Favstar.fm is a cool service that tracks who’s favoriting your tweets. It’s the easiest way to find out, as far as I can tell. Tonight they added RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to see who likes what you’re saying but didn’t retweet or reply to it. It’s so simple and so useful that I think everyone should subscribe to that feed. I wrote about it tonight on ReadWriteWeb.

I’m working on a couple of big research projects for ReadWriteWeb concerning The Real Time Web. I am looking for key articles to read on the topic (suggestions welcome) but I’m also interested in suggestions (or volunteers) of organizations or individuals I can request briefings from.

I’m interested in the use of real time, web-based information not just in consumer web companies, but also in nonprofit organizations, financial services and in media. I probably have the least resources available in media and financial services. If you can recommend any people doing exciting work with the real time web in any of those sectors or believe you’d be good to talk to yourself – please shoot me an email or leave a comment below. My email is marshall@marshallk.com.

I’m excited to try and do a lot of briefings on this topic and learn a frightening amount about it. Thanks for your help with that.

Image 1: Traffic for Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That’s Everywhere
Image 2: Traffic for First iPhone Augmented Reality App Appears Live in App Store

They say that interaction with articles is hottest in the first hour after you post them. I’ve always thought there was some truth to that, but some of the articles I’ve been writing about Augmented Reality lately make me think that might not be as important as I thought. (Check out this post by Sid Gabriel Hubbard explaining what AR is.)

That’s probably because they are being bandied about in social networks until they happen to hit a certain threshold of having been shared, then they go to place with higher profile and more traffic. (Front page, most popular, etc.) I imagine that posts not crossing that threshold exhibit a more traditional pattern of traffic.

It also makes me think Augmented Reality is something people want more coverage of. That’s good because I want to write more about it. I do need to post a poll asking if people think this stuff is stupid or for real, though. Definitely seeing some comments saying it’s all hype, the apps so far are dumb, etc.

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• Augmented reality startups petition Apple for live video interface (digital.venturebeat.com)

Sam Diaz at ZDNet tonight wrote the latest admission that he’s not using his RSS reader anymore. I have a lot of respect for Sam’s writing, but I am having a hard time believing that he and so many others say they no longer even bother to read feeds. Twitter, Facebook and aggregators like Techmeme or Google News suffice for Sam, he says. He’s far from alone.

They sure don’t suffice for me. I do get a whole lot of story leads, perspective and more from Twitter (something I wrote about in an article titled Twitter is Paying My Rent) but RSS is no less important for me today than it used to be.

I’m hesitant to write about my own research methods, to be honest, because if my competitors want to abandon RSS that’s just fine with me! But for other readers here, I will say that social media like Twitter has only added to my inflow – not replaced feeds at all.

I will tell you that I no longer use Google Reader or Netvibes. Instead, I use open source software on our own servers that is more customizable, more reliable and more efficient.
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Not living in Silicon Valley, not focusing on business as much as tech, spending half my time on administrative work and being a little more soft-headed than other tech reporters means I don’t get big fat scoops very often. Yesterday I did and it was pretty awesome. I heard word that Netscape founder Marc Andreessen was backing a new browser, based on Facebook, so I did some digging around and then published this post: RockMelt: Netscape’s Andreessen Backing Stealth Facebook Browser.

Thankfully I got a screenshot and not just news. Because of that even some people who didn’t want to link to me in subsequent coverage did.

The moral of the story is that people should tip me off to hot stuff more often. I think I did a good job covering this one (though I should have reached out to two people rumored to be involved as one has since denied it) and will do a good job covering your tips too. Send ’em to marshall@readwriteweb.com or hit me up by IM. General tips can be sent to the whole staff at tips@readwriteweb.com but the juicy secret ones can come right here. Thanks.

I’m doing some research for a number of different projects where I’m going to need a deep understanding of the real-time web and data. I want to look beyond the standard perspective of real-time consumer web companies and learn about how it is being used in non-profits, financial services and media. I’m looking to find out what people want from real-time service providers, what obstacles there are and what kind of potential outcomes we could see unfold.

Let me know if you’ve got any thoughts or pointers to resources you’d like to share. Please also let me know if you’re someone with some free time who would like to collaborate with ReadWriteWeb staff on some research projects regarding this topic. Will be fun times.

In my last post I wrote about testing two rich media popup tools that are very cool – Apture and Zemanta‘s new Balloons feature. It didn’t work so well to use both in the same post, so this is a post about puppies, popsicles and pennies with just Zemanta markup. If you’re reading this by RSS or email and are curious what’s going on – it’s pretty awesome, but you’ll need to click through to the site proper to see it.

Update: You can’t really use both at the same time on the same blog – Apture hijacks all of Zemanta’s balloon links. You probably won’t be able to see Zemanta links now, but I’ll be posting a full comparative review of the two services tonight or tomorrow on ReadWriteWeb.