Wednesday, July 23, 2003

From Tim Jarrett who analyses online behavior for Microsoft He said this... 4:34:26 PM

Jeff Jarvis on blogging & editors: Just saw this by Jeff Jarvis about editors... 3:34:09 PM

Q: Also, for the blog-impaired, I assume that weblogs.com is a list of participating blogs that have recently been changed. Is that right? A:Yes. Q: How many participating blogs are there? A: Many, many more than are listed. I will find out for you. In talking with some folks (Scott at Feedster in particular), he is monitoring 75,000 RSS (stands for "Really Simple Syndication" among other things) Newsfeeds. He estimates that 10-15% of people who are blogging have their feeds turned on or even know that they are generating a feed. technorati shows numbers of near 800,000 bloggers. I think it is closer to a million. and what's cool is what seems to be happening outside the US. I know the minute I launched HELP!blog that within 24 hours two French bloggers had picked up on it... blogging in French of course. I talked to Dave Winer a little while ago and asked him your question. He said: "You're the second person to ask that in the last few hours. I suppose we're going to have to have some kind of answer. The problem with that is that we cull the weblogs.com database of people who haven't pingd in a week." I'm sure that they do this to protect bandwidth since they don't make any money off the service. So I imagine he'll get us something soon as well. Also, on our itopik.com website, we have a list of "newsreaders" (with reviews that are coming in) that you can download to "subscribe" to newsfeeds. The beauty of this feature is that the content is pushed to you versus visiting hundreds of websites or blogs that you'd like to read. This really is "The Return of Push" in a lot of ways... the fad that died due to slow connections, little content except a few mainline pubs, and bloated, CPU-eating client software. And I think the best newsreader out there is done by Ranchero Software's Brent Simmons who makes a Mac OS X newsreader (niche as it may be) called NetNewsWire. It is elegant and an excellent GUI. He pioneered making these things UI better. His email is Brent@ranchero.com. Q:Also, is there a site that lists the most popular wikis? A: Here's one I found.. I doubt there are near as many as the other. The wiki movement is still somewhat under the radar. Some reason's might be: 1. The application is more focused as a tool relative to blogs. 2. The ones to date are ugly. When things look good as well as meet a need technology wise they generate a mass following. Graphic design and user interface are generally under-valued by programmers or rather not their expertise to be fair, but essential for mass adoption IMHO. Also, check out the folks at SocialText Software. They seeem to be on the edge of this phenomena as a company selling these services. Also, if you ever want to say hello via IM, I'm htkirk on AOL's IM. 2:13:36 PM