gregword

I posted a comment over on TechCrunch that sums up a lot of what I’ve saying to people in person or on Twitter the past few weeks about FriendFeed. Several applications have, of late, risen to prominence that have taken the promise given to us by RSS and improved upon it. A few of those focus simply on taking the concept of content and flipping it around to being person-focused; instead of subscribing to a blog, I subscribe to a person. Examples include Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Other applications have gone one step further. They don’t (intially) offer you the ability to create content, but rather to collect (aggregate) your own content and make it discoverable via your identity (rather than a blog/brand). FriendFeed is the best example. This is RSS subscription, but you subscribe to a person, not a feed.

We have, right now, embraced the social applications idea. Blogs became just another form of media, not the personal avatar on the web, as Richard MacManus called them many years ago. The future is systems like Facebook and FriendFeed (Twitter, despite its obscene limitations on content, is building a powerful social network that could destroy FriendFeed in an instant if they chose to move in that direction).

It’s a final recognition that the web is made of people, not content.

I like Alex Iskold’s article over on Read/Write Web entitled There’s No Money in the Long Tail of the Blogosphere.  I said the same thing once upon a time, a while back, but apparently it wasn’t on any of my blogs, so I can’t find it.  But, yes, the only money to be made from the “long tail” is if you’re aggregating it (or as Alex puts it, “on” the tail, and not “in” the tail).

That being said, I still think there’s opportunities to make money not in the long tail, per se, but as a niche content provider.  I guess if you’re making enough money to live off of (which certainly wouldn’t apply to 90+% of bloggers), you’re not really long tail, but the nature of the web is such that you can aggregate a global audience on a niche topic due to the distribution being next to nothing in cost.

Perhaps we should focus less on long tail economics, which are really just aggregation/network models, and promote the idea of niche content.  Could be another book/slogan/conference series in the making…

After only a few months, this blog is back up and running.  Upgraded Wordpress, which was only slightly agonizing.

I joined Twitter a while back, but never really picked up using it. I’d been using my Facebook Status in much the same way. I’m picking up twittering again, as I realized that, had I been using it, it would have helped me today.

I was in DC for the Sun Tech Day; I spent about 1.5 hours in a hands-on session that was supposed to teach me how to use Ajax with Java Server Faces. In actuality, I spent about one hour installing NetBeans and various other NetBeans add ons (all of which I am now uninstalling), and then about 30 minutes trying to resolve a ClassNotFoundException. After grabbing a quick lunch, I walked around DC a little.

Now, if I’d had my twitter working, it would have been much easier to alert a bunch of people I would be in DC, that I was leaving the Sun event, and looking for something to do. As it is, I haven’t been using twitter, so I couldn’t. So this afternoon’s activity is to get back on twitter and get some friends.

Here I am on twitter. Follow me.

There really needs to be some kind of meta social network; something that I put all my accounts and friends into so that when I start using a new service, I can somehow import friends/contacts/etc. from my existing accounts. This would be a great feature for just about any social network/app to integrate, as it offloads the whole “import your contacts” process onto a third party that will likely have broader reach that your individaul app anyhow.

Ross is the man; I’ve been loving his weekly posts summarizing the weekly goings-on of the DC tech community. Now he’s taken it one step further: DC Tech Events Weekly, a site dedicated to summarizing the next 7 days of what’s happening in DC tech stuff. Simply awesome.

And check this, Ross goes into a bit more detail on the inner-workings of DC Tech Events:

In January I posted about an idea I called the “Editorial Calendar Aggregator“, but I hadn’t really connected it to any particular task I needed such a tool to accomplish….Things started to fall into place after I set up a database and a thin web interface to edit events with. Now I find myself almost there– The system currently pulls in event data from 21 different groups automatically, and I can annotate the events that come in as I see fit. I want to support a few more calendar formats, add an approval queue (so I can subscribe to more general event streams, like searches from Upcoming.org and Eventful, without accepting every event), and publish in one or more forms of output that are actually reusable, but none of those things are much of a leap from what I have now.

In stark contrast to Quantcast, which, when you add their tracking code to your site, gives you more information about your site, Alexa, well, doesn’t. I added their traffic rank widget to a podcast site of mine, which gets around 100 unique visitors a day. We were at around a 2 million rank before adding the widget. For a while, we went up a bit, then plummeted down to the 5 million range…and then we disappeared. Now all I get from Alex is “No Data” and a suggestion to add their widget to my site…which, of course, I had already done. Ugh.

In checking out the other sponsors for Thursday’s TECH Cocktail DC, I was introduced to Wine Library TV. I’m not a huge wine drinker (I’m more of a scotch guy), but I find myself very intrigued by the show, which is done extremely well; the host, Gary Vaynerchuck, shows great enthusiasm and really makes a topic I wouldn’t normally be interested in compelling. There’s even a whole episode devoted to kosher wines!

And today I noticed that Cork’d, a niche social network for wine-lovers, was acquired by Wine Library TV. The combination of original content, user-generated content, social networking and, most importantly, high-end products that cater to high-income demographics, seems like a good combination. I’d bet that something like this would work for scotch, cigars, maybe even beer (putting aside the issues with selling this stuff online, which can be tricky). It’s nice to see a business model that doesn’t rely on advertising.

I’ve signed Blogdigger up for Quantcast, an Alexa-like service that offers the option of directly contributing stats to their system via a Javascript tracker. Before adding their bits-o-Javascript to a few of our pages, we were languishing in the rankings around the 50K mark; after a few days we’re up in the 15Ks (although the monthly visitors and other stats haven’t visibly updated as of yet), and I suspect we’ll go a bit higher before all is said and done. I’m not sure how much the ranking will mean (as most other sites aren’t using their code directly), but at least it gives a better picture of monthly visitors and some basic demographic information that can be useful.

Dana notes a decrease in the quality of Google’s searches; I’ve noticed many of the same things, and have tried to switch to Ask or Yahoo; I even tried MSN.

In the end I came back to Google; the main reason: Google is just so much faster than the others. It sounds dumb, but it makes a big difference.

A few weeks back I was meandering around the Baltimore Craigslist gigs board and came across a posting for a Ruby on Rails position for “a newly funded startup in the Audio/Video Podcasting Arena,” which piqued my interest. The ad states that the startup “will be acquiring a very large presence in the Audio Podcasting space,” and many of the details seemed to point to Odeo, so I was suspicious that Odeo had found a new home. After reading today’s announcement of Odeo’s sale to SonicMountain, it was confirmed.

As for the future plans for Odeo, the ad mentions:

We are going to be enhancing the site with video podcasting and podcast hosting features as well as a patent-pending search system for audio, video and podcast content. The search development is being performed by a company under a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and we have used offshore development for the video conversion engine (.mp3, .mp4, .mov, etc) into Flash (.flv), a custom flash player and the CC billing module for hosting and the podcast hosting / management engine.

Sounds interesting; I think there’s definitely room for a more complete solution for podcast hosting and metrics; I currently use a combination of Ourmedia.org, FeedBurner, Podtrac and Performancing Metrics; if there were a way to tie some or all of that together, it would be very interesting.

And very interesting to me is that the contact listed on the ad is based in Baltimore; the question is: Is Odeo coming to Maryland?

Meanwhile, Odeo itself has been stagnating for a while; I use their podcast player widget for a podcast I do with my wife, and despite my best efforts (pinging, etc.), Odeo hasn’t updated in about two months. Hopefully the new owners can revive the site.