Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 12 of 72.

FIFA World Cup kickoff

Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. home team Germany will take the field against Costa Rica to kick off The World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world. I am a total soccer nut and I’ll be distracted for the next month as I watch from afar as the U.S. lives up to its #5 ranking and Ronaldinho weaves through the defense with his golden boot and a smile. The world’s attention will be on Germany for the next month watching blades of grass fly and a thermal-bonded ball hit the back of a specially woven net. This is…

Think Partnership passes on IceRocket acquisition

Think Partnership’s planned acquisition of IceRocket has fallen through at the due diligence stage. Andy Beal reports the letter of intent has expired and interim CEO Scott Mitchell announced he will not move forward with the deal according to reporting by Andy Beal. (via Search Engine Watch) Tags: icerocket…

URL shortcuts for feed syndication specs

Want an easy way to jump to the specifications of your favorite web feed technologies? Me too! I created a few URL shortcuts to eliminate the need for bookmarks and provide a new and memorable way to introduce people to specs and standards. Add a subdomain before FeedSpecs.com and you just might find what you’re looking for. atom.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the Atom Syndication Format IETF spec. rdf.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the RSS 1.0 spec. rss.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the RSS 2.0 spec. gdata.FeedSpecs.com redirects to Google’s gData spec. itunes.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the Apple podcasting spec mediarss.FeedSpecs.com redirects to Yahoo’s Media RSS spec….

comScore breakdown of Technorati traffic

comScore Media Metrix has published a breakdown of Technorati’s visitors as well as inbound and outbound link traffic. comScore now tracks over 4.5 million monthly unique visitors to Technorati as of April 2006. Of those people visiting Technorati.com in April, 29.6 percent arrived at the site via MySpace.com. Similarly, 26.6 percent of those leaving the site immediately went to MySpace.com. The high level of cross-visitation suggests a symbiotic relationship between the two sites. Yahoo!, Wikipedia, eBay, and MSN are also high sources of traffic according to comScore. No mention of Google, or Technorati’s media partners in the comScore analysis….

Online spreadsheets in the real world.

Google officially launched its Spreadsheet product in its alpha labs, allowing a small user base to poke around and experience the new ideas and integration. I can see the immediate benefit from online spreadsheets integrated with a portal experience such as Google. I’ll give you two concrete usage examples: my soccer team and my mom. First, realize that although Microsoft’s Office suite is probably the best selling piece of packaged software in the market, it’s not a staple of every household. Microsoft created a special basic version of Office 2007 to increase sales from home users. My mom doesn’t…

Mark Fletcher leaves Bloglines

Another day, another startup opportunity. Mark Fletcher has left Ask and is undoubtedly working on his next startup. Mark’s company, Bloglines, was acquired by Ask 16 months ago in February 2005. Officially Mark is leaving to “spend time with family.” In reality he is working on his next startup, assisting entrepreneurs in the valley, and perhaps investing some angel money as well. Tags: bloglines…

Google Spreadsheet

The Wall Street Journal reports Google will release a web-based spreadsheet application tomorrow on a limited test basis. Combined with Writely and Google Base it gives Google a mini office suite in what might be compared to Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and Access offerings. Is there room for an online PowerPoint (Google Pages + S5 perhaps) to complete the suite?…

Turning a pitch into a Survivor

A multi-billion dollar TV almost didn’t happen. A television producer was eventually able to find one person who understood his vision to reinvent television and was persistent enough with his idea to help an old industry grasp a new concept. British producer Mark Burnett had an idea for a new reality TV show but needed support from network gatekeepers to make his vision a reality. In the late 90s Burnett went all over Hollywood pitching the show to whoever would listen, including the cable networks. No one was interested and the idea of reality television had not taken off….

Mugshot: open source social networking by Red Hat

Mugshot is an open-source social networking application and developer platform created by Red Hat. The project features desktop applications for Windows and Linux (OS X is partially supported) and server software if you would like to build your own system nodes. Mugshot features link sharing and collaboration (a link swarm), and music and TV tracking, sharing, and recommendations among other things. My afternoon’s a bit too busy to dig into the platform, but if you’re interested in open social networking features built on top of XMPP, Firefox, and GNOME check out the Mugshot developer wiki for more information….

Ask Blog Search launches

Ask.com unveiled its blogs and feeds search offering tonight using index data captured from Bloglines subscriptions. Users can search for feeds (good for subscription suggestions) or individual posts sorted by relevance, recency, or popularity and scoped anywhere from the last hour to the first time a user added the feed to Bloglines. The new offering is most similar to Yahoo’s feed search based on the My Yahoo! feed index. Ask’s relevance search is based on the ExpertRank algorithm and a few other pieces of proprietary secret sauce. Most recent is a reverse chronological sort for the search term. Popularity…

Technorati introduces microformats search

You can now search for contacts, events, and reviews on Technorati using microformats search. The new feature exposes content from the Technorati index containing special HTML markup within a page or post. Sites such as Upcoming.org and Yahoo! UK Movie Reviews currently markup their content using microformats out of general interest in distributed structured markup but new search engines such as Technorati’s beta search product might send enough traffic to publishers to cause a shift in publishing behavior and templates. Many individual publishers will not notice the change as blog platform providers such as Six Apart’s Vox will collect data…

Economics paper on big company inertia

Wharton professors Sarah Kaplan and Rebecca Henderson recently published a paper in Organizational Science about big company inertia when dealing with new industries and changing times. If you are a managerial econ geek you’ll enjoy the full PDF of the paper, or you can check out the summary in Knowledge@Wharton. One example of the inability to change was Kodak’s entry into the digital photography business. Chemical processing was a lucrative business and making the company a lot of money. The company staffed its new digital imaging division with employees more familiar with this world of chemical processing than image sensors…

FeedShow and RemoteAds

FeedShow is an online RSS aggregator from France hoping to create a business around splitting advertising money with feed publishers. A publisher may opt-in to the advertising system and display up to two contextual advertisements alongside their feed. FeedShow receives a 50% split of the advertising revenues from publishers participating in the program. FeedShow created a new RSS namespace allowing feed publishers to define their ad provider, account number, and additional provider data such as an AdSense channel. While ads alongside e-mail created new businesses and accounts for a large percentage of private e-mail usage today, feed publishers seem…

Blogger dinner tonight in San Francisco

Over 50 people will be at tonight’s blogger dinner at Henry’s Hunan in downtown San Francisco. If you are in the San Francisco Bay area you should come too. Henry’s Hunan is located at 110 Natoma Street, about 2 blocks from the Montgomery BART and Muni rail station….

AdSense API enters beta

AdSense has a new API, allowing users to create and manage AdSense accounts programmatically using SOAP. Sounds ideal for all the spam bots creating new scraper pages for asbestos and cancer news. If your bot creates a new bot account and earns over $100, you get $100 too! Yes, there are more serious uses such as a reputable blog provider creating an AdSense ID for its members, put I just see the piles of web spam getting worse….

American Idol attracts over 63 million votes

According to the Associated Press more people voted in last night’s American Idol finale than in the last U.S. presidential election. Seems like a pretty sad statistic to me….

The machines have a blog of their own

Your gadgets are blogging. Every time you take a picture, listen to a song, or play a video game you might also be blogging. Our shoes log and share our every step, our scales analyze our weight and body fat, and our cars let the world know it’s been too long since your last oil change. The creation and exposure of data from our daily lives is creating new data available for search and subscription. It’s time to rethink what we call a blog. The availability of this new data will cause us to rethink what we want to…

PodSession: Startup Do’s and Don’ts with Matt Mullenweg of Automattic

Last night Om and I sat down with Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of open-source blogging software WordPress and a recent founder of Automattic to record our latest PodSession. Automattic is a software services company centered around the WordPress blogging platform. We chatted about how to successfully scale a new web application. WordPress.com currently hosts about 200,000 blogs with mirrored hosting in San Diego and Dallas. Matt and I agreed that it’s best not to over-optimize at the beginning but instead sit back and watch the actual usage of your web application to fine-tune. Check out Cal Henderson’s new book,…

Blogger dinner May 31

It’s been too long since we’ve had a blogger meetup over chinese food. Next Wednesday, May 31, Dave Winer and I are co-hosting a blogger dinner at Henry’s Hunan in downtown San Francisco starting at 6:30 p.m. Come out and meet a few new people, learn about Bloggercon and its themes, and connect with people and projects happening in the area. Henry’s Hunan is located at 110 Natoma Street, just two blocks from the Montgomery Street BART and Muni station. Check out the journey through the Henry Hunan menu blog if you would like to see a blog entry for…

Nike+ iPod integration

Nike teamed up with Apple to offer new products and services combined with the iPod nano. The new partnership will include electronics, clothing, and online services for people who like to listen to music while working out. Apple claims 50% of iPod owners use their music players during a workout. The new campaign is called Nike+ and features community and social networking components. The first product is the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, a $29 accessory connecting your shoe and your iPod. Runners can place a small sensor under their shoe insole and connect a receiver to their iPod nano to…

Yahoo! is top portal

Hitwise just published rankings and market share for top portals in search, mail, news, finance, and maps. While Google dominates in search, Yahoo! is the clear aggregate leader across these top categories with an almost 10% lead over the search leader. SearchE-mailNewsFinanceMapsTotal Market7.39.33.40.60.521.04 Google47.42.51.90.37.53.80 Yahoo!16.042.46.334.920.55.62 MSN11.522.913.44.33.07 Other8.56 While Google Maps is an often-cited example of the Web 2.0 world Mapquest has 7x the market share according to these numbers….

Google Reader Mobile

Google Reader Mobile is now available on your mobile phone. The pages are served using XHTML 1.0 for mobile, including access keys for each list item. The mobile reader is a good blend of what you would like to configure on your desktop but still access on a more limited input device such as a mobile phone. The mobile interface is purposefully barebones but utilizes features made possible by the full desktop experience such as browsing tagged posts….

Flickr moving to San Francisco

Yahoo! is opening a big San Francisco office later this year and Flickr just announced they will be one of the teams making the move to the city. I know at least half of the Flickr team lives in San Francisco so it’s a healthy move for the group and will probably mean more time working on Flickr things! Flickr is the first Yahoo! team I’ve heard of moving into the San Francisco offices. It was previously rumored these would be ad sales offices but it’s good to see some product folk moving in. Tags: flickr…

Yahoo! unveils video sharing site, Finance redesign at analyst day

Yahoo! presented its business strategy to analysts yesterday and gave the world a sneak peek at what’s to come. A new advertising system is code complete and currently undergoing some testing and, if all goes well, will be rolled out later this year. Yahoo! plans to add advertising to it’s new “coming soon” video site. The webcast was not working for me this morning; all my notes below are based on the slide deck. Yahoo! Video The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well. The top navigation bar references “My…

Tetris using Yahoo! UI utilities

Yahoo! released the latest version of its UI utilities this week, including the components used in the new Yahoo! homepage design. You can use the various utilities to build your own website, but Dustin Diaz decided to build a version of Tetris. The game combines Yahoo’s Event Utility and DOM Collection utility to create some cross-browser brick busting action. One of the good things about releasing your code to the world is you never know just how people will use it. I doubt anyone at Yahoo! thought about gaming when they released the UI widgets but developers are resourceful!…