Bloglines feed statistics

Ask Jeeves just released some statistics about the size of their database and subscribed users.

  • 1,121,655 feeds with at least one subscriber
  • Slashdot is the most popular feed with 37,400 active subscribers.
  • Bloglines indexes almost 600 million articles (items/entries).
  • Bloglines adds over 2 million new articles to its index daily.

My blog has a RSS feed for every post, category, month, as well as custom keyword searches and a feed for the last 15 blog entries. That’s thousands of feeds without even mentioning my Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 feeds. I am definitely not conservative in what I produce and I know I have Bloglines subscribers for many different flavors of my site content. My one blog is contributing to the inflation of those feed numbers and I am sure I am not the only content publisher with multiple feeds for my content (Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, and craigslist come to mind as publishers who let you customize your content as RSS).

Thanks Jeeves for the interesting statistics!

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News Corp buys MySpace parent company for $580 million

News Corporation announced it will acquire Intermix Media, Inc. for $12 a share, or approximately $580 million in cash. Intermix is the parent company of MySpace.com, a popular social networking and blogging service with over eighteen million members. News Corporation is an international media conglomerate and consisting of Fox, Sky, DirectTV, New York Post, and Harper Collins. Intermix Media recently settled a spyware suit with the State of New York for $7.5 million dollars. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter pending shareholder approval.

MySpace.com is attracting 2 million new registered users every month according to chief executive Chris DeWolfe. MySpace had revenues of $6.25 million in the second quarter according to an statement from investors obtained by MarketWatch.

A pretty huge payout for a company with a $140 market valuation just 10 months ago. Fox just put together an entire Internet division in a weekend.

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Newsweek and Time Magazine editors discuss sources and blogging

Journalism Under Siege

Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, and Jim Kelly, editor of Time Magazine spoke tonight at Stanford about the current state of journalism. Topics included confidential and anonymous sources, the influence of blogging, and the consolidation of news media.

On Mark Cooper and Karl Rove

Time Magazine and reporter Matt Cooper were recently criticized for turning over the names of sources after a grand-jury subpoena. Jim Kelly explained that while reporter’s notes and research are their own property Matt Cooper included the names of his sources in company e-mails that were later demanded by the grand-jury investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Jim Kelly commented “if there was no e-mail with Karl Rove’s name in it there would be nothing of significance to turn over to the general counsel.” Time Magazine and other news organizations are now very careful to not name sources in e-mail and leave a trail for prosecutors. Mark Whitaker commented that people would talk to Bob Woodward and no one else because they knew he was the one who kept Mark Felt’s secret for so many years. Judith Miller may have similar exclusivity in her career when she is released from jail.

On Blogging

Mark Whitaker of Newsweek did not seem to be a big fan of blogging. “I think the idea that blogs are going to replace the mainstream media for the moment is laughable. If the mainstream media disappeared what would bloggers have left to write about?” He also stated that blogs do not have sources that are knowledgeable enough or in a high enough position to demand anonymity.

Jim Kelly appeared to be a fan of blogging. He mentioned the recent bombings in London and the incorporation of pictures and text from individuals on the streets of London into the pages of Time Magazine as an example of timely and very topical reporting. He also believes blogs provide a way for people who are distrusting of big media or who feel under-served in the amount of mainstream reporting of their demographic to find the news they care about.

My thoughts

Large media companies are very aware of the blogosphere and commonly cite Dan Rather and 60 Minutes as an example of what can happen if a mob of bloggers goes after your story. They realize that blogs and online media in general is the best way to reach a younger market but it seems like most companies are not sure how to get started and rely on acquisitions of popular online media brands such as Slate and About.com to provide some experience and experimentation with online media.

The journalism industry is constantly learning and changing its practices with the times. The recent falsified stories of Jayson Blair at The New York Times and the close scrutiny of sources in the cases of Mark Cooper and Judith Miller will hopefully lead to a more thorough review process and the willingness of more sources to be identified or justify their reasons for anonymity. In journalism, as in blogging, reputation belongs to an individual and the reputation of a media organization is only as strong as the reporters earning the Pulitzers or creating sensationalist stories.

News journalism and the world of blogging have a lot to learn from each other. I hope each group identifies their uniqueness and find ways to work together to broaden perspectives and provide thorough in-depth perspectives as well as breaking news.

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Blog trademark filed

Marble Sportswear of Beverly Hills, California recently applied for a trademark and service mark for the word “blog.” Is there a new line of blog-specific clothing on the way or are they just squatting?

Small Business Blog is also an applied service mark the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council and their “virtual destination where small business owners and entrepreneurs can communicate about issues impacting their enterprises and the economy.”

Both trademarks seem pointless but maybe pushing the government papers really does pay off.

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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 send me enough traffic for me to make money by reputation or by my own advertisements.

Each company benefitting from my content should provide me a way to opt-out without me resorting to banning IP addresses. Lack of exclusion my main complaint about services such as Ping-o-Matic RPC or Feedmesh.

Who is listening?

Technorati is offering services that will help companies control their corporate message by identifying those blogs and their social network, that have posted around the “wrong” message. Then, I would imagine, some sort of corporate “SWAT” team could parachute in and engage those off-message bloggers.

I expect any alert service or intelligence product would have uses for good and evil. Many people currently subscribe to ego searches in blog search engines and news searches through Google News alerts allowing you to watch millions of sources for mentions of the terms of interest any many companies act on those data today.

A service such as Google or Technorati does not interpret a message as right or wrong, but a person interprets the conversation and may choose to take action or simply listen. I know many small software businesses tracking online conversations around their products. If I mention NetNewsWire or Ecto I might attract the attention of Brent Simmons or Adriaan Tijsseling after they receive a news alert about their product. I like being engaged by Brent and Adriaan and it definitely keeps me more honest. Brent and Adriaan both have blogs but they also engage their users, answer questions, and join in the conversation across the blogosphere. I expect companies that want to understand online content and use the content as a focus group and a feedback loop to be good actors or learn along the way.

Thoughts on the future

I continue to believe content rights will be a huge point of contention this year. There will be advertisements alongside the full content of the content you publish to a feed service, an e-mail service, and even perhaps desktop search. Browsers such as Opera display advertisements for every page rendered by the free version of their software. I discover new uses of my content with each new user-agent. I continue to publish, ban the bad actors, and explore new ways of interacting with data.

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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.

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Yahoo! RSS Search

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 on Technorati and 410 results on BlogPulse.

Yahoo! RSS Search features the ability to order your results by time, relevance, or by popularity. Sort by relevance most likely utilizes the same ranking algorithm as general Yahoo! Search. Sort by popularity may be based on inbound links on a per-page basis, inbound links on a per-site basis, or Yahoo!’s proprietary site ranking. You can also restrict your search to just the RSS feeds in the My Yahoo! database.

The Yahoo! RSS Search home page mentions that Yahoo! intends to highlight works licensed under Creative Commons in its search results.

Yahoo! has a lot of good data inputs for a solid database of feed content. Mix blo.gs ping notifications with My Yahoo! usage statistics and Yahoo! Slurp‘s crawl abilities and you have update information, usage information, and a robust crawler to index HTML content and even enclosures using Media RSS or common file formats such as Word or PDF documents.

I also wonder what happens when terms like “relevance” are publicly used to describe a search method. No one likes to be told their piece of published content is not very relevant.

I expect to see more companies like Yahoo! adding vertical search front-ends to their massive indexes to attract new users and focused advertising dollars. It would be interesting to see Yahoo! Search Subscriptions extended to the personal publishing realm. It’s always interesting to take a peek at web applications in the alpha stage of development.

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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.

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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 ensure that they met their quarterly earnings targets — even if they believed that the cuts were destroying long-term value.

I like these types of articles because they present theory and back it up with observations from client work.

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