Personal Heresy: What OS You Use Is No Longer Critical

Last September, when Google's Chrome Web browser was first introduced, I told you how I spent the day on Windows, just to use it. While Google is making headway in bringing their Web browser to the Mac platform, or so I've been told, it just hasn't happened yet. In the interim, Apple introduced Safari 4 Beta with many of Chrome's much-awaited features, and Safari has remained my browser of choice, as I tend to find Firefox too slow and too bloated, especially as extensions are added.

Today, I came across an article by Rick Klau, who works at Blogger for Google, saying how he was using Chrome on his Mac, also through VMware, but most importantly to me, as a result of Microsoft's new Windows 7 evaluation program, which lets you gain access to the operating system for free for a year. With my nose in the air, I've watched from my Mac laptop the struggle Microsoft has had with Vista, and how users are begging for Windows 7 to arrive. I've seen Steven Hodson and others talk excitedly about what's planned from Redmond, and largely, I haven't cared. I didn't think it applied to me.

But think of what Rick told us. Any Mac OS X user who has VMware Fusion (or Parallels, I assume), can get access to Windows 7 today, just by downloading the 32-bit version of the .ISO file from Microsoft and getting started. No CDs. No hassles. Just an evaluation key, and letting VMware do the work. The geek in me overruled my Mac bigotry today, so guess what? I'm writing this post in Chrome on Windows 7 in VMware on Mac OS X. It just works.


What? Windows 7 installing on my Mac?

Windows 7? Mac OS X? Does It Matter Any More?

So - back to the focus of the post. For the better part of two decades, I have ranted and raved that Macs are superior, whether it be for the hardware or the OS. The Mac vs. PC commercials on TV are very amusing and help cement the belief I've got a better product. I can largely ignore malware, and know I can get a consistent experience from Mac to Mac for the most part.


Logged Into Windows 7 And Checking the Computer

Sharing My Desktop Between Both Mac and Windows

But I'm starting to think more and more that it really doesn't matter any more. I won't be ranting about the cloud and saying all software is dead, but within an hour, I've got my Web browser set up to all the bookmarks and social services I constantly use. I have iTunes in VMware on Windows 7 seeing all my music from the Mac. I have an FTP client I can use to post to the blog. Practically all I really need the Mac for is the Adobe Photoshop family, Microsoft Office and the comfort of knowing my e-mail is saved locally as well as through MobileMe.


A Typical, Active Web Session, But On Chrome and Windows 7
(Click for a larger image)
I don't feel I need to go feature by feature of Windows 7 and see if it has all the bells and whistles that Mac OS X does. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. But with very few exceptions, I could switch to Windows in this environment, and not lose too much sleep - something that would be made even more possible were I to push all my mail to GMail and take my word processing to Google Docs, for example.

Also in September of 2008, I speculated that the new world of browser choices is all about the hooks, especially from each company's mobile platform. The iPhone loves Safari, as you know. But Safari is also available on Windows, and the iPhone can be synced on iTunes on my Windows 7 partition. Hmm.

The line between what is an Operating System, and what is a Web browser, is getting increasingly blurry. And the traditional benefits of the Mac that always had me red in the face and starving of oxygen when trying to convert non-believers are going away. Maybe that's why I stopped caring about Apple rumors, as I told you last week.

If I do run into somebody willing to listen about what operating system they should choose, I can without hesitation say the Mac, because it's still what I know best, and I have had such a good track record with Apple. But Windows 7, so far, is good enough for most people, provided they can avoid bugs, malware and other irregularities.

So you tell me, am I out of my mind, or finally seeing the light?

10 Rules for Today's Consumers In the New World of Real-Time

The world of communication and product delivery is changing as the Web evolves and new services are introduced, enabling us to gain faster access to information, download richer media more quickly, and rapidly voice our opinions and feedback near and far in a wide variety of methods, including text, voice, video and imagery. As customers become more savvy and in tune with these new tools, we are also expecting those offering products and services to adapt, and as such, I thought it made sense to put forth what I believe are key tenets of a new consumer manifesto for today's real-time world.

1. We Want Access to Your Product As Quickly As Possible

We have become an "instant gratification" society. Our short attention spans are being rewarded with ubiquitous access to fast food, the rollout of ever-faster download speeds, near elimination of commercials, thanks to DVRs, and the ability to replace activities that were once limited to venues outside the home with in-home equivalents, including on-demand programming and simulated bowling on our Wiis.

When we order your products, or sign up for your service, we want access to them immediately. We don't want to wait for an approval period, and if the product is physical, we want it shipped quickly at the first possible convenience.

2. We Expect the Product to Work On Any Platform In Any Location

Many of us spend more time in the Web browser and our e-mail than we do in our Operating System software these days. We rapidly grow frustrated with any Web sites or applications that operate differently if you utilize different operating systems or Web browsers, and we expect to have access to your product, or a mobile equivalent, when we are away from our desktops.

3. We Want to See That You Allow for Feedback, Positive and Negative

The time of a siloed product experience is gone. We want to see that you provide a forum or link to a third party site that discusses your business and your products, and connects us with peers, where we can learn from one another in a venue that reaches you as well. And if you do provide a forum or bulletin for us to provide feedback, we will not look kindly on your deleting threads or comments of substance.

4. We Expect That You Respond to Your Customers, Quickly

Customers are talking about your products on their blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook and other aggregation sites. They may send you e-mail or post in public forums. While we can't expect CEOs of the largest companies to respond to every mention, we do expect company representatives to be listening, and for the smallest companies, we do expect founders and entrepreneurs to be accessible.

5. We Expect That You Join and Lead the Conversation

In the absence of communication from you, rumors and negative feedback can snowball. And while you might be coached in handling crisis PR in case something gets out of hand on blogs or Twitter, the best way to get ahead of potential issues is to have a presence in these social areas before problems occur, so that your customers have a place to engage you, and you them, helping to redirect the conversation and react. Additionally, you can use your communication outlets to show thought leadership and teach us better ways to use your product in ways we may not have considered.

6. We Want to See That You Continually Improve Your Product

Thanks to the now assumed two-way conversation with your customers, we expect you will be making incremental updates and improvements that both meet your corporate objectives and satisfy user expectations - beyond fixing bugs. Not only do we now expect instant access and near real-time responses, but we hope for rapid iterations that add to our satisfaction. A stale product will lead to cranky users, and breed disloyalty, as we may migrate to alternatives that appear to be updating more frequently with more agility.

7. We Expect You to Use Your Product and Be Visible

One of the greatest endorsements of your own product is that you use it and make it a part of your own visible activity - making you appear as a peer with a shared experience in parallel to that of your customers. For the smallest companies, including startups with 1-10 employees, we expect to likely see your CEO and founders visibly consuming their own dog food, both exulting in its benefits and suffering through its disappointments. And if you do put up a central example of your employees or founder using your products, don't do it once and never update again, because we'll know about it, and it will a stark reminder of your pandering.

8. We Expect That You Will Embrace or Lead Standards

As we are helping you create a business by selecting your product instead of that of the competition, we expect you will help us, and the ecosystem as a whole, by either embracing existing standards that are agreed upon, or by forging new standards and releasing them to the community for the benefit of all. We reject proprietary methods that don't deliver significant differentiation, or aren't forced by antiquated legalities.

9. We Expect You Are Driven By More than Money Alone

As consumers, we are eager to be seen as your partner, and to contribute to improving the next iteration of your product, or in helping to grow the information base around it, through consistent feedback, formation of user groups, or in creating content related to your product. As such, we do not expect to be seen as blank checks, there to support your bottom line when quarters draw thin. Instead, we want to see that you share a passion for your products and your market, and know that you, as we are, are driven by the potential of what your product can enable us to accomplish. We want to know the story of what you are trying to solve, and how it can help the community, more than we want to hear about your margins and your EPS.

10. We Want You To Treat Us As Informed Consumers and Partners

We have real-time access to news and many of us are rabid information sponges who are experts about you and your product. We don't want to be talked down to, and often have significant history with your organization. We despise the tendency to architect service, support and marketing to the lowest common denominator, and greatly appreciate your expecting that we have a baseline of understanding that includes recent headlines on you and the industry.

---

While books including the Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations have chronicled the move by consumers and businesses to e-commerce and a new world of online communications, continued advancements toward real-time news and exchanges of ideas lay the platform for a revamped approach to consumer relations with business. We are finding out more about you than you ever believed possible, and we are more than willing to share it just as quickly - both the good and the bad. Embrace the change and embrace us as partners and we can be your greatest ally. Be truthful, transparent and trusted, and you can help us cross the chasm from customers to fans.

Online Transparency Leads to New World of Group Dating

Guest Post By Micah Baldwin of Learn To Duck (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Like most everything, even dating has been changed by social media.

Before the explosion of the Internet, a man (or woman) had to find a woman (or man) that they were interested in spending more time with, then ask them out on a first date. The two of them would spend the time over dinner and maybe drinks learning about each other and figuring out whether there was enough interest to continue dating.

It was such a time-honored tradition, that books were written about the practice, and even movies were produced around the subject. Entire professions were created to help people overcome the difficulties of a first date.

Then the Internet came around.

Dating sites such as Match.com, eHarmony and others helped people get to know one other through online interaction prior to meeting. For many people, this was an amazing step forward. No longer were the first dates awkward. Now each party knew a lot about the other from all their interactions online. Pictures were exchanged; stories were shared; and likes and dislikes were enumerated. The first date became almost the triumphant conclusion of the online courtship.

Match.com (15 million users), eHarmony (17 million users) and PlentyofFish (30 million users) thrived in the pre-social network / pre-recession Internet. Even younger users (40% of Match.com, 40% of eHarmony and 35% of of PlentyofFish users are under 35 years old).

Enter social networks.

Now we have entered a world of "hyper-transparency." Most everyone between the ages of 25-35 has a Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and a million different social network profiles. Not to mention Google itself. With a simple name search so much information on an individual can be surfaced, that the awkwardness of first dates has returned. "What do they know about me? Did they see that picture from college?" often runs through people's minds. "How did you know that? Oh, you saw that blog post."

While many stories have been written about folks who have lost jobs or potential jobs (see: Cisco Fatty - www.ciscofatty.com) because of tweets or Facebook photos, how many relationships have been ruined by out-of-context tweets or photos?

As an example, the game "Shots in the Dark," where kids get together and drink shots in a darkened closet to ensure that no photos exist of their hijinks, has become common place in today's high schools and colleges.

As transparency becomes a required part of interaction, especially among people under the age of 35, paid dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony are finding it difficult to hang on to their users, especially those under 35. Jupiter Research indicates that only about 10% of the online population uses paid dating sites, which is a decrease of 6% since 2006. Match.com's largest growing segment is users over 50, seeing a 300% increase since 2000.

Spark Networks, owner of sites such as JDate.com, has seen annual sales drop to $14mm from $15.8mm a year ago. Free sites such as OkCupid, which appeal to the under 35 crowd, have seen new user signups increase 60 percent since September, from 110,000 per month to 180,000 per month.

Younger Internet users demand greater transparency among their online (and offline) interactions. "As a recent grad, it's expected that I will know more about the people I hang out with, " said Grace Boyle, 23. "With all the social media tools available, why would I use something like Match.com?"

Now dating sites such as Ignighter, TeamDating and Mixtt have created the concept of "group dating," where groups meet each other eliminating the pressure of the first date. Now there is no focus on the one-on-one interaction of dating sites, but rather on finding compatibility among groups.

Ignighter, the largest among the group dating sites (They were a Techstars company and recently announced $1.2 million in funding), believes that the group dynamic removes the stigma of having to perform on the first date. On Ignighter small groups create profiles and match to other small groups based on geography and interest area. Mixtt, who launched at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, has a similar format to Ignighter, with the group profile and matching concept. (Mixtt has received no funding to date, and their last blog post was in October. http://mixtt.wordpress.com).

Jacqueline Malan, 25, remarked "It's much easier to go out with a group of friends, since it removes all the pressures of the first date. Of course, if there is someone interesting, we certainly can connect on Facebook and Twitter. Erica Prather, 24, added, "and if there isn't anyone interesting, it removes the awkwardness of the goodbye."

The hyper-transparency of today's social network remove the fear of not knowing most of a person's "dirty little secrets."

For the traditional dating sites, it will be imperative for them to allow users to interact outside of their walled gardens in ways that could potentially reduce the amount of time spent on the sites.

Since everything is out in the open, it increases the difficulty of the first date and the strangeness of matching to someone online and building a rapport that can end up being misleading. Group dating is clearly the 2.0 answer to online dating. By allowing people to see potential relationships interact in the real world and among their friends, there is additional insight into real personalities.

Online dating has to evolve into a collaborative, transparent activity, much like most online interactions have become, to make the fake phone call from a dying mother obsolete, and the drink in the face a relic of yesteryear.

Resources:

• Maneater: Singles turn to online dating as recession empties wallets, hearts
• Dating Sites Reviews: Current Online Dating and Dating Services Facts & Statistics
• AllFacebook: Facebook Demographic Statistics
• Match.com: 10 surprising statistics you’ll be glad to know, including the odds that you’ll find an amour at this age.

Read more by Micah Baldwin at LearnToDuck.com.

Emend Lets You Play Copy Editor for the Entire Web

This evening, I got an odd alert from Twitter saying I had made an error with yesterday's story about optimizing headlines. Amusingly, in that story about headlines, I had made a simple copy mistake, confusing "you" with "your". The alert came from an application called "Emend", which, since its start in November of last year, has suggested almost 70 edits Web-wide, regardless of their source.

The service, which is hosted on Google's App Engine, lets you log in with your Google credentials, and report copy mistakes for any Web site or blog out there, from mine, as was the case today, to Wired, FiveThirtyEight.com, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, the New York Times, or practically anything.

The process is fairly straight forward.

Once logged in, to make "a new edit", just enter the offending URL, show the original copy that needs to be changed, and offer a proposal. When you hit submit, the proposed edit is added to the service's open items list and sent to their Twitter stream.

You can't post edits to Emend anonymously, which is good, and you can see your own list of submitted items (see mine here). From this list, you can choose an open edit and Tweet it from your own account, declare it "fixed", or if you're more daring, you can send a Trackback or pingback to the page - which would be more "in your face."


Anybody who has been on the Web for a good amount of time knows there is a secret army of grammarians waiting for you to slip up, mixing there and their or it's and its. Now, with Emend, you can make the process official and glory in your grasp of the language (or just openly mock those who don't get it right). A list of most edited sites is kept, including the status on proposed changes.

For fun, and just to see if I could tweak my cranky Canadian friend Steven Hodson, I suggested an its vs. it's problem from his own blog, using Emend, and blasting the edit out via Twitter. (see here)

If he doesn't change this post, I'll leave it open, but if he finds the time to make an edit, I'll declare it closed. It's essentially quality assurance for the Web. And if you tweet a proposed edit using Emend, I'll see it and do the best I can to fix things.



See if you can annoy your favorite blogger or journalist today at http://emend.appspot.com.

Let's Stop Speaking Like Machines and Start Speaking Like People

The path from engineering to marketing is usually not a straight line. Often there can be many stops along the way, as a product goes from idea to a spec to prototype release build, through the quality assurance process, and eventually general availability to the marketplace. As the product develops, so does the way it gets named, branded and described - starting with what's typically a straight forward problem/solution issue from engineering, and morphing into a more refined, even if not always as accurate, pitch from marketing. But in the Valley, often we skip those steps, and it's our users who end up paying the price - by being taught to think and talk like machines.

Are you a big fan of hash tags? Or are you wild about boolean searches? Do you find yourself reverting back to "Run DOS Run" instead of just typing and talking like a human being often online? Despite billions of dollars of investment and a plethora of companies trying to develop natural language (especially in search), we still have a long way to go.


Twitter, the hot tech topic of the month and many others preceding it, largely relies on two specific machine language symbols to connect users. The first is the basic @ sign which signals a "reply". The second, a # mark, or "hashtag", tries to connect people talking about the same event, location or idea. But what we're doing by using these symbols is work the machines should do for us. Instead of posting a hashtag about our location or event, Twitter should pick that up based on our profile data or GPS from the phone, or even group people's topics based on the content contained in the tweet and those immediately preceding it.

Web search engines have similarly expected high levels of machine like language from all their users. For example, a search on Google that shows results that mention "dog" or "cat" or "fish" but don't have the word "bird" in them necessitates a search string of "dog OR cat OR fish -bird". If I wanted to demand it have both dog and cat in it, but not fish or bird, I'd be changing things up a bit, typing: "dog AND cat -bird -fish". We're talking like this because we're trying to make nice with a database who thinks this way.


Even in this morning's FriendFeed beta site do you see the same kind of expectation that pushes users away from being people and further along the path of being cyborgs. While the company has some helpful pull-down menus on its advanced search page, it doesn't let you search by specific services, such as YouTube or LinkedIn (while the old version did). Instead, you're expected to type in "service:youtube" in the search field. To search all my friends' posts from YouTube that contained the word pizza in the title, I'd have to set up the advanced search to look for pizza in the title from my friends, and then add "service:youtube" to the query.


I expect the FriendFeed team can fix that query fairly quick with the addition of a pulldown menu, but that will be knocking down one mole before another pops up somewhere else - and many other services are less responsive, expecting you to talk in a way a machine would. Jeremiah Owyang and Loic Le Meur exchanged tweets about a month ago, calling the Web "primitive". But the Web just turned 20 years old. If this is how far we've come in 20 years, do we have to wait another 20 before we can just type or speak in what we want to know and get the right result?

Never Say Never Online. We're Keeping Records, You Know.

Two integral characteristics to the Web are that it is first, constantly changing, and second, practically everything is saved. So if you, like me, and many others, have ever said you will "never" do something, or will "quit" doing something never to return, you're just setting yourself up to be wrong. And once you undo that promise, you can look pretty silly in the process. So, if you are wavering in whether or not you will use a product, or if you're thinking of walking away from one you have already tried, it probably makes sense to keep the dialog internal, instead of sharing with the masses.

First, let me point out how dumb I was for trying this.

In January of 2007, I said, Why I Stopped Using IM and Won't Use Twitter. I wrote:

"What is said over IM is very rarely business, and prevents people from getting work done. It's a significant time-waster, and a technology whose time has come and gone. The idea that I would take it up a notch and tell Twitter my every step is yet another task that would get in the way of my actually working, so we're not interested."

So... yeah, how did that go? Well, a full year later (a long time hold out for me), I announced I "jumped the shark" on Twitter, and started using it. Almost a year later, I've now updated my Twitter account more than 1,400 times, and am following or being followed by about 4,000 people each direction.

In March of 2007, I took things a step further, and thought I'd be smart about saying not just one but TEN services I would "never" use. In a post titled, "Ten Geeky Technologies Not Coming to Our House", I listed Skype, Twitter, Linux, Plaxo, MySpace, BeBo, Piczo, XBox, PS3, the Wii, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Yahoo! IM, GTalk, Delicous, Flickr and EV-DO as things that would never make it in our home. In case you were counting, yes, that's more than 10 items, but I had grouped the game consoles, IM clients and social networks, for example.

So where do we stand? I have a Skype account, which I've used maybe three times in total. I have a Plaxo Pulse account. I signed up with a MySpace account, just to search for times my content was being used or linked to, we are big fans of the Nintendo Wii in our home, I've used Google Talk several times from within GMail, and I bookmarked almost 2,000 different Web sites on my Delicious account this year alone. Add onto that the fact I use my Flickr account for some photos of the twins, though I prefer SmugMug, and I look like a complete fool. Clearly, the mistake was mine to even say I was going to ignore these products, because in the interim, not only did those products get better, but I found more than an edge case to use them.

The same rule applies for those who might be using a service, and then loudly say they are quitting, never to return. Why do that, unless you're either looking for attention, or hoping others will join your cause?

For example, Mark Hopkins (formerly of Mashable) quit FriendFeed back in October, during a very political time for the site. He is back, of course, after a two-month hiatus. Similarly, when directeur, the creator of NoiseRiver, said he was going to leave FriendFeed (which we covered in October as well), the vacation didn't last all that long. He was back and active on the site within days.

More visibly, Jason Calacanis claimed in November that he was retiring from blogging, preferring to use an e-mail list to get his word out. While the e-mail list is alive and kicking, and growing, he has started posting to his blog again, practically every day, even if just to post pictures, or add a copy of his newsletter. It happens.

In May of 2007, we covered a topic I called "blog fatigue", specifically pointing to a few folks who were taking a breather from their sites. Truth is, we could all use a breather sometimes, be it from the blogging, or any services, but rather than say we're never going back, or never going to use something, it makes more sense to both keep an open mind, and probably, a closed mouth. I've proven I can be a leading indicator of nonsense, so don't expect me to tell you what I'll never use. I just might change my mind later.

ESPN.com Launches New Beta Site, Reduces Ads, Integrates Video

ESPN.com's New Beta Site Is Tighter, Has More Features
For more than a decade, ESPN has been on the cutting edge in terms of experimenting with Web site layouts, integration of JavaScript, Flash, and video. While not every iteration to the valuable Web property has been met with excitement from its fans, the worldwide sports leader is looking to again make change, in an effort to declutter its front page, while continuing to add more features, and in an interesting move that speaks volumes, they have done away with banner ads on the home page - likely ceding that the run of site ads were not driving the revenue needed in exchange for damaging the site's look and feel.


The Current Site is Mostly Text and Links
The new beta site, made available to the site's paid "Insider" members starting earlier this week, is said to contain a "larger video player, advanced score boards, improved search and better navigation".


The Current ESPN.com Toolbar

The New Beta ESPN.com Toolbar
Many of the online sports junkies I congregate with via Sports Blogs Nation and Ballhype have two major complaints with the current ESPN.com Web site. First, there are too many ads, in just about every nook and cranny, and second, the site's embedded video player automatically starts playing, making the first move to turn it off, even before reading the day's news and articles. If the new beta site is to be believed, both of those issues are addressed.


The New Beta ESPN.com Shows The Day's Scores
The new beta site separates the online articles from the videos through the use of tabs, showing "Top Stories" and "Top Videos". This both tucks away the video, but also offers, as promised, a larger viewing experience, if that's what you're looking for. And, thankfully, instead of wasting valuable screen space in the top center of the page with an unrelated banner ad, the network has delivered with a full scoreboard of the day's events, much like their scrolling ticker seen on all television broadcasts on their family of sports networks.

The new redesign also reduces the total number of top sections, which had become burdensome in the current version of the site. What had once been a single toolbar with eighteen different menu items, each with their own dropdowns, has been replaced with seven top level items, and a subhead menu for the major sports.

While ESPN has been considered a leader in terms of embracing the Web and making it a major part of their editorial, alongside their magazine and multiple channels, not all their Web ventures have been pretty. Part of the Disney/ABC family, ESPN was part of the ill-fated Go.com experiment during Web 1.0, and has also previously integrated as a big partner MSN. The various domains have strayed from the basic ESPN.com to ESPN.Go.Com, and long ago, ESPN.Sportszone.com, which now redirects to the main Go.com page. But the latest move doesn't smack of such blatant commercialism. While ESPN.com clearly knows how to make money, they've killed the center banner ad, and tightened up the content, which should make its most loyal customers, the Insider team, happy. Should they deliver enough positive feedback, the new beta should make its way to the standard site soon.

Obama Gives You a Seat at the Table on Change.gov

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

Today the Obama-Biden transition team started an unprecedented move in transparency and openness to the public in a move to get feedback from the public.  The team launched "Your Seat at the Table" on Change.gov, giving ordinary citizens the opportunity to discuss and give feedback on documents given to the Obama-Biden transition team by lobbying and other groups, right on the Web site in true forum-style.  From the Web site:

"Talking face-to-face with advocates and experts is a vital part of the Transition. But in past transitions, meetings like these took place behind closed doors and lacked the public input and transparency we're working hard to provide.

Documents from meetings with these groups are available now. Check out our new Seat at the Table feature on Change.gov, dig in to materials we've provided, and let us know what you think."

On the site, you'll find documents ranging from the "Latino Leadership Report to Congress" to the "Woman Business Owner's Platform for Growth".  Each document provides a place to comment about the story, or submit additional documents related to the story.  Each commenter is given the opportunity to then follow each discussion in their favorite RSS reader.  In essence, the Obama transition team has created a wiki surrounding these articles, giving the public full participation around the discussion table.  Commenters are already getting involved on each document, and there is some very intelligent discussion organizing around each one, showing the willingness and desire of the American public to have a part in this process.

Obama is very quickly appearing to mimick the likes of FDR with his open government approach, and perhaps his youthful understanding of technology, use of a Blackberry and iPod, younger kids, and family are all contributing factors to why his future administration and current transition team seem willing to do this.  We have seen similar campaigns from corporations like Pepsi, opening forums to listen to customers on FriendFeed, but never the likes of a President-elect.

In any means, the Obama administration is showing their willingness to listen and certainly adapt as they transition into the role of President.  Their understanding and adaptation of technologies is unprecedented, and makes me very excited to see what's in store, and what they can legally do when Obama gives the oath into Presidency.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Push Yourself to a Healthy Lifestyle With Web Communities, Tools

By Daniel J. Pritchett of Sharing at Work (Twitter/FriendFeed)

photo by nchenga

Has your career eased you into a sedentary lifestyle?  Are you keeping your mind sharp by tracking tech trends but losing your hold on physical fitness?  One of the big downfalls to wired life is the ease with which we can lose touch with our surroundings but the emergence of the social web is helping to change that.  Keep reading for some communities and tools that will help keep you informed and motivated in the never-ending journey to a healthy life.

Learn new exercises and proper form
Try YouTube and Wikipedia for demonstrations of proper form.  One of my favorite virtual personal trainers is YouTube's Scooby1961.  Scooby is a very modest and endearing fellow.

Real-world personal trainer Ross Enamait has a site full of workout information and a vibrant personal fitness community on his forums.  Ross's stuff tends to be geared towards the "combat athlete", so if you're not into boxing et al you might not appreciate the tone of the forums as much as you will enjoy Ross himself.

Share motivation through social networks

• Hit Traineo or Daily Mile to log your weight, diet, and workouts and to trade stories with other motivated individuals.
  
• Search for #twit2fit on Twitter for an easy source of motivation and a simple way to log your workouts.  There's also a Ning community built around Twit2Fit where you'll find forums and better opportunities to talk with people.
• Search photo host Flickr for photos tagged fitness or motivation.  Upload some of your own!

Track your progress with gadgets and web tools

My daily walk plotted on GMap Pedometer

• Some new runner-oriented GPS devices can log your daily run to the web for later analysis.  If you're training for a marathon you might really like one of these!  Thanks @fraser for bringing these to my attention.
• For a free alternative you can track the length of your walks or runs after the fact using Google Maps mashups like Treksee or GMap Pedometer.
  

Nutrition help
You'll want to keep your diet on track, too.  Check up on the nutrition content of your favorite foods using any of a number of online resources like NutritionData.

Your turn!
What keeps you motivated?  What are your favorite online health resources?  I'm sure LouisGray.com readers can chip in with your own personal fitness anecdotes, favorite health tips, and best-loved social networks for exercise help.  I'd say the one thing that really got me thinking about fitness in manageable terms was BripBlap's article titled 101 thoughts on losing 100 pounds.

Read more by Daniel J. Pritchett at Sharing at Work.

15 Useful Google App Engine Applications

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


Google App Engine, which was released in April 2008, is a platform for building, hosting and scaling web applications using Google's infrastructure. It allows a developer to build and test web applications without the worry of maintaining servers, and so forth. It's pretty much a plug and play type of solution, just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users. A lot of these applications are very raw and are just test beds for the developers. There are quite a few that are useful and have some potential. This post highlights 15 of them.

1) Down or Not

This is a simple utility that will tell you if a website is online or offline. This site also displays a tag cloud of the last 100 or so websites that have been queried for their uptime.



2) Check Google Pagerank

This will allow you to check your website's Google Pagerank. What's also great about this utility is the ability to check Pagerank for up to 100 domains per time.

3) Jumbra

Jumbra allows you to combine your favorite RSS/Atom feeds into a single RSS feed. This could save a lot of time with unnecessary checking of multiple feed urls. You can combine up to 30 feeds to create one custom master feed. You can also share this url, and when you add new feeds, your jumbra feed will update automatically. I also set up a testing Jumbra RSS feed you can take a look at.


4) Browse the iPhone app store

This application is an HTML version of the iPhone app store. You can see the full previews of any selections available for purchase such as music, movies, games, apps etc. I particularly like this app because you can browse the iPhoneappstore without the iTunes software. It's at the point of purchase that you are directed to the Apple iPhone App Store, where you must have the iTunes software installed to complete the sale.


5) Go2

Go2 is a quick, free web Proxy. Proxy servers usually sit between an application such as a Web browser, and a web server. They intercept all requests to the real server to see if it can fulfill the requests itself. I tested it by using a simple http request, and it worked. The results and IP address all point back to Google's network. Black Spider is also another Google App Engine/web proxy that works well.

6) TCP3 Short and Tiny URL Generator

TCP3 is a url shortening application. It serves the same purpose as the rest of these services do and it works efficiently. There is an option for creating vanityurls. They also offer a gadget for iGoogle, and a toolbar shortcut that you can use to shorten the url of whatever page you happen to be on at the moment.


7) MyTextFile

MyTextFile is an ajax-powered notepad for quickly storing bits, or a single plain file of text. You can use it to store notes, snippets of text, web urls,or any other form of scribbled information. Login in with your Google credentials, and easily write notes on the fly and access them anywhere.


8) URL-Info

This application allows you to find out more information behind a specific web url. This retrieves the HTTP headers, links, images, and others information. Be sure to add this tool to your SEO toolbox.


9) Linkius

This application gives you your own custom mobile url to access and store bookmarks. The bookmarks are accessible via your mobile optimized url. You can create groups, and add new links directly from your desktop. I find this to be a pretty simple and solid application for what it was designed for.

10) Treksee Map Pedometer

This is a useful mash-up that will show you the distance between two points, in miles or km. You could use it to track how far you drove, biked, jogged etc. I could see myself using this for plotting the mileage points on family summer vacations, which involves a lot of time spent on the road.


11) PrintWhatYouLike.com

This application allows you to print only the the relevant data on a web page. This is done by letting you remove or reformat the elements on a web page. Trim the excess junk, white space, advertisements and save paper in the process. This should be a definitebookmarker.


12) News Served Del.icio.usly

This is an interesting tool for discovery. It works by finding and reading the latest news by using your Delicious tags. You give the site your Delicioususername only and it generates news categories that are basically personalized with your bookmark tags. Clicking a tag will bring up the most relevant news sources for it, that are pulled from blogs and other news sites.



13) Re.flect.net

Re.flect is a simple website mirroring service. Here's how it works. "Give it a URL and Re.flect will attempt to serve a pre-cached copy of that URL. If the cached copy does not exist it will try to cache and serve that request on-demand, future requests will then be served from their cache limiting demand on the originating server."

14) Lullar Com

This application allows you to search and find people across the social web. You can search for social profiles by email, first name, last name orusername. It's very similar to usernamecheck.com.


15) Spy

Louis wrote a nice review on Spy back in August. Spy is great for monitoring elements of the social net for topics of interest and brand monitoring. The service scans in real time, Twitter, Google Reader, FriendFeed and more. Looking backwards as little as one hour, or as much as two days for the relevant topic sources. It's a great way to visualize the social media conversations going on about a specific topic.



You can find more interesting and usefull apps at the Google App Engine Application Gallery.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Web 2.0 and the 21st Century Gypsies

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)


I contemplated sharing this, since 1) it's quite embarrassing and 2) I'm a private person, but the past few days have been so bizarre, I just had to share.

Short version: I'm a hobo. Long version: I was moving out of my old place, and into a long term sublet November 6th, while I took time to search for "the perfect apartment". The subletee backed out last minute, my old place found a new roommate, a friend of mine agreed to let me crash last minute, but his new girlfriend decides to fly in to surprise him, so I had to leave, STAT. To top it off, my credit cards are in transit, so hotels were out of the question, which led to well... Hobo status.

Enter Web 2.0.

When my friend told me I needed to find another place to crash STAT, my first instinct was Craigslist. He saw me browsing and said: "Are you insane? Craigslist is full of freaks. Go to couchsurfing.com." and couldn't believe what I saw. From their site:

What is the CouchSurfing mission?
When we incorporated CouchSurfing International, Inc. as a non-profit, we filed our official mission statement as:: "CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance, and facilitate cultural understanding."
-- via couchsurfing.com's FAQ

Basically, couchsurfing.com is a network of 21st Century Gypsies.
It's a site filled with travelers and people who host - world wide. It's not about finding a place to crash, but connecting people and not as dangerous as it sounds. Participants:

1. Create extensive, detailed profiles.
   
2. Engaging in local activities, discussion groups, chats, are the norm.

There are several precautionary measures to ensure a person is not a crazy.

Call me insane, but desperate times calls for desperate measures, and I sent out a 911 message and found someone willing to put me up for a night, while I exhausted options, looking for a new sublet. The experience? Interesting to say the least. I met a nice young gentleman from Spain, new to San Francisco, and very very single. Don't get me wrong, he was far from creepy, educated, and well mannered. I chose to take this gentleman's offer, since my request was extremely short notice and I jumped on the first person that responded.

It's been a few days since signing up and posting the 911 message, but the community is still getting back to me. Couples, singles, females, males, groups... I'm really amazed at people's hospitality. Granted, this site is not for everyone, but a great networking tool for students, avid backpackers, and budget travelers.

If it weren't for this predicament, I would've never found this site, got to see a different element of Social Networking, and thought it would be neat to share.

Now please excuse me, I'm going to try and sign these folks up to Twitter and FriendFeed.

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

Silicon Valleywood?

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira just posted a great piece about women in tech and how we shouldn't sell ourselves short. I would expand on that, but haven't been around tech bloggers and journalists long enough to give an informed two cents.

But...

I have been in IT for a while. Quickly approaching 10(!) years, to be exact. Wow. Heck back when I started, it was so uncool to be in tech -- even employed by a well known software corporation. My friends made fun of me, my work place was male dominated with the geekiest / nerdiest but brightest engineers. (Think worn out, raggedy dingy white t-shirts and too tight stone washed jeans.)

Fast forward to today, IT is definitely not what it used to be.

Geeks are no longer just white T-shirts with jeans, there's now a "scene", and even a gossip rag! Since becoming fairly active in Social Networks and especially being based in SF, I've been invited to countless Tweet-ups, and parties. Cyndy pinpoints the exact reason I choose not to go. I may be unfamiliar with the blogger / social network / entreprenuer circle, but definitely not new to partying. I've been there, done that, and very aware of what people assume upon first meeting me. I refuse to fall in the: "gaining notoriety by what I'm wearing or who I'm dating rather than gaining respect for my knowledge and insight" category. I am also 100% with Cyndy on how "we (women) don't need to sell out to make it in tech".

That said, I don't see tech turning into a mini-Hollywood a problem.

Within every subculture, there is always sub-categorizing -- just like school. I really thought once I finished schooling, the in-crowd vs nerds / geeks vs weirdos, etc., would be done with it. I don't know about you, but I still deal with all the things I hated about school on a daily basis. Think about it: from our workplaces, social circles, online communities, to even within our own families, it surrounds us everywhere! At least now as adults, it's easier to not get involved or care (at least for me), but that doesn't mean it's nonexistent.

So for the tech scene to have its own mini-Hollywood means the tech circle is growing larger. With that, comes the array of labels, sub categories, and classifications and I couldn't be happier. I love tech and everything tech related, so the expansion and growth is welcomed!

Now, it's up to us.

Us being anyone who blogs, reads blogs, or active members in Social Networks, to change with the way the industry is changing. Especially, since data is democratizing. Whether you're a blogger, a reader, a commenter, content provider -- however which way you want to participate, we have more and more choices to read who we want to read, listen to who we want to listen to, and "follow" who we want to follow. Data is no longer consolidated and centralized like it once was, and moving forward we're only going to get even more choices. Hence, it's up to us.

After all, just like Hollywood, the tech starlets, groupies, and wannabe starlets wouldn't be a part of the mini-Hollywood if it weren't for an audience, right?

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits.

The Valley's Proponents Become Its Critics in Hard Times

Friday's stock market roller coaster was one to remember. With the Dow Jones Industrial Average at one point down more than 500 points early in the session, again, a colleague and I headed to lunch just before noon with the market down more than 400. As we ate, the TV screens alerted us to a market rally that saw the market reverse course, racing beyond the break-even mark to crest at almost 200 points up, only to fall back down to a loss of more than 100. In between bites and conversation, I'd pass along a report: "Down 200. Down 100. Even. Up 50. Up 150. Even again." My latest position in Apple, created just Friday morning, at one point was up 10 percent in the space of hours - making me feel good, if just for a day.

The rise and fall euphoria and despair that we've all seen as the market rises and falls (and falls and falls in recent weeks) is not uncommon. The crowd mentality sees us piling on to negativity when things are bad, and blocking out risks when things are good. But even as things have gotten a lot more tight in our own personal financial accounts and 401ks, banks have gotten wobbly, and credit has gotten unstable, many of the major tenets that saw the Web 2.0 world lauded just a few months ago are still there - namely the ability to start a new company for much less, to attract a solid user base, and reduce burn rates to a level that wouldn't require significant funding. This means that even in times of scarcity, there's room for innovative ideas. And for those companies that already raised sufficient funds, or who have achieved profitability, their major focus should be hitting product milestones and gaining revenue, rather than worrying about keeping the doors open.

With the near extinguishing of companies entering the public markets in the last twelve months, combined with VCs saying funding will be tight going forward, and valuations lighter, the squeeze will be most noticed by companies looking to get the next series of capital, or those who find acquirers won't be offering the big numbers they had hoped. Many companies will be proposing hiring freezes to slow the burn, or letting non-essential people go.

But with that said, the technology advances that have let companies get off the ground for less mean the pressure from VCs and board members to turn thousands into millions and millions into billions is less than it was five years ago, when we saw a similar slowdown. Even Twitter, which has one of the highest profiles of "pre-revenue" companies, has only raised $15 million, a small fraction of the hundreds of millions given to Webvan, Kozmo.com and other high-profile Web 1.0 flameouts. Seesmic, which visibly laid off seven yesterday, also has raised a conservative $12 million or so in two rounds, and Silicon Valley darling, FriendFeed, has only raised $5 million in its initial round.

It has only taken a few months of bad news on Wall Street to see some of the most visible proponents of Web 2.0 startups start to pick on them and demand significant changes. But the calls for a route to revenue and product quality should have been there when times were good, not just now.

Most of today's Web companies don't need staffs of hundreds. They don't need seven-figure marketing budgets. And many are cutting costs on their technology infrastructures by turning to services like Amazon's S3. So the burn rates of years ago have lessened dramatically.

What recessions do is weed out the bad ideas from the good and move timetables. Great ideas continue to be supported and funded. During the last recession, LinkedIn was founded, in 2002. Google went from being a curiosity to a world leader, going public in 2004 after years of slowness for Web companies looking to reach the market. And in 2003, MySpace was started, following Friendster's 2002 debut.

That the economy's struggles will have far-reaching impact is not under dispute. But for Web companies that have been smart about keeping their costs low, and their revenue and profits in sight, they will power through. To prematurely call for their demise and dance on the grave of those that don't survive is not the way to go.

See also:

Dare Obasanjo: TechCrunch Turns Into F-----Company 2.0
The Inquisitr: Paging Chicken Little - The Sky Isn’t Falling

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.

Will Future Information Consumption Be In Nested GUIs?

As Web technologies evolve, new, innovative ways to absorb information via the Web browser are being created. Some, like Google Reader, and blogs on SportsBlogs Nation are utilizing keyboard navigation, letting you type letters to jump from one new item to the next, while others let you move between screens by using the arrow keys, instead of clicking the mouse. An enterprising developer, Michael Buchanan, is hoping that nested GUIs, which he calls "Microspaces", will be a new way to approach navigation - letting you view a page within a page, within a page, all without opening a new browser window.

While he's just getting started with Microspaces, an initial trial site, called StoryLinez, has been posted, that brings top news sources for business, entertainment, health, news, sports and tech in one place. While that in itself is not new, the way the site operates is.


StoryLinez.com Wants to be a Hub for News On All Topics
Instead of clicking on an item, and getting a pulldown menu with multiple options, the nested GUI technology is triggered via mouse-over. For example, having your mouse over the "Business" section opens up a smaller window within a window, with sites ranging from CNN to Fox News, Yahoo!, Forbes and BusinessWeek, surfacing.


The Nested GUIs Technology Shows a Site Within a Site
Rather than send links off to a new browser window, as most sites do, putting your mouse over these news sources, and their resulting headlines instead shows the story in a section within your same window. And when you're done reading, move your mouse back to the listed options and get more stories. The goal? As Michael wrote me, "One of the things I wanted to accomplish was the ability to navigate everything without clicking." (See the blog for more)


You Can Click Through to Articles but Not Leave the Site
We've gotten used to flooding our Web browsers with new windows and new tabs. New Web 2.0 technologies are helping us to see the Web as a foundation for applications, which will need new ways to approach data. Could nested GUIs be one of the future ways we'll consume media? The StoryLinez site is fairly raw, but it's an interesting experiment. Could you get your news this way in the future? Michael hopes you will.

(Also See: TechCrunch: Microspaces: Playing With Nested GUIs from August 19th)

Strands Targets the Mainstream by Going One On One

One of the most common themes in the blogosphere, and here at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, is questioning how Web applications many of us are using will ever reach the mainstream. Will people's parents, relatives and co-workers ever get Twitter the way they finally get e-mail? Will FriendFeed ever get the kind of name recognition that Facebook and MySpace have? Strands, a nascent lifestreaming and content discovery service, is launching a new initiative, starting today, to take the service mainstream, to the masses themselves in a project they call oOo: One on One, or Operation mainSTREAM.
(See their blog for more).

Drew Olanoff, community manager for Strands, says "A lot of what we create is meant to make our lives easier and more entertaining," and that "companies like Pandora deserve to be known outside of our circles," so what the team at Strands is looking to do is to give its users many invites, and will incentive them to invite non-geeks to the service. Those who recruit "nongeek friends" can win geeky prizes, including an Apple MacBook Air for you and your friend, an iPod Touch for you and your friend, or miniature Flip video cameras.


Strands: Operation mainSTREAM
But Strands isn't going to be sitting around, waiting for you to do all the hard work of recruiting by yourself. The team is going one one one (oOo), traveling state to state, to take the story of all these cool Web applications to the masses. As Drew writes, "I'm going to be visiting old folks homes, hanging out with some soccer moms, and hey...maybe some lawyers, to let them know why technology and your personal presence online is important."

Will this work? Will taking something that's considered an edge technology even for those of us in the Silicon Valley, and introducing it to technophobes in North Dakota and South Carolina give services like Pandora, Last.fm, and Twitter that push they need to get into the mainstream? Probably not all by itself. But as part of the micromedia panel I participated in yesterday, we discussed a new rule of marketing. You tell 10, who tell 100, who tell 1,000. If Drew and the Strands team can find the right 10 people in each of these locations around the country, they may be on to something. And just maybe, Web 2.0 applications have found their new evangelist.

DISCLOSURE: Drew Olanoff, the Community Manager at Strands, is also the CTO of ReadBurner, where I am an advisor, and hold a small equity position.

Facebook Still Banning Aliases to Avoid Becoming Fakebook

That Facebook has an itchy trigger finger when banning users or applications for assumed wrongs is not new or a mystery. People have been kicked off the site for adding friends too quickly, for using fake names, or trying to export data from the walled garden social network. And Facebook's adherence to this policy, especially when it comes to pseudonyms, puts them at odds with just about every other popular Web service out there. Just last night, a former colleague of mine, and now a Web friend, found himself on the outside looking in.

Vicky Chaudry (or Chau), whom I worked with at my current company from 2002 to 2005, is now the founder and CEO of StartupNewz, a Digg-like service focused on startup and technology news. To better highlight his immersion into Web 2.0 and social networking, Vicky took to calling himself Vic Podcaster, a name which has served him well, on LinkedIn, where he has more than 500 connections, on Twitter, where he is followed by more than 1,150, and on FriendFeed, where he follows almost 1,300. His pseudonym also didn't seem to stop his ability to get into the recent TechCrunch August Capital party (see pictures on Flickr) or the F8 afterparty for Facebook developers last week.


But eight months after opening a Facebook account under his name, Vic Podcaster, Vicky tried to log in to the service last night, to find his account had been disabled, "because the name it was registered under was a fake". Amusingly, this screen is surrounded by a note that "Everyone can join", and doesn't offer any kind of helpful link to challenge the ruling.


In the FriendFeed discussion that ensued after Vicky told everyone he had been banned, the once-banned Robert Scoble said, "Facebook sucks for just this reason.", while Jesse Stay suggested "One thing Facebook does still need to do, but I argue this is a minor thing, is make sure a human is reviewing disabled accounts before they get disabled."

Vicky's clearly not the only person using an alias on Facebook today. My high school acquaintance Bill Parnell is going by the name of Biznill Parnorell. There's even a user who friended me by the name of Daily Contempt. Surely that's not their given name?

I've been giving a lot of thought of late to the migration away from nicknames and more toward real names, especially as people are taking ownership of their blog posts, microupdates and comments across the Web. In most cases, users of apps like Facebook and FriendFeed are using their own given names, first and last, unless the user name is already taken. Facebook clearly didn't like Vic's changing his name to "Vic Podcaster", although LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed and GMail had no problems with it. But what constitutes fake? If Robert Scoble changed his login to Robert Scobleizer, would he be banned again? And while Michael Arrington uses his real name on Facebook, its the TechCrunch brand he's aligned with on Twitter. What if he went by Michael TechCrunch on Facebook? Grounds for banning?


Vic Podcaster Still Lives On LinkedIn
Aliases aren't the only reason you can get banned from Facebook, of course. Scoble was banned for using an early version of Plaxo software, and many have been banned for spam-like behavior. Alex Hammer, who I've written about before, e-mailed me three weeks ago, saying, "I'm working to get reinstated back into Facebook because I added too many friends too quickly." In their defense, he adds, he was warned.

So who's right here? Is Facebook wrong to stop people from using aliases, or are the other sites that have more permissive rules the ones who are making the mistake? Should Facebook have waited eight full months before banning Vicky? Couldn't they tell by his activity on the site that he's a real person with real connections? It seems to me at the very least, a human should have reached out to him and offered a way to change his last name to get it within guidelines.

Walking the SEO Balance Beam

Guest Post By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira (E-mail / Twitter)

There's a battle brewing, and it's between SEO advocates and content creators who prefer a more organic growth to their sites. On the one side are the SEO abusers who litter poorly written content with an oversaturation of keywords, making content unreadable, and on the other are those who pay no attention to keywords, don't realize that you can add the Page Rank indicator to the Google Toolbar to check the rank of an individual page, and write whatever they want, with no thought to subject focus or search results at all.

There is, however, a fine balance that can be struck between the two sides, and that balance can be achieved with a focus on the reader rather than on the stats. If I had my way, I'd write whatever I wanted with no thought to the dreaded search engines, but if I did that, I probably wouldn't get paid for my work, so I try to keep a constant eye on that balance.

Much like advertising, overuse of SEO techniques is becoming an annoyance to readers, and if someone were to develop a plug-in like AdBlock Plus that could filter out content that was oversaturated with keywords and internal links, people would download it by the thousands, if not millions.

Still not sure what I'm talking about? Let's take a look at this Mahalo page for a spoof video. You'll notice that in a 68-word Guide Note, there are 13 internal links to other Mahalo pages. Some links are split across lines, making it look like even more. While it may look good to a search engine spider, it looks unreadable to the casual visitor. How many users will actually click those links to find more information? How many will instead click out of the page and move onto something more user-friendly?

Walking the balance beam when it comes to SEO involves a common sense approach: keeping the keyword in the URL, title, and text, but not beating the reader over the head with it just to make it more obvious to the search engine spiders. And sure, offer an internal link for something that the reader may want to see for additional information, but don't link to every single possible page on your site in an attempt to plump up your page rank and search engine appearance. Your readers will thank you, and hopefully, send others.

Seeing The Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking

This afternoon, I caught a video broadcast with Wayne Sutton and Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net, where Corvida had the opportunity to share her story of asking Verizon to drop their relationship with Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, in light of his controversial video parodying African American bloggers. While both carried on a strong conversation around the issues of race, bigotry and getting ahead through hard work, their efforts were dwarfed by some of the most hateful, shameful, racist speech I've been exposed to in a very long time.

It's common knowledge that anonymous commenters often fall to the lowest common denominator. The wider the audience, the less respectable the discussion, with YouTube being a perfect example.

Most of the time, the places I engage in social media (and real life) are civil. But as Corvida and Wayne talked about her family's efforts with Verizon, and how black tech bloggers are often stereotyped, with Feldman's video as an example, the Yahoo! Live chat screen filled with filth, with racist words, references to Kentucky Fried Chicken and watermelon, comments on Obama, and discussion of penis sizes.

Essentially, you name the negative stereotypes and hatred that could be spewed against the African American bloggers, and they were there.

I don't want to spread the filth that was said during the chat, but it's worth exposing these purveyors of hatred, to illustrate the nonsense. If only there were a way to break through their anonymity...

There's no question the work was done by a few anonymous malcontents, but it was eye opening to unfortunately be reminded those people are out there, and are willing to share their nonsense in an attempt to intimidate both Wayne and Corvida, in hopes of persuading them to stop. But it didn't work. As Wayne said the issue of Loren Feldman was "a wake-up call for African Americans", today's nonsense was an unfortunate wake-up call for me.

I'm glad both Wayne and Corvida maintained their professional integrity in the face of ridiculous nonsense that could have brought weaker people to tears, but there was absolutely no reason they should have had to put up with that horrible behavior, which, as it was undoubtedly intended to do, made me quite angry.

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and with all the advancements we think we've made in Civil Rights, we still have to see this horrible, ridiculous, ignorant junk. I was appalled at what Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through, and I wish I never had to see it again. These people do exist, but they don't deserve a platform, and in this case, there should have been ways to either increase filters, block by IP address or reveal the real names of the trolls.

I am very sorry Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through that in what was otherwise a very engaging disucssion, and I hope this filth doesn't slow any person of any background down for a second.

Is Your Web Getting Filtered? What's Blocked or Unlocked?

Entering our third full day here at Lucille Packard Childrens' Hospital with our twins, I have to say I'm impressed with the easy access to high-speed wireless Web. For me, wireless high-speed access is a must, and I don't have much to complain about. Interestingly, the hospital's system, by default, has instituted filters, in theory to protect them legally, and maybe to conserve on bandwidth. This doesn't bother me too much, but as I surf, seemingly with one hand tied behind my back, I find that the sites they've opted to block, and those they've allowed to go through at times have me scratching my head.

I noticed I couldn't log into my Mac Mail via the desktop application right away, but Webmail was fine. I later noticed some sites were blocked when I tried to visit Athletics Nation and follow yesterday's A's game. Safari reported being unable to visit the site. I checked other Sports Blogs Nation sites. Those too, were all down.


A Sample of Approved Sites and Those Blocked

Then, after many on FriendFeed had demanded some early photos of Sarah and Matthew, I tried to take the pictures I had from the last two days and post them to Flickr, feeding the beast. But they were blocked. Then, I tried to log on to my FTP site and upload them to louisgray.com directly. No dice, again.


Sorry, can't upload via FTP!
Luckily, I did find a work-around. By sending the photos via the great Mail2FF program, as attachments, the photos themselves were saved on Amazon's Web Service and archived there. (It's the same way I "cheated" and got FriendFeed to host the graphics in this post for me)

After last night's post on my 10 beliefs in blogging and the Web, I saw someone had posted the story to Hacker News. But I couldn't see who, again, thanks to it being blocked.

IM Blocked: iChat and Google Talk don't get through.
The blocking seems well intended, but random. It makes sense that I shouldn't have access to Fleshbot or AdultFriendFinder (mind you, I just checked them to see if they were filtered), but it makes less sense to have sites like Sports Blogs Nation blocked, when ESPN.com is approved, or to have Hacker News blocked if Techmeme is given a pass.

I'm lucky that I usually don't encounter Web filters. I have free-flowing access at home and at work, and this weekend's experience has been outside the norm. If you are filtered, whether it be at work, at school, or at the library, what sites have you found blocked that you think are wrongly stopped? I'm curious to see if this setup is too aggressive, or in line with your own experience.

What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations

Sometimes, when I talk to people about why I blog, and what I set out to accomplish through covering what I do, and engaging where I do, I say that I am trying to help shape the Web, and blogging as a whole, to be what I want it to be - a better community with some strong standards for engagement, ownership, news gathering and innovation. Over time, as the number of posts here has racked up, you can see some of these core elements throughout the site. As an exercise, I thought I'd outline my beliefs, and I'm eager to hear your comments, whether these are shared or we disagree.

1. I Believe You Should Enjoy What You Do

Whether you are are the co-founder of a hot startup, an entry-level programmer at a technology monolith, a blogger, or simply a fan of social networking tools, you should be sure you're doing what you're doing because you enjoy it, and at its core, it brings you happiness. At times, I've seen people succumb to the stress of posting every day, of racing up or down the comparative measures out there, or slog day in and day out at companies because they're too unmotivated to seek an alternative. Even on those days when the work required seems overwhelming, it's worth stepping back and saying, "Are you having fun still?" As Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford University a few years ago, if the answer is no too many times in a row, it's time to think about doing something else.

When you're not having fun, it shows. Your work gets sloppier. Your posts get crankier. You start talking more about how much time it's taking, how much pressure you're feeling. And when that happens... take a deep breath, or take a break. Reevaluate why it is you're doing what you do.

2. I Believe In Supporting and Promoting Innovation

Without an entrepreneurial spirit, change in our technology landscape would be muted. Innovation can be sparked from a single idea, whether creating a new market, or simply improving a new one. When I see potential, I want to highlight it, and work as a partner with the team aiming to deliver a new experience, and fulfilling their dreams.

Often, a rush to call "foul" on a product, to give it a negative label, or call failure, is done more to grab attention than through benevolence. You're not doing the innovator a favor, or their potential users a favor, but seeing the glass half full.

3. I Believe In Trusting First, Looking for Holes Later

For the most part, people don't start businesses or create products with ill intent. New services crop up every day, and the overwhelming number are there to help you learn something new, find something more quickly, or reach peers in a new way. As it can be relatively inexpensive to launch new Web services, or to start blogs, there are, simply put, tons of them out there. Many do very similar things. But at their core, most are well-intended.

For every spammer or troll, content scraper or hacker, there are thousands of others working on the right side of the law. And sometimes, when it looks like a service might be on the border of what's "right" and what's "wrong", I tend to give the benefit of the doubt, so the entrepreneur can explain themselves. I also believe that every service out there, from those a day old, to the market monoliths of Google and Microsoft, has issues. It can be fun to focus on those issues, but unless they completely disrupt the user experience to the point the product is unusable, I feel the product owner is both aware of them, and is working behind the scenes to make the product more robust, faster, and more fully featured.

4. I Believe In Equal Access to Tools and Opportunity

I believe in the availability of free or inexpensive services that enable people to broadcast, share and collaborate. I believe that for-profit institutions should make efforts to spread the availability of the Internet, broadband and wireless access to bring this information spigot to people everywhere, regardless of their financial or geographical status.

5. I Believe In Portability Of Content and Clear Ownership

I believe that products should enable support for open standards, such that data can be simply exported and imported from one service to another. I believe that these open standards should be deployed such that content, be it blog posts, news, comments or other actionable items (be it up/down votes, likes, avatars, etc.) be easily transferred, while retaining clear ownership by the original individual performing the activity. This portability should be developed in such a way that the third-party service, the content creator, and the person reaction to said content, all have the option to approve or disapprove portability or modification.

In those cases where full portability is not yet available, I believe services have an obligation to state their intentions to move toward an API, an open standard, display best intentions, or publicly declare their position to keep data siloed, buyer beware.

6. I Believe In Giving Credit Where It Is Due

I believe in bloggers giving best effort to determining the original source of news, and providing linkage, especially when the alternative is to link internally. I believe in making it clear who the entrepreneurs are behind services, and displaying a human face to what could otherwise be a personless brand.

I believe in displaying clear attribution for the source of quotes, paraphrasing or other use of third-party content, even if it is from what's considered a competitor.

7. I Believe In Supporting The Little Guy, While Not Hating the Leader

I believe in giving a new service or a small company its unfair share of support and coverage, as they make a valid attempt to enter a market. I believe in helping the service clarify their message, their features and benefits to the point they achieve critical mass on par with other market leaders. I believe that this presumed bias can be shown without disparaging leading services, or holding ill will against those already having achieved success.

8. I Believe In Transparency and the Removal of Barriers

I believe that those services who make their intentions, their product plans, and their updates clear to users and partners will achieve a higher level of success and trust than those that do not. I believe that company representatives should be easily accessible through clear methods, and should give best efforts to rapidly respond to feature requests, downtime or other concerns.

I believe that activities or barriers which reduce transparency, reduce access to company representatives and create confusion will be extremely damaging, reducing trust and good will.

Similarly, bloggers should be extremely reachable and should display and pre-existing biases, monetary engagements or sponsorships, be there any.

9. I Believe In The Ability to Disagree Without Ill Will

I believe that it is absolutely possible for multiple people to look at the same data set or service and achieve completely-differing conclusions and perspectives, without meaning either person to be lacking in intellect or experience. In the event that disagreements do occur, I recommend open communication and statement of beliefs will be much more successful at proving a point than labels, one liners or personal attacks.

In parallel, services can expect that not every review will be one they want to print out and send home to mom. If the author's found to not have a conflict of interest, efforts should be made to expose that, but otherwise, it can be assumed there might be some valid points, even in the most vile of screeds.

10. I Believe In Finding New Ways To Find, Share, Manipulate Data

I believe that the creation of data and content is nearing commodity status. New blogs and services debut every minute and die almost as quickly. But each month brings new and exciting ways to manipulate, share or otherwise locate the best data, through the launch of new social networks, aggregators, search engines, or semantic tools. The services we all use today will almost with certainty be different than those we use next year at this time.

It is with these 10 tenets, and likely more, that I look to engage. Through my small voice here, I believe I have been lucky enough to play a role in discussing how blogs give attribution, how they prioritize external links vs. internal links, the growing issue of RSS repurposing and comment fragmentation. I've tried to support the little guys and highlight individuals doing innovation. I've made a small number of negative posts, in contrast to my more supportive posts, and avoided throwing the second stone at times when my views weren't universal. The Web, and our ability in the blogosphere to impact it and play a role, is ever changing and exciting to me.

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.

The Web Offers a Window Into Paradise's Burning

Three weeks ago, I told a story about how Northern California fires had once chased my family and me from our home, as evacuation orders had our family of seven packing our belongings and heading to the central valley floor, not knowing what we'd find when we returned. This weekend, the fires came back to Paradise, where I lived from 1994 to 1999, and where my family spent 10 years. But this time they weren't stopped at the town limits, and the fire has consumed more than 70 homes, so far scorching more than 23,000 acres.

Over the last 24 hours, I've turned to the Web to learn all I can about this tragedy, and through the various tools out there on the Web, from newspaper Web sites to user submitted photography, recorded video, and even a streaming broadcast of the county's public safety scanner, to learn what has happened. And the news is not good.


Firefighters Take to the Air to Fight the Blaze
While this blaze, dubbed the "Humboldt Fire", hasn't gained the national attention given the San Diego fires last year, or even the awareness we saw in the Bay Area for the fire last month in the Santa Cruz mountains, the effects are just as devastating. While I haven't called Paradise home for almost a decade, we've gotten word over the last day or so that friends' homes have been wiped clean from the earth, their life's dreams and possessions erased in a flaming fury.

The two main sources of news have been the area newspapers, including the Chico Enterprise Record, where I once wrote as a staff intern back in 1995 and 1996, and the smaller, hometown Paradise Post.


See KCRA Sacramento's Report on the Blaze from Friday
Photos from the Enterprise Record have been circulated through the Associated Press, and show stories of loss, heroic efforts from those fighting the blaze, and agony. The Enterprise Record also asked those effected by the fires to submit their own photos, and both collections feature hundreds of first-party accounts. At one point, nearly 10,000 of the town's 30,000 residents were asked to evacuate, and of the three roads out of town, only one was left open, with none who left being able to return.

A PDF map of those homes burned shows the flames came within a mile of where I spent my 8th grade to 12th grade years. And while the family who now lives in our home appears to have been safe, other friends were not so lucky.

My younger sister, writing on our family blog, posted last night:

"The Rogers and the Sterlings both lost their homes. The Greers are still not able to stay at their home and are in (Yuba City). The Halls are okay, as is Tiger Tail. All of Wayland is supposedly gone."

The Rogers family and The Sterling family were both friends and members of our church. Tiger Tail Lane, which my sister references, is where our home was, luckily escaping the flames again. Tonight, my mother added a new note:

"The Sterlings are apparently devastated -- it took them 20 years to build their home."

The Sterling's youngest son, Rob, is currently serving a two-year mission for the church, and it now becomes a trial for the family to see if they tell him, or when they can tell him, without distracting from what they consider extremely important work.

This kind of personal detail makes what otherwise would be yet another sad story full of statistics on homes burned and acres torched just that much more real. I can check the CDF's report and see that the blaze is now 45% contained, has cost $5 million so far, employing nearly 4,000 fire personnel. I can see stories that say it will be fully contained by Monday, and that the threat to Paradise has decreased, but clearly, for some it is already too late.

I'm watching on the Web, but I can't help but feel powerless.

Web Service Notifications Outnumber Live Bodies In My E-Mail

E-mail used to be about connecting people, regardless of distance. With time, it developed new capabilities - sending attachments of ever greater size, acting as a marketing vehicle, both solicited and otherwise (see: Spam), displaying pictures and HTML, and of course, serving as a repository for status notifications for commerce, news, and social media. Now, there's no question for me that updates from online services greatly outnumber the amount of person to person communication I get each day in my personal e-mail. (Work e-mail, of course, is another story)

For me, e-mail is where I want to be updated for all things finance, be it bank statements, credit card invoices, stock trade transactions, or the electricity and cell phone bills. As I see it, every e-mail note there saves paper, and saves me digging through the mail to sign something off and send a check.

I also, despite getting them at an increasing rate over the last few months, still get notifications by e-mail when somebody chooses to follow me on FriendFeed, LinkRiver, Shyftr or Twitter, for starters. I also get notified if someone befriends me on other services, like Facebook and Digg. At times, especially when a particular topic is driving up conversation, I can hear the sounds of new e-mail hitting my computer every couple minutes, invariably drawing a sarcastic comment from my wife, who helpfully adds, "Well, aren't you popular?"


Twitter and FriendFeed follows come in pretty often these days...
While I could, of course, turn off these notifications, it helps to see if the person following is someone I'll be soon watching in turn, and it also alerts me to if I'm getting name-dropped somewhere. Usually, a quick visit to Summize or Google Blog Search can help with that.

Curious if others using Web services as I do were seeing a similar onslaught of Web notifications taking over their in box, I posted a question to Twitter, which also hit FriendFeed. So far, the response is certainly mixed.

Susan Beebe claimed 85% of her e-mail to be from "real people", but otherwise, the FriendFeed voting came out 16-2 in favor of services, while Twitter replies also came out with services ahead, 6 to 1. Bwana McCall wrote, "I get more Bacn than real email. It's sad.", while Hutch Carpenter said it simply, "Notifications by far."

While many people are fighting with the e-mail data deluge, striving for the proverbial "In Box Zero", handling online notifications is like any other system. You just need some good hierarchy. I've set up a folder called "Blog" in my e-mail for all correspondence related to the blog, from people pitching stories, to working with entrepreneurs and other bloggers. I have subfolders for some of the services where I've had the most updates, and of course, for real-world work, I have a "Commerce" folder, which surprisingly, has all my stock trade notifications from eTrade going back to the year 2000, and every Amazon.com order ever. Thank goodness for e-mail search, something Apple's Mail program does extremely well.

While robots may have taken over the inbound side of my e-mail, I still own the outbound side, and take every effort I can to keep up. But the mix has definitely changed.

FriendFeedMachine Speeds Up, Cleans Up, and Adds Stream View

On Monday, we announced the arrival of Scott Goldie's new FriendFeedMachine, a Web interface to FriendFeed that lets you filter between all contacts and close friends, and offers to strip out the noise that can occur in a site where aggregation from many corners of the Web can be at times overwhelming.

A week into its release, FriendFeedMachine has made a number of improvements throughout the user interface, including dramatically speeding up its use, which could crawl under heavy load (such as looking up all my friends' activities), separating the friends from their activities, and most interestingly, adding a new "Stream" view, which delivers, as Goldie writes in a blog post announcing the update, a "constant stream of entries from your home feed, easily viewable and sortable."


In this example, I'm sorting the stream by most commented, and deduping.
Essentially, FriendFeedMachine has taken a new approach to FriendFeed's content and made it more easily manipulated, like a database, in that while FriendFeed defaults to highlighting most-recent items at the top of the page, including those items most recently "commented" on or "liked", FriendFeedMachine lets you sort your stream, not just by "Newest", but by "Oldest", by user, by service, by the number of comments, by those with the most "Likes", or the least.

Now, FriendFeed can be sorted every which way, like an Excel table.

Also, FriendFeedMachine claims to have solved the infamous "duplicates issue" that at times can have FriendFeed users in a tizzy. By checking "hide duplicates", items otherwise displayed multiple times will be shown only once in your stream.

On top of giving a better way to view FriendFeed, and sorting good friends from casual acquaintances, FriendFeedMachine still offers the ability to like and comment directly within the Web browser. And in trading e-mails with Scott, I know continued updates are coming. But the first week shows strong promise already.

Former Jobster CEO's Social|Median Incubating in Alpha

At the end of 2007, Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster, stepped down, leaving the online career site behind and taking on a new job of his own, founding a stealth mode online social news site, called Social|Median. Months after raising less than $1 million in seed money from a number of angel investors, the site has risen from "dog food" mode to alpha, on the backs of an offshore engineering team in India and Jason's own efforts, seeing more than 500 early adopter users join the site, aimed at creating topical news networks and sharing hot news with friends. (See their blog here)

While the site has been in closed alpha stage for several months, I managed to snag 200 invites to Social|Median, with the code of "LouisG". (Sign up here)


Social|Median Has a Feed Showing Updates In Your Networks
Despite its alpha stage and so-far underdeveloped user interface, the site has already shown a number of interesting features that put it in line with similar services, from BlogRize to Yokway and to a lesser extent, FriendFeed.

The site bills itself as "a social news service that connects people with personalized news and information".The site's main hubs are its "News Networks", which are user created, whether on tech topics, including Apple, Web 2.0, Tech News or Venture Capital, or other interests, from History to Team Building and Triathlons. Users can join any number of news networks, effectively subscribing to view posted news on topics they find interesting. Some of the networks are quiet, seeing only five stories a day, while those more broad topics can see hundreds of new items in a 24-hour period.

New additions to the site include the ability to find news networks by searching the site, as well as new location-based news networks, for example, "Seattle", "Silicon Alley" or "Incredible India".

Also a unique wrinkle to Social|Median is an intelligent way for new News Networks to automatically grab the best sources around the Web for those items. Want a network on cars? It's like Social|Median will offer up Car and Driver, or if you can't get enough dirt on Google, Google Blogoscoped or Google Operating System would emerge.


You Can See Most Popular and Newest News Networks

There are two ways to add content to Social|Median, the first being a Twitter-like "Snip", where you can post your thoughts on any topic, or a "Clip", where you can post a headline, a URL to the story and any comments you have. Interestingly, Social Median does the hard work of using its algorithm to determine what are the appropriate news networks for your story, based on the submitted content, and that story can be listed in more than one network at a time.

A Social|Median user's front page consists of what's called the "Hot List", featuring relevant activities from people who are in your news networks, whether they've created new networks, added new clips, or commented on posted items. Soon, the site will also feature more analytics, including "most popular" stories in a network, and whether you want to see more or less from individual users, a lot like Facebook's "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" feature which encourages more or less of a specific item.

As with other social news sites, Social|Median isn't forcing you to be on their site 24 by 7 to get all the latest news. Users can get e-mail alerts of the top 5 most popular stories across Social|Median as frequently as three times a day, or less often if you don't want to see your e-mail in box go entirely social.


More E-mail from Social|Median, Please...

Goldberg's team is entirely based in Pune, India for now, working hard at coding and developing the site prior to its public launch, expected later this summer. Like FriendFeed's "Changelog", which shows the latest additions to the code, Social|Median is striving for a similar level of transparency. You can see the team's latest updates and code revisions on the product development blog found here: social|median: Product Development. As the site says frequently, it is in early alpha, and should be for those willing to accept a less-defined GUI in search for a more social way to share news and find new topics.

If you want in to Social|Median, you can start with the code of "LouisG". (Sign up here)

Yokway's Social Sharing Site Launches In Beta

At the beginning of the month, I profiled an early edition of Yokway!, an interesting Digg-like derivative for small social circles of friends interested in similar topics. Now, nearly a month later, the site is ready to open up for beta users, having upgraded their user interface, adding search functionality, and reorganizing the site to better help users find friends interested in similar topics. And while Yokway! doesn't yet have the kind of buzz behind it that FriendFeed has developed, it debuts with a number of handy items that the popular social aggregation site doesn't yet have nailed.

Yokway's central offering is a site that lets you view items shared from your friends. Unlike some other lifestreaming services, which pull data from RSS feeds via services around the Web, Yokway requires users to post items one at a time, like Digg, select a topic, and provide a comment. This is called "Yoking", to be used as in the phrase, "What's Yoking?", also translated as "What's Happening?"


The Yokway! stream in action with two shared items.

The "What's Yoking?" stream has three modes, much like FriendFeed does, offering a "my network" stream with updates from myself and all friends, one just for my activity, and a third, for "everyone", encompassing all Yokway users.

Running alongside the "What's Yoking?" stream is a "Recent Activity" board, which shows not just what's been posted recently, but who may have rated an item (from one to five stars), when they did it, and if they made comments or added new contacts.

In this early beta phase, the "Recent Activity" encompasses the last 12 hours, but undoubtedly, as users increase, it could provide a live, to the minute, feed.

Beyond the basics, what sets Yokway apart from FriendFeed is the use of topics, which Yokway calls "My Sharing Circles". Anybody can create a new "Sharing Circle", and I immediately joined a few that are likely no surprise to you, including "Web 2.0 Technologies", "Startups", "Faebook", and "Semantic Web". Clicking on any sharing circle shows all shares within the circle, as well as comments, the total number of views, and their rating.

Another pleasant feature from Yokway is the ability to state your relationship to a contact. While with many services, including Twitter and FriendFeed, you're either a "friend" or you're not, Yokway has an option to mark a contact as a friend, family or coworker. While I don't yet see how this is used at this stage, the groundwork is there to maybe share items with family or coworkers only, for example, or it could be to show other contacts how you know a contact they're not familiar with.

The service will have an uphill road to climb to take on sites like FriendFeed or Digg who have significant market traction, but its features are certainly interesting, and the team has done a lot of work in the last four weeks to upgrade the user interface. If you would like to start using Yokway, head to www.yokway.com and post your e-mail address to get a beta account. You can find me here: Yokway!: LouisGray.

Our Unborn Kids Will Wear Your Web 2.0 Schwag

Now 23 weeks into our twin pregnancy, it's clear our son and daughter are already doomed. Although they don't even have names picked out, they are already unknowingly marching down the path to geekdom. Still a good few months before they debut, the pair are destined to be branded like the common race car, made corporate shills, through the donning of apparel featuring the logo of some of my favorite technology companies - and they could wear those of your favorites, if you feel generous.


Our Kids Want to Wear Logos. Here's a Starting Pack.
So far, we've managed to procure a pair of onesies featuring the Google, Apple and FriendFeed logos, as well as FriendFeed bibs and Google beanies, and we aren't done by any means. For while seemingly every mother wants her kids adorned in bunny rabbits, flowers and puppies, we'll have nothing to do with it. Similarly, we will push off any Disney and cartoon characters as long as we are able.

So here's the deal. I hereby promise that if you want to see one or both of our children sporting your company logo, whether it be on a onesie, a baby blanket, branded bottles, or any other baby gear, we agree to be sellouts, so long as you are in the technology space. We will not turn down any offers from hardware vendors, software vendors or Web sites. Want our children to mock me with their Windows Vista or MySpace t-shirts? Fine. We promise to dress them up and add their photos to our Flickr account for the world to see.

But rather than have our kids mocked for their poor judgment from the get-go, we already have some favorites in mind. I would love to go weeks without seeing the same logo twice. I want baby clothes from Digg, TechMeme, TiVo, Technorati, Ballhype, Facebook, ReadBurner, and Yahoo!. I'd love to see my kids bearing logos from TechCrunch, Twitter, Mashable, GigaOM and LinkedIn.

If you've got a favorite brand you want promoted, we're here for you. Send me an e-mail or call (my cell phone is on the right of the blog), and I'm more than happy to send contact information which puts my kids in the role of corporate babble-person.

Limelight Networks Searchme Spider Picking Up Speed

For the better part of this year, I've seen some odd traffic to my site from Limelight Networks, a content delivery network similar to the more well-known Akamai. Multiple times a day, I would see a visit, with no originating page, drop in on the site, look at a page or two, and then, just as quickly, it would leave. Later, this pace quickened, to the point that if I saw a visitor came in with no referrer, I assumed it was llnw.net. But, in the last few days, the rate has dramatically accelerated, to the point where this spider from llnw.net is more than 10 percent of my total traffic, and it rates as the number one domain accessing my site, ahead of even Comcast.

So what the heck is it doing?

Well, it's not 100% clear. The assumed spider drops in and advertises itself as Linux UNIX, running Mozilla 1.8.1.11, and displaying a monitor with the odd square resolution of 1300 x 1300. It generally looks at one page, takes off, and then comes back in a few minutes to get another one. No real rhyme or reason, and it's just as happy to suck down old pages as new ones.

So, is it caching my blog so that customers of Limelight Networks can access the pages faster? Is it taking a graphical snapshot, in the same way that www.archive.org has done to show how Web sites looked over time? I'm not exactly sure.

One theory, voiced in the forums at Webmaster World, titled "Unusual Traffic from Limelight Networks", says the activity is from a robot called "Searchme", a LLNW client. Going to www.searchme.com shows this as a possibility. Searchme, Inc. says, " Searchme delivers more meaningful and targeted search results to its users," and that its "intuitive category suggest technology provides users with a dynamic and rewarding search experience by delivering relevant results that are tailored specifically to their unique areas of interest."

But... alas, no search engine and no demo, yet.


LLNW.net keeps hitting the site, every few minutes.
While I'm sure my site and others get hammered all day long from Google and Yahoo! spiders, they don't trigger my Web statistics software to think they're actual people, as LLNW is doing. It could be because their spider acts so human-like that the JavaScript code I use to track accesses is fooled. But regardless, the activity is picking up steam, and at this pace, I wouldn't be surprised to see LLNW take in one of every five visits here, even if they are "junk" visits.


LLNW.net is grabbing 13% of my traffic, beating out even Comcast!
The question is, if it is Searchme who is pushing this spider, and if they are indeed planning to reveal their work at some point, will the world have the need for yet another search engine? I have no idea. But if these oddities are any indicator, something's going on worth watching.

For those of you who have blogs and Web sites that track this detail of activity, are you also seeing the LLNW traffic, and has it increased over time? Also, has anybody ever seen Searchme in action who can let us know what they're doing?

A Big Upgrade Day for Five Social Services

Sometimes, you can go weeks without news, and then seemingly, there's this spike of activity, when the industry snaps out of its temporary slumber and gets coding.

Today, in the space of a few hours, some of my favorite Web services all went into the shop for a tune-up and came out with some intriguing features. Of note, FriendFeed, ReadBurner, Spokeo, Shared Reader and LinkedIn have all made improvements worth highlighting.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn continues to add new features related to who is viewing your profile. I asked LinkedIn back in February to show how often your profile was visited, who did it, and who has similar profiles to yours, and the company is definitely moving in this direction, knocking off the first two in May, and today, interestingly letting you know what other profiles viewers of a specific individual also looked at. (The example on the right came when I viewed FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit.)

The company's official blog tonight hints at even more features of this sort coming, saying, "At LinkedIn, we believe in collective intelligence, and the team that brought you this feature ... is busy working on some even cooler stuff. Stay tuned."

We will, and we're looking forward to it. (My profile is here...)

FriendFeed

FriendFeed, also a good listener, added some great features that let you reduce some of the noise generated from verbose friends, through hiding specific services (like Twitter), muting comments on a specific entry, and, in a new twist, adding the ability to link to a specific item. While this feature was hinted at in a quick note from Paul Buchheit a few weeks ago, it's now been rolled out in style. (See: FriendFeed Options)

FriendFeed is doing a great job of upgrading through what's today still a spartan Google-like interface, managing to get a lot of data without a lot of clutter. The new features come up when you click the "Options" tag next to any item.

I had mentioned that one of my highest recommendations for FriendFeed in "10 Suggestions for FriendFeed" was to add the ability to block updates from specific services. As the blog post says, "does one of your friends Twitter way too often?" Well, the answer is yes. And rather than unsubscribe from that friend, I can just "untweet" them if I so choose.


The level of specificity in the "hiding options" is fantastic, determining that you can block specific services from specific users, and further delineate whether you want to block all such items, or just those without "Comments" or "Likes", which typically split the popular from the unpopular. (See above image)

Spokeo

Spokeo, the friend-focused feeds aggregator, well known for letting you find all the Web services your friends subscribe to and giving you a single point of access for their social network data, got some old media publicity, through Newsweek (See: Friends Under the Microscope), and in a blog post this evening, titled "What's Next?", Harrison hints and improved search features, and expanded privacy settings, which will honor private blog posts and photo albums.

ReadBurner

The day wouldn't be complete without a ReadBurner update. After my post this morning on how to share items to your Google Reader link blog without requiring subscriptions, Alexander Marktl was on the case immediately. As he posted in Share items directly through ReadBurner!, he saw the work-around as a great way to keep populating his fast-growing service.

Shared Reader

Meanwhile, in ReadBurner's wake, Shared Reader is back online and adding new features as well. Shared Reader is duplicating many of ReadBurner's efforts, aggregating the most-shared Google Reader items, but it's also added new pages for "Tags" (See the tag for "ReadBurner" or Twitter), and has added both Digg counts and Del.icio.us counts for every single shared feed item.

Of course, the most popular shared items are also from the same sources you commonly see dominating TechMeme or Digg, so what rises to the top... still rises to the top. Also, Shared Reader has been highlighting the most-active linkblogs, and sources for articles, on the site's front page. So far, Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins of Mashable is #1, and I'm trailing in the #2 position for active link blogging...

Is SiteHoppin Like StumbleUpon for Drunks?

How do you take on a company who has first-mover advantage, significant market share, and a positive customer experience? It's hard to do. If you want to beat an entrenched company like this, your service should either cost less (or be free), be easier to use, or have significant differentiation, with features that customers can't live without. Whether on the virtual or real world, taking on the big guys can be tough.

In recent weeks, I've seen the emergence of a service that takes users from site to site, like StumbleUpon does, called SiteHoppin'. SiteHoppin' describes itself as a "social networking/bookmarking wiki site that lets you find, bookmark or share interesting sites by hopping instead of typing."

SiteHoppin' doesn't mention StumbleUpon by name, but it performs essentially the same function as the wildly popular service, owned by eBay. What it lacks in visual design and market penetration, it makes up for in buzzwords and attitude. It not only claims "social networking", "bookmarking" and "wiki" in its title, but call itself Web 2.5. I've never even heard of Web 2.5, even while others are working over a definition of Web 3.0.

Stumblers er... SiteHoppers can rate sites by the number of beers (from one to five) they give a page, similar to StumbleUpon's thumbs up and thumbs down feature.

Where SiteHoppin' does come out ahead of StumbleUpon is the lacking need for a browser toolbar. As StumbleUpon has delivered toolbars for FireFox and Internet Explorer, they haven't yet gotten to us Safari users. SiteHoppin's user interface is so light, they claim to work well on iPhones, the Nokia E90 and other smartphones.

The site is just getting started, having reached 10,000 visitors on Friday, and features a most-popular sites listing, as well as a directory of users. So far, the most popular site is www.doodlage.com, which has 43 "Beers on the Wall" for an "Average Beers Rating" of 4.63. I don't know about you, but maybe there's something safer about browsing sober. We'll see how far SiteHoppin' gets against the StumbleUpon juggernaut.

Praying at the Tech Geek Altar

So far, I haven't yet tried to convert louisgray.com to any kind of real brand, despite my previous comments that your blog is your brand.

Many of the sites I frequent on a daily basis have done a good job to separate the brand of their blog from the individual behind it. MG Siegler converts to ParisLemon. Jason Kaneshiro turns into Webomatica. And Steven Hodson wears a cape reading WinExtra. But I haven't done it. I've had the domain name forever, and keep plodding ahead.

This gap in my self-branding has opened up the opportunity for others to try and define who I am and what the blog stands for. I saw a few great attempts in the last few days, from some influential blogs.

Mashable was very kind to me Monday night, in their ReadBurner coverage, when Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins said the site "is currently seeded with the linkblogs of several thought leaders in the tech blogging community, such as Louis Gray..."

OK ... Thought leader. I like that.

Then, today, VentureBeat had an outstanding write-up covering FriendFeed, and its growing momentum. The author gave a lot of credit for FriendFeed's rise to its initial users, saying: "It’s used by early Googlers and their many friends. The company was founded (and funded) by former Gmail team members Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh together with Google Maps engineers Bret Taylor and Jim Norris. It’s also getting championed by early-adopter bloggers like Louis Gray."

OK... Early-adopter blogger. That's good too.

And later this evening, Chris Brogan, writing on the challenges of Social Media, reported he often hits a firewall at work, restricting his access to some sites, including mine.

He says, "I’m blocked 3-7 times a day, and almost always with an incorrect blocking message by the firewall company. For example, Louis Gray was blocked as religion. Only if tech geeks are now a religion, and then, I’m praying."

Line up at the altar, Chris. We're right behind you.

So, way back in February of 2007, I was called a friendly neighborhood geek. It looks like the geek label hasn't changed, but now, we're also being acknowledged as an early adopter with a unique approach to the tech blogosphere.

While I haven't worked on enhancing my personal brand, others are setting it for me. Right now, that's okay, and I just might start borrowing their words. Your friendly neighborhood early-adopter tech geek blogger, signing off.

10 Ways We're Trying to Make the Web a Better Place

Recently talking with a good friend and consistent reader of this blog, he told me one of the reasons he likes reading louisgray.com is that he believes I'm not trying to follow somebody else's lead, that I'm not an echo chamber, and instead, I'm actually trying to promote things I believe in. I hope he's right. For while I might occasionally make comments on the news of the day, we're, in this political climate, the blogging candidate for change.

Here are a few examples of how we've tried to push change on the Web and make it a better place to take in new information, find new sources for news, accurately report statistics and influence, as well as ways we're trying to help popular services improve and help people find new tools:

1) The Internal Links vs. External Links Debate

We tried to squash the practice of using Internal Links when External Links would be better ways to bring visitors to the companies making the news. In the ensuing discussions, some major blogs said they would make changes, while others said I had it all wrong. Even if most did nothing, the issue was certainly made more visible.

Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control
More Comments On Inwardly Linking
Backlink Backlash Could Bring Forth Change
Link In. Link Out. Shake it All About.

2) The Elimination of Spam-Like Viral Link Tags for Statistics Manipulation

As it's well recognized Google and Technorati will give your site more perceived value based on the amount of unique links to your Web site, many have made a move to artificially inflate their numbers, incorrectly leading to high PageRanks and Technorati Authority, despite the fact Google can punish those found cheating.

Technorati Needs to Stamp Out Viral Tag Spam Now
Kent Newsome Calls My Comments "Fear and Loathing"
Is There an Antidote to the Link Tags Virus?

3) Correctly Learning What Is Original Reporting, and Who's Just Following Along

News aggregators can be both a blessing and a curse. Sites like TechMeme are outstanding for seeing the day's blog activity, but as they also drive traffic, it can encourage bad behavior, without question. We're still looking to see if TechMeme will continue tweaking its algorithm to report those who break a story first and add original reporting, rather than those who have big brand names or the most external links.

What Should Drive TechMeme's Content?
Algorithms Cause Fight Between Linking and Original Reporting
Robot-Generated Sites Show Occasional Flaws

4) Asking Web Companies to Take Downtime Seriously, and Increase Reliability

If we're really going to move all our data to the Web, we have to trust it will always be there, easily and quickly. But far too many Web 2.0 companies have shown flaky uptime, and later, mocked us with humorous error messages, thinking their downtime is a joke. Guess what? It's not.

Web 2.0 Companies Play With Error Messages
Silly YouTube - Where's The Redundancy?
LinkedIn Provides Another Silly Web 2.0 "Error" Page
Ack! Google Reader Update Wipes Out History
Scoble's Right: Technorati Isn't Scaling to Beat Google

5) Looking to Eliminate Spam, Both on E-mail and in Blogs

There's nothing more annoying than finding a good communication medium foiled by those who want to misuse it for their own ill-begotten needs. That's why I refuse to ever join Plaxo, get annoyed by Facebook application spam, and the rapid growth of spam blogs or "Splogs".

Is Technorati Going After Spam Blogs?
Technorati Confirms Attack on Splogs, Provides Update
Sending Me Spam Makes Us Friends, Right?

6) Communicating With Companies and Offering Suggestions to Improve

One of the best things I've found with the blog is being able to talk to Web companies and help build their products to be more successful through testing, and offering specific comments. In almost every case, I've gained direct feedback from the developer, and in many cases, they've updated very quickly.

10 Suggestions for FriendFeed
10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader
10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn
Eight Reasons the Apple TV is Failing, and How It Can be Saved
Why Can't Del.icio.us Show Most Popular Bookmarks by URL?
What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?
Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies

7) Looking at Mega-Trends for Insight Into Momentum

We don't blog and live in a vacuum. Instead, as technology and business evolve, change naturally occurs. When I see something I think is taking place which impacts us, I want to talk about it and see if you're seeing what I am. Often you see it too, and sometimes, you tell me I'm wrong, which is okay too.

The Biggest Blogs Aren't Really Blogs Any More
The Web Advertising Bubble Has Got to Pop
Did Trackbacks Die, and Who Killed Them?
Alexa Web Statistics Show Old Media Influence Nosedive
10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech

8) Reinforcing the Idea that Blogging Can Be Personal, Yet Influential

I want to blog with passion about those things I cover and discover. I want to have communications with people I couldn't reach otherwise, and while I may enjoy seeing traffic spikes or external links, it's not what's driving me. I believe I should gain additional traffic if I offer good content, not because I am following the latest trend or using link schemes. So often, I talk about why I blog, and what I'm trying to do. After all, I am adamant that your blog can be your personal brand, and you should take care of it.

New Reality: Your Blog Is Your Brand
Why Do I Blog? An Introspective Look
A Big Part of Blogging is Writing to Your Readers
Blogging: Set Goals Or Let Fly?
If It's Not About Breaking News or Traffic...

9) Highlighting New Companies and Services I Enjoy

What's the fun in finding new Web tools if I can't tell you about them? You can believe that if I start begging you to try out a new service, it's because I really believe in what they stand for, and I see their potential. I have a tendency to root for the little guy and am all too eager to promote those that offer unique service differentiation. I don't always have to be first to report something, but I will be clear about why I think it's pretty darn cool.

I Have Seen the Future of Social RSS Feed Readers
Hype It Up: Ballhype Is Here to Change the Game
Friendfeed Follows Friends' Web Activity
PlugandPlay Expo Highlight: Spokeo
AideRSS Judges Feed Posts as Good, Great, Best

10) Thinking Philosophically, Out Loud, to Those Who Will Listen

If I'm not reacting to news, or letting you know about something I like, it's likely I'm thinking about where we're headed. Often, this will be impacted by work I've done over the last decade, or books I've read. Sometimes thinking out loud while writing is the best way to get my points across. After all, I can't exactly have a conference call with hundreds of people, but I can reach hundreds of people this way. Maybe my thoughts have value to a smaller subset.

I Still Get Excited About Silicon Valley
The Big Debate: Online vs. Offline, and Web Influence
Maintaining Integrity of Web Archives Is Essential
Is Timing an Important Element for Blog Posts?

While I don't expect every post I do to be absolutely high-minded, I do want to make a difference here on the Web. I want to help, from my small corner in the blogosphere, to help guide the next generation of blogging. I want to help companies understand their customers, and to help customers find great companies. I do this because I enjoy it and because it's for the betterment of our global community. If you think these are things you find useful, then be sure you are on our RSS feed, and keep following along. It's a never-ending journey.

Why Can't Del.icio.us Show Most Popular Bookmarks by URL?

I'm something of a late or reluctant adopter of del.icio.us, the social bookmarking tool absorbed into Yahoo! at the end of 2005. While I've had an account for years, I didn't really find any use for the service, keeping my bookmarks to myself.

But now, with the ability to post items into my FriendFeed by adding a bookmark to del.icio.us, combined with the ability to track the number of times my own posts have been bookmarked, thanks to FeedBurner, I've been using the service a bit more. By adding items to del.icio.us, I'm not just saving a bookmark for me, but for all those who follow me on FriendFeed.

Also, I occasionally add some of my more popular posts to del.icio.us, not out of narcissism, but out of curiosity, to learn who else has done the same. After all, for some reason, I can't do a search by URL within del.icio.us, but can only find this data by self-bookmarking, and clicking the "saved by 1 other person" link, revealing the fan and how they tagged the item.

And this... is broken.

Del.icio.us is very much a repository based on tagging. It's easy to search the entire site for specific tags, like friendfeed, facebook, or techcrunch, but it's evasively difficult to search on a specific URL and find out the most popular posts from a specific blog or Web site.


A screen capture of some bookmarked posts from louisgray.com
When I search for the phrase "louisgray.com" in del.icio.us, I get some clues, but that's only if the person who bookmarked included the URL in the title of the bookmark itself. For example, I can see 19 saved the story 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader, while 12 saved Facebook Google Reader App Rebrands As Feedheads, and 16 bookmarked Internal Linking On Some Tech Blogs Is Out of Control. And five people have bookmarked louisgray.com itself. But if I referred to the posts by their headlines without louisgray.com, my search results would be useless.

I'm curious to see what Del.icio.us has planned for site improvements in 2008, as the service hasn't changed much of late. Back on September 6th, the company said:

"Fresh news from deep within Tag Mountain: we just launched an early, limited Preview of the Delicious redesign we’ve been working on for the past few months. We’ve refreshed the UI, built an entirely new (and faster) search engine, and added numerous improvements based on your feedback."

Since then, the silence has been deafening. The company's blog hasn't been updated in more than three months, and at the turn of the calendar year, one del.icio.us representative wrote in the comments, "Probably a couple months or so, give or take a few weeks…ish. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re working hard."

So... who knows. Maybe it'll be Spring. Maybe not. And it's not clear if the updated search engine will solve this issue of finding bookmarks by URL, or offering the ability to rank by most popular, most recent, or finding out which users most often like your posts. All of these would be useful tools for bloggers out there who want to see where their content fits in the social scheme of things.

10 Suggestions for FriendFeed

Over the last two months, I've become a FriendFeed addict. The innovative service essentially aggregates my activity from a diverse set of Web communities and presents it in one place. That defines the "feed". The "friend" half of their name refers to the fact I can subscribe to my friends, or other interesting people, and follow them as well. Needless to say, as the service gains in popularity, it has become increasingly useful, and I would love to see the following things happen for the site to get to the next level.

1) Add a small bio or profile to each person's individual feed page

As noted the other day, FriendFeed gives every user their own page, but doesn't have any background information - in effect, acting like the "anti-Facebook". I believe the service would have a lot to gain if I could optionally put in my company, my interests, my university, etc. While this would be yes, yet another profile, it would be tremendous to have the option to subscribe to all employees from a specific company or to subscribe to other alumni, for example.

2) Add the option to not see updates from particular services

By opting in to follow a FriendFeed user (like me), by default I see all of their updates, from their blog, from Twitter, Last.fm, when they add items to their Amazon Wish List, etc. But sometimes, finding out a person has posted 46 items to their Twitter just doesn't have value for me. I would like to be able to block any service I choose.

3) Given the above, add the option to not see specific updates from specific users

If I gained the option to block a service, I'd like to do it on a granular level, for instance blocking one person's Twitter feed, but opting in to another. For those people where I'd like to see their blog activity, and del.icio.us bookmarks, that doesn't necessarily mean I want to also learn what songs they like.

4) Add the option to follow a specific user's comments

FriendFeed recently added the option to make comments to specific updates, or to "Like" them. Often, I see comments from others I've subscribed to on those items. But I bet they're also likely making comments on feeds I'm not watching. I assume from the user's personalized feed page, I should have the option to "See this user's comments".

5) Add the option to make comments directly to the FriendFeed

Last week, FriendFeed had a special "Festivus" feature that let you air grievances directly onto the feed. A few of my grievances? "There's just not enough Festivus for the rest of us", "Paul Buchheit's blog should have a line at the top, saying, 'Dude, I invented friggin' GMail. Have you heard of it?' " and "Facebook applications involving vampires, winking, and throwing crap are completely useless."

But with the close of the holiday, this option disappeared. Obviously, FriendFeed has the capability to bring this back at any time, and those of us who saw its utility would like to see it return.

6) Add the option to share a private message for specific friends

Assetbar has the option to share specific URLs or messages to a subset of users by checking a "Private" box, and then selecting the recipients. Today, FriendFeed shares all activity with all users, without granularity. I would like the option to either send a specific comment to some people, or to specifically highlight an item from my feed to a subset of people.

7) Add a FriendFeed leaderboard

As silly as it seems, geeks like being measured and competing. It would be interesting for me to learn who the most commonly subscribed FriendFeed users are. It's likely there are some insightful people that I'm not familiar with, and this would be a good way to find them. While I could troll my own Subscriptions to see who they're subscribed to, one by one, or I could watch the Public Feed, a leaderboard would go a long way. Taking this a step further, the site could probably show us who shares the most total items, who Twitters the most, who shares the most items from Google Reader, etc.

8) Develop a Mobile Version of FriendFeed

I'm now occasionally sneaking peeks at FriendFeed using my Blackberry or my brand-new iPod Touch when I'm away from the laptop (as rare as that is), and while FriendFeed has an RSS feed, a Facebook app, and the ability to embed the application in iGoogle or my blog, there's no slimmed down version for my mobile phone for quick reading. With more and more people utilizing the mobile Web and surfing on their iPhones, the addition of this will be essential.

9) Customization of the Feed Page.

As with Google Reader's bare shared items page, the default feed on FriendFeed is simply text on a white background. While not every social network service has the option to "skin" a page, offering different looks for text or background colors, it's certainly nice to have. Spokeo offers this ability, offering users a range of colors, from red to orange, green, blue, purple and gray.

10) The Ability for Users to Suggest New Services

As I mentioned a few days ago, only Google allows customers to add an infinite number of services. With both FriendFeed and MyBlogLog, I simply select from a list they've already pre-determined. As there is undoubtedly a certain level of engineering required, I recognize it's not automatic, but I'd like to add my profile for Ballhype (e.g. Louis hyped 3 stories and made 42 game picks at Ballhype) and likely will find other services of note that have a common URL and user name path.

It can be hard to find fault with a service I already like as much as this one, and that's not how this post is intended. I just happen to want the service to be tremendously successful, and think you should be part of it.

If you're not already a FriendFeed user, you're certainly missing out. You can start with my feed here, or if you need a login, send me an e-mail, and I'll be happy to invite you.

For other suggestions on how to improve other popular products, see:

10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader
10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn
Eight Reasons the Apple TV is Failing, and How It Can be Saved

Forget About Privacy. Embrace Openness.

A couple weeks ago, when I was meeting with the Assetbar team, prior to getting my account, they asked, "How important is it for us to be able to block people from being able to 'follow' you?". I told them that it wasn't at all. If I join a site like Assetbar or FriendFeed, if I blog, or if I share items using Google Reader, I fully expect that content to be open to anyone capable of finding it. It's immediately in the public domain, as far as I am concerned.

That's why the ruckus over the last few weeks regarding Google Reader shared items is complete bollocks.

My Google Reader Shared Items has a public URL, which I've chosen to embed here on the blog. Others with shared items, including Arvin Dang, Jason Kaneshiro, Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins, Robert Scoble and Mathew Ingram, have similarly posted their shared items, in effect, giving you the option to surf the best of the blogosphere through their eyes.

But some are alarmed that people they didn't expect to read their shared items could. Some complained that competitors could see what they found interesting, and get to a story first. But cry me a river... if you've got some proprietary knowledge, keep it to yourself, and don't share it! That's why even though I read dozens and dozens of stories per day for work and have many search strings to find out about my company and the competition, I never share it in Google Reader, I never blog about it, and I never add those links to del.icio.us. Because when I do, it would cross the chasm from proprietary to public.

As a blogger, I am sharing my comments, insights, parts of my life and conversations with the Web at large, and through this, we've built a small community of frequent visitors and commenters. I do not believe I would be better served by putting my content behind a password-protected veil. I do not believe that I should be hiding my e-mail address or my cell phone number. I do not believe that my Google Reader shared items are not part of the public domain.

I believe as the Web evolves, the new generation of users will expect full transparency, and those of us resisting the change will be seen as dinosaurs. I want you to read my blog. I want you to subscribe to my RSS feed. I want you to befriend me on Facebook or follow me on FriendFeed. I want you to read my Google Reader link blog. I want you to follow me on AssetBar.

This is the way the Web is going, and we should take the blinders off our eyes.

See additional commentary:

Mathew Ingram: Google ruining Christmas? Get a grip
Robert Scoble: Google Reader needs GPC
Slashdot: Google Reader Begins Sharing Private Data
ParisLemon: Google Readers' Social Flaws Have Users Up In Arms

FestivusFeed: FriendFeed Airs Your Grievances

What do you get when you cross the holiday season with Web 2.0 technology, some free time and a sense of humor? If you're FriendFeed, you develop a new service called "Festivus Feed", letting us FriendFeed Addicts air our grievances toward one another, and the technology market in general, in the Festivus tradition, "Airing of Grievances".

The new service, which debuted late last night, celebrates the Seinfeld-inspired alternative holiday, and features the much-famed Festivus Pole, as you can see below.


My Grievance: Robert Scoble joins every network but this one. :-)
While the Festivus Feed is wrapped in fun, it does mask a true innovation, the ability to post directly to the FriendFeed news feed, in an interesting cross between Twitter and traditional chat. Now, FriendFeed offers the ability to combine your activity from services around the Web, it lets you post individual stories through its bookmarklet, and gives the option to post comments directly. I can't wait to see the new innovations this company has planned for New Year's Day.

See also: ParisLemon: FriendFeed Morphs Into FestivusFeed for the Holidays! and Paul Buchheit: Twas the night before Festivus... or follow me on FriendFeed here.

The Web Advertising Bubble Has Got to Pop

A few weeks ago, while having breakfast with well-known Silicon Valley author, Emanuel Rosen, in Palo Alto (more on that later), I said that I was very concerned that all the companies chasing after advertising dollars, from blogs carrying AdSense to startups, all the way to the mighty Google, will be dramatically impacted by what I see as an obvious crunch in the online ad market. The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes to me that the ad-driven economy, both offline and on, could soon be in dire straights, and companies hoping to cash in need to think of new revenue targets - quick.

I can't remember the last time I clicked on an online ad. Whenever possible, I am running ad blocking software on my browsers. I've learned to ignore AdSense blurbs that sneak through, and any time I'm forced to see an interstitial ad before reading a story, I'm clicking "Skip this Ad", or right-clicking it and adding to my ad blocker's memory.

Meanwhile, I find it painful to watch television without my TiVo. If watching something live, we mute the commercials, and either get something elsewhere in the house, go back to the Web, or pick up a magazine. I just do not want to be sold to.

To me, the most effective way to reach me as a consumer is through buzz, to hear genuine excitement from others who are trying a product early. If they like it, I'll see it in their blogs, in their Del.icio.us links, Google Reader shared items and FriendFeed. I'll see it on Digg or TechMeme. I'll see people using it and showing it off at the office. But I'm not more likely to purchase a product because they purchased some run of site banner ad space.

As I'm doing my very best to avoid advertising, I have to believe a significant number of others like me are doing the same thing. If you (safely) assume that the more educated, more technologically-savvy among us will be the first to block Web ads, then one of the most prized demographics for marketers will be unavailable. Then, as others latch on, the click through rates on ads will dry up. Total revenue from pay per click ads, from Google and elsewhere, will go soft and then crater. Advertisers will decrease their rates per click, and decrease their total ad budgets, moving money somewhere else, to more viral, buzz-driven, targeted campaigns. And while the Web has done a fantastic job about turning a per impression model to a per action model, proactively shunning the medium altogether makes you a deaf audience.

I'm waiting for a major browser manufacturer, like Firefox, or a smaller one, like Flock, to come bundled with ad blocking software, making it even easier for the non-tech savvy customers to start blocking banners from day one, not just stuffing the pop-up variety. It might not ever happen. It might be that there's too much pressure from advertisers and marketers to keep things status quo. I certainly don't expect Microsoft to be the first to adopt it with IE, for example. But can you imagine what would happen if they did, and the unwashed masses found their default browsers blocked ads out of the box? Euphoria.

Think I'm nuts? Look at what's happening out there. While many Web 2.0 companies are making ads their sole revenue target, eschewing subscriptions or chargeable paywalls, see all the news about how the ad-driven economy is showing cracks.

Center Networks: I Want My Slice of the Pie: A Look at Startups and Ad Spending

"We have thousands of sites competing for a piece of the advertising pie today… the problem is, innovation is outpacing ad spending at this point".

Read/Write Web: There's No Money In The Long Tail of the Blogosphere

"Whatever monetization means the blogger in the long tail settled on, be it Google AdSense or Amazon affiliate codes, it can only work on large volumes of traffic. AdSense works for Google because the odds are in its favor - it is aggregating small amounts of traffic across the entire web. The math works for them because it is based on the massive scale of the web. It similarly works reasonably well for the sites with large amounts of traffic, but it fails for smaller publishers who have low visitor counts."

Mashable: 15 Reasons Facebook Isn’t Worth $15 Billion

"Research firm eMarketer projects that by 2011, ad spending in the United States on social networks will reach only $2.5 billion. While I personally believe that most projections from research firms are BS, it’s worth noting that most of the time, these projections actually exceed the numbers that are realized."

Silicon Valley Watcher: Reasons Why Media and Bloggers Should Not Run Google AdSense

"Running Google AdSense will return pennies per click, you cannot make a living off of AdSense. But by running AdSense you are undermining your own efforts to charge a meaningful amount for online advertising. By running Google AdSense you have to accept the pricing of the advertising as determined by Google's AdWords advertising network."

eMarketer: Online Ad Spend to Hit $42 Billion by 2011

"While the current total media ad spending forecasts reflect economic anxiety, a downturn will affect online ad spending... (and) because of the credit crunch and related economic fallout, Internet ad spending will not increase as much in 2007 and 2008 as analysts previously expected"

As a consumer, I recognize Web properties and media need revenue. I'm willing to pay for access in many cases. I don't always assume things are free. But if you're running ads, it's very likely I'm not seeing them, and neither are a lot of people I know. The question is, will there be enough of us and enough innovative tools built to avoid ads that the big giants like Google, who to date has lived almost exclusively through ads, without monetizing its other products, start to have serious revenue trouble? And if they do, how far does that domino effect go? If I were running an ad-driven startup or media company, that question would be keeping me up at night.

Nintendo Wii + Web Surfing = Porn for the Whole Family?

The Nintendo Wii is quickly becoming a serious convergence machine - offering not only video game play, but also News and Weather updates, audience polling and an Internet channel. Much like WebTV had tried to do a decade ago, the Wii moves the Web from the little screen (your laptop) to the big screen (TV).

Now, one content stream doesn't just get accessed by multiple operating systems and multiple browsers, but the Web is now being accessed by a multitude of gadgets, from Blackberry handhelds, to iPhones, the iPod Touch, and the Wii, to name a few.

This evening, I spotted a Nintendo Wii checking in on the blog, and not exactly from a visitor looking for news on technology, sports, or even pictures of my beagle. Instead, the first Wii visit I've noticed was your typical lonely Web surfer looking for a late night porn fix, searching for "free girls on webcams without giving address". Interesting.

The Wii browser is an Opera derivative, version 9.30. And I have to assume there is a pretty good chance that whoever is looking for these Internet-living ladies with loose morals is doing so without their parents knowing. Time to turn on parental controls!

MusicMobs Disappears Into the Ether

Today, Om Malik reported the music tracking and playlist service, MusicMobs, had shut down, and the founder, deciding the best policy was to join the competition, rather than continue to do battle, has now become part of Last.FM. Now, the two services have become one, and in an instant, the dedicated artist, song, and genre pages I'd generated over the last few years were obliterated.

You can see some of my prior mentions of MusicMobs here, here and here.

Now, instead of a site full of charts, album covers and trends showing which artists and songs were the most popular, we've got a note saying the site's moved, and a single link to download my user playlist. Had that been the focus of why I used MusicMobs, that'd have been okay, but I would have preferred it if I could have been given the option to say... download my own generated pages as HTML and host them elsewhere. Maybe I could even utilize the software from MusicMobs or Last.fm and simply point them to the new page, continuing to synchronize my stats.

But it looks like it wasn't meant to be. For the want of a single developer, an entire site was lost. While I still like Last.fm, I hate seeing others I like just go away without warning. Word to the wise would be to go backup your user files at services not named Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! or Apple. On second thought, back those up too. You never know.

More Comments On Inwardly Linking

A dozen or so days ago, I kicked off a discussion in the blogopshere around the practice of relying heavily on internal links, even when external links to the source of news would likely serve a reader better. A few weeks into it, the debate is still raging, not just here, but elsewhere.

Two well-respected bloggers, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research, formerly of PodTech, and Muhammad Saleem, have added their own comments. As you can expect, given that there seems to be no "one right answer" to this discussion, their findings are quite different.

Jeremiah, in a post titled "Linking Strategy and why Back Linking is OK", says, "If your content (on your own website) can add more value linking elsewhere, than it’s certainly ok to do this."

Muhammad, in a post titled "Do you link in or link out?", says, "By linking to other sources you can either use them to back up your own argument or provide your readers with another viewpoint to consider and come to their own conclusions."

To resummarize my comments from before, I have zero problems with referring to old notes on a similar topic. I do it all the time (as in my first link above). But if an external hyperlink would add more value, or lead a reader to the source of the story, that makes more sense than the growing practice of dumping visitors into a random archive page or keyword search results.

Additional comments since my last update can be found from Michael Coates, The Last Podcast, The Net Takeaway, and Daily Grumble.

eBay Locks Me Out for My Own Good

I must receive dozens of fake phishing scam e-mails a week, from spammers who think I'm dumb enough to log in to their fraudulent Web sites to enter my login and password, whether for eBay or PayPal, Amazon or Wells Fargo. I even get junk e-mail asking me to update my information for banks I've never had anything to do with, including Bank of America, Washington Mutual, and others. That's why when I received a note from eBay on July 31st saying my account had been compromised and locked down, I deleted it. Obviously spam.

So last night, I tried to log in to eBay and it didn't work. And it wasn't an issue with my memory. I've used the same login/password combination on eBay since 1998, and I was sure I had it right.

I hit the "Forgot Password" button, and eBay asked me to get two of three things right, my mother's maiden name, my zipcode, and my primary phone number. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Mother's maiden name I got right away, but if you keep in mind I registered my eBay account almost 10 years ago, I've moved a few times since, from my shared apartment in Berkeley to Belmont, Palo Alto and now, here in Sunnyvale. So I had to try a few zip code combinations, not to mention phone numbers. Those changed too.

Eventually, I figured it out, and luckily, the e-mail I had on file at eBay was current, or that would be yet another mess. Now back in eBay, I had a note that said "It appears the password for your eBay account may have recently become compromised. As a result of this, we have reset your password and secret question." That's why I had been locked out. But I didn't see any odd bidding, so I have no idea what triggered the issue.

Now, I have a new password. And now, unfortunately, this just may make me look at the phishing e-mail scams as if they might actually be real, and that's not an improvement. Although I have the utmost respect for Web leaders like eBay, Paypal and Amazon, I have to imagine the fraud business dramatically impacts their ability to do e-mail marketing and customer service, and that must be incredibly frustrating.

For Apple Legal, Resistance is Futile

As I mentioned in a quick note on The Apple Blog yesterday, the latest rumor du jour is that Apple is set to soon release shorter, wider versions of the iPod Nano in a variety of new colors. While the initial "spy shots" on some sites have been blurry at best, subsequent requests by Apple Legal to a number of those sites, from 9to5mac.com to Gizmodo, and most recently, Paris Lemon, for them to remove the images, seems to be a lot like asking for the barn door to be shut after the cows have been released.

Once a rumor or leak hits the Web, it's out, period. If it's an Apple rumor, it's likely on Digg. Other Mac users, like I did, downloaded the images to their hard drives en mass, in the event the takedown notices were issued. If the photos were reposted anywhere, they're on blogs, and Google Images would be next to reindex the images in their library, and cache them forever. Archive.org may crawl the page and take a picture. Even if Apple Legal reached out to everyone, and everyone complied, those images are out for good.

It's an oft-repeated sport for the Mac rumors sites to seek out leaked info, and then for Apple Legal to go after them. But even though I respect Apple's need for secrecy and privacy and for them to break the news, in the world of the Web, with such a maniacal fan base as they have, resistance is futile, and they might as well focus more on those internally who broke the rules, instead of shooting the messengers.

After 5 Years of My Yahoo!, Google Reader Is New Start Page

Back in the Web 1.0 days, seemingly every Web site was morphing into a Web portal - a virtual one stop destination for news, stocks, sports, e-mail, weather, or just about anything. Excite did it. Lycos did it. Yahoo! did it. Netscape eventually did it. But while Yahoo! has done a good job at offering new services and trying to give me enough "sticky" applications to keep my attention, I find myself spending more and more time in Google Reader, catching up on the hundreds of RSS feeds I subscribe too. So today, I made the switch, and made Google Reader my start page in Safari, on all my Macs.

Now, instead of seeing a static page which may have some new AP wires, updated stock prices, and occasionally current sports scores, I get the very best the blogosphere has to offer. It's rare now that I will fire up the Web browser and not be presented with a few dozen news items from around the Web.

Now that we are in the Web 2.0 days, the concept of a portal has passed on. Rather than go to a single destination to have them provide me what they believe I want to read, I would rather go to a single destination which delivers me what I want to read, based on my subscriptions. I don't see myself gravitating back to My Yahoo! or iGoogle any time soon, though both are a simple command key combination away in Safari. But today's move is a significant marker in my continually evolving Web consumption.

New TAB Post: Original Mac Rumors Site Goes Dark

Years ago, the art of forecasting Apple and Macintosh rumors was left to a small number of oddly obsessed people, myself included. Now, with mainstream media, including New York Times, BusinessWeek and Wall Street Journal in on the act, it's hard to remember that dedicated rumor sites like Mac OS Rumors were leading the way almost a full decade ago in near blog-like fashion, reporting the latest whispers from Cupertino.

But now, it looks like Mac OS Rumors has gone dark, after the site's quality eroded, and as of two weeks ago, the site doesn't even come up, replaced with a reminder from Network Solutions for the site to pay its bill. If it were up to me, I'd move on and let it be.

That's the background behind my most recent contribution to The Apple Blog, titled Original Mac Rumors Site Goes Dark. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided a link. Enjoy.

False Alarm: Wii Got Our Wii

It appears the Web can solve all problems, great or small. Shortly after I had noted three local Best Buys and Wal-Mart were fresh out of their Nintendo Wii stock, I took to the Net to bail me out. By 7 p.m. this evening, my wife and I were proud owners of a brand-new Wii, and we've already logged three hours of family fun.

Before leaving the office, I thought I'd give the search one last go, searching for "Nintendo Wii Availability" on Google. That led me to a Wiichat forum, which offered an array of Web links to inventory data for all the major retailers, including Target, Gamestop, Circuit City, and CompUSA.

A few clicks later, I found that Gamestop on Stevens Creek in San Jose had 1-3 units available. I called, expecting the data to be wrong, but after the store clerk first denied having any Wii in stock, he relented, saying I could get it if I showed up right away. Less than 20 minutes later, I found myself purchasing one of the few Wiis around, complete with two new controllers, the included sports pack, and two additional games: Paper Mario, and "The Bigs", a major league baseball game.

It was a little bit of an investment, but after a quick day trading of Apple earlier, I'd already more than made up the cost. (More on that later)

Long story short, the Wii looks right at home next to our plasma TV, aside our TiVo and Apple TV. It's a venerable array of technology entertainment nerddom. In minutes, Kristine and I had our two controllers out and were dueling one another in bowling, tennis, baseball and golf. The fun was enough to make us consider moving our furniture around to dedicate more real estate to gaming. After all, playing on a Wii is quite active, not just mindless staring at a screen.

There's no question this new toy has the potential to consume a great deal of our free time now, eating into "home work", blogging and all things social. But it's given us another dimension of fun competition, as we stretch for every backhand and groan at the sight of a digital 7-10 split.

And we wouldn't have gotten our Wii if not for the combination of Google, and resourceful fandom, which led us the right way.

For Facebook, I Can Already See the Epilogue

Five years from now, Facebook will not be a household brand. Like GeoCities and TheGlobe.com before it, today's hot Web communities are tomorrow's graveyards, as a fickle Web audience will continue to move from one destination to the next, leaving behind ignored friend requests and a a river of bad HTML in their wake.

Even if you throw out the 1990s community sites mentioned above, it's easy to see how once exciting social networking destination sites give way to the next. From Friendster, to MySpace, to Facebook, hordes of teens, wannabe teens or those preying on teens have made the move, until, as Yogi Berra once said, "Nobody goes there any more because it's too crowded."

In 2006, it seemed nothing could beat MySpace. Now, as Facebook has opened up their doors to developers with custom APIs and let in the unwashed masses, instead of just for college or high school students, it seems that it's all anyone can talk about these days. But while that's fun and interesting, the truth is that it's still a closed, gated network, which runs contrary to the full purpose of the open Internet - one of transparency, exchange of ideas, communication and ease of access.

I don't have a Facebook login, don't have access, and don't want it. Why, when there is so much content and real-time collaboration and conversation going on outside of the walls of Facebook, would I take the extra effort to share in conversations and faux digital friendships to a more limited audience? It just doesn't make sense.

Today's Facebook is tomorrow's Friendster, or in five years, GeoCities. Teens are the most fickle of them all, and I'm not exactly sure they're going to be ecstatic that their moms and dads can now jump in and participate. That's just not cool. And once the 'rents start hanging out in your place, it's time to move on. I promise that's what will happen next. Slowly, but inevitably.

So, while John Battelle writes "Why Facebook, Why Now?" and Robert Scoble picks apart Facebook application issues, recognize that it's a lot of talk for today about something that has a very limited future.

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.

I've Already Seen Sicko, and You Should Too

The way that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 was a wakeup call and turning point in the public opinion around the War on Iraq may only have been the controversial filmmaker's opening salvo on the way the American people view their way of life, and the way they trust their government and big business to tell them the truth or offer them the best option available.

Moore's follow-on, 'Sicko', which addresses the state of our healthcare industry, and compares it negatively with universal coverage seen elsewhere in the world, is incredible, a must see for anybody who pays taxes, pays for health benefits, or intends to gain medical care in this country at some point in their life. And it's already available on the Internet, if you know where to look, weeks before its planned debut in the theaters by the end of the month.

While Fahrenheit 911 was seen as starkly political, divided in red state/blue state mentalities, Sicko makes no such alignment. It follows individual American's stories as middle-class couples fight off bankruptcy due to co-pays and premiums from cancer or heart disease. We see a woman whose 18 month old baby is turned away from an out of network hospital with a 104-degree fever, only to die somewhere else. We hear the stories of volunteers who worked at Ground Zero who have come down with debilitating respiratory problems, only to be denied care.

While allusions are made to Nixon's opening up the HMO system, and Bush/Cheney's promises to support our troops and citizens ring comparatively hollow, this is not an attempt to recruit a generation of liberal Decmocrats. Instead, it is a call for change, made ever so stark by the seeming utopia found elsewhere that has me wondering why my wife and I have poured tens of thousands of dollars each of the last several years into a system that doesn't work.

What I strongly advise for you to do is find the movie online wherever you can, and watch it. Then, make sure you take yourself and as many people as you care about to the theater when it opens. Those people who choose not to see it because of what they may think of Michael Moore, or what they might think universal coverage represents, are keeping themselves as close-minded as the Flat Earth Society.

So take a few cues from Slashdot (Michael Moore's New Film Leaked To BitTorrent) and Webomatica (Watch Sicko at Google Video) and get your copy. It is bound to change the way you think about how you go to the doctor and pay your bills today. I know I'll be watching it again.

Google Reader Feeds Restored Following Outage

Turns out the missing feeds and trends data in Google Reader will look more like a blip than a calamity, as the company rapidly responded and restored all previous data in about an hour after customers first started noticing their RSS feeds and shared link statistics had been obliterated. I went back from having only 4 feeds to 190, and my trends data shows 400 shared items in the last 30 days, not zero. This gives us incredible relief, and reduces our level of frustration which hit mid-day.

Some circles define the Web 2.0 movement as being where the Web functions as an application. Instead of photos being stored on iPhoto, they can be stored on Flickr. Instead of Outlook, e-mail is on GMail. Instead of using NetNewswire, we use Google Reader. And while the portability of data from computer to computer and browser to browser is excellent, it does raise the fear that my data is outside of my immediate reach, and therefore, subject to the security of the third party. If Google Reader has an outage, my data is lost. If my blog platform goes down, I shut up for a while. And so on.

So what should we do? The common answer seems to be: Back up your data. After today's outage, many Google Reader users rapidly backed up their OPML files, in case it happened again. But there are a ton of companies out there actually offering backup services through the Web, from Apple to Google (GDrive anyone?) and others. What if those services go down? Are you S.O.L., or will a simple user agreement bail you out when the time comes? You honestly can't be too safe, or have too many backups of your data.

I absolutely appreciate the speed in which the Google Reader team responded to today's data meltdown. They even just posted a note on their official blog about the outage, which they called "brief" and within the "response time that we strive for". But before we saw this post, we genuinely thought our data was nuked and that we would have to start over, and that feeling was uncomfortable indeed. It's amazing how reliant I've become on the Web to give me my information as fast as I can get it.

Comcast Cable Internet's On the Blink

Typically, when we lose Internet access at home, my first inkling is to start the finger pointing toward our Airport Extreme base station from Apple. Despite a recent upgrade, it seems we lose all connectivity for about 20-30 minutes of each evening, often at the most inopportune times. But, in a flashback reminiscent of the 2000-2002 timeframe, when this happened all the time, tonight, in our corner of Sunnyvale, it's our cable modem that's literally on the blink, denying us connectivity.

All I have to say is thank goodness for nearby neighbors with unsecured wireless basestations that don't have a password. When our home network goes down, I just go to the Airport menubar and choose one of the available networks and keep going.

But truth be told, any time one of the key cogs to the Internet gets wiped out, it has me thinking how vulnerable our information delivery systems are. Prior to the Internet's pervasive presence, we could expect TV to always be available, or in the case of power outage, it was always a smart idea to have a battery-powered radio handy, to keep updated through an emergency. Now, we have made the Internet a key player in our communication, entertainment, news and commerce. Disrupting Web access for communities, regions or on a larger scale would have dramatic effect. Forget the obvious issues of forcing geeks to go outside of their cubicles without sunblock. It actually could stall the way we operate.

I'm not saying a mere blip in Comcast's uptime is the end of the world. I obviously found a work-around. But today's virtual highways are just as important as the real ones and disruptions or snarls could slow us down in a big way.

Google Gears Another Utility That Won't Work With Safari

Ratcheting up the company's applications battle with Microsoft today, Google debuted a new platform called Google Gears, a new developer API that lets Web developers also develop for offline use. Some are calling the introduction a game changer, and the service's cross-functionality on multiple platforms is lauded. But in what's too familiar a story, if you're a Mac user like me who prefers Safari as your Web browser, you're locked out.

The Google Gears page says in its system requirements it supports both Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+ browsers, with no mention of Safari. This despite recent close interaction with Google and Apple to deliver YouTube for the AppleTV, Google Maps for the iPhone, etc.

For some reason, being one of those on Safari today is akin to being a Mac user in the 1990s. Developers are coding for the major browsers, and we're lucky to be thrown a bone. Below are a few more bigtime apps that refuse to work under Safari:

1. The Alexa Toolbar

Alexa always, always dramatically undercounts Macs because Mac users site visits aren't counted. Despite years of knowing this was an issue, Alexa has made no move to offer anything but a toolbar for Windows users with Internet Explorer.

2. StumbleUpon

Although StumbleUpon has achieved success, recently making news for being purchased by eBay, the service is mostly mystery to me. The StumbleUpon toolbar is available only for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Safari users are not invited.

3. Google Pack

The Google Pack is available only for Windows users, period. Forget about any Mac version.

4. Google Toolbar

Making Safari 0 for 3 in the toolbar battle, Google Toolbar is only available on Firefox for the Mac or Internet Explorer. Safari users need not apply.

5. Yahoo! Toolbar

Aha! 0 for 4. The Yahoo! Toolbar is only available for Windows Internet Explorer or Firefox. Got Safari? Got no toolbar.

So whose fault is it here? Is it Apple's fault for creating a Web browser that wasn't extendible or developer friendly? Is it instead that the developers are ignoring the Mac OS X Safari market? Or further, are Web standards not being followed? I'd assume Google has the manpower to provide Mac OS X Safari capable Web applications, but they are putting resources somewhere else. For me, Safari is the very best browser. That these popular sites and programs are unavailable is extremely frustrating.

Blogosphere On Holiday Drops RSS Feeds by 40%

On Saturday, I speculated that U.S. Web traffic was down significantly for the Memorial Day weekend, as I had seen a spike in the percentage of international visits to the blog. But the drop-off wasn't nearly as stark as the reduction in total posts received by my tracked RSS feeds in Google Reader for a typical Monday. On the whole, total postings were down on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, with Monday's holiday being down more than 40% off average.


I typically read about 500 RSS items per weekday, and half that number on Saturday and Sunday, according to my Google Reader trends.


My Google Reader stats, by day, with Mondays marked.

• On May 28th, Memorial Day, I read exactly 300 items.
  
• On May 21st, I read 509 items.
  
• On May 14th, I read 553 items.
  
• On May 7th, I read 530 items.
  
• On April 30th, I read 515 items.

Assuming the total number of RSS feeds I read remained constant, the usual 526.75 average I could expect for a Monday had been whittled down by 44%.

Sunday and Saturday were also down, but to a lower degree. On May 27th, I read 259 items, whereas my typical Sunday list tops 280. The decline was only about 10%. On May 26th, I read 248 items, whereas a typical Saturday list is about 260. Saturdays are almost always the lightest days of the week, and the drop-off was miniscule.

Causes for the decline are numerous, of course. With most U.S. offices close, you would see a drop of work-related news, technology events to cover, and press releases to hit the wires. Some took the holiday away from the computer altogether. Others considered Monday a blog holiday as well. But rather than just have a gut feeling that traffic was down overall, Google Reader's stats give us a statistical benchmark.

U.S. Web Traffic Down For Memorial Day?

This being a 3-day weekend and the traditional kick-off to summer vacation season, it looks like even the geeks have left the keyboards behind and headed for more enjoyable places - ostensibly without net access. Robert Scoble's on his way to South Lake Tahoe, and even TechMeme makes it look like it will be a slow weekend.

Of interest, I looked at my own traffic, and I see that nobody from within 1,000 miles has come to the blog in the last little while. Instead of the usual domestic traffic, with much of that from the Bay Area, I've been frequented by visitors from India, Egypt, Belgium, New South Wales, Poland, the UK and a flurry from Nova Scotia. I guess they didn't get the memo the rest of us are on holiday.



Also of interest, it looks like the Register.com laptop theft I mentioned yesterday is leaking to mainstream press. The Inquirer (UK) starts the coverage. Paul Ferguson notes the security breach as well.

Unpopular Opinion: Digg Revolt Is a Bad Precedent

Unless you've been away from the computer for the last 24 hours, you are likely familiar with yesterday's amazing mob-like takeover of the Digg site by its users, angry about the site's removal of a submitted story which offered up a code removing copy protection from HD-DVDs on Linux. While the crack itself was esoteric, and probably didn't mean a hill of beans to the vast majority of the site's users, the ensuing take-down was the effect of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, spawning hundreds and hundreds of follow-on submissions that swamped the front page, even leading to the eventual, short-term shutdown of the site late yesterday.

Amid the din, Digg tried to explain its stance, saying they had to comply with copyright owners. But that just fanned the flames, and eventually, Digg founder Kevin Rose capitulated, saying "Today was an insane day" and added "We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code..."

The inmates had taken over the asylum.

Response to the melee is a lot like rubbernecking on the freeway. Everybody, jaws agape, had something to say on the subject, from TechCrunch and Mashable!, to parislemon to Digg competitor Slashdot. Many are cheering on the user base. Others are wondering if the takedown notice was even valid in the first place. But to me, as fun as it is to watch the mob, I absolutely see where Digg was coming from, and the response, to give the users what they want, is in dangerous territory.

Yesterday's explosion was around a code most of us would never use. But what is to stop the next round of Digg mobbery from promoting software piracy as Microsoft Windows Vista registration codes are passed around, or the latest TV shows and films are posted to BitTorrent? As Digg had first said yesterday, "We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights." But the sheer volume of users took over, and changed the rules. If enough of the mob decides tomorrow that leaking a DIVX copy of the new Simpsons movie online is the topic du jour of the day, they could again revolt against Digg and make sure that Digg's hands are tied. Now, there's precedent that Digg will walk away from a tough fight, when it threatens to cripple the popular site.

There is a population on the Web all too happy to find new ways to get something for free - whether they be film and TV downloads or MP3 files, software or pornography. Now that Digg has shown it can be used for nefarious methods, another barrier has been taken down between the Internet's dark side and those who have always followed the rules.

2 Down, 8 to Go: LinkedIn Launches Blog

LinkedIn is slowly but surely working to implement some of the more low-hanging fruit features I suggested the professional networking site adopt this last March (See: 10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn). After quickly knocking out a resume to PDF feature (#5 on the list), the company has now taken on the most public but integral feature (#10 on the list) by starting a corporate blog.

In late March, Steve Ganz, head Web developer at LinkedIn, in a comment on this site, said the debut of the company's corporate blog was "imminent", and now that day has come. The company evangelist, Mario Sundar, joined LinkedIn just last month, but is ready to start promoting all things LinkedIn. His first post says, "If you’re looking for a singular information source on LinkedIn with regular updates on upcoming product features, tips-and-tricks, and events or if you’d just like to hear about all the fun stuff associated with working at LinkedIn, you have reached the right place."

Congratulations to LinkedIn for offering a very-useful service and for continued growth. We appreciate the efforts and look forward to more progress. Don't forget, if you like louisgray.com, let's get LinkedIn!

(Additional coverage: Mashable)

Robot-Generated Sites Show Occasional Flaws

TechMeme, Megite, TailRank and other sites aim to organize the hot topics of the day, through tallying those news stories and blog posts most frequently linked to in a given day. And for about 99% of the cases, the sites do very well, even if they do tend to tilt in favor of the A-Listers a bit, meaning that if TechCrunch and I were to both post an article at the same time on the same topic for example, TechCrunch would take prominence, due to popularity, not necessarily the quality of writing. (See example from Saturday)

Today, while browsing Megite, a technology news site that aims to tell visitors "What's Happening Right Now", I was surprised to see that HP had agreed to buy Compaq for $25 billion. That's a huge acquisition to be sure, but one that happened six years ago. Amusingly, the story was accompanied by a photo of long since deposed HP CEO Carly Fiorina. The big news came not because it was "happening right now", but instead because a pair of blogs had linked to the years-old story, from CNET's News.com, in the context of new coverage around the computer company.


Click the Above Picture to See Megite's Flashback

Essentially, if enough top ranked bloggers opt to link to a story, regardless of its age, it looks like they could propel it to the top of Megite and other sites like it. And that's broken.

TechMeme hasn't been as loose, but I've seen the occasional oddity.

For example, on March 23rd, I had written that "The Apple TV Debate Is Upside Down", and as part of that note, I had linked to a comment from Robert Scoble, who said "Apple TV Rocks". Not surprisingly, Scoble was carried by TechMeme, and I was a related story. (See the screen cap from Noon on March 23rd)

But I had also gained a lot of traffic from MacSurfer and MyAppleMenu, two Mac aficionado sites who had found my comments interesting. When I wrote a follow-on post, saying "Welcome MacSurfer, MyAppleMenu Readers", that post somehow supplanted the previous article's placement in TechMeme. Somehow, the page generator believed that the second post trumped the first. (See the screen cap from 3 pm on March 23rd)

In theory, after my first article had been linked, I could have changed its title to something profane, or its content to gobbledy-gook, after having gotten the TechMeme pickup. So long as I retained the same linkage from the first piece, whatever was presented on TechMeme was up to me.

The practice of having algorithms define what's hot and what's not, exemplified by sites like these, and Google News, is not yet perfect, and continues to be refined. I expect we haven't seen the last of the quirks as they continue to develop.

CEO Search Caps A Busy Week for Technorati

David Sifry, CEO for Technorati, the Web's leading resource for blog statistics, searching and tagging, offers up an excellent case study for transparency for companies immersed in the world of Web 2.0. After I had guessed earlier this week that Technorati was going after spam blogs and later, that the company was about to give an update to the "State of the Blogosphere" or "State of the Live Web", no less than Sifry came here to confirm that was indeed the case. He even posted a comment letting me know when it was published. Yet, rumors continued to swirl around the company, saying that Technorati was either up for sale, or that he would be leaving the CEO role. Today, he wrote on his blog that Technorati was indeed looking for a new CEO.

Earlier this week on louisgray.com, David wrote, "I'm not going anywhere, I'm very very happy at Technorati!!!", to a commentor who suggested his departure was imminent. He again today said "I have no intention of leaving," and in his version of events, says that it was he who approached the company's board with the idea to change roles. While it's not too uncommon to see early founders change roles as companies grow, it is less common to have that change initiated by the founder themselves, so its possible the board and others had been exerting pressure, but of course, I have absolutely zero insight there.

In the Web space, customers care a lot more about products, services, functionality and integration than they do the individuals pulling the levers and writing the code. Kevin Rose at Digg is a great name and icon for his company, Mena and Ben Trott do the same for Six Apart. But even as transparency in blogging increases communications and openness, the mega-egos of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison who ruled tech in the 1980s and 1990s are going to be less important, I believe. Sifry, as far as I am concerned, continues to do a great job marketing and promoting the service, above marketing himself. Technorati, despite its occasional bumps is still unparalleled in its capabilities, and I've particularly enjoyed some of the new widgets they released earlier this week, which you can see on this blog, from blog reaction tallies to a button displaying Web influence.

So David, if you're still visiting and still reading, we wish you luck in the search, and hope that whichever direction the company takes, that you continue to promote great technology and innovation.

(Additional Coverage: TechCrunch and Startup Meme)

Technorati Confirms Attack on Splogs, Provides Update

Turns out we were right. Not that I should be hired by Law and Order for my deduction skills, but it was indeed true that Technorati was planning a new release today, after I saw David Sifry's blog make updates in preparation. While it's not yet a state of the blogosphere, the blog search and tagging leader did update us on the company.

Meanwhile, a new "State of the Live Web" will be posted by end of week.

The new rundown, which can be found here, shows that the company is going "up and to the right" in its visitor growth, to 9 million unique visitors last month, up 141% quarter over quarter. The site also remains the most highly trafficked blog search engine, ahead of Google, Feedster and others.

Also of note is that CEO David Sifry confirmed my suspicions that Technorati was going after spam blogs. He writes, "Our results are more complete, spam-free, and delivered more quickly than any other service on the Web. We're not perfect - we're always looking to get better, but I'm heartened by the progress we've made over the last six months or so." (More detail here)

Sifry noted the updates in comments placed on this blog, saying "We have been doing a massive spam cleanup," adding "Thanks for noticing! I hope that you've seen a difference..."

Looking forward to the updates later this week. In the meantime, check out the summary, or take part in Robert Scoble's challenge - is Technorati still the best blog search engine in the land?

Hype It Up: Ballhype Is Here to Change the Game

Take the community submitted news engine of Digg or Slashdot, the fanaticism of sports followers from SportsBlogs Nation, sprinkle in Google-like spidering of more than 1,600 sports blogs, and you have what just may be the perfect recipe for a breakthrough destination sports site. Ballhype, who suggests you can "Change the game" and "Hype it Up", offers all this and more, officially launching today after an extensive beta, of which I have been part.

Like Digg, Ballhype users can find new stories and post them to the service. Users can vote to "hype it up" or "vote it down" (like digg and bury), and those stories with the most positive votes rise to the top of the most-hyped list. Like Digg, you can discuss specific stories, but unlike Digg, Ballhype also pulls down stories from around the Web's vast sports blogosphere, from SportsBlogs Nation sites, including Athletics Nation and Sactown Royalty, to others including Deadspin and The Hardball Times.

More than just a story submission and voting site, Ballhype takes fans where they want to go, to a near-live scoreboard showing the day's games from all major sports, including the option to pick the winners before the games start, and have your own win/loss record ranked among the leaders on Ballhype. (I have to admit I started strong but was later shown I should stay out of the sportsbook at Vegas)

Ballhype also features extensive automatic tagging. If I submit a Sacramento Kings story involving Ron Artest, both the Kings and Ron Artest are tagged, and I can see all stories that have the same tags. I can also drill down by team or player, or specific blogs to find out as much or as little as I want to.

But best of all, the site is by the fans, for the fans. Some of the earliest participants, in addition to me, are the very bloggers behind some of the most popular sports sites. Fans have already created groups for "Bay Area Sports", "Basketball Addicts" and "Philadelphia Sports Fans", for example, so those with shared interests can find others who bleed the team colors and bite their nails all the way from preseason to the off-season draft picks. This is fanaticism at its finest, and yet another great example of how the Web can foster community regardless of location.

So, hype it up. After all, an authority no less than TechCrunch already noticed that "Sports Fanatics Will Love This". They will.

Unlimited Is the New Black

Earlier this week, Yahoo! made headlines for eliminating any restrictions on its Yahoo! Mail users. (Coverage: GigaOM, Richard McManus, Jeremy Zadowny)

Previously capped at 1 gigabyte of storage apiece, trailing Google's GMail offering, which queued up 2.8 gigabytes of e-mail space, Yahoo! took the plunge by moving to an unlimited model, in a hope of capitalizing on its strong user base, and possibly to start getting attention away from Google, who has been the assumed technology leader since the company's debut.

The move away from limited to unlimited has been seen time and again in the technology space. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that AOL and other dial-up ISPs charged by the hour you were logged on.

When AOL did switch away from offering hundreds of hours a month on widely distributed CD-ROMs, and moved to unlimited, it was a major change. You may remember that AOL in the first days of the promotion went almost completely inaccessible as the most hard-core users would dial in and never hang up, or set up autoscripts that would artificially keep them logged in after periods of inactivity.

The move from metered to unlimited is also taking hold in traditionally penny-tight industries like cellular phone service. While most plans offer several hundred minutes a month, others, including MetroPCS, are moving to basic monthly fees, regardless of usage. The business model there assumes that most won't exceed a certain threshold, effectively overpaying for the minutes they actually used, while the busiest of users won't bankrupt their provider.

On the Web, unlimited makes sense. Web hosting providers typically limit their customers to a standard amount of capacity space, and megabytes of data transmitted per month. But on the most popular of days, sites may be brought down because they had unforeseen traffic. That's like punishing your most successful customers. (See: Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher)

I expect that the Web providers who will win will offer unlimited accesses and capacity, and those offering limits will only be limiting their own potential growth. That Yahoo! saw this trend, and wanted to be part of it, is smart. It doesn't mean I'll ditch my .Mac e-mail address for Yahoo! Mail any more than I did for GMail, but some might.

The Trouble With RSS: I'm Not Involved

Don't get me wrong, RSS is a fantastic way for me to keep tabs on all the news and all the blogs rapidly, in one place. But the technology is in itself passive, and I keep finding myself missing out on the full picture, as the RSS reader (Google Reader in my case) scrapes the feed, but doesn't give me some very important elements to the blogosphere, including context, community, comments, and presentation. In effect, I am losing my participatory role in the blogosphere, making it less of a conversation, and instead, much more passive.

As I push through the 500 or so articles a day, if I stay in the RSS reader mode, I don't get an indication as to who is commenting on what articles, from any of my 100 or so feeds I follow. Even those feeds that list the total raw number of comments don't speak to who is commenting and the tone of the discussion, and there is no way to see without visiting the site directly.

Instead of adding to the conversation myself, I'm hitting "Add to Shared Items" for my link blog and moving on, not commenting and not alerting site owners and content generators that I'd been by. To those site owners who generate the RSS feeds themselves, I'm a mere number in their Feedburner statistics. I don't show up in their page views, my name doesn't show up in the comments, and I may as well be invisible. And as Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's "Naked Conversations" and other new media books will tell you, often, the comments are more interesting than the original post itself. Blogs are for community, not for a pulpit.

Given I don't have the time to control-click each of the URLs to see them in their own right, to see if the comments and those commenting will encourage my being involved in the conversation, how do I break through the RSS barrier? I don't see that the RSS standard is going to be enhanced such that comments are optionally displayed for each feed, so I should be much more diligent to selectively pursue conversations with top bloggers and top conversations. Otherwise, I've cut myself off from the blogosphere.

Taxes Completed Online, As Always

Intuit's TurboTax is a life saver. Every year around this time, and often earlier, my wife and I take all the last year's financial papers, sort them and then push them through the TurboTax program online, counting income statements and then (crossing our fingers), hoping we have enough deductions so that the government finds itself needing to send us a quick check and thank us for our efforts.

Every year, it seems to get just a bit easier. TurboTax stores our prior year's data, and imports it so I don't have to go through the mundane tasks of telling it where I live, where I work, what my name is, etc. It assumes nothing has changed from the previous year, and gives me the option to update. Additionally, the ability to import my brokerage account data from eTrade is dramatically easier than saving the data into Excel or Quicken or some other tool, then going one by one to add my gains and subtract my losses. (Funny how all year I root for gains, and come tax time, I root for losses...)

This year's efforts took the better part of the afternoon. I had two piles - the "To Do" and the "Done" piles, and I methodically moved from one to the next, with the A's spring training game playing on the radio in the background. By mid-afternoon, we were all done for yet another year, and can store away our papers until the IRS comes calling later to see if we got it all right. But that hasn't happened yet, and we've relied solely on the Web version of TurboTax for more than 5 years. I can't imagine going any other way.

Now, in the next few weeks, I expect an e-mail to confirm everything went through, and a quick bump in the bank as the refund goes through via direct deposit. It just works!

Beyond Syncing: My Data Is Flowing Everywhere

It seems we have moved beyond the point of having all data in one master location, but data is being prioritized such that some pieces are backed up in 3 to 4 places simultaneously, while other data is not backed up at all.

Last night this became especially apparent with our setup of the brand-new Apple TV. At initial setup, the Apple TV synchronizes with a selected iTunes library, and effectively backs up the entire song and TV show collection to its 40 Gigabyte hard drive, assuming it fits. Over my 802.11g network (my PowerBook is not yet n-enabled), this can clearly take a considerable amount of time. In fact, while thousands of songs and my TV shows have been synched so far, my iTunes progress bar tells me we have a few thousand more to go before the first full synch is complete. Additionally, if the Apple TV is seen as "busy", showing media, the synchronization stops. This means to offer the ideal setup for syncing, I should keep the laptop open and not use the Apple TV for a bit.


The Apple TV synchronization, in progress

Meanwhile, as this has been going on, Apple's Backup service (from .Mac) asked me this morning if I wanted to complete my daily backup of personal files and data, consisting of Safari bookmarks, e-mail, documents in my Documents folder and more. As I approved that backup, I also noticed that at the same time, my iSync icon in the menu bar began to rotate, indicating that my Address Book, iCal appointments and Safari bookmarks were being synchronized, so I would have the same data with me at the office.

This got me thinking - are we so far beyond the point of having all my data in one insecure location that I need so many pieces of it backed up every which way? My iTunes media is now on the home laptop, the AppleTV hard drive and my iPod, while my address book and iCal data is on my home laptop, work desktop and via the Web, as well as on the iPod. Clearly, over time I've prioritized some data over other data, backing up some pieces 3-4 times, and others not at all. Apple's recent bias, given the company's focus over the last few years, is to save my purchased music and video, even if my professional life didn't depend on it. But to see my data flowing three ways, to iSync, to .Mac Backup and to the AppleTV, all at once, was an eye opener.

LinkedIn Adds "Profile PDF Export", New Service Enhancements

I've been fairly vocal on LinkedIn's opportunity to expand its services, having first written about how LinkedIn can be made "even better", and second, writing a 10-point list that specifically outlined service enhancements to expand their user experience. As most great Web-focused companies do, they are listening.

Today, I received a comment from Steve Ganz, head Web developer at LinkedIn, who said some of the features I requested were available, and others were Imminent.

He commented, "These are all great ideas. Thanks so much for the great feedback, Louis! Stay tuned."

The first addition?

5. Allow Me to Export my LinkedIn Profile as PDF or Word

He writes:

Check! You will now find a link to download your LinkedIn Profile as a PDF right above your name on the profile page.

And it works too! You can download my LinkedIn profile here, complete with resume and recommendations, as I had outlined. My standard profile is here.

Also coming soon, an official LinkedIn blog. Looking forward to it.

10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn

The business contacts and networking site LinkedIn is becoming ever more integrated with the way we share information and conduct business. Earlier, I wrote that LinkedIn was leaving a lot of opportunities open without cashing in, by limiting the company's scope.

Maybe some of the reasons LinkedIn hasn't yet expanded its offerings is that they may be changing the way the site fundamentally works. If they are, then there's no better time than the present to propose further updates for the site.

1. Categories for Connections

Today, when I accept a connection with somebody, they are simply filed away in my ever-lengthening connections list. Yet, I can't designate whether this person is a colleague, a business partner, a customer, or even the competition. LinkedIn doesn't offer the designation, assuming all connections are equal. I know that LinkedIn has the capability to categorize, as when recommending a person, you can say you are a "Colleague", "Service Provider" or "Business Partner". Why not allow me to categorize my own connections in the same way, along with "Family", "Friends", "Competition" or the many other different types of relationships we have in this world? Even the most simple contact programs, like Apple's Address Book, have this option.

This distinction will become more important later in the list.

2. Selectively Allow Contacts to be Visible

Today I have only two options when it comes to sharing my list of connections with all other connections: either "On" or "Off". Either everybody sees every one of my connections, or nobody sees any of them. That clearly makes no sense. If I'm linked in to my boss, I don't necessarily want him to know I'm also linked in to a recruiter, for instance, so I may opt to "hide" a specific connection from viewing.

3. Selectively Block Contacts from Viewing Your Connections

On the flip side, there are occasions where I may not want a specific connection to view my entire list. You know that old adage about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer? I may Link In to an employee of the competition, to monitor their job progression or see their activity, but I certainly don't want them looking at my connections list, finding partners, colleagues, and customers to steal away. I should be able to mark an individual connection as not having visibility into my list.

4. Assuming Categories, Allow Hidden Groups and Hiding From Groups

If LinkedIn were to offer connection categories, I should be able to have the option of hiding all "Friends" from "Colleagues" or "Prospects" and "Partners" from "Competitors", for example. Rather than going one by one, as you could in the two proposals above, I could uniformly hide groups from other groups with a single checkbox.

5. Allow Me to Export my LinkedIn Profile as PDF or Word

Today, LinkedIn, in a clear attempt to promote traffic, and therefore sell more ads, offers you the option of "forwarding" your profile via e-mail, which alerts somebody to your online profile only. You also can print your profile, but there is no option to "Export" your profile to Microsoft Word or a PDF file. It should not be too difficult to export the profile to PDF, summarizing the profile, and adding recommendations at the end of the resume, following a page break. I could then take this PDF (powered by LinkedIn) and send it via e-mail as an attachment or post to a Web site or blog.

6. Enable Profile Hiding from Site Search

For me, the real benefits of LinkedIn come from face to face meetings, not from random people searching me out and hunting me down. The search function of LinkedIn doesn't add me any value that I can think of. Why not add the option to "hide" my details from the search engine?

7. Enable Permanent Connection Blocking By Individual or Company

You can invite somebody to be a connection up to 3 times, if I remember correctly. It's not that uncommon that I'll get random invitations from people who figured out my e-mail address, or say they took some class with me in college a decade ago, or even worse, an odd subset of LinkedIn participants who measure themselves by the total number of connections. I have no interest in tagging my name onto someone who claims 500+ contacts (the maximum displayed) or highlights the number of connections in their profile as something that differentiates them. Also, if I don't want to be connected to anybody from a Hotmail address, say... ever, I should be able to block that domain.

8. Enable Deleting of Proposed Recommendations, Not Just Rewrites

In September, an otherwise good friend of mine posted a fake recommendation for me. Maybe he was drunk, or just out of his head, but it was ridiculous, and won't ever see the light of day on my profile. Yet, while I declined it and asked for a rewrite, it is still in my "Inbox" as a received recommendation. My only two options? "Show on Profile Now" or "Show on Profile Later". There is no option to "Delete Forever", and their certainly should be.

9. Expand User Profiles With an "Assets" Tab

Beyond my flat resume, my profile on LinkedIn is fairly shallow. It offers me the option to have links to my blog, Web site or RSS feed, but for many of us, it'd be much more robust and demonstrative of my abilities to add PDF or Word documents of things I'd written. Given the rich media capabilities of the Web, why couldn't LinkedIn's "assets" section offer links to product demos or video clips? The flat resume doesn't resonate in a much more rich media world.

10. Start a Corporate Blog

Who is the voice for LinkedIn, and how are they interacting with the community, if at all? Searching Google for a "LinkedIn Blog" turns up some fan collections, but nothing from the allegedly hip, leading Web 2.0 site. In fact, LinkedIn goes out of its way to hide ways to hear from the company, as its "Company Info" is in the bottom right corner, showing only "About LinkedIn" and "LinkedIn for Groups". LinkedIn is a perfect company to have a corporate blog talking about what the company represents, and where it is going.

My Technorati Link Stats Make No Sense

Looking at one's Technorati ranking frequently is well-known symptom of "Egotistical Blogger Syndrome" or EBS, for short. Comics have been made about bloggers needing to get their Technorati ranking fix, and others, like Guy Kawasaki, have made very public campaigns about their quest to reach the top 100. But for me, a small speck in the blogosphere, I don't see that my numbers add up, as Technorati's database often loads slowly, loses items and simply doesn't project consistency.

For more than a year now, we've dabbled in this blog, and while it does cover technology news, sports buzz and the occasional political rant, it is by and large a personal blog. For much of the time, it's gone largely unnoticed. More recently, some of my observations around Google Reader, Digg and timing for blog posts have gotten a wider audience, sending more readers my way, more frequent comments, and, best of all, some external links. After the weekend's activity, which saw links from Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble, among others, today we landed on TechMeme again for our comments on Digg reaching 1 million users, and the well-respected Mathew Ingram noted the post on his blog and in a follow-up for WebProNews.

Yet, for some reason, as Technorati tries to tally the external links to my blog from others, the needle doesn't move. In fact, in some weird blip, many of the weekend's links were erased from my blog's summary page on the site over the last two days, and as more links came in today, both my ranking and the total number of external links stayed the same. So, if I were the obsessive type with EBS, and I were to value myself by my low-low Technorati ranking, I could potentially get annoyed.

Is it a database refresh issue, in that Technorati will update the ranking every 8 hours, or 24 hours? And if it were, at what time would that happen? And should I expect those external links that were there a few days ago to ever come back, or is that data lost? Is that why my ranking is staying static, even as more blogs point my way? I wonder if I will ever know.

Digg Hits 1 Million Users - World Domination Next

There's rapid growth, and then there's exponential growth. If you're a growing Web-based business like Digg, where the massive number of users and page views can be monetized to accelerate revenue, the latter is clearly much more preferred, and today, Digg founder Kevin Rose was excited to announce the site had passed the 1 million user mark, in just over two years after the site's start. Crossing the milestone signals continued expansion for the site, which has eclipsed Slashdot in tech news relevance, if not yet in total users, and has become a go-to site to see the day's popular news and oddities.

While the achievement is fantastic, and as Rose mentioned, "a point I never dreamed of", Digg isn't the only Web 2.0 company to reach such an illustrious mark.

* StumbleUpon achieved 1 million users in July of 2006, four years after its inception, and, like Digg, enables users to submit stories and rate them. (Source: Mashable)

* Del.icio.us reported 1 million users in September 2006, just under three years since its start, and saw its growth accelerate following acquisition by Yahoo! earlier that year. In fact, at the time, reporters lauded the service for being much larger than Digg. (Source: TechCrunch)

* In January, Second Life said they were set to exceed 3 million users, and that 1 million of those accounts had logged in during the previous two months. (Source: Second Life Insider)

* LinkedIn says they have more than 9 million subscribers, with 1,070,300 or so being 3 degrees away or less in my network alone.

Meanwhile, Slashdot, the original Digg-like story submission engine, has well more than 1,000,000 users, even if they don't have all the buzz. I clocked in as user 104,197 some time back in 1999, though I haven't been all that active, constantly reading, occasionally submitting stories, but mostly just watching.

What does this mean? Simply that the Web has a lot of active users interested in sharing news and information, and that the most popular brands will quickly gather millions of users if they offer differentiated services. That Digg has gotten there as fast as it has is quite laudable, if not a surprise. Good luck on your race to 10 million, Digg.

Maintaining Integrity of Web Archives Is Essential

On Monday, IDC announced an estimated 161 exabytes of digital information was created in 2006, by far a record. Expectations are that the data growth will continue, through a zettabyte, six times higher than last year's number, by the year 2010. Increasingly, the world's information is digital, and a great deal of it is online.

As more information related to news, commerce and personal histories goes online, it becomes increasingly essential to ensure the long-term integrity of that data, not just for today, but for future years, to accurately record a history of our time, and to complete the massive linkage needed for the Internet to act as a true conduit of a culture.

Even in the last decade or so, we can see how data has been presented for the short term, without much care as to future access. It's not uncommon to see links to news articles of months or years ago hit 404 messages, as sites change directory structures, or delete old data, in a wholly misguided effort to save space. In other cases, domain names go unrenewed, losing data, or hackers maliciously change, corrupt or delete sites, which cannot be recovered. Even some of the most popular sites, like Yahoo! News' carrying articles from the Associated Press, have a limited shelf life, as articles rise to prominence and fall away quickly, to be forgotten forever, as URLs expire.

I strongly believe that every webmaster, blogger, and news medium needs to pay as much attention to archival data as they do to present-day data and future plans. The very Web-like nature of the World Wide Web demands that one link lead to another and to another, with multiple hyperlinks reaching out like strands from the center of the Web to the edge, and each having a multiple, optional, paths from one location to another. If Webmasters and site owners opt to make wholesale changes to directory structures, domain names, or server names, it should be done in a way that does not impact historical data. External hyperlinks should remain unbroken. Search engine archives should return true data, and access to those archives should remain clear. This line of thought falls in line with the thinking of Web pioneer Dave Winer, author of Scripting.com.

If you run a wholly Web-based blog, make backups to your local computer or offline, to CDs, DVDs or even an iPod. I back up to my laptop, iPod, and using Apple's .Mac Backup service.

From 1996 to 1998, I worked for the student newspaper at UC Berkeley, and had set up a search engine to index all articles on the newspaper's online site for the previous 3 to 4 years. Later, due to a series of site overhauls, and the occasional webmaster error, all was lost. Now, the Daily Cal's Web site offers a search engine option for "Before 1999", and it returns nothing. The 200+ stories I wrote for the paper can only be found sporadically in Google's archives, or where they were reposted on other sites.

Others, like Robert Scoble, note their own history was erased, when blog hosts made widescale changes. That is something that should never happen if the Web is to continue forward for years to come.

Now, at the office, I find media coverage on our company I once linked to in 2001 or later is gone, due to media mergers and acquisitions, site changes, or other reasons. In other areas, early personal home pages I once wrote, both in college, and after, are only preserved in patchwork fashion on The Internet Archive, one gallant attempt at bridging the gap between publishers' holes and the true nature of the Web.

There are countless examples of one day's treasures becoming tomorrow's trash. But if the Web is ever to be considered a historical record, we must treat it as such. Backup the data - there's tons of storage space. Preserve URL structures. Preserve domain names, and constantly look both forward and backward, or that next 404 you find could be your own.

Google Reader Suggestions Proving Popular

My notes yesterday on 10 ways Google Reader could be improved seem to have struck a nerve in the tech community. Offering what I believe to be simple updates to an already strong and very popular tool could turn the RSS reader program from arguably one of the best to the level of elite. The conversation on this topic, on what could have been a lazy Sunday in the blogosphere, elevated my Web traffic to above six times the daily average, and gained feedback from some of the most notable technology pundits out there, as well as some smaller folks with interesting insight. In fact, I was elated to see the post summarized in Portuguese - which hinted to me it'd crossed some sort of barrier.

Edelman's Steve Rubel, author of Micro Persuasion, led off the linking last night with a quick "Google, ya listening?".

The piece got more traction on Digg than any other post I'd offered, getting a dozen or so Diggs. Regardless of quality, it seems I can't clear a handful, given the site's lack of brand recognition, but this signaled more broad appeal.

The esoteric "Library Stuff" noted the piece, saying "I’m still in love with Google Reader." but adding I had "a few ideas."

Things reached a fever pitch when two of the tech heavies weighed in. TechMeme picked up the story late this evening, resulting in an onrush of traffic. Robert Scoble noted the piece in a summary on the potential overload of social media. He adds, "I should make a list too!" Let's hope he does.

Scoble's notes always lead to more conversations, as his book "Naked Conversations" suggested they would. The blog "Capture the Conversation" weighed in later, saying Google would "be the sickest RSS client", calling my notes "good and pretty comprehensive", adding his call for authenticated feed support and server side sessions. Too geeky for me. :-)

Additional comments can be seen on the original story, including better integration with Google News, unsubscribed feeds lying dormant, and password authentication.

It's been a fun day watching a conversation rather than a echo chamber. I can't wait to kick off the next one.

10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader

As an avid Google Reader subscriber and shared link blogger, there are a few ways I believe the fastest-growing RSS reader could improve, bettering the user experience and opening new opportunities for both Google and its users.

Keep in mind I have no insight as to Google Reader's plans, or if some of these options are in development or under consideration.

1. "More Like This" Suggestions

Offer a "More Like This" button, suggesting other similar feeds to those I've subscribed to. I may, for instance, be familiar with Matt Cutts' site, but not know about John Battelle. This could be engineered, as Amazon does, to say "Others who subscribed to Jeremy Zadowny also subscribed to Don Dodge or Robert Scoble."

2. Eliminate Duplicate Feed Items

The ability to determine if a story has already been read, and not display it. In fact, the biggest abuser of this for me is Google itself. If I sign up to receive an RSS feed of Google News Alerts on the topic, I'm alerted that the story has changed every hour, even if the only thing that has changed is that Google knows it is "8 hours ago" as opposed to "7 hours ago" and "6 hours ago". Today, this results in my seeing stories that match my keywords up to 25 times.

3. Add Negative Keywords

I'd like the ability to add "negative keywords" to feeds. It's been noted by some Steve Rubel subscribers that they don't want his daily links to hit RSS, and others have complained that Jason Calacanis talks too much about his "fatblogging" initiative, as opposed to his technology and business insight. If I subscribed to Steve Rubel, I could add "links for" as a negative keyword, and for Calacanis, "fatblogging", letting me get the RSS feeds I wanted and not those I didn't, without being forced to completely unsubscribe, which today is the only option.

This is likely more for the broad RSS community, but if anybody has the talent to innovate out, it's Google. I assume there are likely readers of my own blog who would prefer not to get sports updates or comments on politics as well, so filters would be a wildly utilized feature across the Web.

4. Share Items Without Subscriptions

Enable the ability to share RSS items without first requiring subscription to the feed. Often, I may run into an interesting story and want to share it, but not have it in my RSS subscription list. I should, for example, be able to add a story to my shared links blog from CNN or MSNBC without getting every story sent my way.

5. Aggregate Reader Statistics

Display of aggregate statistics from readers. What are the most frequently read blogs? What ones have the highest % read rate in specific categories? What are the most popularly shared stories that day? Scoble has mentioned that enabling a popularity index would threaten sites like Digg, if it gained mass appeal.

6. Addition of Search

Really, Google. If your job is to search and archive all the world's information, then how does temporarily displaying news items that go away permanently, without offering an ability to search them, fit into that mission? Today, Google Reader offers no way to search through unread items, requiring you to either view them chronologically, by category or by individual feed.

7. Create a Link Blogs Directory

Show a directory of shared Google reader Link Blogs, organized both alphabetically and ranked by popularity of readership.

8. Further Integrate "Trends"

Add "Trends" to the main bar, below "Home", "All Items", "Starred Items" and "Shared Items" for easy access. I've actually made a bookmark for my trends, which I check on occasion.

9. Expand Individual Feed Statistics

Add more statistics by feed. Google Reader trends show the most active sites over the previous 30 days, and also show those which haven't been updated recently, but I don't get an indication as to the timing frequency of each feed. What time do they update, or on which days? Are they publishing more frequently now than they were two weeks ago? A "Show feed trends" could dive down into the individual RSS feed's statistics.

10. Customization Everywhere

More interface options. Google may favor simplicity, but there's zero options to customize a shared link blog. For example, the "Powered by Google Reader" message takes up a third of the real estate. I also can't customize the look and feel of the Google Reader interface itself, to change colors or layout.

LinkedIn Provides Another Silly Web 2.0 "Error" Page

At the end of the workweek, I was planning a simple Address Book export to LinkedIn, to capture all the new contacts I acquired, but stumbled into a roadblock, as LinkedIn appears to have some planned downtime.

True to the site's Web 2.0 form, it provides a playful "We're Down!" message. This follows in line to the silliness provided by YouTube, Technorati, MySpace and others when they've suffered downtime.


The screen shot around 5:15 this afternoon...

I can only hope LinkedIn is in the process of introducing some of the new features I had proposed last month (See: How to Make LinkedIn Even Better). My site logs showed employees at LinkedIn read the story.

Previous stories on Web 2.0 Errors:

August 4, 2006: Web 2.0 Companies Play With Error Messages
January 24, 2007: Silly YouTube - Where's the Redundancy?
January 31, 2007: Scoble's Right: Technorati Isn't Scaling to Beat Google

Tidbits from the Link Blog: March 1, 2007

At what point does the information overload become too much, crossing the line from data to noise? Read/Write Web shows ever-growing millions of blogs indexed by Technorati, more stories per day from TechCrunch, a representative Web 2.0 blog, and Seth Godin says too many people are simply blogging about blogging, delivering noise over substance.

Meanwhile, in the real world, it looks like Apple is having significant traction, doubling computer sales in a year, and seeing iTunes grab more share from the competition. In fact, on the recent stock market weakness, I bought into AAPL in a big way, at $86.30 a share. It sounds expensive, but is at a discount from my last sale, and I was certainly in the green by end of day. Could be a longer-term buy and hold. On with the links...

Read/Write Web: The Attention Economy: An Overview
Seth Godin: The Disappointment of the Noisy People
TechCrunch: Digg Should Sue Wired

The Unofficial Apple Weblog: iTunes use increased in 2006
MacRumors: Analyst: Mac Sales Grew Over 100% In January

To see what I'm finding interesting, bookmark or subscribe to my link blog.

How to Make LinkedIn Even Better

LinkedIn is the best tool I've seen for professional networking - offering a way to present one's work history and expertise, as well as find contacts at other companies through people you know. As one's connections grow, your network similarly grows, exponentially. While it's already the best, I believe there are some new features LinkedIn could introduce to further their lead.

Of late, the site has expanded, adding tools for importing contacts from desktop mail applications and Webmail accounts, expanded into new arenas, including services, and started a forum for questions and answers, with the assumption being a contact's response within your network will have more validity than a stranger.

I believe LinkedIn could get even better through adopting features common with social networking sites, such as knowing:

1. How many times your personal profile has been visited
2. Who has recently visited your personal profile
3. Who has similar profiles to yours
4. Who has similar profiles to your connections
(i.e. "More Like This")

In addition these elements, I believe LinkedIn could extend its "Answers" service into something more along the lines of an RFP submission engine. Within your profile, you could suggest your business type, your availability for inquiries for goods or services, and buyers could directly connect with sellers. LinkedIn could add a new tab to their site, labeled "MarketPlace", which is buyer-driven, instead of seller dominated. Unlike consumer-focused auction sites like eBay or shopping engine databases like Shopzilla, LinkedIn would connect a business service with an individual profile, who presumably could be seen as being so many steps away from you "In Your Network".

As LinkedIn grows in scope, and becomes the default professional-oriented resume/contact information database, the opportunities could be seemingly limitless. With a little tweaking, one could set up dating services based on job occupation and geography. For instance, were I looking, maybe I would want to date a prospect in the field of Marketing or Human Resources in the Technology Field who had more than 10 recommendations from peers. Could happen, although I'd make the "Marketplace" a higher priority...

Do you use LinkedIn? How else could the service improve?
Also, feel free to "Get Connected" or view my profile.

The Big Debate: Online vs. Offline, and Web Influence

In 1998-1999, when I worked for Internet Valley, a small Silicon Valley startup focused on Web search engine optimization, Web influence and technology trends, we believed that you had to "Get Web or Get Out", meaning that the traditional big companies who had dominated the offline world would need to adapt to the Web or risk being left behind altogether. In the year or so I was at the company, we developed new benchmarks to track a Web site's influence, and even tried our hand at predicting the market capitalization of Web companies looking to go public.

Nearly a decade later, it is clear that the Web and the world of e-commerce have had a dramatic effect on the competitive technology and media landscape. It's no mystery that all companies, big and small, have a Web strategy. Some are executing well, while others are seeing their business models completely eroded by faster, nimbler, newer challengers.

Foremost on the road to extinction, barring revolution, are off-line media companies, from newspaper giants like the New York Times to print magazines - especially in the technology field. While technology publications used to number in the hundreds of pages per issue, even the leaders are seeing editions with only a few dozen pages, and maybe a dozen ad pages, including house ads promoting upcomin