Blogging

They guys at FeedBurner (note: Mobius portfolio company) have put up a great post entitled Feed for Thought: How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued and consumed. The article is a great read – very thoughtful about where RSS has come from and where its going. I was going to highlight a few points they made here, but the entire piece is a highlight and pulling stuff out won’t do it justice.  Click over and read it.

I’m going on my first internet date tomorrow. Well – it’s actually not technically a date. For starters, I’m married and on top of that, neither of us is gay. Still, we’re meeting for coffee after many months of e-mailing, reading each others blogs and one or two times talking on the phone. I say this all in jest, but I’m actually pretty stoked to finally meet Ben Casnocha in person. I’ve talked about him on my blog before (here), and am a big fan. I’ll let y’all know how it goes.

hAs you could probably tell from my last post, I’m getting more onto the tagging bandwagon (I haven’t posted about this, but have in the past expressed skepticism privately to a number of you in off-line exchanges).  In case you missed it, NPR did a nice piece on tagging tahis evening. Here’s a link to the story. Props to del.icio.us and flickr who were both featured prominently.

Everyone knows that Microsoft announced at this year’s Gnomedex their support for RSS in their Longhorn (now Vista) release. A quick search on Google or Technorati comes up with plenty of people who have already weighed in on the subject (I particularly like Nick Bradbury’s post here). Most of the talk, however has been around how RSS integrates into IE (see the IE blog post on RSS integration here) and the associated ease with which IE users will be able to subscribe to feeds, create feeds and some of the ways they are extending RSS to handle lists and a common data store, etc. The rest has been centered around Microsoft’s RSS effort for developers to enable them to more…

From the New Yorker . . .

A recent Nielson/NetRatings poll (story here) showed a huge gap between the have’s and the have-not’s. Specifically they asked respondents about their usage of RSS and found that 66% either hadn’t heard of RSS or didn’t know what it was used for and that only 11% of web log readers used RSS to monitor blogs (less than 6% of users overall use RSS according to a Pew Research study from January). There are definitely some implications for those (increasing number) of us who are investing in and trying to grow RSS related businesses (and we’re clearly still in the early stage of the adoption curve for RSS enabled technologies – see Bill Burnham’s great post on the subject here) That…

HHere’s today’s shocker – VC’s don’t have all the answers.  Those of you  who are not VC’s have known this all along, but for people on the inside it’s a slow process of realization (I think I’m on about step 8). Seriously, though, as much as its amusing to poke fun at VCs (and our increasing propsnsity to blog), I do really like to see new non-VC folks throw their hats in the ring to talk about the world of operating growing businesses.  Because of my background, I’m especially fond of reading what people in the corporate development world have to say (which is in part why I encouraged Daniel to write a guest post for my M&A series). Josh…

I’m leaving for a week’s vacation tomorrow (see my vacation curve post – I’m past the inflection point again) and I’m not planning on checking my e-mail regularly.  To keep down on e-mail clutter, my secretary is going to monitor my mail and delete or move things out of my inbox that are not important or that don’t have immediacy.  To make sure the right stuff stays and goes, I’m making a list of things that I would like her to keep and things that she can move or throw out.  This process has highlighted for me how many things I get delivered to my inbox that should be sent via RSS – all the updates, tech dailies, vc weeklies,…

Here’s some stuff I’ve been playing with that I’ve been meaning to post about: First is MyBlogLog, which tracks links people follow from my blog site.  It also tells me how many page views were served from my site. Since I serve full feeds this doesn’t capture all of my link traffic (I miss everything that isn’t clicked directly from the site itself), but I get enough direct site hits to extrapolate these data to my subscriber base. If you want you can also put up a chicklet on your site that shows your most popular links.  It’s easy to set up (you have to embed a small amount of code on your site) and intuitive to use.  Some more…

Sorry – meant to have this one up a little more proximate to the actual event . . . You go to Gnomdex? Me neither.  I was bummed I missed it, so I spent some time rummaging around on Google and Technorati looking for some links.  Here’s a few that I found that, while they don’t replace the experience of attending in person, at least give you a little bit of the flavor. Here’s the conference site. – http://gnomedex.com/ Here’s the conference update site (scroll down and track the action) – http://gnomedex.com/updates/ Here’s the conference blog roll (links to attendees who blog) – http://www.gnomedex.com/updates/2005-04.phtml Here’s some photos put up by “laughing squid” – here and here. Of course the big…