Posts from July 2005

I just finished a full day of sessions at the BlogHer conference in Santa Clara, a conference focused on female voices expressed through blogs. A met a variety of women who blogged about anything from the life of a professional dominatrix, favorite cupcakes, and analysis of the Supreme Court. You could hear the passion in the quivering voices of women as they stood up to speak in front of this crowd of hundreds and share their story. Most of the attendees I spoke were not local and the conference provided a way for them to meet face-to-face women they...

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Today was a huge day for me. It's my birthday. I just bought my first house, a one-bedroom condo in San Francisco's south of Market district near 9th and Howard. I just found out my younger brother is being deployed to Tikrit, Iraq in about six weeks with his Army unit. Posting might be light while I fill out forms and move physical locations. Tags: sanfrancisco...

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There has been a rumor floating around this morning that Microsoft intentionally removed Apple's current headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop from their satellite imagery of Cupertino. It's not true. The satellite photograph used by MSN Visual Earth is from U.S. Geological Survey and was taken on October 30, 1991. I called Apple's Public Relations department and confirmed the current headquarters building was not built at this time. U.S. Geological Survey also has a photograph of the area from February 27, 2004 but it looks incomplete. Microsoft Terraserver Imagery MSN Visual Earth USGS National Map Viewer If you look at the...

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This Tuesday, July 26, is the second meeting of Tag Tuesday. Odeo developers Rabble and Blaine will share their experience evaluating tagging systems and coding a tagging directory of poscasts at Odeo.com. They will also discuss best practices for tagging backends. Odeo runs on Ruby on Rails with a Flash front-end and makes heavy use of Ajax and RSS. Sound interesting? I hope you can join us at Varnish Fine Art at 77 Natoma Street (between 1st and 2nd) this Tuesday starting at 6:30 p.m. Varnish serves drinks but not food, so I recommend you stop off somewhere on 2nd...

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MSN has been busy this week crawling all the syndication feeds it can find. It looks like Microsoft is getting ready to announce feed search for MSN Search on Monday morning. The move is not too surprising as we have seen MSN dabble in RSS search with the small Start.com research project in public for a few months now. Are you curious what MSN has been up to? Check your server logs for IP addresses 207.68.146.41 and 207.68.146.47 to see the initial probe and 207.68.146.53 for the deeper revisit. 207.68.146.47 - - [21/Jul/2005:00:15:05 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 37 "-"...

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Pew Internet & American Life Project asked over 1300 Internet users about their awareness of certain Internet terms. While 88% of respondents had a good idea what the term "spam" means only 9% had a good idea what "RSS" means. 26% of respondents had never heard the term "RSS." I am sure MP3 was just as obscure before the term became synonymous with all digital music....

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Yahoo! announced quarterly results yesterday and gave us a peek at what's been happening for the last 3 months. The Yahoo! Music service seemed to cause the most excitement among analysts on the conference call and Yahoo! plans to fully release the service by the end of September. Terry Semel said over half a million publishers are submitting feeds to My Yahoo! and over 4 million sites have "Add to My Yahoo!" buttons on their pages. He also mentioned the relevance of personal content producers using Flickr and blogs during the recent London bombings. Yahoo! had 3.14 billion average...

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BlogPulse profiles are now online as a beta feature. The new tool from Intelliseek displays various information Intelliseek collects about a the top 10,000 blog URLs such as people linking to the blog, sites linked by the blog, most recent blog posts, and common keywords. They also provide a list of 10 blogs that cite similar links and text. My favorite feature is the common keywords identified in recent posts. It would be fun to take a group of keywords and guess the blogger. Tags: blogpulse...

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Microsoft announced a new version of Start.com yesterday that includes news and feed search. You can view the new Start.com and search for yourself. Search results are displayed in a JavaScript window and each search category's results are displayed using asynchronous JavaScript. You can subscribe to the feed of any result in the RSS search results. I still don't like the branding of feed search as "RSS search" but I do still ask for a Kleenex even if it's a Puffs and my parents call a vacuum cleaner a Hoover even if it's a Dyson. Tags: microsoft, feedsearch, rss...

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Ask Jeeves just released some statistics about the size of their database and subscribed users. 1,121,655 feeds with at least one subscriber Slashdot is the most popular feed with 37,400 active subscribers. Bloglines indexes almost 600 million articles (items/entries). Bloglines adds over 2 million new articles to its index daily. My blog has a RSS feed for every post, category, month, as well as custom keyword searches and a feed for the last 15 blog entries. That's thousands of feeds without even mentioning my Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 feeds. I am definitely not conservative in what I produce and...

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