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. …
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:
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.
Louis Gray has a great write-up on different A-list blogger’s takes on the thorny issue of comment systems that work in tandem with RSS feeds to allow commenting outside of the blogs the articles were originally written on.
One of the more frequently mentioned suggestions for avid Google Reader users is the addition of comments to the service, so RSS readers could respond to blog posts, either directly from the reader and back to the originating blog, or within the Google Reader community itself, in effect, becoming a social network. But while Google Reader has not yet enabled comments, other services are, and it seems the excitement of adding this capability is hardly universal – and its opponents have gone so far as to call it “outrageous” or “theft”.
- louisgray.com: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?: Silicon Valley Blog
Personally, I believe that a large part of what makes social media exciting is being able to contribute to the conversation. And increasingly as I develop this site, and interact with other bloggers and find new sites, it becomes more and more onerous for me to have to register myself with every new blog, leave my comment, and then wander off, perhaps never to return.
Sometimes I agree to have replies emailed to me, and then I can’t figure out how to turn them off again. Other times I read the other comments but I don’t know who anyone is, because often the comments are anonymous, or they only put in a first name and no URL
As a little background, I come from using LiveJournal for many years. I know, I know. Ugh, LJ. And you are right — It’s a closed system with a lot of fluff and drama. But what is really cool about it is that 95% of the comments you get on your entries are from other LJ bloggers. You can go visit their blogs. You can meet new people. In a way, they got the community thing right.. but then they walled it off, and now there are people who have a HUGE following in LiveJournal who can’t break out because their readership might not follow them.
When I recently discovered Disqus, I felt a breath of home, hokey as it may sound. Suddenly, here was a plug-in system that immediately gives me back that community. Better yet, I can bring my community in to the world of RSS using gReader or other tools! It’s like using StumbleUpon but somehow better because it has an API and works with WordPress and Tumblr and other services!
Anyway, go read the article linked up there. Get the rest of the story. I’m going to go check out Shyftr.
Update: Not in love with Shyftr. I’ll keep poking at it, but I can tell you one thing right now — no keyboard accelerators. For me, this is essential. Page Up/Page Down and mouse clicks don’t make for a great feed reading experience.
A good review of Flock 1.1 on this site, including some functionality that I overlooked:
Version 1.1 really shines in its enhancements to the MyWorld page, including the Friend Activity Feed. Once you’ve logged into all your social networking services, you can drag and drop messages from one friend to another. For example, if Sally makes a good restaurant suggestion via Twitter, I can drag that message to John’s Twitter icon in my sidebar and he’ll receive a link to view Sally’s message. If a particularly interesting picture comes across my Flickr feed, I can drag it over to a contact on Facebook, and he’ll receive a notification to view the image.
- Linux.com :: Flock 1.1 offers nectar for social butterflies
I found this video on YouTube when doing a Google search for (ok, I admit it) my own social bookmarking article. Enjoy!
In fact, I just discovered that the group that did the video above has a whole bunch of useful videos, which you can find at their site, The CommonCraft Show.