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

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 32 of 72.

Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast

Tomorrow’s Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast to the outside world. No IRC, no audio, and no video stream will be published of the event.

Jason Kottke to work full time on his weblog

Jason Kottke just announced he is going to run kottke.org full-time supported — he hopes — by user donations. “This is me taking online personal publishing seriously because I feel it deserves as much.”

Netflix San Francisco subscriber numbers

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings claims “one of every nine residents of San Francisco is a Netflix subscriber” in tomorrow’s New York Times. Seems a bit high to me.

Six Apart article in AP

Ben is shy and gets uncomfortable when people talk about him,” said Andrew Anker, Six Apart’s executive vice president of corporate development. “Mena gets upset when everyone is not talking about her every day.

Web Spam Squashing Summit

I have been busy this week organizing a Web Spam Squashing Summit to bring together key players involved in publishing and indexing content on the world wide web.

Jerry Brown starts a weblog

The mayor of Oakland, Jerry Brown, has started a weblog on TypePad to discuss the issues of interest to Oakland and to provide a direct voice. His first post currently has 54 comments.

Technorati mention on Charlie Rose

Glenn Reynolds: “If I had a big organization, like say if I ran The New York Times or some piece of it, I would pay somebody — and you wouldn’t have to pay them a lot, it’s not very hard — to just plug the URL for every New York Times story into Technorati which will then give you a list of every blog that links to that story and see what people say. And if you find a bunch of people saying there’s a mistake in it, I’d run a correction *snap* just like that and I’d credit somewhere on the website the blogs that pointed it out.

Internet Explorer 7.0 to launch before Longhorn

A new version of Internet Explorer will launch before Longhorn. A beta version of Internet Explorer 7.0 will be available by this summer. Gates made the announcement during a keynote presentation at the RSA Conference in San Francisco….

Six Apart site redesign

I just noticed the new website design over at Six Apart. Lots of colors and rounded corners. They used real employees and not models or stock images to decorate their pages. Every page on the site is powered by Movable Type. Mule Design handled the redesign. Their news and events feeds are passed through FeedBurner. The Movable Type home page is now a subdirectory of Six Apart. Six Apart added a contact form for security vulnerabilities….

WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn arrives

WordPress 1.5 is now available for download. If you are upgrading you should follow directions and “reward yourself with a cold soda and some candy.” If you are in the San Francisco area Matt Mullenweg is hosting an upgrade party tomorrow night….

MythTV 0.17 now available

MythTV 0.17 is now available. MythTV is an open-source home media center platform using Linux, MySQL, and other goodies. The new release boasts FireWire capture and increased support for Mac OS X and HDTV among other features….

Yahoo! Slurp crawl delay

You can control the minimum delay between accesses for Yahoo!’s Slurp crawler by adding a “Crawl-delay” line to your robots.txt. User-agent: Slurp Crawl-delay: 20 Thank you Yahoo! Search Blog!…

Orb Networks presentation at Mobile Monday

Ted Shelton of Orb Networks was the final Mobile Monday presentation. Orb Networks offers media streaming from your broadband connection and Windows XP computer to any Internet-connected device with a web browser and RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. You can browse and listen to music, movies, and television from your home computer while you are away from your desktop PC. Orb Networks started in July 2004 and launched its first product at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show. They do not have to pay licensing fees since users have already licensed their own content. The top use of Orb is…

MobiTV presentation at Mobile Monday

Alan Moskowitz of MobiTV was the third presenter at this month’s Mobile Monday meeting. MobiTV delivers 24 channels of live television to your mobile phone for $10 a month on top of your carrier’s data plan. They are powered by Java and claim to be one of the first recurring revenue applications using Java. You can channel surf on your phone with little effort. Alan shared some interesting statistics on MobiTV. Mobile television use is 5.65 minutes per session with approximately 2.34 sessions per day. Live television is used more often than their clips product due to its more…

Caterpillar Mobile presentation at Mobile Monday

The second presentation from Mobile Monday was Anita Wilhelm of Caterpillar Mobile. Anita was a student of Marc Davis at Berkeley. Caterpillar Mobile’s current product is a cameraphone game called Zooke. Zooke allows its members to create challenges for all members or only members of an immediate social circle. You might be on a mission to find the best George Bush bumper sticker in Berkeley and have other game players rate your findings. It is a community-driven reality play experience that makes everyone’s day a little more exciting with minimal effort. I recorded Anita’s entire presentation as well as the…

Garage Cinema Research presentation at Mobile Monday

On Monday I attended the Mobile Monday meeting at Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View. There was an impressive set of presenters all focused on mobile media. The first presenter was Marc Davis of UC Berkeley and the director of Garage Cinema Research. Garage Cinema Research is interested in adding metadata through context-aware applications. You can infer data about the general location of a cameraphone user from their cell tower triangulation, the time of day, and popular photography subjects in the area. If a user adds a category to their photograph, a server can return a best guess of the object…

Technorati office photographs

Last Friday I took some photographs of the Technorati office space to share with our community. We are located in what used to be a printing press building. What a perfect location blogging company! We even have a printing press in our building lobby. Enjoy!…

NewsGator platform roadmap

Greg Reinacker just announced some big new products from NewsGator. NewsGator will now make a play behind the firewall with a product loosely named NewsGator Enterprise Server. NewsGator Enterprise Software will integrate with Exchange and Active Directory and interact with Outlook Web Access, Blackberry, and Exchange ActiveSync without needing to install NewsGator Outlook Edition on desktop computers across the organization. Greg also announced a white label version of NewsGator Online and there will be many APIs on the way for NewsGator Online. The feedback loop taking place on Greg’s blog is very interesting. Greg is actively engaging his community and…

43 Things is funded by Amazon

Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon discovered 43 Things has a substantial relationship with Amazon.com. 43 Things helps users set and track their goals such as reading “Code Complete” or take more pictures. Why hide it? Update: Robot Co-op responds….

Stewart Butterfield interview on Flickr

Richard Koman interviewed Stewart Butterfield of Flickr about how people use Flickr through the site, APIs, and how Flickr will make a business out of photo sharing. Flickr has 3.5 million photos, 82 percent are public. 71 percent of the photos have some kind of human-added metadata that was added in Flickr….

Ask Jeeves purchases Bloglines

Ask Jeeves officially purchased Bloglines. Mark Fletcher and his team will move to the Ask Jeeves remote office in Los Gatos where Mark will be GM of Bloglines. Teoma will power Bloglines search. Bloglines will gather and monetize users’ attention data for contextual advertising. Bloglines launched 18 months ago in June 2003 Official Announcements Ask Jeeves. “Ask Jeeves plans to leverage these technologies across its search and portal brands, and as of today, Bloglines’ Web search capability will be powered by Ask Jeeves’ search technology.” Ask Jeeves Weblog. “There will be no short-term changes to Bloglines that weren’t already…

NewsFire 1.0

David Watanabe just released version 1.0 of NewsFire, a minimalist and speedy feed aggregator for Mac OS X. NewsFire is shareware and may be purchased for $20. I still use NetNewsWire but NewsFire has impressed me for many months with its speed and ease of use. Please open the application to AppleScript so I can write some hacks!…

Ask Jeeves buying Bloglines?

Mary Hodder reports Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines and Mark Fletcher will be a Jeeves employee on Monday. Is this true? Mark Fletcher is presenting a 20-minute case study this Tuesday on RSS syndication, ad splicing, and blogging at the Media Center event. Perhaps the announcement is meant to coincide with the conference and Mark will use this time to talk about the new Bloglines. Update: Bloglines acquisition is official. Supposedly announced on Friday with an embargo of midnight tonight….

Tag-aware RSS feeds

Brian Del Vecchio wrote a long entry about about splicing a RSS feed by tag and how aggregator developers can create more tag-aware applications. It is possible within the RSS specification, but most feed authors have overlooked how to properly declare tags within their feeds. Flickr does not include categories with its RSS 2.0 feeds and Del.icio.us feeds use Dublin Core subject to provide space-separated tags. Before the feed aggregators can make your life easier we need to all do a better job as content producers to provide valuable information for our users. RSS 2.0 Each RSS 2.0 feed has…