Out of Touch or Rude Awakening?

Ionut of Google Operating System shared the following message from the Google Reader discussion group today regarding the “Trends” statistics section of Google Reader:

This is not a useful feature, how can it be disabled so my personal
reading information is not tracked?  This is not valuable information
to me.

Alternately:
Where do I send a blood sample?
Where do I go to get my subdermal microchip?

Guys, if you're going to stick a camera up my backside and track what
I do, please at least do me the service of keeping it to yourself.

It's like coming home and seeing a note on my door with the times and
locations of where I've been.  Not cool.

Interesting perspective.

I get the feeling that we may see more of this as Google Reader morphs out of “tool for the blogging set” into “tool for the masses.”

In other words – most people who aren’t bloggers aren’t as obsessed with their own reading habits.

Do you think we’ll be seeing more of this soon, or do you think this person is just simply out of step with a world of Tweets, MySpace bulletins and Facebook status updates that stay on the collective memory forever?

Twitter has Jumped the Whale

I think we can officially say that Twitter is mainstream.  Pretty soon, we won’t have to explain Twitter anymore, and we can finally bid an overdue farewell to story after story on blogs as to how to properly use Twitter and what Twitter is good for.

The other day, Duncan Riley observed that “the lead story on News.com.au us Australia's most interesting twitter users,” essentially a link bait list post of Tweeters.

Today, though, Anthony Farrior declares the battle for mainstream over as  Ashton Kutcher utilized Twitter and Qik (as did his wife Demi Moore) to vent about a neighbor very loudly building what appeared to be “damn fort next to [his] house.”

Transcript from Kutcher’s Twitter account as of midday Thursday:

• this [expletive] owl feces cougar placenta jack bone [expletive]! about 3 hours ago from web
• Jack [expletive] 7am building a … damn fort next to my house [expletive] up my view and noise polluting the entire [expletive] nieghborhood with pounding steal about 3 hours ago from web
• holy moly I’m gonna lose it! about 3 hours ago from web
• this [expletive] clown has another thing coming! about 3 hours ago from web
• I’m gonna kill my neighbor! about 3 hours ago from web

Transcript from Demi Moore’s Twitter account during the same time:

• calm and gentle baby you can pull out the paint gun later! about 1 hour ago from web
• baby keep it together there should only be another 5 months of this. about 1 hour ago from web
• the neighbor doing consruction with 6 guys pounding hammers against steel at 7am is no way to wake up! about 1 hour ago from web

The blowout has been chronicled in the news media pretty extensively.

We can move on now. We don’t need to do the evangelizing articles for Twitter anymore.

CoverItLive LiveBlogs $1 Million Entering Their Bank Account

According to Robin Wauters over at TechCrunch, CoverItLive has hauled down $1 million in private equity funding from Flagstone Capital and Paul Kedrovsky.

CoverItLive is a tool I’ve been using extensively since I learned about it, and is hands down one of the best tools for liveblogging, particularly for professionals.

The stability of CoverItLive is virtually spotless – I've covered a number of live events from Digg, and even their thundering hoards haven't been able to bring down the system. They offer the ability to embed inline video from a wide variety of sources (Qik, UStream, YouTube, etc), as well as all manner of hyperlinks, formatted text and images.

They also provide sophisticated methods for communicating with the live audience, as well as a certain amount of metrics on who's watching and participating, something you can't find in other solutions. For those looking for the Google after the event is over, you can export your coverage to text format, and replace the embedded widget with the source for the liveblog.

Solutions like CoverItLive offer a more professional solution that appeal to those looking to make a living from liveblogging (or more accurately, supplement their blog coverage with a monetizable form of live coverage). It's tailored to those with a built in audience, already, and you're not likely to grow your readership in a significant way like you could with Twitter and FriendFeed.

What are they using the money for?
According to TechCrunch, further development of enterprise liveblogging is the goal:

CoverItLive has also quietly rolled out a money-making product dubbed CiL Enterprise that brings additional features to professional users, catering to publishers who cover live events with multiple writers in particular. The enterprise version is currently still free, but the company aims to start charging somewhere between $50/month to $500/month for CiL Enterprise within a couple of months, leaving an option for free usage in educational environments.

Congrats to CiL.

Noon on Thursday Works for Twitter, Too [ReTweets, Please]

If you’re a particularly alert reader, you remember from an article I wrote this summer that the best time to get a Digg frontpage winning blog post is Noon on Thursday. As it turns out, that finding holds true for reTweetability, according to findings by Dan Zarrella today.

A number of other metrics were identified as well in terms of what makes a particular Tweet go viral. Even more important than the time of day is the apparent presence of the word “please,” which Dan interprets as the necessity of a tweet containing a call to action.

Similarly, a major factor is the presence of a link, which easy an easy enough data point to interpret – people like sharing resources.

The full post is at CopyBlogger, and is worth a read for any content producer.

ReadBurner Down for a Minute [Site Rebuild]

Finally, I can post about ReadBurner again and actually not hafta worry about a conflict of interest.

As you may have noticed, the ReadBurner widget has been missing from this site for a little over a month now.  It’s a shame, because I like the widget.  It’s a great way to flaunt my content at the site, here, because my posts generally do well by the ReadBurner metric and I’ve always been a fan of the site (even before Adam bought it).

None the less, the widget has been missing because of stability and load time problems. Adam Ostrow put out a post today acknowledging the problem and announcing a solution:

Essentially, the problem boils down to our ability to parse thousands of shared feeds in a timely manner, and right now, it’s not happening, derailing not only our site, but the widgets, chiclets, and feeds that bloggers and readers like to use.  

Today, we’ve decided to temporarily take ReadBurner offline to work on addressing these issues.  The good news is that we have two new developers – Mike and Jason – working to significantly improve ReadBurner.

I’m glad to hear that work is underway to bring it back.  It’d be a shame to see ReadBurner disappear.

FeedBurner Dodges the Question

Pete at Mashable sat down with Steve Olechowski, one of the original founders of Feedburner and current Business Product Manager at Google’s AdSense, in order to answer the many questions that the blogosphere has about what the heck is happening with Feedburner.

The interview was lengthy, and Pete asked a lot of questions, but I was left with a few unanswered by the end of it.  One response in particular did catch my attention:

Q: Will there be a method to sell RSS ads direct from your website (assuming the user has an AdWords account)?

A: We have noticed in our time working with advertisers that they don’t necessarily want to buy sites in an ad network one at a time by visiting the site directly. If they visit your site and want to place a large buy, they more likely would contact you directly to place the buy with your sales team.

Likewise, if they have a lot of money to spend and want to buy on your site and on other similar sites, they will likely go directly to the network and see what other similar inventory is available so they can widen their reach as much as possible. What many advertisers oftentimes want to do, however, is buy an audience, and be able to easily find that audience across any number of relevant sites.

We make that process efficient and scalable by making it easy to buy both publisher-sold ad inventory through Google Ad Manager and DART for Publishers, as well as publisher backfill inventory through AdSense. In short, we can help advertisers find an audience online across any number of sites and deliver their messages efficiently and at prices they control to make sure they are getting the best possible ROI.

So, if I’m reading here correctly, the answer to this question is “no, not really.”

Which, once again, leaves us in the unenviable position as bloggers of having no way to very easily monetize our feeds. Sure, you can slap AdSense for Feeds in there, and maybe you’ll get lucky and someone will do a big ad buy in your category.

More than likely, though, you’re going to get about three pennies for every ten or twenty thousand views on your content.

Sponsorships? What about the ability to manage your own CPA ads? None of that? 

If this was just plain AdSense for parked domains, I could understand the inability to treat a site as if it were a property one would want to sell against. Blogs, though, tend to be niche properties, or at least properties with clearly defined demographics. As an author, i know who my audience is, and that’s something I could package to advertisers. 

Unfortunately, for me to do so requires I set up an additional feed management system behind or in front of Feedburner…

… which leads me to the question a lot of folks have been asking lately: “What do I need them for again?”

Plinky: Really? Questions? WTF, Over?

I watched Scoble’s thing on Plinky today.  I have to say, I’m not particularly impressed.

Here’s the quick run-down of the service: If you like answering questions, this is for you.  Plinky serves up a new question every day. You answer it, and can post it to your blog or a number of other services. Plinky hotlinks your answers and questions to any sort of related media (like a movie title or a book title).

It turns out that the guy behind Plinky, Jason Shellen, was behind Pyra (company that created Blogger) and helped create Google Reader.

My big question is this: how do you go from creating game changing bits of software like that to … Plinky?

Watch Scoble’s interview and tell me if you can figure it out. I’m baffled.

HOW TO: Protect Your Kids Online [Warrantless Wiretaps]

A commonly recurring topic in my writings is the issues that arise from parenting with relationship to the Internet and social networks.  I haven’t tackled the subject in great depth, to the best of my memory, since Miley Cyrus was caught doing some questionable things with her mobile phone and MySpace account.

As I said at the time, though, it is a topic I’ve given some thought on how I plan to handle when my sons are of the age to be frequenting social networking sites that allow significant user input (my eldest is just now starting to outgrow the functionality in Kidzui).

Why is my mind on this today?  Linda Miola-Furrier posted on what I must imagine is becoming a more frequent occurance in today’s school systems: a parent teacher session on Facebook and security as it relates to their children.

From her post today:

The event was billed as an event to increase your knowledge of your kids’ cyber culture on Facebook. The Facebook employee panelist was informative enough, but I couldn’t help feel that he really didn’t “get it”. His youth was indicative of the Facebook employee culture, but I am guessing he has never worried about a child getting home safely or being stalked on the Internet.

I was left wondering, who is monitoring cyberspace outside of school hours? Whose responsibility is it? Should Facebook default to the most restrictive privacy settings for minors? Wouldn’t restrictions to spreading networks be highly counter to their business goals. Is Facebook’s sharing and connecting utility and business growth plan in conflict with the best interest of the kids?

Personally, I’m not sure what role (if any) I’m comfortable having my children’s school playing in their ability to speak freely on the Internet. Granted, there should probably be some policing to ensure illegal acts are not occurring (and optimally, I’d rather have the actual police work on that and have educators focus on education).

In terms of who’s ultimately responsible for my children’s well-being online, I’m pretty sure that falls into my own lap. 

I was one of those brain-case children that stayed plugged in non-stop from a very early age.  In my early teens I was running a local BBS as well as a monthly community publication consisting of crowd-sourced submissions.

My parents kept a pretty good eye on me as a child, but there was only so much they could do without a good awareness of how the technology works, or even much more than basic computer literacy.

That’s where I’m different (and, I imagine for most of my readers, you are as well)… It’s not difficult to find monitoring tools, and I’m not just talking about the pre-packaged filtering tools that they try to sell you. If you think President Bush’s warrantless wiretaps were overly harsh, you haven’t seen anything yet. I’m talking about keyloggers, and remote desktop viewers.

Perhaps it’s over-protectiveness, but I need to know what my kids are going to be into. I know what I encountered back in my day, and the Internet has matured significantly since then.

The drum that’s usually beat here is that education is key – if you educate your children about the dangers online, they’ll learn to avoid them.  Certainly that’s important, but just as important is adult and parent education.  Parents need to learn what tools and sites their kids are using, and how to regulate and monitor them as well.

Knowing what’s out there, as I do, and remembering my own experiences as a youth, I don’t want to hamper their development and learning, but I don’t see any way I could simply turn them loose into the wilds unabated.

Suddenly Everyone is an Expert on the “Blackberry” [BarackBerry]

There have been countless articles today on Barack and his Blackberry. It’s become obvious, now that President Obama has completely disregarded any previous concerns regarding whether or not his missives might later become public record.

If you remember from last week, I spoke directly to not just the security aspects (since other blogs at the time had very thoroughly covered that topic), but the legal aspects of Barack Obama carrying a BlackBerry or other smartphone during the duration of his presidency.

Here’s the backstory again, in case you missed it:

If You Don’t Know About Executive Order 13233, Read This
It actually all goes back Nixon. When Nixon was under fire for doing the things he was doing wrong (like destroying records of wrong-doing), Congress passed a law mandating that records of presidential communications must be kept intact for processing by national archivists and historians after the president leaves office.

The law states that after the archivists receive the materials, it should be made available to the public no less than 12 years later.

As the Wikipedia states on the matter, “thus, the presidential papers of Ronald Reagan were due to be made public when George W. Bush took office in January 2001.”

Of course, if you’re a sufferer of Bush Derangement Syndrome, you’re probably aware that one of the first acts of President Bush was to further prevent the records of President Reagan from becoming public with two successive claims of executive privilege, followed by Executive Order 13233 in early 2002.

E.O. 13233 had the net effect limiting all access to presidential communication pertaining to “military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, Presidential communications, legal advice, legal work, or the deliberative processes of the President and the President's advisers.” In other words, everything but what he’d probably post on Twitter anyway.

The other important thing you need to know about Executive Order 13233 is that while campaigning for president made the promise to get rid of it, and restore the public’s access to presidential records as per Congress’s intent in 1974.

And of course, if you paid attention to the news at all yesterday, President Obama and the administration made a dog and pony show out of signing his first four executive orders. The most prominent one, of course, was the closing of Gitmo Bay Detention Area, but no less significant to most of his ardent supporters is the Executive Order which rescinded E.O 13233.

I’m Popular, but Not That Popular
Clearly no one in the Obama administration is a big reader of this website, or perhaps the President’s addiction to the Blackberry is simply so strong he’s ignoring all legal counsel on this one. The bottom line is, here, by rescinding this order, though, he’s opened up every text message and email sent to and from the device he carries to public review, and he won’t be able to claim executive privilege (or more accurately will have to sue for executive privilege) to keep the messages private.

All of this ignores as well the logistical issues created by this.  By federal law, deleting a message could be considered destroying records, which is a big no-no due to the Nixon administration. What if he gets a spam message … is he now legally obligated to keep it?  It sounds ridiculous to say yes, but the way the laws are now written, it definitely looks like it.

Beyond that, there’s the even a larger nightmare looming down the road – the archivists who’ll have to sift through what could be tens of thousands of messages. I’ve had my GMail account right about since the service launched, which is a little more than four years ago. Currently sitting in my inbox is 28,834 messages.

I can scarcely fathom going through them myself, and I have the ability to skim them and tell if they’re worth keeping or not. A fresh set of eyes doesn’t have that intuitive memory, and will need to do a lot more than skim. I highly doubt that the system is set up for that sort of volume.

What Are His Solutions?
I’ll skip the possible constitutional issues that have been created by denying former presidents their executive privilege since I’m not a constitutional scholar.

It’s almost beating a dead horse, but like I said in my last post on the topic, rescinding E.O 13233 was probably a mistake, particularly when it clearly doesn’t factor in the existence of new technologies.  It’s very reminiscent of Congress trying to regulate YouTube, Twitter and Qik using old House franking rules designed to regulate postal mail communication.

President Obama’s decision to make this one of his first moves as Commander-in-Chief without consulting with someone who is at least savvy of the legal and technological implications floors me, particularly given all the credit he’s been heaped for being so tech savvy himself.

Am I missing something? Is there a magical line in his new executive order that I’ve overlooked that takes care of this? If not, this is an issue which will come back to bite the Obama administration down the line.

Digg Getting Serious about Making Money [Layoffs]

Jay Adelson posted a short note to the Digg company blog today asserting that they were now “aggressively focused on reaching profitability within the year.”

It doesn’t take too much reading between the lines in his missive to get the impression that there might be some headcount reduction in the works over at Digg.

This means we’ll probably see a radical change to the aggressive goals and probably less responsiveness to the issues raised at the regular Digg Town Hall meetings, less focus on community and feature management, and more focus on how ads are placed and what deals are made to make the bills.

It’s important for them to focus now on not only how to get ads on their site, since that’s (at least for the next year) going to be a diminishing source of important revenue, and more focused on how the content continually generated by the site might be resold to other news sources.

It might also be a decent time to assess other intellectual assets created by the site.  The focused bounce of traffic generated by an organic Digg event is no small thing, and while there’s generally a great deal of controversy around the topic of sponsored posts, every other news organization does it (even other aggregators like TechMeme).

It might now be time for Digg to look at being a bit less hippie and a bit more capitalist, in other words.

You and Your Friend: Internet Famous

I just caught a post by TalkShoe CEO Dave Nelson to utilize their technology in a particularly interesting way that could end up pushing an odd couple into the limelight.

The way its proposed to work, should you (and your friend) be the two selected, is this: any time you’d normally call up your friend to chat, you instead both call into a designated TalkShoe conference room which is then broadcast live and recorded to the podcast feed.

Dave provides more details:

Think about it: if it’s REAL talk, it will be ‘real’ INTERESTING! We all want to learn more about ourselves by learning more about others. And there are so few ways to get true insight into other people these days… other than this one. For those of you born after 1950 (and who wasn’t), there once was something called a party line — not for actual parties but for affordable shared telephone service in rural areas… and great for eavesdropping on your neighbors. Alas, since your grandparents’ time, that’s been lost to the world. Until now; until you!

It’s an interesting take, and has been the basis for several podcast ideas I’ve had over the years. In the early part of this decade, I had a radio show that ran for several years called The Mark and Darrell Show (it ran the longest on RantRadio), that was based mostly on the interesting and wacky conversations I had on a daily basis with my good friend.

It’s a format for a duo with good chemistry will definitely work as a show, and it’s a great exhibition of the technology at TalkShoe, utilizing the ad hoc streaming capability.

Up to five pairs will be selected, and all applications should email Dave directly.

Google Calendar Moves to the Desktop

One of the most useful, to me anyway, apps from Google is the Google Calendar system.  In conjunction with Plaxo’s ability to synchronize my devices and Google’s ability to keep a non desktop specific collaborative calendar is what keeps me on track with what’s going on in my world.

Google has today made it even more useful by launching a gadget for their desktop bar.

Pretty much all the functionality for the actual calendaring software is duplicated here, and you get the added benefit of getting an alert from the system without keeping the window open all the time.

Pretty great, and enough to get me to switch from Microsoft’s desktop gadget system to Google’s.  Just click on over here and give it a go.

RSSFWD Finally Admits Defeat. Steve Rubel, Not So Much.

Jennifer Van Grove over at Mashable writes today about the demise of utility app RSSFWD:

RSSFWD, an end-user RSS to email service, announced via Twitter today that they will be shutting down the service at the end of the month. With less than 100 followers, this doesn’t seem like the best method to announce one’s demise, especially when the service in question is one that some people find useful.

According to the tweet, a blog post is pending (even though the current post reads that the service is ready to roll), but making this type of announcement via Twitter just seems crass.

Actually, the site’s been less than worthless for some time now.

I was playing around when I got my phone a couple months ago trying to hack MetroPCS so I could get Twitter via SMS, and my first stop was to try to use RSSFWD:

Apparently, though, I’m the only one who remembers it exists (including its developers) since the site works great but it’s no longer able to send out emails at all.

As I said back then, this was a site category that could use some serious work and development. There are very few sites that perform this function, or at least perform it reliably (and in a world where every phone service provider has an email to SMS gateway, it’s a service that when marketed right could be in great demand).

As Steve Rubel notes, though, this isn’t an issue just isolated to RSS-to-email gateways (even if Steven Hodson noted it first).

You see this with a lot of Twitter applications.  I haven’t had a Qwitter notice in a long time, and I know for a fact that I’ve irked at least one or two of my followers on Twitter, and that’s just one that springs to mind immediately. I’m sure if you pick your favorite list post maker, and find a list of Twitter apps – you’ll find at least a 30% dead rate.

Back in the podcast world, we call that podfading, and it’s just a given that it’s going to happen to a certain percentage of all podcasters (just as there’s a relatively constant percentage number of failures amongst new businesses). If you compound that with the fact that, like most podcasts, there’s little to no economic incentives involved with running the app, you’re only increasing the chance that it’ll fail.

Are We Headed for a Massacre?
I hate to repeat myself, but I’m going to: Steve Rubel’s the guy who brought you the “skunk drunk / kool-aid” meme last year. You don’t get to predict the death of Web 2.0 throughout most of the boom (while it’s still growing, even) all the way through the bust cycle, and when one barely functional app folds, declare your premonitions infallible.

How does the saying go?  A stopped watch is right twice a day?

We’re not headed for a massacre, but when you have a perfect storm of barely functional technology along with slipshod marketing, you’re going to see some apps fold, yeah. That’s exactly what you had with RSSFWD.

It also helps when an application serves a capitalist purpose (something Steve decried in the original “skunk drunk” post, ironically).

Unfortunately, you’re not seeing a lot of that, because most of these services are free.  That’s great, and it’s been the spirit of Web 2.0 for some time now, but it’s time for change. I, for one, would have paid for RSSFWD, or a service like it, that would successfully get around the issue of Twitter not working on MetroPCS.  $5 a year would have more than paid for the volume of bandwidth I’d use and leave a bit left over for the developers.

App developers that are smart will find clever ways to market their product, reframe their services, and then charge for the value-add.

Are we due for a massacre?  I sort of doubt it … or at least I like to think that most developers are smarter than Rubel gives them credit for.

Jaiku: What is it Good For?

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch today continues to push the line on this narrative the rest at TC and other blogs seem to have been trying to insinuate lately: Google has popped it’s cherry, has jumped the shark, and is beginning the slow slide away from innovator and into whatever category most people put Microsoft and IBM in these days. The tool they’re using to shoehorn this idea down our throats with is the pending Open-Sourcing of Jaiku.

Google’s got a lot going on, and they’re still one of the world’s capital for pure blue-sky R&D, when it comes to technology and a lot of things not even related to tech.

The real question here is whether or not there’s a market for what they’re trying to turn Jaiku into or not. The best I can tell, they’re trying to create an open source utility that will fill the void for Enterprise 2.0-grade intra-company status-microblogging.

While the idea certainly fills a week’s quota of hyphenated buzzwords, I don’t think it really fills any sort of need. Twitter is great for a large number of things, from news applications to straight-up one-to-one and one-to-many communications.

Does it do anything for us that can’t be more adeptly accomplished by other, pre-existing utilities?  I say no.

Enterprise Status Microblogging. Whoopee.
It was why I was so puzzled when Yammer won the TC50, and then like lemmings, every organization I belonged to online started sending me invites to participate in their Yammer networks.  These were organizations that already had private Google Groups set up, or Utterli private groups, or even already had 100% persistent auto-logging chatrooms.

There are hundreds of ways to skin the cat of telecommuting company’s group messaging, and I really don’t see how limiting conversations to 160 characters really solves the problem at all.

I can see, given how everyone’s drank the Kool-Aid on this one, why the folks at Google might think this is the great white hope for Jaiku, but even they must be pretty half-hearted in their belief that this is going to be the next killer app (if, indeed, corporate solutions is their true aim for the product).

Here’s what Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström said on his blog today regarding all of that:

Soon, anyone, for free and with little effort, will be able to install and modify the Jaiku code, launch it on App Engine, and run their own microblogging platform. Combine that decentralization with standards such as OAuth and the forthcoming activity stream standards, and what we’re seeing here is the accelerating trend away from microblogging being a destination to microblogging being a pervasive and ubiquitous part of the fabric of the web itself.

To me, this says less about the possibility of corporate microblogging and more about the fact that the kids at Jaiku and Google may not get the concept behind the live web or Twitter … still.

For the record, the reason all the Twitter clones haven’t taken off (and why would-be Twitter usurper FriendFeed has taken off) is the community contained there-in. Jaiku just never achieved sufficient saturation or critical mass to spiral out like FriendFeed and Twitter did.

Google Needs to Swallow Their Pride and Do What They Do
Scobleizer and a few others like to pontificate on how Google is losing the race for the live web. We’ve only had the live web in a real way for a short minute now, so I think it’s a little early to brand Google with the Fail Whale.

On the other hand, they aren’t exactly on the right track at the moment. They’ve a couple of fingers dipped into the pools of the live web business, and neither one is really doing much significant at the moment.

Jaiku is one of them, and it’s not going to un-seat, well, anything any time soon. The other is Google Friend Connect, which as I discussed a while back, a good start towards a lifestreaming product, but is definitely no Jedi yet.

Has Google jumped the shark yet though? I don’t think that’s a foregone conclusion.  I’m working on a much longer piece that addresses the business issues that Google’s working through at the moment, but in terms of overall strategy, in the face of everything else that works for the company, they aren’t far enough behind the curve here to really say they’re down for the count.

Instead of focusing on creating a competing Twitter in Jaiku or even creating a competitor to other non-starters like Yammer, they need to work on aggregating the live web in useful ways, something that may run contrary to their instincts since it can be easily done with publicly available mashup utilities and doesn’t require an engineering degree to accomplish.

They need to swallow their pride, though, and get on it or get left behind.

Scoble’s Live Web Breaking News Dilemma

This is one of those fun days where I’ve just sorta had news paralysis.  A lot of my work today (yes, I’ve had a bit of work here and there) had me offline, so catching updates here and there of all the crazy news of the day has been interesting, to say the least.

The one real story today that made me sit and think for a while was something Scoble said about getting a handle on trending topics via Twitter. He was speaking in the context of the Steve Jobs resignation and the absolute deluge of Twitters on the topic.

It was truly amazing the amount of buzz that was screaming across the network.  Like Scoble said, there were hundreds (if not thousands), of tweets screaming by every minute. Here’s part what Robert said in reference to that:

If you aren’t online there’s no “warning” system that something is happening. I wish I could tell Twitter to SMS me whenever a “high flow” event is underway.

It made me ponder.  This would be a pretty easy tool to launch, using the Twitter search API, which as far as I know, doesn’t have any major limitations on it like the main Twitter API has. Creating a system that polls the API for the trending items and then will send out SMS alerts based on changes based on velocity is a pretty simple task.

According to the Twitter search API, you can pull down trends only as a JSON feed, which rules out using Yahoo Pipes for a quick and easy mashup, but with a little PHP code, you can grab the file and store it in a database (or even a text file), and make comparisons on how long an item sits there and how quickly it’s shot up the ranks.

It would take a little tweaking, but it’s definitely worth pursuing for someone with a little more spare time than I do to whip up a quick app (you can just name it after me or something).

FeedScrub Helps You Read Faster [500 Invites!]

Feedscrub is a new, useful little web app I happened to stumble across this week that promises to help those of us who cling to our RSS readers in favor of the river of information or the live web save time.

I’ve done a bit of socializing lately here in Dallas at the area gatherings, and I routinely have introduced myself as semi-well known blogger from my former job, and the most common thing I hear is that regular folks (that is, folks who don’t do the blogging thing for a living) don’t obsessively read every post from high traffic blogs, and with blogs that routinely put out 20-40 posts a day, as many do, they find that they just don’t have the time to bother with it.

FeedScrub is an attempt to alleviate that pressure.

It functions simply enough, and integrates with your existing feed reader, including my favorite, Google Reader. You simply take your high volume feeds (that often contain good information, but also likely a lot of noise as well), enter them into the system, and replace your subscription in your feed reader with the new RSS feed given to you by FeedScrub.

You then need to engage in a few day period of “training the system,” which consists of simply telling them which items in the feed you like and which ones you don’t.

After a while, it builds up a library based on scanning the words in those posts of generally what you like.

Their screencast on integrating with Google explains in a bit more depth.

Who This is For, and Who This Isn’t For
I’d say that this best benefits the average and casual users of RSS readers. Heavy users and power users of Google Reader and other similar services will become annoyed from a couple limitations in the system – some that can be worked around, and some that I’m not so sure can be fixed.

First of all, the act of creation of a new feed will be annoying to those who not only track  how blog posts are shared (like RSSmeme and Readburner), but those who do the sharing and the reading of those shares. It’ll make things more difficult for those up and down the chain, unfortunately, particularly for those who read a shared feed, are interested in subscribing to a feed based on a post that’s been shared, and instead will end up with your custom feed.

The other thing that’s annoying about the system – though admittedly this is probably a temporary problem – is the limitation FeedScrub’s made of 3 feeds per account.  Casual users of RSS probably won’t see this as a problem, but power users will quickly use that limit up in the first five minutes.

As the service grows, though, I imagine that will be opened up much wider.

Aside from these issues that leap out at me as I’ve played with the system, it’s actually surprisingly accurate on what it is I’m interested in filtering out of a feed.  The first one I stuck in there was the PE Hub full news feed. I’m essentially interested in whatever news they have in that feed, if there’s a tech angle to it at all – they do M&A’s and all sorts of news for large business transactions, so it’s not uncommon to see news of a restaurant chain or something pop up in there.

I trained the system just based on the first 20 items, and it seemed to get a pretty firm grip on the type of stories I was interested in, though, which means that the mechanics of this service are pretty well in place.

How Can You Try It Out
FeedScrub is currently in closed beta, but I was able to get my hands on a whopping 500 invites, so grab them while they’re hot.

Simply head on over to the service, and use the invite code “rizzn” to get in. If we run out, leave a comment here, and I’ll see if we can’t scrape up a few more somewhere.

Did You That Thing I Sentcha, Biz? [New Hires]

Word comes via the Twitter Blog today that they’ve made a new hire, another one that has a sharp eye on how the quickly exploding status micro-blogging service can make some money, mostly with respect to the mobile business.

At first, I took it as a sign that I’d been passed over for that position I applied for a few weeks ago, the product manager position that everyone was talking about just before Christmas (you know, the one that finally said to the world “we’re serious about making some money.”). I’m happy, that upon further reading, I’m finding that the job I originally applied for is still open.

As most of you know, I’m currently gig-less. It was serendipitous, I thought, that the position opened up on almost the same exact day that I became a free agent.  I figured they were actually creating a position for me over there, and didn’t have my number, so the only way they could get my attention was to get everyone else in the blogosphere to forward me the job opening (something that happened about six times, actually).

For those of you who’ve just read my stuff at the various places I’ve posted in the past, while you know that I’ve certainly got quite a few opinions on how to monetize Twitter and an intimate familiarity with the service, you may not know that I’m also a qualified veteran of startup executive management. I’ve been a C<insert-letter>O of no less than five startups in the last several years, at least two of which had yearly revenue in the millions.

What Would I Do for Twitter?
If you’re interested in all that stuff, though, you’d be at my LinkedIn profile. I’ve talked about a number of ways to monetize Twitter, and certainly the new guy, Kevin Thau, looks like he might have an inside track on how to do that on the mobile level.  I worked on the SMS spec back in 1999, but that doesn’t make me an expert personally on how to create carrier relationships that benefit the content aggregator, so I don’t presume to know more than Kevin in that area (though I do have a number of friends who are absolute experts in that part of the business).

My experience and interest lies in the content side of things.  Twitter has become a conversational tool, in the sense that IM is a conversational tool.  Still, it still has a ton of aspects that still bear striking similarities to it’s original intent, which is as a type of blogging utility.

In that sense, I’ve extensively case-studied a number of different ways to leverage branding and tight knit “tribes,” as Godin calls them, to get a bit of cash and monetization out of it on the user level.

To that end, if I’m able to find angles that make Twitter a worthwhile activity on the user level (for the user) monetarily, replicating that out to the rest of the community shouldn’t be that big of a struggle.

Without going into a 30-page treatise, a lot of my ideas revolve around the same thoughts that YouTube has involved with their Partner Program, and I’ve expounded on these principles many times in the past.

How Serious is this Post?
I’ve occasionally written a tongue-in-cheek post, so you may be wondering how serious I am about asking for this job.  The truth is, I live in Texas and I’m not looking to re-locate. This job is, presumably, not a telecommute job.

On the other hand I do have a few jobs that, even though I’ve got some good projects going and opportunities I’m closing in on, I think I’d drop just about everything else for, and making Twitter profitable is one of those jobs.

I’m definitely outside the bubble, though. The Twitter guys know who I am (we conversed several times in blog comments), but I don’t know them or most of the Silicon Valley circle well enough to say that I’d have a real shot at the job.

So on the seriousness level, I’d say this post ranks about a six or seven of ten. I’d like the job, and I’d make the effort to convince my family it’s worth uprooting us and heading West for. I’m not banking on it though, and won’t be heartbroken should someone else get the job.

I will seriously consider, should I not get the job, selling all future blogposts on Twitter monetization to Twitter as eBooks – no more free advice!

Transpera Signs On MSNBC and The Weather Channel

The last time I spoke to Frank Barbieri was at the beginning of this summer, where I spoke with him and the CEO of ManiaTV, Peter Hoskins, and talk about their (then) new partnership.

Frank is the CEO of Transpera, a company that specializes in taking video from online and standard media outlets and customizing advertising services for content producers on the mobile platform.

Transpera at the time had a decent New Media portfolio, but has since added what can best be described as a crapload of Old Media partners, including Associated Press, CBS News, Discovery Communications, Fox Reality Channel, MTV Networks, and the Travel Channel. Add to that their New Media partners, and you’ve got a mile long list.

I spoke very briefly with Frank yesterday afternoon, and he told me that they’d been focusing almost exclusively on Old Media partners since we’d last spoken to really bulk up the volume of content they handle (and presumably because there’s very little left for them to conquer in the New Media world).

As a result of that focus, with the signing of MSNBC and The Weather Channel, he says that they’ve now partnered with every major network.

We’ll Be Exploiting Frank’s Expertise Later this Week
If you get the chance to hit play up above on the old show, you’ll see that valuable and interesting analysis comes very easy to Frank our discussion, and that’s something we hope to replicate this Wednesday when I sit down with him to talk a bit about what these new partnerships mean, and how the video startup and advertising world has shifted in the last six months.

What I mean by that is best exemplified by something I saw at NTV today in an article by Liz Gannes, where she said: “… it doesn’t seem like online content studios are going to fade out of existence anytime soon. That’s for one simple reason, and it’s not massive profit margins: they keep finding true believers to give them more money.”

Transpera isn’t a content studio, and they haven’t raised a whole lotta money lately to stay solvent (to the best of my knowledge), but the statement is indicative of a general malaise that seems to have beset all ad-supported media, and I want to get a handle on how that’s affect strategic planning and the industry as a whole from Frank on Wednesday.

If you have any questions along those lines, leave them in the comments and we’ll include them in the show.

Is Your Congressman Social?

TechCrunch today is cashing in on the high volume of political chatter today in the wake of President Bush’s exit press conference today by asking with the headline today: “Is your senator on YouTube?”

Erick Schonefield there talks about two new directories that YouTube has launched that allow you to find your Senator and your Congressman, if they’re on the site putting out videos.

I was at Alex Muse’s happy hour down at the Infomart last week, and met up with Squeejee’s Chris McCroskey, who’s been working on a similar project with relationship to Twitter.

Their directory is called Tweet Congress, and essentially performs the same function for Twitter as YouTube’s new hub. You simply enter your zip code, and it’ll pop up all the congressmen from your area, and if applicable, their Twitter address.

It’s an odd transition from the debates politicos seemed to be having about social media just a few scant months ago. Back in July, I covered (along with several other tech and political bloggers) the goal of censoring Twitter and other social media presences by some in Congress through the use of obscure franking and postal rules.

Very soon after it became clear from the press coverage in the blogosphere that this was a decision that would not pass muster with the public, Representative Michael Capuano quickly changed his tune on his intent no longer being to censor (even though he was suddenly becoming interested in enforcing these rules that would have that same net effect).

Suddenly, though, since the election of Barack Obama, it seems that social media has received authentication somehow, and if you’re inside the beltway, you’re suddenly uncool if you don’t at least understand what’s going on in the tubes.

Odd how things work, but if there is one good thing (heh – from my perspective, anyway) to come out of Barack Obama being elected president, that might be it: social media savvy being considered a required skill.

Nielson Tracking More Accurately with Audio

Those of us who have been producing video content for a while now know the problem of coming up with accurate metrics for not only our own edification but for the purposes of turning around and selling those metrics to sponsors and advertisers.  Neilson has been an Old Media institution that from very early on in the podcasting revolution has been interested in making sure they not only had a handle on all this new technology, but strove to find more accurate ways to measure a complete audience, no matter how the media is being consumed.

Andy Plesser, over at Beet.TV, sat down with Jon Gibs (the VP of Media analytics over at Nielson) to discuss a new method of tracking viewership of online video through the use of audio signature files (video of the interview below).

It basically comes down to this: the same file may be on YouTube, Hulu, NBC.com or any other number of sites where the file can pirated, copied or otherwise syndicated may not be counted for the totals, particularly if the syndication was done by a ‘fan’ and not the content originator.

Twitter is the New MySpace [You’re Doing it Wrong]

Guest poster Atherton Bartelby at Mashable listed on Tuesday 10 reasons why he will refuse to follow you on Twitter. Aside from the very annoying fact the article attempts to tell me that there’s a right way for me to use Twitter, reason number three in particular stuck in my craw:

#3: Your “website” listed is a MySpace Profile

…or, far worse, an AngelFire “page.”

I’ll admit it: I had a MySpace profile…until I deleted it a year ago when it became obvious that only teenagers and musicians were still using it. I also had a GeoCities/AngelFire “page”…for my very first website when I first got on the Internet in 1994. If the Twitter user in question happens to be an actual teenager, or musician whose MySpace presence truly works for them, then fine. But I tend to pass over those users whose proffered web presence is, well, clearly doing it wrong.

It doesn’t take much these days to establish a web presence that seems genuine and thoughtful, and appears to intend to attract and build an online community based on the content it provides. AngelFire pages simply don’t communicate that.

After glancing over the rest of them, he could have more or less just skipped all the ten reasons and said “if it looks like a fake or sales and marketing related user, I’m not going to follow your account.

But the dig at MySpace fails to notice one key element of Twitter that it seems most of us aren’t noticing at the moment: Twitter is the new MySpace.

Back in 2006, I launched an experimental video podcast network that used MySpace as the primary thrust of it’s marketing.  The content was very high-brow (as compared to what’s typically thought of as MySpace content), being accessible hacker-centric technology news and general commentary on world affairs.

Using the system to find folks to subscribe to our podcast was surprisingly easy, and we grew our download and viewer-count to over 60,000 a month.

If you look at even more recent history, a primary fixture on the Mashable site layout were places to download MySpace templates. Some of the most popular features on the site, at least by comment counts, continue to be MySpace related list posts.

So what’s the great sin in having a MySpace profile as your primary point of contact? Chances are if it’s listed, it’s because it’s worked for that user. If you’re going to discount out of hand a Twitter user because they list a MySpace profile for their primary point of contact, it’s going to be you who ends up out of touch with most of the web’s userbase, not them.

In short, you’re doing it wrong.

Picasa Better Than iPhoto? Yes, Still.

Mashable’s brand spanking new Associate Editor Jennifer Van Grove on Tuesday declared iPhoto to be awesome and Google’s Picasa to officially suck eggs.

If this was based on something that made sense I’d just let it slide, but she lists the following features as the ingredients of the new killer app:

Face Detection, Face Recognition, and Places - tagging faces, names, and places in iPhoto for online sharing turns into an almost completely automated process … slideshow themes, smart albums, the ability to auto-create titles, transitions, and credits, and even a Places feature for animated travel maps that uses GPS geotagging.

Given that Picasa has had almost all of these features for months now, though, I wouldn’t call that exactly groundbreaking or anything.

Here are two things that are groundbreaking: Picasa just came out for Mac, and Picasa continues to be free. iPhoto still costs money.

Which one is better, now?

Are Intel and Adobe Killing Video Podcasts?

Caught a story Tuesday afternoon from NewTeeVee that, as Chris Albrecht put it, could be one of the dominant stories for 2009 in web technology if people pay attention and all the dominoes fall the right way.

The crux of it is technology announced Tuesday by Intel and Adobe that brings web video to the livingroom in a seamless way:

Intel and Adobe announced today that they are collaborating to bring Flash to the Intel CE 3100 Media Processor, a move the two companies say would provide a better, more seamless web video viewing experience on your HDTV. The new Flash-enabled chips are set to roll out before the middle of the year and will be found in CE 3100-based cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray disc players, digital TVs and other AV devices.

The idea here is that the TV itself (not the TV plus a box plugged into your TV) becomes the platform itself. Widgets run on it, web video runs on it, and you just plug it into the ‘Net and watch it go.

It sorta makes me question the technology I’ve been harping on for ages now, and gravely emphasizes the fact that I need to start reading up on this new technology to determine exactly how widespread, common and disruptive this will be.

I’ve been preaching the word of Media RSS and podcasting for as long as people have been putting MP4s in RSS enclosure tags. For me, it was the only technology neutral way to prepare for your content being widely distributed into the mainstream.

It now appears that I may be wrong, or at least that this new technology may rise to dominance (and even eclipse video podcasting) before video podcasting has a chance to take root.

Who here has read up on this stuff?  As you know, my connection has been sort of dimmed lately, so I haven’t had a chance to do all the research I’d like.  I’m going to get on it, but in the meantime, what do you know about this?