Last week, literally out of the blue, I got an email from Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb. He said that the blog had an opening for a news blogger, and would I be interested? Say no more, I replied. I am just a bit more than slightly interested.

In fact, I was thrilled.

So, after setting some timetables and learning the ropes, I can finally announce that I am RWW’s newest daily news blogger! I will be providing the tech and new media communities updates every weekday afternoon. In fact, I’ve already begun, you can already check out my very first RWW post here. We slipped it in Sunday night as a sort of test.

That’s not all the good news, however.

Apparently, though a series of what I can only believe to be fortuitous coincidences, I managed to score a press pass to South by Southwest Interactive this year! Oh my yes, I’ll be there representing RWW!

It took me a while to pick my jaw off the floor when the team revealed this news to me, as you may imagine.

Now before you start wondering if I somehow deposed a more capable, seasoned writer.. as far as I know, I didn’t. It happened to be the case where due to prior commitments (and perhaps the fact that I live near Austin) it was available. But I’m not looking this gift horse in the mouth! I’m just going to try my hardest to prove that their gamble with me pays off for everyone concerned.

So that’s my news. I honestly don’t know how it is going to affect my posting frequency here and other blogs that I write for, such as Louis Gray’s site yet. Time will tell. But please do follow me over on RWW as often as you can, and know that I am certainly open to post ideas, suggestions and recommendations.

This weekend Twitter has been more reliable than Identi.ca. Steve Gillmor ‘dented a threat about returning to Twitter. And Dave Winer tweeted that he was thinking of mirroring his tweets to Identi.ca.

During the conventions, and up to and including this weekend, Identi.ca has found out what Twitter already knows: the Jabber chat protocol “firehose” can be a wild stallion, even for a site that is an “increasingly quiet echo chamber”. It’s the same feature that brought the Fail Whale at Twitter during the primaries in May. It is now disabled at Twitter but for approved vendors such as FriendFeed and Gnip.

[ ... ]

I was at CNET in San Francisco last Friday with Evan Prodromou and representatives from Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Disqus and Seesmic. Evan mentioned that there could be millions of MicroBlogging networks in a few years.

There was a 58% drop in unique visitors to Identi.ca, that’s the only service where anyone can take their friends and the site’s software and make their home base wherever they want to. That probably affects the site’s traffic numbers.

I implemented the very same openmicroblogging protocol myself this summer. The 0.1 version of my Identi.ca-compatible software, OpenMicroBlogger, has been downloaded about 700 times in 3 weeks.

– Brian

Originally posted as a comment by brianjesse on louisgray.com using Disqus.

Silona and the Unicorn

They say write about what you know, and since I’ve been spending hours of my time on FriendFeed, I am starting to know it fairly well.

The Apology

Therefore, I am sorry that I’m contributing to the growing pool of I had this great conversation on FriendFeed and it inspired me to write this post-type posts, but this is going to be one.

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Last week, Toluu rolled out some big features.  Today, we are seeing a couple of more subtle but no less welcome improvements to our favorite feed subscription-matching service.

First up, Caleb reports via the Toluu Blog, that the feed-matching page has undergone some refinement, adding three selectable filters.  The new filters let you choose a time window for best matches, adding this month and this week to the matching algorithm.

Finally, in-line contact management as been implemented pretty much everywhere.  What this means is wherever you see another user, whether it be on your contacts list, matches, or a feed’s subscribers, you can now add or remove them from your contact list right there.  No more needing to go to a special page!

These tweaks will improve an already unique and useful (and free) service even further.  As always, you can ask for a Toluu invite here in a comment, in an email to me (phil@scribkin.com) or from Caleb at Toluu (.com .. get it?)

I was burning some time online a few days ago, and I came across this discussion on FriendFeed about last.fm versus Pandora.  In the thread, this was my contribution:

.. last.fm and Pandora are both great but, like Twitter and FriendFeed, have completely different goals. Pandora works behind the scenes to tailor a stream to you. last.fm throws everything together in a huge pot and gives you the sliders to make a great listening experience. They call this "scrobbling" (actually, the AS in LAST stand for "Audio Scrobbler") .. anyway, like a stew, the more stuff you put in it the better it is. Add a bunch of people, hook up last.fm to your itunes, go nuts!

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That is probably the punniest headline I’ve written to date.  Sorry for the groan.

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