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

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 26 of 72.

Tracking online conversations

Tom Foremski wrote this morning about a presentation that included some possible future products from Technorati. I won’t comment on future products, but it’s interesting to take a look at some of the underlying issues some bloggers are worried about. Commercial Use Can another company make money off of your content? I currently receive a lot of referral traffic from a variety of search services such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Each search company sells advertisements alongside an excerpt of my content. I have no problem with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN making money off of my content because they also…

Lorem Ipsum is the new alpha

Lorem ipsum is the new alpha. Thanks to three year beta programs by large companies such as Google I think we all place little value in the term “beta.” Why should alpha be any different? The solution? Keep some lorem ipsum on your page so your visitors know this site is not yet ready for a general audience. It’s like leaving the top corner of a house unpainted to let everyone know it’s not yet ready for the realtor. Tags: loremipsum, alpha…

Yahoo! RSS Search

Yahoo!’s new RSS search site was introduced to the public domain this morning. Yahoo! RSS Search is no longer exposed outside the firewall so don’t be surprised if you are redirected to Yahoo! Search when you follow the aforementioned link. This early version of a future Yahoo! search component appeared to restrict searches of Yahoo! Search’s index to only include content published as a feed. I presume Yahoo! will use RSS as a generic term referring to feeds including RDF, RSS, and Atom. A search for “Niall Kennedy” returned 205 results on Yahoo! RSS Search compared to 565 results…

Technorati page on the London bombings

Technorati has created a special page dedicated to aggregating weblog posts related to the four bomb explosions in London this morning and the corresponding activity in London and around the world. The sidebar contains links to popular sources of news and information chosen by the Technorati staff. There is a lot of information still being discovered and it has been interesting to watch the story unfold from millions of keyboards around the world. I was especially surprised to see the number of photographs people posted of their televisions tuned to news channel reporting. Tags: 070705, london…

Building long-term corporate goals

The current issue of The McKinsey Quarterly has a good article on building long-term corporate goals. Most companies focus on short-term results such as quarterly earnings at the expense of long-term corporate health but I was really surprised to hear the results of a recent study of 401 financial executives and their planning goals. A majority of the managers polled said that they would forgo an investment offering a decent return on capital if it meant missing their quarterly earnings expectations. Indeed, more than 80 percent of the executives responding said they would cut expenditures on R&D and marketing to…

Gnomedex was very different

I’ve been reflecting on Gnomedex for most of this week. It was a very different conference than I have ever been to before. The entire place was full of content producers. Text bloggers, audio bloggers, video bloggers, cartoonists, rockers, photographers, journalists, publicists, marketers, and venture capitalists all mixed into the same room. Everyone I met at Gnomedex created new things and publicly made available their own view of the world. We had so much to share even two T1 lines could not hold our stream of thoughts. “I read your blog” was a line of introduction. “I like you, I…

Movable Type 3.2 is coming

Guess what? There will be a new version of Movable Type sometime in the future. Six Apart will talk about some of the new features in the latest version of their software sometime between now and when it’s released. They are sure you will enjoy the upgrade. Yep, that’s a summary of a real announcement from Six Apart. No big surprise that there is a new version that will contain new features so I’m not really sure the point of the announcement other than admitting the versioning of the next release. Tags: movabletype…

Microsoft bidding on Claria?

The New York Times reports Microsoft is currently in talks to acquire Claria for $500 million. Claria, formerly known as Gator, is known for its software installed on Windows computers to track browsing behavior and serve personalized advertisements based on this acquired user behavior. The article reports MSN is very interested in personalization technologies and the increased advertising revenues they provide and is pursuing companies in the space in an attempt to close the gap on Google. I am not a big fan of the methods used by Claria to deliver personalized listings. I think MSN could accomplish similar tracking…

MySpace switching to .Net

MySpace, a popular online social networking and blogging site with nearly 20 million users, is moving from ColdFusion to .Net. MySpace received over 7.5 billion page views from 15.5 million unique visitors in May according to comScore. Looks like the site will continue to use its CFML code as native .Net web applications. Seems like a big win for Microsoft! Tags: cfml, coldfusion, dotnet…

Yahoo! launches My Web 2.0 beta

Social search is here. Yahoo! introduced My Web 2.0 beta this evening, the first step towards personalized and social search online. I have been exploring the new service for the past half-hour and I am impressed. Personalized search and extending that search to a network of friends is an intensive computational operation and I am surprised Yahoo! has pulled it off. What can you do with My Web 2.0? Each search is limited to your saved bookmarks and the bookmarks of your friends my default. Every bookmark has an option for one or more tags and Yahoo! will suggest tags…

Friday geek outing

Many geeks are in town for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference this Wednesday and Thursday. I’m planning a geek outing for Friday if anyone is staying in the area and would like to see some sights and unique things, leave a comment and I will announce more details soon. We can do some geolocation-specific things like GoCar or Segway tours, visit the Lucas Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio, walk the Golden Gate Bridge, or many other things. I liked my Seattle experience of a group breakfast followed by group excursions. Let’s plan for a 10 a.m. breakfast at…

Seattle photo safari

I had a good time in Seattle with all the geeks at Gnomedex. There were more people podcasting and videocasting than I had ever seen before and 400 people armed with laptops managed to clog the 2 T1 lines coming into the conference center within minutes. I had breakfast with Robert Scoble and about ten other bloggers at Pike Place Market and watched Argentina beat Mexico in a Confederations Cup semifinal soccer match in penalty kicks. Scott Beale and I decided to spend the rest of the day wandering around Seattle and the surrounding area on a photo safari. Our…

Jeff Hawkins on entrepreneurship

On May 18 I saw Jeff Hawkins speak at Stanford. Full video of Jeff’s talk is available on Stanford’s website if you are interested. Jeff referred to entrepreneurship as “a tool of last resort.” An entrepreneur is not a thing to be, it is an intermediary thing. If you succeed as an entrepreneur you transition out of that job into a success. Jeff became an entrepreneur out of desperation because he could not accomplish the things he wanted to accomplish with his current employer or an existing major player. In 1987 Jeff decided to not take the entrepreneurship route when…

Stealing citizen content

I am sitting in my hotel room in Seattle researching all the sites that used my photographs from yesterday’s Microsoft announcement in violation of my Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial license. I broke a story with high-resolution photographs and commercial websites decided not only to use my content without attribution but in one case a site was selling prints of my photographs. Breaking news is very competitive and everyone wants the scoop in their search for full and in-depth coverage. Unlike a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge or something artsy I feel like these sites already have benefitted from…

Microsoft announces RSS support in Longhorn

I am currently attending Gnomedex in Seattle where there are many product announcements happening. The big announcement of the morning is Microsoft’s integration of RSS into Longhorn at the platform level. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer, admitted Microsoft is “trying to get on the Cluetrain.” Microsoft’s marketing message for its RSS integration is “Browse. Search. Subscribe!” They distributed jackets to all Gnomedex attendees and expect to see this message at PDC in September and other marketing venues. RSS is again being used as a generic term encompassing all feed formats including RDF and Atom. Dean demonstrated Internet…

Technorati party on Wednesday

Technorati is having a party! We’re preparing for a busy week and a few product launches and we want to bring the community together to learn face-to-face what’s new and exciting and to gather your feedback. We will also have a few announcements so if you are a blogger in search of a scoop this will be an extra fun party. The party will be held at the House of Sheids on Wednesday, June 22, from 6:30 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. or until whenever everyone decides to leave. Technorati will provide some food and a no-host bar. Please send an…

GoDaddy misstates the facts

Some companies love to issue press releases for every little thing. Go Daddy is one of those companies. Hot on the heels of their press release about their blog’s six-month anniversary comes a press release claiming Bob Parsons has the 23rd most popular blog and the most popular CEO blog. Too bad they provide no fact to support either claim. Technorati ranks blogs according to the most “click-throughs” on commonly-searched keywords. http://www.bobparsons.com covers a variety of topics, many of which do not contain such keywords; for that reason, Parsons’ blog is not listed in the Top 100. Not true. The…

Flickr adding ranking algorithms within the next month

Stewart Butterfield announced a new Flickr feature at tonight’s Tag Tuesday event. In the next few weeks Flickr will introduce the ability to algorithmically sort photographs using criteria such as the most commented posts, the most popular photo publishers, and the structure of a user’s social network. The new ranking system will allow for the most active pictures surrounding an event to rise to the top of the pile instead of treating an entire tagspace as a chronological flow.Tags: flickr…

Yahoo! acquires blo.gs

Jim Winstead just announced Yahoo! has purchased blo.gs. The cloud interface will still be available for general use. What does this mean? Yahoo! now has a ping beacon that is already built-in to most weblog software as well as a database of blog posts from the past few years. The cloud technology allows Yahoo! to easily share content update notifications inside and outside the firewall, allowing for easy sharing between blo.gs and Yahoo! Search for example. Jim originally planned on pulling the cloud interface offline at the end of last year and it is good to see the continuation of…

blo.gs transfer imminent?

Blo.gs is currently down, indicating an announcement is imminent. Whois records show Jim Winstead is still the domain contact and resource, but Jim previously announced the domain and its assets would change hands on or after Monday, June 13.Tags: blo.gs…

Technorati is sponsoring a trip to BlogHer

Dave Sifry just announced Technorati’s contest to send a blogger to BlogHer, a conference focused on women bloggers taking place in Santa Clara on July 30. Technorati has thought about the best way to support the conference and the bloggers we serve. I thought about some of the different classes of bloggers out there and how each might benefit from attending the conference. I talked with the conference organizers to get a better idea of their vision and what they hope to accomplish. I am very lucky to live in the Bay Area at the center of technology world and…

Tag Tuesday tomorrow at Gordon Biersch in San Francisco

Technorati and Flickr are co-hosting a gathering of tag implementors and other interesting people tomorrow evening at 6:30 p.m. at Gordon Biersch in San Francisco. We are calling the event Tag Tuesday and hope this will be the first of many meetings about tags as a freeform organizational tool. Kevin Marks of Technorati and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr will each have small presentations followed by a discussion. Technorati often receives questions from other organizations about the best way to implement tags within their blog, software, or project. I think the best way to learn is in-person and from people that…

Going to Gnomedex

In less than two weeks I will be in Seattle at Gnomedex. I attended Gnomedex back when it was in Des Moines and had a lot of fun. As a former sexiest geek finalist — I lost to a Lockergnome employee — I just have to represent. I’m looking forward to the latest version of the conference in the most unwired city in America. Gnomedex will have a very large RSS presence this year with all the major aggregators attending and new aggregators being introduced at the conference so we can all geek out and make people’s reading habits a…

del.icio.us tags by file type

Del.icio.us now allows users to browse tags by media types such as MP3 files or MPEG movies. RSS feeds now include enclosures for easy media subscription. The tag “system:media:audio” includes: *.mp3 as “system:filetype:mp3” *.wav as “system:filetype:wav” The tag “system:media:video” includes: *.mpg as “system:filetype:mpg” *.mpeg as “system:filetype:mpeg” *.avi as “system:filetype:avi” *.wmv as “system:filetype:wmv” *.mov as “system:filetype:mov” The tag “system:media:image” includes: *.jpg as “system:filetype:jpg” *.jpeg as “system:filetype:jpeg” *.gif as “system:filetype:gif” *.png as “system:filetype:png” The tag “system:media:document” includes: *.pdf as “system:filetype:pdf” *.doc as “system:filetype:doc”Tags: delicious, tagging…

KRON blogger gathering

I spent the afternoon at KRON-TV with about 100 other bloggers as part of a hosted meetup. In attendance was a diverse crowd of bloggers covering food, photography, travel, technology, and local news. General Manager Mark Antonitis (pictured above) hosted the event. KRON is a television station struggling to survive after being separated from NBC a few years and they differentiate themselves from the market by airing many programs with a local focus such as full coverage of parades or a weekly show about exploring the lesser-known parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. I arrived at KRON’s television…