Big wine for a big idea ... what is it with geeks and booze?  The Bloglines team is going to give away giant bottle of wine.  Now if I have a big idea ... I ain't sharin' it with them!  QReader is going to get it!

Analytics across the board that will let you mash up information to know if a post it popular in a particular area.  Eh, not a big idea.

Now a big idea ... automatic synthesis of content into something digestible.  Giving context.  Now, I'm wondering is FeedRinse will do this? But ... it would be something I would use.

Bloglines as social networks ... nope.

Ratings of content, eh.

The winner was ... content synthesis!  I guess that's a hint.

Tags: Gnomedex, Gnomedex6, feed readers

... perhaps the deep currents towards organizational democracy will continue ?  Or maybe not ?

Via CNET News ...

Corporate America wakes up to Web 2.0
By Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com


Big companies have for years installed industrial-strength content management systems in the hope of sparking collaboration among workers. There was just one problem: People didn't use them.

Now, tools that people are familiar with on the consumer Web, such as blogs and wikis, are staking out ground inside businesses, often led by the end users themselves.

Industry observers say these popular Web 2.0 technologies are an effective way to collaborate at work; they are simple and easy to use, making them very appealing to end users.

"The key part of Web 2.0 is that there is something about these new tools that enable new practices of collaboration," said John Seely Brown, a consultant and former chief scientist of Xerox, who spoke at the Collaborative Technology Conference in Boston last week. "Web 2.0 is a profoundly participatory medium."

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... to recognize that social software is used to communicate and build information between people ... even people at work.

Via ZDNet ...

RSS: The new intranet protocol?


In a story he headlined Web 2.0 sews grassroots collaboration, CNET News.com's Martin LaMonica wrote:

Like others, Seely Brown expects to see a wide range of techniques common on consumer Web applications–including blogs, collaborative Web page editing through wikis, tagging and RSS (Really Simple Syndication)-based subscriptions–to bleed into mainstream business applications….new Web standard products could push people to stop using e-mail to share documents and instead collaborate through shared workspaces like wikis….The onus is back on the incumbent providers, especially IBM and Microsoft, to (react). This stuff is beyond good enough, and it's easy to work with," [said Burton Group analyst Peter O'Kelly].

LaMonica's story goes on to say that Microsoft is responding by building wiki functionality into a forthcoming version of its Sharepoint collaboration technology. LaMonica also picked up on this zinger:

"This way of capturing collaborative wisdom, collective knowledge is a different take on knowledge management, which was fundamentally flawed" [said IBM Lotus Division general manager Michael Rhodin].

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Arieanna continues with Part 2 of the results of our blogging survey focused on RSS and RSS readers.  In another post I'm going to talk about the relationship between time blogging and feeds read, but this one is on RSS readers.  I've lost count of the number that I've tried and keep trying.  Yes, Lektora is my favourite (it is a real Victor Kiam story), but I know that it isn't perfect.  So I keep trying other readers to see what other's are doing and get inspired.  You can see from the chart at on the right that while Bloglines is the largest single player (and I, frankly, use it myself to search feeds.), there is a huge amount of fragmentation out there  I think people are still trying to figure out how best to present feed information.  We have web-based browser-based, we have browser-based, but offline.  Outlook integrated.  Standalone.  Wow.  What is the best way?  Personally I like browser-integrated, but offline.  I also like being able to skim fast through feeds.

This tells me that there is room for a breakthrough.  A new metaphor for reading news.  A new way to integrate the data you receive with your routine, your thinking, and your work.  Do I have the answer?  Nope.  I'm still looking.  I think I've tried most on the RSS readers on that chart in the past month ... all for like the second or third time.  Just to look at improvements, to understand.  Any one have suggestions?  What makes a great news reader for you?

Technorati Tags : RSS+aggregators, Lektora, Qumana

We will continue our analysis of our blog survey results by looking into the use of RSS, and the preference for aggregators. I particularly like this section for what it says of blogger behaviour, and what it speaks to about the fractured RSS aggregator market - a surprise to me, as it may be to others.

(n=95)

71% of our users read 100 or less blogs. On the high end, we have 19% reading more than 150 blogs - I would be in this high end, given that my RSS reader fluctuates at around 350.

I was surprised to find that 19% of our users read less than 10 blogs, while 15% read less than 30. To me, the act of reading blogs is a necessary step in writing them effectively, so I expected these figures to be higher.

To understand how blog readership was correlated with the act of blogging, I cross referenced these figures with blogging experience (how long they've been blogging) and with number of blogs.

According to the survey, 49% of users who have been blogging for at least one year have at least 100 blogs in their RSS reader. This, of course, makes sense - time increases likelihood of number of blogs read, as well as written on, which we previously noted. 61% of bloggers who write on at least 3 blogs read more than 100 blogs - noting the importance of reading blogs in writing on them.

(n=95)

The use of aggregators was a little bit more variant than any other question in the survey. Although we have a strong indication of the market presence of Bloglines, FeedDemon and NewsGator, we have a very high proportion of users favoring other RSS readers. There are 16 RSS readers used only by one person, with half a dozen more used by only 2 or 3. This says to me that, despite the dominance of a few key players, people are not completely satisfied and are searching for something more specific to their needs.

Our own Lektora was in the top 5, which is satisfying, but shows a great need for growth in the market, and says something about our own attention to this product in our offering - our marketing and our blog posts need to speak more to this market.

37% of Bloglines users have at least 100 feeds populating their aggregator, while the next largest player, FeedDemon, has only 18% of users reading more than 100 feeds. Looking at the figures for all of the players, the number of feeds read does not correlate overly strongly with chosen reader, but perhaps certain readers offer more organizational abilities for larger numbers of feeds than others.

When you look at time blogging versus aggregator, you get a stronger preference for Bloglines. For those blogging 1-2 years, 28% use Bloglines; for those blogging more than 2 years, 61% use Bloglines. These are very interesting correlations.

Well, I think I could play all day mixing up these figures and figuring out some interesting things, but I think I've put forth those that speak most clearly to certain trends in blogging and the RSS market.

Related posts:
Blogging Survey - On Bloggers

Technorati Tags: qumana, survey, blogging, blogosphere, aggregator, RSS, bloggers, blogging survey