Thursday, September 30
RSS is changing everything in regards to Web content
by
fred
on September 30, 2004 04:55PM (PDT)
I found the results to a survey on how people use RSS. It was an informal survey done by D. Keith Robinson and is posted on his weblog, Asterisk. He is a Web designer with a background in user-centered Web design, Web standards-based development and much more. I live in Seattle, Washington, and have been a working Web professional for going on 10 years now. Here is a quote: "The first thing that became obvious is that there is no doubt that RSS and related technologies have significantly changed the way many of us use the Web. Web content will never be the same, and I imagine as these technologies mature, the future of Web content will change even more strikingly. ... news-feeds have made access to content on the Web much easier for me and have really changed how I get information, not only on the Web, but in general. "
Dave Pollard on Successful Product Development
by
jonh
on September 30, 2004 01:09PM (PDT)
From his blog ... you can read the rest of the article here.
FOUR CRITERIA FOR NEW PRODUCT SUCCESS
If you're wondering why you've seen so little original thought on these pages of late, it's because I can't seem to shake the post-vacation blues. 'Til they're gone, I'll keep relaying good ideas and inspirations from others.
It's been said that there are no new ideas in the world, just unique and clever ways of re-combining and articulating the old ones. A recent article in Strategy & Innovation by Eric Mankin contains no new insight, but a brilliantly simple formula, based on well-established business knowledge, for assessing whether your business concept truly fills an unmet need.
Blogs and Business
by
fred
on September 30, 2004 01:05PM (PDT)
Sometimes the next big thing on the Net reshapes the online world (universal e-mail, a graphical browser for the Web); sometimes it evaporates upon contact with business reality (PointCast, anyone?). Wise companies explore new trends cautiously, and that seems to be what's happening with weblogs. Most of the companies I've observed using blogs are trying it on their customers before unleashing it internally on their staffs. The external need, apparently, is more pressing. Many businesses already have other systems in place for managing internal information, ranging from simple brown-bag lunches to overkill knowledge-management regimens. But companies are always looking for better ways to touch base with existing and potential customers, and there's no hotter way to communicate on the Net than via a weblog. ... Right now, we see blogs more to look out, to communicate with our customers, and to solicit suggestions from them. Read the full article here.
RSS Agregators adopt new Web Services form Bloglines
by
fred
on September 30, 2004 09:27AM (PDT)
Redwood City, Calif.--September 28, 2004 -- Three leading desktop news feed and blog aggregators announced today that they have implemented new open application programming interfaces (API) and Web Services from Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) that connect their applications to Bloglines' free online service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. FeedDemon (www.bradsoft.com), NetNewsWire (www.ranchero.com), and Blogbot (www.blogbot.com) are the first desktop software applications to use the open Bloglines Web Services. Bloglines Web Services address a key issue facing the growing RSS market by reducing the bandwidth demands on sites serving syndicated news feeds. Now, instead of thousands of individual desktop PCs independently scanning news sources, blogs and web sites for updated feeds, Bloglines will make low-bandwidth requests to each site on behalf of the universe of subscribers and cache any updates to its master web database. Bloglines will then redistribute the latest content to all the individuals subscribed to those feeds via the linked desktop applications -- FeedDemon, NetNewsWire or Blogbot -- or via Bloglines' free web service. "The exploding popularity of RSS and ATOM news feeds has put the spotlight on a potential network bandwidth problem that could stifle the technology before it can develop and mature. As the leading web services provider in this space, we saw an opportunity to resolve this issue," said Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines. "Bloglines Web Services expand our vision of Bloglines as an innovative platform for dynamic personalized content. Since the beginning we have been open to outside parties enhancing our web offering, with utilities such as notifiers. Bloglines Web Services take that open approach to the next level."
Wednesday, September 29
To Dermot of the "Science and Society" Blog
by
jonh
on September 29, 2004 08:18AM (PDT)
I have been unable to sign in to the "comments" section of the Science and Society blog ... so I'm relying on the connectivity potential of people checking who links to their blog, as a way of conveying this message.
I wanted to respond to a comment by the blogger Dermot at the above-named blog regarding Qumana's inability to provide a Blockquotes tag for his use on his blog.
Dermot, I believe that we have fixed this, and that it's now straightforward to add this capability to Qumana should you wish to.
If you leave us your email in the comments here, or in the User's Forum (link in top left-hand corner of this blog), we'll be glad to provide you with more detailed information.
Tuesday, September 28
Kathleen Compares ... Blogware and Typepad
by
jonh
on September 28, 2004 01:35PM (PDT)
... and comes out in favour of Blogware. For many of the reasons she cites, we sought out Blogware as a reseller partner. We are hoping that the addition of Qumana to Blogware's features is so obvious, and creates such an elegant blogging process, that it's an unavoidably compelling proposition.
That being said ... Qumana also works elegantly with a number of other blogging applications.
We've had a bit of interest from some of them ... for example, Anil Dash of SixApart wrote to enquire as to what we wanted to do with Movable Type / Typepad. We sent him a reasonably comprehensive, open response but (as often happens) there has been no response to our response. The same thing happened with Mark Fletcher of Bloglines ... a bit of initial interest, and then silence (even tho' using Qumana with Bloglines adds some significant functionality to what you can do with aggregated feeds).
Thursday, September 23
GWhiz ...
by
jonh
on September 23, 2004 07:35AM (PDT)
From the Guardian's blog (the Guardian being that British newspaper):
Google browser rumours heat up
The longstanding rumour about a Google browser has bubbled up once again, this time backed up by some concrete evidence in the form of a web domain Gbrowser.com registered to Google. Jason Kottke sums up the story so far, here.
Rich Skrenta's post "The secret source of Google's power" is also required reading for anyone interested in Google's growing influence.
Blogs and Qumana will give Social Networking new directions
by
fred
on September 23, 2004 12:02AM (PDT)
Having conversations in real time by sharing information is fueling the birth of all kinds of knowledge in the blogging world. “Blogging search and discovery” tools help us navigate the distributed conversations going on across weblogs, so we can pick and choose the nuggets of info we want from the massive amounts out there. These tools help us to meet and form relationships with kindred blogging spirits… This is a quote from the article below. We think that you will find Qumana in combination with your weblog an ideal tool for collecting, organizing and sharing those microcontent nuggets of info with your social network. Blogging is the Ultimate Social Software Posted Jul 13, 2004, 9:34 AM ET by Peter Caputa I think it is safe to say that sharing information is at the center of social networking. And blogging software is the best and most popular tool available which combines social networking and sharing information publicly. Blogging is at the center of many social networks. Livejournal and xanga are blogging tools with social networking built in. Similarly, ecademy and multiply are social networking sites with blogging tools built in. Kinja even recently tried to make reading what other people read, a social networking activity. (e.g. example digest). Bloglines might succeed at doing just that. It is only natural that timely sharing of information with different degrees of a social network be a core piece of social networks. Although blogger recently launched profiles and public profiles have been available in typepad (e.g. mine) for awhile now, most bloggers rely on blogrolls to denote social networks. Many bloggers use blogrolling.com and TypePad users often use typelists. The recently improved Bloglines.com, the online rss aggregator, also powers blogrolls. If these public profiles aren’t enough, some bloggers have started publishing republishable “blogger bios” as weblog posts to aid their networking using blogs. Read the full article here.
Wednesday, September 22
International panel named for Vancouver 2010 G...
by
Yuan
on September 22, 2004 02:05PM (PDT)
International panel named for Vancouver 2010 Games emblem competition "We have a stellar list of judges with excellent experience in the areas of art, design and branding," said John Furlong, chief executive officer of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC). "This panel will offer diverse views and cultural perspectives that will help us select the emblem for the 2010 Winter Games"
Thursday, September 16
Market share of Blogging systems
by
fred
on September 16, 2004 04:45PM (PDT)
Market share of Blogging systems
The increasing power of blogware is disruptive to Content Management Systems
by
fred
on September 16, 2004 04:31PM (PDT)
From an article more than two years old: Blogware has grown from its simple origins to an increasingly powerful content management solution. As first, weblogs just supported basic features: time stamps for each weblog post, automatic archiving of old posts, automated header dates for the posts on a given day, permalinks that automatically gave its entry its own unique URL. But in the past two years, there have been incredible advances in blogware functionality. Now many blogware packages support advanced features like: - Multiple databases
- Multiple templates
- Multiple users
- Draft status, and future posting
- Category support
- Data syndication
and much, much more. Increasingly, there's only a thin layer of functionality separating blogware from low-end Content Management solutions. Features like: - Basic Workflow, so administrators can approve content and templates
- Permission Levels, so you can easily separate content editors from template designers
- Update Histories, so you can track whose updating what (and when)
- Multiple Types of Data, so you can do more than just post blogs (e.g. post Press Releases or Job Listings)
A blogging software company that adds those functionalities to basic blogware could start to eat away at Content Management market share on the low-end. It's already starting to happen with corporate weblogs: knowledge management blogs, corporate communications blog, and marketing blogs are all making a splash in the marketplace without much participation from the low to mid-end content management systems. WEBLOGS V. CONTENT MANAGEMENT Much like the computing world, there will continue to be a role for the truly big Content Management systems: after all, IBM is doing well selling consulting services for its existing Mainframes and other Big Iron hardware. The Weblogs versus CMS dilemma will probably unravel much like the PC versus Mainframes dilemma: at first it seemed like PC's didn't have significant market or revenue potential. By the time the Mainframes caught on, PCs were a full-blown revolution and were beginning to match the price/performance of the powerful Mainframes. But much like Personal Computers, weblogs are riding a whole new price/performance curve that threatens to move upscale into higher end solutions. In other words, weblogs are a violently disruptive force in the content management sector!
Top four blogs reach 5.5 million per month
by
fred
on September 16, 2004 02:15PM (PDT)
If blogging is so pervasive, how much traffic do blogs attract? According to ComScore Media Metrix, the top four blogs - BlogSpot, Typepad, Blogrolling, and Blogger - reach about 5.5 million people per month. Google's BlogSpot, which shows consumers how to create their own blogs, has grown 56 percent over the past six months. Technorati, a company that provides search and notification services for active content on the Web, monitors more than 3 million Web logs. Microsoft's MSN has said that blogging, blog searches, and links to blogs will be integrated into the search product it's creating. Blog networks made up of hundreds of individual blogs have also entered the scene. Alwaysonnetwork.com is an ad-supported blogging network, as is Weblogs, a blog network created by Jason Calacanis, founder of the now defunct Silicon Alley Reporter. One of the largest Web log ad networks, Blogads, enables marketers to place ads on some 500 blogs. They're blogs such as Instapundit, Politicalpundit, Talkingpointsmemo, Dailykos, Littlegreenfootballs, and Atrios. Blogads sells not on a cost-per-thousand basis but on a sponsorship model, according to its founder, Henry Copeland, who has witnessed dramatic growth in the blogosphere in the past two years. Take Talkingpointsmemo, for example. Copeland says that two years ago, the political blog had about 300,000 page impressions per month. Now it racks up nearly 4 million per month, "the size of a decent-size magazine," Copeland notes. And therein lies the untapped potential of blogs - huge audiences of typically hard-to-reach people. Read the full article here
Saturday, September 11
Has anyone tried a group blog?
by
fred
on September 11, 2004 05:04PM (PDT)
Below are two items I found in my surfing today. The top item is from David Weinberger's weblog, a well-known journalist in the KM space and the bottom item is from Fast Company, a magazine dedicated to new management and leadership issues surrounding fast growing companies. As an avid users of blogs, it is obvious that blogs are a fantastic tool for social dialog, communication and collaboration. It is not just a toolfor individuals, but for groups too. I am surprised that this capability is not more obvious. From David Weinberger: There's a niche in the blogging/media ecosystem I hope someone fills. Aggregators are wonderful, but I find using them makes me as lonely as a night watchman making his rounds. So, between the solipsism of aggregators and the impersonalism of mainstream newspapers, I'd like a site where my friends and I can read stuff together. We suggest blogs and sites, and the aggregator surfaces the hot posts based on clever metrics and heuristics (mumble mumble handwaving). And we get to comment and annotate for one another. That last point is important because I find that I often don't leave comments on other sites because I don't have a sense of who the readers are. On this site, I'd know with whom I'm talking. Do such social reading sites exist? Q: Which communication mode is the most effective and productive for global teams in your organization? Current Results (168 votes counted so far) Email and instant messaging : 53% Teleconferences : 11% Video conferences : 11% Face-to-face meetings : 23% Weblogs ? - (my addition) Powered By Qumana
Statistics on Music Download sites
by
fred
on September 11, 2004 04:04PM (PDT)
Who says that people won't pay for content! Below is a quote from a New York Times article outlining the use of music dowload sites. The article also contains information on movies, sports and talk radio feeds as well. With Rhapsody (www.rhapsody.com), consumers pay $9.95 a month to stream or download as much music as they want from a catalog of more than 55,000 albums. Customers also receive a broad range of other content, including music videos and band information with their subscription. To keep the tunes and burn them onto a CD, however, costs a 79 cents a song. The Rhapsody software gives customers an easy and quick way to search for songs by artist, song and album name. It also presents a sample of a given artist's popular songs, related artists and an option for saving playlists for later use. Like RealNetworks, Napster (www.napster.com) also sells a music subscription service, with more than 700,000 songs available for $9.95 a month. (As with Real's services, Napster lets subscribers listen to as much music as they want, but they never actually own the tunes; when the subscription lapses, the music is deleted from their computer unless it has been purchased separately.) Microsoft's MSN Music site (beta.music.msn.com) plans a link to Napster's service, while putting up single-song downloads of its own for 99 cents. Apple, the clear online music leader with over 125 million songs sold, offers only permanent downloads, not streaming, through its iTunes Music Store (www.apple.com/itunes/store). Thus far for streaming, RealNetworks has been the subscription leader with more than 550,000 customers.
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