My ongoing list of feature requests for the perfect RSS to IM/SMS alert system got longer this morning. Last night I got a pretty darned fast notification of the NBC/Newscorp partnership story in LA Times - which is great, but now my alert for YouTube in the news is ringing off the hook with follow up coverage of the same story. I'd like to be able to tell Zaptxt to pause that particular alert for like 24 hours, then turn it back on. I'd turn it off, but I don't want to forget to turn it back on again once this story has passed.

To be honest, I'm also not very happy that it took an hour for Zaptxt to bring me the story in the first place. Mashable and PaidContent already had it. I've got the service set to alert me "as soon as possible" so why did it take an hour? I'll go on the record right now and say I'd pay $25 or something every month for my monitored feeds to be pinged every 5 minutes. That's not a mass market service or price point, so it shouldn't be too much to ask for.

Here's my previous list of feature requests:

1. IM me if I’m online, if I’m not then SMS *and* email me the URL of the feed item if I’m not online (Rasasa and zaptxt each fill different halves of this request)
2. Let me set the hours I want to recieve SMS alerts, outside those hours email me. (rasasa does that)
3. Send me the first 25 characters or however much is possible from the feed item, not just its title (anothr.com does that by Skype IM but no SMS is avail)

4. let me unsubscribe from alerts for a particular feed by responding to a text msg
5. don’t send me alerts an hour or two after the item was available - if I select “as soon as it’s available” then send it to me within 15 minutes every time. I hate getting an alert for something only to find that it’s already got 5 comments and 3 trackbacks on it. Experiences like that really mitigate my trust in the service.
6. filter for duplicate URLs, titles or both at my request. (feeddigest can be folded in to existing services if you want to do the leg work)
7. let me exclude particular feeds from my search results. i want to know when my name is used online, for example, but not when it’s in the author field of my own blog.
8. easy integration with Dapper, Yahoo Pipes or some other feed creation tool so I can get alerts from feeds that don’t exist yet would be nice.
9. easy import and export of OPML files.
Is that too much to ask? lol, I trust that if and when more people start using services like this it will be in the interest of vendors to become increasingly sophisticated in what they offer.

Statsaholic isn't quite as catchy a name as Alexaholic, but you can imagine the objections from Alexa (an Amazon property) to the original name. As of yesterday there's a redirect and a new name. Ron Hornbaker had high hopes for a more amiable relationship with Amazon, but using the Alexa API and exploring more value added services sounds like a good plan for a site Hornbaker says he built in a weekend. Snap, the creators of the most annoying blog plug-in in the world, are an early sponsor of Statsaholic. If you've never checked out Hornbaker's service, you should. It's the fastest, easiest way to get comparative Alexa data, as imperfect as that data might be. Cool graphs too. It'll be fun to see what else is in the works there.

See for example the graph below of Allen Stern's CenterNetworks (blue line) vs. Boing Boing type site Neatorama (in red).

Trying to join this Web Content Syndication social network on Ning, the newly relaunched "start your own social network" service. Can't tell if I can't create an account because my full name is too long (way too common a problem) or if I've already started an account (probably the problem). Why on earth does a hip, new site for building social networks require me to get a whole new Ning ID? Ugh. Of course the company I work at doesn't support OpenID yet either, but that's another matter

Here's a shocker, though it needn't really be - Michael Arrington has reportedly hired a CEO for the Crunch Network. Heather Harde, senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media, will take that position, Om Malik reports and FIM confirms. It's news to me but I presume it's true. Sounds smart.

My six months at TechCrunch were a whole lot of fun. Working at a pre-funding startup in the crowded media sharing market as I do now is actually much less stressful than TC was, believe it or not. I filled in at TechCrunch for two weeks last month and had a good time, we'll see if I fill in again what it's like to work with Heather. That could be fun.

I wish all parties involved the best of luck, I'll be very interested to see what changes the network undergoes. Maybe Mike will get more sleep, he certainly deserves it. Good luck Heather!

Just watched a really self-satisfied white guy on stage say things like "we all want to be affluent, but we want guilt free affluence" while showing slides of poor black people around the world. His point about helping people deal with their worst issues in order to provide a springboard for self determination was fair enough, but the presentation had an icky feel to it. It was far more politically conservative than most of the people in the audience appeared willing to admit.

Whatever. WorldChanging is an interesting enough web site to check out every once in awhile. Want a cooler one? It's less optimistic, but it's smarter, more honest and less politically retrograde -check out Grain.org. I'm sure the Grain folks wouldn't say these kinds of things about WorldChanging - but I'm not involved, so I can.

That's the plan anyway. Alex Williams and I are headed down Thursday afternoon to cover South by Southwest for SplashCast. We're both speaking on panels as well. He organized the first panel of the whole conference - all about Snakes on a Plane!

Anyway, we're going to work our tails off to be as on top of the news there as possible. I think we'll be able to do some very cool things with RSS, podcasting, photos and video all delivered through SplashCast. We are armed with new EVDO connections and Twitter accounts. We even created a special RSS feed for the coverage: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SxswBySplashcast Here's our first post kicking off coverage. Thanks to Scott Beale, one of the first people to post the player publicly.

We (ok, I) talk a big game, so hopefully we'll be able to live up to it! I'm addicted to blogging first on news and Alex is a great interviewer - so it should be fun. If you're down there too, don't be shy.

We'll see how it goes, I'm at http://twitter.com/marshallk I'm going to have to figure out the best way to deal with the SMS options. I'm used to getting piles of SMS alerts from RSS monitoring services, but this is ridiculous!

My co-worker Alex Williams and I have rented a 3 bedroom house in Austin from the 8th through the 15th. If you are interested in sharing these comfortable digs with us, a short bus ride from the event and coming in at $100/night, drop me a line. marshall@ marshallk.com

Digg just announced the addition of two new topics on the site - one about a boring software company I don't follow and the other, the US 2008 Presidential Election. It's going to get heated in there - people assume that Digg has a liberal bias but conservatives are very comfortable going there as well. Michelle Malkin, besides making one of the most well produced video blogs on the web, has encouraged people to go there in droves, if I remember the story correctly. (Here's the discussion of the announcement.)

Anyway, what better time than now to post here a wonderful SplashCast creation - one embedded media player that contains all the candiates' offical YouTube videos and updates automatically as it's populated by RSS feeds. Woo hoo! I'm going to be working on promoting this one and many other related channels to relevant bloggers in the coming weeks. I don't even like any of the candidates - not at all, I just think this is a very cool use of SplashCast. So let's celebrate Digg's insane move into thumbs-up, thumbs-down partisan politics on a large scale with a player right here and now.

Having run out of dour topics to post about here I thought I'd share a quick link that I think people will appreciate. Are you wondering just what's going on with the Belgian papers suing to get out of Google News? Danny Sulivan has written an excellant post about it, complete with an interview from one of the Belgian parties. It's here.

The shortest version of the story here is that Danny suspects that the Belgian papers don't really want out of Google, they just want Google to pay them before indexing their content. That's not going to happen, and it shouldn't. Very interesting story though, in its details.