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

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 35 of 72.

Technorati developer chat

Technorati is hosting a developer chat on IRC this Wednesday night at 7 p.m. San Francisco time (03:00 UTC). If you are working on an entry for the developers contest ending this Friday the chat is a good opportunity to receive live answers to any problems you may have. Join #technorati on irc.freenode.net. I will be in the chat room and try to answer any questions or explain how the site and services work. Any really difficult questions will be left to the Technorati employees to figure out….

Opera version 8 beta

Opera released a beta version of its Opera desktop application last week. The new version features improved RSS handling including address bar support similar to Apple’s plans for Safari RSS. A user can choose between RSS feeds declared as alternate links of type application/rss+xml. After you subscribe to one or more feeds a Feeds menu appears showing your subscriptions and unread items per feed. The Opera RSS browser treats each RSS item as a mail message, complete with the e-mail address of the item’s author. I did not check to see which RSS element is pulled here but I…

Marc Canter rants again

I tried to leave a comment on Marc Canter’s weblog in response to his post reacting to requests for reasonably priced geek dinners, but his weblog is not setup correctly. If you want to use TypeKey you have to edit your Movable Type weblog preferences and add your TypeKey token. You’re not enabling a conversation! I was motivated enough to post here since Marc unfairly targeted some people trying to make the event work for everyone. Tantek’s idea was to try somewhere new and to make the event as inclusionary as possible. He’s been to geek dinners all around the…

Six Apart moves into its new SoMa office

Today Six Apart moved into its new offices. No more interviews at the Tokyo Star, or driving to work for a lot of people. Moving into new space closer to home must have a big “we made it” feeling and make you realize how you have created something where there was nothing before. Congratulations Six Apart, and may your new pad be full of many bits of moving type….

Forbes on RSS

Forbes has a brief article about RSS feeds changing the business landscape. Some inaccuracies in the article: “Instead of searching for information, you get RSS to push it to you.” RSS is a pull technology, not push. A user requests the data and is sent a response. “Technorati.com is now monitoring more than 5 million RSS-enabled blogs.” Technorati claims to watch over 5.2 million weblogs, but Technorati builds its database primarily by parsing HTML. Technorati is not a RSS-based searcher as the article claims….

Technorati Users Group aftermath

The Technorati Users Group went well. Nine people learned new things about Technorati and five Technorati employees had a chance to interact with potential power users. I enjoyed making it all happen. I tethered myself to a projection TV and stepped through my prepared slides — my first time using the S-Video output on my PowerBook. I highlighted some features of the Technorati web site, showed how to create a watchlist, introduced the developer wiki, and showed the API responses. I briefly showed the Java SDK and an application I put together just minutes before the meeting. I did not…

FIFA to compensate clubs for World Cup injuries

FIFA announced an insurance fund to compensate clubs for injuries sustained by their players at the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Each national association will contribute 5% of its prize money to the insurance fund for a total of $13 million. The surplus will be reimbursed after the tournament. it’s good to see assurances to the companies sponsoring these athletes and their long-term development. The World Cup would be very different without club soccer and the two need to learn to get along….

Technorati Users Group tonight

Tonight is the first ever meeting of the first Technorati Users Group at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment in San Francisco. I will give an overview of Technorati and dive into its APIs. We will meet upstairs in the loft area. Everyone in attendance will receive a Technorati Users Group founding member t-shirt. You could also win one of two books. Good beer, good food, and a chance to learn about a service you can use for free. Come on down! I put together some slides to cover the basics of how Technorati works, how you can access their data,…

Six Apart business figures

San Francisco Business Times writes about Six Apart’s planned move to San Francisco next month. Some interesting statistics: $2 million in revenue for 2004.$5 million projected revenue in 2005.New office space on 4th Street is 14,000 square feet.40 employees in San Francisco, 11 in Paris, 12 in Tokyo.Plans to add 60 employees in the next eighteen months….

Technorati moving to a new colo

Technorati’s servers will be down this weekend as they move to a new colocation host. I mirrored the API documentation and SDK if you would like to continue developing without the live servers. Adam is posting pictures from the move on Flickr. [Update: As of 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday servers are back online.] Old compared to new:…

Amazon customer images

Amazon allows customers to share its images of a product with the intention of helping buyers understand product features and uses. In the digital camera category customer images has become a high profile way to show off your work and be evaluated by other photography enthusiasts. Take a look at the customer images page of the Nikon D70 for a good example or view the top images in the camera and photo category. It’s an online portfolio hosted by Amazon….

My picks for the Feedster developers contest

The Feedster developers contest is over and developers are waiting for the winners to be announced. You can view all of the entries on the Feedster submission form. What do you think about the contest submissions automatically being posted on Feedster for all to see? Good idea or bad idea? I went through the entire list of submitted Feedster hacks, removed the garbage entries seeking free linky love, and was able to put together my own list of winners while we wait for the official results. Best use of Feedster in a standalone RSS aggregator David Watanabe added Feedster search…

Technorati Users Group meeting December 21

Come drink beer and learn more about the Technorati API next Tuesday, December 21, at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment in San Francisco. I will introduce Technorati API calls, demonstrate some existing applications built using the APIs, and lead you through some sample code using XPath and Java. A few Technorati employees will stop by and provide updates on the developer program and provide the latest company news. If you are interested in learning more about live search, web services, or corporate intelligence this event is for you! The Technorati developer contest ends December 31 so this will be a…

Search wars

Charles Ferguson has a lengthy analysis of Google and Microsoft in the January edition of MIT Technology Review and how the search wars might play out over the next few years. Will Microsoft crush Google like it crushed Netscape? Ferguson bets on open standards and APIs as Google’s saving grace, creating a lock-in of tools and services. Winning architectures are proprietary and difficult to clone, but they are also externally “open”—that is, they provide publicly accessible interfaces upon which a wide variety of applications can be constructed by independent vendors and users. In this way, an architecture reaches all markets,…

FeedBurner announces FeedCount

FeedBurner announced new features today FeedCount, an image displaying the total number of readers of a FeedCount enabled FeedBurner feed. You can choose your own background and foreground color and choose an animated version. FeedBurner also claims 1 in 5 podcasts listed on audio.weblogs.com is provided by a FeedBurner feed….

Tiger adds default RSS reader option

The next version of Macintosh operating system, 10.4 code named Tiger, defines a default RSS reader at the system level. Preferences in the current early start kit allow a user to define the time between feed updates, the color annotation of a new article, and when to remove stored items. Hopefully this means aggregators will be able to share a common feed storage location. Update: MacNet took down at the request of Apple Legal. The preference pane showed a drop-down boxes to select the default RSS reader, choose an update interval, highlight new items, and the length of time to…

Value of idle time

I just finished reading “Quitting the paint factory,” an article by Mark Slouka in the November 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Mark looks at the history of the American worker, the pursuit of money over the value of time and mind, and questions what we value. Mark talks about the value of idle time, how we now spend money to have busy leisure time, and he shares the stories of literary figures struggling with some of the same questions about life. (via BoingBoing) What it says, crudely enough, is that in order to be successful, we must not only work…

PubSub LinkRank detail

PubSub has had LinkRanks for a while, but yesterday BoingBoing linked to a detail page not listed in the PubSub site links. PubSub displays a line chart of incoming links to the specified domain over the last thirty days and inbound links in the past ten days. Only one double listing in my results, a TypePad weblog with a separate domain. The chart is presented in Flash, making copy and pasting much more difficult. PubSub should learn from Alexa and make their images easy to add to other content. Think PowerPoint slides. PubSub is experimenting with NewsML for entry tracking…

Technorati API first long look

I spent some time today looking at the Technorati API and coding part of a personal tracking application. The API server was spotty throughout the day, making testing difficult. I cleaned up some of the wiki documentation, stored my own copies of API responses, and used my own servers to pull the data. I put together a demo application using JavaScript. Some things I noticed: Cosmos query never returns rssurl or atomurl elements even though the data is stored. Use the weblog url as a parameter in a bloginfo query to pull this data. The lang element in bloginfo is…

Bay Area tech employment on the rise

Every day this week I have received an e-mail and phone call from Bay Area technology companies looking for a technical product manager. Some companies I have never heard of, others have a market capitalization in the billions. I would love to say they heard of me through my weblog, but most found me on Monster or some similar service. These companies just signed some big deals, more are coming, and they need to hire people quickly to support the new business. The Bay Area economy is picking up and many companies just can’t hire fast enough. Referral bonuses are…

NewsFire 0.4 adds Feedster search

David Watanabe released version 0.4 NewsFire, a slick RSS reader for Mac OS X. The new version adds support for Feedster and Yahoo! News search from within the application. A very well integrated and fast use of live web search….

Society of the Underemployed

As an economics nerd I have a lot of thoughts about weblogs and theories of incentive. Weblogs share some social and economic motivations with the world of open source software yet I struggle to quantify the economic effects on an individual publisher level. The key overlooked metric of the blogosphere is the society of the underemployed. People with full-time jobs and a paycheck who rather be doing something else on a full or part-time basis utilize weblog tools in an attempt to gain notoriety or possibly a new job. Weblogs are the karaoke night of online journalism where many participants…

Dan Gillmor starting new citizen-journalism project

Dan Gillmor is leaving the San Jose Mercury News in January to work on a citizen-journalism project. Wow! I better finish reading We the Media and tune in to what will surely be an interesting project….

Forrester Research on search loyalty

Charlene Li authored a new paper on search engine user loyalty and posted a summary on her weblog. The $50 six-page paper cites extensive customer survey data. Some interesting findings: MSN gained substantial share as the default browser home page. (Internet Explorer no doubt) MSN has a slight lead in toolbar users. (related to Messenger installs?) Almost half of all toolbar users also use another toolbar. Charlene concludes that customers are becoming more sophisticated and specialized search companies will take away market share from Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Feedster is mentioned as a player in the RSS specialty….

Omidyar Network invests in Feedster

Feedster announced funding from Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network, Scott Rafer told me on Monday that the Omidyar Network had a good understanding of his approach to life and business from reading his weblog. A good business case for blogging about more than just your startup. Omidyar Network is interested in enabling the public. Feedster seeks validation as it continues to pursue venture capital funding, but the Omidyar Network is known for investing in social ideas and non-profits (Creative Commons, voting intiatives). Feedster is currently the only live search player without venture capital funding. I know little about the world of…