Pocketed 03/21/2008
Posted in 
TechCrunch (View Site) by Michael Arrington - 03/20/2008
I enjoy watching how a midnight rant has generated countless people-hours of feedback and analysis.
What’s my secret master plan around developing our business? The secret is I tend to speak plainly and I already said exactly what I wanted to say. I believe bloggers should be careful about raising too much money and thereby killing opportunities to work with others. I believe the politics of linking is at times distasteful, but necessary for any blog to thrive (that is something I’ll write more about later). And I believe the rollup of big blogs is about to begin.
Are we thinking about how all this affects our business and making plans of our own? Sure we are. Are others helping us think through this? Of course they are. Was any of the speculation about our exact plans, based on “sources close to the situation” accurate?
Mostly, not. One thing that’s pretty easy to do, once you know how rumors are circulated, is throw off others trying to figure out what you are up to. The truth is far less entertaining that people have imagined.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Pocketed 03/20/2008
Posted in 
ParisLemon (View Site) - 03/20/2008
By now everyone has probably read
Mike Arrington's piece/rant on blogs raising money, the inevitable rise of blogging networks and the politics associated with such things. I'm not going to say much on it, but I do have a few thoughts as someone who has made the jump from a personal blog to one of the larger blogs. This is of course my own perspective and in no way indicates how others I work with at VentureBeat feel.
I think Arrington makes some great points, namely on the blurring line between blogging and business as well as the politics of linking. That said, I'm not sure the end game here has to be a massive "dream teaming" of blogs into super networks. I completely understand why that makes sense, but I also thinks it runs somewhat against the principals of blogging. That, of course, leads to another debate,
which Frederic mentions, as to what is blogging vs. what is more traditional journalism -- something which I am getting to know more and more about.
When I was writing the majority of my thoughts here, at ParisLemon, some other writers and myself did have this whole B-list group thing going on
as Louis Gray mentions. But it was never anything formal, and there were certainly no rules on linking to one another or anything like that. We all just sort of gravitated around the same stories and it was interesting to see one another's perspectives on things.
I think that is the innocent side of all of this. Perhaps Arrington is right that if we all were to get larger and more money was involved, it would have gotten political and things may have potentially grown sour between some of us - it's probably naive to think that wouldn't have happened in some regards despite the fact that a lot of that stuff is awfully petty and really distracts from interesting conversations. Still, when it is your livelihood, it is your livelihood.
Exactly why we need a
Bitchmeme.
Pocketed 03/20/2008
Posted in 
The Last Podcast (View Site) by Frederic - 03/17/2008
Reddit just started embedding items from ‘custom reddits‘ into its homepage. Before, a user had to explicitly navigate to a separate page to see the items posted to the different custom reddits the user had subscribed to.
From the reddit blog:
We updated the front page today to normalize each link’s hotness to the other links within the same reddit. What this means is that you will start seeing more content on your front page from smaller reddits. We did this to give the smaller reddits that you are subscribed to a fair chance of getting displayed. If a particular link is very hot within its own reddit, it will now be very hot on your front page as well.
This is great news for those of us involved in posting to and moderating their own reddits, such as the Elite Tech Reddit founded by MG Siegler and co-moderated by Steven Hodson, Louis Gray, Mark Hopkins, Tony Hung, Jason Kaneshiro, and myself. The ‘l33t’ reddit now boasts about 1250 subscribers and is growing rapidly - even more so since the changes on the frontpage.
The reddit community has also reacted very positively to this change so far.
Technorati tags:
reddit,
l33t
Pocketed 03/20/2008
Posted in SheGeeks (View Site) by Corvida - 03/14/2008
There have been quite a few tweets, discussions, and blog posts about the influx of FriendFeed friend requests and subscriptions, not to mention a host of new users joining the service. Most have asked why now? Well look no further than our very own A-list, awesomesauce, Silicon Valley blogger, Louis Gray.
On Wednesday, Louis Gray posted an awesome, though subjective, list of ‘Elite’ bloggers that are on FriendFeed. It’s now one of the hottest lists circulating the web! Since then, a few additions have been made to the list, but overall it still maintains its charm. And most who are on his list have received a lot of FriendFeed community love!
So now you know how to thank (or blame), though I’d suggest you read between the lines in this particular situation. Some things happen for a reason ;) .
Pocketed 03/20/2008
Posted in mathewingram.com/work (View Site) by Mathew - 03/15/2008
I was going to title this post “Duncan Riley: Lessons in how to be an asshole,” but then I thought that would bring me down to the same level as Duncan, and I really don’t want to do that. I suppose it wouldn’t be a weekend without a Techmeme bitchfest (or what Frederic of The Last Podcast calls a “bitchmeme”), but the one Duncan started is really over the top. Despite the fact that I’m all relaxed from being in Florida for the past two weeks, I feel compelled to comment.
Disagreeing about the value of a Web app is hardly anything new — it happens all the time, and it’s largely a good thing, even if sometimes people get their knickers in a twist over a perceived slight. Differences of opinion can be instructive. But Duncan’s response to Louis Gray’s post about FriendFeed is in a whole different category. If Louis lobbed a hand grenade at Duncan with his post, the TechCrunch writer unleashed what amounts to a fleet of Apache attack helicopters in retaliation.
In fact, Louis lobbed what amounts to a wet squib, by questioning Duncan’s review of FriendFeed with a single phrase: “quasi-analytic.” Duncan then responds by calling Louis a nobody, and calls him a “pious, self-important c*nt.” Not satisfied with that, he goes on to tell his Twitter friends that he “truly held back” because he “only dropped the c word once,” and that Louis is an “uppity, self-important wanker.”
I know that many Aussies pride themselves on their ability to start (and in many cases finish) a scrap with just about anyone, and it could be that using words like c*nt constitute an intellectual argument in Duncan-land — but I think Louis deserves an apology. Either Duncan is so desperate for traffic to his blog that he descended to such depths deliberately, or he’s the kind of person who prefers ad hominem attacks to rational argument. In either case, I think it’s pretty pathetic.
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Pocketed prior to date tracking.
Posted in 
louisgray.com (View Site) by louisgray - 03/05/2008
In the world of online RSS feed readers, there are the most popular options, like
Google Reader,
BlogLines and
NewsGator, and just below the radar, there lies a group of new entrants to the market, who are looking to change the game through more interactive features - using innovation to potentially gain ground on the big brand names. One interesting entrant is
Shyftr, which combines the ease of an online feed reader with the ability to find friends, make shared comments on feed items, and see which are the most popular feeds.
Most popular feeds, and how many have them "Shyfted".In early beta now, Shyftr has only a few dozen users, and isn't yet overloaded with tech heads, showing a good mix of sports fans, offbeat news and a smattering of gadget lust. What it lacks so far in a thriving user community, it makes up for in potential, echoing some of the pleas I made almost a year ago in
10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader, when I first asked for the ability to aggregate user statistics, and mirrors some of the work
AssetBar has done in this space, through offering comments to RSS items, and shared comments that can be viewed by all the service's users, along with displaying the most frequently commented items or most popularly subscribed feeds.
Shyftr in action, reading posts in line, with feeds on the left.Dave Stanley, the founder of Shyftr, came up with his concept for the site about a year and a half ago. As he wrote me in an e-mail last month, he wanted to see what feeds his friends were reading, "and have the ability to quickly add a feed of interest to the list of feeds that I read - a social rss reader." But six months after his idea didn't come to pass from anywhere else, he set out on his own, and with a small team, Dave has seen the service develop to where it is today, offering to give users a single place to read all feeds, share with friends, and discover new sites.
As
I stated in December, "Reading one's RSS feeds today is a journey of isolation." Shyftr now breaks through that isolation booth, letting you add friends, make comments on their profiles, or even suggest feeds directly from Shyftr. In fact, Dave, now the proud father of a 5-month old daughter,
saw my wife and I are expecting twins, and suggested I check out the feed for
Babygadget. We'll see about that, but I liked his thinking. From within Shyftr, I too can suggest any subscribed feed to any friend.
The best way to get feeds into Shyftr is to export an OPML file from whatever feed reader you're using now, and copy/paste the best ones in one at a time, for now, or add sites' RSS feeds as you run into them. They're working on full OPML import, but it's not yet here, something I forgot more than once. :-)
When you've added a feed, clicking on the feed name with new items displays the items in line, with all new items from a specific feed in the viewing pane, much like AssetBar or Google Reader. If others have seen an item before you, it will show you're viewing from archive, and if you make a comment, future Shyftrs will see your note, as you would theirs if you weren't first to the game. Most frequently commented items rise to the top of Shyftr's "Popular" page, and if you find somebody who often comments on sites you read, you can add them as a friend, or view their own profile to see their friends or what feeds they read.
Interestingly, you can even choose to read the feeds your friends have added to Shyftr. All of them. As I had added Dave as a friend, I can walk through the blogs he has subscribed to, see which sports teams he is following, or catch up on his gossip sites. This is a feature called "Their Feeds". Clicking back to "My Feeds" takes me back to those I've added.
Shyftr also is very public about recent activity, displaying the most recent blogs added, or "Shyfted", and the most recent comments. The site also keeps a running tab on the most frequently subscribed feeds, which so far is led by CNN and the New York Times. And like AssetBar, Shyftr wants you to not feel overwhelmed by RSS feeds as they rack up. Offering more options than just a "read all" or "mark all as read", Shyftr lets you mark all items read that are older than a certain point, letting you reduce your feed glut down to a smaller time period. AssetBar said this makes you
not a liar. Shyftr makes no claims to your morality, but it is a tidy way to clean up.
Choosing to mark some items makes sense if you're behind.Can Shyftr gain traction in what's obviously becoming a crowded market? Sure, assuming more people know about their service, find the shared comment streams and popular items compelling. Given the site seems a bit overweighted, thus far, with sports fans, and not enough with the
Twitter pushing,
TechMeme worshipping digerati, there's significant room for growth from those who have been actively calling out for a more interactive way to consume the news and RSS. As the site grows, adding new features, like OPML importing, improved feed searches and additional social features, it could carve out a space for itself.
Feel free to join in.
Shyftr is open for business now. No sign-up codes, and no waiting.
You can find me at the ID of "louisgray".
Dave
ashton
thattalldude
Randi
Matt
suggs