a blog by Ian Kennedy
The popular alternative to Microsoft Explorer, Mozillla’s Firefox, released it’s 1.0 preview on Tuesday. There’s been a steady increase in the number of Firefox installs as folks start to move away from IE in the wake of all its security problems.
On my personal site, I’ve seen Mozilla and Safari traffic grow to where it now represents over 25% of all the hits coming to the site.
Upon initial use, I see no significant changes except a
CNet today sums up the current debate of the future of RSS. Robert Scoble at Microsoft set off a firestorm when he claimed that RSS is broken because of the bandwidth spikes set off by readers everywhere that are set to go off on the hour.
Dave Winer, defender and champion of the protocol, quickly jumped in to say the reason bandwidth was a problem for Microsoft was because they had aggregated all their MSDN blogs into one gigantic feed with a high probability of new content always being there and thus greater attraction of (a) everyone subscribing to the mega-feed as a one-stop shop and, (b) everyone setting their RSS readers to pull this feed more frequently in order to stay up to date.
Large file + pulled by many people around the world + with great frequency = expensive bandwidth bill
The debate is still ongoing but I think we’re always going to see the tendency to aggregate feeds into collections. As much as Winer rails against it, the tendency of humans to aggregate for convenience and knowledge sharing coupled with the other tendency of humans to be lazy and go for the pre-packaged is going to win over the ideal which is to require everyone to roll their own.
Despite it being cheaper and better for you, no one catches their own fish anymore.
I read somewhere that Scoble reads something like 1,000 feeds a day. It makes me think that maybe RSS has now gotten to the point where we’re downloading and caching whole segments of the web for individual perusal which seems grossly inefficient. Perhaps it’s time to push it back out again and layer a RSS search engine on top of the “living web” of blogs and their feeds and layer a semantic filter on top of this engine which only feeds you what is of interest and relevant. Ah yes, please define a static filter of what is of interest and relevant. . .
The San Jose Mercury News did a piece this week on companies turning to new tools to track consumer opinions on blogs. More and more people are beginning to realize that the right blogs, if monitored correctly, can serve as an early warning mechanism for the PR flacks everywhere. With their finger on the pulse of “the next big story,” the more popular blogs can amplify little known facts and points of view to the point where they can get picked up by the popular media and broadcast to the world at large.
So how does a company keep track of the sentiment of what’s being said in the blogsphere about their product and brand? One of the more interesting tools highlighted in the article is Blabble. Founded by Rochester, NY based web designer, Matt Rice. The concept is called “thought parsing” using natural language processing to aggregate opinions expressed about a set of user-defined keywords to get at overall sentiment.
Existing software products aggregate listings from blogs, but require the user seeking a view of overall trends or opinions as represented in blogs to read through all the blog listings to make that determination manually.
Rice says Blabble goes a step farther by incorporating natural language processing that parses blog listings returned in a search into parts of speech so as to extract from them words, phrases and constructions that indicate opinion. “50,000 people may write about a topic, but you don’t have time to read 50,000 listings,” says Rice. “And I probably don’t care about one individual opinion; it’s the aggregate that I care about.”
UPDATE : as of January 2006, the Blabble service will no longer parse the blogosphere. According to the site, “we don’t know what we’re going to do with the technology.”
You know your industry is getting into the mainstream consciousness when The Onion does a parody piece on it.
In other news, this blog got it’s first Comment Spam this morning, in a strange sort of way, I feel that I’ve arrived.
A lot of people are reading about weblogs and bloggers for the first time in the media coverage of the recent Democratic National Convention. While the debate in the traditional media over what exactly qualifies as a jounalist comes off sounding a tad defensive, it’s instructive to read some of the coverage of the convention from a blogger’s point of view. I particulary enjoyed Jessamyn West photo blog coverage which turned the camera on the cameramen with clever meta commentary on the side.
DNC Day 1
DNC Day 2
DNC Day 3
DNC Day 4
DNC Day 5
I particularly liked this shot which shows Moveable Type in action (on a Mac and a PC as well!) at the convention.
After much anticipated fanfare, Microsoft launched NewsBot into beta for it’s headline MSNBC site. Looks like the advertising execs got their hands on it first though because, according to an MSN spokesperson, NewsBot favors MSNBC stories over others.
an MSN spokeswoman later confirmed it in e-mail. “As Newsbot resides on MSNBC and is branded as such, MSNBC is considered a first among equals, meaning that if they and another top-tier source offer the same story, information, etc., MSNBC will be listed first, followed by other sources,” wrote Elizabeth Herrera Smith.
So much for objectivity!
Thank you everyone that made it last night to my send off. It was great to reminisce about old times and share stories from days gone by. It seems like St. Thomas and the coming together of the JV is burned in everyone’s memories as a particular highlight but there were also plenty of other stories of Factiva’s “derring do” as people went that extra step for either work or pleasure. The folks at Factiva are a unique group of talented people ~ keep the spirit alive, I’ll miss you all.
Add another story to the books from last night. The picture below shows David Hamm’s car which joined us for drinks last night and was still “thirsty” even after four pitchers of agua. We certainly had the waitress wondering where all the water was going. . .
UPDATE: Correction. I see that the US Newsbot site has launched this morning and is framed as subset of the overall MSNBC site.
According to this CNet article, Microsoft will launch Newsbot on Tuesday next week. Although it doesn’t spell this out explicitly, it appears that this will be a site focused on aggregating news sources from North America and supplement the 17 other regional beta sites that are already up and running.
So I guess the dancing and zoning is over and the beta & pre-promotion period begins.
A shame too, now that the Toronto Star is about to join the New York Times and Globe & Mail behind the subscription wall. I guess they’ll miss the party.
Depending upon your perspective, Microsoft is either dancing around or zoning in on perfecting their news searching technology with their launch of six new regions of their Newsbot beta.
Belgium
Germany
Ireland
Switzerland (French)
Switzerland (German)
US (Spanish)
Indonesia
Philippines
This brings the total to 17 regional views of the news.