Remember the stories about YouTube being banned in various countries around the world? One of the most interesting cases was in Thailand, where after a long period when the Thai government blocked its citizens from accessing YouTube, the government lifted the block this week. It cited Google's willingness to censor videos that insulted Thai royalty, though I believe Google had said it was willing to block this content months ago. Now tonight it's reported that the Thai government has turned its attention to Veoh and Metacafe, two other video hosting sites. See Global Voices and the Committee to Protect Bloggers for reports.

How much more evidence do we need that when you cave to authoritarian demands, authority just makes more. What an awful precedent to set. I know that people more knowledgeable about Thailand assure critics that the Thai people themselves really do revere their king and want this censorship to be carried out, but since values are probably always arbitrary in the end, I reserve the right for mine to oppose such censorship anyway.

Allowing governments to silence unpopular voices is a bad idea for lots of reasons, not the least of which is this: people suffering at the hands of power must be supported in their efforts to contest that power, even if a large, other group of people would prefer that suffering to go on in silence.

See also the "self-discipline" pact signed by Yahoo and MSN in China this week, promising to report personal information on bloggers to the Chinese government on demand.

This stuff drives me nuts. What can we do about it? I'm try to do what I can to support the newly resurrected Committee to Protect Bloggers. Subscribe to their RSS feed, check out the "safer blogging" guides they link to and help spread the word. Everybody knows that injustices are less likely to occur the more light that's shined on them.

You can also help expand the reach of voices online outside of the dominant groups allready being heard from. Check out what my friend Beth is doing right now - she's in SE Asia training people to train others in video blogging. That's awesome. If you can do things like that, that's great - for the rest of us, we can support people like Beth.

The internet holds far too much potential for social change to let it go dark in some of the parts of the world where it's needed the most. Everyone, everywhere who seeks freedom using new media deserves our support and no one deserves the threat of imprisonment for challenging power online.

I've been so busy with day job and consulting work that I haven't been able to post here for some time but thought I'd cross post this write-up on the fantastic Blogher conference I just returned from in Chicago. It was so much fun! I got to meet a number of web pals face to face for the first time, including the super cool PR guy Jeremy Pepper. Jeremy, who's been to every Blogher since the conferences began, says of the Blogher scene - "You won't find a better community where stuff actually gets done."

I got to go to the 3rd annual Blogher conference on women bloggers in Chicago this weekend and it was awesome. Though this was the first time I was able to go, I'm told that year after year the conference doubles in attendance. I can see why - it was well worth the trip.

For my contribution to the discussions that went on there, I thought I'd post a few things here. To the right you can see I've built a very simple Blogher channel in SplashCast. I used the Blogher logo at a channel preview image, then put in two shows - one the most recent videos on YouTube tagged Blogher and the second the same tag on Flickr.

Some of the things I've been thinking about since returning home yesterday:

* Different rock stars. I was surprised that the session on blogging more efficiently was not packed with attendees despite being put on by Gina Trapani of Lifehacker and Barb Dybwad of AOL's Engadget and Joystiq. As Liz Henry pointed out to me on Twitter, though, the Blogher community has a different set of rock stars than the tech blogging community I'm most familiar with. Confessions of a Pioneer Woman gets more comments per post than any blog I've ever seen - and I'd never heard of it before! Did you know that Elise Bauer's Simply Recipes has over 232,000 (!) subscribers by RSS and email? Mommy bloggers have another community altogether still.

* Blog atmosphere. One classic dilemma on any web site that allows visitor comments is whether some comments should be deleted because they are offensive. People who feel they should not tend to think it's the most obvious thing in the world but I heard someone express another perspective at Blogher better than I had ever heard it expressed before. When you allow comments that are read as oppressive by people of color, women and others to remain on your blog it requires members of those communities to prepare themselves emotionally for a hostile environment before participating in conversation. That's not something I want to ask of people who are already outside the dominant power paradigm- so I'm going to make it a practice to delete comments like that if and when they appear on posts I write anywhere.

Though that opinion was expressed well at Blogher, there was hardly consensus around it. For example, I heard a number of women say things that I personally thought quite oppressive - from "retard" and "ching chong" jokes to shutting down question askers with "you just don't get it" arrogance. In other words, it was hardly one big perfect PC-fest.

* Powerful women. Blogher co-founder Lisa Stone is a great interviewer, keynoter Elizabeth Edwards was better though at answering her questions than she was at being interesting in response to audience questions. Hopefully the interview will be posted in video online so you can see one way to do a great interview. After hearing people talk all weekend about how much smarter Elizabeth is than her Presidential candidate husband John Edwards, I'm sure I wasn't the only one in the large audience that was grinding my teeth a bit every time she said "well, my husband's position is this..." It's not fun to listen to anyone use a phrase like that more than once or twice in a conversation.

* Blogher seemed very well sponsored. GM, Dove, Yahoo! and Google were all major sponsors. Butterball (yuck) sponsored the food sessions (food blogging is huge) and even PayPerPost was there. One of the recurring themes of the sessions, though, was the need for financial support in underrepresented online communities, women bloggers outside the US in particular. Perhaps they already have, but I think it would be nice to see some of these sponsorships come in the form of donations to international organizations in Blogher's name.

* Social media production. Blogher is not just a yearly conference, it's also a great place to read womens' blog posts throughout the year and an ad network for blogs all around the web. Judging from the photos and videos uploaded quickly to the web tagged Blogher, one outside organization has done a particularly good job of producing media content arround the conference. Check out the player above and you'll find a whole bunch of interviews with speakers from the conference produced by an organization called The Experience Project. Experience Project is a privacy-centric social networking service and anyone who is searching for Blogher video on YouTube in the days after the event will now be exposed to their company and their approach to engaging with related issues. It appears they are collaborating with podcast network Podtech. Way to go Experience Project!

Blogher was a great conference to go to and something I will do my best to go to next year. So many tech related conferences are completely imbalanced with 90% or more male attendees and speakers. It was fantastic to be at an event that was split the other way. Conversations were very friendly, the content was broader in concerns addressed than at many tech conferences and there were any number of psycho-social ways this conference was different that I as a man won't even try to describe. It was great and I highly recommend attending next year's conference to anyone able to do so.

I really appreciate those of you who are subscribed to this blog's RSS feed.  As part of my recent, albeit aesthetically challenged, redesign of the site - I've started to run a new section of links along the right hand sidebar.  Those are links to the most interesting things I've found online throughout the day that I want to share with readers.  I've been doing a good job keeping that content fresh, something I waited to make sure I could do before blogging about it here. My motivation really has been a desire to share these off-site resources with others.

I've put together a new RSS feed that you can subscribe to, one that combines this blog's feed with those links I want to share.  Here's the URL:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarshallsBlogAndSharedItems

Of course my existing feed will still be available, delivering only my full blog posts from here.  I think many of you may enjoy some other quick links, though.

For those of you who want to subscribe to a daily email digest, for now I'll put a form for that in this post.

How did I splice these two RSS feeds together?  I used FeedDigest, one of my favorite tools and a service I gladly pay for every month.  I combined my blog's feeds and my shared items feed (a tag I'm using in Del.icio.us in FeedDigest, then took that new feed and ran it through FeedBurner.  

I think my next step will be to combine my SplashCast video favorites into the same super feed.

MovableType, from SixApart, is one of the oldest blogging platforms on the market but last night the MT team released a new version that's worth taking note of. It sounds like they are taking a very smart approach; learning from best of breed related apps (many of which they also own) and developing towards where users appear to be headed. (skip to the meat of this post)

SixApart's Anil Dash pinged me yesterday and said that the basics are this: MT 4.0 will go open source in Q3 and it will incorporate lessons learned from other SA products - the media handling and templates of Vox, the publishing control of Typepad, the scalability and OpenID support of LiveJournal. That sounds very intriguing to me; I'll be checking out MT the next time I set up any website and recommend that others look at it as well, in addition to WordPress. I hope it's easier to install and customize. Let's be honest, that project logo above doesn't evoke the kinds of smooth user experience that it ought to. There is a WP to MT importing tool available, that's good news.

Here's the press release for the announcement and here 's Duncan Riley's coverage on TechCrunch. Richard MacManus, at the MT powered ReadWrite Web blog, has a typically thoughtful write up as well.

MT says it currently powers sites for organizations ranging from "the Washington Post to the Huffington Post, from General Motors to Nissan Motors, Boeing to BoingBoing, Intel to Instapundit." None of those are particularly elegant sites, but they aren't messing around either.

If MT can nail the uptime issue that plagues WP on some high traffic sites then that alone will lead some people to switch.

Will MT remain a financially viable product if liscences are free and its pro level support that's monetized? Sounds like a very good plan to me. Blogging platforms are essentially commodities now, there are enough of them that no matter how good they are few people will pay much for the software itself anymore. Support, on the other hand, will probably always be the kind of value-added service that can serve a vendor well. It will be interested to see if SixApart is undercut in support pricing for an open sourced MovableType. I'd love to see numbers on how this is same type of enterprise plan is going for WordPress.

We'll see how the open sourcing goes, there is such a strong open source developer community built up around WordPress that MT will probably take some time to build up a signifigant one themselves. One caveat here is that there's also a strong community building up around Drupal, which bears some resemblance to MT but is arguably not much fun to use. I won't claim any expertise regarding the open source community (see my friend Dawn's take on this from that perspective) but I wouldn't be surprised if some number of people are excited to get their hands on the code developed by the pros at SixApart for not just MT but also Vox, Typepad and LiveJournal - some of which will now be integrated into MT and thus presumably open sourced as well.

One of the things that the company learned from Typepad is that people like widgets. It's obvious from WP and Drupal that people also like full-scale plug-ins. MT 4.0 will come with a library of plug-ins and 15 preselected profiles with thematic collections of plug-ins pre-installed. That sounds very smart; we'll see if it's truly useful and wether different types of organizations truly want and need different collections of plug-ins.

Two-way OpenID support will now be a part of MovableType. That's great news. SixApart's LiveJournal was one of the earliest players in OpenID and for readers and writers of large, MT powered blogs to be able to offer OpenID login for authors and commenters is another big step for this important movement. OpenID support is a real bear to install in WordPress if you're unfamiliar with working on the command line level - hopefully MT implementation will be much simpler. Ease of installation for semi-technical users in general is a big question I have about this new version, it would be great if SixApart worked with web hosts to offer one-click install like many do of WordPress.

Media handling ala Vox will hopefully be improved upon as its ported into MT - that was the one thing I was a little critical of in the release of Vox. Vox is a great blogging product in terms of privacy, aesthetics and social networking functionality, but its much vaunted media handling feels strange to me. Media items are oddly sequestered on blogs instead of being integrated gracefully. That's the way it seemed to me last time I looked, at least.

The ability to easily modify the look and feel of the admin dashboard sounds interesting to me and the MT appears to offer much more sophisticated reporting and analytics than other comperable products on the market. It's also got a reputation for being more complicated and less flexible - we'll see if that's still the case.

I will definitely check out the new MovableType when the opportunity and need arise - but I'll remain cautiously optimistic about this old-school software's ability to update itself and become as elegant as users today prefer.

My new pal Baratunde asked on Twitter last week for info, examples or anecdotes about companies using new online social media for marketing. I thought I should type up some thoughts about what we've done at SplashCast so far because I think we've done a particularly good job of it. I thought I'd post it here in hopes that others would find it useful as well. It's rough around the edges but I thought not posting it would be a lost opportunity.

If you haven't checked out SplashCast yet, you can see just one example of its many capabilities in the podcast player on my sidebar here.

SplashCast's Use of Social Media for Marketing

SplashCast has hired two experienced social media producers, myself and Alex Williams [that's Alex on the right], founder of the Podcast Hotel series of podcasting industry conferences. One of our big responsibilities is what I call in-house content production to engage with existing social media communities.

I write blog posts that are accompanied by channels of mixed media content compiled using our company's product. Alex publishes interviews from events using SplashCast.

My primary media production activity at SplashCast is similar to what I've done when working for content companies (TechCrunch, AOL Social Software Weblog, NetSquared and others). I try to break news, publish mixed media content related to existing online discussions and otherwise add value to the media landscape for readers interested in the emerging online video market. The goals of this work are to drive traffic the SplashCast website, demonstrate the potential of our publishing tool and ultimately to encourage people to sign up as SplashCast publishers themselves. Plus it's a whole lot of fun for me.

The primary ways that we work to build readership for our blog are these:

*Daily blogging, not only about company news but interesting industry news as well. Some of our posts have been deemed interesting enough
to receive thousands of visitors from StumbleUpon, for example.
*Sending trackbacks to other blogs, where our posts that are related to theirs are linked for their readers to discover.
*Leaving thoughtful, value-ad-focused comments in response to posts on other blogs, where our names are linked to the SplashCast site added in the URL field of the comment form.
*Putting relevant bloggers at the center of our strategy for company and new product release PR. That strategy lead to more than 250 blog mentions within 48 hours of our launch, for example.
*Attending events and building relationships with other social media producers, who will think of us later when writing about related subject matter.
*We also use Twitter to stay abreast of what other people are doing and keep friends up to date on what we're doing at SplashCast.
*Engegement with and inclusion in relevant topical aggregators. This is a big part of what we do. For example, a Google search of Techmeme.com for SplashCastMedia brings back 1,400 results and we've now made 15 appearances on the front page of Digg. Both easier said than done, but both great sources of traffic and lead generation.

All of these steps could have been done well or poorly, but because we have two experienced social media producers in house we believe we can effectively communicate in such a way that our commercial message is more implied than it is overbearing. (For another perspective on appropriate marketing communication in new media, see this very smart post written by Jeremy Pepper.)

The high level themes of our work, I believe are the following:

*We find creative ways to participate in conversations of general interest. In particular, we let people publish aggregated collections of mixed media, so we watch the news and see what would be interesting to publish collections like this about. When the DoD banned social media sites from official networks, we published a channel of videos and photos tagged Iraq in YouTube and Photobucket, for example.

*Timeliness has been important - we work hard to cover news as early in the news cycle as possible. That's a whole other topic that requires its own strategy.

*Helping people do their own work better. This is becoming cliche in the web 2.0 world, but it bears repeating. Our posts on things you can do with mixed media RSS, ways you can tag videos and how you can build a successful website around aggregated media were all big hits.

*Finding the balance between marketing and conversation. It's no secret that the SplashCast blog is trying to convince people to use our product, so we don't hide that. We do however try to make our posts compelling enough to be interesting on their own merits, regarding general interest topics, whether you care to try SplashCast or not.

As a result of implementing this strategy before, during and after our initial launch, we had more than 1,000 publishers register for an account at launch, we doubled that in our first month to 2,000 and doubled it again in our second month to more than 4,000. SplashCast player loads are now aproaching 5.5 million.

As a social media service company, it also makes sense for us to do a lot of in house content production so that we know the application, its possibilities and performance issues, as best as possible. That said, I believe that any company can benefit greatly by adding social media participation and content production to the center of their marketing strategy. The use of social media has proven enormously helpful to SplashCast.

The roll of social media in a market sector in a relatively commoditized sector is something else that could use some further consideration.

I hope you'll stop by SplashCastMedia.com, see this work in action for yourself and create an account to publish your collections of mixed media. If you would like my help in coming up with a strategy like this for your company, drop me a line. I can be reached at marshall@marshallk.com

Update: This post was linked to by the BBC today, it's the second time I've had a pull quote linked on the Tech section and I always get the most hillariously hostile comments! This one's my favorite from this thread: "Blogging is like wearing a coat that says I am Billy No Mates." Is that adorable or what? Much nicer than the really crude stuff I got last time. Keep up the good work BBC readers!

I was honestly woken up last week by the fear that I would stop blogging because Twitter is so much more compelling. The desktop tool Twitterific even more so. That's not entirely the case, but I have been Twittering many a tweet lately. I thought it was stupid when I first heard about this short messaging system but now I love it. I won't write an ode to twitter here, but just wanted to note my current affinity for very short form writing. Believe it or not, launching the blog editor page, coming up with a title, spell checking, chosing a category - is just more work than I want to do to share many short thoughts throughout the day.

I do want to write a long post here asap about media embargoes. I think they're fascinating and the one we've got at SplashCast on an announcement we're making tommorow morning has been an interesting experience to see unfold. So I'll post some thoughts about that here soon. Thanks for stopping by!

To follow up on my last post about how blogging may have benefitted the just acquired Hitwise, I left the comment below on a post at Gigaom today about the rapid growth of Scribd. (Om: "What we have heard from multiple and reliable sources that the company was offered $5 million on a post money valuation of $10 million, but passed on that offer. ")

What's Scribd? It's an embeddable document viewer, particularly for PDFs! How exciting is that? Actually, it can be pretty exciting. The company's leverage of social media, Digg specifically, is similar to but above and beyond what we're doing at SplashCast. This is really forward looking, paradigm changing stuff. Below is my comment on Om's post and an example of a Scribd embed in action.

One thing Scribd is doing is hitting the front page of Digg with incredible frequency. They are posting really timely, funny, crowd-pleasing PDF content (who knew such a thing existed??) and they are getting piles and piles of Digg. We at SplashCast are using a similar strategy - using content delivered through our service to participate appropriately in social media conversations - but while we're very proud of our 14 Digg front page appearances in the last 4 months, Scribd is the leading example of this tactic. They hit page one 9 times in one month and had more total diggs in that time period than all but 9 other domains on the web. (for stats see http://elfurl.com/qvabu )

Heck, we even provide similar functionality for PDFs, but online humor isn't my strong point and the people at Scribd are leveraging the heck out of it for big traffic and visibility. I'm sure this is only one of many factors, but the strategy does work - even for user acquisition. We've doubled month over month since launching and I'll bet Scribd is seeing really awesome growth in new users. It's awesome that some of that visibility is translating into potential financial support. It reminds me of the boost Hitwise can't help but have gotten from blogging (see http://elfurl.com/c486t ) To some degree, these are stories illustrating a new paradigm: vendors who participate in conversations can really benefit from it.

Megacorp Experian has acquired Australia based website traffic analysts Hitwise for $240 million, it was announced today.  That announcement really caught my eye because Hitwise has done an incredible job of using blogs and participating in social media to raise the company's profile.  I can only assume that this has helped it raise revenues and thus contributed to its acquisition.  What other traffic stats company puts out really interesting, timely data for free on a regular basis?  What other companies write blog posts that hit the peak of Techmeme?  What other traffic companies provide the fodder for thought provoking, informative posts on blogs like TechCrunch, Gigaom, Mashable and many, many more - on a regular basis?

Three cheers for these folks coming down off the "I see the traffic, now here's a quarterly press release" high-horse that their competitors are too often on.  Blogger Andy Beal writes similarly this morning. "All of those great charts that Hitwise so freely provide us," he quips, "have paid off big time for the web intelligence company."

A Google search of Techmeme for Hitwise has 2,400 results; only Comscore can come close to that among the major traffic analysts. (The little startup I work at has 3X the number of Techmeme appearances as traffic analyst leader NetRatings, for example.) [Update: The folks at Compete.com just emailed me to point out their extensive engagement in the blogosphere. Plus, I'll add, they advertise on blogs, which is very cool. I think their numbers are funky, but whatever, they are totally raising their profile by leveraging social media. We'll see if they can be as smart about it as Hitwise, though.] Outside numbers tracking is a crap-shoot game, no one really trusts anyone's methods all that much - so the best you can do is to be highly visible in a positive light.

Specifically, three cheers for  LeeAnn Prescott and Heather Hopkins - two women whose ability to see what the tech world is interested in and shape the conversation by providing pertinent data, thoughtfully presented early in the conversation.  Remember when you didn't give Photobucket a moment's thought?  Guess who posted numbers about their huge market share and got tech bloggers talking about them?   LeeAnn Prescott.  Who blogged about it when Bebo reportedly passed MySpace in traffic in the UK for the first time?  Heather Hopkins.   Blog posts like this have changed our understanding of the web 2.0 market.  

I'm sure the smart blogging strategies Hitwise employed were just some of many factors leading to the company's acquisition for $240 million, but I think company blogging and these bloggers in particular deserve some serious recognition.

Microsoft and AMD sent out a pile of very expensive (yet trashy looking) laptops to a number of bloggers over the past week. We were told we could keep them - now after a day of minor outrage by some people they are emailing us back with the following request that we not keep them after all! And to think, I almost smashed mine in the middle of the street 10 minutes into trying to use it! I did figure out some of the basics after awhile, but it's still nothing life changing. Ok, so obviously I'm being a bit snotty here and am in a position of ridiculous privilege to get one of these things for free - I just don't think it's anything to get your knickers in a twist about given the state of the world.

My point is: the PR backpedal here is just silly. The original email read" "you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can hold onto it for as long as you’d like." Now this follow up:

Marshall,

No good deed goes unpunished, right? You may have seen that other bloggers got review machines as well. Some of that coverage was not factual. As you write your review I just wanted to emphasize that this is a review pc. I strongly recommend you disclose that we sent you this machine for review, and I hope you give your honest opinions. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I’m going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews.

Thanks for your understanding, and happy reviewing,

Aaron ***

Ha ha ha - the snazzy laptop I got in the mail from Microsoft yesterday was the only way I was ever going to use Vista anyway. And I'm certainly never going to take a laptop with a stupid looking Ferrari logo on the front anywhere but home and my cube at work.

The computer itself doesn't retail for $2k plus for nothing - it's fast. Windows is so annoying and (to me, a Mac user) so counter-intuitive, that I'd never buy a Windows machine. My partner won't touch the thing. I'm going to set it up to look pretty, take incoming news as if it was the 2nd half of a super large monitor and work on my Mac. Not that I'm super happy with the crash-happy, Flash-hating Macbook I have either. (That said, Parallels is a great program for testing Windows only applications.) See also oops - no new podcasts caught by iTunes for a week.

Ultimately all these companies are probably a lot like cell phone providers. Which is the least ugly one in the room? I wouldn't chose at all if I didn't have to.

I can't believe they are telling me not to keep it now. What kind of blogosphere reaction were they expecting?

Yesterday was my last day at TechCrunch. It's been a good run but I'm excited to get back into consulting for non profit organizations and startup businesses. This is a post about how I did my research while writing for TechCrunch, written in the belief that the more valuable information a person shares the more likely they are to be hired to share even more information as a consultant.

I may also try to continue writing professionally, I haven't decided yet. Michael Arrington and I parted ways on very good terms. If you enjoyed my writing at TechCrunch, watch this space for more that's similar but definitely not the same. If you are a loyal reader of this blog from before my time at TechCrunch, I hope you'll enjoy my return to writing things similar to what I wrote before.

One of the things I'm most excited about regarding this transition is that the research methods I used to train people in are no longer a trade secret. Those tactics, specifically ways to use RSS, were what got me the job at TechCrunch and were a big part of my everyday work flow there. Though many of the stories I wrote came from press releases and TechCrunch contacts, I live in Portland, Oregon (not San Francisco) and had to come up with the vast majority of my stories on my own.

The following is a description of my feed reading methodology. It's how I break stories, if not in the first place then into the larger blogosphere. It's a work flow that I believe can be applied in almost any sector. I'm looking forward to helping a variety of people learn to use these tools so they can be put to use for more than just bloggers blogging about the blogosphere. This is a big picture of what I know now and I know that a week from now I'll have more to offer. I haven't included any discussion about small things like filtering feeds, scraping feeds or using RSS and email together but there's a lot more that can be done with RSS for research than I feel like writing about this morning. My plan for consulting is to offer customized training in the use of these tools, other related practices and whatever else I learn about in the future.

How To Read Feeds & Rock the Blogosphere

RSS feeds make it possible to consume far more information at a faster pace than would otherwise be possible for the human brain. That said, many people experience a new level of information overload once they begin reading feeds. Here's an overview of how I read thousands of RSS feeds without breaking a sweat.

Using a Startpage

I've recently added the use of a startpage or single page aggregator to my workflow to compliment my regular feed reading. I've drug the link to OriginalSignal and now PageFlakes onto my toolbar and I give it a click a couple of times an hour. It provides a quick and easy way to see if my competitors have written anything new since the last time I looked. Almost anything can be read by RSS feed, so you can display almost anything on a startpage. These services fulfill a very specific function for a person working on the web - they provide a one click view of updates from various sources, inside the browser and distinct from the more heavy duty environment of a feed reader.

Organizing a Feed Reader

I use Newsgator's desktop feed reader for Macs, NetNewsWire, to subscribe to RSS feeds. It's the fastest and most reliable RSS reading tool I've found yet. It's nice to be able to read my feeds when I'm not online, too.

I am subscribed to thousands of RSS feeds and currently have thousands of unread items in my feed reader - that suits me just fine. The secret is to organize those feeds so that the most important information is easy to access. I have several folders that include feeds from the blogs of companies I wrote about at TechCrunch, news search feeds for those companies and other high priority topics. I refresh and check those folders frequently throughout the day. I keep everything else in low priority folders that I only check if I find the time. That way I end up reading 100% of what's most important and probably 10% of what's unimportant enough to miss.

Finding the right feeds is a whole topic in and of itself that I'll save for another time, but I will say that it is very helpful to subscribe to feeds without a moment's hesitation. As long as they are well organized, even a list of feeds that you almost never read will be more likely to catch your attention that something didn't subscribe to in the first place. I also subscribe to a lot of news, blog and web searches that never have any results - but that I will want to see right away in the event that those searches do result in something.

High Priority Sources

The single most helpful tool for me in my efforts to blog about news events first has been an RSS to IM/SMS notification tool. I use Zaptxt to subscribe to very high priority feeds. It sends me an IM and SMS whenever a high-profile company blog is updated and in a number of other circomstances. There are quite a few services that offer this functionality now and it's invaluable. A big part of taking a prominent position in the blogosphere is writing first on a topic. That's a large part of what got me the job at TechCrunch and it's something that an increasing number of people are clearly trying to do.

In sectors where people are already using tools like the above, I expect further developments to emerge that differentiate writers' handling of the huge amount of information available. New tools and new practices. It's a very exciting time to be someone who works with information.

Those practices described above are relatively simple but they worked well for me to get and do my job at TechCrunch. In six months of writing the majority of the posts there, I helped the site grow from 75,000 subscribers to almost twice that number at its peak last Tuesday. Over the last six months the blog has gone from the 9th most linked to blog on the web to now the 6th most linked to.

Michael Arrington is a larger than life person that clearly deserves the vast majority of the credit for the success that blog has had in the 18 months it's been online, but I'm proud of my time there as well. I'm excited now to share what I've learned about working on the web and I hope you'll join me here on this blog for that conversation. Drop me a line if you're interested in doing some work together.