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

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 34 of 72.

Paid software to submit pings?

I just came across RSS Submit, a $25 piece of software that will ping RSS search engines with your feed URL. (via Danny Sullivan) Hilarious! It’s like Ping-o-Matic but for $25!…

Dear Technorati: Play well with others

This week’s announcements from Technorati have been mixed with endorsements and a message that Technorati may work better with one weblog platform than another. The Technorati tags help file contains an inline advertisement for TypePad. I could understand the use of Flickr and del.icio.us as the current most prominent uses of tags by the online community, but endorsing a weblog hosting company in your help file stinks of paid placement. Adding rel=”tag” to any link should be enough to build a tag library for links off the link text. Technorati instead grabs the last part of the URL after the…

Technorati launches Technorati Tags

Technorati launched Technorati Tags, a new, decentralized method of categorizing posts that also integrates with popular online communities del.icio.us and Flickr. Browse tags The front page displays a sampling of current popular tags sorted by UTF value. A tag’s popularity is expressed through font size: the more popular tags appear larger. Tag page Each tag has a page aggregating photos from Flickr, weblog posts indexed by Technorati, and del.icio.us links. Each page contains ten photographs, twenty posts, and fifteen links. http://www.technorati.com/tag/ + tag of your choice (no spaces) . Join the game of tag How can you be sure your…

Marissa Mayer on Google user experience

Marissa Mayer of Google spoke at PARC on Tuesday night. Marissa is product manager for Google.com and formerly the technical lead for the user-interface team. Alan Williamson provides a good summary of the event. Some interesting bits of information: The Google copyright statement was added to the bottom of the home page as an end of page marker after users expected more page content to load. If at least 20% of people use a feature Google will include it in the full site. At least 5% of users need to use an advanced feature before it is included in Google’s…

PubSub events page

PubSub created an events page for the Golden Globe Awards as an extension of their provided sample subscriptions. (via Gary Price) PubSub also has a slick Flash demo of its services linked from the home page. The demo provides usage cases and execution using PubSub’s services….

Developer contest referral traffic

I have more referral traffic this week from the Technorati Developer’s Contest page than domestic Google and Yahoo! combined! Ranchero has about a third as many referrals as Technorati. Technorati released some new features this week but holding off on the announcement draws more attention to my work. Thanks!…

Atom working draft

A new version of the Atom sydication format working draft is online. There are element changes such as a change in the publish date and updated tags, and new category support. The new draft also adds a length attribute to link elements, enabling podcasting and other applications. Format freeze is supposed to happen Monday, January 17….

Live search comparison

Last week Starbucks announced a new drinkable chocloate beverage called Chantico. Beginning last Saturday consumers could purchase a six-fluid ounce cup, creating many conversations across the blogosphere involving the new drink and the newly formed category of “drinkable chocolate.” This new product also provides a perfect opportunity to play the role of the marketing department of a Fortune 500 company tracking the reaction to a new product introduction. How should we measure the reaction to a product that has been on the market only four days? With live search companies of course! I will use search engines Technorati, Feedster, and…

Apple releases Mac mini, iPod shuffle

Apple released the Mac mini and the iPod shuffle at this morning’s MacWorld Expo keynote address. The Mac mini is available for $500 in an anodized aluminum enclosure housing a 1.25GHz G4 processoor, 40 GB hard drive, 256 MB of RAM, slot-loading Combo Drive, and ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card with dedicated memory. The iPod shuffle is available in 512 MB and 1 GB flavors for $100 and $150 respectively. The music player has no display and doubles as a USB data stick. The new iTunes Autofill feature should be very interesting for loading up the latest podcasts. What is…

Technorati site search

Technorati now supports site search as a beta feature. Pass the “from” parameter in your URL string with your desired base URL and you can restrict your search to just those references. Technorati also has a searchlet for home page integration. As an example you can search my weblog for the keyword “technorati.”…

Technorati tags?

Just spotted on Adam Hertz’s blog links to Technorati tag URLs. The syntax is http://www.technorati.com/tag/ + keyword. Adam added a Technorati tag and a contest tag for a recent entry. A sign of things to come from Technorati? Could be a decentralized del.icio.us. Adam is Technorati’s VP of Engineering. A Technorati cosmos search for the base URL shows Adam is the only known source using the tag links. Kevin is playing along too, this time with a subdomain….

23 Years of Usenet on Google

Google has an archive of Usenet postings since 1981. Google has a page full of memorable moments from twenty years of postings. First mention of the term “search engine” was in March 1988. Linus Torvalds’ Linux announcement First post from an AOL account was in May 1992, almost three years after the first mention of AOL. Yahoo! and Lycos mentioned in December 1994. Altavista announced in December 1995. Lots of interesting reading and a reminder I have not yet been to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I plan to attend the Steve Case and Walt Mossberg event on…

Technorati cosmos within NetNewsWire

I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers’ contest but I won…

Attention.xml export for NetNewsWire

Attention.xml is an open standard to track attention metadata such as what you read and what you would like to learn more about. So far there has been a lot of talk around the idea and what it could mean for synchronization, resource discovery, and social networking. Technorati and Steve Gillmor have talked about the idea but there has been no implementation to show how you could use this open format with existing applications such as web browsers and feed aggregators to make sense out of your daily activity. Until now. I wrote an AppleScript that exports all of your…

Technorati now supports keyword watchlists

Technorati now allows users to subscribe to a keyword search through a watchlist delivered in RSS format. You could of course do the same thing through the Technorati API through a SearchQuery and setting your format parameter to rss, but this method is a lot easier and finally fills a big hole for Technorati persistent search. Technorati also supports the use of boolean operators such as “AND” and “OR” and “NOT.” Note the operators must be in all capital letters for Technorati’s query analyzer to parse correctly….

Six Apart to buy Live Journal

Om Malik reports Six Apart will acquire Live Journal and the deal should close by the end of the month. WOW. Om has been correct in every scoop I have seen, so I consider this news very accurate. Update: It’s official. From Mena: “While the code bases will remain separate (since LiveJournal is of course remaining Open Source), we will have unification through APIs, syndication formats and shared functionality (i.e. TrackBack support).” Big news! I wonder if all the LiveJournal employees will move to San Francisco, but some personnel will inevitably be lost. When a company is trying to grow…

Lawrence Lessig on The Connection radio show

Lawrence Lessig was a guest on this morning’s The Connection radio show on WBUR Boston and NPR. He talked about the history of copyright law, Creative Commons, and how technology is changing copyright behavior. You can listed to the entire show in Real Audio. A good introduction to the copyright law and how Creative Commons is trying to help publishers overcome this complex world of fair use and remix. Callers addressed some of the key issues of the Creative Commons such as rights to a commercially published collaborative work, and what online publishing means for traditional media publishers….

Halo 2 rankings reset

All Halo 2 Rumble Pit statistics — the statistics used to rank match players on Xbox Live — were reset on January 1, 2005. Bungie acknowledges the problem, but I now have to fight my way back to the top. No word yet from Microsoft on what caused the reset….

Fighting the white ninja

When I was eight years-old I had a recurring dream in which I was chased by a ninja but had no voice to scream for help. It baffled me that no one else could see a ninja in white chasing me and occasionally throwing his ninja stars by my ear. The dreams continued for about two weeks, until I realized no one was going to stop this ninja except for me. I turned, I fought and won, and the world took notice. As I think about resolutions for things I would like to change about myself and my life in…

Dan Gillmor has a new weblog

Dan Gillmor has a new TypePad weblog. Grab your RDF feed or Atom feed if you would like to keep track of Dan’s new citizen journalism projects and other technology insights….

Personalized search meets the job market

I am meeting more and more people dissatisfied with their jobs. The top gripe is not job function, but management environment. Are you encouraged to learn new things? Attend conferences? Do you feel like you make a measurable difference? All interesting things to think about heading in to 2005 from the perspective of the employee as well as the employer. Companies are too busy to post articulate job listings and interview candidates. Most of the good job candidates are passive seekers since they cannot send an explicit signal that might get them fired or make life uncomfortable in their current…

Google on 60 Minutes

CBS News will air a segment about Google on this Sunday’s 60 Minutes. John Battelle is a featured commentator….

ccPublisher 1.0

Nathan Yergler announced ccPublisher, a tool that allows content creators to upload Creative Commons licensed audio or video files to your site or to the Internet Archive for free hosting. ccPublisher will embed a license claim in MP3 audio files. The OS X version is a whopping 60 MB. The application is written in Python and is a part of the Creative Commons Tools project on SourceForge.net….

Feedster contest winners announced

Feedster announced its contest winners today. Two out of three of my picks were correct. Feedster’s contest seemed like a developer relations failure. The submission date and announcement date were moving targets, and when the winners were announced there was no explanation of the tool beyond a link to the author. What are your thoughts? What would you like to see from a developer contest?…