Feed for Thought
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.
November 23, 2005· 1 min read
My first internet date
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. …
October 16, 2005· 1 min read
Tagging
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.
September 20, 2005· 1 min read
Why Microsoft needs RSS
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 easily pull feeds from applications. All great stuff, but that’s not at all why I’m excited about Microsoft embracing RSS and since no one else was writing about it I thought I’d throw my 2c into the ring. Love it or hate it, the Microsoft Office suite is a critical part of most businesses (with apologies to Star Office . . . ). Unfortunately their organizational/search/storage/retrieva paradigm is all wrong. While trying to ease users into the computer age, Microsoft has unfortunately created programs that attempt to mimic how people use and store information in the off-line world (i.e., in logical hierarchies, folders, etc) – which limited the power of the new computing medium. This is true both within applications and between them; in our file folder hierarchies and in how we store mail; in how we save bookmarks to the admin of an LDAP directory. Anyone who has ever tried to search in Outlook for a contact for whom you had only limited information or for a file that you misplaced understands the limitation of this system – it works great for structured data, but not so great for unstructured data (i.e., if you know you’re looking for Joe Smith in your contacts you’re fine; if you remember meeting someone name Joe who was an investment banker and who you met sometime in the summer of 2003 you’re screwed). The current system is fine for storing basic information, but lacks the database like ability to assign attributes and then search on those attributes (there are some limited ways to do this both in outlook, in contacts and for files – i.e., you can create different categories of contacts or add certain information to file properties but neither is very powerful and neither is meaningfully searchable). Enter the Internet age and people have discovered the power of unstructured data. Google built an entire service around it in the form of Gmail (lots of storage is great, but their real innovation was the elimination of folders in favor of fast and easy search and what essentially amounts to the ‘tagging’ of conversations). Both Google and Microsoft recognize it in their efforts in desktop search. And companies like del.icio.us and social text really really get it in allowing us to control how we label and categorize information. Perhaps I’m stretching some or perhaps being a bit too hopeful, but I believe RSS can bring Office into the 21st century. Imagine being able to tag a contact or a file with various attributes that you can later quickly and easily search on. Imagine being able to subscribe to a shared document folder to know when someone in a workgroup updates a file (enabling shared folders to function almost as a wiki). Imagine being able to stop placing files in work folders altogether but rather tagging then with the pertinent information which will enable you to much more easily find them later (and remember what they were for). …
September 20, 2005· 3 min read
Dogs on blogging
From the New Yorker . . . Blog_1
September 15, 2005· 1 min read
RSS – Hot or Not?
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) …
August 30, 2005· 3 min read
Josh King and the corporate development perspective
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). …
August 26, 2005· 1 min read
We still have a long way to go
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, investment banking research reports, etc. My list of things to discard is shockingly long. All of this is really unnecessary – everything in that group should really be delivered via RSS (I already subscribe to a long list of update or keyword search type feeds through RSS, but the ones on this list are not available in that format yet), which would allow me to be in better control (the Outlook filtering functions aren’t very reliable) and not have to bug someone else with my e-mail clutter. …
August 3, 2005· 2 min read
Toys
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 flexible reporting and perhaps different UI for reports would be helpful, but I’m sure Eric is working on those. If you blog and you care about user stats (what am I saying – all bloggers care about their user stats!) this is a great tool to have. I’ve written a few posts (here and here and here) that reference better ways to view information. While the UI of TagCloud is pretty lacking its still a HUGE step in the direction I’m talking about. You can point a bunch of blogs to this tool and it will pick out the overlapping words. Yah – this needs a NLP engine to really be useful and pull out full concepts rather than single words. Still it’s a great idea. Now they just need to make it look more like this. (thanks to Walker for pointing me to this site) …
July 8, 2005· 2 min read
Gnomdex Redux – As if you where there
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. …
July 4, 2005· 1 min read