KRON blogger gathering

KRON boss

I spent the afternoon at KRON-TV with about 100 other bloggers as part of a hosted meetup. In attendance was a diverse crowd of bloggers covering food, photography, travel, technology, and local news. General Manager Mark Antonitis (pictured above) hosted the event.

KRON is a television station struggling to survive after being separated from NBC a few years and they differentiate themselves from the market by airing many programs with a local focus such as full coverage of parades or a weekly show about exploring the lesser-known parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.

I arrived at KRON’s television studios not really knowing what to expect. I commend KRON for putting on the event and starting the conversation. KRON plans to have its own local news aggregator on its website with staff responsible for reading the weblogs of over 500 bloggers they have already identified in the bay area. I spoke with some of the staff about Creative Commons licenses and the willingness of bloggers to share their content in exchange for no more than proper attribution. KRON is considering opening up some of its video content for bloggers to use in and remix.

Overall I came away disappointed with the event, possibly because I had set my expectations a bit too high. There was no question and answer period and no discussion forum, just a one way message from mainstream media. KRON was airing infomercials during our visit to the station. Some tips for KRON and other media outlets who would like to engage bloggers:

  • I want to learn what you are all about and what makes you different than the next media outlet and what may be your unique perspective on news or covering community events.
  • Many bloggers wish they could learn how to be better at their hobby by learning from professionals. Provide a learning experience in exchange for licensed content.
  • Treat bloggers as peers. No one likes to be talked down to or feel like you’ve changed your lingo to be more hip.

Meet the new Technorati

It’s finally out! Meet the new Technorati (beta), a complete redesign and a few new features thrown in as well.

  • Technorati blogs! Yes, it’s true. Technorati is a blog search company yet had no blog. Now we have two: one for the main site and one for developers.
  • Snazzy new tag pages full of Ajax goodness. Related tags, photos, and links all load after the rest of the page.
  • Subscribe to RSS feeds for tagged posts! This feature has actually been available for a few months but never exposed. We do not include the feed as a link alternate because it is not an alternate representation of the full page, just one portion of the page.
  • Web-based watchlists for everyone who is confused by orange buttons or has no idea what RSS means knows how to visit a page to view new items, just like e-mail.
  • Staff page. Meet the people who work on Technorati every day.
  • Track popular movies.
  • And more…

The entire site uses XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS web standards. It even looks good on my Treo! It’s interesting to take a look back at the three previous Technorati designs:

  1. November 2002
  2. June 2004
  3. July 2004
  4. June 2005

The new version of the site is meant to introduce Technorati to a larger, less technical audience. The last Technorati design was created with political journalists in mind as Technorati geared up for the 2004 Democratic Convention and the associated exposure of appearing on CNN.

Go check it out! The team at Technorati worked day and night to make this site happen and I hope you like it.

Macintosh Small Business lunch

Macintosh Small Business group

I just got back from lunch with about twenty-five Macintosh small business owners and developers visiting San Francisco for this week’s WWDC. We talked for about ninety minutes about common business problems and people shared their experiences with running a small business selling applications for the Macintosh operating system. Some quick notes:

  • If no one complains about your pricing, you priced too low.
  • Higher pricing usually leads to lower support requests.
  • Most software publishers allow users to use trial versions of their software before making a purchase.
  • eSellerate dominates as a payment provider but most developers choose to use their own serial number generators. Using the eSellerate API many developers have integrated payment and licensing systems with their applications to pass successful license keys back to the application without causing the user to copy-and-paste from an e-mail.
  • Some publishers were frustrated with their beta program and the user expectations and negative reviews associated with a beta program. A few application developers mentioned they were utilizing only private betas to avoid this concern.
  • If you publish your bugs and feature requests online, expect your competition to read every report and use this to their advantage.
  • The operating system’s built-in help has gotten a lot better since Panther (OS X 10.3) and more developers are looking into publishing both on the desktop and using pages on the web. Developers are starting to look at wikis for community support and collaborative tricks and tips.

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Gathering and distributing search results as RSS

I often receive questions from people about how search engines gather and distribute subscribed search results such as the results provided by Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, PubSub, and MSN or Yahoo! Search. It’s worth a brief explanation. Caveat lector, I work for Technorati but I will try to deliver an impartial view of the world of ping and search while keeping the post relatively brief.

All of the aforementioned sites output search results in the RSS 2.0 feed format. Your feed results will differ between services based on what is indexed, how frequently it is indexed, and what content is made available to each indexer.

Notification

Every site but MSN Search hosts its own ping beacon, a server location site authors can notify of new or changed content to prompt a fresh crawl. There are also publicly available change files for independent ping beacons such as Weblogs.com or hosted blog services such as Blogger or LiveJournal

Short definitions

Technorati
Blog focused.
Indexes HTML, RSS, and Atom.
XML–RPC ping beacon at rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping.
Ping submittal via a web form at technorati.com/ping.html.
Feedster
Feed focused.
Indexes RSS and Atom.
XML–RPC ping beacon at api.feedster.com/ping.php.
Blogpulse
Blog focused.
Indexes HTML, RSS, and Atom.
No ping beacon.
One-time blog submittal via a web form.
PubSub
Feed focused for future events.
Indexes RSS and Atom.
XML–RPC ping beacon at xping.pubsub.com/ping/.
MSN Search
Indexes anything its crawlers can find and interpret.
No ping beacon.
Yahoo! Search
Indexes anything its crawlers can find and interpret.
XML–RPC ping beacon at api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping.

Search result feed

So why might your results differ between services? Let’s take a look at a RSS search feed for “Mark Felt” — recently revealed as Deep Throat and a hot news topic — on each service.

Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, and PubSub output search results in reverse chronological order: last in, first out. MSN and Yahoo! apply their ranking algorithms to your search query and return the results of whatever happens inside their black box. PubSub will start monitoring its data stream for matches to your search once you create a request. You are unable to find out what was said about Mark Felt yesterday. Blogpulse indexes a feed once per day and your feed publication date is measured in days, not minutes.

Wrap-up

Now you have the inputs and outputs of a variety of search services. Maybe in the future I will dive into what happens in the middle.

Google Sitemaps using Movable Type

It’s pretty easy to make an XML Sitemap of your blog for easy parsing by Google or other search engines.

Just create a new index template and copy the code below. Choose an output file that is easy to remember such as sitemap.xml. Save and rebuild your new template file once you paste the code.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc><$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<MTEntries lastn="9999">
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$></lastmod>
</url>
</MTEntries>
</urlset>

Now you need to let Google know where to find your sitemap. Open up your web browser and enter http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= + the URL-encoded location of your sitemap.

That’s it! You can use your Google account to keep track of your pings or multiple sites.

Google announces sitemaps, ping beacon

Google today unveiled , a way for webmasters to let Google know about the files on their site as they are published. Webmasters can create a XML file describing the files available on their site and ping Google or simply ping with the location of a RSS or Atom file with each update. You can sign in to your Google account to add and track sitemaps.

Update: User-Agent seems to be new: “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” coming from 66.249.66.1.

Movable Type 3.17 released

Six Apart just released version 3.17 of Movable Type, a minor bug fix upgrade. From the changelog:

  • Nofollow plugin version 1.2 fixes “a bug in the nofollow plugin which causes HTML sanitization of everything within an <MTPings> block.” Finally! The nofollow code is licensed under The Artistic License if anyone wants to tweak and rerelease.
  • mt-db2sql.cgi now has better handling of subcategories.

I like the availability of a changed files document to save me time.

Anil Dash in New York Times wearing a goatse shirt

Anil goatse

Anil Dash appears in the Thursday, June 2, edition of The New York Times posing in the Six Apart offices wearing a goatse t-shirt. I think it’s in bad taste to appear in a national publication in your employer’s offices while wearing apparel promoting pornography but that’s just me. (via Boing Boing)

eBay acquires Shopping.com for $620 million

eBay has agreed to acquire shopping comparison site Shopping.com for $21 a share in cash, or about $620 million. Shopping.com just went public in October. Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, told the Wall Street Journal eBay became interested in the comparison shopping sector after they noticed sellers listing on both shopping comparison sites and eBay.

I am not sure this acquisition will cause other players such as Yahoo! or Google to acquire a shopping comparison site such as PriceGrabber or NexTag. Epinions was not mentioned in the press release but I am sure eBay would like to provide more reviews and general product research for its customers before purchase.

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