Wouldn’t it be great . . .
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 click through on posts that I particularly like or think will be well commented to and see what’s posted, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to subscribe to these and read them directly in your reader. In an ideal world you could subscribe to comments for only those posts that you care to see feedback on. Yup – that would be pretty cool . . .
June 23, 2005· 1 min read
Podcasting on the rise
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 Podcasting is an interesting phenomenon. I’m not sure I completely get it in its current incarnation (I listen to a few podcasts, but its frankly hard to find the time to fit them in). Stepping back. however, I think the technology makes a lot of sense – just an easier way of storing, shipping around and retrieving audio and video files. I can think of plenty of scenarios where this would fit into a corporate infrastructure (i.e., training, compliance, etc.). I’m sure that’s all coming . . .
June 6, 2005· 1 min read
The state of the feed world
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, the growth of podcasts is pretty amazing – there were no podcasts in the top 15 a few months ago; now there are several. Finally, there are now few porn blogs that are starting to climb the list (I guess that was to be expected, although I was hoping the feed world would stay a little more pure than that). Interestingly based on their hits vs. subscriber ratios, it appears that these sites are having their contentscraped a lot vs. actually having subscribers to their feeds. …
May 15, 2005· 2 min read
Feedburner clarified
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. …
May 14, 2005· 3 min read
Why blog?
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. …
May 11, 2005· 4 min read
Your on-line world
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. …
April 29, 2005· 1 min read
Making the RSS world a more user friendly place
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 on topics I care about that are published in feeds I don’t care about; and how can I organize my information capture so I spend more time reading what I want to read vs. figuring out what I want to read. …
April 18, 2005· 4 min read
Burn me!
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 – and I know that a bunch of people subscribed in the first few days after I put up my first post (a result of some shameless self promotion I did). …
April 1, 2005· 2 min read
How do you view your news?
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). …
March 28, 2005· 2 min read
A small step?
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 . . .). …
February 17, 2005· 2 min read