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

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 20 of 72.

Microsoft to unveil listings service

Microsoft will unveil a new listings service and marketplace within the next few weeks according to eWeek. The new service is a competitor to Google Base and will be integrated with Windows Live service offerings. Windows Live Fremont is currently only available to users with a Microsoft.com e-mail address. Microsoft plans to integrate listings submitted through its Windows Live service into MSN Search results as well as Virtual Earth map visualizations. TechCrunch dropped a teaser about the project yesterday….

Sony PSP adds RSS support

Sony’s PSP gaming device now supports RSS feeds. The RSS Channel is presented to users above the web browsing option in version 2.6 or above of Sony’s PSP system software. Users can add feeds by clicking on a link to an advertised feed in their web browser. The mobile RSS aggregator is specially designed for downloading podcasts in MP3 or AAC format. The channel list and streaming media is saved on Memory Stick Duo media. Only the RSS 2.0 syndication format is currently supported. Sony has a special page for developers documenting their aggregator’s handling of RSS. Russell Beattie…

Joyent acquires TextDrive

Joyent, a groupware product that launched six weeks ago, has just acquired TextDrive, a 18 month-old web hosting company. Joyent was struggling with its infrastructure and TextDrive wanted to become more involved in the hosted applications space so the acquisition makes sense in that context. The announcement definitely seems like a case of startup synergy from two cash-flow positive businesses. I host my sites at TextDrive and received a 1 GB bump in my storage allocation this morning. TextDrive offers cutting edge developer features including the latest versions of Apache, Lighttpd, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails….

Happy birthday Technorati

Three years ago, on November 27, 2002, Technorati was introduced to the world. Technorati started as a way for Dave Sifry to track who was talking about his blog online and the project eventually grew into a company of 30+ employees. The blogosphere often gets caught up in the buzz of the moment, so here is a little history from Technorati in 2002: The first Technorati 100. Scripting News was on top with links from 598 blogs and Boing Boing was #4 with links from 408 inbound blogs. 12,739 blogs watched in its first week. $5 a year for…

Tag spam and ranking at Tag Tuesday

Tag Tuesday takes place this Tuesday, November 29, at AOL’s Mountain View campus starting at 6:30 p.m. Tag Tuesday is a developer-focused event with lead developers of products and companies involved in tagging come together to share their experience, code, and best practices. Edwin Aoki, chief architect at AOL, will talk about tag spam and some of the existing spam countermeasures at AOL. Kevin Burton, founder of TailRank, will introduce us to tagging of news items within his ranking system for blog posts. Some food and drink will be provided. Our past events have been in San Francisco and hopefully…

San Francisco Auto Show marketing highlights

Yesterday I attended the San Francisco auto show to geek out over the latest cars. A few companies stood out in their marketing efforts to connect their brands with passive customers. Chrysler had special photo zones around popular cars such as the Dodge Viper, a Chrysler 300 Dubs Edition with gull-wing doors, and the Chrysler Phaeton concept car. The company setup special floor mats as photo zones and attendees lined up to have their picture taken. Chrysler representatives handed special cards to everyone they photographed with a URL and access code to retrieve their digital photograph the next day. Subaru…

San Francisco municipal WiFi is live

MetroFi announced today the deployment of wireless mesh networks at San Francisco’s Civic Center, Ferry Building and Portsmouth Square. I visited all three locations this evening and SF TechConnect, San Francisco’s wireless access grid, is definitely alive and broadcasting. Using the network supposedly currently requires visiting a splash screen and accepting a terms of service document, but I could not establish a connection to any of the nodes. (pictured above are the three network locations plotted on a Google Map. Please open this post in a web browser if you do not see a map) Macworld reports the system…

Brightcove receives $16.2 million Series B

Brightcove just closed a $16.2 million Series B funding round led by AOL. Other investors include IAC, Hearst, and Allen & Co. Barry Diller of IAC will join Brightcove’s board. Series A was led by Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners. Brightcove was founded by Jeremy Allaire, formerly chief technical officer at Macromedia where he helped develop the Flash format. Brightcove makes heavy use of Flash throughout its site to deliver video direct to customers over the web for free, subscription, and individual purchases. Brightcove also signed a deal with AOL allowing publishers…

Mobile technologies PodSession

Om Malik and I sat down tonight to talk about mobile technologies, the latest developments in networks, and mobile phone hardware. We discussed the recent changes at Cingular, the benefits of each major mobile carrier, wireless data networks, MVNOs, and the phones we recommend for the holiday season as well as early 2006 corporate budgets. Om and Niall PodSessions are now available as a weekly feature on their own domain: ONPodSessions.com….

Google searches local store inventories

Google’s shopping comparison service Froogle will now contain inventory information from local brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy, Circuit City, Home Depot, Bombay and CompUSA. Google will also populate the database with local merchant information from Google Base in addition to Google’s existing merchant feeds. Users searching for a product will be shown a map with local an overlay of local stores carrying the item. Google is in a unique position to offer the service because unlike traditional shopping comparison engines that make most of their money when a user leaves the site, local search does not provide easy lead and…

Microsoft announces Simple Sharing Extensions

Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML this morning. Ray explains on his weblog the need to synchronize data such as contacts, calendaring, and read status on a wide range of devices across multiple profiles such as personal, family, and professional. The new namespace is the first extension of OPML I know of. Ray mentions there “nothing to announce right now in terms of which [Microsoft] products will support the spec, when, and for what purpose, but people are experimenting with it and are intrigued.” The acronym “SSE” makes me think of Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions processor…

FeedBurner State of RSS report

FeedBurner just published a report on the current state of RSS and Atom syndication formats across a variety of publisher types with varying goals. The graphic above helps illustrate the difference between feed search and blog search. While the two used to be almost one and the same, blog search focuses on just blogs and podcasts and not commercial publishers, web services, watchlists, and other peer-produced content. I think the report was a bit light on monetizing subscribers, so I hope FeedBurner addresses advertising in syndication feeds as its next market report topic. Tags: atom, rss…

Google Base blog import instructions

Google Base launched last Tuesday as a new repository of information for distribution across Google’s network of sites including Google search, Froogle, and Google Local. You can add your existing content to the Google Base for broad distribution with only a few easy steps. I’ll show you how. You need a Google account associated with Google Base to submit items. Sign-in to Google Base to get started. Complete your extended profile. Market yourself with your full name or the name of your site, a description up to 400 characters in length, your URL, location and contact information. Create a…

Napster UK advertisement

Napster UK has a sexy new commercial online to promote its music subscription service (NSFW). The commercial shows a 30 second peep show that abruptly ends as the stripper is about to remove her bra. The ad ends with “Leave you wanting more?” and links to a free trial subscription. Clever. A link to a free download for the commercial’s musical track would have been a perfect ending. Tags: advertising, napster, commercials…

Tis the season for recruiting

The holidays are upon us. Around the United States this week millions of employees will return home to their families and relatives and be greeted with typical questions about life and the pursuit of happiness. The conversation inevitably turns to work, and causes a self-examination fueled by the best wishes of friends and relatives. Are you happy? How’s your job working out? Are they treating you well? Do you think you will get a raise, bonus, or promotion this year? Have you heard about how John is doing at his job? The questions raised during the holiday season cause employees…

W3C Feed Validator

The W3C now has a feed validator based on the open source software feedvalidator. I like the support for direct input as well as its close proximity to the HTML markup validator. They also have an open SOAP 1.2 API for validation via a web service. Tags: atom, rss…

I’ve been digged

It’s 5 a.m. in San Francisco and the Google/Riya story I blogged about on Wednesday night is currently the #4 story on Digg.com with 313 diggs as I write. My server is still holding up nicely under the load, but since there has been a lot of talk about Digg lately I think it’s interesting to share some stats. Unlike Slashdot which has posts listed in reverse chronological order, I believe a top digg can rise or fall over time since I am currently #4 on Digg yet the post has more diggs than #2 and #3. I mention the…

Om and Niall PodSessions #3

I sat down with Om Malik tonight to record the latest of our weekly podcasts. We sat across the table from each other in a quiet room instead of using Gizmo Project and you can tell the difference in the quality of the audio file. This week’s podcast is 8.9 MB in size and 19 minutes and 15 seconds in length. We spent most of the podcast talking about startup companies in the Bay Area. Last week Om and I became well aware of the new bubble forming in the valley. I shook my head as I saw two new…

Podzinger podcast search

I just came across Podzinger, a podcast search engine developed by BBN Technologies. BBN Technologies is the same company that developed the first Internet router, sent the first e-mail, pioneered voice over IP, and the TCP, to name a few. They have been working in acoustics and voice recognition for decades, funded by the government’s need to listen to broadcasts from all over the world and transcribe the results. Podzinger is powered BBN’s AVOKE STX speech recognition technology which adds speaker recognition and confidence level detection to its speech-to-text technologies. The site’s database currently contains a little over 10,000 podcasts…

Google Sitemaps adds search stats

Google added some new features this week to allow webmasters to learn more about what Google knows about their sites. Once you verify ownership of your weblog you can view the top Google search queries displaying your site as well as the top terms generating click-throughs. You can also few statistics such as PageRank distribution across your pages, the amount of content on your site in various formats such as podcasts versus text, and errors encountered by Google’s search crawler when accessing your site. Check out my Movable Type Sitemap entry if you would like to provide Google with an…

Google purchasing Riya?

Photo service Riya has been acquired was being acquired by Google for close to $40 million according to sources involved with the company. Riya uses face recognition technology to identify people in photos. The system can also recognize text such as street signs. Google likes using algorithms to solve complex problems, so the acquisition seems like a good fit. Om Malik has done some additional digging on the deal’s details. Riya has approximately 12 employees in Redwood City and an additional 10 employees in India. Riya is set to launch this week with a party in Atherton this Friday. Update…

Ray Ozzie is blogging again

Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft and leader of Microsoft’s service business, is now blogging on MSN Spaces. MSN Spaces is one of the many Microsoft services receiving an overhaul as part of Windows Live. Ray’s former company, Groove, was one of the first companies to introduce a blogging policy. Groove’s policy has guided the policy of other companies in the many years since it was first introduced. I had to point to a copy of Ray’s previous blog at the Internet Archive because all of his previous blog entries now redirect to his Spaces blog homepage. Please don’t lose the…

Google Maps API Blog

The Google Maps team just launched a blog to talk directly to developers using Google’s APIs. I had no idea the API changed weekly, but it’s good that the team will be communicating those changes and highlighting implementations of their APIs. Tags: googlemaps…

Corporate blogs as more than a marketing brochure

Too many corporate marketers see a blog as a marketing brochure to spread the same marketing content in multiple formats. Below are three different areas often overlooked by companies considering blogging as a communications strategy. Recruitment Corporate blogs can be a recruiting tool for both active and passive candidates. Job candidates like to know who they will be working with, on what types of projects, and if the company takes good care of its employees. All of this information is best discovered and trusted from individuals within the company. In a larger company the blogs of individuals can be used…