• This doesn’t just work with early adopters. Most services have you “add friends” by asking for your email password because that’s where most of the online world has most of its friends. It’s creepy though and a bad practice to do that. MyBlogLog can grab the “Friend of a Friend” (FOAF) data from your public profiles at services like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace – hardly a tiny set of bleeding edge users. Your application could consider doing the same. Think also about using the new GMail contacts API.
• There’s still no “add all” link. In what I assume was a silly oversight, there’s no link to “add all” when you pull up your friends from these networks. You have to add them one at a time. It would be nice to be able to select all and then deselect a few. That’s no small thing, it would make a big difference in growing the service and I assume they will fix that soon. As it is, the list of 20 friends at a time gets mixed up a bit like FriendFeed recommendations. Implementation of both are clunky though and could scale much better by presenting more options at once and displaying more information about users you are prompted to add as friends.
• Service discovery could be faster. MyBlogLog is “discovering friends” via the public profile pages you filled out in your MBL profile. That process presents you with a long list of services from around the web and asks you to fill in the part of profile URLs where your username goes. Everyone should check out how Lijit discovers new accounts from other sites. It asks you “what is your most common username” and then searches to see where it can find an account with that username. You then confirm or deny each one and can enter exceptions to your standard username on any particular service. It’s really smooth and smart. I wish MyBlogLog and everyone else did it that way.

Almost every service on the web wants to connect users with their friends elsewhere, for aggregate activity feed displays or “viral introductions.” There are some best practices emerging for doing that, though. Companies looking to implement such features should take a look at oAuth and at Niall Kennedy’s recent post on user authentication best practices. If you want to see something cool about MyBlogLog, I’d also recommend checking out the BlogJuice bookmarklet. You’ll like it, I promise.

Now I am hesitant to think about anything without the ability to “write it down” in a mind map. The ability to document the free flow of connected thoughts is just too seductive to pass up when thinking through complex proccesses.

I could use some help figuring out what the best mind mapping service is, though. Here’s my criteria so far – above in an image from MindMeister (which is AWESOME so far). Can you suggest anything I’m missing or favorite tools I should evaluate?

Imindi isn’t doing it for me yet. It’s an alpha level service that should be substantially improved when the team is able to make some updates, but for now I want to find something that works better for me. Imindi is cool because it’s going to be really social, it publishes RSS feeds, supports OpenID and includes Del.icio.us integration. The ability to embed a live map in an iframe is neat but it would be nice if it were a Flash widget that scaled or if I could scroll in this iframe (can’t figure that out). There’s a whole lot more that they are working on as well, the back end is striking, it’s largely the front end that’s not usable enough for me right now.

It doesn’t allow for data export, though. That’s a deal breaker. Navigation and color differentiation between levels and types of relationships is weak, I want some AJAX where there isn’t any yet, the pagination for nodes with more than 6 connections is annoying, etc. Also, just in order to make a more informed decision (and to make a blog post about it on Read/WriteWeb) I want to evaluate some other mind mapping tools. First stop, http://del.icio.us/popular/mindmap

If you’d like to make any suggestions for important criteria or mind mapping tools that might meet these criteria – I’ll follow up here on what I figure out.

I want to post here about some pitches I’ve gotten from PR people and I don’t need to look back further than 24 hours to find most of them that I want to use as examples. I look at probably 30 pitches a day, sometimes more.

I want to emphasize that some of my favorite people in this industry are PR people. I won’t say who they are here, but trust me – it’s true. Preamble taken care of, check out these pitches I got today and my thoughts on them. After a whole lot of complaining, I’ve framed things in the positive at the end of this post. These examples are just symbolic, a chance to discuss the issues.

Finally, the following lines of emotional abuse do NOT reflect the opinions of my employer. Richard just wants people to send tips to the tips@readwriteweb.com email – that’s his primary concern. Now let’s bring on those poor PR folks.

Ben White for BitePR, pitching Piczo and Keibi today

Subject line: Facebook Subpoenaed: How Two Companies are Making Social Networking Safer

Ben and I crossed paths almost a year ago when he was on his way out from working with a company that I was on my way into a working relationship with. Does he say hi when the email opens? Barely. It’s super templated, no personal check in – just straight to the pitch. Come on Ben, who are you even representing here between these two companies? I’m fine, how are you? It’s been a year, we haven’t talked. Whatever.

So what’s the value add here? Am I going to chase this story around that you clearly sent out to more bloggers than I can imagine – just because some random company is doing something marginally different than Facebook is? What am I a local beat reporter with no ambition just looking for the first semi-hip story that falls in my lap and hoping my editor doesn’t notice how many other people wrote about these two random companies? No.

If we had been communicating over the last year, Ben, and you had got me an intelligent quote about what these companies were doing the day or hour the Facebook suit was filed or settled then I might very well have incorporated it into coverage of that news.

Relatedness to Facebook does not constitute a news hook unless something is launching (is it?) or there’s some other time element to it. To be fair – I know that clients sometimes insist that non-news be pitched as news. That’s a shame, it doesn’t reflect well on anyone. It creates an antagonistic relationship between PR and bloggers if we have to watch out for you tricking us into thinking non-news is news.

Next pitch came from…
Joy Nestor OutCast Communications, pitching something from Salesforce this morning

Subject line: salesforce.com news – interested in a pre-brief?

OutCast drives me nuts for all kinds of reasons. They represented both Zimbra and Yahoo! before the former was acquired by the latter. They represented StumbleUpon before the eBay acquistion. I hear from them regularly and they are really tight lipped with information. There are PR people who at least admit that they have to be manipulative – OutCast doesn’t hire those people, apparently.

Anyway, today’s communication with Joy was actually some of the best I’ve ever had with an OutCast person. I appreciate being contacted about news from a huge enterprise vendor, though that isn’t my beat, if there’s something of interest to me about the announcement.

The problem was this. The pitch email said that Salesforce is announcing product news and would like to brief me under embargo. THEN it says that the news “focuses on” the next annual version of Salesforce. Do I care? Not really, unless there’s something really interesting in this year’s release that’s related to my area of interest.

So at this point I email back and say, yeah, send me the info under embargo – right? No, now I’m offered a number of dates that I can schedule a phone conversation with Salesforce representatives. I do NOT want to spend my precious time on the phone listening to an explanation of the newest version of this relatively complicated, enterprise software. I DO want an email with the high points in bullet points. I’ve got time to read that – and to write a long winded blog post complaining about their PR.

Even if this was right up my alley, here’s what I want. I want details first, preferably with pre-announcement access to the software if possible. Then I want a company representative who is capable of answering my questions to be easily available to me. I love it when all of that happens. If you send out a release with no embargo then I want as a blogger to be able to contact you by phone or IM at a moment’s notice to get answers to my questions. Other bloggers are going to regurgitate your press release in minutes, I want meat to write a real review with and I want it fast. If there is an embargo then just let me contact you on a reasonable time frame leading up to and shortly after that embargo.

To Joy’s credit, when I asked she said it was possible that I might be able to just get the info and skip the talk. We’ll see.

Christine Emerson Weber Shandwick, pitching for Transpera yesterday.

Transpera is going to announce a mobile content partnership with some big brands sometime soon. There was no mention of any embargo in the email but I’ll stop there. You probably don’t want to read about a mobile content partnership with some major brand, right? Me neither. Unless it is hot as hell. And it’s probably not.

If I’ve ever written about a mobile content partnership with a major brand I apologize. There’s lots of blogs that cover mobile news and while they tend to not have as much audience as general interest tech blogs – fact is that there are many industry sub-topics for which “big news” is NOT of general interest to people outside that niche.

Matt Tatham Hitwise

I asked the HitWise folks to include me in their press list more than a year ago and I’m really glad they did. They used to make such good blog posts, that added so much timely value to my tech reporting, that I monitored their blog’s RSS feed by SMS. I don’t anymore because it’s full of shopping crap.

Today Matt from Hitwise sent out some interesting Hitwise traffic numbers related to the Facebook Microsoft story. At 2:45 PM PST. What was I going to do with it then? The first round of stories on the topic hit the web by 9am PST today (Google, Microsoft fighting over Facebook investment) and the second round, announcing the Microsoft investment in Facebook, was covered by Read/WriteWeb at 1 PM PST – and we weren’t real quick to the punch on that one. Some traffic stats would have been nice for either of those stories (though I wrote neither, I’m just saying) but 2 hours later they are close to worthless. (Ok, to be fair, I saw by RSS that lots of people, like mainstream journalists, were covering this news hours and hours later.)

Beyond that, have you seen Techmeme today? It’s all Facebook. Is Hitwise on it? No. I don’t know why it couldn’t have been a blog post and email people with a link to it. When you put your announcement on a blog post, it increases the chances of inbound links and of RSS subscribers, otherwise known as mini-long-term-stakeholders in your messaging.

Margaret Clark SHIFT, pitching mystery client doing a thing with some stuff

I think I’ll let the following screenshots sum up this pitch. I am in awe of this one.

The Good News

I hope all these examples don’t just make your ears burn – there’s some advice hidden in here.

1. Keep in touch and remember where we know eachother from. If it turns out that I don’t like you that much, then keep it formal and focus on adding value to my workday.

2. Send me a backgrounder with details about your announcement as soon as I agree to embargo it, if you’ve got an embargo (which I think are fine, btw). Make yourself available to answer my questions by phone and IM on very little notice when time-to-write is near.

3. Pitch me on things that are relevant to me, offer me a b.s. free summary before your formal press release and be very clear about the time and time zone of the embargo. It’s good practice to include both my local time zone and GMT, just to be respectful of those outside the US and as a second point of reference. I presume you’re pitching European bloggers too.

4. Put it in a blog post, ad value to my blog post and let the link love fly. And if you’re trying to get in on other news coverage – get me that info before I write my blog post, if you can anticipate it. Otherwise I’m probably not going to be interested.

5. Avoid doing what Margaret whatsherface did above. (Update: Sorry to be so rude Margaret.)

6. One thing I haven’t mentioned here, if you’re a PR person – you know what I’d love? An OPML file of all your clients’ blogs. Heck, through in a news search feed for their names too. I’ll plop it right into my feed reader and you will win big points with me. That would just plain be very cool, would it not?

Ok, thanks for reading all this and good luck in everything you do.

The one thing I haven’t been able to get out of my head in the weeks that have passed since I tried the service out is how easy it was to get started with SquidWho. It’s simple, really – and I was kind of kidding about using the word unforgettable in the title of this post, but I really do keep thinking about it. It’s more like it’s unnoticeable for once!

Easy login is important because there are so many web applications launching every day that yours should be as pleasing to use as possible at every step or you’ll loose out on the use and advocacy of early adopters – at the very least.

Here’s how it works. After you create an account on SquidWho, to edit a page on the site for example, you are able to start making your edits immediately – before you click on the confirmation link sent to you by email. You are not able to save your edits until that confirmation link is clicked, but that’s ok. Once you switch over to your email tab or client and click on that link, SquidWho is loaded and you’re already logged in.

This might not sound remarkable unless you consider the far more typical scenario. Too often when you discover a new web application the following is true:

• You can’t do much of anything until you create an account.
• Once you create that account, you cannot proceed in using the application at all until you click on the confirmation link sent to your email.
• That email doesn’t always show up right away, sometimes you have to wait for several minutes or longer until you can use the app.
• Once you get the link, you click on it, the app is loaded, you’re told you’re confirmed and then sometimes you have to click on yet another link before you’re even prompted to login!

Compare all of that hullabaloo with the SquidWho flow: sign up, keep using it, then click confirmation link just before saving and SHA-POW! you’re logged in. Pure joy. Note that Squidoo proper doesn’t seem to work like this and isn’t perfect otherwise, but I like this part of the program a lot.

Want an even more seamless login experience? Try some OpenID well executed, perhaps with a little APML mixed in. The future will be smooth and painless – or at least logging into it will be!

One of the promises of the internet is to democratize access to both information and publishing. That democratization, in theory, makes voices outside of the halls of power more capable of changing the world than they would be otherwise. The jury is still out as to how real all of that is. There are lots of people and organizations giving it a try. Good deeds alone rarely pay the rent, though, and a relatively small number of people online want to watch often-depressing investigative journalism when there’s so much fun to be had in other media sectors.

Liz Gannes wrote a good article last week about the monetization challenges faced by Alive in Baghdad, a project she called “arguably the best-positioned citizen news video outfit in the world.” AiB is pursuing licensing deals with major media outlets but advertising doesn’t seem to be a very viable option for sustaining this fantastic project.

Who else is doing great investigative journalism in video on the web? I spent a fair chunk of time looking, and asking other people for their favorites. Here’s the best projects that I’ve found so far. Please leave more in comments so we can all be inspired.

Each of these shows illustrates a different model for financially sustaining investigative journalism: foundation support, viewer donation and licensing/advertising. There’s a lot of overlap between examples and models, but I think the differences will be clear if you give them a look. The final example is of a project that appears to be funded by a commercial video production business; that may be the best model in some circumstances.

I’ve placed the RSS feeds of the five shows below in a SplashCast channel that you can view here. Click on the “channel guide” button to switch between series, the thumbnails at the bottom of the player to switch episodes. If you’re a video (or audio) journalist or just want to share your favorite serialized media with visitors to your website – SplashCast is the ideal way to do it.

I hope you enjoy these selections.

Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a work of historic proportions. A daily show running an hour in length, DN is broadcast on over 500 radio and television, satellite and cable TV networks in North America. It’s also available as a video or audio podcast. It’s not exclusively, or even originally, an online project – but it’s so darned good I have to tell you about it. It’s the only media phenomena that’s made me cry more than once.

Each episode starts with a hard-hitting ten minute news round-up; the remainder of the hour is filled with world-class guests related to whatever is in the news that day. It’s incredible content.

Democracy Now, according to their Wikipedia entry, receives no money from corporate, government or Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants or funding. Founded in 1986, DN is filmed in New York City and is the flagship program of Berkley, California based Pacifica Radio. The show is funded entirely by foundations and viewer donations.

Alive in Baghdad

The aforementioned Alive in Baghdad, produced by Philadelphia based Small World News, publishes video footage made by paid Iraqi correspondents and others on the streets of Baghdad. That’s how I understand it, anyway. It’s a great way to see some perspectives that you don’t see in mainstream media and to say that it personalizes the people most impacted by US policy in Iraq is an understatement. (Check it out, it’s the second show in the channel displayed above.) It’s a great project that’s also the basis of the next selection on the list (Alive in Mexico) and plans to launch more outposts in the future.

If the Alive series can sustain itself, it will go down in history as one of the most important media efforts in the era of online media that’s emerging today. Small World News asks viewers for small one-time or monthly donations and occasionally licenses content. For more information about Alive’s monetization challenges, check out the link at the top of this post.

Alive in Mexico

The sister show of Alive in Baghdad, Alive in Mexico covers “everything from street battles in southern Mexico to Mexican culture and history.” “Tune in each week to learn something new about Mexico,” the website says. This too is great content, offering in-depth English language video about this very important but too-often ignored country. Mexico’s struggles are, in some ways, the world’s struggles and AiM is a great way to learn about them.

Talking Points Memo TV

Joshua Micha Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog is one of the leading liberal political blogs online. It’s now expanded into a small media empire – including Talking Points Memo TV, a show that TPM makes for video blog network of networks, Next New Networks. The group says it broke and pushed to center stage the Alberto Gonzales/U.S. Attorneys scandal.

How do they do it financially? Though monetizing a liberal political blog is not an easy thing to do, it’s probably easier than any of the above models. The video component specifically is paid for by Next New Networks. NNN has raised $8 million in venture capital. In order for a company like Next New Networks to pay a video show’s producer, I imagine, it will have to have a lot of potential to make a lot of money.

Collateral News

Collateral News is a well produced series produced by Philly based WoodShop Films. It appears they do commercial video production to support their investigative journalism. Or they do investigative journalism that borders on conspiracy theory to drive traffic to their commercial video production business. Just joking, that’s not very likely. In a world where there’s relatively little demand for investigative journalism in online video – there is HUGE demand for commercial video production for media and marketing companies (some of the kinds of clients WoodShop lists.) Though they aren’t puting out an hour a day with high faluting guests, like Democracy Now!, or paying correspondents in remote, war torn parts of the earth – for what they are doing Collateral News may have the most viable model for financial sustainability yet. Some of their politics (and pedantic attitudes) really irk me, but it does seem that they are doing a good job so far.

Honorable mentions

Journeyman Pictures describes itself as “London’s leading independent distributor of topical news features, documentaries and footage. We’re like a video encyclopedia of the world.” Embedding turned off from YouTube, though.

People of the Web is the new Yahoo! project from Kevin Sites, intrepid reporter hired to run the Hote Zone series. Both are good, and People of the Web is pretty good – but it’s a little more fluffy than investigative. Definitely worth a watch though, and I love the site design.

Hot Air with Michelle Malkin is a really well produced video series. I’m sure some of the reporting is good, and I tried to include one conservative source in this list – but the content is just too offensive to post live on this blog.

LinkTV is something I don’t really understand, but it looks good. I think it’s a satelite TV station that buys documentaries from independent producers. Some good stuff, anyway.

So those are some of the best investigative journalism video projects I’ve found online, what about you? If you’ve got favorites, leave them here in comments – or better yet, build a SplashCast channel to show off your favorites on your blog, Facebook or MySpace page.

Know of any more business models being explored for this work? Have any thoughts (or clarification) on the ones mentioned above. We could all use any information you’ve got, dear reader, because the world needs more critical media online.

To be fair, the site could have seen a huge influx of traffic, and thus real search queries, when the first bad news came out. It seems unlikely, though, that the 6 people who told me on Twitter that they also received emails from Rapleaf today were honestly searched-for in the past 2 days using this relatively obscure service. The company has also instituted some new email push features in the past week, though there’s no mention of search subjects getting emailed on the company blog (come on guys). (It may be that all it takes to get an email from Rapleaf is for someone else who has you in their email contacts to try out the service. Small but very bad move on the company’s part.)

If you’ve been following Facebook app development, for example, you know that the “when do I send a notification” question is one companies are wrestling with as much today as ever. Likewise, it’s hip to ask users for their email usernames and passwords today – though it’s not going to be the casual thing many companies are treating it as now for much longer. Emails are everywhere and many people are nervous. I don’t see any public response to any of these questions and criticism by Rapleaf. Update: A couple of days later, Rapleaf has made a very long, thoughtful and encouraging post to their blog. Check it out.

The ZDNet story about selling data was so stirring that more than 5 readers braved the noxious ZDNet commenting requirements to reply. You want to talk about selling user data? Why do you think all these ZDNet/CNet blogs ask so much information when they require you to register to comment? If not to sell that data, then to “verify” the demographics of their readers to advertisers – or at least the handful of readers who comply. This ZDNet story is in fact one of the most reactionary pieces of trash I’ve read in awhile. Consumer control over data portability is great (see this, for example), but that kind of backlash against data portability all-together is just anti-innovation.

So the company was criticized last week for selling user data – but not email addresses – to third party companies. This, in and of itself, doesn’t seem like a problem to me. I think that the monetization of aggregate, anonymous data is a powerful means of making money that I hope more companies will pursue in the future. Presuming, of course, that a legitimate marketplace emerges and there’s parties other than pure scumbag companies to do the buying (subjective, I know.)

Update: after reading more about how the company works, marketers in fact come to them with email addresses and Rapleaf and allied companies fill in details about the people behind those addresses for more effective targeting. Any marketing company that buys more ads targeting me and my friends on Twitter than on MySpace, instead of just sending bulk spam into my Gmail spambox – that’s a good step for a company to take, in my mind.

Data-mining can be a good thing. Twitter, for example, seems like a data-mining commodity just waiting to happen. If you’re familiar with the UMBC project Twitterment, for example, that’s a service I’d readily buy data from if it worked reliably. The serious problems experienced by all 3rd parties building on the Twitter API is another story, though, and one that threatens a pretty cool potential mini-economy imho. As someone who makes a living, in part, by being early in the news cycle – a system for putting a giant ear to the ground has value for me.

Nonetheless, data mining does have a bad name.

What do you do if you’re Rapleaf in this situation? You do not send out scores of emails telling registered (non)users that “someone has searched for you on Rapleaf” with a link to click through to your profile. No one believes it. As a service whose value proposition to users is verification and trust – this email story is another PR crisis following the last one. I’m sure they know that.

Here’s what I think they ought to do:

Institute OpenID login with a clear explanation that AIM screennames are sufficient and stop requiring people to register for a Rapleaf account in order to edit or delete their Rapleaf pages. (Good faith gesture towards the nerds and good policy.) Put a link on the top of every landing page from the emails sent out, linking to a post on the company’s blog. Post to the blog an apology for being over-eager in who to contact and when. Email addresses fly all over the web all day long, but reputable business don’t email those addresses unsolicited. Mea culpa. Then explain what Rapleaf does, why you have peoples’ email addresses and what the value of the service is. Draw an explicit analogy to eBay and to Google. Make it short, enable comments to that post and reply to the comments with more comments. Do an Ask.com blogsearch (nearly spam free) for Rapleaf and privacy, sort by popularity and get to work apologizing for spam with a link to the blog post.

That’s what they ought to do. Then they need to remake their reputation as the ultimate verification system and never abuse their access to emails again. Go ahead and keep selling the information that they are to marketers, they’ve created a unique tool to leverage data portability that I think is ok.

Good luck to us all in the stormy future that’s now!

AideRSS scores each post by the number of comments it received, number of times it’s been tagged in del.icio.us, inbound links from a number of blogsearch engines, etc. Thankfully, it scores those posts relative only to other posts in the same feed. So while a post on TechCrunch with 20 comments might score a 5 out of 10, for example, a post on Marshallk.com with 20 comments would score a 10 out of 10! Unfortunately, and this is a big dissapointment, AideRSS is just plain wrong far too often – reporting, for example, completely inacurate numbers for several posts in my feed. Come on AideRSS team, fix these problems. So it’s nothing to bet the bank on, but there’s some real potential here and as a rough guide it could still be useful today. I’ve contacted AideRSS to ask why they are getting things wrong as often as they are.

That’s all well and good, it’s a good way to see which of your posts are getting the most reader engagement (at least via these gestures being measured) and the widget that AideRSS provides is a neat way to highlight your most popular posts – but I know there’s a lot more that’s possible here.

Tonight I tried something unusual, at least it seemed that way to me. I plugged the RSS feed for items I’ve tagged “toread” in del.cio.us into AideRSS. It worked! It appears that the service figured out which were the hottest items in my feed. What a handy way to prioritize! I could grab scored RSS feed from AideRSS, including “good posts”, great posts or only the best posts. Here’s a widget displaying the best posts currently in my “toread” feed, according to AideRSS.

Isn’t that cool? Obviously it would be nice if users could define the number of characters and items displayed in that widget and the metrics used don’t capture anything personalized – but nonetheless, I think there’s some real potential here. (The numbers fetched aren’t always accurate, either – hopefully that will improve.)

Here’s an idea I thought of previously: say you’re looking to identify some of the top blogs in real estate. (Woo hoo!?) I would recommend starting at http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate and sorting from authority. There’s an export in OPML link there, which unfortunately will not give you anything other than the top 10 blogs in that category no matter what you try to do, but you can import that OPML into AideRSS. You can then see the hottest posts in each blog, in other words: you can get a feel for what that blog’s community of readers takes interest in. So Technorati+AideRSS = easy identification of the biggest interests of top niche bloggers’ reading communities. Sounds invaluable to me.

These are the kinds of ideas I help come up with and implement with my consulting clients; though we wouldn’t want to depend too much on a tool that’s as loosely accurate as AideRSS is today.

If this general idea is of interest to you, perhaps more for personal use than marketing purposes, see also Rogers Cadenhead’s recent post on APML – Attention Profiling Markup Language. I tagged it in my blog and shared items feed, which you might like to subscribe to.

Thanks for reading.

It’s not the full text search of blog posts that Technorati is really good for. Google Blogsearch is faster if you want to know if anyone has beat you to a story and Ask.com has much better spam control as it only indexes feeds that have a certain number of subscribers in Bloglines (hello, Google Reader and Blogsearch teams). Technorati has created a whole bunch of awesome experimental features, some of which worked and some of which didn’t. I don’t know how many of the people behind much of that innovation are still at the company but I hope things brighten up over there in the future.

What is Technorati good for? First, the Blog Index section of the site is very useful. Go to http://technorati.com/blogs/wtfeveryourelookingfor and you’ll find blogs that have been tagged as a whole, not on the level of a single post, by their own authors. Sort by “authority” (shudder) and you’ll see the ones with the most inbound links. I was talking to a potential client on the phone last week he asked “are there a lot of real estate blogs?” I knew anecdotally that there were, but quickly visiting http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate told me there were more than 12,000 in Technorati alone! The Blog Index makes it easy to see which, by one standard, are some of the top blogs in any niche. It’s not perfect but it’s a good start.

Unfortunately, OPML export of anything more than the first 10 results of these searches isn’t possible. That looks to me like broken functionality and as the company slashes staff I have to worry that there’s little hope of the best parts of the service being maintained or improved upon.

The second cool thing about Technorati is the company’s partnerships with outside traditional large publishers. Specifically, the kinds of relationships they’ve built like the one with the Washington Post. In some sections of the WaPo website, you can see blogs linking to that article displayed in a little box, curtosy of Technorati. If those are sorted a bit for spam and crap then that becomes great stuff. I know that Sphere is providing related functionality on some sites, but it’s not the same. The ins and outs of this sort of service deserve a big blog post in and of themselves.

Finally, the Technorati 100 is a good thing. I know there’s a whole lot of criticism of it and a lot of that is valid. I don’t like the word “authority” and I don’t like measuring authority by links – but linking does mean something and the fact that Technorati shows off a leader board of that metric is worthwhile. FeedBurner ought to too, if the group feels like separating out blogs from the other feeds they publish.

I know that Technorati has been painfully slow at times, the most recent site redesign is awful and the focus on inbound links is overdone – but it’s an important company that deserves support in my opinion.

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.

If you are in the mood for explanatory video you should make sure to check out this post: The Common Craft Show: A Case Study in Video Awesomeness. Fantastic videos introducing the concepts of RSS and wikis. Not to be missed.

Click To Play

• Adium (for Mac) and Trillian (for Windows): Muti-client IM software.
• Twitterific: a desktop application for Twitter
• URLTea: a very useful URL shortener
• Ustream.tv: Live streaming video
• memeorandum: a political discussion agregator
• SplashCast – the coolest of all, of course!

What tools should I share with Holly and the NTEN community next chance I get? I’m sure some of you out there have some suggestions. I’m thinking BlogRovr, which I would use all the time if I used Firefox instead of Safari, Google Gears, the new framework for taking GMail, Google Reader and other apps offline onto the desktop, and maybe NetNewsWire/FeedDemon. Do readers have other suggestions for cool tools for nonprofit folks to check out?

“Users who liked what you’ve cumulatively told me you like, also tend to like these other things.”  It’s a beautiful concept – I mean that I’ve been struck by the beauty of this concept across a number of sites for weeks.  Everyone knows that’s a big part of Amazon.com but it’s also what makes StumbleUpon what it is, too.  My favorite lately has been Pandora.

Recently I’ve heard people say things like “I worked on my Pandora ‘stations’ for months and I’m finally getting a really solid stream of music that I really, truly like.”  That kind of learning by a web service, starting from a point I designate and refining the trajectory based on thumbs up and thumbs down on subsequent movements, strikes me as fundamentally beautiful – especially when it’s music we’re talking about.  I far prefer Pandora’s interface over Last.fm’s, by the way.

The roll of cumulative recommendation versus other core systems of analysis at Last.fm or Pandora isn’t completely clear – but there seem to be two defining traits to both these sites and StumbleUpon:  The interface can be related to very simply (though more complex use is also an option.)  I get access to the fruits of my labor very quickly.

I used to use Furl.net for my social bookmarking – I miss it terribly, in fact.  Furl would look at my bookmarks and suggest not just other URLs, which were less interesting, but it would recommend other users with similar interests.  I could look at each of these and decide whether or not to subscribe to their bookmarks by email or RSS.  Back in the day I chose email; I still get those emails and the signal to noise ratio is stunning, it’s like a stream of pure gold.

It looks like MeFeedia offers something similar to this for video feed recommendations.  The fact that del.icio.us does not offer recommendations seems a huge lost opportunity to me, almost a crime of neglect against my data.  You know that companies that collect loads of my data are going to mine it for their benefit – I want to be able to do the same thing, at least on the simple level of getting recommendations relative to other users.

This post isn’t terribly coherent or carefully crafted as much as it is a series of thoughts on the subject, but no series of thoughts here would be complete without the following.  Service providers, give me access to my own damn data.  I do the work using your tools, you hold the resulting data, you monetize that data for as long as I’m happy with you, I benefit from the act of data creation and secondary impacts like better recommendations over time.  Then I find someone I like better than you and I’m out of here.  Do you get to keep my data?  Not exclusively, no!  Keep it in aggregate if you’d like – but for goodness sake, if you think that holding my data hostage and threatening me with data poverty if I leave you is a way to keep me from leaving your service – well that’s just a totally dysfunctional way to maintain a relationship.

Now I’m angry, thinking and writing about user control over our own data.  VERY few companies are hip enough to this, I don’t think any of the above discussed companies are.  Why should they be until their users insist on control over our own data?

None the less, the CBS acquisition of Last.fm is a big validation of the social recommendation concept.  I’m very excited about it and though I’ve got some big concerns, I am interested to see what a giant media company will do with it.

These guys work hard to build relationships with their users all around the world. They are doing a lot of things that I really admire.

An interface available in more than 15 languages, free pro-accounts for bloggers who write about them, rapid feature development – the list goes on and on. Way to go, guys.

I had the UStream player in question embedded here, but it was leaking audio when my pages loaded.

One of the most compelling parts of the live video world for me is the roll of widgets.  Live video players can be embedded on any site around the web.  That means if something really exciting is being broadcast, it can spread across countless points of distribution quickly.  Imagine what kind of live broadcasts you might see having their embed code copied onto more and more MySpace or Facebook user profiles in real time.  That has the potential to move masses of people politically.  I’m sure there’s some net neutrality issues here, too.

Embedded here is the BlueFox TV channel on Ustream. It appears to be one of the more regularly live channels on the site. It’s not terribly exciting in the first few minutes I’m watching it, but it’s good for a proof of concept. Neither the video nor the audio are streaming well enough for me over my EVDO connection. The medium is obviously in its infancy, but I think the potential is clear. Try viewing the most recent episodes of Democracy Now in my sidebar here and imagine if that was being broadcast live.

I would love to produce live video.  I don’t know if I’d rather do live news coverage, web 2.0 tutorials or both.  Imagine being able to afford a team of researchers and technical producers.  That’s pretty much what you’d need to have a steady flow of interesting content instead of a lot of video of some person sitting in front of a computer. Really robust text chat and good integration of archived content perhaps between live broadcasts are other things I’ll be watching for. There are some really powerful possibilities.  Just something I’ve been getting excited thinking about lately.

Probably not a huge big deal – there’s loads of scraping splogs out there around the web, but I’m amazed that Corante can’t do better than this.

Don’t forget to see the last story I wrote too, about Google’s kinda creepy TV plans. Downloader beware about this video player, huh?

The Google Research team at last week’s Euro ITV (the interactive television conference) won the best paper award for research just posted to the Google Research blog. Their topic? Personalized experiences synchronous with mass-media consumption. That means a system where your computer listens to the TV in your living room, compresses the sound for comparison to a Google sized audio database and then offers you services online related to whatever you are watching.

This does not appear to be functional yet, but the paper also seems to assure readers that it does not require much new technology either.

Advertising? Wasn’t discussed. The examples the Google scientists provided fell into the following four categories:

• personalized information layers
• ad hoc social peer communities
• real-time popularity ratings
• TV- based bookmarks

Of course advertising can be contextual to any of those, as is shown in the hypothetical screenshot above from the Google paper. There will also be the option of selecting Two Minutes Hate worth of advertising in exchange for access to premium content. Just kidding about that part. The rest of this is real, though.

“If friends of the viewer were watching the same episode of ‘Seinfeld’ at the same time,” the paper says, “the social- application server could automatically create an on- line ad hoc community of these ‘buddies’.”

The paper assures skeptics that the privacy will be technically ensured.

The viewer’s acoustic privacy is maintained by the irreversibility of the mapping from audio to summary statistics. Unlike the speech-enabled
proactive agent by Hong et al. (2001), our approach will not “overhear” conversations. Furthermore, no one receiving (or intercepting) these statistics is able to eavesdrop, on such conversations, since the original audio does not leave the viewer’s computer and the summary statistics are insufficient for reconstruction. Further, the system can easily be
designed to use an explicit ‘mute/un-mute’ button, to give the viewer full control of when acoustic statistics are collected for transmission.input-data rates. This is especially important since we process the raw data on the client’s machine (for privacy reasons), and would like to keep computation requirements at a minimum.

There’s no mention of localized versions for China, for example. Can the US government be trusted not to demand access to this kind of data? No. I can imagine the privacy concerns here are going to be huge. People may go for it though. I am open to the idea, but I don’t think I like it. GMail’s contextual advertising doesn’t scare me though.

This seems like a recipe for nothing but shopping and superficial interaction. I suppose I could debate with people in my “snobby snobs” group about the veracity of a History Channel show. So maybe I’m wrong.

One way or the other, this seems like a pretty viable vision of the future.

The company is really going to make the most of FeedBurner offerings, customizing the links that appear after each feed item (as anyone can do) and advertising Geffen artists in other feeds. FeedBurner keeps adding to it’s list of mega customers.

The Geffen website is delightfully low key in its aesthetic. You can see the first iteration of FeedBurner feeds there now; some of the links aren’t working yet but others are. They use the standard orange icon, the words “feed” and “subscribe” (not RSS) and the “add to MyYahoo” button because of it’s dominant market share. The aesthetics of the feed landing page could use some work, but the functionality looks pretty good.

This is a smart partnership. Eventually all organizations large and small that represent artists will offer feeds for fans to keep up with news about each of those artists. It’s just too compelling a model to avoid, to allow users to pull in news automatically about their favorite artists, as part of their default web experience either in a start page or a feed reader. Unlike the spam filled world of email, news delivered by feed is just a part of our individualized web landscapes. Feed reading builds relationships. The early-adopter nature of feed reading surely has some impact on its unusually high reaction rate right now, but I don’t think that explains it all. Feeds are just plain effective.

Related news: Feed aggregator NewsGator signs an agreement to move into the Japanese market. Is your organization publishing and reading feeds yet?