Arrington Betting Big On the CrunchPad Mobile Device

While many things have been written and said about TechCrunch's Michael Arrington since he debuted his technology blog network four years ago, he is without a doubt a risk taker. The pending launch of the eagerly awaited CrunchPad device could possibly do more to define his legacy than almost any other challenge he has taken on. Not content to having one of the most visible and influential technology sites on the Web, Arrington looks to be charging head-first into an extremely competitive field of consumer electronics, an area that will cost considerable investment of both time and money. If the CrunchPad is a success, the way we consume the Internet on the go could be forever changed. And if it is not, the device will join the ranks of many that have charged up the hill before it and fallen short.

Arrington's trait of a risk taker is one that has helped make him very successful, pushing his blog to near mainstream acceptance, competing against publications with history marked in centuries. And now, the story of the CrunchPad, so far, is one of his trying to develop a product that was a solution to a problem no consumer electronics hardware developer has yet done well - introducing a device whose sole purpose is to help browse the Web on the go. No hard drive. No phone calls. No keyboard. As he told the New York Times yesterday, the device's focus will help it avoid the slowness of other netbooks that are often impacted by other applications. And he doesn't see the device being eclipsed by the long-rumored tablet that Apple may or may not ever introduce.


An Early Prototype Image of the CrunchPad (via TechCrunch.com)
Early photos and short video clips of CrunchPad prototypes have not only made the device look real, but extremely inviting. On my first visit to TechCrunch's new headquarters in Palo Alto in April (See: Super Geek Spotted at TechCrunch HQ On a Segway), I saw the CrunchPad being worked on, but at Mike's request, did not take pictures of it or blog about it myself. As he was host, I obliged, of course.

But my interaction with the CrunchPad prototype was strictly visual. I didn't pick it up. I didn't turn it on. And I certainly didn't get to compare it to my laptop or my iPhone to see how it fared. And therein lies the real question of whether the CrunchPad has a home in my fast-growing gadget pile. I love the idea, but wonder just when would I need to have a CrunchPad along with me, either instead of the laptop or instead of the iPhone. The MacBook Pro is clearly my workhorse, and the iPhone is great for browsing quick clips on the go. The CrunchPad, a 3rd device, sits in between - a great looking device that I might pick up when I don't need to use any Office applications, but to instead just take in the Web.

The pricing of the CrunchPad, at a rumored $300, is about the same for an iPod or iPhone, and at the low end for some of today's underfeatured, ugly, netbooks. $300 is an aggressive price point that would make it practically impossible for me to make good excuses not to buy one, even if just to hit those "in between" scenarios where my laptop or iPhone would not fit the bill.

Coverage of the CrunchPad's continued development states that news will arrive by the beginning of August, and that the tablet will soon be available for purchase, giving Mike back the hours he would otherwise be spending blogging, as he looks to turn over day to day management of the product.

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.

Topsy's Social Search Will Benefit Big Blogs, Influential Tweeters

Combining the world of search and the world of microblogging, including Twitter, is a popular thing to do these days. With Twitter Search having its hiccups, entrants like Twazzup, OneRiot and TweetMeme have all joined the game of trying to find the best content on Twitter, or finding the most influential users. In the last few days, Topsy, which bills itself as a "new kind of search engine" powered by the social Web, has gotten a good amount of visibility, especially due in part to an aggressive recommendation from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch - who is a big fan.

Topsy is interesting in that rather than finding the best result due to external hyperlinks or having "one right answer", as Google and most other search engines do, Topsy instead relies largely on the number of times a URL is shared (or tweeted) around that specific keyword.

For example, while searching Apple on Google sends you to Apple.com, Searching for Apple on Topsy instead sends you to watch Apple's TV Ads for the "Get a Mac" campaign. You can guess that when the new ads debut, they are frequently sent around Twitter, pushing that link to #1.

Similarly, Topsy is influenced by recency, which explains why a similar search for Microsoft has articles on their Bing search product competing with Google rather than the vanilla Microsoft homepage you would get with Google.

But, as with Google, not all things are equal in the world of microblogging. If you have an account with hundreds of thousands of followers, thanks to a position on the site's Suggested Users List, you will no doubt have much more influence on how many times items are retweeted, and therefore, a much higher impact on Topsy. That means then that accounts like TechCrunch and Mashable, who are in the SUL, are highly featured, and other competitors, like VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb, do not fare as well.

The impact of a big account can be seen both on individuals and topics.

Stories on TechCrunch.com are #1 on Topsy when searching for individuals like Eric Schmidt, Dave Sifry and Reid Hoffman, each a leader in tech, covered by the network. In parallel, Mashable holds the #1 overall position for individuals including Mark Zuckerberg., while ReadWriteWeb finishes #1 for Paul Buchheit.


Top Topsy Results for Eric Schmidt


Top Topsy Results for Mark Zuckerberg


Top Topsy Results for Reid Hoffman


Top Topsy Results for Dave Sifry
Essentially, Topsy is the delivery of "authority-based search" that Loic Le Meur was asking for at the end of 2008, but done so in a way that doesn't explicitly say so.


Top Topsy Results for Tesla Motors
On topics, you can see TechCrunch holds the top position on Topsy for Tesla Motors, as well as the #1 position for LinkedIn, #2 for Socialmedian and Google News as well as #3 for FriendFeed, with Mashable finishing #4 on that search. In each case the coverage of the company trumps the company's site or official comments.


Top Topsy Results for Apple's iPhone
In turn, Mashable holds the #1 Topsy result for iPhone, and the #3 spot for MySpace.

That's not to say there is anything inherently "wrong" with these results, but they are definitely different, and if Topsy should take off, the influence of larger blog networks and the Suggested User List on Twitter will expand further. Should search results lead you to the one true answer that delivers you a bland corporate page, or should they instead lead you to social news impacted by a large community?

Super Geek Spotted at TechCrunch HQ On a Segway

With today being a day off from the office, I had scheduled to meet up with Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens In Tech for a breakfast meeting in Palo Alto. Despite his 16 year tenure on this planet, I'd heard great things about his aggressiveness and entrepreneurial spirit, and was looking forward to finally connecting.

Not knowing if he would recognize me, I donned a self-promotional louisgray.com shirt, putting fashion aside for the moment.

But as fate would have it, while awaiting Daniel's arrival, I bumped into Michael Arrington of TechCrunch in Palo Alto, who was finishing breakfast at the place Daniel and I had scheduled. Arrington kindly offered us both an invite to see the uber-blog's new office, just a few blocks away, which we accepted.

Unbeknownst to us, the casual invite turned into meet and greet mania. In addition to Arrington's team, including Jason Kincaid, Sarah Lacy, Henry Work, Asad Akbar and CEO Heather Harde, both Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis stopped by - making the room high on geeks, even if low on furniture (they're still building it out).

As the team is low on furniture, there's plenty of open space - perfect for the new Segway, which arrived this morning. After Daniel managed to break its kickstand in about five minutes, Arrington let me take it for a spin. Surprisingly, it was very easy to run - so if you don't mind seeing what a geek looks like while being geeky at a geek haven... there you go.



Oh... and any rumors that I was there on official business are false. But feel free to spread them.

Web Two Dot Oh DotCom Dot Cloud Colon Slash Slash

This afternoon I had the opportunity to attend a session presented by TechCrunch, hosted by Steve Gillmor, around cloud computing, featuring some of the Valley's thought leaders, from many of the biggest names in all of tech, ranging from Salesforce.com to Rackspace, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sun, Ning, FriendFeed, Facebook, Amazon.com and a small handful of startups. Each of the participants discussed how their product leveraged the cloud, what it was about this new approach to harvesting data storage and computing that made their products execute the way they do, and how they approached new problems of bandwidth, capacity, licensing, security and scale.

The event, essentially a two parter, with early-stage start-ups presenting for five minutes apiece in front of an expert panel for the first half, and a roundtable of technology elite for the second half, saw a healthy dosage of skepticism mixed in with what was largely a genuine desire for these companies to try and deliver higher-quality services for their users by taking advantage of new protocols.

With everybody saying the word "cloud" to represent customer data or computing being stored independently of local physical disk or blade servers, the word itself grew to be mocked. One 'expert' said cloud was the new "dotcom". Another compared the cloud to rabbits as they kept multiplying, and a third called the cloud "Kool-Aid". With the move of terminology over the last decade from "Dotcom" to "Web 2.0" to "Cloud", you can see why people would be necessarily wary of jumping on the newest movement with two feet.

All names aside, there is as much fact as there was fad in the cloud. The cloud's benefits are clear as data can be stored independent of physical disks, and doesn't require dedicated storage and server administration. Code developers want anytime access to infinite bandwidth and storage, and consumers want instant response times. As the panel debated the genesis of enterprise apps absorbing consumer application features, it was clear that each was facing challenges impossible just a decade ago, and the cloud's availability changed everything.

Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed referred to the Internet as just one big computer, and said that instead of shipping software in a big cardboard box with floppies to introduce version 3.0, you could just ship new code three times a day. Mike Schroepfer of Facebook talked about how his team could handle 1 billion status messages of 100 characters each on a different level of storage than the 1 billion images, each a few megabytes apiece. And Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com won the prize for the best quote of the day, saying, "As an industry, we are always overestimating what we can do in a year and underestimating what we can do in a decade."

Benioff's quote is no doubt true. The next engineering team I meet that hits the initial proposed date with all the requested features is the first one I will meet. But a decade ago, we wouldn't have expected to stream full-length feature films without buffering, or do many of the things we do online, always having been limited by location, bandwidth, memory, storage, or even operating systems. Now, the operating system is even less a part of the discussion. While the panel was held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley office, practically all presentations were done on Apple Macintosh, and featured FireFox, not Internet Explorer. Now, consumers and businesspeople expect to get all their applications and data from anywhere on any device. It was enough that Benioff even left his laptop behind on a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in favor of his BlackBerry Bold.

It is happening. Not too long ago, yet another meme went around the Web on what the Internet looked like in 1996 - a blink of an eye when you think about it. In 1996, I was hosting a personal home page, using WebStar, on my Apple Macintosh Performa 631 CD, with all of 8 megabytes of RAM. Now, my blog is hosted on the cloud. The images themselves are on the cloud. My participation in social networks like Facebook and FriendFeed... is done on the cloud. And I'm taking my iPhone everywhere. I used to despise the term cloud, and used to rail against it with my colleagues at 3Cube back in 1998 to 2000, but it looks like I lost that battle. Good thing all of us as consumers are winning.

Watch for the Telephone Game in Your Short Attention Span World

One of the recurring themes on this blog has been how to handle a seeming overflow of information. We've discussed creating a social media consumption workflow. I addressed a new concept I called continuous parallel attention. I said how you handle the information overload Is up to you and later said there is no social media overload and cautioned bloggers to relax, because nobody is keeping score. But we still see problems crop up when a story gets passed from person to person and details get lost. It's the modern equivalent of the popular "Telephone" game we all played as kids, where the last phrase was never close to how it started.

Take a look at an example from this weekend, after Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote a piece saying FriendFeed had seen site growth that reached almost 1 million visitors in December of 2008.

Seems straight forward enough. The data came from Comscore, which shows a higher growth rate for FriendFeed than do other services, including Quantcast and Compete.com. Compete reports 700,000 visitors or so to FriendFeed in December, by the way.

But then, Robert Scoble, a good friend, good blogger, and fellow FriendFeed user relayed the story a little differently, saying that the report said FriendFeed had surpassed a million user accounts.

Using that as the baseline, Robert stated the 26,000 or so subscribers to his feed represented one of every 39 users. (See the FriendFeed thread here) But that only exacerbated the flub. Having used the site myself for quite some time, I'd be shocked if there were more than a million registered accounts, and FFHolic estimates the number to be closer to 200,000 total accounts, one fifth of a million. This of course makes Robert's penetration even higher, as that means one of every eight users follows him, but that's not the major issue.

If you're FriendFeed, and you know your actual user count, you can't exactly issue a correction saying that you "only" have a quarter million users. And if they did announce such data, which they don't, it might seem to be a letdown now that the higher, incorrect number has been released.

The service is now becoming a destination site as users share links on Twitter, their blogs, Facebook and elsewhere, so it's no surprise that the unique visitor count is higher than the number of users. After all, if I visit from home and on my wife's laptop and the office, doesn't that count as three unique visitors?

This is but one example, and I know practically all of us have made the mistake of reading stories too quickly, or coming to conclusions and extrapolations based on only partial data. For example, Stowe Boyd wrote a great piece tonight saying I was "Wrong About Twitter Funding", but he had only seen one of the two posts, which had taken point/counterpoint positions. That's not a victim of the telephone game, but he is a busy guy, like the rest of us, and no doubt overlooked one of the items.

When we're reacting to other items, or relaying them, we should be careful that we're not making new stories based on data that's not true. We're all going fast, and maybe reading a ton of RSS feeds, seeing thousands of Twitter updates, and rushing in an effort to post quickly. But there's something to be said for watching for the telephone game.

There's No Way Twitter Is Worth $250 Million Today

See Also: Twitter Is Worth A Lot More Than $250 Million

In the Web 2.0 space, it would be extremely difficult to find a more-successful, faster-growing service than Twitter, who has carved out a significant niche for itself in the microupdates space, as people from around the world tell you what they're doing, right now, even if you didn't ask. The service has an estimated 6 million active users, and recently surpassed the 1 billion "Tweet" mark, if you count all updates. But the company hasn't yet made a buck in traditional revenues. (Although I can't claim to be privy to their books, and they just might have recognized something somewhere) Word comes this weekend, via TechCrunch and others, that Twitter is embarking on a new funding round that could see the company valued at $250 million. And while I already made the case that Twitter will get its funding, and could end up being worth a lot more than that number in short order, it is pretty easy to also poke holes in that analysis.

Quite simply, now is a very difficult time to attain a high valuation. Venture funding is dropping dramatically, and positive exits for companies are rare. Practically nobody is talking about going public, so to make money, you would have to do it the old fashioned way, through profits. And Twitter has grown its user base rapidly, but has done so on the backs of users who are used to getting something for nothing. We've already seen users revolt when Magpie launched with the possibility of inserting ads in one's tweets, and you could expect to see the user base shudder when being asked to shoulder any of the revenue themselves - so you can practically forget about monthly fees. Given that scenario, site ads and ads inserted in third party applications, like TweetDeck, would have to be one option, but an unattractive one, as the ad market itself is tailing downward.

Additionally, what Twitter does is incredibly basic. It's sole functionality is one that it is easily replicated. You can provide status updates on Facebook, on GMail, on FriendFeed, and the whole process rolls back to AOL instant Messenger, when you would set an "Away" status to say you were "At Lunch" or "In a Meeting". So that's not hard.

A recent post by Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed, called Communicating with Code, showcased a prototype offering of FriendFeed that borrowed heavily from the look and feel of Twitter. Given FriendFeed updates include those from Twitter, and then build on with additional services, it can be considered a superset, while Twitter is simply one service of many. So the barrier to entry to compete with Twitter is not that hard, leaving the company's major assets as the community and its developers.

But communities are incredibly fickle. None of Twitter's six million users were using the service five years ago, and maybe, five years from now, they will be doing something else. If people use Twitter for conversation, they can replace that with e-mail, with IM, with FriendFeed, Facebook or other social destinations. I've talked about the five stages of being an early adopter before. One of the final stages is when you grow tired of an environment, and leave, begging your followers to come along. It happens with news groups. It happens with e-mail lists, and it just might happen with social networking tools, including Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and others.

Today, Twitter is among the hottest, fastest-growing brands out there. But no matter how you multiply its current revenue to try and guess at a market capitalization, the answer is still zero. At a time when real brick and mortar businesses are seeing their own valuations decimated, how can a virtual company with a free user base and a low barrier to competition expect to be valued so richly? Whoever does invest should exercise extreme caution.

Twitter Is Worth A Lot More Than $250 Million

See Also: There's No Way Twitter Is Worth $250 Million Today

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch led the weekend news cycle Saturday evening after revealing Twitter is in the middle of a funding round that could see the still pre-revenue company valued a cool quarter-billion dollars. Not only do I believe the company will end up getting the money they are looking for, but whatever investors choose to pony up could eventually be seen as having gotten a bargain - because Twitter, with the increased investment, looks prepared to 'double down' and become a must-use utility in our increasingly realtime, increasingly connected, digital world.

Despite the company's many failings, be it with uptime, developer relations, or seemingly blaming its most active users for aggressive activity, Twitter has, over the space of 24 months, cemented itself in a position where it is a critical part of the way we share information, communicate with others, and in times of news and change, can learn from the firehose of tweets from all corners of the world.

Twitter's rise to prominence has been largely in part due to its simplicity. It does two things - let you send short updates to followers, and let you see updates from those you follow. The addition of many third party services, including the since-acquired search capabilities, and scads of desktop or Web tools, have only served to let people consume and distribute the data as they wish, as Tweets can be issued automatically from mobile phones broadcasting location info, sent from blogs using RSS, or from a host of updating services, including Ping.fm and FriendFeed.

Twitter, amid pressure from users and developers to add the ability to display photos and video, to extend the number of characters to beyond 140, to add threaded comments, and to find a business model - any business model - has simply continued doing what it does, even as competition has faltered. Pownce shut down altogether. Jaiku disappeared into the Google black hole. And FriendFeed dances to its own drummer, acting as a great complement for Twitter even as people occasionally say it could knock Twitter off its pedestal. Facebook's status updates are probably the closest thing to being a head to head fighter to Twitter out there today, and many simply pull their updates from Twitter to the social network, as I do.

Twitter will find a business model. It will very likely include some form of advertising, even in a tough economy for ads. It may also charge for premium options to users, and might find a way to break into the enterprise, eliminating the need for Yammer and other copies. And investing in Twitter today means you're buying into a company that already is #1, by a long shot, in its self-built market, before it has truly hit the mainstream, and among the Web 2.0 set, Twitter is the closest to do so - being featured frequently on CNN and used by prominent figures, including the new president's team as part of his social Web strategy.

And don't be fooled into thinking Twitter is just for consumers. Savvy business users are recognizing that Twitter is a vital audience to be communicated to and to listen to, for product mentions, feedback and competitive updates. Twitter is part of the noise, and you can either embrace it, or ignore it, to your own peril.

How can Twitter be worth 1/4 billion today without any revenue? Take a look at the market capitalizations of Web companies today, even after the stock market blowout. Yahoo! is worth nearly $16 billion. Google is worth more than $100 billion. And in traditional media, even the very damaged New York Times is worth more than $800 million at its current price. As I have mentioned many times on this blog, I find Twitter's search capability to be even more important than that of Google for breaking news. Given the company's incredible momentum, and inability to get knocked off its pedestal, we would be foolish to think Twitter can't continue to grow and increase its user base and offerings, and be worth more than $1 billion in very short order.

If I had cash sitting around to put into Twitter and they came knocking on my door, I would ask plenty of questions, but at the end of the day, I would be investing. This will be a deal to watch for sure.

Scoble Starts His FriendFeed/Twitter Monetization Strategy

Uber-blogger Robert Scoble came under criticism in late December when TechCrunch's Michael Arrington said he had neglected his blog, in factor of spending time on FriendFeed and Twitter. Arrington said It’s Time For A Friendfeed Intervention, saying he was contributing to the popularity of those services but getting nothing for himself, adding, "How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch." Well, thanks to a tip from one of Robert's Twitter friends, it looks like he is trying to capitalize on his popularity on these new services, through embedded Amazon affiliate links.

Whether it is a one-time experiment or a sign of things to come, tonight Robert sent a note to his now 25,000 FriendFeed followers, and nearly 50,000 followers on Twitter, saying: Want a news tip? Amazon Kindle is sold out. Hint here:, and adding on FriendFeed:

"I just bought a version 1.0 machine. It's sold out. Will they make more? I doubt it. So, why are they still accepting orders? I just bought one and will let you know what shows up. I'm hearing that new version comes in next few months."

After that introduction, he gave a personalized affiliate link, which would give him a percentage of the sales made during the session of any of his followers. (See the FriendFeed thread here)


Note the Scobleizer tag in the destination URL...
As simple as that sounds, the power of Amazon affiliate links on the Web can often be underestimated. John Gruber of Daring Fireball made nearly $6,000 in just over a week by encouraging his blog visitors to buy Mac OS X 10.5 from his affiliate link instead of directly from Apple.


Scoble is caught "red handed" without disclosure...
Robert probably won't make $6,000 from this experiment tonight. Assuming he also gets 7.5% referrals from Amazon, It would take $80,000 worth of orders to get him a similar return - meaning 223 of his more than 50,000 followers would have to buy the $359 Amazon Kindle for him to reach that mark. But if he continued to drop Amazon links into his FriendFeed and Twitter stream, it could be some good spending money over time.

Of note, when Gruber asked for users to visit his affiliate page, he was very clear about what he would get from such a purchase. Tonight, I noticed and asked Robert myself if this was his "FriendFeed revenue strategy". His answer? "You caught me red handed!" I don't mind him trying out the idea, and think it's an interesting approach, but I would have preferred disclosure.

---

Update: As anticipated, this topic is being discussed on FriendFeed on my feed as well as that of Robert, who says I missed some important points. Also see: Free Rides Can't Last Forever from Dennis McDonald and Network World's Paul McNamara: Blogger Catches Scobleizer With His Hand in Amazon's Kindle Jar.

The Global Recession Is Crushing Web Ads. Expect it to Get Worse.

That I am not a fan of Web advertising on Web services and blogs is not a big secret. I was roundly pummeled for my over the top comments in April that tried to divorce authors from the idea that they could publish a blog, add AdSense and then wait for the money to roll in. But recent developments make it look like the Web advertising crunch is becoming critical. Inventories are not being sold, prices are dropping dramatically, and it's very likely more and more services reliant on ads are going to feel the pinch, forcing them to rapidly change their business models or close altogether. And they won't be alone. I'd look for many multi-author blogs you've grown to rely on to start thinning the ranks of reporters as ad returns weaken, and some have already started to make such cuts.

Back in December of 2007, I expressed my concerns in a piece called "The Web Advertising Bubble Has Got to Pop", where I said:

"The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes to me that the ad-driven economy, both offline and on, could soon be in dire straights, and companies hoping to cash in need to think of new revenue targets - quick."

The reasons I gave for decreasing ad revenues, at the time, stemmed largely from audiences learning to avoid ads, or to use software to block them. I mentioned that even the mighty Google would be susceptible to a crunch, if was to happen, in the online ad market. Like others, I didn't forecast a massive global recession, but as the financial markets have spiked lower, and public markets have been closed to innovative companies, the drive to reach a profit, and do so without relying solely on ads, is stronger than ever.

Last night, Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr summed it up in what had to be a tough piece for him to write, "The Web Ad Apocalypse". He, being one of those bloggers who is heavily reliant on ad revenue, said advertising inventory at his providers has dramatically dropped. He adds, as I did more than a year ago:

"Advertising in blogging and 2.0 services/ apps is on the downward march, and companies that rely on advertising that were marginally profitable, or running at a loss are about to find life that much harder."

Duncan's comments are not in isolation. TechCrunch reported today that video ad rates dropped 25% in the last quarter. Be it in video, in banners, or in text ads, the trend is downward.

It is my belief that this problem, while exacerbated by the financial downturn, has been a long time coming. While Google made money hand over fist by pushing sponsored ads alongside native search results, their AdSense product, beloved by many bloggers, is often way off the mark when it comes to contextual advertising - and practically the only memorable online ads are those polluted by nonsensical dancing and misleading graphics that make you think you have a computer virus, or lie to you and say you've won an iPhone by being the 1 millionth visitor. I'd say we've come a long way from the late 90s when we were asked to "Punch the Monkey", but we haven't.

Online ad successes in Web services and blogging are not non-existent, but they are incredibly rare, and they are going to get rarer still. If you're trying to make money on the Web, it's time to think of a different way. If you have a service, get users to pay for it. Find a way to deliver value through premium offerings. Charge monthly fees. But the whole "free plus ads" mantra is going to get worse - and not worth the effort in many cases. That's a major reason I've never run ads here. I knew the trade-off for mucking up the site wasn't going to be worth the pennies. Now it's clear that's likely all I'd ever get.

10 Predictions for 2009 In the World of Tech

Following on to last year's 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech and the recent results: My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close.

1) The Real-Time Web Will Become Critical for News and Information Discovery

Delayed news will no longer be acceptable for early adopters, who will gravitate to the quickest sources of news, wherever they may be. As tools like Twitter Search and FriendFeed real-time offer people to rapidly broadcast their updates, reactions and news with true immediacy, a segment of the population will adopt these real-time sources and favor them ahead of delayed or filtered engines, including RSS, and of course, edited mass media. At the same time, while many of us early adopters may be fairly noisy about this development, we will remain in the significant minority, even as the mainstream becomes more aware of these options.

2) Businesses Will Be Expected to Be On Social Media If They Have Web Sites

In the mid and late 1990s, there was a land rush for domain names, as every company jumped in and procured Web addresses and built out Web sites to establish their electronic home. Although many of these sites were rudimentary at best, they knew they needed to be there to participate. In 2009, it will be expected that brands and businesses will be similarly established on social media, using tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and YouTube.

3) Apple Will Introduce A Succession Plan for Steve Jobs as CEO

While Steve Jobs is not likely in imminent danger, the continued unsettled rumors, as well as a good level of common sense will push Apple to present a succession plan for Jobs, which will not take place immediately, but over the space of a few years. One to three names of potential in-house replacements will be named, as well as a timeline, as Steve fades to the background, but continues to wield tremendous power over Apple's vision and deliverables.

4) TechCrunch Will Acquire VentureBeat or Silicon Alley Insider

Mike Arrington's tech blog continues to be the influence leader in its space. Both VentureBeat and Silicon Alley Insider have forged strong brands with a financial bent which would be good additions for the TechCrunch brand as Arrington and team look to extend their umbrella and wrap up what he considers to be the best blogs. SAI in particular would offer an East Coast/financial bent that the Silicon Valley-based TechCrunch is currently not known for.

5) Android Will Have Less than 20% the Sales of iPhone in 2009

While commoditized PCs managed to put pressure on Macintosh and relegate Apple to a small market share percentage the Cupertino company is still trying to recover from back in the 1980s, history will not repeat itself, as Google's Android partners will be unable to knock the iPhone off its perch as the must-have smart phone for power Web consumers. BlackBerry will continue having a significant share in the enterprise, but it will continue to be iPhone eroding its share, not the Android, especially given the unmatched array of applications available for the iPhone which Android will not be able to match.

6) A Major Alternative to FeedBurner Will Emerge As the Service Stagnates

Google's mismanagement of FeedBurner has many people frustrated with how the feed service has been run since its acquisition last year, as the service continues to see slowness, outages, and recently went dark, shutting down their blog and being gobbled up by the AdSense team. Competitors will emerge, enabling bloggers to move their FeedBurner subscriber base and historical statistics to their new platform.

7) FriendFeed and Twitter Will Both Be Independent Through 2009

Despite Twitter's recent dance with Facebook, it will rely on its existing venture capital funding and find revenue that enables the company to stay afloat at least through the end of the year. FriendFeed, similarly, will not be acquired or merge with any other service prior to the end of 2009. The company, if necessary, will instead do a second round of funding, with its own internal sources providing much of the capital.

8) Companies Will Continue Budget and Staff Cuts Through the Third Quarter of 2009

The layoff parade in 2009 will not be limited to unprofitable companies, small companies or practically any category of companies. The doom and gloom that have hit the financial markets, advertising, real estate and almost every sector will continue through the first half of the year, before starting to see a rebound in the third quarter. You will see strong companies like Microsoft lay off thousands, and practically everyone will not be renewing contract positions that have concluded - even Google and Apple.

9) An Extremist Group Will Manage to Take Down or Deface the White House Web Site

America's political climate is extremely polarized, following the conclusion of two extremely divisive terms. As Barack Obama moves into the White House, the very features that make him a "first" will also make him and his administration the chief target for some incredibly angry and hate-filled groups. One will somehow manage to access the WhiteHouse.gov site and manipulate it this year.

10) eTrade, Digg, StumbleUpon, Skype and Yahoo! Will All Be Sold.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. eBay will want to ditch its non-core assets like StumbleUpon and Skype (I made the sale of StumbleUpon a prediction last year too). Digg, losing momentum, will sell cheap. Yahoo! will eventually be purchased by News Corporation, AOL, or even Google, assuming it passes regulatory approval, by the end of the year. Microsoft, still insulted, won't be back to the table.

Arrington? Le Meur? Scoble? Everybody's Right About "Authority".

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

This weekend's blog flareup on whether Twitter should track the "authority" of a user, based primarily on the number of followers, has a number of people up in arms. One side says it makes sense. After all, Technorati and Google have always tracked influence. Others say the following number can be easily manipulated, and has no weight. First of all, before we address the issues, why am I writing this on LouisGray.com and not my own blog, StayNAlive.com?  It largely comes down to numbers.  LouisGray.com has near 4,000 RSS subscribers, while my blog only has 500.  Aside from the fact that I enjoy the team of great writers I work with on this blog, I have a much louder, and because of that, more authoritative, voice here.  More people listen with a larger audience than those with a small audience.  And like it or not, all bloggers trying to compete play the numbers game - that's simple marketing.

Background

Recently Loic Le Meur wrote a post, suggesting that Twitter Search sort their results by most popular on Twitter.  So, for example, if Robert Scoble has more followers than Michael Arrington, Scoble's posts will appear higher than Arrington's in the search results.  Scoble responded with a blog post suggesting Lemeur was wrong, saying that the number of people you follow is more important than those who follow you.  Today, Arrington reignited the flames with another follow-on post, supporting Le Meur, effectively saying the controversy was much ado about little, that it wasn't a separation from the haves and have nots, but instead, a simple recommendation to add to Twitter search.

So we have two business men, trying to find more readers and users to build revenue for their businesses (Arrington runs a content business, TechCrunch.com, while Le Meur runs a Video publishing service, Seesmic).  At the same time we have a video blogger, Robert Scoble, trying to find new content, which in turn generates revenue for the business he works for by building unique content.  He's very good at that, but They're both right.

Of course Arrington and Le Meur want more followers, and preference placed on followers - they benefit by doing so.  Their experience, as businessmen trying to generate revenue for their business, shows that more followers can both directly and indirectly translate into revenue for the businesses they own and run.  Arrington, after today's article, will generate even more readers of his blog because of the discussion going on about this on Twitter and FriendFeed.  That converts to more followers, which in turn sends them back to TechCrunch.com.

If I launch a new feature for SocialToo.com (Disclosure - I am CEO and co-founder of SocialToo.com, a service that, among many other features, enables you to auto-follow those that follow you on Twitter and other networks.), I have 4,000 followers I can now announce that to.  A year ago, when I was only at a few hundred, that announcement would not have made anywhere near an impact.  Now, with a sound business model, I have the potential to convert many more users to drive both traffic and revenue to the service.  The same goes with Arrington and TechCrunch, and Le Meur and Seesmic.  They're smart businessmen.  Notice Guy Kawasaki, another smart businessman said the same thing.

At the same time, it makes complete sense that Scoble places his value on the people he follows. Scoble's value is in the information he learns.  It's a sound strategy for a journalist, a PR professional, or a blogger.  After all, I met Scoble through following him on Twitter and FriendFeed (in person even!).  I also met Guy Kawasaki by following him on Twitter, as did I Chris Pirillo, and following the Tweets of the two of them was the premise behind me starting SocialToo.com.  There is value in that as well.  Scoble, and others can be experts, because of the people they follow - that is powerful.  It should also be noted that Scoble has a lot of followers because of this strategy.  This really is a "Chicken or the Egg" argument!

Social Networking is About the Experience for the Individual

The power of Social Networking is that it allows each individual to develop their own personalized experience on the web.  By the people they follow, they get the content they want.  By the people that follow them, they are given a voice outside of that personal world.  Scoble is right - you are defined by the people you follow.  I've talked about that here before - relationships define the individual.

However, a relationship is a two-way connection.  In the end it's those that follow you that can vouch for who you are, and what type of person they perceive you as.  If anyone were to steal my identity, I now have 4,000 people that can vouch it's the real me.  Of course there are ways around this, but it's still a form of identity, and will solidify even more as technology evolves.

I am a smarter person because of the people I follow - I've mentioned before that I separate those I pay attention to from those I follow.  That's how I follow smart people.  At the same time, I can ask any question now, and get multiple answers to that question from my 4,000+ followers.  I couldn't do that when I had only a few hundred.  I'm also smarter because of the people the follow me!  The people that follow me are very valuable, and make me a more authoritative source, just as the people I follow do.

I really don't think there is any right or wrong answer here.  I think Scoble, Arrington, and Lemeur are all right - it's important to follow smart people, yet at the same time your followers are just as important.  I don't think either one is any more valuable than the other on a general level - it varies on a person-to-person experience, and that is why you see them arguing over it.  That's the amazing thing behind Social Networking - there is no right or wrong answer because each individual can define their own!

In a perfect world, Twitter Search would provide multiple filters, some based on followers, some based on people you follow, some based on the number of people you converse with directly in your network of friends and followers.  The more personalized that search becomes, the more valuable it becomes to the individual.  "Authority" is determined by the individual.  Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

The Best Solution to Embargo Angst? Write Something Else.

As blogging approaches the traditional role of journalism, traditional elements of journalism, including public relations firms, embargoes, briefings, and bias are going to surface, as they have with traditional marketing, media and business for centuries. Today's flare-up, kicked off by one of the best discussion starters on the Web, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, isn't the first time embargoes have been slammed, and it certainly won't be the last time. Back in August, I discussed why I believed the embargo process was both broken, but necessary, and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb followed on with a great take of his own.

I think the bigger issue is not that embargoes are being broken - which they are by blogs both big and small - but instead, that there are a large number of sites who act like they are the only game in town, and that they must cover every single story.

To those guys, please stop. Seriously.

In the tech blogging sphere, there is a serious echo chamber. While I look forward to banging through my Google Reader feeds every day, I can pretty much bank on seeing the same story, spun a different way, a good dozen or two dozen times by every single tech blog - even if it's clear that they are just reporting that someone else reported the news. If you see a story has been covered already and you have nothing to add - leave it alone.

Given the ease of news distribution, let's now write with the assumption that everybody reading your site is reading a few others as well. If you see a story broken by TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb or Mashable or VentureBeat or CenterNetworks, there's no need to pile on and become story number 18 on the topic. Let it go and write about something else - unless you have unique insight, unique quotes or access.

In my day job, I work with press releases and embargoes and reporters on a frequent basis. There is a need to be sure announcements go out when the products and partners are ready, or the customer is ready to take press calls. But Arrington is no doubt right that, as king of the hill, which TechCrunch is, some companies and PR teams are making coverage on the site practically mandatory, and near harassment of him and his team is no doubt occurring.

When trying to get coverage elsewhere, memorably one time in 2006 in Computerworld, I know I aggressively called the feature reporter every few hours until they finally picked up. After berating them for covering a competitor, and not our story, I got hung up on (no doubt deservedly so). I can only imagine being a TechCrunch reporter getting hit over and over by desperate firms, begging for coverage and honoring of their embargo.

A suggestion to those PR teams, please stop. Seriously.

Take your story somewhere else, to one of the many other tech blogs who write well, and will give your company or service its due. There are many new writers who have posts to file, and they want your story - and they will honor your requested embargo.

On this site, when I was running the whole thing myself, and now, with the great team of writers we have here, no embargo has ever been broken. On one occasion, I prematurely posted the Seesmic/Disqus integration news, having forgotten the day it was due, but I promptly deleted and reposted the next day. But one of the major reasons I haven't broken an embargo is because I strive, and ask my cohorts the same, to write things that are new. Cover new stories and new angles and be unique. If it has been covered somewhere else, let it go. We're not TechCrunch, and we're not trying to be.

TechCrunch doesn't have time for stories like Gawkk.com, which we covered last night. They probably aren't interested in stories like the one today on Resume Donkey, or Monday's announcement of Twit Or Fit. TechCrunch also doesn't have the leisure anymore of introducing great new blogs, as we do every month, or highlighting how to better use FriendFeed and Twitter, as we can. That's because they have taken on a new role, as a very real media company, and with their focus on Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and other big companies, there's room down at the bottom for us small fry to find the stories that are in the cracks.

It takes a different mentality to find new companies and new angles that nobody else has written before, that doesn't require a PR firm's input or embargo. And it takes strength from the PR firms to turn away from their top target and take the story somewhere else. While I don't think today's missive from Arrington will do just that, it might make some think different about the way they blog and distribute stories.

Social Median Surveys Early Adopters' News, Tech Preferences

Despite only having been out of invitation-only alpha for a little over two months, the social news service Social Median has quickly gained a foothold among early adopters looking to get the latest on topics as diverse as technology news to the financial crisis and the 2008 presidential election. Though still small, the site saw traffic increase more than 90 percent from July to August, according to Compete.com, and is finding a niche, alongside other services, including Twitter, FriendFeed and Strands, for early adopters to find and share information.


Social Median's Numbers are Small, But Climbing
Founder Jason Goldberg, in an effort to learn more about the site's first users, sent an e-mail survey on September 30th to registered members, asking them what services they used on a daily basis, which Web sites they relied on for news, and, of course, which features would be most desired for later iterations to the product.


Twitter Is By Far the Most Popular Service by Social Median Users
With nearly 500 respondents, it's clear that those using the site are much more likely than the general population to own an iPhone, and more than four out of five are daily Twitter users. But the data did show, as could be expected, that Social Median users are more than seven times as likely to use Facebook as MySpace. Approximately half post to their blog each day, and use FriendFeed.

Social Median, unsurprisingly, fared well in its own survey, with 57% saying they use the site more than once a day, and just under 65% saying they visit it "regularly".


TechCrunch and the New York Times Follow Social Median In Use
Ranking just behind Social Median for news gathering was TechCrunch, with 52% of all users voting in the affirmative, and approximately 40% apiece selecting Digg, the New York Times and CNN. Others trailed further behind.

Interestingly, despite only 23 percent of Social Median's users saying they used an iPhone regularly, more than 28 percent said a dedicated iPhone application was a top priority. This, however, didn't rank as the top response, trailing the addition of likes for stories, news alerts, improved search, blog widgets and private news networks. Social Median may have already gained a significant role in the lives of those who responded to the survey, but they continue to have high expectations for the site - which just might not be undeserved. Goldberg told me by e-mail that the #1 request, the ability to "like" or "dislike" an item would go live as soon as Monday, bringing them even further into FriendFeed's neighborhood.

You can always find me on Social Median here: http://www.socialmedian.com/louisgray

Why the Embargo Process Is Broken and Why We Still Need It

In the world of public relations, press management and blogging, an embargo sets a date and time by which a story can be written. Often, the embargo date and time coincides with a press release from the company, a Web site refresh, or the product's availability. Assuming all goes well, an embargo restricts all outlets from publishing a story until all is ready, and assuming multiple parties have been briefed, you can expect a waterfall of stories and press coverage to flow in a short period of time.


But, as you know, any time humans are involved, things can go awry, especially, as you see often in the blogosphere, you have a large number of media outlets that cover similar spaces, and a scarcity of topics. The resulting clamor to be heard amongst the noise, when so many different people are writing very similar stories, makes for an environment where the slightest bit of mistrust can turn into a simmering feud, or outright frustrating and finger-pointing, be it at a competitive blog, or the people behind the service being launched. Add in to the mix a rising number of inexperienced writers, prone to mistakes, with high levels of visibility, and this can happen with some regularity.

To start, why would a company ask for an embargo?

1. To be sure a product would not be pre-announced before it was ready.
2. To prepare and have enough time to brief all interested parties.
3. To ensure no favoritism was shown to any media outlet.

Why would media/press/bloggers agree to an embargo?

1. If they wouldn't agree, the company might not give them the story.
2. Because an embargo often comes with news ahead of time, allowing time for writing.
3. The service might have given them an interesting non-standard angle.

At an enterprise company, a media and analyst tour typically consists of a series of face to face meetings, plus conference calls, with an agreed upon date for a press release that coincides with the product's launch. Reporters often are looking for customer references and analyst references to validate the company's claims or add a wrinkle to the story.

For more bare-bones operations, including startups focused in the Web space, face to face meetings are less necessary. Sometimes, a series of e-mails, with potential for a phone call, is all that's needed. That's why you, on most blogs, rarely see quotes from a company's executives or customers, even if they had an extensive beta. Most bloggers, even if they have tested a product themselves, are echoing a press release or e-mail introduction from the service's founder. Again, a date is usually referenced in the e-mail to "go live".

Sounds good. Right? So why do these nicely laid plans fall apart?

On the company side:

1. Sometimes an embargo is for "everybody except one or two publications", who are allowed to break it.
2. Sometimes the Web site or company blog can go live before the embargo, in effect, scooping themselves.
3. Sometimes a story isn't all that much of a secret, and things leak to the point there's no reason for an embargo.

On the media/blog side:

1. Going first is seen as being "special", even if it's a matter of minutes.
2. Being first can make the originating blog get more attention and linkage, or prominence on sites like Techmeme.
3. Some blog management systems aren't fool-proof, enabling stories to go "before their time".

Clearly, you have some juxtaposed issues. The company launching an announcement would benefit from being covered by the most publications as possible, seen by the highest number of people. This is augmented by a need to be seen by publications with a high level of prestige. (Think Wall Street Journal, News.com, eWeek, TechCrunch, etc.) But there's something of a magnetic pull on press or blogs to go early, whether that's at midnight on the day of launch, or by posting five minutes before an embargo is lifted, and simply moving the timestamp, as has been known to happen. Blogs and press publications get a lot of visibility through gaining exclusives, and even if the same announcement has been sent to a wide audience, to hit the "post" button a little early, getting the word out first makes you appear more "in the know".

Whether intentional or not, blogs are rewarded for breaking embargoes, even if it hurts the launching service. And there's rarely any level of repercussion, as competing blogs in the know of the embargo are not naming names.

Of late, I've seen a healthy dose of complaining by some bloggers that other blogs have willingly or unwillingly violated an agreed-upon embargo. Yet, interestingly, it's a rare person who will name the offending party, even after their activity has clearly irked them.

See for instance:

Svetlana Gladkova of Profy:
"Very-very angry. Is it impossible to run a blog without breaking embargoes these days???"
08:23 PM August 18, 2008

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks:

"wtf is up with the broken embargoes this past week - 3 today, 5 in the last week - im feeling like busting out a video tonight"
06:32 PM August 18, 2008

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb:
"PR just called to say that mainstream media guy broke embargo, lol. you can't trust those mainstream media types with embargoes!"
02:18 PM August 15, 2008

Notice how even though they claim frustration and anger, nobody says who the offending parties are...

Embargoes serve a real purpose for the company making the announcement. They are there to build time to polish the product, to enable true beta testing, to set up press activity with multiple targets, and to get one's message distributed. Embargoes serve a purpose for the blogging community, for those who choose to follow them, to help guide an editorial calendar, or to be sure you're also talking about a story on the day of its debut. And while some people might wish they disappear, it's not going to happen, so long as companies look to synchronize their internal and external activity.

As we see a rise in the total number of bloggers writing on the same topics, the issue of some sites trying to get out a step ahead of others isn't going to go away. Those that play by the rules and follow the agreed-upon embargoes, are on occasion, going to get burned. But what doesn't help the situation is that nobody is making a list and checking it twice. Why complain if nobody is going to name names? If there are one, two, three or ten blogs that regularly break an embargo, and it's clear there is a pattern, it should be visible, and these sites should be avoided by companies like the plague.

I believe in and honor embargoes. I also love exclusives, and think that there is more than one way to launch a product. But this practice is tried and true, so long as we have more transparency. What disincentive is there for bloggers who break embargoes if nobody steps up?

Where You Get Your Tech News Shapes Your Tech Views

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

FriendFeed seems to be the source of most of my interesting conversations these days. Sometimes the benefit of FriendFeed is not even the conversation itself, but finding a link to a blog post that I normally would not read. This happened this week when Jesse Stay shared a post to a story on newspapergrl.com. I read a lot of what Jesse shares, but this site is one I had never read. I found the post interesting because it was about tech news and how slow things are:

I just got off the phone with my friend Chris and we talked about how we hardly blog anymore. Also about how nothing seems that exciting in tech lately. It's mostly about Google and the iPhone over and over. Are we just cynical or have things quieted down considerably?

I had no idea that this is what people thought. This was not written during the iPhone hype, this was written a few days ago. So, I decided to look and see what news was posted on Thursday, July 31st.

First, let us look at what TechCrunch had to offer.


Click to Enlarge Image
Out of 16 stories in our selection, 4 were tech financial news, 3 streaming video stories and the remainder (9) were about various sites and their features. For a technology news site, that seems very reasonable.

ReadWriteWeb tends to have more opinion and review posts than TechCrunch and their stories reflect that.


Click to Enlarge Image

You can not tell from all of the headlines, but of the 16 posts, 6 were opinions and reviews. 4 of the posts were about video, image or mobile devices. The remainder were about various sites and their features. Again this is a reasonable breadth of information.

The last "heavy" technical news site I want to look at is Mashable. They tend to be not as news-heavy as TechCrunch, and have more of a social application focus. So, what did they post?


Click to Enlarge Image
Out of Mashable's 16 posts, 5 were about video, audio or images and 10 were opinions or reviews of various sites. Lastly, there was 1 self-promotion post. Given the specific content focus, this is also reasonable. So, we have looked at the 3 popular tech sites that many early adopters read. In order to contrast what a mainstream user might read, I took a look at what stories Yahoo Tech News listed for the day.


Click to Enlarge Image
For Yahoo, we again sampled 16 stories. Of these stories, 5 were financially related, 2 were about cell phones, specifically controlling kids use and cancer risks. 3 of the stories were about server products (VMware, Microsoft "Midori", and SharePoint). 3 more stories were about video games, 2 of which were about WordScraper/Scrabulous. The last 3 stories were the Chinese internet censorship, a Blu-ray player for Netflix, and 6 Ways to Save on Groceries. A simple breakdown does not really show the difference, except for the groceries story. The 3 stories on server products were mostly business related. VMWare giving something away, another product trying to replace SharePoint, and what "Midori" could do for Microsoft.

Most of the stories on Yahoo contain little or no technical detail. You do not see anything about social networks or other social applications. There was no announcement for the SocialMedian release or the redesign of Delicious. So, why is this important? It is important because most people are not reading about the same things that an early adopter is reading. Obviously, there will always be some overlap, but the mainstream users care about very different things. Given the various discussions about passionate users, early adopters and mainstream users, maybe we need to take a step back and think about how we bridge that gap. If you do not agree, then find your most non-technical friend and explain why they need to use Twitter and FriendFeed. Do not be surprised if they ask whether they could find more than 6 ways to save on their groceries.

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.

Techmeme and TechCrunch's Detractors Prove It's Hard to be On Top

One downside of being in a visible leadership position is that you often have a bulls-eye on your back. Sometimes it's from your competition. Sometimes it's from people who feel what you offer isn't benefitting themselves personally, and other times, it can arguably be your biggest fans, who want to change what it is you do to serve their whim of the day. In the tech blogosphere, there is no single blog more influential and visible than TechCrunch, and there is no single aggregator or news site more influential and visible than Techmeme. That the two's fortunes are at times seen as being closely linked only helps to fuel the flames of frustration by those eager to see change, be it through finding alternative sources for news, or, instead, asking for either site to change its tone, its breadth of coverage, or its methodology.

From a third party point of view, it seems the day in and day out potshots against both Techmeme and TechCrunch have taken their toll on the most visible representatives of each site. Techmeme's Gabe Rivera is well-known for his sarcastic, evasive, answers when his site's reputation is questioned, and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is often described as short-fused and sleep deprived. Recently rumors have circulated saying Arrington wants out of the blogging business, and is looking to sell, no doubt in part due to stress of the "always on" atmosphere and ruthless competition. Of course, rumors are simply rumors... but given most PR firms have gotten to the point where reaching out to TechCrunch is part of their standard shtick, it's likely not as fun fielding all the inquiries and sticking to others' schedules as openly writing once was. And TechCrunch has burned through its share of strong writers, with talents like Marshall Kirkpatrick and Duncan Riley leaving, one on good terms, and the other, not as well, as it turned out. (See: On Arrington, My Final Word)

The two sites' major detractors tend to rail on common topics. TechCrunch can be seen as egocentric, and Arrington is perceived to have a bee-line on exclusives. Techmeme similarly has been described as elitist by those who don't get included, navel-gazing by those who think it's too insular, biased by those who feel they have been overlooked, or a single person's playground, by those who feel Gabe's claims to automation are overblown. And some industry blog veterans who regularly appear on Techmeme have even taken to saying it's not as relevant and influential as it once was, replaced by other sources of news.

The complaints around either service became so commonplace that a new word, bitchmeme, was made, loosely defined as "bitching about Techmeme", usually on the weekend, when some tech bloggers had no news to write about. The phrase since took on a life of its own, meaning any silly conflict between blogs that took place on the weekend.

TechCrunch and Techmeme get as much grumpiness tossed their direction as they do because they each own a valuable niche in the blogosphere, and are expanding their lead, rather than relinquishing it. While you could say that TechCrunch competes with ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, GigaOM or others, they have cemented themselves as the go-to site for new services entering the market, and even their opinion pieces are widely read, with almost a million unique RSS subscribers taking note. Techmeme's best competition at this point is BlogRunner, with Hacker News, Dave Winer's TechJunk, Duncan Riley's QMeme and more organic sites like RSSmeme or ReadBurner coming up in conversation. But Techmeme's original perceived competition, like TailRank and Megite, are mere shadows of what they initially promised. Meanwhile, TechCrunch is bringing on new writers, and posting more stories than ever (See: The Statbot: TechCrunch Statistics A-W), and Techmeme is going more mainstream, with news sources like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times featuring more prominently than most individual bloggers.

And with this leadership position, the sites don't have the luxury of acting without criticism any longer. Gabe almost has a part-time position made for himself just to go from blog to blog and explaining that in fact, Techmeme is not evil, and that it is relevant, explaining that TechCrunch has built a reputation as a reputable source for tech news, and therefore, is adequately represented on his site and in the leaderboard. Seemingly every day, Gabe is having to answer questions on Twitter or FriendFeed from people like Robert Scoble (or me in one example, when I wondered why a hot topic wasn't getting airtime). Meanwhile, Arrington gets called nasty names, mocked by Valleywag, and yelled at on Twitter.

But if you take a step back, TechCrunch's goal is to be a technology blog focused on Web 2.0, and it's doing that. Techmeme's stated goal is to be like the front page of the memes that are happening in the tech blogosphere at any given time, and for the large part, it does do that. While there is some uncertainty as to all the criteria that makes up being part of Techmeme, or rising up and down the page, or when something makes the site, it typically takes discussion, not only on the original site, but through links from other blogs, on Twitter, and other sharing sites.

The argument could be made that you could possibly find your technology news faster in another way. Maybe you could find it on FriendFeed, and get a broader scope of sources. Maybe you prefer the democratic approach of ReadBurner and RSSmeme. Maybe you want to go through Google Reader yourself, or rely on others' shared link blogs. But there is no question in my mind that Techmeme is relevant, as is TechCrunch, and being mentioned on either site continues to drive traffic today.

I also believe that Techmeme does a very good job at being available to those bloggers who aren't elite household names. Just tonight, we saw a blog that was born only three days ago make the site, and Yuvi Panda's work on The Statbot shows one third of all Techmeme headlines come from the "Long Tail". Techmeme is accessible to bloggers who write quality content and spur discussion. While I'm absolutely active in places like FriendFeed and Twitter, I don't believe that discussions from FriendFeed belong on Techmeme any more than do popular Twitter posts or popular YouTube videos. Techmeme has specialized in bringing us top tech blogging news, and it's doing it.

The bottom line? If you don't like Techmeme and you don't like TechCrunch, stop reading, or go out and make your own. The best way to show they're no longer relevant is to take them down yourself through competition. But today, they are both standing strong whether you like it or not. I just hope Mike Arrington and Gabe Rivera are enjoying what they do as much as when they first started, and that the daily body blows haven't gotten them so jaded that they want out, for that would be a big loss.

The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining

I am a strong believer in the power of linking between blogs, and I still go out of my way to link, especially to peers, to smaller blogs, and to developers of services I write about. At one time, I thought being linked to by the most prominent bloggers could have a significant impact on my traffic. And for a short time, it did. But now, I've seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search.

Yesterday, out of curiosity, I downloaded all my visitor logs going back to January of 2006, when I started regularly posting on the blog. While there's no question traffic overall is significantly higher now than it was one year ago or two years ago, the impact that even the biggest of blogs can deliver is lessened. I believe that this is due to a few things:

1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including Techmeme, Hacker News, Reddit, Mixx, FriendFeed and others.
   
2. People, especially those who read this site, are relying more on RSS readers, and many have subscribed to so many feeds that they are reading through stories in an effort to clear out their unread items, not clicking the embedded links.
   
3. People who actually read blogs on the site (outside of RSS) are clicking through to respond to the author with comments, rather than viewing links.

This year, thanks to covering some of the hottest topics in the tech blogosphere, I've been lucky enough to have been linked to from some of the most-prominent blogs in the market, including TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Scobleizer, MicroPersuasion, Jeremiah Owyang, Mathew Ingram, The Inquisitr, Profy and others. I've also been actively engaged with those flying lower on the radar, including I'm Not Actually a Geek, SheGeeks, Regular Geek (see a theme?) and others.

But looking at my aggregate statistics from the last six months, not even the "big name" linkers drove a lot of traffic, relative to just about every other source. And in some cases, the top blogs that drove traffic were themselves relative unknowns who I've featured in my monthly obscure blog recommendations, themselves often being the beneficiaries of being on Digg or Techmeme.

Top Blog Referrals in First half of 2008:

1. I'm Not Actually a Geek: When Your Blog Is LouisGrayCrunched
   
2. Scobleizer: Loving my FriendFeed
   
3. Regular Geek: Required Reading in Social Media
   
4. ValleyWag: Most bloggers don't deserve any ad revenue, the seven-word version
   
5. TechCrunch: More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Come The Politics. And Here Comes My Rant.
   
6. Micro Persuasion: Become an Expert with the Power of Deliberate Practice
   
7. Mathew Ingram: Duncan Riley: Lessons in diplomacy
   
8. WebWare: A Proposal for Twitter: Shut It Down
   
9. ReadWriteweb: Content Is Becoming a Commodity
   
10. Mark Evans: Who's Louis Gray?

Definitely a lot of bigger names here, mixed in with some others. But the most interesting thing is that the highest among these "only" delivered just shy of 500 visitors over the first six months of the year, and the lowest passed less than 100. That doesn't even come close to a single day's worth of Google traffic, or a single day of having a post on Techmeme or Hacker News, let alone Digg.

Instead of blogs driving traffic, we have some more mainstream names, as shown in the below graphic from Google Analytics, highlighting sources for the last 30 days:


In fact, it isn't until the #10 position overall over the last 30 days that you get a total number of visitors that is less than the #1 blog referral over the last 180 days. And in most cases, I've not seen any kind of meaningful traffic from mentions on Mashable or ReadWriteWeb. Back in January, I was a little less than happy that Mashable wasn't giving linkage a lot of prominence, but even now that they are, the impact is extremely small. I got 77 referrals from Mashable on their story around Twitter brand management, and 53 more from a story on my being an early adopter, very insignificant in the large scheme of things.

Now, I'm not saying that this data proves linking is dead. I know links power Google juice, and they enhance Technorati rankings, and if done well, people can find new sources of data, but the ability for even a so-called A-List blogger to deliver a windfall of visits is much less than I had ever expected. It is now more important to be part of the social media sites that drive strong traffic - the Twitters and Techmemes and FriendFeeds and Stumbleupons and Reddits, if traffic is your goal. Those sites, combined with RSS activity in Google Reader and other programs are what will drive traffic. So don't wait around begging for Scoble or Mashable to write you up. It might not have the effect you thought.

louisgray.com Experiences 100% Uptime During WWDC Keynote

Today, many of the popular sites aimed to deliver minute-by-minute updates to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote, as well as some social networking sites extremely popular among the technology elite, slowed to a crawl under the rush of traffic from Mac and iPhone fans hoping to get a glimpse of Cupertino's latest products. Sites as diverse as TechCrunch to Twitter buckled under the pressure, while others, like MacRumors Live, Engadget and FriendFeed, maintained stability, gaining praise.

I am happy to report that louisgray.com enjoyed 100% uptime during this rush. Here's how we pulled off the enviable feat, all without removing services, reducing features, or requiring the offloading of some traffic to partners:

1. I Posted Absolutely Nothing At All

After much advance study, I realized that one of the major issues behind some of these sites who ran into trouble was in their offering of interesting content. Whether through rumors of new products in advance of the conference, live feeds during the conference, or reaction to the conference's announcements, each of the sites had attracted a population of users disproportionate to the norm, resulting in traffic spikes well above average, invariably causing slower access times or even downtime.

To avoid such a fate, not only did I not promise anything, but I didn't post anything, not just the morning of the keynote, but in the preceding 24 hours, essentially throwing potential visitors off the scent. I believe that this strategy, delivering an overall reduction, both day over day and week over week, in terms of total visitor traffic and page views, left the site with considerable headroom, and reduced chance of service interruptions.

2. I Made No Modifications to the Infrastructure

For several years now, louisgray.com has been hosted via FTP on Register.com hosted servers, powered by Google's Blogger engine. After considering many options available in advance of the WWDC keynote, it was determined the best course of action was again, nothing. Given the site's near 100% uptime over the last few years, despite significant year over year growth, the prevailing bias was to hold off on any significant software or hardware purchases which could cause complexity.

3. I Made No Advance Promises to Uptime

Murphy's Law dictates that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Many were surprised as to Twitter's advanced promise of significant uptime during the keynote, after such a recent spotty track record. By promising 100% uptime for louisgray.com, I knew that I would, in turn, be placing myself in the line of fire for overzealous hackers and an overcaffienated faction from the Mac army, ready to take my site down like so many others.

Conclusion

I think there's no other option except to congratulate myself for delivery of 100% uptime during a time of considerable stress for tech media giants. Where they zigged like moths to the flame, I zagged away from the noise, bravely hiding in the corner, cowering in fear. You can count on louisgray.com to deliver the 100% uptime during such mega-tech events, both now and in the future thanks to our unique strategy of reverse traffic optimization. I hope we can count on your support.

Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget

Sometimes, in the race to declare one service better than another, to be among the first to say one product won't scale, or that one product will be killed or eclipsed by another, the rush of feeling declarative overlooks the fact that underneath every single one of these services we interact with each day lies people. In almost every case, especially when it comes to the nascent Web 2.0 market, the services are understaffed or sole-sourced by well-meaning developers with little more than hope, an idea, and reams of code.

One thing I have tried to do when writing about the many services I've grown to like or otherwise launch here is to mention the names behind the services. I will let you know that it's been Benjamin Golub behind FFToGo, Tweet2Tweet and RSSMeme. It was Alexander Marktl with ReadBurner, Caleb Elston with Toluu, Mario Romero with Feedheads, Yuvi Panda with TheStatBot and Dave Stanley and Matt Shaulis teaming up on Shyftr.

I say these names not because they'll eclipse their "brands", but because in almost all cases, I've forged a relationship with these entrepreneurs, even if it's just been e-mail, phone calls, late-night Google Chats, or Facebook messages. And while it's easy to crow that Twitter's down (again) or say one service is going the way of the dodo, you can be sure that the best, most aware, entrepreneurs are watching what you say. They've got their Google Searches, Technorati queries and Summize feeds set to alert them when their companies are mentioned, and the last thing they want to see is you getting a rush from being the first to say "Deadpool", a term popularized by tech blog giant TechCrunch, who has made something of a side business declaring startups dust.

On Tuesday, in a FriendFeed comment thread, I was reminded of this by a somewhat snarky note by Robert Seidman, who in response to an amusing piece that highlighted both me and Robert Scoble as finding new services in our own way, said a few sites I've covered here might as well close up shop now.

"The sad thing is, other than FriendFeed almost ALL of the services Louis touts will 'sleep with the fishes'. You could call deadpool on stuff like Social Median and Toluu right now. Functionality will be absorbed into other Google products."
-- Robert Seidman (Link)

This bothered me, not because he was suggesting I have a tendency to pick losers, but instead, because the eagerness to call "deadpool" didn't take into account the people behind the service, nor their goals. Not every Web service is expected to grow into a real company, and be sold off or enter the public markets through IPO. Many of these are hobbies. Others should be seen with the same light as shareware, in that most content is for free, and if they make a few bucks, that's just fine. Sometimes, a Web service will launch and help a developer pad the resume, or use it as a springboard to the next job. And whether it's one person behind a product or a hundred, there's no value in prematurely suggesting they wave the white flag.

Beyond this issue, I was also surprised to see the occasional visitor to my blog from searches done on Techmeme for its creator, Gabe Rivera. (See the search results) After a few of these searches had hit my referral log, I thought I'd check what was going on. Interestingly, despite the fact Techmeme is spoken of constantly, and the site comes up often in blogging circles, the last three stories to reach Techmeme that mentioned Gabe Rivera were mine, including a piece from each month in March, April and May. This tells me that people, when writing about Techmeme, don't mention Gabe, and have divorced the service from the individual.

As I wrote in April, when I asked "Does Negativity Deliver Credibility? If So, That's Nuts.", I have a tendency to shun negativity and be excited about new services. In parallel, I am supporting the developers who are taking a risk by shipping. I am supporting the people behind the services who are looking to help us consume more information, helping us build new social networks, or improve our communications. When I write about a service, I'll continue to do what I can to remember the developers and hopefully, let you get a glimpse into their world as well.

TheStatBot Analyzes Top Tweeters, TechCrunch, Makes Techmeme

It's only Wednesday, but it's already been a very big week for Yuvi Panda of TheStatBot. After launching on May 1st with an analysis of Robert Scoble's Twitter activity, Yuvi has followed on with the most detailed analysis of Techmeme ever done (well beyond my surface attempts), and has now branched out to cover other large social media sites and blogs.

Yesterday, Yuvi published the definitive analysis of Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, picking apart the popular site's 7,000+ posts and nearly 2 million words. See: TechCrunch Statistics A-W. In the analysis, Yuvi discovered the site's posts per day has accelerated dramatically from less than 5 a day three years ago, to nearly 25 a day now, as TechCrunch has gone professional, with a stable of talented writers.


TechCrunch's Posting Frequency is Up and to the Right
That post, as with nearly every analytical post from TheStatBot, made Techmeme. This rate of achieving the popular tech news site has meant that TheStatBot has now achieved a ranking on the Techmeme Leaderboard, down at #99 overall, from the last 30 days. Given my downward trajectory, I'll likely fall of the board as he rises at this pace. (See his excitement here)

Today, Yuvi follows on with a detailed review of the Twitter Clients used by Twitter Power Users, finding that among the top 100 users of Twitter, the Web interface dominates, as it does with the rank and file, but that SMS text messages, Mobile Twitter and Twitterific are much more popular clients, while Twhirl is more popular among the common users. The Web interface, in fact, encapsulates almost 60% of all activity (and more than 90% of my own activity, though I'm not in the top 100 by a long shot).


A Breakdown of the Clients Used by the Twitter 100
As mentioned a few times here, I'm a big supporter of Yuvi's work on TheStatBot. I've informally helped him discuss topics, timing, and given the occasional tip on graphics or grammar, but the work is absolutely all his own, and he's doing great. Now, the 17-year-old is looking into college admissions, and hopes his work on TheStatBot as an extra-curricular activity will help him get further along in the education process. You can help either by linking his way, or ordering up a custom analysis of your site or any service. He would be more than happy to put his analysis to work for you, and obviously does an excellent job.

Mint's Latest Additions Make It My One Stop Financial Hub

For years, I've manually edited a custom portfolio in Yahoo! Finance in an attempt to track all my financial details in a single place. That meant copying and pasting trade details from eTrade and checking in with Fidelity every two weeks to get an update from my 401k. But even then, it wouldn't have bank data from Wells Fargo, or credit card debts, so I haven't had a perfect picture on a single page - until now. With the addition of investment tracking capabilities at the end of April, Mint has now morphed from a simple curiosity to becoming my long sought after single point for financial details.

Mint came to my attention last year, like it did for many people, when it won the best presenting company award at the inaugural TechCrunch40 event.

While some have said storing financial login data on a 3rd party site makes them nervous, I've always erred on the side of trusting the Web, and I registered right away. But site slowness, and Mint's initially not offering support for my investment accounts at eTrade and Fidelity meant it wasn't all that useful for me. I wasn't interested in following their little tips on how to save a few bucks here and there by switching my bank or credit cards, so I largely left my account dormant.

But now, Mint shows me everything in one place. After synchronizing my Checking and Savings accounts, my investments and my credit cards, I now get a perfect picture of available funds. And Mint, having more than 200 days history of my activity since I first signed up, also has some educated guesses on where I spend my money most frequently, trends on whether I'm spending more than others in my geographic area, and even records of which vendors.

Now, according to Mint, I can see I've spent $155 on iTunes since October 1st of last year, in 16 different purchases, I've spent $798 at Safeway in 9 tracked purchases, and $332 at Chevron in the same number of visits. Of course, with more than 1/3 of my spending being marked as "No Category", I have some work to do to get the data even better, and there are some amusing bugs, like the one showing I've spent $6,891 at "Louis Shoe Shop", in four transactions. My guess is that's supposed to be where I've made credit card payments, and I have no idea why it's called "Louis Shoe Shop". Are they confusing me with Imelda Marcos?


One month's financial tracking within Mint.
Regardless of those rare oddities, the simple fact that Mint shows me all my activity in one place means that I don't have to go to each of the individual financial sites to get my data. On occasion in the past, I've gotten hit with late fees on my credit card just because I had forgotten to log in before the bills were due. Now, if I can just log in to Mint instead, I can not only see when money comes in, but when money needs to go out. And I'm done messing around with Yahoo! Finance, manually entering owned shares data and estimated per share costs. Now, Mint does all the hard work for me. It's the way Web finance tracking was supposed to be.

Duncan Riley's First Week at The Inquisitr Is Inspiring

When news first hit that Duncan Riley had left TechCrunch, I thought his departure might see him theoretically fading into something like the proverbial sunset, as one of the blogosphere's most notable characters could have declared "Enough", put down his keyboard and gone home. On the news, I publicly wished him well, and hoped he would keep "staying aggressive". (See my comment.)

Not only has Duncan Riley stayed absolutely relevant, but he's captured the "aggressive" piece as well. Now, arguably, I'm reading Duncan Riley's news with more interest than I had been when he was at TechCrunch, and a week in, his transition to The Inquisitr, his new home, seems perfectly natural. Just one week in, the new site is getting about ten times the page views as I am, and he reports subscribers have already eclipsed my number, rocketing upwards to the 2,000 mark (myself included). Not shabby at all.

Part of the intrigue posed by The Inquisitr is Duncan's mix of both tech news, which makes sense, and more spicy celebrity news, which can also be interesting, even to us jaded geeks. And the reduced stress through no longer posting at the grindstone of TechCrunch has clearly lightened Duncan's mood. Virtually gone are the f-bombs that would be a common sight on his Twitter feed, replaced instead with a plethora of smiley-face emoticons. And in the midst of his move, Duncan has even opened up to reconsider his stance on a few things where we had locked horns back in March.

To those unfamiliar, in mid-March, amidst unprecedented hype around FriendFeed, Duncan took a look at the service for TechCrunch, and came away unimpressed. Responding, I said, undiplomatically, that he had missed the point, and argued a response. As I wrote Duncan in an e-mail earlier this week, at the time, I had used his name in the headline to differentiate from TechCrunch, who has multiple authors, and had previously written some positive notes on the service, but my write-up hit him quite personally. Making matters worse, my response stayed atop Techmeme virtually all day that Friday, which I was monitoring from my sun-drenched seats at Spring Training in Arizona.

The unexpected exposure definitely had gotten under Duncan's craw, as the next morning, I awoke to a follow-on note from Duncan on his personal site, that bluntly questioned my goals and credibility. Uninterested in fanning the flames further, and gaining an enemy for life, I stayed quiet, but others made plenty of comments on my behalf.

Knowing this is a small industry, I hoped Duncan and I could reconcile the differences. After all, who knew when we would see each other at an event? What if we were on the same panel or even were asked to speak on the same podcast? But as the rift had been very public, I thought it unfortunately might not ever happen - until this week. Now at The Inquisitr, Duncan sent me an e-mail on Monday asking if I could help him understand why I supported FriendFeed. He said he was even open to reconsidering his stance and would listen to opposing viewpoints. So, not only did I send him a lengthy note with my answers, (See: The Inquisitr: Why You Should Use FriendFeed), but I also gave him more background on the March flare-up. I have always respected Duncan's efforts, and see him as a good writer, but if there was ever an example of getting off on the wrong foot... this had been it.

Monday night, I opened up the laptop, and saw that not only was the story published, but Duncan had re-signed up to FriendFeed, and was talking up his renewed relationship with the site via Twitter. It's a wonder what the combination of reduced stress, a little communication, and time can do. Now, you can find Duncan on FriendFeed, and he's doing more than using it as a broadcast medium, but he's engaged. He's commenting, and liking and giving tips to fellow users.

I'm liking the content I'm seeing from The Inquisitr. It's a fun read, and there's a good pace of new articles coming in through the RSS feed. But I'm more pleased (and relieved) the public rift with Duncan is over. As with the back and forth I had with Mashable back in January, there are definitely things I would change about the words I wrote, and the way things were portrayed, but in the end, we're stronger for it. I get along excellently with the team at Mashable, from Adam Ostrow to Mark Hopkins, and now, I feel I know Duncan better than I would have otherwise. Given the industry's size, it makes sense we try and avoid these battles that tear us down, and instead work to prop each other up. I'm glad Duncan's at a place where he can contribute to the tech blogosphere and stay stress-free. We're all better for it.

Are You Having As Much Fun As I Am?

With all the talk out there about how if you blog too often, you could die, or so-called "bitchmemes" and the occasional cranky rant, you'd be perfectly acceptable in thinking the blogosphere is a dire, dark place. But, if we all could take a step back and look at what's happening through blogging, how we're helping each other find new ways to use technology, how we can hold conversations across geographic and demographic boundaries, and find commonalities with people we might never actually meet in person, it's actually a lot of fun - and I get a kick out of not just what's happened so far, but where blogging could be going.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, the posterboy for hard-working, aggressive reporting in the blogosphere, was quoted in the much passed-around New York Times article this weekend, saying, "At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable."

But while Arrington and his team may live in fear of getting scooped or somebody else finding the story, the breakneck journalism pace isn't for everyone. I doubt that many of the bloggers who are now trying to break news and report news originally thought that's what their blogs would be. After all, do you really think I have some unique dirt on the Yahoo! and Microsoft merger negotiations? Of course I don't. I also have zero insight into when Apple will come out with their 3G iPhone, or what company Google plans to acquire next. And guess what? Neither do 99% of the other bloggers talking about it.

Due to this understanding that I'm not bound to play by the old-school journalist fears, I'm really having fun doing what I'm doing. While I have had the opportunity to break the news on some promising young services, and have seen that number rapidly grow over time, I'm blogging for the sake of writing and sharing and communicating, on those things I really find interesting. If I'm keeping silly hours, it's because I choose to. If I choose to write about TiVo one day and Toluu or Technorati the next, I'll do it. And if I'm gaining weight, it's because I'm getting lazy and like eating, not because "my blog made me do it".

Finding new Web services = Fun.
Communicating with peers = Fun.
Engaging with today's blog leaders = Fun.
Becoming part of what people read every day = Fun.

So if you are blogging, and you're finding that you've strayed too far away from the core mission of your blog, and what it is you really wanted to do in the first place, and you've lost the "Fun" factor, think about what you're doing, and see if you can get back to it. I wouldn't be blogging any more if it stopped being fun, and I'm not writing about things that aren't interesting to me. We can't all go be the next TechCrunch. But we can be ourselves. Lose the stress and enjoy being a blogger for the reasons you started - whatever they were.

TechMeme Leaderboard's Top Ten: Six Months In

Gabe Rivera turned the world of ranking technology blogs upside down six months ago, seemingly overnight, with the debut of the TechMeme leaderboard, constituting the top 100 blog or news sources whose posts reached the popular site in the prior 30 day period.

A more focused and relevant measurement of a tech-oriented site's momentum and impact than the flaccid Technorati Top 100, the TechMeme leaderboard has already undergone significant change in the six months since its debut, as new sites emerged near the bottom. But in large part, the largest sites solidified their positions at the top, not yielding ground, and in the specific case of TechCrunch, increased their percentage of stories, expanding the gap between first and second place.

Utilizing the TechMeme leaderboard's archive pages for its debut and each of the following six months, our source data is:

• October 1, 2007 snapshot
  
• November 1, 2007 snapshot
  
• December 1, 2007 snapshot
  
• January 1, 2008 snapshot
  
• February 1, 2008 snapshot
  
• March 1, 2008 snapshot
  
• April 1, 2008 snapshot

TechMeme Leaderboard: The Top Ten

Of the original Top 10 sites ranked on the TechMeme leaderboard, six have maintained a top 10 position in each snapshot at the beginning of the month, with TechCrunch maintaining the #1 overall position in each month since the leaderboard was made public. In fact, those holding the top five positions today (TechCrunch, CNET News.com, New York Times, Read/Write Web and Ars Technica) have never been placed lower than #7 overall. (Read/Write Web was positioned at #7 from December 2007 to February 2008)

Outside of these elite sites, there has been some movement with the original ten leaders. Engadget, the original #2 overall source, has fallen to the #11 overall position in April, while GigaOM plummeted from #7 overall in October down to #20 in November, only now crawling back to the #10 position. The BBC, ranked 8th in the original survey, has been mired in the teens, before falling precipitously to #29 overall this month. Also, the Wall Street Journal, which owned the #10 spot back in October of 2007, slipped as low as #23 overall in January before recovering, where it holds the #13 spot now.

In their places, a number of other blogs and traditional media sites have at times clawed their way into the Top Ten, sometimes just for one month, and other times, longer.

• November saw InfoWorld, the Associated Press and Silicon Alley Insider rank #8 - #10.
  
• December saw Computerworld and Reuters take the place of AP and InfoWorld at #9 and #10, with SAI bumping to #8.
  
• January saw Gizmodo debut at #6 (from #12 and #54 in prior months)
  
• February saw paidContent.org jump to #8 from #22 and #21.
  
• March saw no new entrants in the top ten.
  
• April now shows VentureBeat at the #8 spot, from #15 and #18 in the last two months.

TechMeme Leaderboard: Percentage of Stories

TechCrunch has always had the leading position on the TechMeme leaderboard, with about 1 of every 16 stories coming from Michael Arrington's popular blog. But TechCrunch's percentage of stories on TechMeme has never been as high as it is now.

When the rankings debuted, TechCrunch was credited with 5.56% of the prior 30 days' stories, and Engadget was relatively close behind, with 4.84% over the same timeframe. By the following month, TechCrunch increased to 6.08% of the total, and expanded again, to 6.86% by December 1.


While the gap between TechCrunch and the second-highest position was closest in the March snapshot (6.14% for TC and 5.8% for CNET News.com), it looks to have been a one-time blip. In the ensuing month, TechCrunch jumped to 7.17% of all TechMeme stories, while CNET fell back to 4.57%, still good for the #2 overall position. Effectively TechCrunch grew their lead over the field from a 6% gap to 57%, a nine-fold increase.

The weight of the top ten ranked sites on the other 90 is interesting as well. Starting with the October rankings, the top ten sites encompassed over 27.5% of the stories on TechMeme. That number has grown to 31.29 percent in the April snapshot, and has been in the 30 percent range for the duration. With the top ten holding down about 30% of stories, that leaves the other 90 entrants, and not to mention the hundreds of other sites that may have made TechMeme sporadically in the last six months, to fight over the other 70% of stories.


April's data shows the other 70 entrants on the TechMeme leaderboard constituted 42.35 percent of the stories in the prior month. Combined with the top ten, fully three quarters of all TechMeme headlines were from the 100 sites that encompass the leaderboard, with one quarter coming from additional sources.

Is the Leaderboard Relevant?

The higher the positioning on the TechMeme leaderboard, the more accurate the rankings become, in my opinion. There's no question that TechCrunch enjoys the largest voice in the tech blogosphere, and has for some time. As the site adds more writers and posts with more frequency, it is extremely likely that the network can continue to grow and take share from competition with less funding or resources. Some have called for a TechMeme without traditional media, such as the New York Times or Associated Press, but the truth is that traditional media continues to have a voice and is relevant, starting discussions and getting bloggers to link.

While this data shows the top ten positions have a significant voice, I believe it's accurate. ReadWriteWeb, Engadget, Ars Technica, and News.com all have significant weight today. Even as we may at times instead enjoy the work of individual bloggers like Mathew Ingram, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel or Steven Hodson, none of us have enough time and juice to take down the big blog networks, and so we are destined to play a role somewhere in the middle of TechMeme's leaderboard, or down a few rungs of the ladder.

The data also tells us that while the top ten players command about a third of the attention on TechMeme, there is the same amount of room available for those not even in the top 100. With good content, and good linkage from others, reaching TechMeme is available to anyone. While Gabe's algorithms are a well-kept secret, it's unquestioned that the data is driven mathematically, and doesn't smack of human intervention to push one site's stories over another.

It's been an interesting six months for the TechMeme leaderboard. In this time its moved from an intellectual curiosity to a respected measure of influence. It should be fun to check back in six or twelve months from now and see what's changed.

RSSMeme Helps Bloggers Know What Their Readers Like

RSSMeme, now two months old, has carved out an interesting niche in the shared links aggregation market, first forged by Mario Romero's FeedHeads application on Facebook, and later seeing ReadBurner and RSSMeme crowd in for availability on the Internet as a whole.

One of RSSMeme's so-far unique options is for a blog author to drill down and see how frequently each of their own blog posts have been shared on Google Reader link blogs. For those authors who have a variety of topics, RSSMeme can help gain yet another level of insight into what readers are finding most interesting, as well as saying what topics should be avoided in the future. As RSSMeme has the largest easily accessible library of Google Reader shared link blogs, it provides a good sounding board for the many popular tech blogs users are subscribed to.

To be counted among the most popular shared items on RSSMeme, an item would need at least 50 shares to achieve the weekly leaderboard, and nearly 100 shares for the all-time leaderboard. But for small fry like me, I can tell that one of my own items can be considered "popular" when it has as many as a dozen shares, and most popular items occasionally cross the 20 threshold. (See my RSSMeme page here)

Looking at my dedicated RSSMeme page, of the 20 items listed there, I had a total of 232 shares (as of 5 p.m. Sunday), for an average of 11.6 shares per item. Of these 20 items, five had as many as 18 shares or more apiece, including "Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag (18)", "LinkedIn Company Detail Shows Silicon Valley Carousel (20)", "In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break (19)", "Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed (19)" and "ReadBurner to Return With New Ownership (21)". Each of these items had a technology/Web feel to it, as did those items which fell just behind.

On the other side of things, three posts only had one measly share. Of those three, two were stories I wrote about baseball, and one was about having to use my old PowerBook. As Yuvi Panda, the once and future stat king, wrote me not too long ago, "One thing that you seem to like writing about but people don’t really pay too much attention to is sports." Looks like he was right.

This level of disparity becomes even more pronounced with the more popular subscribed blogs.

TechCrunch's last 20 items range from 3 and 4 shares for a pair of stories on Yahoo! to 72 and 81 shares for a pair of stories on FriendFeed. (See: RSSMeme: TechCrunch)

ReadWriteWeb's last 20 items show one item on Microsoft's SilverLight gained only 2 shares, while a review of Toluu racked up 45 and Sarah Perez's comments on good UI design got 70. (See: RSSMeme: Read/Write Web)

And Robert Scoble bottoms out at 2 shares for highlighting a recent video with Mashable, but peaks at 86 for revealing the secret to Twitter. Other hot topics gaining about 40 shares each was a post saying FriendFeed would trump TechMeme or Google Reader, and saying TechCrunch's Michael Arrington had the wrong goals for assembling a "Dream Team". ( See: RSSMeme: Scobleizer.com)

RSSMeme has done more than just tally the most popular shared items on Google Reader, and display publicly available link blogs. You can now visit any shared blog's dedicated page, and get a visual approximation for how frequently the site's readers are hitting share in Google Reader, and what topics those who read RSS feeds like.

If you have a blog with an RSS feed, I encourage you to go to www.rssmeme.com, do a search for your name, and see what your readers like. It'll even tell you who shared what, and isn't that the kind of direct feedback you're looking for?

TechCrunch's Arrington Launching Recruitment Effort?

This morning, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, amid news and rumors that some blog networks are raising millions of dollars in funding, said that with more to lose in the blogging business, these funded networks are going to get more aggressive, not just in focusing on content, but also on politics, picking fights when necessary. But most interestingly to me, he stated he would like to be part of a proverbial "Dream Team" of bloggers, who if aligned and focused, could take down more established, traditional, media.

In his widely-referenced piece, Arrington said he has been, of late, trying to promote "young but promising" bloggers, specifically mentioning Silicon Alley Insider, CenterNetworks, Mathew Ingram, and me, by name. He wrote, "these guys rarely agree with me, but when they talk I listen because they've put some thought into what they are saying and how they are saying it."

The combination of these two messages in his story led one colleague to tell me over breakfast this morning, "His article made it sound like he was recruiting you - in public."

A fun idea, to be sure, and far-fetched. But not completely impossible.

Bloggers, even those not raising funds, find friends and create informal networks. SheGeeks Joined Grand Effect today, a small tech blog network, including Sarah Perez of Sarah In Tampa. Closer to home, MG Siegler of ParisLemon, Steven Hodson of WinExtra, Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica, Fredric Lardinois of The Last Podcast and I often refer to ourselves as "The B-List", jokingly mocking our non-elite status. When not linking to each other or leaving comments on our blogs, we're trading e-mail, or monitoring one another's FriendFeed. There's no money in it, and if we formed a network, we probably couldn't raise enough cash to keep the lights on for a month.

But others who are true A-Listers, if that term carries muster, might be on Arrington's short list for what could be the next media empire. And while he set CNET as the target to take down, I'd say that's aiming too low. If Arrington really is interested in taking resumes from aggressive, well-written bloggers, and is answering his phone to calls from potential applicants, it could be little time until the TechCrunch Dream Team starts blocking shots from the rest of the upstarts like an underpowered Angola 1992 squad.

I just want to know who he has in mind.

Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed

Yesterday, it could be said that FriendFeed "tipped", as TechMeme's Gabe Rivera put it. Dozens of visible FriendFeed users reported getting an unprecedented swarm of subscriptions by new friends, and the site gained incredible exposure via comments on a number of high profile blogs, including a highly prominent role on TechMeme for virtually the entire day. In the wake of its dramatic rise, TechCrunch's Duncan Riley checked in with a quasi-analytic comment this morning, saying after a day's use, he doesn't get the service's value versus Spokeo or a host of others who "do exactly the same thing."

And to put it bluntly, he missed the entire point. TechCrunch is right a lot of the time, but not today. FriendFeed is not the exact same thing as any service out there, and there's no way that Duncan could have given the service its full due in his limited exposure to it.

FriendFeed has been described by different folks as a social Web lifestream, by others a Web services aggregator, or as a conversational platform. But it's not just one of these things - it's all of these things. There are a definitely a wide number of sites out there that let you share all your activity in one place, or to track friends' activity, but FriendFeed is the only one that lets you share items directly to the feed, elevate discussions through comments and show "likes" to highlight individual posts.

See my FriendFeed here: http://friendfeed.com/louisgray

Like Twitter, FriendFeed enables users to sift from the best of the blogosphere to find their friends and peers. No two individuals' FriendFeed is exactly alike. And while I once questioned why anybody who wasn't a Web services junkie and RSS maven would join, I've seen users who want to be consumers of information instead of producers of information enjoy the service, solely for communicating with friends. And while the term "friend" can vary from service to service, FriendFeed has got the formula right. I can see quickly who likes the same items I do, who contributes to FriendFeed conversations that I do, and if in need of new friends, I can use FriendFeed's recommendation engine to suggest people my friends find interesting.

Looking at Duncan's stream on FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/duncanriley), I can see he imported his service and added friends, but he didn't participate. He didn't comment on other items. He didn't respond to others' comments. He didn't "Like" anything. He took a very passive approach and it's the interactivity of FriendFeed that sets the service apart.

Luckily, others besides Duncan get the FriendFeed story. Muhammad Saleem writes Where is the value? Connections or Conversations?, where he says conversations are more important - a big win for FriendFeed. Adam Ostrow of Mashable said yesterday that FriendFeed Crossed the Chasm, Frederic Lardinois of Last Podcast noted FriendFeed's Big Day, Dave Winer said FriendFeed Gets Interesting, Robert Scoble loves the service, and both Corvida of SheGeeks and Mark Evans gave me some of the credit or blame for yesterday's spikes. (See: Louis Gray Is The Culprit and What’s the Caramilk Secret?).

FriendFeed is winning not because it has smart folks behind it (though it does) or because it has more services supported than most competitors (which it does) or because it has a strong evangelist (though it does). FriendFeed is winning because it is interactive, it is architected intelligently, and the company listens to its users. Maybe Duncan will listen to this one.

Robert Scoble to Kick Off Fast Company TV Wednesday

Lost in the din of CES last week and MacWorld this week was the conclusion of uber-blogger Robert Scoble's time at PodTech. As of Monday night, Robert Scoble reported he is "unemployed", at least for 24 hours, as he moves from one venture to another - starting Fast Company TV with friend Rocky Barbanica.

As announced by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington back in December, Scoble made the decision to leave PodTech, where he produced the ScobleShow, amid uncertainty surrounding the company.

Reached by phone Monday night, Scoble said he would be revealing more about the new Fast Company TV venture late Tuesday, risking going head-to-head for bloggers' attention with Steve Jobs' impending announcements at MacWorld.

Jokingly, Robert said, "Steve Jobs can have ten hours atop TechMeme and then we'll get it after that."

While some I had talked to in the Valley had speculated Robert and Rocky would go their own way, not joining Fast Company after all, Scoble said the prospect of running a business wasn't what he wanted to do. While he said there were six different companies fighting to land the duo, in the end it came down to two options.

"The serious options were Fast Company, and us running our own thing," he said. "What brings me joy is interviewing people, hanging out with geeks and blogging. Doing my own thing would mean having to run my own business, and that's not as fun as interviewing Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse." (See: Join us at Doug Engelbart’s house)

On Tuesday, Robert, with son Patrick en tow, will be headed to the Moscone Center to see Jobs' keynote live. Near midnight, we should see a post on Scobleizer.com outlining the new venture, and Fast Company TV will become a reality shortly afterward.

Resisting Temptation at Fry's and the Apple Store

Yesterday, I pulled off a daring two-fer, as a friend and I went to the Palo Alto Fry's, and later to the Apple Store, and I managed not to buy a thing. Despite being surrounded by flat-screen televisions, DVDs, video games and widgets of every kind to support my iPod and Mac habit, we were thrifty, and didn't get our credit cards out once. Tough job.

But that didn't mean I resisted letting my geek flag fly.

At Fry's, I wore a tie-dyed Apple logoed t-shirt throughout the store. While everyone else was bundled up from the storm-like weather outside, I donned the t-shirt, sensing a marketing/advertising community, helping to push the unwashed, white box PC builders at Fry's to consider a healthier alternative.

When at the Apple Store, we outgeeked the sales reps themselves. As we messed around with a 30-inch Cinema Display, we ended up showing the employee some of our favorite Web tools, from Assetbar to FriendFeed. We showed off high-quality videos playing on our iPod Touch. We even introduced him to products we knew the company sold on the online Apple Store but not in their retail store. After a while, the guy was asking us if we were "visiting from corporate", i.e. from the mother ship in Cupertino.

Interestingly enough, the Apple Store in Palo Alto continues to be a major hub for Silicon Valley digerati. Years after seeing Apple CEO Steve Jobs there, in the store's early days, last night I recognized and talked with Michael Arrington from TechCrunch. He reported he's not going to CES, and said Om Malik is still in the ICU, but has been well-protected by his team, so updates have been slim. Arrington said it was good to meet fellow bloggers, and it's likely not too often he's recognized in the real world.

So, that was fun. Why didn't I buy anything? Because we're still recuperating from the holiday purchases. I didn't tell you we bought a 50-inch Samsung plasma screen from Fry's on Christmas Eve for our living room, and got a guy to take our old, bulky, entertainment center. So that means our overhaul is further along, but not complete. We still need to get both TVs on the wall, and get a smaller half-height entertainment center. Then, maybe... I can start buying again.

Scoble's Link Blog Delivers An Influential 1 Percent

I covered most of my near year-end statistical data on Christmas Day, when I said a lot of my visitors in 2007 were not only coming from Google, but looking for information on Google. But there are still a few pebbles left to be uncovered. As I quickly looked at the year's statistics - through 5 p.m. today, a unique referral caught my eye.

Almost 1 percent of my visitors in 2007 came from Robert Scoble's link blog. In aggregate, after each of the Google properties, MySpace, BlogLines, and Feedburner, Scoble's link blog sent about 5,000 visitors in 2007, in little dribs and drabs, usually about one to two dozen visitors per item he chose to share in Google Reader. In all, there were 51 posts I made in 2007 that he shared, which delivered 10 or more unique visitors.


While the URL strings from Google Reader aren't pretty, they still work, as you can see in the quick screen grab above from my report from Analog.

It's always interesting to me to learn how we first find out about people, and find their blogs.

The way I first found Robert's blog? The infamous "Brrreeeport" experiment from early 2006.

As this blog was getting off the ground, I was peeking at Technorati, and this nonsensical word caught my eye as a common search term. After finding Robert's blog, it was off to the races for me. Clicking off to GigaOM and TechCrunch and eventually on to folks my own level was a serious rush, and I was dumbfounded I hadn't found it before. Somehow, I'd been so siloed as to not have the light bulb go on until early 2006.

You can see my first mentioning of this here in March 2006: Top Ten Sites for NextGen Tech Info

Others have told me they found my blog either through one of Scoble's posts, or from the link blog. I know it works. While I doubt I have the power to deliver people 1% of their yearly traffic from my link blog, that's one major reason I keep mine going. I want new people to learn what I'm reading, and find new sources for information. I read Scoble's Link Blog, and often open the links in a new window, and eventually find myself subscribing to their RSS feed in Google Reader. That's one of the major tenets of the new Web - sharing, following, and discovering.

So Robert, thanks for the 1%. And if you were one of the 1%, thanks for visiting. I hope you'll stay.

To subscribe to my link blog, start here.

TechCrunch Reports AOL Completes Netscape's Demise

It's silly how one can get nostalgic over a software application, but Netscape Navigator, in its original incarnation represented to many, including myself, the first days of massive Web adoption. Netscape was the first huge Internet IPO, and the first real solid challenge to Microsoft's monopoly, after Apple had made its share of missteps. Now, as TechCrunch reports, the browser is officially left to die.

While I had used Mosaic prior to Navigator, I dutifully downloaded all the beta versions of Netscape on my Mac my freshman year of college. My roommates didn't understand why I kept Navigator 0.93, 1.1 and 1.12 on my hard drive. Some part of me wanted them for history, I guess. But as we all know, it was Netscape who became history. Internet Explorer dealt them a body blow, and Microsoft squeezed their life from them. Then AOL's acquisition of Netscape made things unbearable.

The browser stagnated, and Apple had grown closer to Microsoft, as Steve Jobs told an annoyed Macworld crowd that Internet Explorer would be the Mac's default browser. Mac IE 5 was actually pretty good too! Meanwhile, Navigator skipped version 5 altogether, and rolled out a clunker, moving from Netscape 4 to Netscape 6, but it was too late. And by then, we'd all moved on - to IE, to FireFox, and eventually, to Safari. Now, Netscape is but a blip in Silicon Valley history, one that helped kick off the first Web bubble, preparing the way for future tech giants like Yahoo! and Google, and reinvigorating the economy.

A quick search of my Mail archives shows the importance of Netscape.

As I wrote in February of 1996 in a letter home, my freshman year, called "Bad tech day":

"About dinnertime, my computer went totally nuts. To make a long story short, my entire sytem folder was thrown away, including all extensions, preferences, and the like.The final result may still not be final, but there are some key things missing. ALL mail from Eudora which I had saved since October is GONE. All mailboxes. All adresses. All nicknames. All Bookmarks for Netscape, which I was proud of. Gone."

Later, from March of 1996 in another letter home, called "Checks and balances":

"Here's something annoying. I have a Macintosh. Non-Power PC, with a 68030 processor... This means I don't have a Java-supporting Netscape browser, to view live sports scores, and I can't download RealAudio 2.0, which I also need. Ahh. The life of the underprivileged."

Later in March, I sent home a "Top Ten Anagrams for Netscape Communications". I have no idea where I first got it, so apologies to whomever I ripped off:

Top Ten Anagrams for "Netscape Communications"

10.Companies can't consume it
9.I cannot compute sans mice
8.Can't access 'net... I'm on opium
7.Um, options scam can entice
6.Net's uncommon capacities
5.Connect communities, ASAP
4.Mosaic IPO, etc., can stun men
3.Optimum 'net access: An icon
2.Connect it up; amass income

And the number one anagram for "Netscape Communications":
1.Mosaic, minus neat concept

Just think, those e-mails home were from 11 years ago, and we're still talking about Netscape today. While AOL and Microsoft can take away the company and its browser, they can't take away its legacy. Long live Netscape.

The Crunchies 2007: My Voting

According to TechCrunch, more than 82,000 nominations were given for companies and products that best deserve industry recognition for their effort in the past year. They were then whittled down to a final 100 in a wide variety of categories.

Here's how I am voting:

Category: Best technology innovation/achievement:
Vote: Move Networks

Category: Best Bootstrapped Start-up
Vote: FriendFeed

Category: Best New Gadget/Device
Vote: Wii

Category: Best Business Model
Vote: Zazzle

Category: Best Design
Vote: SmugMug

Category: Best Enterprise Start-up
Vote: Zoho

Category: Best Consumer Start-up
Vote: LinkedIn

Category: Best Mobile Start-up
Vote: Twitter

Category: Best International Start-up
Vote: Netvibes

Category: Best User-Generated Content Site
Vote: Facebook

Category: Best Video Site:
Vote: Joost

Category: Best Clean Tech Start-up:
Vote: Tesla Motors

Category: Best Use of Viral Marketing:
Vote: StumbleUpon

Category: Best Time Sink Site:
Vote: Pandora

Category: Most Likely to Make the World a Better Place:
Vote: Kiva

Category: Most Likely to Succeed:
Vote: Wordpress

Category: Best Start-up Founder:
Vote: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Category: Best Start-up CEO:
Vote: Dick Costolo (Feedburner)

Category: Best New Start-up of 2007:
Vote: Tumblr

Category: Best Overall:
Vote: Facebook

Robert Scoble also posted his Crunchies Votes. We agreed on only 7 of the 20 categories.

What I'm Reading and Sharing on Google Reader

With 225 feeds filling my Google Reader every day, there have to be some good sources for news across the blogosphere. According to Google Reader trends, over the last 30 days I have read 16,711 items and shared 387 items. The total number of items and feeds is up only fractionally from my last update (in October), while I'm sharing about 30% more items on my link blog. Admittedly, I'm probably being more free with my sharing to get it noted on Friendfeed, which I'm now using voraciously.

But of these 225 feeds, which ones are getting on the Link Blog most frequently?

My Top 20 (and how many shares) for the last 30 days are as follows:

Silicon Alley Insider (27) * Scobleizer.com's Shared Items (27) * TechCrunch (24) * LouisGray.com (19) * WinExtra (17) * Mashable! (17) * Read/Write Web (13) * ParisLemon (11) * GigaOM (10) * Google Blogoscoped (10) * Scobleizer (10) * Google Operating System (8) * Engadget (8) * The Last Podcast (7) * Mathew Ingram (7) * Epicenter (7) * CenterNetworks (7) * Scripting News (6) * VentureBeat (6) * Fortune: Apple 2.0 (6)

Most of these you have seen me mention time and again, especially my fellow B-List Bloggers. But Silicon Alley Insider continues to put out good news, and most days you can see Henry Blodget and others delivering scoop after scoop or making comments on business and tech in a way some of us simply can't, whether we're too Silicon Valley focused or just not in the line of gossip. CenterNetworks and Read/Write Web are also very heavy in the signal vs. noise ratio. Also of note, as Robert's said a few times, his link blog is consistently delivering more relevant news than his own blog, as he's become an excellent filter for the many feeds he takes in on a daily basis. As for the rest, they're all worth visiting. I read every single story they publish every single day.

To get those I cherry pick, add my link blog to your Google Reader here.

TechCrunch Discontinues Internal Linking Practice

In what many readers here will no doubt see as a positive development, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch announced the popular blog will no longer link the names of companies they cover to the CrunchBase, the network's internal database on company information and resources.

As he wrote in a post today:

"We started linking to CrunchBase often in our posts. This tends to drive some readers absolutely nuts because they want to go to the company, not CrunchBase, when they click a link. As of today that policy is being discontinued."

I've been a vocal advocate for clarity in linking practices, and generally dislike unnecessary internal linking. Though I didn't call out TechCrunch for this practice, many here did in our previous discussions of common behavior from leading tech blogs.

Arrington and his blog network, despite the occasional criticism, have done excellently well at making a name for themselves, and becoming one of the leading resources for Web 2.0 information and news. I applaud this move, and hope that others will look to the leader and follow suit.

Fun With Technorati Chart Matchups

A week ago, Technorati turned over a new leaf, with the return of charts throughout the company's blog search service. Very quietly, the company also has enabled Web surfers to compare trends between keyword pairs, by using the VS command.

This "officially unsupported" command (per ex-CEO David Sifry), allows for comparisons of what's hot and what's not, over a specific time period, to a stretch as long as six months.

(The code: http://www.technorati.com/search/TERM1+vs+TERM2?authority=n&language=en)

Running a few comparisons myself, we saw more people are blogging about Slashdot than I had anticipated, especially relative to Digg, that the iPhone shot like a meteor to eclipse the iPod, and that a battle for higher profile between Robert Scoble and TechCrunch or Jason Calacanis and ValleyWag just might never be resolved. It's that close.

For all charts: Note the peaks and dips for weekends, as well as the scope of the chart. The most popular keywords register in the thousands, while less frequently discussed items just crack triple digits.

First Up: iPod vs. iPhone



In the Search World: Yahoo! vs. Google



Building a Community: Digg vs. Slashdot (Big surprise here!)



Social Networking: Facebook vs. MySpace
(MySpace plunging, with Facebook eking up...)



Long-Time Tech Titans: Apple vs. Microsoft



New Age Blog Titans: TechCrunch vs. Scoble



Let's Be Friends Edition: Calacanis vs. Valleywag



Mix and match the terms and see what you come up with. Others I tried included "baseball vs football", and Plaxo vs LinkedIn. What can you come up with, and do these charts accurately track the blogosphere's momentum as you see it?

In Absence of Google Innovation, A-List Ranks Feeds

It's been more than seven months since I first asked Google to tabulate the most popular feeds, and the most popular shared items on link blogs within their Google Reader service. While Google has made improvements to Reader in that time frame, including the long-awaited addition of search, and integration of Trends data, the statistics many hold dear are still missing.

In that vacuum, A-List bloggers, including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Robert Scoble and Gabe Rivera have teamed up to use their own resources, and make a faux Top 100 of their own.

Arrington posts a note today of the Top 30 list he and Gabe came up with (Top Blogs On Google Reader). The list shouldn't surprise you - Engadget and TechCrunch lead, with Wired, Slashdot, and other household names following behind. Meanwhile, Scoble does his own number crunching, and also puts TechCrunch and Engadget among the leaders.

Though he asks, "How many Google Reader Subscribers Do You Have?", I don't exactly want to answer, for I am but a small speck in the blogosphere, in the double digits, when some of the mega-blogs are over 100,000.

But truthfully, while the A-List titans likely enjoyed putting the numbers together, it's a mockery that they're left doing this independently when Google obviously has enough resources to deliver the data. It comes down to either not knowing how (unlikely), not wanting to (maybe), or choosing to do something else. So what is it they're doing?

Alexa Web Statistics Show Old Media Influence Nosedive

As flawed as Alexa's Web statistics can be, a quick array of searches displays a very clear message - that traditional media portals, including CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and even more trendy media monoliths, like ESPN.com, are dramatically slipping in overall rankings, losing visitors to new media by the droves - no matter how you dice the data.

Sites that used to be among the top visited sites in all the Web have plummeted, as fickle Web visitors have turned their attention away from the brands they once relied on to new brands that have taken their place, including, unsurprisingly, Facebook, YouTube, and major blogs, like TechCrunch and Engadget.

This change, according to Alexa's statistics, has accelerated, first starting in 2005, and at an increasing pace over the last two years.

For example: CNN, a top 20 site as recently as the second half of 2005, has plummeted below 100, nearing 120th overall.



The New York Times, a top 50 site in early 2006, has roller coastered down to nearly 300 overall.



The Washington Post, a rising star in 2005, peaked below 150 in early 2006, and has collapsed to nearly 1,000 today.



It's not just an East Coast phenomenon. The LA Times, one of the top 500 sites on the Web just 18 months ago, has recently seen its ranking dip below the 2,000 level, with no sign of a rebound.



Moving north, SFGate.com, home to the San Francisco Chronicle, has paralleled the LA Times fall, from above 500 at the beginning of last year, to nearly 2,000 overall today.



And the drop isn't limited to only newspaper sites. ESPN.com, part of the Go.com corporate family, representing 60+% of the network's traffic, according to Alexa, has dropped from the top 20 levels to around 50 today.



This isn't to say all is bad. In the place of old media, Web visitors are taking their traffic elsewhere. One major stop: YouTube - a top 5 site that was virtually nowhere just two years ago.



TechCrunch, invisible before the end of 2005, has catapulted into the top 1,000, passing up both the LA Times and SFGate.com site, set to pass the Washington Post next.



Engadget, from the 6,000 range in 2005 to between 500 and 1,000 overall today.



Facebook, a rising star, from 100,000 in 2005 to a top 8 site today. (Ignore the blip)



What does this overly long set of Alexa graphs mean? It means that what we've all suspected is true. Old media brands have not capitalized on the early success and traffic brought their way in the fledgling days of the Web. As their traffic has stagnated, and in many cases dropped significantly, more agile, interactive, forms of media have risen up to take their place. While there's still a need for investigative journalism and on the spot reporting, still the realm of the mainstream media, Web aficionados are all too happy to look elsewhere, for news, for entertainment, and for engagement.

PlugandPlay Expo To Feature Earliest-Stage Startups

If at all possible tomorrow, I will try to zip down a few blocks from my home and catch a good portion of the PlugandPlay Expo at the PlugandPlay Tech Center, here in Sunnyvale. The show promises to feature three dozen of Silicon Valley's unknown startups looking to make a name for themselves, the second tier, if you will, when contrasted to all the noise around this week's TechCrunch40.

I received a list of the companies looking to make a name for themselves with VCs, press and other entrepreneurs, and ... who ever said all the good names were taken in tech? Just check these out!

1) Lending Club 2) Broker Storage 3) Pixsy 4) Vator.tv 5) Ccube 6) PhotoCrank 7) ScreenerKey 8) Ceino 9) Planaroo 10) MyMagMedia 11) BlueGem Security 12) Souki.com 13) QbizTech

14) SueEasy 15) TechDirt 16) Zephyr 17) Spigit 18) Geejo 19) UrNetlife 20) Paybl 21) Spokeo 22) Pollection 23) College Wikis 24) GetQuick 25) FuGen Solutions 26) Bizy

27) Apsoftek 28) DataMash 29) StrayForm 30) Xpree 31) QClip Media 32) CopaCast 33) Zipidee 34) Gigya 35) Twiki 36) UserZoom 37) Moowee

Some of the companies listed above are, in fact, so brand new that their Web sites aren't even live.

Depending on when I can break away from the office, and other priorities, I hope to give you an update tomorrow and see if any of these hard to pronounce names will soon become household names. And if not, it's always a lot of fun to surround myself with people even geekier than me. For more on the conference, check out their Web site.

Backlink Backlash Could Bring Forth Change

My post-midnight ramblings on the questionable practice of overly relying on internal links certainly hit a nerve in the blogosphere, drawing attention from all corners, as we saw comments from Ryan Block at Engadget and Robert Scoble of Scobleizer, while representatives of TechCrunch and Gawker Media also weighed in on whether or not they found issues with the rapidly-growing model of preferring links to their own blog as opposed to the outside world.

Some reactions:

Surflizard: Sneaky Links

"The key to reading Engadget is to know that only the last link in a post is usually relevant to the post’s subject, and every other link is usually self-referencing spam."

Kent Newsome: Evening Reading: 9/12/07

"The problem, of course, comes down to the prospect of money. Rather than double linking, I'd call it double ad-serving. I'd love to know the average duration of those internal link page views."

The Last Podcast: Internal/Double Linking is a Bad Practice

"I am glad others are picking up on this, as it is annoying the heck out of me and keeps me from enjoying some of the best blogs out there."

Ryan Block of Engadget did a great job illustrating why Engadget favors self-referential links over external links. He notes that stories that reference other sources do contain an external link at the conclusion of the story, but he disagreed with my belief that tags should lead to referenced companies instead of prior coverage. In a post he titled On backlinking (or “internal linking”), he said:

"At Engadget, our MO is to offer a compressed, editorialized edition of technology news. Sometimes we can go as long (or longer) as any big-name newspaper on an important story, but because we do (and must!) have greater respect for our readers’ intelligence and attention, generally speaking we expect them to understand the jist of what we’re talking about when we start to geek out."

Essentially, he said Engadget readers already know the URLs for companies like Apple, Google, or Microsoft's XBox, so to link their way wouldn't add much value. Fair enough. But he did say the site will reevaluate their frequency for backlinking, adding, "I’m sure we could use additional fine tuning in what and how often we backlink, which I’ll be evaluating closer starting today."

His comments mirrored those from Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch, who wrote in a comment on this blog, "We often link to CrunchBase pages rather than company websites because we think that our company profiles often give readers better corporate overviews than they would get by going straight to company websites," adding, "We do realize that many readers find this linking behavior undesirable, so we are actively looking into ways we can refer to both corporate websites and CrunchBase pages from the main blog."

Elsewhere, Nick Denton of Gawker Media wrote that the network has recently changed how they handle internal links versus external links, writing, "We have changed the style of internal tag links. They are no longer underlined. So the emphasis is on the external links, but regular readers know they can get background on a name or a product by clicking the text."

In 24 hours, we got an excellent cross-section of some of the tech blogosphere's most influential and most respected blogs. With the exception of Mashable, all sites I referenced, or commenters referenced, provided reason and updates as to why they operate the way they do.

(UPDATE: Mashable checked in this morning, saying "We have a verbal policy that the first link should go to the site in question, so that one is human error," and "I can guarantee that we'll try to avoid the LinkedIn type screnarios. As for linking to reference material...possibly we'll find a way to offer the user a choice.")

That's why, even when I see things that raise my eyebrows, I have faith in the direction blogs are going, and how we can continue to enable conversations. It should be interesting to watch and see how after the post ran through the Scoble/TechMeme gauntlet, if we see changes.

ZoomClouds Seems To Have Floated Away

The visual tag cloud engine ZoomClouds seems to have disappeared, taking a significant piece of my blog sidebar with it. Whether this is a short-term bug or longer term outage, the service, which used to show those topics I most frequently blog about (i.e. Apple, Google, Microsoft, TiVo, ANtics) is down for the count, and there is no news as to why or for how long.

Promoted by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch in March of 2006, I added the service the next day, and for the better part of 18 months, have enjoyed seeing certain keywords grow with increased use, and others fall out with neglect.

But now, the service's publishers seem to have gone away, without any notice as to why.

The URL Zoomclouds.com, which redirected to zoomclouds.egrupos.net, now redirects one final time to the generic site egrupos.net, home of the service's authors, and my ZoomClouds widget remains blank.

You can see cached images of blog ZoomClouds on Google, but for now, the service appears to be dead. Unfortunately, this means I will be pulling ZoomClouds from my sidebar, and I'm not sure if I'll be looking for a replacement.

Update: As luck would have it, ZoomClouds are back up and running, as of mid-day today. No sign as to why they were down, but it sure did make me look silly.

TechCrunch's Celebrating Failure Doesn't Help Anyone

Though the argument could be made that for all of the breathlessness that follows the debut of Web companies and services, there should be an equal amount of noise on the down side when some of them fail to meet expectations, I don't quite understand the seeming excitement around seeing others struggle or even close their doors. Today, TechMeme and the blogosphere are abuzz over two prominent Web 2.0 companies, Technorati and PodTech, who saw changes at the executive level, and much of it is seemingly celebratory. And that makes no sense at all.

The news you likely already know. At Technorati, David Sifry, after previously stating there was a search for a candidate to replace him at CEO, announced he would move to a board-only role. Meanwhile, PodTech, home of well-renowned "on sabbatical" blogger Robert Scoble, promoted from within, giving the COO the CEO position.

Change happens. It's a well-known industry norm that startup companies see change as they grow. Founders often first move from CEO positions to "strategic" positions, and then later, out of the picture. But to see some talk about it, you'd think that as this change occurs, that it's an opportunity to pile on and throw dirt on those who were often the biggest risk takers of them all.

Take, for example, TechCrunch's coverage of Sifry's very transparent note on his blog, which chronicled the change, and noted the layoff of eight employees:

"Sifry’s last blog post as CEO of the company was representative of his entire tenure - vague and cold. Layoffs also occurred today but Sifry didn’t mention them until the end."

Though I don't have any specific insight here, it's most likely the small (and eight people is small) layoff was not given top billing out of respect of those who just lost their jobs. No company likes to highlight bad news, and it's not the CEO or former CEO's role to highlight the very personal loss on his or her blog. For Sifry, his blog is to be about him and his company. Let those others who have left talk about the story from their words if their story is to be told. And for TechCrunch to dump on Sifry by saying his entire tenure was "vague and cold"? Where is the backup on that? It's complete balderdash. Sifry, through his blog, and through frequent comments in the blogosphere, including here, was hardly vague, and hardly cold. TechCrunch is wrong, period.

TechCrunch's negativity feeds the beast of those who like to pile on. Comments on the site said, "for Sifry, his arrogance and constant self-crooning have half the Valley clapping hands," and "Sifry misspelled “loser” with “leader”."

It's one thing for "stuff stirrer" Web sites like Valleywag to delight in presumed failure, and quite another for Web 2.0 king maker TechCrunch to do the same. Yet the site delights in tracking what it calls the "TechCrunch Deadpool", where Web services like 37 Signals, TailRank, Backfence and others are recent entries.

It's a lot easier to criticize those who have tried and failed than it is to try and fail yourself, let alone to try and succeed. For TechCrunch, a growing media site covering companies where 4 of 5 are likely to fail eventually, to delight in others' struggles is ridiculous, and I hope that the arrogance will someday stop.