Feedburner Stats Way Down
I noticed a big drop in the number of Feedburner subscribers to my blog over the past few days with the number of subscribers dropping nearly 50% starting sometime Thursday last week (May 8th). I noticed one other person reporting a drop and they pointed to Google Reader numbers being the culprit and, sure enough, if you look at the two graphs below, my Google Reader numbers are down significantly (230 vs. 60) but other readers (Netvibes for example) are down as well.
Anyone else notice this?
US Postage up a penny on Monday
As of tomorrow, First Class postage is going up from $0.41 to $0.42. I bought a book of Forever stamps a couple weeks ago and as of tomorrow they are worth a penny more. That’s a 2.4% gain in just a few weeks. Not the most practical investment vehicle, you have to stand outside the Post Office to liquidate your holdings, but the closest thing to a sure thing anyone will see these days.
I wonder how many people took the Postal Service up on their futures contract and how much interest revenue they’ll gain from front loading their earnings? They say that email and automated bill pay have cut deeply into the Postal Services’ earnings. The credit market crunch means I don’t get my daily assortment of Capital One credit card offers (don’t miss ‘em!). I also read somewhere that after Capital One, Netflix is the Post Office’s next biggest customer (my local post office has a dedicated slot for Netflix drop-offs). What happens when broadband delivery of movies takes over and Netflix drops out as well?
What businesses is the Post Office thinking of getting into in order to stay relevant?
Small Town Messages
You know you live in a small town when the local PTA message board posts the following:
We lost one of our black silkie chickens near Santa Clara and Court. If you see a small black chicken roaming around please call us.
We miss her. She is a pet, not dinner.
Where’s the Kaboom?
There are so many things I could say right now about Microsoft walking away from the table this past weekend. More than anything, I feel like someone peering up over the parapet and looking at the smoke clearing from the battlefield.
Where’s the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom? (.wav file)
Raw vs. Polished
Eric Berlin writes about the differences between Friendfeed and TechMeme.
Therefore, perhaps we can say that Techmeme aggregates what’s important about tech and Internet news and easily provides links to surrounding conversations. It’s really a new kind of online newspaper, and a pretty terrific one. And Friendfeed is an aggregator of lots of stuff, of what people are reading and writing and sharing and looking at and listening to.
Friendfeed is the modern version of a newswire while TechMeme is a constantly updated newspaper. If you have the time to scan through the real-time updates of everyone’s lifestream, FriendFeed is going to get you the news faster. If you’d rather let the editorial algorithms do the heavy lifting, TechMeme is the way to go.
Which do you prefer and why?
Cognitive Surplus will free up time to
One of the best talks at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo was Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus. In it he suggests that modern television is a, “cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.”
He concludes after describing how a child spent a few minutes looking for the mouse connected to her living room television;
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.
The ironic thing is that I was stuck in the hallway and missed this talk. I read Clay’s transcript and was moved. But watching him deliver his talk on video was even more impactful (for instance, listening to the collective, “Ahhh!” from the crowd when he delivers the lines quoted above).
As with many involved in the tech industry, I watch very little television but when I do, it’s mediated by timeshifting technology that lets me watch it on my own terms. It’s either on Tivo or filtered through social pointers such as Jeremy’s blog post which determine which videos I invest time to watch.
“The web is in its infancy,” says Tim Berners-Lee and looking at the tools available to manage information flow it’s easy to see why. We’re shifting from a time of channel surfing to web surfing but the evolution from web portals to something more dynamic and efficient has only just begun. The vast wealth of information is still intoxicating and we constantly jump around afraid we’re going to miss something. What’s going to happen when we wake up from this second, “collective bender” and use our spare time to improve the world around us.
Then we will have the capacity, as Tim O’Reilly challenges us, to “wrestle with angels.”
MyBlogLog & Microformats
Sometimes it’s the simple things. Last week we switched on another piece of the microformats suite and all MyBlogLog profiles now support vCard and hCard formats.
For more details, see the MyBlogLog blog.
For more on Microformats in general and why they’re cool, see Denise Olson’s excellent primer, An Introduction to Microformats.
MyBlogLog and Web 2.0 Expo
Todd and I have been busy hanging out over at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo (save one short visit to the nearby Blue Bottle Coffee, thanks Sam!) but the team has been back at MyBlogLog HQ cranking out some cool stuff regardless.
HCard & VCard support - very cool to see these come to light. Todd has the scoop.
MBL Mobile - we brushed off this hack and updated it a bit. Steve wrote a java client (and Chris made a cool Mac installer) that you can download and run on your desktop. It runs in the background and a little bubble pops up when a fellow opted in MyBlogLogger is within Bluetooth range.
Wi-Fi enabled invitations - O’Reilly was kind enough to give us the IP Addresses of the wi-fi routers at the Expo. We now look for any traffice coming from this range and if we see a MyBlogLog member accessing it from this range, we leave them a message on their MyBlogLog profile inviting them to check out MBL Mobile and to stop by the Yahoo booth and say, “Hi”
Collective Intelligence - as we have done before, we use the wi-fi address range to collect a gallery of all the MyBlogLog members that have used the internet via the Web 2.0 Expo routers. We sometimes get around to showing a rank ordered list of the most popular links but didn’t get around to it this time.
Dipity Lifestream Visualization
Just re-discovered Dipity which was a cool tool for creating timelines. They now have jumped onto the lifestreaming bandwagon and provide a way to publish and share a portion of your lifestream in a visual way.
The Lifestream Filter Will be the Next Great Algorithm War
I’m paraphrasing the title of this post from David Recordon who threw this line out following a chat I had with him a couple of weeks back. It’s a very insightful observation that predicts opportunities in the real-time world which lifestream services operate.
It’s now easier than ever to pull together an aggregated feed of content from across the web. Facebook and FriendFeed organize this content around your friends and contacts. MyBlogLog also presents a New in My Neighborhood view which shows a mixed feed of all your contact’s lifestream content. Yet, once you get more than a handful a friends on these systems, the number of updates (especially if any of them are using twitter) quickly spins out beyond what you can handle.
Twitter is often used to announce new blog posts and the new broadcast service from Six Apart, Blog It, only exasperates the problem by spawning multiple posts from a single Facebook entry. We live in a world where finding out what your friends are doing is not a problem. The difficulty is in filtering through the hundreds of updates that stream by each day to those events that are most relevant without losing the sense of serendipitous discovery that we experience today.
So here we are today. It’s like we’re all discovering search engines all over again. In a matter of weeks we’ve gone from “Wow! I can find everything here!” to, “Crap! Over 600,000 results for the phrase Serendipitous Discovery? How can I find the one reference I’m looking for?”
The huge opportunity ahead is a filter to bubble up the things you need to know without missing anything you want to know.
A couple of posts point to this being a trend
- Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise - TechCrunch
- Lifestreaming Services Need Better Filtering - Lifestream blog
We’re trying a few things out at MyBlogLog that vector results based on how you have tagged yourself on your profile. Right now, in a user’s New in My World feed, it’s a straight, chronological feed based on items that match your tags. Also, because it’s based on meta-data, this only means we can present you with items that are tagged so that leaves out plain text updates such as twitter posts but we’re just getting started.
As David’s quote indicates, this is a huge opportunity and something I look forward to working on. I look forward to a robust debate on different approaches in the coming weeks!
