As I May Think...

Getting attention....

[Updated 29-May-2005, 4:20pm EST]

I found this in a PubSub feed and enjoyed reading it... Apparently, Ken Dyck of Waterloo, Ontario recently came across a Windows bug and couldn't figure out the proper procedures to report it. So, he did the obvious. He used the "mention them and they will come" method by simply posting the bug report to his blog:

I finally decided to report the bug here instead of Microsoft's award-winning support site, in the hopes that some clueful Windows Update developer with a PubSub feed might happen by it and spend two minutes fixing it. Are you that developer? Please fix it. [Link]

Robert Scoble of Microsoft confirms that folk at Microsoft saw Ken's message and were discussing it internally. He says, in part:

"blogs are changing how customers talk with us and thanks to PubSub and other blog search engines we can watch for customers having troubles.[Link]"

Expanded Blogosphere Statistics and Atom Feeds of data available

We've expanded the statistics that we provide on the PubSub LinkCounts pages. Now, you can find graphs of:

• Number of New entries seen each day
• Number of OutLinks seen each day
• Number of sites with OutLinks each day
• Number of feeds with updates on each day
• A variety of other bits of data.

Also, we now provide detailed information on individual sites (InLinks, OutLinks and New Entries) via our SiteStats pages. For instance, you can find the numbers for this blog here. In addition, we publish Atom feeds with the data for each site we track. You can find the atom feed for this blog here. To get the statistics for your site, or any other, just go to the SiteStats page and key in the URL of the site. (Note: If you see any apparent inaccuracies in the data, please send mail to linkcounts@pubsub.com )

As always, data collected by PubSub comes only from sites that publish RSS or Atom feeds. We do not "screen-scrape" sites or blogs that don't publish feeds and thus collect no data on them.

bob wyman

Microsoft to support Atom!

Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee/insider very familiar with Microsoft's plans for syndication, declares in comments on his blog "we are supporting Atom in any aggregator we produce." Microsoft's example in supporting Atom should be followed by all other aggregator developers in the future and Microsoft should be commended for supporting the adoption of openly defined standards for syndication.

Given that virtually every aggregator in use today and virtually every blog hosting and syndication platform (expect except MSN Spaces) already supports both RSS and Atom, it is clear that the heyday for the historical RSS format has passed. RSS is a historical format, Atom represents the future. We don't need two formats -- or twenty... We should consolidate on that format which incorporates the most learning and experience with the syndication problem. That format is Atom V1.0.

Technorati.com joins PubSub and BlogPulse in the "10+ million Club"

As I predicted in my recent posting, it appears that Technorati has crossed the line and is now claiming to monitor over 10 million blogs. Before today, only Blogpulse and PubSub could claim that they were monitoring more than 10 million. So, to all the folk at Technorati, I'd like to say: Welcome to the Club! Let's hope other folk join us soon!

In the future, as a result of the growing acceptance of the FeedMesh, we'll find that it won't be nearly as hard for new and existing blog monitoring or search services to know about just as much data as the rest of us do. FeedMesh establishes a system that will allow us all to "share and share-alike" information about the new blogs we discover and updates to existing blogs. The result will be that services will compete with each other by focusing on providing high quality services to our users -- not just by trying to have the largest number of feeds. i.e. We should be competing based on quality, not quantity...

bob wyman

10,000,000 blogs monitored

Blogpulse.com beat us to the 10 million mark a few days ago, but we finally crossed it ourselves at PubSub.com yesterday. As of this moment, we're monitoring 10,029,037 feeds of which we consider 5,418,993 to be "active." (I sure wish other services would break their numbers out to show "active" vs. "total" so that we can see how well we're doing...)

According to Mike Barnako, Technorati will be over the 10 million mark sometime this weekend. At this moment, they are only reporting 9,940,423 weblogs watched, however, that is close enough to 10 millon that they probably will make it soon.

If you look on our "LinkCounts" page, you'll be able to get a much more detailed breakdown of what we see in the stream of blog updates. Yesterday's summary numbers were:

• 295,966 sites created 919,384 new blog entries
• 1,346,557 outlinks were created to 167,907 other sites
• 106,478 sites (36% of those with new entries) created outlinks.
• 7,758 sites (3% of those with new entries) had both inlinks and outlinks.
• 309,338 syndication feeds had new entries.
• 5% of the 5,418,993 recently active feeds monitored by PubSub had new entries.
• 3% of the 10,029,037 feeds monitored by PubSub had new entries.

When the Gray Web meets up with Structured Blogging and Prospective Search...

Mary Hodder points out that charging $240/year per group is the least of the problems with MeetUp.com's new business model. The real long-term threat to MeetUp and other companies who rely on similar business models is Structured Blogging. The combination of search engines (both retrospective and prospective) with Structured Blogging will force many of today's web businesses to either adopt new business models or cease operations. At the same time, a tremendous number of opportunities for entirely new and innovative businesses will be created.

Structured Blogging is an almost trivially simple idea which delivers on the many promises made for the semantic web. But, unlike previous semantic web proposals which have been crushed under the weight of new and exotic technologies, Structured Blogging as proposed by PubSub is practical and relies only on existing, proven, and widely available methods. As a practical approach, not merely a vision, Structured Blogging has the capacity to be one of the most disruptive Internet technologies of the next few years.

Sites like MeetUp, eBay, Monster, EVDB, and hundreds of others have business and usage models that work only because they exploit a small number of temporary limitations of today's most commonly used web publishing and searching tools. When those limitations are eliminated through deployment of Structured Blogging capabilities in millions of syndication feeds, by enhancing search engines to handle structured data, and by broad deployment of prospective search, the very foundation upon which these businesses are constructed will disappear. Their market window will have closed...

AOL opens blogging to non-subscribers

The Blogosphere grows! We now have a new entrant in the "Free Blogging" space. MediaWeek and John Panzer of AOL report that AOL has opened their journals.aol.com blogging service to anyone who has an AIM account (just about everyone it seems...). To find out more, go to the AimBlogs page at: http://pc.channel.aol.com/aimblogs .

There are a number of really neat features in AOL's service that havent' gotten much notice in the past -- probably because it has been a closed service. One neat feature of the new service is that they have implemented a text search capability that lets you search across all the Aim Blogs. Another feature that I like is that I can update my AOL Journal from within the AIM client itself by sending messages to the AOLJournals bot. Also, you can use AOLByPhone to update your blog over the phone and you can set up AOLAlerts to send you a message whenever somone comments on your blog or when someone updates a blog you're reading (It's kind of like a private, limited version of PubSub integrated with AIM...)

RSS Ads done the wrong way!

We've recently received complaints about a large number of duplicate entries suddenly being published by PubSub. This has been a bit of a surprise because we normally get good marks on the effectiveness of our duplicate detection algorithms... On close inspection, it appears that the recent problems are being caused by DoubleClick ads which are being inserted in such a way that the duplicate detection code in our feed readers is tricked into thinking that the entries with DoubleClick ads are "updated" every time we read them.

The FeedBurner feed for the Industry Standard provides a good example of the problem. If you do "view source" on that feed, you'll see that each of the entries carries a link to the ad.doubleclick.com site and each link URL looks something like:

http:// ad. doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.idg.net.standard.rsstower/;
pos=skyscraper;tile=2;sz=160x600;ord=20050428170456

The problem is that the "ord" part of the url changes very frequently throughout the day... While I'm sure that someone at DoubleClick thinks that it is useful to have whatever intelligence is provided by the tracking data in the "ord" field, this is clearly a case of ad insertion done wrong... Let's hope this doesn't become accepted as "Industry Standard" practice!