Hillary Johnson picked up on yesterday's post here on RSS, and really expanded on my commentary in her post on her Kerabu blog (also cross-posted on the Engagement Alliance blog ... wonder how she did that ;-) ).  The basis of my post was that readers and users don't really care about the underlying technology as long as it's easy and it works.  Hillary turned the tables on me and pointed out that while Qumana has been derided by some for it's simplicity--that it's dumbed-down--that's what she likes most about it.  Yes!  She hit the nail on the head!  Here is some of her commentary:

I find Qumana to be extremely smart where it counts--which is in streamlining the small, repetitive motions involved in posting to my blogs. When I click the link button in the WYSIWYG editor bar, the field auto-fills with the last thing I cut and pasted. This may not sound like much, but when you are writing a post with a half-dozen links, cutting the number of clicks per link in half and reducing the mouse-mileage by half as well is absolutely brilliant. Qumana creates exactly this kind of gestural economy throughout. In Typepad, the category default is set to a single category; selecting multiple categories is a chore. In Qumana, you check the categories you want, with no control key to hold down, and no false distinction between single and multiple categories. SixApart should have corrected this annoying hurdle long ago. Guess they're just not "dumb" enough.

   It takes a pretty dumb bunny to think that complicated = sophisticated. There are three reasons to write your blog posts in html: it's faster; you can do more stuff; you think it makes you one of the cool kids.  I've had about enough of this geek chic mentality--it fosters bad design. Good design is sleek, user-transparent, dumb as dumb can be.

Well if dumb is cool, and dumb works ... you know, I'm okay with that.  See, when it comes right down to it, while I know how to code, while I don't mind tweaking things, I'm way too busy to fuss with tools that make things too hard.  I'm all about fast and easy.  Simply complex, complexly simple.  That's what we're going for with Qumana.  Looks like we're on the right track.

Tags: Qumana, blog editors

John Jantsch has some insightful commentary on RSS today.  It's a truism that within a group, new words, concepts, and practices emerge and these become to the keys to entry into the group.  RSS this is one of those things for many Internet users.  Does my mom care about RSS?  No, she just wants an easy way to keep up on my blog (I don't think she reads it often ... that's okay because she's busy teaching Sex Ed in the public schools).  I really like these two paragraphs in this post and I think it says it all:

You don't do this by trying to convince someone that they "should" know that this is the defacto standard for an RSS feed. Maybe someday, but I doubt it, will mean something to everyone, but right now it says to some, "I'm a blog snob and this is the only way you can subscribe to my blog so, if you don't know what this is then, go away."

That's like saying to a reader of an ad, we have this long distance number and if you call sometime between 2 and 4 on Tuesday, we'll take your order - would you ever do that? Lower the tech barrier to entry - give them an email contact, web site, toll free number and fax option to place their order!

We have the same philosophy at Qumana for blog editors.  It needs to be dead easy.  You should  just see it and get it.  We're working hard towards that goal, and if you have any suggestions on how we can do it better ... please let us know.

And yes John ... we offer more than one way to get our posts ... including e-mail.

Tags: RSS, John Jantsch, blogging, Qumana

BlogBurst popped up this weekend as a hot (or not) discussion topic.  The main question is WIIFM (what's in it for me).  Right now, it's a traffic and link boost, and hints at a revenue share later.  Is that enough?  Is this the savior of the MSM? I think it has a lot of potential ... but I'm also withholding final judgment until I know more about the revenue share.

Tags: Pluck, BlogBurst

Some Qumana 3.0 users have been having problems when posting to Wordpress blogs. After clicking on "Publish Post" a dialog with a message about an XML-RPC error is displayed. The post is published but no categories are set.

We've identified what the problem is and have implemented a fix. We'll be releasing a new version of Qumana 3.0 that will solve this problem soon.

In the past 24 hours relevancy, the A-list, the Z-list, and blog "authority" are the hot news items.  Right now there are two polar opposite approaches to this situation.  Let's take the "traditional" approach first ... links.

Tech.memorandum is one of my favourite places to track who is talking about the hot issues of the day -- and even find them.  But there is some (growing?) criticism that Memorandum is too insular, too tied to the "A-list" (don't know if I'm on the A-list, but I do show up there pretty often, still waiting for making the top spot though).

Now there is an upstart in Megite.  Similar idea, but Matthew seems to be getting a few more interesting sites.  He's also offering custom/personalized pages based on an OPML file you send him (on it's way to you Matthew).  Megite is getting more of my attention lately.  Still small number of readers according to FeedBurner ... but this could be a diamond in the rough ... a site just waiting to make it big. (Yes, I show up here a lot too).

Regardless, both these sites work on a similar principle.  Find a topic, then track all the people linking to that article and related articles.  Of course it is impossible to track all of the blogs talking about a topic, so the question will be who do they drawn from.

Technorati is working on a similar idea with its "authority slider" ... authority as measured by the number of other blogs that link to that blog.  So Scoble is highest authority, my blog is a step down (I'm in the "magic middle").

This would be better than Tech.Memorandum or Megite because a niche site with lots of links on a topic might be able to garner significant traffic on that topic.  I've only played a little with this tool so I can't give much of a review of it right now.  The risk, of course, is that if you always keep the slider all the way to the right (a lot of authority) you will almost certainly miss cool stuff. (See also Techcrunch)

Now if we take this concept of authority and relevance and turn it on its ear, take the new site BlogCode.  Mark, Scoble, and I have written about BlogCode ... Mathew should since he's on our lists ... and I see this as a new way to connect blogs and find blogs.  You don't search with terms, you start with the blog.  Then you see what blogs are most like it.  Starting off, the rates are pretty much self-driven (you code yourself first), but as other people code your blog (essentially saying what they think your blog is about based on many different factors), the matches start moving and changing.  I've watched my matches shift even in the last 12 hours.  Of the folks above ... Scoble, Mathew, and I are all on each others' lists and I'm on Mark's but he's not on mine (I expect that to change).   This is different because it isn't about linky-love.  It's about content.  It's about finding new blogs like yours (like Scoble, I've found a few new ones).  I think this has a serious amount of potential in the future as most blogs are added to the list.

So, several different ways to track new content and find new blogs.  One group based on who links to whom, another based on what you and others think you write about.  Both important, both interesting, both exciting.

Tags: BlogCode, Technorati, authority, Megite, Tech.memorandum

Tim Bray (oh yeah CTO of Sun) and David Sifry (Technorati, of course) on stage on.  As David just said, following Julie Leung ... not fun.

David is talking about the birth of Technorati ... Interestingly, or maybe not, David started it to track the conversations spawned by his own blog posts.  Sure, this is the core of the ego feed, but this is also an important facet of finding what is of interest to you.

"The flaw in search engines is that they don't have a sense of time" -- Sifry.

Posting volume ... just under a million daily+ bloggers ... the news cycles in MHz ... 15 posts per second.  With a blog a second ... with so many posts at once ... how do you keep up?

It's nearly impossible.  And that's okay, you don't read all the newspapers in the world or even North America.

"The magic middle" ... people who have between 30 and 1000 links to them ... the niche areas.  Sifry feels, and I concur, that this is probably the most interesting part of the blogosphere the people who can still manage the conversations, the links.  So then, how do you help these people get found?  That's where blog finder came in.  Track blogs on a topic ... what are your tags.  Who are you.  What are you about.

Now ... how do we coalesce the tag universe?  Tagging, because it's a human thing, it's a sloppy thing.

Make tagging easy, but making it public and accountable thing, then there is an emergence of a system.   A connection of similar tags, statistical analysis can be done to connect the dots and make tags connect better.  By tagging, for example, in more that one language then the connections get stronger and better.  This eliminates then need for a formalized dictionary ... or does it?

What is the challenge ... comment spam, trackback spam, splogs (spam blogs), splings (spam pings).  The idea of accountability is the thing that keeps the signal to noise ratio pretty good.  Your blog is public and on your permanent record.

Now, I think David is over simplifying this.  The problem with spam in all its forms is greed.  As long as there is money to be made from a single click, this will still be a pretty big problem to manage and to be continued to be managed.

Ah Net Neutrality ... oh there is a topic I will probably write more and more about ... and I agree with David, this is the single largest threat to the Internet as we know it.  It's going to be up to us to stop it.

And before my battery tanks out ... I'm going to post this.

Tags: David Sifry, Tim Bray, Technorati

Thanks to Rick for posting to the BBC mailing list how to get some invite keys to coComment.  Of course, by replying I also volunteered to review it (doh!).

So ... I've signed up (very easy, only a little bit of info required).  I put the bookmarklet on my toolbar.  I added my person comment RSS feed to my aggregator. And then I left my first comment.  It happened that Scoble had a post on another comment tracking service I just couldn't resist!

First impressions ... easy sign up.  Easy to use.  The comment I registered was immediately reflected in my account.

I'll also throw my two cents in on this whole topic.  While blogs are all about the conversation, I know personally I haven't left as many comments on blog posts for the very simple reason that it's been way, way too hard to keep track of them.  Not all platforms offer comment feeds, and who really wants to have to keep adding and culling those feeds.  E-mails ... well good sometimes, bad other times.

I'm pretty hopeful about this new service and am certainly going to kick up my commenting a notch to give it a good, solid try

Tags: coComment, blog comments

Powered by Qumana

Technorati's David Sifry's regular State of the Blogosphere update was released today.  As expected the Blogosphere continues to grow at an astounding 5.5 month doubling rate.

Here are the highlights from David's post:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Several important points to note ...

• while there are certainly a growing number of spam blogs (9%) Technorati and other key parties are working on stemming the tide.
• Blog abandonment seems to be lessening.  13.7 million blogs are still active three months down the line
• Tagging of posts in increasing at that same rate as blogs.

Implications of these points are that blogs are increasingly becoming one of the largest content sectors on the Internet and tags will allow searchers for find niche blogs, topics, and posts more quickly.So, have blogs and blogging passed the hype test?  The technologies the power blogs certainly have.  RSS, easy web-based posting of content, and aggregation of microcontent all have solid adoption in many mainstream online publications.  In the next six months I expect to see more blogs focused on niche areas as e-mail becomes less viable for newsletters

Tags: blogs, blogging, tags, blog growth, Technorati, David Sifry

Powered by Qumana

Many have discussed and commented on this AT&T billboard.  Scoble thinks that blogging has "jumped the shark" and while I don't think I'd go that far I don't think this bodes well.  Why?  Well, whenever something comes around, like blogging, that can be defined many, many ways and it starts to become a buzzword it can be taken over by marketers (sorry guys and gals) and exploited.

Frankly, blogging is just coming into it's own now.  We're getting good ranges of blogging, RSS is getting easier, and technologies associated with blogging, like trackbacks and RSS, are finding their way into non-blogs.

AT&T is clearly going for people who have heard about blogs and blogging, aren't really sure what it is, but now they know that AT&T will give it to them.  Man I can just hear the cocktail party/dinner party/bar conversations on this, trying to explain to someone no, AT&T doesn't equal blogging.  A blog is just a website that has this, this, and this.  Blogs are diverse ... Ugh.

Of course it's bound to happen.  No, I'm not calling for raising the drawbridge.  Really my concern is more along the lines of trying to explain to potential investors, supporters, clients that blogging isn't all hype.  Regardless that AT&T has this patently silly billboard, blogging also isn't just about writing.  Blogging is about sharing and connecting information too.  Maybe most importantly it's about sharing and connecting information.

Via: bloggersblog.com

Tags: blogging, advertising

Powered by Qumana