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

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 23 of 72.

NewsGator purchases NetNewsWire

NewsGator Technologies has a new page on their site about the acquisition of NetNewsWire. Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, will be joining the NewsGator team as a product architect according to a release on the NewsGator site. Om Malik scooped the news last night. The phrasing of the announcement is around NetNewsWire only. I presume NewsGator has acquired all of Ranchero software, including products such as editing software MarsEdit, and not just NetNewsWire. NewsGator Technologies now produces software in C#, ASP.net, Delphi, and Objective C. Lack of a unified codebase and the company’s reliance on one engineer per…

Bugzilla queries as RSS

The latest stable version of Bugzilla, 2.20, outputs queries in RSS 1.0 format. The new feature cuts down on the notifications flooding your inbox and will probably lead to more developers following more product changes. Tags: bugzilla, RDF, RSS…

Elements of an ideal cafe

A am sitting at a café working and thinking of the ideals of a social yet commercial working place away from home. Le Procope created a meeting place and exchange of ideas for great minds such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Hugo. Is it possible to create an intellectual center for geeks to match the historical cafés of the Middle East, Paris, and London? What are the essential ingredients to creating a meeting place for geeks and a birthplace of ideas and companies? Historical coffeehouses contained small libraries, bulletin boards, and self-publishing. We now use the Internet, blogs, and cell…

OPML listing of my weblog entries

Dave Winer and Robert Scoble would like more blog outputs as OPML. I just put together a Movable Type template to output all of my entries in OPML format complete with top-level categories. I output the resulting file as my index.opml. Check out my OPML template if you would like to create a OPML output of your Movable Type install. I have not validated the OPML is perfect and valid (but I did e-mail Dave Winer), and I really should have full subcategory traversal. It’s a start. Update: Dave Winer verified the output is correct and works with his browser….

Engadget Labs launching October 15

The popular gadget blog Engadget is moving into new offices in New York and will be launching a testing lab for in-depth product reviews. The Engadget team announced the new venture at their San Francisco Engadget Reader Meetup. Engadget Labs will perform benchmarks and in-depth reviews of products. It sounds like a nice departure from the typical pay-per-article model of weblog networks. Editors Peter Rojas and Ryan Block will work out of their new office in New York with possibly a few other members of the Weblogs Inc. network. The new office space will include a special podcasting room…

Determining the birth of a startup

Many people consider September 7, 1998, the day Google was incorporated, to be it’s birthday. Google has a birthday logo on its home page today as well as a blog post about the the company’s birthday. When is the born on date of a startup? When you first file papers of incorporation? When you move into your first company-specific office? When you hire your first employee? When you close your first deal? I consider the birth of a startup to be the first time you solve the problem you set out to solve. It might be the first time…

MSN Search takes market share from Google

According to OneStat over the last 8 months Google’s share of the search engine market has decreased 0.3% while MSN’s share of the same market increased 0.3%. Yahoo!’s market share remained stable. Could Google be losing a significant amount of search customers to MSN? Tags: google, msn, onestat…

Blogging and PR survey

Technorati and Edelman are partnering to help public relations and corporate communications in general better understand the preferences of bloggers. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with PR pitches and there is definitely room for improvement. If you would like to help companies better tailor their methods and their approach to blogging you can share your opinions and answer a short survey. A bad PR agency e-mails me a press release asking if I would please post the press release on my blog. Good PR is when I am introduced to new things that solve a personal problem or…

Tag Tuesday with HP and Technorati

Tag Tuesday is back! If you are in the San Francisco area come out to Varnish Fine Art this Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. Scott Golder from HP Labs will talk about his recent research paper on collaborative tagging and Kevin Marks of Technorati will talk about the design and implementation of Blog Finder. Tag Tuesday is a developer-centered event. If you are working with tags or related methods of user classification and would like to present, let me know. Tags: hp, blogfinder, tags, tagtuesday…

Talking Second Life with Beth Goza

I had the opportunity to talk with Beth Goza yesterday about multiplayer online worlds such as Second Life. Beth worked for Microsoft for seven years but just accepted a new job with Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world of Second Life. I have read economics papers on virtual worlds such as Everquest or World of Warcraft but last night was my first tour from a fan. Second Life is a user-created world. Linden Lab has its own scripting language, soon to be compatible with C# I hear. Users create scripts and virtual worlds, and even actions within those…

Rockin’ Webzine 2005

Webzine 2005, a weekend grassroots event all about online publishing, is finally here! Thanks to all of the organizers for their months of hard work to make this happen for an attendance cost of $22! If you are in the San Francisco area this weekend, come down to the Swedish American Hall at 2174 Market Street to meet the people involved in personal publishing and grassroots media while hopefully learning a few things. I will present a workshop tomorrow at noon on publicizing your work using feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) and tagging. Tags: webzine, webzine2005…

More TypePad 2.0 details

Six Apart just unveiled “Project Comet” a codename for a new approach to weblogs throughout Six Apart blogging tools as an online activity hub incorporating multiple media types, multiple authors, multiple readerships, and a lower technical and psychological barrier to entry. The new technologies will be available in early 2006 as a free upgrade. Mena describes the new approach as a result of observing the variety of users across Six Apart properties and thinking of ways to increase the user base across all tools. We’ve taken the stuff we’ve learned from the community features of LiveJournal and mixed them with…

TypePad 2.0 and new pricing announced

Six Apart demonstrated TypePad 2.0 at the DEMOfall conference yesterday and announced new discounted pricing. Mena Trott’s mom won the coveted DEMOgod award for showing that TypePad 2.0 is so easy even your mother can do it. TypePad 2.0 is a “significant re-engineering” of TypePad. You can now apply multiple group privacy settings to a single blog to allow various visitors to see only the posts intended for their group. TypePad is also supposed to have increased media abilities, but I have not seen the product or any detailed reviews. TypePad also lowered its yearly subscription prices across all three…

Visit to Google

Today I visited Google to talk about web spam. I had never been on the Google campus so although I was busy I did make a point to note many details. Just about every meeting room I saw was video enabled. The spam summit met in a medium-sized room with array microphones hanging from the ceiling tiles, three video cameras in the back of the room, and one video camera in the front of the room for crowd shots. Smaller meeting rooms had phones with eye-level cameras. Lunch was really good. I had a chicken breast pesto panini with roasted…

Time magazine on Blogging 2.0

The latest issue of Time magazine introduces readers to blogs and blog search engines. The layout of the online version is a bit confusing but perhaps the print version is better arranged. Time describes Technorati as “long the best blog-search option on the Web.” Thanks! Tags: technorati, timemagazine…

Chrysler launches Firehouse Blog for journalists

Earlier this week DaimlerChrysler introduced The Firehouse, a blog authored by company executives and created as a continuing conversation with professional journalists between periods of typical briefings such as auto shows. DaimlerChrysler has a tradition of turning an old Detroit firehouse, Chrysler Firehouse, into a press-only gathering spot every year during the North American International Auto Show. DaimlerChrysler is expanding this communication event through weblogs and other tools to answer questions year-round in a semi-public forum. I contacted Jason Vines, DaimlerChrysler’s Vice President of Communications, and was told that The Firehouse is a place for reporters to relax and mingle,…

Google Blog Search infrastructure thoughts

I have been reading through some of the posts about Google Blog Search and have some new thoughts on possible infrastructure although nothing has been officially stated by Google. I’ve read about how fast Google’s results come back. I would hope so, their entire index covers only about 90 days. Powered by Google Fusion? We already know that Google Blog Search is indexing only feeds, and the index does appear to separate from the main Google index. We also know that Google’s feed search index only contains posts since June 2005. We also know that Google plans to add a…

Giving Dave Winer credit for infrastructure

When writing help pages and other documentation aimed at informing a user there are choices to be made about how much information is too much information and what exactly is the correct information to note. Dave Winer feels a bit slighted by not being recognized for his contributions to the community allowing blog and RSS services such as Technorati to index data in a more timely manner. I wrote Dave an e-mail about six months ago thanking him for his contributions and detailing some of the ways Technorati uses technologies he has dedicated time, effort, and money to produce, but…

Google Blog Search is live

Google Blog Search is now live. I spent some time clicking around and searching for terms and phrases where I expected a certain result. Some early thoughts: Query time is very fast, at around half a second for most queries. The database only goes back two months, so a quick response is to be expected. The related blogs search for “George Bush” suggests “George Bush doesn’t care about ugly hoes” which cracks me up. No advertisements. Is this another “mistake” like Google claimed for Google News? I don’t think so. Google exposes results as RSS and Atom feeds in…

Google launching feed search tonight

Google is launching a feed-specific search interface tonight for both all feed producers as well as a search interface specific to Blogger. It’s important to note that from what I have read on Search Engine Watch and others Google is specifically restricting its search to feeds, and not using the HTML of the blog. Why? Googlebot is designed to swallow a page whole and not break the page up into individual entries or items. Feeds come prepackaged as individual items or entries allowing for easy digestion by parsers and indexers. Google would need to overhaul its indexer or design a…

NewsFire blocks RSS ads

I noticed something new and interesting in the NewsFire release notes today: NewsFire now blocks advertisements from Google and FeedBurner. NewsFire is the first aggregator I know of to block advertisements in the default installation and not a custom user-supplied CSS stylesheet. I tested the new feature with Brad Feld’s feed and Engadget’s feed and both display advertisements in the source but not when displayed in NewsFire. I cannot find any way to enable advertisements at the application or feed level. Is NewsFire the first of what may be many aggregators to block advertisements in feeds? Will products tout this…

Los Angeles loses power

A large portion of Los Angeles lost power today as thousands of geeks converge on the city for Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference. Coincidence? Suggested headlines: Windows Vista takes so much it brings down an entire power grid. Microsoft opens a portal to Hell, sending Los Angeles into darkness. 12,000 geeks charge their laptops at once, cripple local power grid. Totally joking, but a strange coincidence. Tags: pdc05…

Blog about your passions

Many people have cold feet when they think about starting a blog. Do I really have anything important to say? Will anyone read what I write? Choose a topic you are passionate about and share it with the world. My favorite coffee spot in San Francisco is Blue Bottle Coffee Company, an artisan small-batch roaster located a few blocks from my house. The company’s San Francisco location serves their own coffee from a small storefront in an alley. The staff even writes their own blog about new equipment, bean comparisons, and other topics that show the passion in their work….

Running a reliable blog tool and ping service

Most people do not realize how ping notification services (“ping beacons”) can negatively affect user experience for a blog tool vendor. Blog authors usually welcome the publicity but are not sure who to blame when something goes wrong, if the user even knows what went wrong and where. Let’s start with some background on the process of a ping notification (“ping”). The blog author hits the “Post” button, publishing his or her blog entry to a publicly available website. The blog tool retrieves a listing of specified services that are either platform-defined defaults or user-specified preferences. The blog tool attempts…

Microsoft attempts to recruit Eric Raymond

A Microsoft recruiter’s e-mail to Eric S. Raymond, a well-known open source developer and evangelist, cracked me up this morning. Senior recruiter Mike Walters sent Eric an e-mail allegedly on the recommendation of a research team at Microsoft. If you had bothered to do five seconds of background checking, you might have discovered that I am the guy who responded to Craig Mundie’s “Who are you?” with “I’m your worst nightmare”, and that I’ve in fact been something pretty close to your company’s worst nightmare since about 1997. Tags: opensource…