Tuesday, July 15, 2003

The Blog Explosion I need to find a chart of weblog growth... I was just over at Technorati and noticed the "weblogs watched" count went over 400,000 today (it's at exactly 400,091 right now). It was only March 5 when the 100,000 mark was passed. At this rate, there will be more than 6 million blogs by the end of the year. [VentureBlog] ...expect a hockey stick when AOL Journals rolls out. 9:35:52 PM

RSS Killed the Infoglut Star Here's the same meme again... RSS Killed the Infoglut Star Quote:"When I started using an RSS newsreader daily, some remarkable things happened that I didn't necessarily expect: I began to spend almost no time surfing to keep up with current technology information, and I was suddenly able to manage a large body of incoming information with incredible efficiency." Comment: I've had the same experience...more information, dealt with more quickly. Slowing the pace of information isn't a solution to our current information overload...finding new and innovative ways to deal with overload is....which is the basic point I made here. RSS is a great example. [elearnspace blog] 9:34:52 PM

CNN on RSS and news aggregators This meme, about weblogs reducing time and increasing reach, is quickly spreading... Christine Boese writes an overview of news aggregators as a new way to read weblogs and news sites. "Less wasted time and more efficient surfing might appeal to folks dealing with harassing pop-up windows and masses of spam. It helps to balance the signal-to-noise ratio back in our favor." [Ranchero] Now if we could just drop the term surfing... which do you prefer, aggregating or harvesting? 9:30:52 PM

the aggregator protocol The Fuzzyblog makes an interesting suggestion: Now if I was making an aggregator, I'd want to make it easy for people to subscribe to RSS feeds.  Really I would.  Now take a look at the Feedster seach results page and you'll see that even we're trying.  The three aggregator specific links on the right allow you to click on a Feedster RSS feed and subscribe to it in any supported aggregator.  So what's a supported aggregator you ask?  Well its any aggregator that exposes a web interface for subscriptions.  There are two ways to do this -- ports and protocols.  The port mechanism means that the aggregator runs a tiny little http server on a port and uses that for subscriptions.  Radio and AmphetaDesk both do this.  Of course they both use different ports.  Sigh.  The other mechanism, protocols, is what Kevin Burton did with NewsMonster which uses NewsMonster:// links.  Now what I'd recommend to aggregator vendors is that they standardize on an aggregator:// protocol so that other tools which produce RSS can easily embed that into applications.  I'd gladly add a generic Aggregator button to Feedster in a heartbeat so that this could work with any tool that handles the aggregator:// protocol.  BloggerJack will gladly support it! Others have pointed out that many aggregators can auto-discover an RSS feed from a website URL. But not all websites support this, and many people still want to click on something specific to get a subscription. Couldn't hurt to have both a protocol and auto-discovery. 9:20:43 PM

The market for micro-content managers Anil Dash wants a good micro-content manager, and is willing to pay serious bucks for it! I'd pay $500 for a Google-branded microcontent management platform based on the Mozilla core if it were scriptable, stable, and integrated API-neutral blogging and aggregation tools. Or I'd pay $150 annually. So, Google, are you guys game for taking your position as a platform vendor seriously? [Anil Dash] 9:18:36 PM