The average person would be under the impression that taking the time to get intellect on this affair is a waste of time….

After the extreme disappointment yesterday morning, I took some time off from the world of glitz, glamour and happy faces. I needed some time to be with myself, sometime to see the truth and sometime to realize things. I thought a lot, a damn lot and d…

How do I find a blog I might want to read? Easy. It will usually be mentioned by Mark Pilgrim, Anil Dash, Sam Ruby, Dean Edwards, MiniMSFT, Groklaw, or Slashdot. Or it may mention Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Xen, Qemu, UML, Python, Ruby, Tomcat, Java, Mono, Glassfish, JOnAS, or OORexx.

However, the “share my blogroll” meme has proven its fitness, and the affinity recommendations will be compelling to a number of users. Perhaps if SYO or a lookalike provided mass-market appeal through blogroll widgets, etc. Or at the very least republished as OPML so we could micropublish using Grazr or Optimal.

In short, SYO’s aggregate data is exciting to researchers and marketers, but they’ll need to provide more selfish benefit to grow the participant pool (and motivate even the 56K to keep up-to-date).

PR Week writes what I believe is the first look at the impact of OPML on marketing. OPML is a great technology that is just getting going. It will be a few years before it starts to impact our world…

The problem is, without accurately monitoring each users reading habits, there can never be a true top list of any feeds. And by accurately monitoring each users habits, you’re invading privacy and are no better than Spyware…and “attention” malarky won’t solve that

Mike,

If I am a leader here, as you kindly suggest, then it is incumbent upon to me to state that we _are_ in an Echo Chamber. It’s an incredibly pleasant place to be, but it’s an inhibitor to getting significant businesses built and broad societal progress made. Contrary to your point, my only “religion” is advancing the power and desires of my users — and as many of them as humanly possible. Innovation is a means to an end, not the point of the exercise.

I don’t know how much of the last Bust you were here for, but your statement above will contribute to the stress and anguish of many more people than you realize. Many first-time entrepreneurs now look to Techcrunch for Web2-industry context. I’m of the opinion that a measure of responsibility is coupled with that authority.

Taken literally, and that’s how I think you mean it, your quote says that people should build whatever applications they think of in the hope that enough people care. That will cause a far higher rate of startup failure than is necessary — just like the last time. The more pointless applications that are built now, the more layoffs there will be later. Market research and product marketing aren’t things that come naturally to many smart technical folks, but they are the best way to lower the risk of failure. With the success of Techcrunch, if you encourage better business practices, a reasonable number of people will listen to you.

Specifically, the problem is that many startups are building applications that ONLY innovators will ever love. It’s fine for startups to use our ivory-tower world as an early adopter segment if they have an idea of how to break out of it into a market large enough to matter economically (e.g. Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.). However, there are any number of startup people who think that getting traction with the valley insiders equals success. That’s a fine first step if you want to build a small profitable business, but under few other circumstances.

Neither Dogster nor SYO fall into the pattern that I’m worried about above. A very small percent of Dogster’s 200k+ users are valley insiders, and they have a defined market of millions to address. I sit in the Dogster office every day, and innovation for it’s own sake is completely absent. Everything they do is product marketing and customer-driven. SYO is also exempt because Dave Winer clearly tells anyone who listens that he’s _only_ interested in serving the innovators and not in building businesses. He won’t raise errant venture capital, hire a bunch of people, and then need to turn them out when the money’s gone.

That would reflect the true audience of a blog and would report an honest ranking i believe

Of couse with the time more people will use RSS and less Bookmarks but i believe a significant share will remain on bookmarks specially new internet users.

I am glad to know that Michael wants some sort of Search tool that can come out of RSS feeds.

I think the upcoming flickrss. com will try to build a Social Network over RSS which will come closer to Michael’s grand vision.

I am glad to know that Michael wants some sort of Search tool that can come out of RSS feeds.

I think the upcoming flickrss.com will try to build a Social Network over RSS which will come closer to Michael’s grand vision.

I completely disagree. It might work decent until it gets spammed. But it will. Just like general search, blog search, forums, comments, trackbacks, tags, pings, cross site scripting errors, etc etc etc.

I bet it is exceptionally easy to put legit looking co-citation into an OMPL list and randomize it to work spam blogs up toward the top. So little effort. So little relevancy. It can’t be widely adopted without becoming a spam den.

Plus I find more interesting stuff by reading in content citations from channels I already read than from looking at some of the blogs they say they read. If they read something influential and useful often then most likely that will show up in the content area of their blog, no?

The problem with commenting from your feed reader relates to the inherent holes in the major blogging APIs. There is no standard way of programmatically accessing comments for a given platform.

The CommentAPI makes an attempt at doing such, but it’s far from being widely adopted. RSS Bandit supports the CommentAPI for blogs that also make use of it by the way. So you can comment from that feed reader.

Personally, I read Signal vs. Noise 7:1 over TechCrunch (which I also enjoy), but SYO would just reinforce the #1 position of Techcrunch if I added my OPML. This is not giving an accurate account of position in my mind.