread count grow larger every morning. And you could forget about trying to catch up after a long weekend!

So this is where I began to change my mindset and workflow. I surrounded myself with trusted friends that have the same indulgences and interests as myself. I began building a wide array of people and started adding them to my Google chat client so they would also show in my reader. I then sat back and watched as the shared links came in. Not too surprisingly, many of the exact articles I found interesting, they did also. That is why they are my friends in the first place. As the shared items grew, my need to visit my own folders lessened.

Let me explain more in detail. I had about 14 folders for sorting purposes and a general bucket. The general bucket got looked in on at an ever increasing gap in time. I found myself scanning the first few then marking all read. This means those feeds could possibly be removed, but it was nt like I was wasting space or anything, so of course they stay. I would find a good story here and there, but the most part I had added them for one good story and found nothing else really came out. The effort to weed through is now larger than the effort to ignore them.

The remainder of the folders were sorted by my own mental process and it works great. Each folder gets attention at least twice weekly, some daily. When I am working on a project or article, well maybe more than once a day. What happens to the rest? They either sit a few days until I change back to that folder or I mark them as read and declare feed bankruptcy on a semi regular basis.

Here comes the change. Once I started noticing that my freinds were sharing the same feeds I found interesting, I took a chance and started working from those folders more often. I grew my friend base and even solicited more of my Twitter followers and other networks to link up. My library grew as well as my enormous filter.

I have basically outsourced my feed reading. I rely on a large amount (always taking more) of workers, that I hire for free, to sort through my news, announcements, stories and excellent blog postings. They then provide filtering and share to me what should be focused on immediately. I choose to look at the others when I have a moment. Like sitting in the car waiting on yet another child to finish yet another activity. Bless the Google Reader for Blackberry.

I then, in return, become a worker for my friends by sharing an filtering feeds to a finer granularity that many of them use as a feed. Mainly the staff that works for me. They have now gotten a cleansed feed that has been through many filters and then the final siphon. All built around being a friend, sharing with a click and then doing the same in return. I thank all my filters and would like to expand my empire. So add me as a friend and lets get to filtering. idonotes@gmail.com for google chat (not e-mail, Twitter me otherwise).

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Chris Miller, for starters, is the author of TheSocialNetworker and the podcast TheSocialGeeks. He is an avid social media consumer, tester and early adopter, which leads to his apparent enthusiasm to write and podcast site reviews. He even sneaks in his own opinions. You can find Chris on all the social networks (yes, really almost every one of them) as IdoNotes, including Twitter.

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RSSMicro Adds FeedRank to RSS Search Engine

RSSMicro and FeedCamp have been out since 2006, trying to measure hot topics, popular RSS feeds and offer a broad search engine through millions of feeds. (See Search Engine Journal for a 2006 review.) In the last week, RSSMicro introduced a new measure they call FeedRank, which utilizes an algorithm they claim taps into a feed's updating frequency, quality of content, and whether the sites are "known", to deliver a numerical score, graded on a steep curve.

The new FeedRank is said to have eliminated many spam Web sites through ensuring the quality of the content on the source, and its unique information across articles. But even if you think you are a top content producer, you might be surprised at how poorly you're rated. In fact, only 1% of all feeds rate better than 7 of 10. 3% rank as a 6, 6% as a 5, and 9% garnered a score of 4. The vast majority of blogs (including this one) get a score of 3/10 or less.

Given the preponderance of low scores, I'd be surprised if most bloggers would want to display their FeedRank.

But outside of that single measurement, RSSMicro, and its companion site, FeedCamp, could give the much more popular Google News and Google Trends a run for their money - if anybody knew about them, or if they worked harder to make their site look current.


Today's Top News and Images are Political, Of Course
The main RSSMicro page highlights top news, videos and images from almost 6,000 different news sources, on top of the more than 4 million RSS feeds they say they scour with their search engine.

The FeedCamp site, powered by RSSMicro, shows the top terms across the many feeds they cover. Unsurprisingly, you see terms like Obama, McCain, Election, Palin and Voters atop today's list. You can also delve into the archive to find out what terms were popular at any date, starting with June 9th of 2007. At that time, Bush and Iraq were top topics, but today's presidential candidates were nowhere to be seen. Flash forward to November 1, 2007, and Clinton ranked as the #7 topic, with Obama as #43. McCain didn't crack the top 100.

The sites are worth checking out, especially for trends, assuming somebody can crack the code and track keywords over time.

If you are interested in seeing where your feed sits in FeedRank, use the FeedRank Checker on this page. And if you crack a 4 out of 10 or higher, consider yourself privileged.

AideRSS Rebrands as PostRank, Launches New Features, API

Since its launch, AideRSS has aimed to leverage social tools to help determine a publisher's most popular content, through analysis of individual posts and their related activity, including Diggs, bookmarks on Delicious, links in Google, and total comments. RSS advocates suffering from information overload have even turned to AideRSS to act as an intelligent filter, providing them the best stream, rather than the default firehose. With today's new announcements, along with a rebranding as PostRank that saw the launch of a new Web site and look, the service has added tags, keyword filtering, and other tools that will get users to the data they are seeking quickly.

(See from December 2007: AideRSS Judges Feed Posts as Good, Great, Best)


PostRank Shows Posts With Audience Engagement Have Higher Score
The first major enhancement to the new PostRank is keyword filtering. As Ilya Grigorik wrote, users have asked for the ability to customize and filter any RSS feed with specific keywords. For example, you could get all posts from The Unofficial Apple Weblog that mention iPhone, or posts from Matt Cutts that mention SEO.


I Tagged TUAW as iPhone and Filtered for Only iPhone News
You can also now tag feeds you import into PostRank, helping to build out what the team calls "custom content channels" based on those tags and keywords. All feeds tagged with BlackBerry would be in the BlackBerry channel, etc.

Most interesting to developers may be the introduction of full API access. According to Grigorik, all operations possible on the new postrank.com site are accessible by API, making it easy to utilize the filtering capabilities seen in their service on other applications.

As a blogger, the new PostRank offers better ways to see if specific posts do better with readers and the social services based on keywords. As a consumer, you can now read fewer feed items and still be sure you don't miss those that are most interesting to you. You can find PostRank at http://www.postrank.com. Of course, going to the old AideRSS.com will push you there as well...

Google Reader Unveils Individual RSS Consumption Statistics

Google is sitting on a goldmine of data around RSS feed reading and consumption. As most universally accept that Google Reader is the most popular feed reader, Google likely has a plurality of information showing when bloggers post, when people read, and what the most popular feeds, items, etc. are. So far, despite having all this detail, the Google Reader team has been largely reticent to reveal their knowledge, choosing instead to promote RSS as a standard, rather than setting bloggers up with yet more ways to measure one another.

Today, a crack opened in the stone facade, as Google Reader delivered charts for every feed you are subscribed to, which shows when the feeds publish, by day, date and time, as well as how quickly you get to read the items themselves. The data, which leverages the last 30 days of activity, rather than the duration of the feed, or when you first subscribed, highlights the total posts per week, the total subscribers known to Google, and when the feed was last pinged. This part is not new.


Google Reader says Mondays have been busy here.
What is new are a set of bar charts showing what days bloggers post, what time of day they post, and when you read the pieces. The resulting charts can show gaps in a blogger's schedule, whether you wait hours to get a feed, or if they are filling your RSS in box overnight as you sleep.


Google Reader Shows Scoble Skips Days and then Spikes
For individual bloggers who post 1-2 items a day, you can see two or three day holes in their publishing, but for more high-volume sites, like Techmeme, TechCrunch, or Wired, for example, the resulting curve of information begins to take on a liquid form with fewer spikes. It's us individuals, who actually don't read RSS feeds 24 by 7, as much as we would like to, who have the holes in our consumption of that data.


Google Reader Shows Techmeme's Activity to be Fluid
To access this information, go to your Google Reader, click on the feed name of any item, and then click "Show Details" in the top right corner. Last 30 days will show what dates the author published (and you read it). Time of day will show the time the author published (in your time zone) and when you read it. Day of the week will show the day the author published (and when you read it).

We already had aggregate statistics, and now we have individual statistics by feed. It's tempting to guess what other mountains of data the Google Reader team is sitting on, and to wonder how we can tap in.

Apploop: FINALLY - A Useful iPhone RSS Reader!

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

FriendFeeders ask time and time again, "Where do you find the things you post?" and "Why don't you ever run out of things to post?" My short answer is "Google", since my methods are quite simple... yet complicated. Discovering this app is the perfect opportunity to elaborate on one of my major resources: RSS.

I am a huge RSS junkie.

I'm all about picture + headline + the first few topic sentences. If all three interest me, I have the option to read the entire article. Most of the stuff I post is pulled from my various feeds. Since my job is computer related, I am always connected to the Internet, my reader is always up, and I'm constantly scanning the headlines. My RSS reader choice is Google Reader, since it gives me everything I am looking for:

1. Headlines
2. Thumbnails
3. Few topic sentences
4. Option to click

The problem = 98% of the readers do not include the things I'm looking for.

I've been on the hunt for a good RSS reader long before I signed up for FriendFeed. Most RSS readers (especially for mobile phones) are plain text with no visuals. Because I am a huge visual person, I don't even bother looking at my subscriptions via mobile, since a highly visual application didn't exist.

Enter AppLoop.

I randomly stumbled upon this company whilst Googling. I was floored. Not only would this simple application solve my problems while on the go, they are also a content provider. Meaning, if you have a blog / website, with an RSS feed, they will turn your blog into a native application for a phone, for any platform, and submit it to the store for you. For free. Holy wow.

Now the latter doesn't really excite me, since it would be kinda sorta mortifying to see a "Mona application" in the app store. I am ultra excited for this app because I'm hoping my favorite websites will hear about it and choose to offer a mobile RSS option using AppLoop, -- such as LOL cats, Gizmodo, Engadget, or Boing-Boing since again, I'm all about: headlines, thumbnails, few topic sentences, AND the option to click. If all my subscriptions published their content with AppLoop, I'll even go as far as to say: I foresee giving up Google Reader -- even when I'm in front of my computer.

Anyway, the demo video is finally up and they JUST launched. So take a look, the video speaks for itself. :)


iPhone Application Generator Demo from AppLoop on Vimeo
And no, I am in no way affiliated with them, just an excited end-user. ;)
So what's your favorite reader? (mobile or desktop)?

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Update: For more 'techie views' visit TechCrunch: "AppLoop Transforms Blogs Into Native iPhone Applications" and by ReadWriteWeb: "Make Your Own iPhone/Android Apps With New App Generator" and Duncan Riley's Inquisitor's, "AppLoop iPhone App Generator: High Wow Factor"

iGoogle Integration Kills Need to Go to Google Reader

A devoted Google Reader user, I spend a good amount of my time at various points during the day diving into the RSS reader and catching up on the news around the Web. In contrast, I have spent very little time in iGoogle, Google's nascent portal, which utilizes widgets to help you build out your own information workspace. But today, Google Reader announced it has fully integrated with iGoogle, including the ability to view feeds in canvas mode, while still letting users benefit from the many keyboard shortcuts that have made powering through hundreds of feeds a relative breeze. The move means there is now very little need to go to Google Reader directly.


My iGoogle today features various widgets in one place.
By utilizing Google Reader in iGoogle's canvas view, you can see all feeds in Reader in either expanded or list mode and use the J and K keys to go to the next feed item or the previous. You can also star items or share them to your link blog, as before.


The new Google Reader integration makes iGoogle much more useful.
By hitting the canvas button, all other widgets you may have installed on your iGoogle page are shunted to the left for later retrieval. But you can just as easily get back to iGoogle's standard view just by hitting home. This lets you retain access to all other feeds or widgets you have installed, but still get the benefits of the RSS firehose that is Reader.

Integrating Google Reader with iGoogle will make it more attractive to mainstream users who are still figuring out RSS, and now need one less site to go to in order to get their fill of news. While iGoogle hasn't exactly dominated the market, still owned by My Yahoo!, the integration is smart, and for early adopters like me who aren't huge fans of pretty search-based portals, this just might be enough to do the reverse, and get me using iGoogle.

Of course, you can always find my shared link blog from Google Reader here.

Hey FeedBurner, Wake Up. You And Google Didn't Talk Last Night.

You would think that as FeedBurner has been further incorporated into the Google monolith, recently incorporating with Google's feedproxy, that its service would be finer tuned and could be trusted to sync up with the Web giant's other products, including iGoogle and Google Reader. On most days, they seem to do a fairly good job, getting feeds out to the various RSS readers, and reporting statistics accurately. But today, like many other days before, the two seemed to walk by one another in the hallway and not make eye contact, because we are once again seeing a decimation of feed counts across the blogosphere, chopping away thousands of subscribers from popular blogs, and for the little guys, taking them down to zero.


My subscriber count plummeted by two-thirds (at least for today)


Coalminersgd wonders if all her subscribers went away.
This miss, one in a series of misses over the last few years, also comes at a time when many are openly voicing concern that FeedBurner is asleep at the wheel, having moved its ping server without telling anyone, and adding delays between people add posts to their site and when they actually hit the RSS feed. Techmeme's Gabe Rivera and ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick have been among their most vocal detractors. Gabe said yesterday that "Feedburner lameness continues", and at the end of last month, Marshall said that FeedBurner May Not Be Hearing Your Pings.


DearRobot is clearly not happy.
In Marshall's story at the end of September, Steve Olechowski of FeedBurner said "we hear all your pings" and that "both ping servers still work", but that hasn't been the experience for everyone. Gabe said "It's inexcusable," adding "At this point, Feedburner is infrastructure" to the Web, something virtually all bloggers, myself included, use to have their content distributed. In fact, Gabe's response to Steve was quite direct, saying, "you guys broke the blogosphere, and your above verbiage reads like a bunch of evasive hooey."


TimBrownson is frustrated to the point of physical violence.
Whatever the problems are at FeedBurner, they aren't seeming to get any better with time, no matter how many times people like Gabe, Marshall and I bring it up. The company's blog hasn't been updated since May 30th, even though they've been called out for being silent before. (See: FeedBurner Quietly Kills All-Time RSS Feed Stats from February). It's alarming for some that a product that has become infrastructure and is expected to have 100% uptime continues to have such gaps and flaws. Losing one's statistics for a day is essentially meaningless, but it really makes you wonder what's going on over there.

See previous coverage of FeedBurner/Google mismatches:

• June 19, 2007: Bloggers Panic as Google Stops Reporting RSS Stats
• February 21, 2008: Google FeedFetcher and FeedBurner Miss Each Other Again

Shyftr Reloads With New API, Activity Stream, Widgets and UI

The crowded world of online RSS feed readers is one that's been dominated by names like Google Reader, Bloglines and Netvibes. But underneath that layer you have a few interesting innovative players, including FeedEachOther, and Shyftr. Shyftr came to prominence this spring, drawing attention for a shared comment stream on linked items, and has been quiet for the last few months as they worked on enhancing their platform. Today, they woke up in a big way, revamping the service, while adding an API, activity streams and widgets for bloggers.

Shyftr's main draws continue to be the same. You can add friends on the service, and see which RSS feeds they are following, or have "Shyfted". You can see who else is reading feeds that you have added, which you can do manually, or by OPML. And despite your reading your feeds in your own space, you can make comments and see them shared with the broader Shyftr community, much like other aggregation tools, including FriendFeed and Strands do. But unlike those services, Shyftr deduplicates, providing a single instance for each unique URL.

In addition to the social aspects of Shyftr, the service offers what they call a Pocket blog, the equivalent of a Google shared links blog, letting you see what friends have found interesting, as they "pocket" new items they discover.


Today's announcements set the foundation for Shyftr and for outside developers to further enhance the service. The API can tap into just about every aspect of the service, except for actually reading feeds, Shyftr reported in a blog post this morning. Among the first introductions is a new activity stream, which shows your activity, or that of your friends, as they "Shyft" new feeds, "Pocket" new items, or make comments.


Like FriendFeed and other social tools, you can filter whether you want to see "Everyone's activity", "Friends activity" or just your own activity. You can also view a single individual's stream if you like.

The last addition are embeddable widgets. Every Web service under the sun has a corresponding widget these days, and Shyftr is no different. You can make widgets for your activity stream, for a specific feed, or to show all activity on Shyftr itself.

As Shyftr founder Dave Stanley wrote in this morning's post, the development of an API was critical to expanding the site's social features, and bringing it to be much more than a passive RSS reader. While the service remains small in the shadows of giants, it has set the groundwork for growth. You can see my profile here: http://www.shyftr.com/profile/louisgray.

I'm Evangelizing RSS With Google Reader's E-mail Function

Living on the cutting edge as early adopters at times can seem like an exclusive club. The tools we use every day have funny names to the outside world - Twitter... OPML... Technorati... Plurk? But while we're hanging out in these oxygen-poor communities, and seeking out new ways to aggregate all our online activities in one place, a good deal of the people we work with, our family and our friends, have precious little to aggregate. But they get e-mail, and you can leverage e-mail as the bridge to an RSS-powered life.


Google Reader Shows I E-mail 1 or 2 items a day
Google Reader is my starting point to consume the day's Web news. While Google Reader offers the best way to consume hundreds of RSS feeds in one place, and read them quickly, it has entrenched itself as a core element of my online activity thanks to a few social functions. The first is the ability to quickly add items to a link blog, which can be embedded on my blog, or streamed to lifestreaming sites, including Plaxo, Strands, Social Median and FriendFeed. And while that retains the geek cred, it's the second element, e-mail, which can bring in the mainstream and have a more long-term impact, in terms of expanding the conversation .


I can even track the sources I e-mail most frequently
Every single item in Google Reader can be e-mailed to anyone, most easily to those in your Google Address Book. In the last few months, I've been liberally e-mailing feed items to colleagues, to friends, and even to family, my wife and parents included. Why do this, when they are used to simply getting a link, or, better yet, a full copy of the story, which I could also do easily? Because I know that with the combination of repeated exposure and curiosity, we can help make the mysterious seem common, and each note offers recipients the opportunity to sign up for Reader and begin gathering subscriptions themselves.


E-mailing an item pre-populates the subject line, and the message is simple
E-mail, without question, crossed the chasm to the mainstream long ago, and it sets the stage for you help spread some of the elite tech knowledge you've gained and share it with a friend. If you're already using Google Reader, or other similar tools that offer the ability to e-mail out, think of how you can be an evangelist and bring a little preview of our world to those who haven't yet seen the light. I will be.

My Blog Is Less a Destination Site than a Conduit

By now, we've all likely grown used to the fact that RSS readers don't often see a blog's redesign. For those who choose not to click through and leave comments, there's little reason at all to visit a blog directly any more, considering it's possible to power through dozens or hundreds of feeds in a feed reader, be it Google Reader, BlogLines or any other. With tangential services like Disqus enabling me to even engage with readers via e-mail, instead of through the blog, there's now even less reason for me to even visit my own site.

At this point, I probably, on most days, can't even tell you my daily RSS subscriber count, visible on the blog, or see the MyBlogLog widget's most recent visitors, as I'm using my blog as a way to project content outward - to RSS readers, to aggregators, like FriendFeed, Strands and Social Median, and to connect with readers via e-mail, using Disqus. It also, via RSS, powers popular sharing sites, like ReadBurner and RSSmeme. But none of those activities, with the exception of comments, require actual visits.

While it's still important to be sure the blog itself loads quickly, for those who view it for the first time, or for those who do click through RSS and choose to leave a comment, the look and feel of the blog is less important over time. I expect fewer people are typing in the louisgray.com URL and viewing pages directly, as they accumulate feeds and read more, and see the blog's UI more as a shell for content than a destination where a reader would spend a good amount of time. At this stage, the blog is simply a point in time for the content to begin its journey.

The life of a post, as always, for me anyway, starts out in e-mail, where it's authored. Then it's copy/pasted into Blogger. Then I visit the site, quickly, and ping FeedBurner. Subsequently, I refresh the blog feed in FriendFeed to keep it up to date, and send a TinyURL copy to Twitter. At that point, I really don't have to come back. Should someone opt to comment, I can reply via e-mail in Disqus, and even Delete unwanted spam or other messages.

The bulk of the activity around the blog is pretty much happening someplace else - making the number one purpose for the blog site itself to convert new visitors into signing up for the RSS feed. So if they bump into the content, via Techmeme, Digg, StumbleUpon, ReadBurner, FriendFeed, or anywhere else, they'll sign up and take in my content in the way they choose. But my blog is not the destination. It's a point in the journey. For those who are relying on ad revenue to come through via page views, this won't be good news, but that's what I see happening. For me, as I'm not trying to convert visitors into cash, this is the new reality, and we're fine with you just signing up, passing through and being part of the conversation as you choose.

Toluu Takes On Tagging to Further Feed Finding

Toluu, the popular feed discovery engine and OPML sharing site, is making steps toward enhancing categorization and feed discovery with an update this morning, adding tags to feeds, and helping users find similar feeds by learning what other feeds carry the same tags, or seeing what tags other users' feeds share most frequently.

I spoke with Toluu developer Caleb Elston yesterday evening, and he told me "tagging has been the most requested feature" since Toluu launched back in March. By adding tagging to the vast majority of feeds, and letting users add new tags to feeds, he hopes this will improve users' ability to discover new content. So far, he told me, more than 35,000 tags have been added, even before it's reached the hands of the service's user base.


Beginning today, every feed in Toluu will feature a "tag tab", which will show existing tags for that feed, or let users add new ones. Smartly, the service remembers tags you have made in the past, and those will auto-populate, much like the behavior on Del.icio.us.


Also starting today, you can view any other Toluu user's list of tags most frequently subscribed to, in addition to their entire feed list, with a feature called "Profile Top Tags". Now, I can see if you commonly read up on Apple and Google, like startups or social media, and can traverse your tag cloud to see which feeds match those tags.


As the tagging engine hasn't hit the public market, it's clear there is more work to be done. Toluu leverages the categorization users place feeds in during OPML import, and while Caleb said Toluu scrubs for odd tags, I've seen a number of feeds with tags that look like they are the result of a single individual.

So far, Toluu hasn't made too many efforts to become a destination site. Instead, it's a utility that helps you find better RSS feeds, and learn what your friends are reading. But with the addition of tags, users may just be sticking around a little bit longer to fill out their RSS subscription to do list. If you still don't have a Toluu invite, which is nuts, you just need to ask me for one by leaving your e-mail address in the comments, or sending me a note to louisgray@mac.com. You can find my account here: http://www.toluu.com/louisgray/

Social Median Integrates With Google Reader for News Discovery

Social Median, over the last few months, has taken a growing role in my tech news discovery process, falling in line alongside FriendFeed and Google Reader, offering up news submitted by other Social Median users on topics I've asked to follow, such as Apple, Blogging and Lifestreaming. Starting this last week, Social Median made it even easier for me to share news items with fellow site users, by integrating Google Reader shared links into the site, making me appear more active, and dramatically increasing the available news to followers.

Social Median's news sources have, to date, come through "Snips", which are user generated notes, a lot like Tweets on Twitter, and "Clips", which can be done from any page on the Web, through the bookmarklet, or through submitting news directly on the site. As with other social sites, you can "Clip" other users news items, essentially adding your vote and sharing it to those who follow you, or make comments on the story excerpts. Integrating with Google Reader's shared items reduces the effort needed to add news, and Social Median parses the shared content to determine if it is relevant to specific networks, based on keywords, automatically making the shared news available to those following individual topics.


A recent item shared via Google Reader to Social Median
Unlike sites dedicated to showing the most frequently shared items, including Feedheads, RSSMeme and ReadBurner (See Disclosure), SocialMedian doesn't display a leaderboard for stories, focusing instead on offering personalized news and information on the topics you have selected.

Integrating with Google Reader's shared links removes the need to proactively share news to Social Median, cutting out the middleman, and undoubtedly increasing the volume of stories that are on the site. I expect the move to be good in terms of making the site more of a go-to for topical news, but also that it may result in fewer comments and clips per story.

You can see what I've shared to Social Median here: http://www.socialmedian.com/louisgray. Those from Google Reader are said as "Submitted by louisgray from Google Reader". My Google Reader shared links blog is here.

My Google Reader Leaderboard: August 2008

Last month, I shared with you the top 40 sources for my Google Reader shared items link blog. See: Roll Your Own Blog Leaderboard With Google Reader Trends. As a month has passed and it's the 26th of the month, as promised, here is the list updated for the last 30 days of activity.

First, the dataset:

According to Google Reader, from my 368 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I read 15,566 items and shared 765 items. Month over month, despite adding 32 new subscriptions, they contributed 820 fewer items, and I shared 154 fewer items than in July.

Second: The leaders for August of 2008:

Unlike last month, where items from my own blog held the #2 position, this month, thanks to some strong content from guest bloggers, it held the #1 position with 45 total shares. As mentioned last month, I don't want to manipulate the statistics, so I'm leaving the data here. Close behind in the #2 position for August was Duncan Riley's The Inquisitr, up from #3, and Robert Scoble's Shared Link Blog, which rose from the #14 position. TechCrunch, last month's leader fell to #4, followed by Read/Write Web, which was #4 overall in July. All percentages shown are the result of taking the number of shares in the month per source, divided by the total number of shares. (In this case N/763)

Position	Blog	% of Shares
1.	louisgray.com	6.28%
2.	The Inquisitr	5.58%
3.	Robert Scoble's Shared Link Blog	5.16%
4.	TechCrunch	4.60%
5.	Read/Write Web	4.18%
6.	Profy.com	2.93%
7.	Webware.com	2.65%
8.	CenterNetworks	2.37%
9.	9 to 5 Mac	1.81%
10.	GigaOM	1.67%
11.	Scripting News	1.53%
12.	Scobleizer	1.39%
13.	Andy DeSoto	1.26%
14.	Kyle Lacy	1.26%
15.	WinExtra	1.26%
16.	SEO and Tech Daily	1.26%
17.	I'm Not Actually a Geek	1.26%
18.	Alexander van Elsas	1.12%
19.	Stay N' Alive	1.12%
20.	Twitter Blog	0.98%
21.	Chris Brogan	0.98%
22.	Google Blogoscoped	0.98%
23.	Fred Wilson	0.98%
24.	Mark Evans	0.98%
25.	Michael Fruchter	0.98%
26.	David Risley	0.98%
27.	Silicon Alley Insider	0.98%
28.	Technologizer	0.98%
29.	Rex Hammock	0.84%
30.	Pixel Bits	0.84%
31.	Mathew Ingram	0.84%
32.	TechWag	0.84%
33.	Webomatica	0.84%
34.	Regular Geek	0.70%
35.	Epicenter	0.70%
36.	The Boy Genius Report	0.70%
37.	Sarah In Tampa	0.70%
38.	Venture Chronicles	0.70%
39.	Daring Fireball	0.70%
40.	Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat	0.70%

All told, these top 40 sources accounted for 477 of the 765 shares over the last 30 days, or 62.4% of the total, meaning the other 328 sources accounted for 288 total shares, or 37.6% of the total, showing there are a number of sites I consume, but never share, which could include pre-determined searches and the many sports or work-oriented sites I don't share to the public feed. If your feed isn't in the top 40 here, or you think I'm not subscribed at all, but should be, feel free to drop in your site in the comments. And if you're an avid Google Reader shared links blogger, be sure to add your feed to ReadBurner, where I'm an advisor, so it can be counted.

You can find my Google Reader shared items link blog here, or see them included in my FriendFeed.

Fav.or.it Comments On Commenting Statistics

Fav.or.it, which is attempting to bring RSS to the masses, has recently been under fire from people like Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr and Mark Hopkins of Mashable for essentially republishing full feeds of blogs, with integrated comments, alongside advertising.

While I'll leave that fight to them at this point, one interesting byproduct of Fav.or.it's importing of blogs, and their comments, is the ability to spot trends across more than 2,000 feeds, including how often people post comments, what days are most frequent, how often brands are mentioned, and whether the biggest blogs have frequent commentors, or a wide distribution.

An initial post by Nick Halstead, titled "Blogosphere Commenting Statistics", shows an average of 13,000 comments per day coming into the system, and unsurprisingly, that number dives down to just over half on the weekends. And while he only offers three examples: TechCrunch, Mashable and ChrisBrogan.com, it looks like the more intimate feel and participation of Chris leads to a higher level of repeat commenters than do the blog networks.

The discussion around whether RSS readers like Google Reader, Shyftr, and now, Fav.or.it, should include full feeds, include comments, or show ads, has been among the most controversial topics this year in the blogosphere. I believe that at the very least, these systems should make best efforts to push out comments from their system, and that Fav.or.it is actually doing the reverse, pulling in external comments to their system, is at least eyebrow-raising. But while they're doing it, Nick and team have their hands on some very interesting statistics that have got to have Yuvi Panda of The Statbot salivating. Let's see if we end up hearing more from this pool of data.

Take a Google Reader Shared Item Viral Using Notes

If you use Google Reader as your online RSS reader, you're no doubt familiar with the ability to share an item to your shared link blog. For example, mine can be found here.

Earlier this year, the Reader team added the ability to post a "Note" to your share items. The idea of Google Reader Notes is that you introduce friends who subscribe to your link blog to the story you've shared, explaining why you found it interesting.

As a subscriber to some shared link blogs, it's growing increasingly common that I am seeing Notes posted, and sometimes, these Notes are authored by "friends of a friend", whom I am not subscribed to myself. For example, I recently saw a note that Jesse Stay posted on a WebWare.com article, shared in Robert Scoble's link blog. This means the WebWare.com story was originally shared by Jesse Stay, then shared by Robert Scoble, and then read by me.

Item's Source: Jesse Stay → Robert Scoble → Louis Gray
As more people are subscribing to Google Reader link blogs, I bet this is happening everywhere. So here's an experiment I would like to try:

1. I will share this article with a note.
   
2. The note will request you also share the item and say where you got it.
   
3. In your note, request those subscribed to you also share it add their name and keep your original text.

In theory, a Google Reader shared item, as it gets reshared from person to person, could be as viral as the old-school offline chain letter, with the most-recent recipient having absolutely no connection to the original sharer, except for the connection path.

So why don't we give this a try? As RSSmeme tracks shared items with notes, we could see a variety of paths the shared link took to get to you, and we could see a number of interesting "comments" on FriendFeed that show the route of the item.

I'll go first. This could of course fail due to a small number of Google Reader users who use notes, my continued obscurity, and disinterest, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

Roll Your Own Blog Leaderboard With Google Reader Trends

Tech bloggers and readers are quite familiar with Techmeme and the site's accompanying leaderboard, which tracks the top 100 sources to the popular news-tracking site over the previous thirty days. Since the leaderboard was initiated, Michael Arrington's TechCrunch has held the top position, accounting for between 5 and 8 percent of all stories. As of Friday night, TechCrunch represented 7.03% of Techmeme's stories in the last 30 days. As a subscriber to the Techmeme Firehose feed in my Google Reader, I see 3,162 items reached Techmeme in the last 30 days, meaning TechCrunch's share was somewhere north of 200 items. But Google Reader does more than show me the items I've received, it also shows me the items I've shared, and the most often shared sources, in effect, giving me the option to record and display my own leaderboard of the top 40 sources that I've shared on my Google Reader shared items blog.

Anybody who uses Google Reader as their RSS feed reader of choice, and who shares items to a link blog can make their own personal leaderboard. While I won't be updating mine multiple times daily, as Gabe Rivera does on Techmeme, and I can only show 40 items, instead of 100, I will, starting tonight, be posting my own LG Leaderboard, for the previous 30 days, and will update this list every month, on the 26th of the month.


First, the dataset:

According to Google Reader, from my 336 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I read 16,386 items and shared 919 items.

Second: The leaders for July of 2008:

Like Techmeme, my #1 shared blog was TechCrunch, thanks to their frequent posting and high number of stories I believe those who follow my link blog would be interested in. Similarly, given my own bias, this blog is in the #2 position. I'd remove it from the leaderboard, but don't want to skew the statistics. Duncan Riley's The Inquisitr has made a strong showing at the #3 position, followed byRead/Write Web at #4 and Silicon Alley Insider at #5. All percentages shown are the result of taking the number of shares in the month per source, divided by the total number of shares. (In this case N/919)

Position	Blog	% of Shares
1.	TechCrunch	6.52%
2.	louisgray.com	4.46%
3.	The Inquisitr	4.14%
4.	Read/Write Web	3.59%
5.	Silicon Alley Insider	3.48%
6.	Profy.com	3.26%
7.	Mashable!	2.72%
8.	Scripting News	2.50%
9.	WinExtra	2.18%
10.	CenterNetworks	1.52%
11.	Why Does Everything Suck?	1.41%
12.	GigaOM	1.41%
13.	I'm Not Actually a Geek	1.41%
14.	Robert Scoble's Shared Link Blog	1.31%
15.	Scobleizer	1.31%
16.	Webware.com	1.20%
17.	Online Media Cultist	1.20%
18.	Stay N' Alive	1.20%
19.	CodingExperiments.com	1.09%
20.	MichaelFruchter.com	1.09%
21.	Sarah In Tampa	1.09%
22.	TechCrunchIT	1.09%
23.	PaidContent	1.09%
24.	Broadcasting Brain	0.98%
25.	Deep Jive Interests	0.98%
26.	Furrier.org	0.98%
27.	David Risley	0.98%
28.	/Message	0.87%
29.	Mathew Ingram	0.87%
30.	SheGeeks	0.87%
31.	Scribkin	0.87%
32.	BoomTown	0.87%
33.	Colin Walker	0.87%
34.	VentureFiles	0.87%
35.	A VC	0.76%
36.	Engadget	0.76%
37.	The Unofficial Apple Weblog	0.76%
38.	SEO and Tech Daily	0.76%
39.	Jeremy Toeman's LIVEdigitally	0.76%
40.	Regular Geek	0.65%

All told, these top 40 sources accounted for 595 of the 919 shares over the last 30 days, or 64.7% of the total, meaning the other 296 sources accounted for 324 total shares, or 35.3% of the total. Everybody's leaderboard will be vastly different, for sure. Contrasted with the Techmeme leaderboard, the flagship for measurements like this, I lack a number of more mainstream feeds, like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Forbes, but in its place, you see a lot more individual bloggers who bring me the news I find interesting. I'll be posting these regularly, and if you would do the same, send me a link in the comments to your list. Could be a great way to find new blogs and news sources. Also, if you think you belong here, add your blog in the comments, and there's a chance you'll be on the leaderboard next month!

You can find my Google Reader shared items link blog here, or see them included in my FriendFeed.

Trimming the Fat On RSS Feeds - You Could Lose 99%!

Guest Post from (jeff)isageek (FriendFeed / Twitter)

Recently J. Phil of Scribkin and Corvida of SheGeeks decided to see if they could trim some of the fat off their RSS subscriptions to help control getting overwhelmed from it all. I thought this was a pretty cool idea and decided to take the plunge and purge everything! So with the click of some buttons I was at ZERO.

So now I had nothing coming in, and it was kind of a weird feeling, after having tons and tons of feeds shooting into Google Reader by the hour, feeding my RSS addiction. I was back to day one and back to where I was a few years ago... what do I do now? I had this feeling that I am missing stuff already!!! I needed to get the flow going again, but with a little cleaner look.

Here is my RSS reduction plan that I thought I would share with everyone so that you too can start new and maybe tweak the idea a little bit (or a lot even).


Shared Items From Friends - This was a given since I was using Google Reader anyways and I get such great content from the likes of Corvida, J. Phil, Billy Fairchild, Louis Gray, Drew Olanoff, Sarah Perez, etc. My friends help me in discovering new stories, services, and content, so they were a must.

Shared Items - This would be content from RSSmeme and ReadBurner. These of course would have Shared Items from my friends, but would also have top items my friends may have missed. With the great friends I have, they seem to pick up all the good stuff... but with the two services combined, they offer another great option to grab from.

So that pretty much it when it for me when it comes to Google Reader now... just wanting to grab Shared Items... crazy, huh? Before this, I had tons of feeds from services to personal blogs but now I was down to just stuff that was shared, which contains most of the stuff I was getting from the various RSS feeds, only now, reduced.


This is the new tool in my quest to find all the great posts and content out there on the interweb. FriendFeed is just plain awesome! It is a great way to aggregate all the information out there from Flickr pics my contacts are posting, blog posts they are talking about via Disqus, blog posts from their personal sites, YouTube videos, shared items, the list goes on and on.

The great thing about FriendFeed it is so easy with Greasemonkey scripts for FireFox to customize your experience allowing you to get the most when visiting and finding great content. I have scripts setup to clean up the interface, allow me to jump from Google Reader or ReadBurner right in the FriendFeed page, options to read things later, clean up the interface, filter by service, improve the profiles, and the list goes on and on.

A few new features recently added include rooms which allow you to break subjects down even more and contain them all togather to follow as well as embedded audio which can help you keep track and stay upto date with your podcasts you like.

Since using FriendFeed, I am discovering a lot of great stuff from people I would have never known about if it were not from the service and like I said the clean interface, scripting options, and options right in FriendFeed have helped make it happen.


The last piece of the puzzle is one everyone is familiar with, and that is Twitter. With the service I can get breaking news, alerts that someone I am following has a new blog post I can check out, get feedback on a service in real time, the list goes on and on.

These days, of course, it seems we hear more about Twitter being down and the issues that the service is faced with but when it is doing what it does best it can be a major player in helping us all take control of information overload.

So there you have it I took all my feeds and blasted them and brought back:

• Shared Items (from friends and from services like rssmeme and readburner)
  
• FriendFeed Aggregation of my friends (with help from scripts, rooms, and settings)
  
• Twitter (getting real time updates, advice, and information)

So what do you think? How are you working to control your RSS/information overload? Feel free to leave a comment or contact me at jeffisageek@gmail.com.

RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares

The foundation of RSS is in its syndication (the second 'S'). A feed, published from one location, can be read in a different location, whether it be a feed reader, a blog widget, a lifestreaming application or any number of aggregation services. The simplicity in sharing has also led some to worry about where their content goes when they hit "Publish", as, often, they lose control over where it can go.

Today, RSSmeme's Benjamin Golub, who has developed a tracker for the most popular shared items on Google Reader, saw one unhappy publisher threaten him with legal action after she had found her feed included in the service.

The RSSmeme service utilizes Google Reader's shared link blogs as its underlying database. Those items that receive the most shares from Google Reader rise to the top, and Benjamin, over the last few months, has updated the service to sort by categories, by languages, and highlight the most active users and tags. But one thing he doesn't do is hand-select the content displayed. That's done by the thousands and thousands of people using Google Reader every day, and sharing new items. So when he received a takedown request by e-mail, he was a little surprised.

Talking with him by phone this afternoon, he said the complainant's feed had only been shared two times, by a single sharer. But she had essentially penned an e-mail saying to "remove all content, or I will send a lawyer."

Not eager to have legal trouble, Benjamin removed the offending shares, and recommended to the publisher that her feeds be set to broadcast as partial feeds, not full feeds, assuming she was concerned her content was being stolen, or used in a commercial way. Benjamin told me that he anticipated such a threat might happen once he posted ads on the RSSmeme site, but said with rising Web hosting costs, monetizing in some way soon became necessity.

"When I started RSSmeme, it only cost $20 a month, and (due to site growth), it doesn't cost that much any more," he told me. Since launch, costs have more than tripled, and the Google-sourced ads are used to offset any out of pocket expenses.

While Benjamin considers his options, at the time, he has globally altered settings on RSSmeme to show only the excerpts of feeds, removing the ability to read an entire blog post on the site, the same approach taken by Shyftr back in April when similar complaints arose.

The issue of how RSS-enabled content is monetized, where comments lie, and who has full control over blog entries isn't going away any time soon. Even if Benjamin never hears back from the woman threatening to take him to court, it's definitely got him rattled, and once again is stirring up discussion, as you can see on FriendFeed.

Fav.or.it Opens Up, Reminds Us of Google News for Blogs

When I first learned of Fav.or.it, I thought the site was going to try and take on the powerhouse Google Reader, as a next-generation RSS reader with social features and integrated commenting back to the site. Not meeting those expectations, I didn't give my beta experience a very favorable review.

Now that Fav.or.it is finally here, the service has tried to make it more clear that it's about trying to reach "the masses" and not the odd early adopter (like me). The result, so far, is a portal-like service that looks a lot like Google News in terms of prioritization of stories and categorization, but utilizing blog content instead of mainstream media.


The top story on Fav.or.it on Wednesday morning
The change in strategy, or at least the change in my understanding the strategy, makes me both less interested in picking them apart, and less interested in making part of my daily consumption, so far. But I'm not exactly the target audience. For what it's worth, I don't read Google News either.

Fav.or.it's front page says it's "Bringing blogging to the masses." Note no mention of RSS or feeds. It has a top story, although it's unclear how that's determined, it features a section of recent posts, called "Brand Spanking New", and highlights many other facets of news and blog categorization you're used to, including "Tags", "Most Commented", and topics, such as Technology, News, Business, and Culture. Clicking through any of those topics leads you to the full copies of stories generated elsewhere, but integrated into Fav.or.it's look and feel.

Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr calls Fav.or.it's new approach "splogging", essentially repurposing other people's content and aiming to make a profit, potentially in violation of copyright. Nick Halstead, the site's creator, responds in the comments there that by blog authors implementing Creative Commons, having the option to feed comments back to the original source, and being able to opt in or opt out of the site, this should reduce any concerns.

I don't share Duncan's concerns in this case. I've always erred on the side of letting RSS readers and sites innovate in new ways to present my feed content, and I expect that as RSS enables full feeds to be displayed, there will be some new and interesting ways they are shown from one site to another. For every reader who sees my full content elsewhere and chooses not to visit my site, there's another who does come in and becomes a regular, so those sites can serve as free advertising.

What Fav.or.it does do well is deliver a clean-looking site, with a strong amount of underlying data, easily findable. There's clearly a robust underlying database of stories and metadata around tags and comments powering the site, but it does a much better job than other sites, like Technorati, who have tried to make blog posts a valid replacement for mainstream media. If, in fact, the common layperson chose to get their news from Fav.or.it instead of say, Google News, it would clearly expose them to a wealth of new sources for stories. It might also get them comfortable with the concepts of comments and tags, things we've long taken for granted.

In fact, Fav.or.it's efforts in the comment portability process should be lauded. At launch, the service claims to support many different commenting engines, meaning comments placed on Fav.or.it flow back to the original blog. They don't support threaded conversations, believing simple threads are preferred, but again, in theory, this might be less complicated for the blogging newbie. (See more in Nick's launch blog post: Bringing Blogging to the Masses)

Talking about Fav.or.it now, as TechCrunch has with their piece, Fav.or.it Finally Opens Beta To Take RSS And Commenting Mainstream, makes me feel wistful, like when you go to the graduation of a son or daughter leaving junior college when they once were offered a full-ride scholarship to an Ivy League school. Sure, you're proud of them, I guess, but it's tempting to wonder what might have been, and what they could have been if they'd just taken your advice or gone a different direction, they have so much talent.

Fav.or.it might have a hit on its hands with people who are nothing like me. There sure are a lot of them out there. But for now, it's a destination site displaying content I've either already seen in my RSS reader, or didn't care to see anyway. As a start page, it could work very well, and as a blogging ambassador it works well, and I'll probably just have to accept that maybe this is what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Feedly Brings New Social Experience to Start Page, Leveraging RSS

In the last two years, there have been a number of attempts at taking what's been a solitary experience of reading one's RSS feeds in isolation, and adding new social elements, sharing feeds with friends, discovering new feeds, or adding comments and notes.

Following a lengthy incubation period, intended to get the product rock-solid with an army of features and a sharp interface, Feedly hits the Web today with their own take on the social start page - using your Google Reader subscriptions at its core, but layering on intelligence that learns from you, including your reading patterns, to personalize your information waterfall.


The Feedly Cover Page
Feedly was first known as Feeddo, but recently changed its name to eliminate confusion with other products on the market, and has been in private testing for several months. I first started talking with Edwin Khodabakchian back in mid-February, and even then, the project had been under scrutiny from more than 100 early testers for the better part of three months. The goal? To bring a new, graphical, view of feeds, via Google Reader, and add multiple social layers on top of what's already recognized as the world's most-popular online RSS engine.

Khodabakchian brings a strong resume to the project, once being a Chief Architect at Netscape, and later, the CTO of eCommerce at AOL, following that company's acquisition of Netscape, as well as four years as the co-founder and CEO of Collaxa, later acquired by Oracle. Khodabakchian also considers the team behind Yokway close friends and has been a visible early beta tester of that product.

The months and months of quiet effort appear to have paid off. If you have a FireFox browser, you'll want to see this new approach to taking in the day's news. In my own testing, I kept uncovering new features, and I'm sure I won't get them all here. But here are some of the main elements:

The Magazine Cover

Feedly looks at itself as a start page and magazine hybrid. The main cover page, noted by an icon that looks like a book, shows the latest new items from subscribed feeds, using your own learned reading activity, combined with your sharing history in Google Reader, to bring what's anticipated to be your most interesting stories to the very front. Feedly also, in the bottom right corner of the page, has an "Explore" option, where new stories from similar feeds you may not subscribe to, are available.

Like most feed readers, you can click on any of the articles' headlines, and view the full item. But Feedly isn't intended to be a passive experience. From the article, you can:

1. Save it for later reading.
2. Annotate it (more on this later)
3. Recommend it to friends
4. E-mail it.
5. Send a note about the article using your Twitter acount.
6. Preview it, giving a glimpse of how it looks from the source site.
7. Copy the link to your clipboard.

From that article, I can go back to the cover page, view other articles from that source, or make a new selection from my Feedly toolbar.

What's New

The What's New page combines the latest updates from your subscribed feeds with recommended articles from friends, and again, highlights those feeds and items you are most likely to read, based on your past behavior.


Due to Feedly's tight integration with Google Reader, the items in the What's New page are segmented by topic, gathered from your folders in Google Reader. Mine, for instance, include "Technology", "Web 2", "Apple News", "Mac Rumors" and "Misc" for all other blogs.

While viewing "What's New", I can not only see what the latest feed items are, but on the right, all sources of news are listed, with the number of available items at each source. If there's a new story from one site, it'll be bolded. If I've already read all the stories, they won't be.

As with the cover page, the lower right corner always offers me new feeds to add, should I find them interesting.

The Wall


The Wall can act as your social springboard to both shared items in Google Reader and Twitter updates. If you opt in to synching your Twitter account with Feedly, you can use the Feedly interface to get tweets from friends, as well as see items shared by friends within Google Reader.

This can become a two-way conversation as you annotate articles or send posts out to Twitter from Feedly.

Integrated Google Search

While some sites don't think about search until well after launch, Feedly has developed an extensive tie-in with Google Search and Google Reader on day one.

For example, if I search for the term "Caramilk", a word not often used, I not only found an article from Mark Evans called "What's the Caramilk Secret", but also related items, including WinExtra's Would you hammer a nail with a shovel? and Tris Hussey's response, FriendFeed explodes onto the scene, but it is still an information fire hose, both of which referenced Mark's article.


Feedly's Results for "Caramilk"
Searches for more frequent terms, like Apple and Yahoo!, had their expected 1000+ results, in reverse chronological order.

Annotation and Sharing

Similar to Google Reader shared notes, you can make notes on any item within Feedly and share it on "The Wall". But unlike Google Reader, you can highlight the portion you're commenting on, and make notes, as you are more accustomed to seeing in Microsoft Word's Track Changes option.

On any item, you can either click the "annotate" option, or select the desired text, and an option comes up to either "search related articles" or "highlight". If you chose to highlight, the selected text is in fact highlighted, and you can add a comment. As you can see in the below two examples, I was able to add comments next to articles from both Sarah Perez and Steven Hodson, and my own avatar was displayed next to each.


A Note on WinExtra's Item in Feedly

A Note on Sarah Perez' Item in Feedly
Tweeting an article is similarly easy. If I find an article I like, I just click "tweet" and a new box opens up with the headline, an automatically generated TinyURL, and a note on how many characters I have before running out of Twitter's 140 character limit.


Clicking e-mail opens another box with a simple "To:" field, and a "Note" field. As you start typing, Feedly automatically shows contacts you have in your GMail address book. Select one of those, or enter a new contact, and hit send.


Managing Feeds

Feedly is 100% synchronized with Google Reader. Add a subscription through Feedly, and it will show up in your Google Reader. Read an article in Feedly? It's marked read in Google Reader. Recommend it in Feedly? It's shared in Google Reader. Want to move a blog from one folder to another in Google Reader? You can do that through Feedly. Feedly essentially brings you all the aspects of Google Reader we've grown accustomed to, but displays them in a new, friendly, visual way, while extending the feed universe out to Twitter and e-mail, and adding social elements.



Feedly also takes things a step further, showing all your feeds in a single dashboard view, letting you toggle your favorites, or in a unique twist, offering what's called "Spring Cleaning", where, in theory, should you get bogged down with too many updates, feeds are flagged warm or cool based on your reading behavior and how often you mark them as favorites.

Other services, like Assetbar, got dinged for packing in too many features and not focusing on delivering a clean interface. Feedly has largely avoided this problem through strong segmentation between portions of the service, and through leveraging existing accounts, including your Google profile, existing friends in Google Reader and your GMail account.

If you're the type of RSS power user who wants to read hundreds of items through aggressive keyboard navigation, then Google Reader still can't be beat, but if you want to pick the very best from the many feeds you have, share items with friends and find new sources for news, Feedly is a compelling option. They've clearly done a lot of work to make their solution feature rich, with a flexible, clean, user interface, and options not found anywhere else.

Check out the new offering at www.feedly.com.

RSSMeme is the Authority on Google Reader Sharing Notes

One month after the Google Reader team added the capability to add personal notes to shared items from RSS feeds, it hasn't been entirely clear whether this feature has been a tremendous success, a dud, or somewhere in between. But Benjamin Golub, author of RSSmeme, a shared items tabulator and statistics tracker, has amassed a wealth of data on these notes, which puts RSSmeme to the forefront as far as a resource for measuring their use.

I personally may share a few dozen stories on my Google Reader shared items feed per day. But I have, so far, stayed away from adding notes to the items I share, preferring to let those who may follow my feed get the item, uncluttered by my own graffiti. In fact, I am less willing to reshare an item from another person's link blog whom I am subscribed to for that same reason, not wanting to pass their own notes to my readers.


But while I'm lagging in my early adopter responsibilities, Golub reports that nearly 30,000 shared items in Google Reader that flowed through RSSmeme were tagged with notes in the last month, just over 13% of all stories. (See: More Google Reader Notes Statistics) The average item with notes had 1.44 notes per story, meaning there is a 44% chance that once an item gets a note, it will get a second one also. These 42,000+ notes, Benjamin shows, were created by just over 4,200 users, at 10 notes apiece, or one per individual user every three days.

While I've not yet embraced the notes, I have embraced RSSmeme's showing me when people added a note to my own items. Through use of the product's FeedFlare, I can see not just how many shares an item has, but I can see if it has notes, and click through to see what somebody said about my post. Now, if I see "Shared 15 times with one note", I often click on the alert and am directed to RSSmeme's dedicated item page to see who said what. Rather than subscribe to a boatload of linkblogs, RSSmeme can act as the conduit between the blog author and the person sharing and noting.

Is RSSmeme's cool integration enough for me to start adding my notes to Google Reader shared items? Probably not. As Drew Olanoff of ReadBurner noted on our weekly podcast earlier, I am already pushing a lot of new items in and sharing every day. I don't think I need to add commentary to each one. But for those who like it, and aren't acting as a fountain of noise, RSSmeme's capabilities are very useful.

Toluu Expands Activity Threads, Rolls Out New RSS Options

Not eager to sit still, Toluu developer Caleb Elston is rolling out yet new features, just a week after making headlines with Twitter integration. This week, after seeing a great deal of usage of the newly redesigned activity page, Elston is expanding options to see new activity, now splicing the stream to show feed changes, contact updates, and favorites.

The increasingly popular OPML sharing and RSS feed matching site is still invite only (and I have many if you are interested), but in the two months since its debut, Toluu has become a flexible gateway to add new feeds, discover new content from friends, and find new peers.


Toluu's new Activity stream, showing changes to Feeds.
Also new today, Toluu is dramatically expanding the number of RSS feeds available on the site. It's not just a one-way street for RSS for Toluu. Now, each filtering view (feeds, contacts and favorites) can generate a feed, just for you, for all your friends, or for the daring, for all Toluu users worldwide. Filling out that simple 3 by 3 grid means you have 9 new RSS options in aggregate.


Toluu's new Activity stream, showing contact changes.
As Caleb wrote in an e-mail yesterday, the growing user base of Toluu means that if you're not constantly watching the site's activity stream, you could miss something. Hence, the need for splicing the feed.

"We wanted to make it easier to see a particular kind of activity," he wrote. "It is super interesting being able to see what feeds Toluu users have recently marked as favorites or see who your contacts are adding to their list of contacts."

Caleb has also made himself very much available to feedback from site users. There's even a new FriendFeed room for Toluu, where he has been quite active, taking comments and requests, as well as passing out the much-desired invites: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/toluu.

And don't expect Toluu development to slow any time soon, as Caleb's got even more plans in the works, especially when it comes to better honing in on the date you need quickly.

"Filtering, either explicit or implicit, will continue to gain importance as we live with more data than can be consumed comfortably," he said. "This is just one step towards helping Toluu users get more from their activity stream."

Still don't have access to Toluu? Leave me a note in the comments and I'll send you one via e-mail. You can find me on Toluu at http://www.toluu.com/louisgray.

Google Reader, Why Dost Thou Taunt Me?

What if you got into your car and saw the fuel tank registered at full, but you ran out of gas after you exited the driveway? What if your laptop reported full battery, but the screen went black before your e-mail application even opened? What if you bought a dozen donuts, and opened up the box to find only crumbs?

It's this feeling of first hope, and then, emptiness, I'm getting tonight with my Google Reader. While Google Reader, despite significant competition of late, is still the best online feed reader out there, its occasional quirks are almost always worth highlighting - especially as the small team does such a great job the other 99.9% of the time.


So do I have 229 new items, or zero new items? Confusing!
Tonight, after only about 30 minutes away from the computer, I returned to my feeds and found more than 200 new items awaiting - an astounding number, even for the most prolific readers. But after reading a small handful of items, I was done. Amusingly, Google still said I had more than 200 new items, even though it also claimed I had no new items available. Clearly a minor error, but a misleading one, to say the least. As you can see from the two screenshots, it's as if Google Reader cached my "unread items" list at some point earlier in the day, and didn't clear them from my "to do" list, even as I methodically read each post.


Google even knows which feeds I need to get to!
What if this "number inflation" suddenly sweeps through all Google apps? Will I seem more popular on GMail even though nobody e-mails me there? Will miles be added on to every trip where I get directions from Google Maps? Will I see the number of search results dramatically increase, but only have one link per page? The possibilities are mind-boggling.

Toluu Embraces Twitter With New Integration Option

Since its debut almost two months ago, Caleb Elston's Toluu has become the go-to site for seeing what RSS feeds your friends are subscribed to, and finding new sources. In the ensuing 50 days, Toluu has embraced activity feeds, letting people announce what new sites they'd discovered, and as of this morning, these announcements can extend to everybody's favorite microblogging tool, Twitter.

Also debuting today: The addition of a new feed called "Everyone", showing all activity on the Toluu service, and an enhanced "Activity" feed with greater clarity and larger user avatars, to show recent activity from you and your friends.


Toluu's Brand-New Everyone Feed In Action
The addition of Twitter notifications offers Toluu users yet another way to share activity with friends, which in turn, offers another route for greater awareness of Toluu, already growing quite well so far on its own. By enabling Twitter integration, you can ask Toluu to send a note if you add a new feed by way of the site, through the bookmark (which I use heavily) or through the import page, which accepts OPML of all flavors.

Despite still being in the stage of invite-only beta, Caleb reports the site has gained thousands of users, and Toluu is now tracking more than 100,000 individual feeds.

With this wealth of data, he's even considering showing the most popular subscribed feeds, or most favorited, should it add value. As he wrote me in an GMail Chat session yesterday, "I need to make sure there is a great deal of value to showing a leaderboard. Right now, Toluu is very tech focused, so it is more interesting than Technorati's Top 100 for tech users."

But that, of course, is for another day.

Toluu's Twitter integration is customizable, and absolutely an option for Toluu users, not being enabled by default. If you're looking to get your hands on Toluu, leave me a note in the comments with your e-mail address, and I'll get you one pronto.

See also:

CenterNetworks: Toluu Helps You Like What Your Friends Like
ReadWriteWeb: 10 Reasons Why You're Going to Love Toluu
louisgray.com: Toluu Looking Like a Real Winner
SheGeeks: Toluu Activities Includes Twitter Integration
Jeff Is a Geek: Toluu Adds Twitter And Strengthens Its Streams

Shyftr Gets More Social, Showing Who Reads Feeds You Do

One of my positions I've long held from my RSS bully pulpit is that rather than viewing feeds alone, and sharing to a mystery audience, I'd like to know if my friends are subscribed to the same feeds I am, if they've read articles before I have, and if they liked them. This wisdom of crowds theory helps me discover not only new sources for news, but also new peers I may not have known I had.

Yesterday, Shyftr, a next-generation social RSS reader, took another important step toward fulfilling this vision, following in the footsteps of fellow innovators Toluu and Assetbar.

Now, while you read your feeds in Shyftr, a rectangular box at the top right of the feed shows up to twenty avatars of fellow users who also read the feed. If the feed is not popular, all avatars will be shown, while if the feed has more than twenty followers, a random sample will be selected.

Clicking on any of the avatars leads to the user's profile.

Shyftr's Matt Shaulis asked on Twitter yesterday, "Ever wonder who else was reading the same feeds as you?"

Now I know. In fact, as a gradual student of these avatars I've seen used everywhere from MyBlogLog to BlogCatalog, Twitter, FriendFeed and elsewhere, I'm eerily able to recognize avatars, even of people I've never met. Just this morning, after looking at the avatars in Shyftr, I learned that Chris Miller of IdoNotes reads ReadWriteWeb, as does LiveCrunch.

Additional good news for Shyftr comes from the aforementioned Toluu today. Caleb Elston helpfully added Shyftr as a feed reader option in the open OPML sharing and matching site, letting users of both services add feeds to Shyftr with one click through his custom bookmarklet. (See: Shyftr: Our latest feed reader option)


Toluu has integrated Shyftr as a feed reader option
There is definitely a market for social RSS feed readers that let users find what other peers are reading, sharing and commenting on. Shyftr is methodically hitting all the key points one by one, rather than overwhelming users with feature overkill. I know I'll be clicking through these new avatars to see if there are even more peers whom I should know.

Content Filters Proving Evasive for RSS, Social Media Sites

Whether it be RSS feeds, social networks, or one of the many social media aggregation sites, it's no surprise that even your closest peers are sharing data they care about that you just don't. But so far, despite many users calling for content-based filters, solutions to block keywords or topics are missing from the vast majority of information spigots. In fact, I can't think of a single one I use that's gotten the formula right.

Not to overly repeat myself, but one of the major hopes I had for Google Reader last year was that they would add what I called "Negative Keywords", which would let me block specific posts from people I had subscribed to, be they off-topic posts on politics, family and sports, arrays of links from del.icio.us, or their latest cause du jour.

As the 2008 election season is heating up, it's no surprise that even the most geeky of tech news sources are starting to give some coverage to Obama vs. Clinton or Obama vs. McCain, and it will only increase over time. If I so chose, why couldn't I ask Twitter or Google Reader or FriendFeed to preemptively hide updates that included keywords like "Clinton", "Obama" or "McCain"? Today, I can't do that in any of those services, so far as I know.

Taking things further, I've also at times been tantalized by the idea of a "nuclear option" for the Web, where if I so chose, I could eradicate the mentioning of a keyword of any kind from all activity.

On Wednesday, Robert Scoble said “I wish when you blocked someone on Twitter they disappeared from Google Talk too.” Makes sense. But what if you had a button that not only blocked the person, but also, any mention of the person, from all social media services, by using their own name as the negative keyword? What if they were even automatically filtered out of Google searches, blocked just like profanity and pornography are from decency filters?

Google Reader hasn't yet debuted negative keywords. So Mahalo fans still get updates on Jason Calacanis' bulldogs and "fatblogging" and followers of this blog will still get summaries of Oakland A's games I attend. While I can always unsubscribe from somebody, there's got to be a safer middle ground in the social media and RSS space that lets me get the content I'm looking for, and not the content I'm not. Do you know of a service that's got negative keywords nailed?

I Am a Google Reader Shared Links Ninja

On March 3rd of 2007, I made a list of 10 suggestions to the Google Reader team on how they could make the world's most popular feed reader even better. The tenth option was a simple one, which I titled as "Customization Everywhere", where I said "there's zero options to customize a shared link blog." As of today, only 14 months later, we now have the first user customizable options to make the shared items page a little more fancy. And today, I can profess myself a ninja.

Alongside the so far much-criticized announcement that you can append notes to Google Reader shared items, you can also choose from four artistic styles on the shared items page, including the Default, as boring as it sounds, Ice Cream, Sea, and ... Ninjas.

Seeing how episode 7 of the Elite Tech News podcast was titled "Explanatory Ninjas", it makes sense that at least for today, I would use the theme of "Ninja".

(See my Ninja-Themed Shared Items Blog)

By selecting Ninja, all that's really added is a cute banner at the top of my shared items page, showing four ninjas and their various weapons. It's not necessarily a status symbol, showing my link sharing prowess or skills with the black arts. The theme is cute, but of course, non-functional. I still can't change the color of the background, or the fonts, or go "all MySpace" with the page, so I guess that's good. But it's a start.

Of note: I was lucky enough to meet and talk with Chris Wetherell of the Google Reader team last Thursday for lunch. We didn't talk about this feature, but I remain very positive on the direction and focus the Google Reader team has going forward. It's a small team, but very dedicated.

Shyftr Adds OPML Support To Intriguing RSS Feed Reader

With RSS becoming ubiquitous now, it is not uncommon for Web power users to have hundreds or even thousands of individual RSS feed subcriptions, covering anything from sports to technology, news and blogs of friends and family. But adding these feeds one by one to a new feed reader is simply out of the question. It takes too long. That's why the majority of RSS feed readers, both online and off, have moved to support OPML, enabling the portability of both your feeds and your folders.

Today, Shyftr, an online feed reader that lets you share comments within the Shyftr community and learn what are the most popular feeds and items, added this crucial capability, making them a stronger competitor to other market leaders, such as Google Reader, BlogLines and NewsGator. (See the official post: OPML Support Is Here!)

Shyftr first caught my attention earlier this year, when I highlighted their integrated comments system and blog rankings. (See: Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings) But at the time, I had no choice but to highlight their lack of OPML, a real sticking point for me. Later in March, Shyftr added pocket blogs, much like Google Reader's shared links blog.

You might also remember that last month, the Shyftr team was engaged in some controversy over their practice of displaying full feed items and comments away from the original blog, a position from which they later relented, following criticism. While I didn't have any issues at all with what they were doing, others did, and Shyftr was smart to quickly adjust.


Like with other RSS feed readers, adding OPML to Shyftr is very simple. Just export your OPML from your existing reader, and from your Shyftr Profile, click the "+" button under Feeds to add new items. Once you upload your OPML file, Shyftr will then keep you updated as to its progress, first by laying out the specified folder hierarchy, and second, showing how many feeds have been imported.


For somebody like me, this process can take several minutes. It's not the fastest OPML import I've ever seen, but it definitely works. Just make sure you don't close the browser window while it's operating.


What I liked best about Shyftr's implementation is that the system automatically recognized if I had already manually entered a feed. If I had, it would correctly move that feed, which was duplicated, into the folder specified by my OPML file. I was at first worried I would have to manually move each duplicated feed, but it took care of the hard work for me. (That also explains why in the above graphic, the total number of feeds imported is less than the number processed)

With the addition of OPML, Shyftr has many of the major checkboxes for next generation RSS feed readers nailed. They have online feed reading. They have user profiles. They have comments. They have popularity rankings. They have a personalized link blog. Just about the only thing that Google Reader and others have that they don't yet is keyboard navigation through feeds. If they can manage to get that nailed, Shyftr could be even more compelling than it already is today. It has been fun to watch the team go from pet project to serious RSS feed reader alternative in the space of a few months, and I expect that adding OPML is just the beginning.

Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.

Some of the most confused buzzwords in Web 2.0 are those of aggregation and lifestreaming.

As evidenced by the many different sites that have debuted offering a single location for differing online activities, harnessing together RSS feeds from Web services and presenting them as one, delivering a base foundation for aggregation is not all that hard.

Plaxo did it. Profilactic did it. Iminta did it. Socialthing did it. FriendFeed did it. Facebook is starting to do it.

But simple aggregation is not enough. What FriendFeed got right very early on in the game is that it's one thing to get all the services in one page, and quite another to make them interactive, so friends can talk to friends and peers can show peers what they like. Back in November, I wrote, "I first became interested in FriendFeed as the service could aggregate friends' Web activity in a single place. But in recent weeks, it's grown to be much more."

FriendFeed became more because of two things: participation and discovery.

FriendFeed let me respond and interact with the services my friends were sharing. It also allowed me to discover new services, new friends and new sources for information. Through FriendFeed, I've found new blogs to read, found new online social circles, and engaged in real-time with people who are completely unreachable, even by e-mail or Twitter.

Now, as the early adopter crowd has found the FriendFeed religion, despite the occasional grumpy holdout, they're now finding that the real potential in FriendFeed, as with other Web services, comes through participation. It's one thing to passively aggregate your online activity in a single place, and quite another to thoughtfully add comments and like items you find interesting, and think your friends will. Robert Scoble, now as prominent a FriendFeed advocate as I ever have been, has highlighted this factor in The really interesting FriendFeed page to watch tonight, where he notes FriendFeed has set up separate "discussion" pages that aggregate comments and likes. (His | Mine)

Google Reader became the leading RSS feed reader for me not just because it was a strong, quick, offering, but because of the shared link items blog. Twitter is actually useful due to tracking of @Replies and the ability to see others streams intermingled. But to sign up to any of these services to broadcast, and not to participate, shortchanges the process.

There's a reason I've made more than 1,200 comments in FriendFeed since signing up in October, and why I've "Liked" almost 700 different items. It's not because I have a bot set up to do my dirty work. It's because it helps both those I follow, and those who follow me. Take away that participation, and FriendFeed becomes as quiet as a library, and just about as exciting.

So if you're not quite sure where to start with FriendFeed, with Google Reader, with Twitter or any other social network, get started and participate. That'll make all the difference.

My Social Media Consumption Workflow

Amidst watching some talk about how they are reducing time in Google Reader due to information overload, or switching away from one service for another, whether due to its features, the friends, the noise or the content, I've been thinking a bit about how I consume social media, and specifically, the order of how I do it, to be sure I've caught up on everything quickly.

There's no question the amount of information I consume can be daunting. Glancing quickly, as of this morning:

1) I have 270 RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, sending between 500 and 800 items a day.
2) I follow 490 Twitter users.
3) I am subscribed to 269 FriendFeed users.
4) I have 210 Facebook "friends".

On the back of all this information coming this direction, I am pushing out information:

1) Posting one or two items here daily (1,300 so far)
2) Updating people on Twitter (334 updates so far)
3) Comments and Likes on FriendFeed (1,135 and 643 respectively)

In addition, there are a number of ways to engage and act on the data.

1) Adding bookmarks to Del.icio.us (630 so far)
2) Tracking activity via Technorati and Google Blog Search
3) Tracking comments here and elsewhere via Disqus
4) Trading e-mail with readers, entrepreneurs and peers

Add the above to a way a typical non-robot views the Web, including viewing news, sports and entertainment, not to mention everything to go with work and family obligations, and it can be hard to know where to start. While there's no question I'll vary from this process from time to time, below is a good idea of how I start the day in social media.


1) It always starts with e-mail. E-mail helps me know what's actionable. From e-mail, I can find out and act on:
a) New Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook connections
b) Direct Messages from Twitter
c) New comments on the blog via Disqus
d) If Google Blog Search has uncovered references to the blog
e) If there are conversations about upcoming posts or new services to check out.

When e-mail activity is completed, I open the Web browser. While FriendFeed is my home page, I usually leave it on the first visit of the day, and head to Google Reader, to rapidly consume the Web.

2) Reading Google Reader, I can catch up on the night's blog posts, add items to my link blog, or open posts in a new tab to bookmark or comment.

3) I'll open Twitter and do a quick scan of the first few pages of "tweets" from those I'm following to see what the discussions of the day are. I'll also check the replies tab to see if anybody tried to send me a message where action is required.

4) I head to FriendFeed.

Why is FriendFeed last in this order? It's because unlike the first three, which feel like work, where there is an action that needs to take place, or a task that needs clearing, FriendFeed is more like the finish line, where I can finally relax and engage with peers. I don't necessarily want to be rushed when I'm on FriendFeed, but can take time to see what others have done throughout the Web, make comments and respond to others who have commented on my own activity.

Also, visiting FriendFeed last here means that my feed is "properly" filled, with shared items from Google Reader, bookmarked items from Del.icio.us, any updates on Twitter, etc.

5) Additional activity

All other social media activity is optional, and comes when it makes sense. That would include:
a) Submitting items to the Elite News Tech Reddit
b) Digging items from the Upcoming list of Digg's Technology section
c) Visiting Shyftr and posting comments or responding to conversations.
d) Seeing what's popular on LinkRiver, ReadBurner or RSSMeme.
e) Checking trends and news on TechMeme and the TechMeme River.

Everybody has their own route to how they consume and act upon social media. This is how I tend to do it, so I feel I'm on top of things. Am I doing it wrong? How do you go about your social media workday?

You Can Only Pitch Me In Reverse Polish Notation or Pig Latin

As the world of journalism/old media gets increasingly blurred with bloggers/new media, some of the larger news-breaking bloggers are finding themselves inundated with pitches from companies looking for additional exposure. In an effort for some top bloggers to reduce the total noise sent their way, some are spelling out the right way and the wrong way to pitch them. But for any company looking to make a name for themselves, how can they possibly remember who wants to be communicated how?

Take a look at some of the more high-profile bloggers who have, at one point or another, said there is one approved way to get their attention:

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Stowe Boyd of /Message writes Via Twitter, "The Only Approved Way To Pitch Me" is via TwitPitch.


On his blog, he writes, in Twitpitch Is The Future, "Companies will be directed to this page to get the idea, and those that try to stick with the bulging email approach will suffer a three-strikes-and-you're-out rule: After three times of being warned, they go into the spam category."

Upside to him: Less e-mail, more clarity on whether something is being sent his way to write about.

Downside to the company: Their pitch is visible to everyone, making it clear they are shilling, and exclusivity is eliminated.

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Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb says the site gets "piles and piles of pitches for coverage from companies all day long and they almost always come in by email." His recommendation for would-be article subjects would be not to send an e-mail, not to call, not to use Twitter (even Direct Messages), not to use Facebook or Instant Messenger. Instead, he wants you to use RSS!


His idea there is that PR folks should send RSS feeds for client blogs and news releases, so when updates are made to their blogs, he'll see it, at his leisure.

Upside to him: Less e-mail, and the ability to enjoy/actually use Facebook, IM and Twitter without getting pitched.

Downside to the company: No understanding as to whether ReadWriteWeb actually "saw" your pitch, absolutely zero pre-pitching, and zero exclusivity. This way, RWW wouldn't get the news until it was out. In fact, Marshall says this is only for things that are public with no embargo, even pushing people back to e-mail for those.

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And last year, Robert Scoble famously said Facebook would be "a new kind of press release". In the face of a growing e-mail tsunami, he said Facebook wall messages would be passed to his Nokia phone. He says, "now we have a new way for PR people to let me know about their apps. Write it on the wall please. Facebook: the new press release."

Of course, this only works until every PR person figures it out, and Robert would end up with the same information glut, just moved somewhere else.

Upside to him: Lower e-mail flow and fewer phone calls.

Downside to the company: Not every company uses Facebook or considers it professional. Facebook pitches would get lost amidst others wishing Robert a happy birthday or any other notes, and again, they would lose any chance at exclusivity or an embargo, after pitching in public.

---

So what do we have here, just in these three examples? We have three prominent bloggers with three very highly differentiated, inefficient ways of soliciting engagement with public relations and companies. While it's extremely popular these days to dish on old media journalists and claim print is going the way of the dodo, even the biggest reporters at the high-profile media outlets can still be reached by phone or by e-mail. They're not making you jump through hoops to get their attention.

To me, while its likely bloggers are looking to make their own lives easier, and looking to utilize available technology tools to bring clarity to the process, it looks like a sign of weakness. Can't handle the data glut or the outreach coming your way? Somebody else will. Somebody else with the ability to write as quickly as you can, with the right tone and a big enough audience, who can be reached by e-mail or by cell phone, or by Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed or anything, will write that article and get that news coverage you miss.

Do you really think companies are going to remember to pitch Marshall at ReadWriteWeb via RSS and Stowe Boyd by TwitPitch and Scoble by Facebook? Knowing PR companies, I know they won't. Most of them still believe in the spray and pray method of e-mailing all contacts under the sun. There needs to be change, but making everybody jump through hoops while losing the personal engagement, exclusivity and timing won't work.

UPDATE: Elliott Ng, in the comments, gives us some good links, including Brian Solis' article on PR 2.0: In Blogger and Media Relations, You Earn the Relationships You Deserve and Rafe Needleman of WebWare complaining on Twitter about being pitched via Plaxo.

Profy Rolls Out Combined RSS Reader, Blogging Platform

Profy wasn't satisfied by simply rolling out a brand-new online RSS feed reader to challenge the established leaders, including Google Reader, NewsGator and Bloglines. With one massive update, the new service, launched in beta yesterday, not only gives Web users a new option for RSS feed consumption, but also, a new blogging platform, with interesting features that integrate the two, as well as linking in to other Web services, including Blogger.

While the world isn't lacking for RSS readers, Profy's combined offering is very interesting. With some fine-tuning as the company moves out of the beta process, the service could be very compelling to both established bloggers and new ones looking for a simplified platform to get started.

There are a few facets to Profy to focus on, including the "Feed Reader", the "Blog", the "Dashboard" and their messaging system or "Inbox".

The Feed Reader operates much like others out there. I imported my 260 or so feeds from Google Reader, and Profy recognized the folder structure. The Feed Reader is laid out cleanly with multiple tabs, enabling me to select from "Posts", reading the available items, "Feeds", showing me the name of the feed, its URL, and giving me the option to make edits, and "Folders", matching those I had in my OPML file.

I can read posts in list view, showing the source, feed name and author, or I can select expanded view, showing the entire post in the reader. Those are the basics. And aside from adding keyboard shortcuts, like Google Reader and AssetBar, there's not too much to demand before the company hits 1.0.


In the Feed Reader, I can "Add Star" to highlight a post, E-mail it to a friend, add tags, or most interestingly, I can hit "Blog It!", which pre-populates a post in my complementing Profy blog, including the full text and links of the post. Profy essentially copies the full text and headline of the post in my own blog, with me as the author, leaving the deleting to me. It's a cool tool, but one I could see abused by spam bloggers, should they ever get into the system. In my testing, it was easy to use, and I could simply post a Facebook story as my own (See the below screenshot). Profy does give credit to the source in the bottom right corner of your own post, but I expect it'd be a bit better to tweak "Blog It!" to instead focus on the headline and URL.


The Feed Reader also offers some strong flexibility. I can search my feeds for keywords, and I can look at the "Subscribers" link on any feed to see if other Profy readers are subscribed to that same blog. From those results, I can even "Add to friends" to get connected to similar Profy users who like reading what I do.


The Blog operates like those in TypePad and Blogger. There are a wide array of blogging templates provided by Profy, and you're given a Profy URL, like TypePad, with your own username: (For example: louisgray.profy.com)


Once you've selected a blog template, you can edit the layout of your blog, make new posts, or further down the road, read or moderate comments on the site.


Posting to Profy is simple for any TypePad or Blogger user. There's the option to post in either WYSIWYG or HTML, and you can use helpful buttons for styling or for adding images and YouTube video.

But most interesting to me is the ability to cross-post to Blogger or other platforms from Profy. If I were to move to Profy as my RSS reader or blogging platform, I wouldn't have to change a thing on louisgray.com. I wouldn't have to move files from the FTP site, or tweak Blogger in any way, as Profy could cross-populate both the Profy.com hosted blog and my own, just by linking the two. In testing, it was transparent to me that both posts from my Profy blog hit the louisgray.com site. To be honest, I was hoping to make it less transparent, so I could "push" individual posts to louisgray.com or Techaiku, instead of it happening automatically, but I expect either I was missing a step, or they'll make that option in the future by the 1.0 release.

Once the Feed Reader and Blog are up and running, you can manage all activity via Profy's Dashboard. From the Dashboard, I can view blog posts, read feeds, see comments made on my blog, or exchange messages with other Profy users. And any friends I've found through Profy automatically populate my Network, which assuming service growth, would expand over time.


Click for larger Dashboard image
For a beta product, Profy has done a solid job in introducing a lot of good functionality not usually found even in some of the more established feed readers, or blogging platforms. The idea of linking the feed reader and blog, while not abandoning existing services, is a good one. Obstacles in their way, aside from the usual efforts of growing awareness, and keeping up with user expectations, would be to follow the lead of Fav.or.it or others to enable commenting from RSS feed readers to the original blog, integration of Disqus in either area, and the ultra-important area of keyboard feed navigation.

The question is, can Profy rise up, in 2008, to challenge the established leadership of TypePad, WordPress and Blogger? The big three hold a commanding mindshare and user base, which is formidable. But so long as Profy makes it transparent and easy to move data into their service from others, and continues on the path of innovating and linking their disparate services, they have as good a chance as any.

If you're interested in getting your hands on Profy, it is in limited invite-only beta. I believe I have five available, but with any luck, I can get more. Let me know if you're interested!

ReadBurner Fired Back Up With Revamped GUI, Reader Integration

ReadBurner is back... with a serious makeover
The short history of ReadBurner, Alexander Marktl's pet project aimed at finding the most shared items on Google Reader has already been one of many twists and turns. First, it was discovered before planned launch, forcing Marktl into a wild one day scramble. The site rapidly gained followers, and competition, aiming to seize onto the shared links tabulating trend. But suddenly, Marktl went silent and on March 5th, said he was to shut the site down for good, or so we thought, only to see it resurrected less than ten days later, following the site's acquisition.

Now, under new ownership, ReadBurner is back with a bang, offering a dramatically improved UI, and a wealth of new features highlighting popular items and sources, as well as the most innovative new wrinkle, full integration of Google Reader within the site, making it more sticky as a destination site than ever, and keeping it one step ahead of Benjamin Golub's RSSMeme, who in ReadBurner's absence, aggregated more shared links feeds than anybody outside the walled garden of Facebook, where Mario Romero's Feedheads app reigns supreme.

The first thing you'll notice with the new and improved ReadBurner is its shiny Web 2.0 look, courtesy of PixelTalent. The new site embraces bright neon orange and blue, making it tempting to wear shades simply to browse the site. Maybe that's the idea, as ReadBurner tries to take what's honestly a very geeky application, on the fringe of blog reading and recommending, and make it seem "cool". Let's be honest though, talking up ReadBurner at most parties outside of Silicon Valley won't get you too many dates.

There are three major ways to filter the news, from the Popular (most shared in the last 48 hours), Upcoming (most shared in the last 24 hours) and Most Recent (a fire hose of shared items in near real-time). This is not new. But what is new is the way ReadBurner has now developed Categories (including an Apple category), Sub-Categories and in a TechMeme-like shift, "Related Items". Now, stories in the system are viewed based on their content, and they can be grouped together in story listings and individual item pages.

For example, Steven Hodson's WinExtra post (ReadBurner link) features similar stories from Mashable and SheGeeks. The other stories may not actually link to Steven in the way TechMeme's grouped stories tend to, but they are on the same wavelength.


ReadBurner shows related items.
Also new for ReadBurner is the ability for a blog owner to track their own site and how often items are shared. RSSMeme has long had this feature, (see: RSSMeme/louisgray.com) and now ReadBurner is doing the same (see: ReadBurner/louisgray.com). I've found this approach to be a good measure, beyond page views, as to which stories are best reaching my audience.


An item from louisgray.com on ReadB