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 feature as a key reason to switch? Will publishers such as Weblogs Inc. ban such user agents from accessing their feeds?

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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.

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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. I enjoy subscribing and learning a little more about what goes into my favorite cup of coffee.

What do you like to talk about? Do your friends look to you as an expert in a certain topic? Share your thoughts with the world with a blog. You may be surprised with the community that develops around your content and if nothing else you will have an archive of your thoughts and writing.

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”).

  1. The blog author hits the “Post” button, publishing his or her blog entry to a publicly available website.
  2. The blog tool retrieves a listing of specified services that are either platform-defined defaults or user-specified preferences.
  3. The blog tool attempts to deliver a notification message — usually XML–RPC in Weblogs.com format. — to all of the destinations retrieved in the previous step.
  4. The ping results in a timeout, success, or failure and that status is communicated back to the user.

What if the ping results in a timeout or failure? The blog author waits and waits and eventually might see a failure message from the blog tool letting him or her know the ping failed to successfully complete. Who does the author blame for the failure? Does he or she blame the owner and administrator of one of the ping beacons he or she copied from a list on a blog marketing site or a checkbox in the blog tool preferences? Or does he or she blame the blog tool for not effectively publicizing the author’s latest entry? A failed ping results in many user complaints and general dissatisfaction for blog tools.

Different blog tools have taken different approaches to the problem of errant pings.

  1. Hand-select ping beacons known to have a fast response time and infrequent failures.

    Technorati has a ping beacon with a fast response time and high level of uptime. We work with individual blog publishers to make sure if they add Technorati as a ping option that we are able to receive the volume of updates they generate and provide a reliable user experience for the authors using that blog tool.

  2. Utilize a ping distribution tool to receive one ping and distribute the information to a list of ping beacons.

    Ping-o-Matic was created by WordPress developers Dougal Campbell and Matt Mullenweg as a default ping option for all WordPress installations. WordPress and other tools send one request to publicize the updated status of the author’s blog to whatever destinations Ping-o-Matic chooses.

  3. Create a change file hosted on the servers of the blog tool company for parsing by interested parties.

    Blogger publishes updates to its own site as a chnges.xml file.

  4. Create a stream of updates and allow interested ping beacons to connect and listen to the stream.

    Six Apart currently publishes a stream of updates for LiveJournal journals and TypePad blogs. This stream includes the full content of a blog post.

A company such as Technorati would like to index as much new blog information as possible and will read and interpret many of the different methods of notification. The ideal situation of course is when the data comes directly to us either through a direct ping or through a relationship with the blog tool. Relationships with the authors of blog tools creates a direct point of contact for expediency and reliability and helps the company better understand the unique needs of a tool and its users.

If a blog tool chooses an alternate and indirect method of publishing updates Technorati is still active in ensuring the reliable delivery of legitimate update notifications. We’ve helped Ping-o-Matic by supplying hardware and tweaking some software code to make the service faster and more reliable and continue to help open and closed source developers help their users publicize their content.

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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.

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My new iPod nano

nano vs. shuffle

I arrived at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco today right before the first shipment of iPod nanos arrived via FedEx. I had to wait a little while, but I am now the proud owner of an iPod nano 4 GB in black.

I already have a 1GB iPod shuffle but my biggest frustration was not being able to see what I was going. I would often load my iPod shuffle with just a few tracks — podcasts at the beginning followed by music — to avoid not knowing where anything was. My shuffle barely ever contained over 100 MB as a result.

Yes, the nano does fit in my change pocket. It’s so tiny! It is perfect for my walk to and from work each day, and I am pretty sure it will increase my appetite for podcasts.

Apple Store employees told me Apple had produced a special bag for the iPod nano, but it was still downstairs and not unpacked. The iPod nano should be the hot gift this Christmas, and marketed as a stocking stuffer because you never know where that box might turn up.

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Vint Cerf joins Google

Vint Cerf will join Google starting October 3 as their Chief Internet Evangelist. Vint already posted to the Google blog to let us know he is “committed to the vision of Google’s criticality to the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people.”

Vint Cerf is currently working on the Interplanetary Protocol and may be working with Google to create the first Earth node at the top of the often rumored Google space elevator. :)

Wall Street Journal on blog search

Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal features an article on the world of blog search and how companies such as Technorati, BlogPulse, IceRocket, and Feedster are providing users with access to information as it happens. It is a pretty good overview of the industry and the various search services that will introduce people to the concept of searching for information as it happens.

The failure to mention Ask Jeeves and its purchase of Bloglines seems like a big omission given the comparisons made between smaller search startups and bigger search players such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

I will have to flip through the hardcopy version of The Wall Street Journal tomorrow to check where in the paper the article appears.

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