where code and culture converge
Update: Post pulled for inaccuracy. Sorry about that! When it comes to stats I’m still learning. Thanks to Louis for setting me straight. However, FeedCompare is still a useful utility that you should check out.
I was re-reading yesterday’s post about RSS Reset and, since I included the live FeedBurner counters in my post, I noticed that many of them seemed slightly higher. I decided to drop them in to FeedCompare and see the trending. …
It’s common knowledge in the blogging industry that updating more frequently will net you more viewers and feed subscribers than writing fewer, perhaps higher-quality posts. Today, I wanted to address this topic and see if it is actually true.
About a week ago, Corvida and I kicked off a plan that is now known as RSS Reset. In my original post, I said I would check back periodically and let you know how I was doing. And here we are!
In the first followup post, I listed the 40-odd subscriptions I felt could survive the cut (and that I was still interested in following). I’m not going to re-list all of them here, but let’s touch on the changes:
Yesterday afternoon, I sat down with the goal of creating my first FeedBurner FeedFlare. I wasn’t sure just how hard it would be, so I was ready for a grind. As it turns out, creating a working FeedFlare was not that difficult.
Just joined FriendFeed? Want to know some dirty secrets you can exploit to gain you popularity, followers and perhaps a bit of fame (or at least infamy)? If so, I have some tips for you! Keep reading and I’ll make you a master of the craft in no time.
A few days ago (May 30th) I got my usual twice-monthly Microsoft Technet Flash newsletter. Usually I just skim and toss, not finding that much of interest. But in this one I found not one, but three interesting links! It sort of jolted me, in a way.. I really didn’t think Microsoft was doing anything really breakthrough in the social media space, I mean Live Spaces has been covered to death, and let’s not even bring up MSN.
The big social app news from them is a social bookmarking service cleverly called TechNet Social Bookmarks. Currently a preview (beta?), and confusingly referred to in the FAQ as MSDN Social Bookmarks, it seems to be very similar to del.icio.us. Although they only support Internet Explorer explicitly, they say that other browsers will work if they support javascript.
They support bookmarking in the form of a javascript bookmarklet. They have specific support for Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it has been my experience that most bookmarklets written for Firefox also work in Safari.
I am guessing that this is one of Microsoft’s first pushes to open MSDN to a wider social networking community. How do I know? They happen to have published an introductory video as well, linked below.
In the video, Microsoft Evangelist John Barton gives some details about this new direction and also gives two links to the Social Bookmarks application:
Except for the color of the banner and the default homepage link, I’m not seeing a huge difference in these two URLs, and in fact my login works in both and my avatar appears the same. So, I’m guessing that your private bookmarks will work in either and it’s mostly differentiated by what public bookmarks appear.
Also in the newsletter were links to a couple of updated applications:
To be honest, the first time I found Autoruns, it was not from a Microsoft site. So I was a little surprised to see that it came out of the MSDN labs. In my eyes, that just gives it a big dose of legitimacy and trustworthiness that I hadn’t afforded it before!
And in fact, with a little more research, I learned that Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft in 2006! How did I miss that!
I already have news about the little RSS reset project that I kicked off earlier today!
Corvida has made her move over at ReadWriteWeb. Hopefully we will get some more enterprising souls to give the project a go.
Caleb Elston, the creator of Toluu, has been a strong supporter of this move. He has decided to join us and should announcing this on his blog! Welcome, Caleb! Be sure to check out his FriendFeed Room if you need help or have questions.
Also, he has hooked me up with a bunch of invites to Toluu. So if you want to experience it for yourself, please email me at phil(at)scribkin.com and I’ll shoot one off to you. See you there!
Although not exactly in the same category as above, my post was featured on TechMeme! At this point, it’s no longer front-page news, but that’s ok because I took a screenshot.
More after the break…
Tonight, I was chatting with Corvida, and the topic of RSS feed overflow came up. We were both frustrated because there was so much new (potentially great) content being produced every day, that we couldn’t keep up!
A radical new plan was hatched that we both agreed to abide by, starting today. We would dump all our RSS feeds out of Google Reader and only add new feeds based on a set of rules:
This plan will be in effect for 1 month. We will be dumping our current profiles on Toluu and will make sure it stays in sync with our new OPMLs.
In addition, I will make sure any feed I add gets sent as a tweet from Toluu and I will try to re-visit my feed list week during the month and explain any additions or changes.
I am completely open to suggestions for small, quality site feeds inside or outside the realm of social media as well as links to any google reader shared items feeds!
I’m looking forward to this excitement, both because it hopefully will make my RSS feed reading more manageable, but also because I am adding a huge social filter in to the mix. I am expecting the best reads to be more visible, while still keeping an eye on the little guy.
It was with complete surprise that I learned tonight that this blog was chosen to be the very first on WinExtra’s new series, the Sunday Blog Review!
I was looking forward to seeing the review, as Steven Hodson had promoted the series earlier in the day. I just happened to be on FriendFeed when it picked up Steven’s tweet about the new article:
Of course, I replied immediately in utter disbelief, and rushed over to check out the article.
Overall, I am completely flattered and honored that Steven chose my site to be reviewed. This attention really helps reinforce my resolve to continue writing solid, helpful posts and news into the future. And with that resolve comes a new awareness of networking.
While each of our blogs may be an island, its important to remember that when reading something interesting or useful, link it up if you write about that subject later. It will add depth to your article and raise awareness for the other site.
I’ve never done a stats update, and I haven’t refined my tools at all, so this post will be a little rough. First, let’s start with the good news: For the first time, scribkin has over 100 feed readers!
Earlier this week in my FriendFeed article, I mentioned an aspiring developer and statistician named Yuvi Panda, or The StatBot. In the last couple of days, he has been playing with the FriendFeed API and has come up with an interesting stat: the FriendFeed Compatibility Index.
Essentially, this algorithm looks at the articles that a certain person has liked (currently the the latest 300 liked articles), then keeps a list of all the other people that liked the same articles. The people who have the highest number of the same articles liked are at the top of the list!
Simple, but also revealing! Take a look at my list:
As you can see, of 300 articles, Shey comes out on top with 66 similar likes. However, Shey also tops many other people’s lists — I am thinking Shey just loves to like stuff!
If you head over to Yuvi’s article, you can see more compatibility lists. Worth a read!
Update: I forgot to include some other conversations surrounding this type of stat. Felix has posted his own quick’n'dirty utility looking at the last 30 300 likes. Mark Trapp posted about it here, and Hutch posted here.
I know what you are thinking…
This is the 35th FriendFeed post I have read in the past week!
And you are absolutely correct.
FriendFeed has been a big news item for a while and especially recently as a result of Twitter downtime. Apparently, when (to use a crude metaphor) the heroin runs out, people start glumly looking at methadone, but not with any real sense of excitement. Sure, it takes the edge off, but it just isn’t the same.*
In any case, this post isn’t going to be comparing the two services at all. My goal with this post is to raise some questions I had about FriendFeed when I first started using it, and what I learned to address those questions.
So, on to the questions.
This is the elephant in the room. Why, indeed?
Ok, let me turn it around: Why use Twitter?
Because it is paradigm changing? The future of the internet?
Web 3.0?
The answer is the same: Why indeed?
So basically, I can’t answer this one for everybody. We all have a different reason for using Twitter. Similarly, everyone has a different reason for using FriendFeed.
From personal experience, my reasons for using both services have changed over time, and respectively my involvement in both have fluctuated.
Yuvi (also known as The Stat Bot) recently wrote a post grumbling about the fact that FriendFeed will not consolidate identical links from different sources, a major issue perceived by most who use the service.
Basically, it has a clever algorithm for consolidating all the posts on the same service within a certain small window (for example if you send a bunch of tweets you might get something like below.) But, if you bookmark the same article in 3 different services, it shows up three times in FriendFeed.
| Consolidated | Not Consolidated |
 |
 |
| shamelessly stolen from Yuvi |
I have to admit, this was a cause for quite a bit of consternation for me when I started using FriendFeed as well. But now I am not as worried about it. Not because it isn’t a problem, but because of a handy filtering feature FriendFeed has called hide.
See, what I wasn’t taking into account originally is that other people are smart enough to see what they want to see. In Twitter, you don’t have a choice.. you are either following someone or you aren’t. But in FriendFeed, you have a very flexible way of only seeing what you want to:
This means all the power is in the hands of the FriendFeed user. I should not need to care if I use 9 different social bookmarking services, because eventually my followers will notice that I bookmark everything to all of them, and filter out all but the one (or more) that they use.
And in fact, it could actually actually hurt me! If I consistently link up the same URL to the same 9 sites, my followers will learn that they aren’t missing anything by hiding the other services. If, on the other hand, I share one article to del.icio.us, another to tumblr, and a third in Pownce, my followers have to follow everything, and the moment I use more than one service to promote something.. what happens? Annoying redundancy!
This does indeed take some getting used to. The key thing to remember here is that the flow of new links and updates is not set it stone. It’s not like listing a directory or even watching tweets float past.
In FriendFeed, any entry that has a like or comment (that isn’t hidden) jumps to the top of the feed.
So there are actually two observations you can take away from this fact:
That question has a complex answer that has just gotten more complex with the advent of FriendFeed rooms. Before late last week, I could have given you some fairly simple instructions to make the most out of conversation-hunting in FriendFeed. Well heck, let’s start there anyway.
If you want to see who has liked/commented on your stuff, click on the me tab at the top of the window. That will show you everything you have posted. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way of showing just your entries with likes or comments. A very good question, and one that is still being answered. Rooms have just been added. Currently, I can give you what I know about them, but you will have to draw your own conclusion about their usefulness.
I’m going to wrap with some other useful FriendFeed tips:
 |
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh |
* I have never taken IV drugs but I have read Trainspotting. And I am sure that’s about as close to taking heroin as I want to get.
I was just reading an article from Louis Gray about how to use the very cool and capable FriendFeed bookmarklet.
That got me thinking about just how many bookmarklets I have gathered in the past couple of months, and what they all do. You can see them in the screenshot over there.
Ok, be careful clicking on these.. the bold text (in most cases) is the actual bookmarklet. Just drag them into your bookmark toolbar or a folder to use them:
.. and that’s just my set of social media bookmarklets. The reason I don’t have bookmarklets for certain things (like del.icio.us, Iterasi, StumbleUpon etc.) is because they primarily use browser addons. However, especially in the case of Iterasi, I would love to see a bookmarklet version.
If you are using FireFox (or, to a lesser extent Opera or IE), there is another group of bookmarklets that are really handy that you must check out. They are called web development bookmarklets and they can do magic with CSS.
I would call these essential if you do any sort of web development or are interested in CSS at all.
If you have any bookmarklets you find essential or really useful, please link them up in the comments! Especially a good Digg bookmarklet, for some reason it doesn’t seem to exist.
Image by Tom Raftery via FlickrToday I noticed an interesting new multi-browser plugin called Zemanta. Having both Firefox installed and a WordPress blog, I decided I would give it a spin and see what it could dig up for me with itself as the topic. So far, it found a nice screenshot and a few good related articles.
Plus, it scans the articles for words it can make link-able with anchor tags, which saves time. And it suggests tags too. Ok, that’s pretty cool.
It looks promising.
For me personally though, I use Windows Live Writer almost exclusively when creating content for my blog. Zemanta works through the browser and only activates when it notices you are on a write post page for WordPress, Blogger, etc. So, I don’t know how much I will use it. We’ll see.
Have you ever grumbled that a particular application you use doesn’t work the way you want it to, or doesn’t have a specific feature you want?
Sure you have. I have too. Everyone has. But what makes coders and developers different is that they usually hunker down and implement the feature or fix the code themselves. Especially in the world of open source, whining for a new feature will just get you, at most, a derisive comment. You are expected to pull your own weight, get the ball rolling, and then people will join in to your effort.
That said, this post is going to be an unabashed whine for an essential tile that is missing in this blizzard of puzzle pieces called social media. And that piece I will call the universal receptor protocol.
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