Are You Writing Your Headlines for Google or for Twitter?

While RSS still plays a very important role for practically all online publications to get their news out to subscribers, and Google plays a critical role for the stories to get picked up by casual visitors, Twitter is playing a middleman role and growing in the minds of many publishers, who see the microblogging service as a significant traffic driver. Now, instead of using the catchy headlines we once saw in print, or keyword-laden headlines that make Google giddy, we're now seeing headlines truncated to less than 140 characters, or even as low as 125 characters as the standard, assuming a short URL follows.

For me, practically the only driver for the length of a headline is whether it easily fits in one deck for somebody using standard fonts in a browser. I don't tend to think about SEO benefits down the road and don't consider if the headline will "play well" on Twitter or other social networks, but do recognize that a good headline can be "make or break" for those seeing the story downstream, be it through RSS, or on aggregation sites, from FriendFeed to Techmeme or even Digg. (See my post from last year on this topic)

Given that practically every blog is publishing to Twitter in parallel with their RSS feed, the drive to keep headlines short is very real. In my short visit to TechCrunch headquarters on Friday, their tech team said they are very much making sure the headlines play well with Twitter. Their Twitter account now not only shows a headline and a bit.ly URL (for stat tracking) but also the author's Twitter handle, similar to how I've called out posts from other writers on this site with their own IDs.

As Twitter's impact on immediate traffic expands, it should be interesting to see how many blogs change their approach to headlines, and to see if they are in any way reducing longer-term traffic benefits from SEO for instant returns.

Tweetmeme Adds Leaderboard, Tag Clouds to Tweet Links Tracker

As Twitter grows in use, so grows its influence, and the total number of times the most popular items are shared and retweeted from user to user. As with Techmeme, Digg, RSSmeme and other sites that try to find the most interesting shares of the day based on user votes, Tweetmeme crawls the vast Twitter network and watches for frequently popular shared links, images and blogs. (See our initial coverage in July.)

Today,Tweetmeme expanded its offering with a pair of new features aimed at making the site more sticky. The first is a tag cloud, which analyzes the shared content, finding other words that Twitter users have included in their tweets, and displaying them below the items in their "popular links" page. The second is a leaderboard, which highlights those Twitter accounts which have most frequently been the first to share the most popular links.


In terms of determining influence and popularity, you've always seen a push/pull between enabling a gatekeeper with the power to move items up and down, and letting the crowd decide. Tweetmeme believes solely in the crowd - even featuring the total number of times the item was shared. Today's top shares are in the 400 to 600 range through all of Twitter.


Accounts on the leaderboard aren't much of a surprise - including RSS feeds for TechCrunch, Digg, popurls and ReadWriteWeb, for example. Additionally, the cloud below each item is tempting to click, but not functional. In theory, it'd be good to click on an item in the tag cloud and see other shared links that have the same tags. Maybe that's coming, but it's not yet here.

You can catch up on the most popular items, as determined by Twitter, at http://tweetmeme.com/.

10 Ways to Maximize Your Google Reader Link Blog

I've been sharing articles I've read in Google Reader for the better part of two years. I don't know exactly when I started, but I'm fairly sure I'm nowhere near finished. And while I admittedly started sharing to a link blog without having a clear goal in mind, I'm finding that this massive shared items repository is becoming an incredibly versatile information hub that benefits me, the authors of articles I've shared, and the consumers, be they friends in Google Reader, or in many other locations.

I believe that while Google Reader has grown in visibility, arguably becoming the most popular RSS reader on the Web, the utility of shared link blogs is less known. Here are ten ways you can maximize your Google Reader link blog - most of which I'm doing, and probably didn't anticipate when I first started sharing items into the ether.

1. Act as a trusted information filter.

Regardless of how fast a reader you are, there is no possible way you can read every single news source and blog on the Web. Neither can anybody you know. And regardless of how closely your feed match percentage is on Toluu, there are feeds you read that your friends don't. By sharing the best items of what you read every day from Google Reader, you are hand-selecting the best of the Web and "endorsing" those items to your link blog subscribers.

Do so with some regularity, and you might be surprised as to how people come to rely on your manual intervention and news discovery. I first became cognizant of this in February when "SeekGround" reported "I discovered that I had shared more of louisgray's shared items than anyone else's in the last 30 days". In May, Duff's Device similarly wrote: "I saw another article that I received from Louis Gray'sGoogle Reader Shared Items again. Thanks for keeping on top of the world for me Louis. :-)"

As of tonight, ReadBurner reports I have nearly 8,500 articles shared on my Google Reader link blog. While there are others who have shared more total items, I know that I have shared those items I believe are most interesting to me, and others I believe are following along.

2. Share your items with Google Friends.

Though Google hasn't nailed the "what is a friend" issue, you can add friends through GMail and Google Talk. If they are also Google Reader users, and share items, you can opt in to seeing their Google Reader shares, and they can see yours. If they subscribe to your shared items, your shares are mixed in with all the other feeds on their list. Of course, if you don't want to see their lists, click "Hide" next to their name, or "Show" to bring them back.



3. Embed your Google Reader link blog to your own blog or Web site.

When I first started sharing to my link blog, I had this odd feeling I was sharing posts and nobody knew about it. After all, the link blog URL isn't the most intuitive on the planet. But you can embed a widget on your blog to display a subset of your recently shared items, and visitors to your blog can click out to items you've shared.

4. Add your Google Reader link blog to your Google profile

Your Google profile is a fairly blank slate, for you to add or delete as you please. While it's very common for people to add links to their Twitter page, their blog or their LinkedIn profile, I'd suggest it's just as important to add your link blog to the page. Mine is here.

5. Share items to Facebook, FriendFeed or Socialmedian.

2008 was the year of personal news aggregators, which took updates on your services from around the Web and put them all in one place. While this trends was best exemplified by FriendFeed, Facebook also offers the option to feature your Google Reader shared items, and Socialmedian will pull them in as news, going so far as to check the shares by topic to place them in the right categories.

You can see my Google Reader shares on FriendFeed here. And to avoid duplication of items, if I share items from louisgray.com, I manually delete them from FriendFeed. Takes seconds, and reduces the noise. (My Socialmedian page is here...)

6. Add your share count to ReadBurner, RSSmeme or Feedheads.

Feedheads, the pioneer in tabulating popular Google Reader share counts, was joined by ReadBurner and later RSSmeme, in early 2008. As some people are turning to ReadBurner and RSSmeme as a democratically sorted Digg or Techmeme, sharing items you like will add your vote to the list.

Be sure to add your feed to ReadBurner here.

7. Replace your bookmarks with Google Reader shared items.

At the end of the year, I said that RSS Has Practically Eliminated My Need for Browser Bookmarks. As I thought about it more, it's my Google Reader Link blog that is essentially my rolling bookmark list, highlighting those items which are the best, and which I will want to return to. While Delicious is also a good Web-based bookmarking system, the link blog is a good way to find recent items of interest.

8. Expand the visibility of lesser-known sources.

Sometimes, I get in a routine of reading my RSS feeds and then sharing, without thinking about how the shares are effecting the downstream author. But I've gotten e-mails saying the shares have generated attention beyond what I expected. Last month, one blogger wrote, "When you pop an article on (the linkblog), I'll get 60-70 hits and get pumped to the first page, that is pretty averge for the support you give me." Earlier this week I got a similar e-mail from a second author, who wrote an e-mail titled "Thanks yet again", adding "Your Google Reader share really lit up that discussion."

In a tech blogging world where there are so many different sources of news, and so many people writing about the exact same thing, you can make a difference by choosing lesser-known sources of news, and highlighting the best content, not just the loudest. I've tried to share items from those who have done original reporting or are thinking differently than the echo chamber, and it in turn can deliver greater visibility.

9. Use your linkblog as your "to comment" list.

As part of my online new year's resolution, I said I would be making more time to comment on other blogs through the year. But as you know, my full-time job doesn't work all too well with browsing the Web and making comments throughout the day. Instead, I've found I'll go back to my own Google Reader linkblog, and open the items in a new tab, and go through to add comments one by one, left to right, so I've given the authors feedback and participated.

10. Create your own leaderboard of news sources.

Google Reader tracks statistics on what your most-shared news sources are over the last 30 days, which can report on who you've found most interesting in the last month. Given each person's individual tastes, the results can be very different than more public leaderboards which tend to feature those who are most popular and have a deeper subscription base. While my own link blog does tend to feature popular sites like TechCrunch, Scobleizer and ReadWriteWeb, I can see that I've also shared a high number from lesser-known sites, including TechWag, Regular Geek, The Future Buzz, Andy DeSoto and Chuqui 3.0. And if you're stat-oriented like I am, you can check in and see how this changes over time. (See my blog leaderboard from last July)

So... are you sharing your Google Reader items? I am. You can find mine here. For the betterment of the community, it'd be great to see your shared item links in the comments.

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DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner.

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Does Your Ethical Stance on Rumors Change in a Down Economy?

By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira of Shakespeare I Ain't (E-mail / Twitter)

Tech blogging is just as competitive, if not more competitive, than mainstream news. Nearly every blogger salivates over the tiniest little rumor that could turn into the scoop that lands you the top spot on Techmeme or the front page of Slashdot or Digg. It's practically become acceptable to run with the unconfirmed rumor in order to make it out of the gate first.

Should that codicil to a blogger's code of ethics be removed in a down economy?

Two notable stories have "broken" so far this year that lack confirmation. The first, making its appearance on Gizmodo this past Monday, had Steve Jobs passing on the Macworld keynote because he's allegedly on his deathbed. The second, also breaking on Monday, had SD Times claiming Google would put Juniper out of business by coming out with a hush-hush router to end all routers.

Apple still had a new 17" MacBook Pro and some sexy software upgrades, but Juniper didn't fare so well, dropping steadily throughout the week with a huge dip this morning as the story about the stock falling and the alleged Google router hit the mainstream press.

Are either of these stories true? Looking at past history and the companies involved, I think it's pretty safe to say that Steve Jobs is sick. That's been apparent since the rumors of his imminent demise started swirling after his appearance last year. However, Steve Jobs is not stupid. I don't think he would let things get to the point where he's on his death bed before taking some steps to turn over control of the company, and speculating that he's got one foot on a banana peel over a grave is gossip, not news.

As for Google and Juniper, it's no big secret that Google wants things Google's way. Is Google going to go into the hardware business and compete against companies like Cisco? Never. It's simply not going to happen. If they weren't willing to do it for a consumer device like the rumored Gphone we were all salivating over the idea of years back, they certainly aren't going to do it on a scale like routers, where failure would be catastrophic. But they have Android, and they've shown a desire to apply their software acumen to existing hardware issues. Is it conceivable they are planning to (or already are) working with a hardware company, much as they did with HTC on Android? I might bet a few pretzel sticks on that.

Based on the evidence, however, Google isn't going to topple Juniper, and we aren't going to see Cupertino shrouded in black crepe any time in the near future. And in a climate where tech jobs are on the chopping block and companies are scampering to drive their stock back up to appease shareholders, going for the big dramatic story rather that looking at the facts is going to end up with all of us out of work. If the tech companies go under, so do the jobs writing about them.

Read more by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Shakespeare I Ain't.

Armchair Quarterbacking and Why I Talk to Companies Using the Blog

Whether it's due to the fact it's another 'slow news' weekend, or due to the fact I was more bare in my recommendations for how FriendFeed, a service I am constantly using and like a lot, could improve in yesterday's post than I usually am, there was quite a bit of feedback from around the Web, which both echoed the comments I had made, and questioned the reason for my making them in the first place. Interestingly enough to me, despite a full year or so of being called a FriendFeed addict, apologist, or what have you for my consistent favoring of the service, several people tried to construe my direct suggestions as somehow interpreting the site would fail - which I don't believe I ever came close to saying. But what they missed was I have a history of offering suggestions to companies, both new and established. Sometimes, I can do this 1-1 with the developers, but often I use the blog.

A person's blog can be whatever they want it to be. It can be your brand. It can be a megaphone that allows you to speak to many at once. It can be a personal diary. I've chosen to make mine about services I find interesting, and to a lesser extent, about me. The posts I make are about services I encounter and usually care about. I tell you how I feel or what I saw, and make it personal. And when I give feedback about companies, it comes from my thoughts and usually is spat out top to bottom as I was thinking about it, with little organization - just raw.

And given the blog's relative obscurity in 2007 and 2006, it's likely few saw my original set of feedback I offered FriendFeed more than a year ago - and how it mirrored other occasions where I've done similar posts for other services.

For example:

• February 18, 2007:How to Make LinkedIn Even Better
• March 3, 2007: 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader
• March 12, 2007: 10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn
• August 27, 2007: What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?
• December 30, 2007: 10 Suggestions for FriendFeed
  
• March 9, 2008: 10 Suggestions for Google Reader, One Year Later
• August 27, 2008: 10 Suggestions To Improve FriendFeed's Beta

And I haven't always been nice. See: Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close. and After Monkeying Around, I'm Not Going Bananas for Chi.mp, for example.

On August 29th of 2007, I wrote that you should Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies, and I've been doing that. I do it because as consumers we are often the silent party in the buyer and seller relationship. The company controls the product, the message, the delivery method, and tells you how you should use it. As a consumer, you can buy it, and you can be satisfied, or not. I tend to believe that as a consumer, I may have some ideas that the company either didn't think about, or didn't think were as important as other items. By using the blog, I can make my opinion clear, and also act as a sounding board for other people who might have shared the same opinions, but didn't know where to start, or thought they were alone.

Just look at some of the comments I saw on Twitter following yesterday's post:

@elizabethsosnow: "I am one of the stale accounts."
@spinko: "Louis Gray talks about friendfeed and how it's not intuitive for new users like myself. Amen, I still don't get FF."
@maryhodder: "just read the Louis Gray article myself.. agree. FF is overwrought and makes me feel like i'm drowning."
@jayrosen_nyu: '"Simply put, people aren't getting it." Louis Gray on FriendFeed's barriers to intuitive use. I'm one of those people.'

Sarah Lacy said she is one of those people I described in yesterday's post who pipes their data in and gets a lot of followers, but doesn't participate. For whatever reason, FriendFeed hasn't won her over, and she says the company didn't try to engage her inactive account (one of the suggestions I had yesterday).

I mention these not to pile on, but to show the post started a discussion of people who weren't thinking about the issue, and might possibly have extended the visibility of the issue to others who thought everything was "just fine". As Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr said, FriendFeed Isn’t Dying, and I never said it was.

What I chose to do with yesterday's post, and the many before it was to speak up where the above examples had chosen to be silent. Mark Trapp called it 'Armchair Entrepreneuring' and said I could collect more flies with honey than vinegar, adding, "Offering feedback is one thing: but the sheer hubris of tech bloggers that they know how to run a company better than the ones actually running it is entirely different." But I wasn't aiming for hubris, nor was I aiming for linkbait, as my cranky Canadian friend, Steven Hodson, suggested I might be. What I was doing was sharing my candid thoughts about a service I really like and one I want to get better and better.

I use the blog because it is public. It is searchable and others with similar issues can find it. I use the blog to talk to companies because very often, they listen. Many of the suggestions I've given to LinkedIn, to Google Reader, to FriendFeed and others have happened. I'm not naive enough to think it was because I recommended they would, but it tells me I occasionally am on the right track.

I will armchair quarterback and keep talking to companies, as Dave Winer says, to help them, not to hurt them, and to help others. And sometimes, companies really do value the feedback. That's part of why I'm working with ReadBurner, SocialToo and engaging with others informally. It's about pushing people who make products to make them even better than they are now, and potentially, being part of that process.

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.

Techfuga: If Techmeme and AllTop Had a Baby

Where do you get all the day's tech news? For many people, including me, it's Google Reader. For others, they look to Techmeme or other sites that aggregate the headlines from around the tech newswires and blogosphere. But as there are a seemingly infinite number of news sources and social news tools, from Digg to Reddit, Hacker News, ReadBurner and others, aggregation sites are getting a second look. A new site, launching this morning, called Techfuga, not only aggregates all the leading blogs, but also those social services as well - including FriendFeed. The result is a very busy site that has hundreds of links to the day's news, from a wide variety of sources.

Techfuga's mission, like many others before it is to provide "the ultimate top tech news from around the Web." On launch, the site has aggregated 40 different technology news aggregators. It then separates those aggregators into three types: "Human aggregated based on submission and voting/sharing", including Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Readburner and FriendFeed; "Solely based on algorithms", including Techmeme and Google News, and "Editorial human-aggregated", including TechCrunch and Ars Technica. As you might guess, the result is pretty busy. The data's there, but like with Guy Kawasaki's AllTop and PopURLs before it, you might spend as much time scrolling down to find the article you want to read as you eventually spend reading.



Like Alltop, Headlines from Across the Web Populate Techfuga.
Beyond the simple headlines, Techfuga groups related stories (as Techmeme does) and attempts to link to the discussion pages of items that are indexed. They also, like Techmeme, say they offer an algorithm that determines "Top Stories".


Techfuga Correctly Found Linkage Between Stories
After midnight on Tuesday, Techfuga correctly found that Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins' article "FriendFeed: Like Most Things, Good in Moderation [Scoble’s Intervention]" was related to a FriendFeed post by Robert Scoble, "Oh, oh, @techcrunch thinks I need a friendfeed intervention!". That in turn, led to related items at TechCrunch and Scoble's blog. So, in theory, the algorithm works. It's not the prettiest I've ever seen, but if you assume that Techfuga is the superset of data, incorporating Techmeme as one of its sources, it does have a ton of data to work with, and as many early versions of sites have shown, cleaning up the GUI can be easier than discovering the content initially.


You Can Search The Full Techfuga Archive for Keywords
Techfuga's value is also found in its search engine. Searching Techfuga also searches through its many different sources, so when I performed a vanity search to see if I ever came up, responses came through Propeller, BuzzTracker and ReadBurner, and did so quickly. Broader searches, even outside of tech, like one for "Baseball", showed similar diversity.

Techfuga opens its doors this morning, so find it here: http://techfuga.com/.

Social Media Advertising: Crossing the Streams

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

Can you hear it? That's the sound of social media companies scrambling, hustling, and scraping to find new revenue-generating models to beat back the hounds of this wacky economy.

Most recently, we're starting to see talk of experimenting with the insertion of advertisements into what users normally expect to be ad-free content streams. In movie metaphor terms, it's time to look to Ghostbusters for inspiration.

As we all know, Dr. Peter Venkman (played by the amazing Bill Murray) advised that the streams of the ghostbusting team's Proton Packs were not to be crossed… right up until the end of the movie, when they had run out of ideas in defeating the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It was a classic "it's so crazy it just might work" movie moment.

Are some social media companies reaching a similar "crossing the streams" decision point? For instance, Techmeme, the well-known technology news aggregator, has actually employed the practice of inserting "sponsored posts" into its stream of algorithmically generated story and blog post clusters for some time.


Techmeme Interweaves Sponsors' Posts With News
With a clear label of "sponsored post" and a different colored background on what is essentially an "advertorial" ad unit, Techmeme is leading out a new form of online advertising that other social media companies might be looking to adapt.

A story on TechCrunch this week called Digg's Sorry Revenue Stream, And Rumors Of An Experimental Ad Product was illuminating in a number of ways.

Key takeaway:

One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.

So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.

I think allowing users to vote on ads that they like and have them "bubble up" to the top, social news-style, might be a rather clever addition to the Digg platform. That said, we can imagine that some of Digg's famously rowdy commenters would be incensed at the prospect of any advertising inserted into an area previously set aside for user generated story submissions.

How incensed is hard to say, but we can look at the reception that ad network Magpie received on Twitter to get an indication. To be fair, Magpie is an independent service - it has no formal affiliation with Twitter - that offers to sell "tweets" on Twitter user profiles. So its revenue model aims to cut microbloggers in on revenue, and not Twitter itself. The reaction thus far from the Twitter community has been pretty negative, and indeed signs are that Magpie is gaining very little traction.

That said, it's perhaps doubly interesting that Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams would mention inserting ads into Twitter streams as a potential revenue option during a recent interview. However, he noted that they are "looking into other options." Maybe it'll come down to a "don't cross the streams" decision?

It's worth considering if Internet audiences will be generally more accepting of seeing "sponsored posts" on Techmeme – or indeed inserted into the "blog stream" on well known tech blogs such as Mashable – versus user generated content-driven platforms like Digg and Twitter.

In any event, social media companies are going to be looking for new ways to keep the lights on and servers humming, and that will likely mean seeing more forays into previously ad free content zones.

What's your opinion on crossing the streams?

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

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.

My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close

It's a year-end tradition for many media, blogs and individuals, to predict what will happen over the next year. Some prefer to make their guesses fairly straight-forward in an effort to be right (Example: Apple will release new notebooks with a faster processor at MacWorld) and others will make their guesses seemingly outlandish, so that if they're right, they're seen as virtual psychics. Others, somewhere in between. At the conclusion of 2007, I made ten predictions that I thought would be fun, and as we're coming on the one year anniversary of that post, it's a good thing you didn't bet your home mortgage on my list. (What? You say there are other issues with your mortgage? Oh.)

See: 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech

In the spirit of reducing my ego, here are how those ten predictions in the world of tech stand:

1) Google Will Trump Both TechMeme and FeedHeads

Wrong. I expected that Google would start to tabulate its shared items and most popular feeds via Google Reader, and that using this data, Google could provide a democratic version of Techmeme, or at least pull Feedheads outside of Facebook. Instead of Google doing this however, it was ReadBurner, followed by RSSMeme and others, including Feedheads, who started a site at www.feedheads.com. Later in the year, Google Blog Search did introduce the option to show hot topics in tech, but it's largely been a stale effort. At this point, Techmeme is still more important than Google in this regard, and Google Reader has declined to show most popular feeds or shared items.

(Disclosure: I am an advisor to ReadBurner and took the position in August.)

2) Facebook Will Buy Digg in an All-Stock Transaction

Wrong. I thought Facebook would use its expensive stock and buy up some smaller companies. Digg continually sounded like it was shopping itself, but it never sold, and the company's CEO often denied talks were occuring with anyone. Also, given the stock market crash, Facebook is no doubt valued much lower these days, making a stock transaction less likely.

3) eBay Will Sell StumbleUpon to Yahoo! or News Corporation

Wrong. So Far. In September, TechCrunch and others reported that eBay planned to sell StumbleUpon, but no sale has taken place yet. At this point, also, with Yahoo! crumbling, they are less likely to take on the service.

4) Twitter Will Add Video, Photography Support

Wrong. Twitter focused on growing and not crashing this year. Still just text.

5) Apple Boot Camp Will Morph to Be Like Parallels, VMWare Fusion

Wrong. I hardly hear anything about Boot Camp these days, likely because VMWare Fusion and Parallels have become entrenched, and nobody cared about Apple's "restart" alternative. My comment that Apple would "slowly take over the market" in this space also looks quite dumb, as did the expectation that Windows applications could boot alongside Mac apps. The question is, why not?

6) At Least One Major Browser Will Embed Ad-Blocking

Wrong. And it's too bad! Sure would change things a bit if somebody could figure out how to check a box and have graphical ads or text ads disappear.

7) Assetbar and FriendFeed Will Gain Early Adopter Audiences

Wrong and Right. AssetBar, in its attempt to replace Google Reader, failed fast. FriendFeed, however, did much better than I could have guessed at the time I wrote the post. Obviously, I played a small role in evangelizing FriendFeed through it coming out of beta in early 2008, but it got bigger than even I expected. My comment saying that "neither would be acquired by the end of 2008" did manage to be true.

8) Video Blogging Will Remain Unpopular, Unprofitable

Right. While there are some bloggers who prefer video and are using it, from Robert Scoble at FastCompany TV to Loic LeMeur at Seesmic, it hasn't become as second-nature as standard blogging or mciroblogging. And so far as I know, nobody is making money on this in a consistent way.

9) iTunes Video Rentals Will Decimate Netflix, Blockbuster, Hurt Box Office

Mostly Wrong. Netflix didn't blink against iTunes' charge. They instead branched out with their "watch instantly" feature and partnered up with TiVo and others. Blockbuster is still a disaster, and I certainly am not going to the box office thanks to so many alternatives. But iTunes video rentals cannot be said to have hit Netflix and others all that much.

10) Fast Company Will be a Fast Stay for Robert Scoble

Wrong, So Far. Robert joined FastCompany at the beginning of the year, and is putting up some interesting content. That said, FastCompany has seen changes in focus and leadership, and I am curious to see how his show evolves in 2009. Scoble continues to be a mainstay on the social Web and at industry events of course, so even if 2009 sees him somewhere else, it won't be far from the limelight.

So wasn't that fun? Now you see you can largely ignore my predictions, or maybe, I should try harder to be right. Maybe, if I'm good, I can put a 2009 prediction list up by the end of the year...

Twitterank's Leaderboard: Odd, Mysterious and Broken

The launch of a leaderboard for the once-feared Twitterank was inevitable. After all, in the online world, if you can measure something and give it a score, then by all means the next step is to rank people from high to low, and provide a leaderboard. It's happened with blog "influence" (Technorati). It's happened with mentions on Techmeme. It's even happened with how frequently people's items are shared on Google Reader (Feedheads, RSSmeme and ReadBurner). As ranking one's Twitter influence has been tried several times by a bunch of different sites, from Twinfluence to Twitter Grader, Twitterank was practically destined to join the crowd. On Friday, the site launched a "Top 50" list and after watching the dust settle a bit, I have to be extremely amused by the results.


Every ranking system has its flaws. And considering Twitterank's algorithm is both secret and changing, according to its author, Ryo Chijiiwa, initial hiccups are no surprise. But glancing at the top 50 tells me that Twitterank must measure influence in a very odd way, contrary to just about every other measure I've seen out there.

For example, according to Twitterank, the #1, highest scoring person in all the world is Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. (@laughingsquid) Scott's account garners a score of 237.591. His own Twitter account shows he (as of Monday after midnight) is following 1,636 people, has 19,307 followers, and has made 5,285 updates. This does not rank him among the top 50 on Twinfluence in total reach, but he does reach #20 on Twitter Grader.

In the #2 position on Twitterank is Brian Solis (@briansolis), who weighs in with a score of 235.847, and Twitter activity of 582 following, 8,033 followers and 3,524 updates. This activity garners him the #43 position on Twinfluence and #22 overall on Twitter Grader.

While Twitterater's top list does have a lot of "household names" like Dave Winer, Michael Arrington, Jeremiah Owyang and Steve Rubel, there are some big oddities, including at least one account that has never sent a message on Twitter at all.


Let's be honest, there's no way I should be this high.
For example, Loic Lemeur (not pictured, but at 226.91) actually ranks below me in the rankings, despite his following and being followed by almost five times as many people, and sending ten times the amount of updates. Meanwhile, Leo Laporte gets a 179.87 ranking, well off the top 50 list, despite having more than 60,000 followers, behind only president-elect Barack Obama and Kevin Rose of Digg (that I know of). And the ever-present Robert Scoble gets only a 188.63, also keeping him off the Top 50.


Leo Laporte, with 60,000 followers, misses the leaderboard?


And Scoble, Mr. Twitter, doesn't break 200 either?
So how does that make any sense? I was going to guess that Scott Beale ranked highly thanks to his high followers to following ratio, but Leo Laporte's ratio is an astonishing 120 to 1, so that, in theory would rank higher. And Scoble's real numbers are off the charts in almost every metric.

Another canary in the coal mine - the account of @google, which ranks #13 overall, according to Twitterank's Top 50, but has only 366 followers, isn't following anyone and has never updated their Twitter account.

So... @google, a user with no updates, has a higher Twitterank than does Scoble, who tops out at 39,000 followers, and more than 15,000 updates. Whatever you think about the content of Robert's tweets, whether they be too frequent or too off-topic, to say that an unused account is among the top in the world is as they say in the Web world... a big FAIL.

That Twitterank has an algorithm which measures something is clear as it gets some of the names you'd expect, but there are still a lot of questions around this service. Right now, it's basically a toy, and has little value.

Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

This Spring, when the tech blogosphere discovered Shyftr, a next-generation RSS reader, had launched with comments on their service, alongside full feeds, you would have thought they'd barged into bloggers' homes in the dead of night, stealing their money, their laptops and punching them around besides. Despite comments from me and others who believed this to be a natural progression of RSS readers and aggregators, their missteps landed them on virtual page one, and they haven't really escaped the many bad things thrown their way since.

But since Shyftr's unfortunate early flub, we have seen sites that are centered around other people's contents continue to grow in popularity, and in many cases, they feature conversations that are native to the service, but don't flow back to the blog. Meanwhile, some are doing more than just featuring a headline, but have excerpts that can at times display the vast majority or the entirety of a blog post. Has the Web collectively grown numb to this, and have we accepted this as "fair use"?

One tech developer wrote me yesterday, highlighting the way many posts were being displayed on the growing news discovery site, socialmedian. He wrote, "I'm sitting here finding example after example of this on Social Median? Do you think people are giving them a pass? Do people not realize that this is happening? Or do they just not care anymore?"

As socialmedian displays upwards of 1,100 characters of any given story, shorter stories could be posted in their entirety, without the original author's permission. As socialmedian now lets its users pull in content from Google Reader shared items and other sources, the author doesn't have to explicitly provide approval for their content to make it to the site. And on that site, users can engage in conversations around the content, without that data being ported back to the originating blog.

Some examples of these short stories (plus conversations) on socialmedian are here:

• Original story on Twitterati: Twitter Revenue Just a Matter of Time
• socialmedian story: Twitter Revenue Just a Matter of Time
• Original story on GHacks.net: Is Windows 7 any different?
• socialmedian story: Is Windows 7 any different?

As Shyftr operated this Spring, before having the Techmeme crowd go after them with pitchforks and torches, socialmedian unifies each article shared to the site in one thread, showing the multiple people who "clipped" it, and unifies the comments in one siloed stream.

So how is this different than the mini-scandal that erupted just over six months ago?

I've been a vocal proponent of socialmedian, and have seen the site take off over the last several months. I have also seen that the site doesn't pull in full feeds, but instead clips longer items. I can't remember the last time I published a blog post that was less than 1,100 characters after all. So I asked Jason Goldberg, socialmedian CEO, to help explain their limits and thinking. He wrote:

"While crawling the sources, we fetch short summary and full content (if exists in feed). While displaying the story on different pages of socialmedian, we first check if we have short description and show it after truncating to a certain limit. If short description is not present for the story we truncate the full content and show it. On the story page we check if we have full content for the story and display it after truncating it to 1100 chars. If we don’t have full description, we show the truncated short description."

Goldberg's response shows the team has given the issue of "fairness" a lot of thought. Unlike Fav.or.it, who believes it has every right to show full feeds and pull in comments from the original blogs, socialmedian consciously clips the data after a certain length. And outside of the story itself, depending on the page, or whether it's in an e-mail alert, these limits are even smaller, between 130 and 325 characters.

So what's fair? We've largely accepted that aggregation and bookmark sites like FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News and others are allowed to post URLs and headlines and allow for conversation. We have largely accepted that it is bad behavior to keep the full content of a post and integrate comments. But in between is a gray area. Can I borrow one paragraph? Two? Can I show the first few graphics you use? At what point does it move from linking and enter the land of scraping?

I would venture a bet that as the social Web continues to evolve, we have gotten more accepting of sites centered around other people's content. I believe you can't undo the move to aggregation sites, and conversations will occur where people want them to, not necessarily on your blog. I believe that sites that offer attribution and a link back to the original source are providing their own sites as a distribution and reference medium, so I don't find fault with services like socialmedian. But it's likely that others aren't realizing their content is getting in the site, and it's not getting out. So what are the standards that one should follow? And do we care anymore?

You can find me on socialmedian here: www.socialmedian.com/louisgray

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

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


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


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


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


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

See previous coverage of FeedBurner/Google mismatches:

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

Hackr WatrCoolr: Tech News Aggregation With No Mouse Required

A couple weeks ago, in an article about Microspaces, I said that Web entrepreneurs are finding new ways for you to navigate their sites, and many are now incorporating keyboard input, to jump to new comments or pages. Though I mentioned it in a quick tweet on September 25th, I thought it was worth highlighting the Hacker WatrCoolr, a site that displays headlines from many popular tech news sites, and lets you quickly flick through them using only your keyboard - no mouse required.


A Headline from ReadBurner on WatrCoolr Tonight
WatrCoolr shows the latest headlines from Digg, Hacker News, Del.icio.us, Techmeme, Reddit, RSSmeme, Slashdot, Yahoo! News and ReadBurner. Each headline shows its recency, and the destination URL (e.g. nytimes.com or makeuseof.com).


Scoble's Post Hits Techmeme and Makes it to WatrCoolr
But unlike many other news aggregation sites, the Hacker WatrCoolr doesn't shoe-horn them into one busy page, like AllTop. Instead, it displays one headline at a time. To scroll through older items from the same source, you just need to hit the down arrow key. To see a new source, hit the right or left arrow. And to read the article, you just have to press the "r" key, or press "n" to have it open in a new window or tab.

While Hackr WatrCoolr is not looking to replace your RSS reader, some of the functionality is very similar to that of applications like Google Reader, and it's a very easy way to get all the top stories from each of these sites in one place. It may be a little experiment, but it hints at one way the Web could go to make the process of our news gathering even that much more easy. I hope to find more Web developers who are thinking different about how we navigate today's often-formulaic and static Web sites.

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner, and hold a small equity position.

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?

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.

TweetMeme Returns Following Months-Long Twitter-Forced Outage

The on again off again cold war that Twitter has been having with its development community has been the subject of much discussion over the last few weeks, especially with the news of reduced unauthenticated API calls, and the new integration of Gnip. But even as Twitter is appearing to get its footing, significant damage has already been done to many services that relied on the microblogging service to survive. One of those was the popular link tracker, TweetMeme, which returned to the Web over the weekend, after months of the service being unavailable, not thanks to developers' neglect, but Twitter's restrictions.

TweetMeme launched in January, gaining significant coverage in the blogosphere, including an article in TechCrunch, who gushed, "The killer Twitter-tracker just arrived and its name is Tweetmeme". But by May, Twitter, under incredible pressure, started disabling developers' access to Jabber and XMPP services, which knocked the service off the Web.

See: Tweetmeme Down Due to Twitter Jabber Problems

At the time, the downtime was expected to only last days, but it turned out to be months.

Service founder Nick Halstead, also the author of Fav.or.it, wrote in a comment on this blog Friday, "Our side project http://www.tweetmeme.com which was the first twitter URL tracker has now been down for months because we were offered the use of the XMPP feed and by the time we had implemented they pulled it. We will not bring it back up again or put development effort into it unless these kind of restrictions are a thing of the past."

The XMPP firehose has famously been limited to only four partners - FriendFeed, Zappos, TwitterVision and Summize, plus Gnip this last week. And Tweetmeme couldn't play on the uneven field, shutting down. But as of yesterday, Halstead reported his team had a work-around, essentially piggy-backing on the search capabilities of Summize itself, now owned by Twitter. (Confused yet?)



Tweetmeme is back in operation now, aiming to show the most popular shared links on Twitter, highlighting the biggest stories on their front page, like Techmeme does, and showing them in order of appearance on the Tweetmeme river, just as Techmeme's river does.

Now that Tweetmeme is back in action, the questions remain - will traffic return, remembering the site's out there, and can it deliver relevant results worth following, as Techmeme has proven it can? And will following Summize's lead be good enough, or will Twitter change the rules again? Hard to know, given the microblogging giant's inconsistencies. That's why many developers are bailing on Twitter altogether.

To Blog, or Not to Blog - That is the Question

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

I'm noticing a trend lately which started several months ago, and I couldn't quite pinpoint what was causing it. It seemed as though many of my friends and others that I esteemed as good bloggers were getting tired, and were posting much less frequently, or not at all. Many of these people were part of the reason I became an entrepreneur and it was disappointing to see them stop posting. It seems as though those blogging are getting tired, or just see it as a waste of time.

We see this with the recent fallout of Jason Calacanis - he just wasn't getting what he needed from blogging and decided to find another way to achieve what he wanted out of it. Louis Gray himself has mentioned on this blog about the change in traffic via links from A-list bloggers, and I have to say, I've seen it as well. The blogging landscape has changed significantly.

With the advent of Social Networking sites and tools providing outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed, I think many bloggers are getting overwhelmed with all that is out there, and frankly, they have found other outlets to get what they were previously getting from their blog. I'd like to share some tips on when you should and shouldn't blog, in hopes that other bloggers don't feel overwhelmed or quit altogether:

Post only when it is something that educates, or brings original news to your readers

This is an important policy of mine, for the most part. Often, especially before I started seeing bloggers fall away in exhaustion, I noticed many people just blogging for the sake of blogging. There often was no real new content in their posts. I like to keep a little Mac Sticky Note on my Desktop with all the blog post ideas I come up with (this post was one of those), and I can then turn back to them when I hit a slump. The most breaking and original get first priority. I think you will find that the most original posts you can provide will be the ones most visited, and re-visited by your readers.

Avoid posting just to state an opinion about another person's post

I believe it is mostly no longer necessary to blog about the content of other bloggers. There is an occasion or two where you may want a little more exposure from other bloggers if you really want your opinion to be known, but for the most part you can comment on other posts in other ways. With the advent of sites like FriendFeed and Google Reader it is now very easy for you to gain an audience, or even port your blog audience to these sites, and write your opinion either as notes in Google Reader, or as comments in FriendFeed. Let's face it, especially for a beginning or mid-level blogger, FriendFeed and Google Reader get a lot more traffic than most blogs get, offering you the chance for much more exposure on your opinion. Hopefully you are encouraging your readers to utilize FriendFeed more and they too can comment on your opinion to these posts.

Disqus is another great way to state an opinion about a post. Any blogger that implements Disqus is empowering their users to eventually make their own posts about the content, and have others comment, in threaded fashion, to those posts. Bloggers that implement Disqus are giving their users power to own their own opinions.

You don't have to post multiple times a day, or even every day

It's actually okay to only post once or twice a week. What's important is that you try to stay at least semi-regular so your readers don't give up on you. Your readers will come back if they know you'll keep posting. Blogging is certainly not dead, and it can be a great way to build up a following for your personal, or professional brand - that has never gone away.

Don't blog if it's only for individual gain

If all you do is blog to try to gain attention for yourself or your business, maybe through some good SEO and Google juice you'll get some traffic, but you'll never gain the loyalty and trust that many of the largest bloggers on the internet have. The best bloggers gain traction because they are working to empower, help, and educate others, not build up their own identity. Your own identity will come from that as you try to help others - writing a blog is all about building community.

Have something quick to say? There are other options

Believe it or not, Twitter used to be called a "micro-blogging" site (yes, hard to believe that was just a few months ago!). Sites like Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, even FriendFeed, and the dreaded, "Identi.ca" can all be great places to post your random thoughts, comments, and short posts. Twitter has since become much larger than that as a communications platform, but the capability to use it in such manner is still there, and I argue, a great way to start a discussion when used in conjunction with sites like FriendFeed. Look to find ways to integrate this with your blog and ensure your readers can find you and talk to you on these sites. There are even Wordpress plugins which will show all your Tweets in a single day (although you may want to think twice about this if you tweet more than 10 times a day like I do!).

Blogs are still good for SEO, and building brand, just not as much any more

The fact of the matter is that in order to get recognized by Google, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get recognized by Technorati, you have to have content, and you have to have others link to you. To get even recognized by Techmeme, you have to have good, original content, and have a few larger bloggers link to you. While Google and Technorati may not be the traffic drivers they used to (although I have a friend blogger that still gets 1,000 visitors a day just for a single post he did on a theme he wrote, all from Google), they are still too important to ignore. The fact is Techmeme will still give you thousands of potential new readers to your blog, as will Digg, and others. If you hit this jackpot of sorts, it can help you way more than any of the Social Networks ever will.

However, to get to this point is often a slow process, and can be achieved in other ways now, and that is getting more and more so as these Social Networking tools take root. The fact is I still get more traffic from social networking sites than I do Google on my own blog, so balance is key.

Lastly, settle for "good enough"!

I know several bloggers that spend hours on a single blog post. I heard of one blogger that takes an entire day to post. While sometimes an hour or so may be necessary to do research and gather data, for the most part it shouldn't take that long. Louis Gray often writes his posts in under 20 minutes. My average post is under 30. The key is, you can't be perfect - "good enough" is all you have to be.

As you can see, while the many options can seem overwhelming, they are actually there to help reduce some of the burden and fluff previously seen by bloggers and readers of blogs just a year or two ago. I hope, if you're one of those overwhelmed these tips can guide you to figure out how much you should blog, and where your content should go. It's okay not to blog some times! Just figure out what your motives were when you did (or do) blog, and see if there are other places that could be better satisfied.

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.

LOUD3R Launches Massive Semantically-Driven Network

As I mentioned in yesterday's story on OneSpot, the quest to separate the wheat from the chaff in news and blogs through leveraging RSS and social tools is a vibrant market. Whether Web users are relying on Digg, Slashdot and Reddit to bring the hottest items to the top, or if they are instead turning to automated memetrackers like Techmeme to rank stories' popularity, a lot of people are asking to not read every single story, but instead, put their faith in the hands of others.

A new network debuting today, called LOUD3R, hopes to leverage this automation and social prioritization of stories, through a vast network of sites, including 25 at launch today, each one of them utilizing a semantic publishing engine, which finds, clusters and ranks content for a number of vertical topics, ranging from technology to sports, fashion to business.

Each one of the sites carries their trademark - 3R ending. For example, a site dedicated to Web 2.0 and community, isn't called Buzzer, but instead is translated as BUZZ3R, and can be found at www.buzz3r.com. Similarly, an auto site is called ROADST3R and can be found at www.roadst3r.com. I'll let you guess as to some of the others, including GLITT3R, WATCH3R, and FOUND3R.


A sampling of LOUD3R's 25 sites at launch
Like many other topical Digg-like sites, including Ballhype and Showhype, the LOUD3R network family promotes stories that have received attention from throughout the Web. But instead of getting voted up or down by users, the articles are driven by background rules, in Techmeme-like fashion, as Gabe Rivera has implemented on his own family of sites, including BallBug, Memorandum and WeSmirch. Users can make comments on the items, see related stories, or e-mail them.


A lead story on one of LOUD3R's sites.
The sites also use the same background semantic engine to highlight hot topics on each site. On PUTT3R, it's no surprise that Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate are hot topics. On WOOF3R, the topics instead turn to terriers and poodles.

Like Digg, you can see the "Most Popular" items, as well as "Newest", and the LOUD3R algorithm also tries to make a best guess as to what is most "Interesting".

Will LOUD3R's cute naming strategy and interesting use of semantics gain them significant traction? The company certainly hopes so. They have gobbled up more than 550 topically-oriented domain names with the "3R" brand, so today's launch is just the beginning. They hope that their semantic engine will help filter all the content on the Web and only bring visitors the "best available". And they definitely believe that through targeting topics that are historically underserved, they can get a leg up against competition.

With more than 500 sites planned for launch, not every single topic has to be a dramatic success for LOUD3R to make some coin, they hope. Their press release, also issued today, says each site has a low maintenance cost, and each will deliver advertising revenue. If the audience doesn't get QUIET3R, then LOUD3R should get BETT3R and BIGG3R.

OneSpot Makes Publishing Personalized Memetrackers Simple

News aggregation sites that can help highlight the freshest, most relevant or most popular news from around the Web are essential to separating the signal from the noise. But all too often, these memetrackers are siloed, without readers having all that much input into what's considered most relevant, or determining what content gets in and what does not.

The success of Gabe Rivera's Techmeme has had many thinking how they could create their own personal Techmeme, featuring the best of the Web, but only for those topics they're most interested in, or from those sources they choose. Gabe's product, despite some competition from BlogRunner and Megite, as well as others, has remained the most relevant and accepted leader in the space, but its algorithm has left some people wanting more.

Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr leverages FriendFeed, building what he called QMeme, displaying the most popular content on FriendFeed over the last 24 hours from those he follows. Corvida of SheGeeks once said LinkRiver was her own personal Techmeme. Rafe Needleman of WebWare once called ReadBurner a Techmeme for Google Reader. But none of these solutions, while interesting, offer the individual manageability of a new product that's now come available to the Web at large: OneSpot.

Already in place at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, as well as some more vertically-oriented sites, OneSpot enables anybody to leverage the service's more than 250,000 RSS feeds to design and configure a personal meme, simply by starting with a few "trusted" RSS feeds, and letting OneSpot do the hard work of finding similar feeds on the same topic, and then determining the most popular content.

The result is a highly customizable personal memetracker that can be displayed on a full Web page or as a widget, drawing from the criteria you set, and publishing as frequently as you would like.


The OneSpot Dashboard Lets Me Choose Topics and Schedules
In the last few weeks, I created three memetrackers using OneSpot. One used my blog as the center of the universe (as most bloggers would like). One focused on technology at large. A third, and so far, the most interesting to me, focuses solely on the creators and participants in social media, link aggregation and lifestreaming.

See:
LouisGray.com: Top Stories > OneSpot
LouisGray.com: Social Media Top Stories > OneSpot
LouisGray.com: Technology Top Stories > OneSpot

To configure my personal OneSpot publication, I entered a few "Trusted Feeds", and OneSpot then found thousands of "Related Feeds", allowing me to see the name of the feed, when it was last updated, and giving me two choices: to add the feed to my "Trusted" bucket, or to "Remove" it from the list of options.

I found OneSpot's recommendation engine to be very good. If I showed louisgray.com as a Trusted Feed, OneSpot recommended SheGeeks, The Last Podcast, the Official ReadBurner Blog, Benjamin Golub, Webomatica and a few others, no doubt leveraging my own previous linking behavior.


Trusted Feeds I Posted to my Social Media OneSpot

Related Feeds Suggested for my Social Media OneSpot
For the Social Media publication, I had added the main blogs for FriendFeed, ReadBurner, Toluu, Shyftr and others, and OneSpot recommended I also add blogs from Assetbar and Twitter. Very cool.

OneSpot is extremely flexible, letting me schedule updates as frequently as 60 minutes apart, letting me customize the memetracker's look and feel, or even to add up/down voting recommendations or comments. At a time when news organizations like the Associated Press are throwing up roadblocks in how you link to or highlight their content, why not use OneSpot to make your own memetracker using sources you trust?

ReadBurner Podcast Talks Comments, Twitter, FeedBurner Ads

After a few months participating in the Elite Tech News podcast each Sunday evening, I was excited to be invited by Drew Olanoff and Adam Ostrow of ReadBurner to participate in their ReadBurner Weekly Live podcast this evening.

Although I already knew the two guys were sharp from my previous interactions with Drew and Adam via e-mail, Twitter and seeing their blogs, it was absolutely a pleasure to talk with them both about the big issues of the week. My only regret from the call was that Skype and TalkShoe didn't get along all that well, so when you listen, you'll hear me drop off the call four separate times. Frickin' Skype...

Topics included:

• Once again, the diversity of new places to make comments, away from the original blog.
  
• The integration of AdSense and Feedburner to post ads in RSS.
  
• How to bring RSS to the mainstream?
  
• Twitter's continued uptime issues.
  
• Continued improvements to ReadBurner, including chiclets and the addition of a "Breaking News" feature.
  
• What would Techmeme look like without content from the Techmeme leaderboard? (101+).

You can find the archive on the Official ReadBurner Blog or download the MP3 file directly here. It weighs in at 27 megabytes. Be sure you "fast forward" five minutes, as it appears the recording was turned on well too early.

Also, as for the Elite Tech News podcast, the team completed another successful call Sunday, with guest panelist Tamar Weinberg. You can find it on Mashable: Elite Tech News #10: Crickets.

State of the Blog: May 2008 Recap

May 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,351

Total stories published in May: 47
(About 1.5 per day, up from 1.3 in April)

Total stories in May with comments: 43
(91% of all stories, up from 34 and 89% in April)

Total comments on May posts: 456
(About 9.7 per post, 10.6 per commented post)


May statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 659 (up 88)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,031 subscribers (up 394)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 47 subscribers (up 5)
MyBlogLog Members: 246 (up 43)

Twitter Followers: 1,109 (Up 308)
FriendFeed Followers: 1,998 (Up 1,008)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter):
3rd overall, behind the last two months.

Top Five Most Visited May Stories (According to Analog)

1. Blogging 2.0 Causing Friction With 1.0 Bloggers
2. The Social Media Feature War is the Wrong War
3. FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function
4. Participate. Participate. Participate. Repeat.
5. Take FriendFeed Mobile With FF To Go

Others receiving votes: Continuous Parallel Attention: My New Reality, FriendFeed Friday Tips #2: Using the Bookmarklet, Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?, Developers Are People Too, Don't Forget, Five Social Media Bloggers to Watch This May, and Where Are They Now? A Look at A Dozen Services That Debuted Here...

Top Five Visited Archive Stories (According to Analog)

1. FriendFeedMachine Debuts New Approach to FriendFeed
2. My Social Media Consumption Workflow
3. What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio?
4. Most Bloggers Don't Deserve Any Ad Revenue
5. Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?

After a continued "up and to the right" graph over the last few months, May's overall visits fell about 24% compared with April, at levels 4% lower than even March, according to SiteMeter, while in all other aspects, the surrounding elements of the blog have grown. Part of the reason for the decline? To be direct, the answer is a lowered presence on Techmeme. In April, a number of my more controversial posts, especially around the weekend, drove a significant portion of traffic. In May, I consciously made the decision to not only not launch these controversies, but also to not participate once they had started. It had a negative impact on my simple visitor traffic, but I believe a more positive impact with the blog overall. I didn't exactly want to get the reputation of being a controversy-stirrer, when not necessary.

Now, partly due to not engaging in the more-visible Techmeme headlines, my position on the Techmeme leaderboard is in doubt. At peak in April, louisgray.com had been above position #40, drawing amusement from fellow bloggers like Robert Scoble, who needled me about the positioning on video earlier this month. But now, I'm lingering in the precipitous #98 to #100 position, seeing folks like Yuvi Panda of TheStatBot blow by me.

As mentioned last month, lest it be believed I've started this series to highlight the higher awareness achieved in recent months, be assured that's not the case. I started doing monthly summaries after August of 2007, when I had 103 RSS subscribers, and 40 comments in the month. Hopefully you find these interesting or useful.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on the shared link blog!

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.

Scooped: Who Brought the Story to Techmeme First?

When Gabe Rivera opened up search on Techmeme recently, the three-year-old site's archives became an extremely interesting playground to see trends, strong sources for news, simple ego-searching, tracking how companies have been viewed over time, and even to see which blogs are the first to bring the news to the big stage. I did some quick searches on a number of company names, products and other terms to see which sites were the first to have the terms included either in the title or summary of the piece.

Techmeme search only searches main items that reached the front page of the tech news aggregator, and does not include the "Discussion" links. Of the terms I searched for, none debuted on Techmeme prior to September of 2005, so if a service was already well established (See: Yahoo!, Google, Digg, etc.), saying who mentioned it first and made Techmeme after the site debuted doesn't add a ton of value. In the terms I looked for, it was interesting to see such a wide variety of original sources.

Also of note: Popular items that had more than 1,000 total results, including iPhone, made it impossible to find out who got on Techmeme first, as results only go to 1,000, similar to Google and Yahoo!'s limitations.

To try out your own terms, head to http://www.techmeme.com/search/, put in your term of choice, and report the results here. This is merely the tip of the iceberg for sure.

Term: Alert Thingy
Source: TechCrunch
Date: April 16, 2008
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/look-out-twhirl-alert-thingy-adds-twitter-support/

Term: Apple TV
Source: MacDigest
Date: January 9, 2007
Link: http://techdigest.tv/2007/01/macworld_2007_l.html

(Note: Engadget first covered it when it was called "iTV", on Sept. 12, 2006, here: http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/12/apple-to-release-itv-video-streaming-box-in-2007/)

Term: Assetbar
Source: louisgray.com
Date: February 8, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/02/assetbar-proposes-solution-to-twitter.html

Term: Disqus
Source: VentureBeat
Date: August 8, 2007
Link: http://venturebeat.com/2007/08/08/disqus-to-launch-new-features/

Term: Drobo
Source: Michael Gartenberg
Date: June 5, 2007
Link: http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg/archives/2007/06/drobo_changes_t.html

Term: FriendFeed
Source: New York Times
Date: October 1, 2007
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/technology/01feed.html

Term: Google Reader
Source: Official Google Blog
Date: October 7, 2005
Link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/feed-world.html

Term: Hillary Clinton
Source: CNET News.com
Date: November 1, 2005
Link: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5924424.html

Term: iPhone
Issue: More than 1,000 results

Term: iPod Touch
Source: Engadget
Date: September 5, 2007
Link: http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/05/ipod-touch-gets-official/

Term: Jaiku
Source: Scobleizer
Date: April 8, 2007
Link: http://scobleizer.com/2007/04/06/leo-laporte-leaves-twitter-for-jaiku/

Term: LinkRiver
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Feb. 13, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/02/linkriver-enters-life-streaming-fray.html

Term: Megite
Source: TechCrunch
Date: Feb. 4, 2006
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/04/a-look-at-the-memeorandum-killers/

Term: Newsvine
Source: GigaOm (Formerly Om Malik's Broadband Blog)
Date: November 9, 2005
Link: http://gigaom.com/2005/11/09/introducing-newsvine/

Term: Obama
Source: Valleywag
Date: Dec. 28, 2006
Link: http://www.valleywag.com/tech/tail-wagging-dog/lagging-presidential-candidate-turns-to-robert-scoble-224623.php

Term: Porn
Source: Wired
Date: September 22, 2005
Link: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68934,00.html

Term: Profilactic
Source: Mashable
Date: April 23, 2008
Link: http://mashable.com/2008/04/23/onaswarm-lifestreaming/

Term: PSP
Source: Pro-G.Co.UK
Date: Sept. 16, 2005
Link: http://www.pro-g.co.uk/news/nid/1220/1474/

Term: ReadBurner
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Jan. 8, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/01/readburner-in-stealth-mode-looking-to.html

Term: RSSmeme
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Mar. 17, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/03/did-readburner-acquisition-cause.html

Term: Seesmic
Source: TechCrunch
Date: October 8, 2007
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/08/loic-le-meurs-new-startup-launches-seesmic/

Term: SocialThing
Source: TechCrunch
Date: March 10, 2008
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/watch-out-friendfeed-socialthing-is-even-easier-to-use/

Term: Summize
Source: ReadWriteWeb
Date: March 16, 2007
Link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/summize_search_heatmaps.php

(Note: Summize pulled a 180 following this post. The first time they reached Techmeme in their new incarnation was when Paul Stamatiou covered them on May 10, 2008, here: http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/05/09/review-summize-twitter-search)

Term: Techmeme
Source: TechCrunch
Date: May 8, 2006
Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/08/techmemeorandum-is-now-techmeme/

Term: Technorati
Source: The Blog Herald
Date: Sept. 14, 2005
Link: http://www.blogherald.com/2005/09/14/google-blog-search-reviewed/

Term: Tesla
Source: Gizmodo
Date: Aug. 26, 2006
Link: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/clips/lexus-self-parking-car-video-and-review-196551.php

Term: TiVo
Source: PVRblog
Date: Sept. 13, 2005
Link: http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2005/09/tivo_72_os_adds.html

Term: Toluu
Source: louisgray.com
Date: Mar. 24, 2008
Link: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/03/toluu-offers-gateway-to-friends-rss.html

Term: Twitter
Source: Ben Metcalfe Blog
Date: Oct. 26, 2006
Link: http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php/2006/10/26/ev-williams-buys-back-odeo-and-twitter/

(Note: As Gabe Rivera notes in the comments, Twitter was originally called Twttr, and Biz Stone's announcement in July of 2006 brought the service to Techmeme.)

Term: Wii
Source: MTV.com
Date: Apr. 27, 2006
Link: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1529658/20060427/index.jhtml

Term: Yahoo! Buzz
Source: Valleywag
Date: February 15, 2008
Link: http://valleywag.com/357006/screenshots-of-yahoo-buzz-a-digg-competitor

Just a start. But Techmeme search gives a good glimpse into who's breaking the news in Tech, or who's got enough juice to be the first to reach the popular site with a new story. Can you find some more good examples? Does this data teach us anything at all?

The StatBot Debuts Series Analyzing Techmeme Sources

Last month, working only with Microsoft Excel and archived Techmeme pages, I took a look at how the top ten sites on Techmeme's leaderboard had changed over the first six months of Gabe Rivera offering the rankings. But I knew my minor effort would be no match for a statistically-oriented tech maven, like Yuvi Panda, who has kicked off what should be a very interesting series of posts examining the popular site and how it gets its news.

To date, Techmeme has been something of a black box. Leading bloggers love seeing the regularity of their posts being included. Meanwhile, less visible posters see complaining about Techmeme as something as a rite of passage. Some even claim impropriety and bias, while others still complain the site can be flooded with me-too news and copycats.

But that doesn't change the fact that Techmeme is tremendously relevant and a must-subscribe, either by RSS or by Twitter. To ignore Techmeme is the tech news equivalent of unsubscribing from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and hoping the local town daily can fill the gap.

In my initial look at Techmeme, I had observed that just over 30 percent of all stories came from the top 10 sites from the Techmeme leaderboard, and more than 40 percent came from sites ranked 11-100, leaving about 30 percent to "the field". Luckily for me, Yuvi's first pass at Techmeme arrives at similar results, saying "One third of Techmeme’s headlines come from the Long Tail".


A Graph from The StatBot's Techmeme Analysis
If you think The StatBot's efforts at this point are simply echoing my first pass, don't be fooled. Yuvi has a lot more tech savvy at his disposal, and as he promises in today's post, today's entry is the first in a series. You can expect to be something of a Techmeme expert by the time he's done.

We previously introduced The StatBot here: The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics. Yuvi also lent a hand analyzing my own site here: Analyzing LouisGray.com's Links, Topics, Timing and Comments.

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.

Robert Scoble on Long-Form Blogging, New Voices

Video Courtesy Mashable! and embedded from Stickam.
Starting around 6:20 into the video...

Pete Cashmore: "... the key question I wanted to ask you, which is, we're asking 'Blogs - what are they good for?' Is the long form of blogs kind of outdated now, and are you and other personal bloggers kind of moving on to Twitter, to FriendFeed and Facebook? It seems like you're building a personal brand, and blogging, really, that long form that takes more time - you seem to be on Twitter, developing more on Twitter..."

Robert Scoble: "Yeah, but new voices are taking our place, right? Louis Gray... who the hell is he? He came out of nowhere and is on the TechMeme leaderboard."

Cashmore: "There is something I seem to remember..." (Likely referring to this discussion from January)

Scoble: "Absolutely. And that's part of getting attention. But he's doing great, thoughtful, long posts, and he's adding something to the blogosphere that we're not able to add any more because we're too busy flying around the world."

I certainly didn't expect this kind of praise from Robert Scoble, who has forged one of the most well-recognized brands in blogging, but it's much appreciated. I just hope that over time, we move away from "Who is this guy?" to the name meaning something. Appreciate the mention, Robert. (Also: Hat tip to Matt Shaulis at Shyftr, who alerted me to it.)
-- Louis

The Largest Blogs Are Still Rapidly Growing Their Subscriber Base

There's no universally accepted way to track momentum in the blogosphere. Some point to Alexa and ComScore statistics, while others poke holes at this data. Others instead look to the TechMeme leaderboard to show who has the largest share of voice in tech. But we do have access to some quantitative tools that give us a clearer picture into just how fast the largest blogs are growing their most loyal readers via RSS, thanks to FeedBurner and tertiary services, including BlogPerfume and RatingBurner.

In December I first mentioned BlogPerfume and the site's ability to review your FeedBurner RSS growth, and project your statistics three, six and twelve months ahead. But more interesting than self navel-gazing, you can view any blog's statistics, so long as they use FeedBurner as their RSS engine and activate the Awareness API.

(This restriction made some popular feeds, including Engadget and Robert Scoble, unavailable for analysis.)

I clicked over to RatingBurner, which ranks public FeedBurner feeds from most popular to least popular, and fed BlogPerfume some of the most popular technology blogs.


(Click for larger image)
A quick look at some of the leaders in the so-called A-List, who hover in the 100,000 or so RSS subscriber range and above, shows 3-month growth of 10 to 25% per site. Looking much lower in the list, to those who are in the 500 to 5,000 or so RSS subscriber bracket, you can see a great deal wider range, including some who have nearly doubled their subscriber count over the last 90 days.

Unsurprisingly, TechCrunch is the king of the hill here, with an average of nearly 700,000 subscribers this month. Over the last three months alone, TechCrunch added nearly 84,000 new RSS subscribers, for a growth rate of 13.72%. BlogPerfume also showed single month growth of 4.2%, and projected TechCrunch would break 1 million subscribers before this time next year.

TechCrunch's enormous subscriber base means other sites can grow more quickly, despite getting fewer net new RSS readers. In the same period, Read/Write Web grew 16.47%, adding 25,017 subscribers, and Mashable! grew 15.77%, increasing their total by, 20,954. In fact, Mashable!'s high growth rate, coupled with GigaOM's lower 8.92% growth rate, would see them pass up Om Malik's team before six months are up, if you project that 90-day trajectory forward. Lower down the chart, you can also see Fred Wilson and Brad Feld posting growth rates of more than 20%, as they reach six digits. (Also Included: Guy Kawasaki, John Battelle)


(Click for larger image)
In fact, RSS subscribers are growing steadily at all levels. Looking down where I live and breathe, growth rates over the last three months at those off us under the 5k level show 30% increases for Andy Beard and Mathew Ingram, and dramatically higher levels for people like Tamar Weinberg (78.72%) and Muhammad Saleem (59.67%). (Also included: Mark Evans, Zoli Erdos, Susan Mernit and Sarah In Tampa)


Our own stats reflected one-month growth of 41.88%, and three-month growth of 286.89%, with an average of 708 subscribers, up from just 183 back at the start of December. (See: BlogPerfume: LouisGray.com and above chart.)

Even as some are openly discussing dropping the RSS feed reader, or asking where they are going next, this rising tide is raising all boats. While there's no doubt this initial report is partial, it shows RSS adoption is strong at every level. With anticipated further growth in adoption and gravitation toward tech blogging, the momentum is sure to continue.

---

I know I didn't get every relevant site, so if you found one that is remarkable in growth rate or wasn't what you expected, head to http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/index.php, put their FeedBurner URL in, and note it in the comments. I'm eager to see what you find.

In Blogging and RSS, Headlines Can be Make or Break

In mainstream print journalism, a good headline can be remembered for decades, whether for its unintentional incorrectness ("Dewey Defeats Truman" -- Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1948), its unconventional approach ("BASTARDS!" -- San Francisco Examiner, Sept. 12, 2001), its editorial wit ("Headless Body In Topless Bar" -- New York Post, April 15, 1983), or its emotional angst. ("Ford to City: Drop Dead" -- New York Daily News, October 30, 1975)

With social aspects of blog consumption becoming increasingly important, as well as the meteoric rise of RSS feed readers to take in information, a good blog headline can mean your story will be read instead of others on the same topic.

A good headline can mean the difference between getting ignored and getting Dugg, and as seemingly everyone is adding new feeds by the day, the sheer overload of information virtually guarantees a high number of your readers may never get to the full body of your story, if the headline doesn't grab their interest, or even turns them away.

Today, it is well accepted that Google Reader is the most widely-utilized RSS feed reader out there. While some have said it's not capable of handling the most avid feed consumers, I've yet to see one built more robustly. Helpfully, the service also offers a full set of historical statistics.


My Google Reader data as of this evening.
On a typical weekday, my stats show I'm seeing 700 to 900 items in my Google Reader, and need to make a quick judgment call on whether I'll read the full story, click through if it's a partial feed, hit share, or move on.

Just how little time do I have to make that decision? Assume that I read every post for 1 minute apiece. This would mean I spend 12-15 hours a day just in Google Reader. Take that number down to only 10 seconds, and you're still looking at 2 hours a day. What about three measly seconds? Taking a mere three seconds per headline means I've carved out 45 minutes a day just for feed reading, assuming 900 items. On the low end, that would be 30 minutes a day for 600 items, including those you actually read, and don't just scan the headlines.

RSS feed reading at that volume only truly becomes trivial if you think you can read and determine an action for the average post in one second. One second per post could take you all the way down to a stressful speed reading demonstration of 15 minutes a day. (Don't even try and get me started on how folks like Robert Scoble, who read more than I do, manage to cope.)

Contributing factors to whether I share a post on my link blog include the newness and uniqueness of the information, the quality or brand of the source and conversely if it's a new and emerging blogger, the amount of interest I have in the topic, that I perceive my readers to have in that topic, and the quality or content of the post itself.

But also a factor? The headline. If I happen upon two stories on the same topic, of interest to me and my readers, where the source is equal, it can be the headline and first paragraph that make one item shared over another. And as it is only the headline that is displayed in my Google Reader shared items on my blog or on FriendFeed, that's sometimes all the consumers see as well.

The issue of headlines becomes especially important for sites like Digg, Reddit and the like. Reddit, in fact, shows only headlines, begging for an up or down arrow. Digg shows a headline, and a submitter's authored one paragraph description. When you see stories that have hundreds or thousands of Diggs, do you really think all of those folks clicked out to the story, read it, and returned to Digg it? I doubt it.

Outside of social news submission sites, you can also see the importance of the headline on places like TechMeme. Items in the TechMeme discussion links show only a headline, and the story's source. Often, there can be 5-20 different stories from different sources on the same topic, making the headline, or the brand of the source, be the deciding factor for which post to click.


An example TechMeme discussion from tonight.
In 1998-1999, while wrapping up my senior year at Berkeley, I worked at a Web site focused on Internet and Silicon Valley history, called Internet Valley. My boss was certain that Web site consumption would change, and that the era of long textual pieces without styling was dying, in favor of pieces highlighted by bold, italics and colors. His theory was that Web users would "skim" and no longer "read" articles.

While his design tendencies were abysmal, he was right about people changing the way they consume news in this firehose of information. Now, it's obvious that you can lose them from your headlines alone, so for as much work as you may put into your writing, and getting the data or sources right, give your headlines their due.

ReadBurner to Return With New Ownership

Alexander Marktl's debut of ReadBurner in January had rapidly propelled him and his service to a short-list of new Web tech All-Stars. In days, the Google Reader shared items tracker rocketed to popularity, gaining praise from all corners of the Web, many of whom, including me, had long begged for a universal directory of shared links and most popular items - seeing the ranking of such shared items as a democratized, transparent, version of TechMeme.

But, like fellow All-Stars Barry Sanders and Michael Jordan in their respective sports, Alexander prematurely retired, and left us wanting more - in this case, saying real life had gotten in the way. But as with Jordan, this early retirement has not been the true end - setting the stage for a dramatic re-entrance, this time, with a little help from some powerful friends, including Adam Ostrow of Mashable, Drew Olanoff, and Eric Kerr. (See: I’ve Acquired ReadBurner: Attention Data is the Future of Social News

As of this morning, ReadBurner is no longer a gaping hole in the Web 2.0 sphere, but has returned with a splash page promising big things. The plan is to relaunch the site in a couple weeks with a more scalable back-end, improved design, and even more features requested by ReadBurner's demanding fan base - myself included.

And this development is tremendous. Many ReadBurner fans were up in arms over seeing one of the best sites to debut in 2008 get shuttered. Steven Hodson of WinExtra wrote, "ReadBurner - Please reconsider", and ReadWriteWeb simply lamented, "ReadBurner is Gone". The loss of ReadBurner left us with RSSMeme, a strong alternative on the Web, and Feedheads, ReadBurner's Facebook counterpart, and the original innovator in this space.

ReadBurner hasn't just found new friends. In fact, the site's found a new owner. Adam Ostrow isn't just bringing the site back. He bought it, for an undisclosed sum, from Alexander, in partnership with Drew and Eric. Now, the threesome, with Alexander acting as an advisor, will move forward and help ReadBurner achieve the amazing potential it always promised.

The excitement I had when I first uncovered ReadBurner and exposed the fledgeling site to the world is back.

When I found ReadBurner, after midnight on January 7th, I knew this little site had the power to change how we share and discover new sites and gauge momentum. In days it had its share of copycat sites (including RSSMeme on February 6th), and had gained media buzz from Mashable, LifeHacker, WebWare, the Download Squad and many others. It was fun to see Alexander's project grow to a full-fledged service, one too big and too successful to be held down by my little blog. Now, I feel like I've seen the baby grow up... and it's ready to set out on its own.

Welcome back, ReadBurner.

5 Blog Candidates for Tomorrow's TechMeme Leaderboard

We all know today's A-List by heart: TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, Scoble, blah blah blah... but there are many other bloggers I've found who are either delivering consistent strong stories with real focus, or have the occasional gem, who I believe with time, should be the leaders of tomorrow. Below are five who come to mind, who I think could be major players in future iterations of the TechMeme Leaderboard. If you have some you think I'm missing, and I know there's no way I have them all nailed, please let me know in the comments.

1. SheGeeks (shegeeks.net)

Corvida has until lately been a more prolific Twitterer than a blogger. But she's got a great writing style, enthusiasm and energy, not to mention a fantastic site name and look. In the last week alone, Corvida has touched on the debut of Socialthing!, reviewed FriendFeed, provided her view on Twitter projects and Google2Go. I hope she chooses to keep up the pace, and with some momentum behind her, I swear we'll be seeing a lot of Corvida in the future.

Subscribe to SheGeeks using RSS

2. Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen (andrewchen.typepad.com)

Andrew to date has been extremely focused on Facebook applications and trends, and the nuances of social network or social media. Having already attracted a few thousand RSS subscribers, largely on on the back of a major endorsement by Robert Scoble in January, which sent his subscription base from the 1,000 range to around 2,500. Sticking with development in this new age of application platforms will show Andrew's success to not be a fluke. Andrew can also be lauded for not spitting out a multitude of short posts. Nearly every item is well researched and full of detail.

Subscribe to Andrew Chen using RSS

3. Charles Hudson (www.charleshudson.net)

Blogging since 2003, Charles is no newcomer to the world of tech blogging. But Charles, like Corvida and Andrew, isn't in the race for quantity - instead focused on being clear direct, with comments on FriendFeed's similarities with the Facebook news feed, how Microsoft is missing the boat in competing with Google Apps, and adding his two cents on this weekend's meme around what it takes to be a technology workaholic trying to make headway at a startup.

Subscribe to Charles Hudson using RSS

4. Seek Ground (seeknock.blogs.com/seek)

Though relatively anonymous, "Seek" offers a strong signal to noise ratio, and the author is among the most intriguing in terms of how they opt to consume and report news. While today, Seek argues many folks are trying to make content to gain ad revenue, without thinking of consumers, it was just Saturday when Seek caught my attention for deleting all their Google Reader feeds and starting over - just like when they erased their blog and restarted about a year ago. Regardless of the change, SeekGround is an avid consumer of link blogs, and link aggregators, including Feedheads, LinkRiver and Twitter.

Subscribe to SeekGround using RSS

5. Unraveling Obfuscation (obfuscation.wordpress.com)

Todd McKinney, the author of Unraveling Obfuscation, doesn't post as often as some of us do, especially those on the TechMeme leaderboard, but when on a roll, Todd can write with the best of them. In January and February, you could see comments on the engagement of Google Reader RSS subscribers, whether or not Network Solutions and Microsoft could be trusted, or how popular services are approaching the issues that come with spiraling user counts utilizing technology.

Subscribe to Unraveling Obfuscation using RSS

Scoble's Link Blog Slows to a Crawl

For the better part of 2007, Robert Scoble trumpeted his Google Reader shared items link blog as a potential alternative to TechMeme. As a subscriber to his link blog in my Google Reader, I could typically look forward to a dozen or more new stories each day from blogs I'd never heard of - leading me to a lot of great new sources, many of whom I added to my subscription list.

But then, almost coinciding with his leaving PodTech in mid-January, with sporadic interruptions just prior, the link blogging slowed to a mere crawl, in comparison to his previous activity. Scoble, a busy man, was not only working on starting up FastCompany TV, but was flying all over the world, to the World Economic Forum in Davos, back to the West Coast, and off again to Switzerland this week. And while he found time to stream video on Qik, post to Twitter, and occasionally blog, his link blog was comparatively a low priority.

On January 29th, via Twitter, I asked him about this:
He responded in kind:


My question to him had come after an 8-day gap in the link blog. On January 29th, he shared one item. On January 30, one more. On January 31st, he seemed to approach regular form, with eight links. February started off with a little rhythm as well, six on February 2nd, ten more on the 3rd, and four more on Monday. And again, a return to silence (just two days so far). You can also see Scoble's link blog is not among the leaders in shared items according to ReadBurner's rankings, where it no doubt once would have been.

How does that compare to previous months? Well, on January 15th, Scoble shared 21 items and 17 on the 14th. December 30th was 16 items. December 28th was 15 items. December 27th was 26 items.... and you get the idea. In fact, AideRSS reports Scoble shared 455 posts per month on average, with a total of 2,279 posts since Jul 24 of last year, when the service started counting. (You too can use AideRSS to count these up.)

Did the blogosphere all of a sudden get less interesting? Did Robert stop reading feeds altogether? Has Robert raised the standard for sharing items? Did subscribers complain about the frequency? Maybe it's a mixture of all these things. Maybe he's just reached a point where he's gotten too busy, or the new post-PodTech world keeps him further away from Google Reader than when he was at PodTech.

Regardless of the answer, I hope he soon finds the time to get back to his link blog. I know I've found it a very good resource, just as nearly 300 others have liked the Elite Reddit which some of us B-Listers are working on. There's something to be said about the world of tech news being filtered with real eyes instead of a machine.

Also see: Scoble's Link Blog Delivers An Influential 1 Percent

Rating Burner's Alexander Fedorov Explains Site, Hidden Features

Yesterday, we uncovered Rating Burner, a new site that ranks popular blogs by their total subscribers, as calculated by FeedBurner. The site, previously unknown to the blogosphere, offered little behind its story, and little clue to its owner, though we did find Alexander Fedorov as the registrant of ratingburner.com. Today, Alexander emerged, and sent me a few e-mails, which further explained the site's origin and purpose, uncovering an interesting approach to discovering new sites and RSS feeds, as well as Web advertising opportunities.

First off, the site is more than an Internet egotist's dream. Rating Burner has its own Web crawler, aimed to discover new FeedBurner feeds and subscriber counts. As Fedorov wrote today, "The rating is growing all by itself. As soon as someone links to your blog, sooner or later it will be found by Rating Burner's bot."

And the bot had to start somewhere. Fedorov kicked off the Web crawling using John Battelle's Searchblog at http://battellemedia.com/. You can see this by using the same type of URL hacking popularized with ReadBurner just yesterday. Try the URL http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=1&dir=a and find the exact order of the robot's work. Hovering your mouse over the "1" in the "N" column shows the site was indexed by January 18th at 11:18 a.m. 4 minutes later, it was off to the Black Hat SEO Diary. 3 minutes later, the robot found TechCrunch, and it was off to the races. The robot eventually found louisgray.com on January 20th after noon, making me #216 in the list, which now has 368 individual sites.

Even more interesting, Rating Burner shows a detailed map of how each of these blogs link to one another. (Download the detailed graphic) The sites with the most links their way have the most arrows, and those sites with the most FeedBurner subscribers have the widest arrows to and from their site. As the below graphic shows, his robot correctly noted I link out to Mashable and WinExtra links to me. The map was generated by GraphViz, an open source tool.


My position in Rating Burner's map.
The robot spawned by Rating Burner has specialized intelligence to discover ad networks, and enables site owners to display going rates. As Alexander explains, the "crawler scans all blogs for signatures of some well known sponsors/advertisers and lists this information. It is possible to publicize prices for banner ads using special html comment . Crawler will find this info and publish price in the rating."

There are also a number of hidden tricks in the database.

To find out the total number of comments in the most-recent post on any included blog, you can sort with the below URL:
http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=17

To sort included sites by the most recent post, it's a different command:
http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=16

... and by PageRank:
http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=12

If you recall, Rating Burner also hinted at further categorization, including tags for SEO and gadgets. Alexander promises there are many more to come, automatically generated, again by the robot and the intelligent database:

He writes, "...categorization is completely automated. I have several samples of texts on special subjects like "gadgets" and then all blogs (5 last posts) are tested againts this texts using bayesian filter and shingles, and if the similarity is close enough, this blog will be listed under this category. I just need to add more categories and collect more sample texts."

Rating Burner is still in its infancy, even after yesterday's debut, without question. But there are some interesting tricks lurking in the database. Want to find recent posts with lots of comments that might be "hot"? Try this link: http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=4&filter=category%3ATOP.

And the blogosphere has noticed. In addition to my post, which hit TechMeme, and Mashable's coverage this morning, the site's debut was included in Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land wrap-up for the day, as well as Marketing Pilgrim.

Custom Reddit for Elite Tech News Created

It wasn't all that long ago that RSS and blogging pioneer Dave Winer called for the ability to create a Digg clone. He envisioned a service not for a vast market, but instead, one for a specialized niche of readers. With a limited number of participants, an elite group of moderators could serve as editors, using their collective brainpower to push the best news to the top, unimpeded by random videos, images, politics and the latest Mac or Linux war to hit the blogosphere, as can be seen all too often on popular "wisdom of crowds" sites, from Digg to TechMeme.

Last Tuesday, Reddit was first to the scene, offering users the ability to create their own reddits. Now, instead of one massive catch-all site that absorbed all the news of the day, many parallel reddits have emerged, including some for Comics, lolcats, wikipedia and much more, from atheism to politics and the environment.

While the total number of subscribers to these custom reddits remains small, with the most popular typically sporting a few hundred users, one in particular has heeded Dave Winer's original call to deliver a site dedicated to the top tech news of the day, edited by a group of popular tech bloggers.

A sample of tonight's tech news.
The reddit, focused on "Elite Tech News" and featuring the "elite" address of http://reddit.com/r/l33t, is moderated, so far, by MG Siegler of ParisLemon, Steven Hodson of WinExtra, Frederic Lardinois of The Last Podcast and me.

While the site is just getting started, we are approaching 100 subscribers, and hope to include you among us. You can be sure that this reddit won't fall victim to pictures of kittens, promotions of fringe presidential candidates and off-topic nonsense. Find us at http://reddit.com/r/l33t.

The Downside to Raised Blog Expectations

Heading into the last week of January, this has been more than a record-breaking month for louisgray.com. Instead, it's been a tidal wave. Without giving away all the fun statistics, planned for a February 1 post, suffice it to say that we've already had traffic more than 1,500% greater than January 2007, also more than double that of December, which was the previous record.

Rather than resulting from a few Digg spikes or runs at StumbleUpon, this increased level of activity has been through increased presence on Google, significantly higher linkage from other blogs, and a number of highly-discussed posts, both here and elsewhere.

And with the higher page views, site visits, RSS feed subscribers and Technorati Authority, I'm feeling as if I'm going to fall victim to my own raised expectations. While I used to be content to make comments on the latest updates in Bay Area sports, or my favorite TV shows, the threshold has been heightened, and more is expected.

After all, take a look at what Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read/Write Web (and formerly of TechCrunch) was saying on Twitter last night...


Via http://twitter.com/marshallk
Whether he was being too kind or just trying to send me a few new visitors from Twitterland isn't 100% clear, but now that we're getting noticed by some high-profile folks, and achieving previously uncharted levels of traffic, as well as reaching the rarified air of the TechMeme leaderboard, I'm feeling the pressure if I'm staying too many hours at work, or if I'm putting the laptop down a few hours to catch up on TV. My new subscribers are going to expect big things from this blog, and they won't want to be let down.

While I can't expect to find new services like ReadBurner and Shared Reader every day, and I don't anticipate starting a verbal war with one of the most widely read blogs on the planet all that often, I do expect we'll try to find new insight into the world of technology, and hope to earn the kind of accolades I've seen from people like Marshall, or VentureBeat's Eric Eldon that we've received over the last few weeks.

I do expect there will be days when I don't post at all. There will be days when my posts just might not be interesting to people, and there might be days when my RSS feed count goes down as people unsubscribe. And just as we've seen our traffic jump in January, it may fall in February, making me feel we're not measuring up. Even if there were an official "Up and coming tech blogger of the month", and even if I won for January, somebody else would win the next month, and I'd be yesterday's news, potentially fighting to stay relevant.

louisgray.com Debuts at #92 on TechMeme Leaderboard

I only mention this because it may not ever happen again. :-)


Source: http://www.techmeme.com/lb at 11:45 p.m. Pacific on January 20th.

You know the stat is screwy when I've managed to top well-respected folks like Jeremiah Owyang and Jason Calacanis.

Other good friends of note:

#18: Mathew Ingram
#25: Robert Scoble
#73: Paris Lemon

As you might recall, the TechMeme leaderboard launched in October of 2007. This is the first time I think I've been included.

Feedblitz Bug Sends My RSS Stats Through the Roof

Today has been a big day for louisgray.com. For the first time ever, I had two posts atop TechMeme at the same time (one | two), with my question around Twitter generating a ridiculous amount of buzz, garnering over 1,000 visits, more than a dozen comments, and several different articles through the blogosphere. All told, it was the second-highest traffic day ever.

But not even this good news can be credited for my huge spike in RSS feed subscribers reported by Feedburner. That... unfortunately, is a bug.


Did your RSS Subscribers Double Overnight?
Overnight, I saw my total RSS subscribers nearly double, from 287 yesterday, to a whopping 570 today, an increase of 283. The culprit? My blog to e-mail service, Feedblitz, which somehow reported to Feedburner that instead of 18 e-mail subscribers, I somehow had 305. Simple math tells me Feedblitz added my 287 number to the 18 to come to 305, but regardless of the reason... it's just wrong.

While I'd like to think I'm Mr. Popularity, I'm still Mr. Small Potatoes.

The Feedblitz blog says its "probably just a previously unknown defect (ok, a bug) somewhere in the code." It might be related to Blogger's feed redirection, and it might not. Who knows? I had hoped the double TechMeme hit plus organic momentum had made me an overnight sensation, but it was not to be. Dang.

At least I wasn't the only one with a temporarily oversized ego.

See also:
Franzone.com: Subscriber Count Madness
BizTechTalk: Feedburner - Analyze Feed Subscribers
Authority Blogger Forum: Feedburner Messes Up

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.

ReadBurner, In Stealth Mode, Looking to Sort Shared Feed Items

While Google remains silent on highlighting most popular shared items within Google Reader, and still has not provided a directory for shared link blogs, other innovative developers are filling the gap. ReadBurner, a service just now entering private alpha, might be the next to challenge TechMeme or Google on their home turf, once they exit the development stages.

As Feedheads has successfully demonstrated with its Facebook app, there is a market for people looking for most popular shared items, and finding new people sharing what they read on Google Reader. Just a few months ago, Mario Romero's application reached 10,000 users. But to date, there's been no "Real Internet" solution outside of Facebook.

Enter ReadBurner. It's obvious where they got the name, combining Google Reader and FeedBurner. They even have Google's colors in the logo.

(Good luck to you legally on that unless this is a Google skunkworks project, which I doubt, given it's hosted on Amazon Web Services and using EC2...)

ReadBurner, starting with a few dozen link blogs from popular Web personalities, including Chris Brogan, Mihai Parparita, Chris Wetherell, Robert Scoble, Scott Beale, myself and others, esentially tabulates the shared items from each feed, creating areas for "Recent" shared items, those "Popular Today", "Popular This Week" and "Popular All Time".

There are not yet any details who is behind the service, although I've seen accesses here via the site from Vienna, Austria. Google finds no hits on "ReadBurner" related to the service. But it looks like it started indexing shared items in December of 2007. And the more shared link feeds you provide, the more complete the service will be.

You can see which shared reader feeds are included (as a tag cloud), and you can even submit your own to be included. While clearly in private alpha, and not likely expected to be blogged about yet, the service is doing exactly what we asked Google Reader to do almost a year ago. In the ten months since we laid out specific requests, Google Reader team has really lost its way in the court of public opinion. It's time to get that back, or services like ReadBurner are going to find a niche and grow.

As for the service's eventual domain name? Who knows? Internic and GoDaddy both told me ReadBurner.com is available. If they want it, they had better act fast.

10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech

1) Google Will Trump Both TechMeme and FeedHeads

Amid the discussion of Google's sneaking in a social network, little has been said about Google Reader potentially tabulating and reporting the most commonly-shared items and most popular feeds. I believe that in 2008, Google Reader will start reporting the most popular feeds, clicked items and shared items. By the end of 2008, it will become equally important for bloggers, if not more so, to be atop this list, instead of on TechMeme. Google will also integrate this information for both Facebook and iPhone, competing head to head with Mario Romero's excellent Feedheads application.

2) Facebook Will Buy Digg in an All-Stock Transaction

With the company being valued at $15 billion, Facebook can offer around 5 percent of the company to Kevin Rose and team at Digg and net them pre-IPO shares of what's sure to be a white-hot 2009 offering. The all-stock transaction would value Digg above $500 million, the highest possible exit for the company. Public companies, including Microsoft, will counter with $300 million of real money and be rebuffed.

3) eBay Will Sell StumbleUpon to Yahoo! or News Corporation

eBay has done absolutely nothing with StumbleUpon since the service's $75 million acquisition. Unlike PayPal, which was a natural fit, StumbleUpon has no fit within the ecosystem of eBay. A more acquisition-savvy businesses, like Yahoo! or News Corp, will end up with the property by the end of the year. Expect this to accelerate alongside management changes at eBay and continued fallout after the Skype disaster. What it will do is pocket eBay some serious cash. This time, StumbleUpon goes for north of $200M.

4) Twitter Will Add Video, Photography Support

Moving outside of its 140-character niche, Twitter will enable bored microbloggers to show exactly what they are doing with still photos and 15 second video clips. Despite the novelty wearing off, many will continue to do so, gaining us precious photos of the window over their computer desk, overexposed facial closeups and pictures of their breakfast. The service will be integrated with Picasa, Flickr and Photobucket.

5) Apple Boot Camp Will Morph to Be Like Parallels, VMWare Fusion

Some time in 2008, Apple's Boot Camp application will no longer require a restart to run Windows applications. Users will be able to natively run Microsoft Outlook, Project, Access and all other Windows-only applications alongside their Mac OS X applications on any new Mac. While developers may decry the competition to Parallels and VMWare Fusion, Apple will remain quiet, and slowly take over the market.

6) At Least One Major Browser Will Embed Ad-Blocking

By the end of 2008, either Firefox, Safari or Opera will natively ship with the ability to block all ad banners and Google AdSense. Publishers and bloggers will make a lot of noise about it, while secretly avoiding ads themselves. A significant percentage of early adopters will change browsers solely for this feature.

7) Assetbar and FriendFeed Will Gain Early Adopter Audiences

Early adopters always looking for an edge will move away from Bloglines and Google Reader in search for something more cutting-edge. Many will turn to FriendFeed and Assetbar, following the latter's launch, to find a rich feed reader with social networking features. However, neither service will enjoy a significant market share prior to the end of 2008, and neither will be acquired by the end of 2008.

8) Video Blogging Will Remain Unpopular, Unprofitable

Despite advances in video capture and broadband speeds, Web users will not gravitate toward long-form video blogs, choosing instead to stick with text and photography. Only the rare extreme niche businesses will find any success with utilizing video for blogging.

9) iTunes Video Rentals Will Decimate Netflix, Blockbuster, Hurt Box Office

The introduction of video rentals on iTunes will not only force a dramatic subscriber exit for Netflix and reduced rentals at Blockbuster, but will also further slow attendance at movie theaters nationwide, as consumers find the service good enough, and much less inexpensive than a night out.

10) Fast Company Will be a Fast Stay for Robert Scoble

After joining FastCompany in early 2008, Robert Scoble will be at first jubilant, have initial success, and then plateau. While he will remain tremendously popular, there will already be discussions by the end of 2008 as to where he will end up in 2009, giving ValleyWag and Uncov, among others, plenty to gossip about.

Other 2008 predictions:
Jeremy Toeman: Technology Predictions for 2008
Paris Lemon: The Year Ahead 2008: 17 Predictions
The Economist: Technology in 2008
Mahalo: 2008 Technology Predictions
Center Networks: 2008 Predictions from CenterNetworks

BlogBurst Intertwines New Media With the Old

Recently, I enrolled this blog in BlogBurst, a service which opts in your posts to traditional media, including Reuters, Fox News, and USA Today. It only took a few minutes to configure, and was worth taking a look at. Now, as of this morning, my first post, as far as I know, has been added to the Reuters news services, sitting alongside other wire stories from Reuters journalists.

See: Apple Finally Getting Around to iTunes Movie Rentals

This is both a positive development, and a negative one. It's good to gain the blog additional exposure, and have my content read by a new audience, but it also puts my posts on par with those from professional journalists with real-world fact checkers, editors and sources. Additionally, ads sold alongside the wire story will be gaining Reuters revenue, and not me.

I don't expect significant traffic to be referred my way from this service. It's just another distribution medium, like Digg, TechMeme or StumbleUpon. But this one comes with an old media brand.

Blogrunner Likes Me, TechMeme Hates Me

I've watched many a blogger follow the TechMeme feed, commenting on new, popular, stories as they happen, hoping to get captured as part of the ensuing "Discussion". There's not much mystery to it, and if you watch TechMeme for any amount of time, you can see who does it, versus who is actually adding new material.

I won't name names, as that's petty, but we have a good idea who they are, and so do they.

As I see this behavior, I have a natural tendency to actually avoid the more popular topics, so I'm not seen doing the same thing. In fact, had I not already talked ad nauseum about Google Reader and Apple TV, two of the most favored topics on this blog, I'd almost have skipped tonight's news on both. But, having written about both announcements, it's interesting to see that TechMeme's algorithm is keeping my comments out, and letting others in, while the New York Times' similar service, Blogrunner, found my post worth including.

Take a look at the below screen captures, taken around 11 p.m. Pacific tonight:

1. TechMeme's coverage of Google Reader's "Managing your shared items"


2. Blogrunner's coverage of Google Reader's "Managing your shared items"


In the first, I don't exist, whereas in the second, the post is prominent, though it will drop as new ones are added.

In June, we discussed, "What Should Drive TechMeme's Content?", as the powerful blog news aggregator is one of the very best of the Web, but often keeps people guessing and the non A-listers whining. Tonight's example, contrasting the two services, is quite interesting to see.

Google Reader Blinks, and the Mob Wins

As Google's features become more widely adopted, the company will have to transition from developing products an engineer would love to developing products that more mainstream, less geeky users can understand right away.

At times, it seems the company's high and mighty approach to software development can leave many guessing to their intentions, and the motto of "Don't Be Evil" just doesn't cut it any more.

As noted earlier today in my post "Forget About Privacy. Embrace Openness.", the blogosphere seemed up in arms over a recent innovation by the company's Google Reader team to tie in your "friends" list within GMail and GTalk with your shared items in Google Reader. While on its face, this innovation would more easily bring those things you find interesting to your friends, it instead raised holy Hell with those who never considered just who could gain access to a list of items they had made public. It had people screaming about privacy, saying Google had ruined Christmas, and had others demanding to know why someone they had a casual conversation with was somehow called their "friend".

While I believe the revolt was seriously overblown, and that those decrying the sharing need to wake up to the transparency of the Web, it looks like Google had enough bad press for one holiday, and cried Uncle. Tonight, the Google Reader team offered a new blog post, lightly titled "Managing your shared items", that enables you to make some of your "shared" items private. As they write, "Thanks to all our users for helping to make Google Reader better, so please keep your feedback coming!"

"Thanks for all the feedback" in Geek world is a euphemism for "Stop complaining and pointing out our problems!", slightly mixed with the angel dust of PR. And Google isn't a huge fan of bad PR, so they got this one fixed right away. For now... until their next innovation gets voted out by the TechMeme mob and non-expert netizens.

Will RSS Readers Ever Report Detailed Referrals?

It wasn't all that long ago that much of the blogosphere was abuzz around the power, or supposed lack thereof, from A-list sites and TechMeme. How come they were only counting a few hundred visitors? It could be, in my opinion, due to the growing use of RSS readers, like Google Reader, NewsGator and Bloglines, which mask the URL of the referring feed if a visitor clicks through.

Instead of telling site owners what feed, and what post, a visitor originated from, RSS feed readers trumpet their own URL as the source for the link. As a result, instead of giving TechMeme, Scoble or TechCrunch the credit, it's Google Reader who snakes the statistic. And God forbid a small site link your way that only has a few RSS feed readers, but one who liked your content. In that case, you'd see a visitor from the feed reader to a specific subpage, but not know who was linking.

Yesterday evening, after my flight from Dallas, I clicked through on my Blackberry to obsessively check my blog stats, and I saw an uncommon spike in traffic, sent my way from a post on Scobleizer linking to my Feedheads article. While I know that more than 500 unique visitors came my way in the last 24 hours from his note, scobleizer.com only is given credit for 40 to 50% of that amount in my site statistics, as you can see in the side graphic, which shows the share of referrals among my last 4,000 visitors. Instead, Google Reader, BlogLines, Twitter and other RSS feed engines snaked the rest.

Ideally, an RSS feed reader would pass to the site owner enough information as to ascertain which feed was being viewed, and even better, which post fed the link. It could be that this data today doesn't rest with the feed reader, but instead with today's browsers, and the URL passed to Web server logs is dictated, not by the feed reader, but instead by Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari, but I'm sure somebody smart (like Dave Winer) could figure this out and help us get more detail.

Technorati Fights Off Irrelevance With Return of Charts

Given the discussions of the last few days, it's obvious there's little better the blogosphere likes to do than find new ways to rank one another, show charts and count links. That's why the on-again, off-again discussion of Technorati's potential demise is so odd, as if there's anyone positioned to own the stats sphere, it's them, if only they can execute and stay focused. But in a mix of feature missteps and general lack of reliability, they've lost face amid challenges from Google, TechMeme and others.

Today, they charged back in a good way with the return of keyword charts and filtering by blog "Authority" in search results.

Previously, I had wondered where the charts went, but hadn't given it too much thought. Now, like Google's Trends feature, I can see how frequently a keyword has been mentioned each day in the blogosphere over the last 30, or choose not to see results from blogs that haven't gained enough popularity yet to be deemed relevant.

While the additions were noted on Technorati's official Weblog, I was alerted via RSS from David Sifry, the company's former CEO. Additionally, it looks like he was so excited about the move, he blasted his Twitter audience as well. How did I know? Not from using Twitter, but instead, from Technorati.

You can see some quick examples of the charts provided by Technorati by way of searches for the aforementioned TechMeme, Google Reader and Technorati itself.

Algorithms Cause Fight Between Linking and Original Reporting

I stepped away from the computer for the better part of 12 hours today, and found the world hadn't changed all that much. Guess that's good.

Following Sunday's kerfuffle around Google Reader stat tabulations, both official and unofficial, there continues to be a lot of discussion throughout the blogosphere on what statistics are relevant or not, and whether they are valuable, or simply point to a bunch of ego-focused invalids aiming to give themselves greater visibility. Additionally, comments from Jeremiah Oywang question whether some of the clear gaming of public news aggregators, like TechMeme, can be snuffed out.

Yesterday, Pete Cashmore of Mashable called B.S. on the whole argument, saying Google Reader's stats were prefilled, and therefore tainted. Of course, Google Reader spokespeople disagreed. Scott of Blogcosm, in an effort to round up the discussion, correctly notes a lot of this back and forth could have been avoided if Google had just listened to my requests back in March, for more transparent data. His clearest comment on whether they would? "I'm not holding my breath."

Which leaves us with the TechMeme issue. Jeremiah Owyang correctly pleads with bloggers to stop following TechMeme around and to start adding real substance. But, as I noted in a comment to him, sometimes it seems that those of us without the big brand names (yet) just might break a story or have original reporting, but proving that to a faceless algorithm is nearly impossible. As a result, to gain the real estate that's felt to be deserved, a little link play is needed.

Frederic at The Last Podcast backs me up, saying, "Sometimes I know I had a story first, but nobody linked to me, so I will still tag on to the Techmeme headline." It's kind of like chasing for scraps, but somebody's got to do 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?

Who Can Build an Inverse Technorati?

With all the hubbub earlier this week around the introduction of the new TechMeme Leaderboard, the fading aura of Technorati was once again brought to the fore, as TechMeme's new offering was seen as challenging the longtime blog search engine's hold on who owns the most "Authority" on the Web - best indicated by the number of unique sites provide direct links to their blogs.

In the last 12-18 months, Technorati has seen more than its fair share of bad news and bad karma. From consistent bouts with downtime and sluggish responsiveness, an all-out assault from Google to own the blog search space, bloggers' gaming of the site's ranking index, and the loss of CEO David Sifry, many don't see the Web 2.0 pioneer pulling out of the spiral and reclaiming share - especially as its latest forays into innovation, WTF and Topics, are more confusing than useful.

Despite all the above, Technorati still performs an excellent set of functions - tracking who has linked to your blog, sorted by date, or "Authority", and giving you your own "Authority" count, based on the number of individual blogs pointing your way in the last six months.

But, partly due to our recent thoughts around internal links, and the work of Yuvi Panda, showing how some of the biggest sites link outwardly, I've been thinking we need a spider-driven search engine that will index blogs, and provide reports on who we link to the most frequently. The question is, who builds it?

Ideally, the service would:

1. Provide aggregate reports on how many internal and external links were created, and in how many posts, over a given period.
2. Provide a ranking of the most-frequently linked-to sites or pages in a given period.
3. Recognize links from blog posts, and could exclude both "sidebars" and "action" buttons, (i.e. for Digg, Ballhype, StumbleUpon, etc.)
4. Be able to display subsets of data, such as the ranking of most-frequently linked-to sites in which I had a specific tag (i.e. Sports, Technology, Media).
5. Show me which bloggers have similar sites in my "Top 10 Linked", for example, which might indicate people who have similar interests, who I would undoubtedly want to read.

Yuvi Panda has created a statistical engine that crunches a single site at a time, reporting back on internal and external link frequency. Could this service be expanded to crawl the entire blogosphere, like Technorati, and provide individual bloggers with their own statistics? And could this service ever be marketized? I know I'd love to use it.

Tech Blog Link Power: Spiky Visitors or Sticky Visitors?

Download the Full-Size Image

While many tech bloggers live for the instant, drug-like satisfaction of hitting the Digg front page, or getting picked up by StumbleUpon or Slashdot, that rush of one-time visitors doesn't last long, and they won't come back again. A Digg visitor is usually one that won't comment, won't bookmark, and won't remember your URL.

Repeat visitors to tech blogs usually aren't forged by traffic spikes from well-known news hubs. Nor are they from search engines. It's a rare blog or Web site that can drive both high levels of both one-time visitors and repeat visitors. In fact, in my experience over the last two years of technology blogging, the very best sources for repeat, engaged visitors are:

1. Robert Scoble / Scobleizer
2. TechMeme
3. My own comments on similarly-focused blogs
4. Links from other B-List Bloggers
5. Shared Link Blogs (such as those from Scoble, Webomatica and others)

In fact, while I don't want to give Robert all the credit here, I have seen his hand in some of my highest-traffic posts. Often, his addition of my posts to his shared link blog or his own blog later leads to other bloggers linking, which pushes my post to TechMeme, in turn, leading to more follow-on posts and residual traffic.

But I can't just sit around and "write for Scoble", hoping he'll throw pixie dust my way. In order to engage with the crowd and encourage return visits, I need to link to others, make comments on other similar blogs, and make tools for engagement, like my RSS feed and MyBlogLog, easily accessible.

Thus, I've broken the Link Power Index into four sections:

1. High spikiness, low stickiness (Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Megite, Slashdot)
2. Low spikiness, low stickiness (Google, Facebook, Technorati, Yahoo!)
3. Low spikiness, high stickiness (RSS, word of mouth, comments, LinkedIn, B-List linking)
4. High spikiness, high stickiness (Scobleizer, TechMeme, Shared Link Blogs, MacSurfer)

Last month, "BeachBum" asked, in regards to some of my less-desirable visitors from Google Images, "Do you find that the porn traffic converts or do they just come and go?". The answer is no. None of them convert. Unless I start writing about porn full-time, they're not coming back, and that's okay. While a one-time visitor may have found a keyword sequence on Google that had your blog listed #1 overall, it's unlikely they're your demographic.

In fact, surprisingly, links from B-List and A-List bloggers have been more useful to me than links from more mainstream media. While I was flattered to see coverage of one of September's posts on MSNBC.com and the Houston Chronicle, they didn't drive the traffic of a strong link aggregator, and their visitors, as far as I could tell, were one-offs.

If you want a one-time spike of traffic, go ahead and write to make the front page of Digg (Yuvi Panda's Round 2 analysis of Digg's front page shows how...) or get a group of friends to Stumble your content. But to cultivate readers and engage with the blogging community, you should comment often, share ideas with your peers, and hope somebody with real pull, like Scoble, or MacSurfer, notices your effort.

The above image is how I've interpreted sticky traffic vs. spiky traffic to louisgray.com in the last year-plus. Do you have any comments or insight? Am I off the mark, or have you seen similar behavior? Please let me know, and feel free to use the image yourself. Links back are always appreciated.

Also on this topic: Chris Brogan: Scoble Effect Better Than Digg and Search Engine Land: December 2006 Statistics Review

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.

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.

Not All Links Are Created Equal

There's all sorts of hubbub on the blogosphere in the last few days, over how one ranks authority of bloggers' influence. It is in the aggregate number of links, or the aggregate number of individual sites linking? Should all that be discarded due to the advent of microblogging? Given the current thinking is to throw out total page views in favor of total minutes on a site, as well, it seems the whole concept of how we measure authority is in flux. But while most argue tit for tat on whether a blurb on Twitter counts as much as a link from another blog, there should be no secret that not all links are created equal.

In fact, while one blog could dedicate its story to you, it may not result in 1% of the traffic you can expect from another highly trafficked source, whether it be Digg, or StumbleUpon, TechCrunch, TechMeme, Scoble, etc. Compounding this issue, there is a significant population of Web sites that don't even enter into the radar of statistics aggregators like Technorati, due to the fact they aren't classified as blogs or "the live Web".

A few self-focused examples:

1) Today, my site traffic spiked in the middle of the day to about 8-10x normal traffic. Instead of 100+ visitors per day, my norm, I saw 100+ just between 1 and 2 this afternoon, only to see the one-time spike go away, and traffic return to normal. Was there new content? No. Was there any reason the content got less relevant in the space of an hour? No. So what happened?

A StumbleUpon user found my story from last week on Facebook where I suggested the site would go the way of Friendster and GeoCities before it. Submitted to the popular service, I was seeing 25-40 concurrent visitors on the site, with new ones every minute. Then, as quickly as the spurt arrived, they vanished. Yet, the one link had given me a boost of 100 visitors, not exactly chump change.

2) On July 5th, we saw a similar spike in traffic, to about twice normal, thanks to 100+ visitors coming to the site to see my simple comments that I had gone a full week without filling my need for an iPhone. Again, without any promotion on my part, the visitors came. So what happened?

MacSurfer happened. MacSurfer posted a link to the story, sending all sorts of Apple afficionados my way. Like Digg and StumbleUpon users, those one-time visitors are a cheap date. They show up, don't comment, and move on. But there's no better place to drop a Mac link than MacSurfer, the granddaddy of all Mac link aggregation sites. Of course, MacSurfer doesn't even hit Technorati's radar, so they had no idea the link had occurred.

3) Just two days prior, on July 3rd, we had another spike, thanks to Robert Scoble's mentioning my post on addicting games that can reduce productivity in a story he had written on the Web-based game phenomenon. Interestingly enough, though the Scoble crowd dropped in to the site in strong numbers, not even his A-list credibility could send me as many unique visitors as MacSurfer and StumbleUpon in this round. His crowd was more in the 80-100 range.

It's hard to determine what posts will get traffic, and which ones won't, or which ones will draw comments, and which will be ignored. There's also always going to be interest from people to determine what the most successful, influential, or highly trafficked sites are. It's clear that a link from me to Scoble would drive maybe 1-3% the traffic his way as he could drive mine, so anybody in the business of counting links and assuming they are all equal is absolutely off their rocker. Not all links are equal, and someday, somebody will come up with a great algorithm to show just how much "more equal" one can be versus another.

What Should Drive TechMeme's Content?

Robert Scoble ruffled a few feathers today, when he issued his latest missive against TechMeme's direction, as he sees the blog headlines site moving away from its roots and more toward general news coverage, like Google News. Robert says the site should give higher credence to those sites which are generating discussion, arguing in summary that he with the most links wins. But with TechMeme's proprietary algorithm being somewhat of a mystery, it's interesting to consider what I would see as the ideal blog news aggregation site, and how it would change what TechMeme is today.

For the large part, TechMeme automatically senses what are the hot blog conversations of the day. The more noise, the higher on the page, with those blogs with the highest readership and external links receiving the "lead" and referring or related sites being shoehorned in their shadow. Today's biggest discussions? The continued coverage of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, and the latest developments on Apple's iPhone. Today's news was that the devices have reached the mainland.

To be sure, both stories have tongues wagging. But Robert, looking inwardly, noted that one media site's coverage of Plaxo's new platform was rated more highly than his own dedicated coverage. Looking at referrals from Technorati, he can't figure why The Register would trump The Scobleizer. And he's got a point. If TechMeme's tracking discussions, The Register would be a related item, not the lead.

But I have other issues. It seems to me that if TechMeme wants to treat A-list bloggers equally with others generating news, then those who provide original coverage, or break the news, should be given higher credence. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten to a story before "the big guys" get it, only to be ignored. For example, last night, around 2, I posted that I thought Google Reader was down. A TechCrunch reporter, Duncan Riley, and I traded e-mail, we both visited and commented on a discussion board on the outage, and later, he wrote a story. That TechCrunch got the lead can make sense, as the site has tremendous credibility, and many external links, but not only was my note not the lead, but it didn't even get noted by TechMeme, who instead opted to carry follow-on notes from The Download Squad.

Total Technorati external links to The Download Squad? Eight. Total Technorati external links to my story? Eight. So all things being equal, I'd argue that the site which got the story first chronologically, with original reporting, should be given equal or greater value. But if, due to some mysterious rule, I'm being kicked to the curb for a lack of pre-existing popularity, that seems to conflict with what I would hope is the goal of TechMeme, to deliver the a real-time summary of what's happening now in the blogosphere, and to raise the profile of those bloggers who might not necessarily be household names. Otherwise, TechMeme isn't offering much real value.

Robert jokingly called himself an "arrogant bbbbaahhhhhsssssttttttaaaarrrrrdddddd" for calling for change, and wondering why his efforts didn't make it, and I might come off as a whiner as well, but with extra effort should come extra reward. Duncan Riley and I put in an equivalent amount of effort to find out the truth, analyze the situation and write it up. But as far as TechMeme is concerned, I'm a cipher. I can take the abuse, but I think the blogosphere as a whole would be better served to highlight original reporting from the corners of the Web that are driving value.