Blogging

Wouldn’t it be great if you could subscribe to the comments of certain blogs (or better yet, to certain posts) in your reader?  I’m going to add it to my wish list (we’re actively working through these sorts of ideas at both Newsgator and Feedburner). I must have reached some kind of critical mass in my readership where I’m actually getting a reasonable number of comments and trackbacks to my posts.  It got me to look at the comments to some of the other blogs that I read (I rarely visit sites directly – rather I read them in Newsgator).  Turns out that there are great comments out there that I’m completely missing.  The solution for the moment is to…

I wrote a post last month on my way back from some meetings at Feedburner about some trends in the RSS world.  In it I noted that Podcasting was on the rise and promised to link to more details once Feedburner posted them.  They did that today  – you can check out their report here.  Clearly podcasting is taking off.  To quote from the report: It took us [FB] nine weeks to manage our first thousand podcasts, and we added our most recent thousand podcasts in under a month. As you can see, the rate of growth changes in bursts. We added about 800 podcasts per month initially, then 1000 a month, and now we’re adding about 1400 a month…

I’ve had Feedburner on the mind recently (my last post was on the company as well).  I’m on my way back from our first post investment board meeting in Chicago as I type this and I had a chance to spend yesterday afternoon playing around with their system (read: see how many hits and how many subscribers are being served to various sites that have burned their feed).  Lots of interesting data there.  Feedburner is preparing a post on this, so I won’t steal their thunder, but I will share three data points that struck me:  First, the number of subscribers to the largest feeds is pretty amazing – the top sites have literally hundreds of thousands of subscribers.  Second,…

David Jackson, who is the author of The Internet Stock Blog (as well as a series of other blogs on investing and technology), was kind enough to add me to his recommended VC blog list. As part of our exchange about this I noticed that he hadn’t ‘burned’ his feeds through Feedburner (which is a Mobius backed company). I asked him why he hadn’t done this and he replied with some really good questions about their service.  I thought I would reprint them here, along with my responses with the idea that if David, as a sophisticated blogger, had these questions other people probably do as well. David writes: I’ve resisted using Feedburner, because: 1. It’s not clear to me…

Paul Kedrosky writes on his blog: Here is a puzzler: Why are there so many venture capital blogs? It is hard not to notice that there a host of such things out there, from Brad Feld’s to Fred Wilson’s, and everyone in between. Here are five possible hypotheses: 1. Professional service firms are highly branded by individual, so it makes sense to get out there and present yourself as a way of attracting deal flow. 2. There are just as many legal/financial/other blogs, but those people aren’t as good at getting media attention. 3. Venture capitalists don’t have enough to do. 4. Having a blog as a technology VC is a way of demonstrating your technical competencies. 5. Having a…

Remember The Brain?  It was a cool technology for people to map out linkages in their universe. Companies could use it to map out enterprise relationships; individuals could use it to keep track of who knew whom in their universe (a precursor to the social networking concept); they even had some search capabilities that allowed you to view your search results in terms of how they mapped to each other (they call this the WebBrain).  Interesting stuff. In my continuing search for better ways to represent data (see my original post on the subject here), I also came across MyDensity (thanks for Brady Bohrmann for pointing it out to me).  Its powerful stuff – basically a way to visually map…

I’ve been thinking about the ways that I interface with feeds that I read. Specifically, how I parse through information, how I figure out what I want to read and subscribe to and how I’d like view different types of information. I see a couple of problems with the proliferation of information brought upon by the explosion of RSS. Specifically, with so much noise, how does one cut through all the chatter to focus on what you really want to hear? The issue is not just how do I figure out what blogs or news feeds to subscribe to (that’s actually pretty easy) – it’s the broader question of how do I manage those feeds; how do I capture information…

I complained a while back about how much the feed stats in TypePad suck.  I then proceeded to do absolutely nothing about it, I guess figuring that site stats were something that would be high on their priority list and they would somehow figure it out.  Well, they haven’t so I have a request to make. The basic problem I have with the TypePad stats is that they don’t provide me good data on who is subscribed to my feed.  About a week into writing this blog I started using FeedBurner – which has much better information about who is reading my posts.  The problem is that  my FeedBurner stats only capture people who subscribed after that first week –…

As an investor in an RSS aggregator (Newsgator – far and away the best of the reader platforms out there; although I suppose I’m biased) I pay attention to how people use syndication services and how they use, manage, manipulate and read their news and blog feeds. I’ve played around with some of the different technologies in the space – most of which are variations of the same theme (very effective for reading individual posts, not as effective for sorting through large amounts of information). Today Adam Rentschler sent me links (here and here) to a couple of sites that use RSS feeds (and a Google-like measure of what certain news sources are reporting on) to create a visual map…

This is a totally vain story, but I’ve been asked about this a few times, so I’ll repeat it here – plus it goes to the heart of why I blog which is something I realized in looking over some of my posts that I haven’t been writing much about. (This reminds me that still haven’t finished my post on ‘is blogging about vanity?’ yet – not sure what’s keeping me from doing that . . .). Over the past couple of months I’ve been asked how I might measure my success as a blogger. I’m blogging for two primary reasons: 1) I want to make a name for myself. I’m a young VC who wants to stay in the…