Pito’s Blog

Welcome! If you're interested in the same kind of things I am, consider adding this site to your favorites, or better yet, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed (using BlogBridge, of course) . Welcome, and thanks for visiting!

From LifeHacker (one of my new favorite sites) comes a pointer to a site called FeedsThatMatter.

What it seems to do is to look at public subscriptions listed in BlogLines, do a tag analysis, and display a tag cloud. BlogLines is a huge web based aggregator service and so I’d guess that their subscriptions are relatively representative of the whole blogosphere.

In light of my recent musings on bridging the gap between all the great content out there in feed land and regular people, this algorithmic analysis of topics and interest levels is an interesting data point. You can see that the coverage is extremely spotty. I suppose you can draw different conclusions from this:

1. The feedosphere doesn’t come close to covering the breath of topics of interest that one might have
2. BlogLines subscriptions are very caught up in the tech world because that’s their user base.
3. FeedsThatMatter confuses popularity with value. Perhaps the feeds are out there but , by the BlogLines statistics they don’t matter.

I don’t know (obviously) which it is…

Technorati Tags: feeds, rss

Popularity: 4% [?]

Before I discuss this new product idea I am turning over in my mind, I want to say a few things about why I keep working in this area. I mean there are so many people working on aggregators, and after all Microsoft is building it into IE, and it’s been in FireFox for a while. Why bother?

I’ve thought all along, and I still believe, that all these blog readers, or aggregators, or whatever you want to call them are really important but still very primitive.

I’ve also said and still believe that all of them, BlogBridge included, are very much generation zero, and are more or less following the same pattern, in a way set by email readers.

The reason I am very bullish on this space (and I use that vague term on purpose) is that there is so much useful, general, non geek, high quality information out there, that such a large percentage of people have no idea about, and yet if they could see it they would devour it.

Just recently I was reading Discover Magazine, and I came across an interesting article that mentions that mathematician Peter Woit has a blog called “Not Even Wrong.” I’ve not looked at that yet, but, I am intrigued. Every day I come across an example of that.

So I say: Are you interested in Politics? Geology? Mathematics? Joint Ventures? Model Airplanes? Medicine? Rock and Roll? I can guarantee that I can find information on your passion that you will want to look at as often as you look at your magazine subscriptions.

This is my belief: great stuff, regularly written, by experts in every field, is there (supply.) There is a large class of people who would stand up and cheer if we could bring that information to them easily. (demand)

I want to help bring those two together.

The answer is not a better aggregator. It’s something else.

Technorati Tags: aggregators

Popularity: 16% [?]

While I was on vacation I often had an idea pop in my head and feel the urge to write about it my blog. Why, why, why?

I think I’ve been writing this blog for over three years. Here is my very first post. Since then  I must have spent innumerable hours writing. It is almost like an addiction.

Why? I’ve given this thought over the months and years, and also have had to answer the question more than once. Here’s what I think:

1. When you work on your own like I do, you miss the usual outlet of popping into someone’s office to tell them or show them or share with them something interesting, cool, funny or great that you experienced or saw. Writing it on my blog gives me an alternate outlet.
2. Often I write in my blog for my own future reference. Something which I think is useful or memorable often gets put down just so I can later remind myself of what I was thinking and working on at the time.
3. It’s definitely a kick to know that anyone on earth can read what I write, and in fact that thousands are doing so every day or so.
4. I am obsessed with the phenomenon of blogging (viz. BlogBridge and related projects)
5. It’s a live, rich and personal testimony of who I am and what I am about, kind of an online professional reputation which is part of my professional persona and supports my consulting.
6. I guess I love writing.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I just returned from a trip in the American Southwest, starting in St. George Utah, to Bryce Canyon National Park, Capitol Reef Park, Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park and ending in Mesa Verde National Park. A spectacular trip. I am now back, invigorated and ready for action.

One of the funny things that happen when I am away is that I get ideas for new blog posts which I can’t actually post. So here’s the backlog that I hope to unleash on you in the coming days and weeks:

• Why do I blog, anyway?
• Bryce National Park
• Why do I keep on coming back to building better interfaces for reading blogs and feeds?
• Capitol Reef National Park
• New product idea: <unnamed as yet> - it’s not an aggregator but it does let you read feeds, it’s not a directory but it does help you find the best feeds on each topic.
• Arches National Park
• Edward Abbey - good reading!
• Why the whole “A Million Little Pieces”  dust up was a total joke and makes Oprah look totally ridiculous
• Canyonlands National Park
• Moab Utah
• Mesa Verde National Park
• Shadow Divers - good reading!
• What I’ve learned about grinding coffee
• Mormon founded towns in Utah go North/South

Looks like I’m gonna be busy! Where do I find the time?

Popularity: 3% [?]

This article: The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web is a very interesting survey of RSS and issues that folks in the Science community have to be aware of.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Just announced over on the BlogBridge site, BlogBridge 3.0. Check it out! I think you’ll like it. It has lots of new goodies, too many to mention here, but see the announcement for the juicy details!

Popularity: 3% [?]

BloggerCon IV is going on right now, in California. This is Dave Winer’s original ‘UnConference‘. It’s being incredibly well covered, by blog, photo and podcast. I haven’t come close to reading all the stuff being posted, so these are just some semi-random posts to give you a flavor:

• Dan Farber: The user complaint session
• Dave Winer: Notes from Day 1
• Robert Scoble: BigCo employees should listen to this
• BloggerCon IV docNography
• Nick Bradbury: BloggerCon IV
• Dan Farber: Standards Matter

There’s lots more. Check Technorati!

Technorati Tags: bloggercon

Popularity: 3% [?]

• Guy Kawasaki — Bona tempora volvantu
  Guy Kawasaki’s blog always has good stuff!
  (tags: feed soflow interesting)
• TIME.com Print Page: Nation — Exclusive Book Excerpt: How an Al-Qaeda Cell Planned a Poison-gasAttack on the N.Y. Subway
  Pretty amazing! Worth a quick read
  (tags: politics terrorism nyc)

Popularity: 2% [?]

The other day I complained about comment spam on my two blogs. Comment spam is when fake comments are added to a blog post that include links to some random site. They are supposedly put there by spammers to generate traffic to their sites, as well as try to improve their  site’s ratings in Google. Whether it works for them I don’t know, all I know is that it’s a pain in the butt for me.

I am now using a Movable Type plugin called HMPassphrase. It’s very simple and effective. Whenever anyone wants to post a comment they have to read instructions on the web page and type in a certain word into a certain field. The word is right there in the instructions. It’s super simple and yet the spam robots can’t read the instructions and so can’t enter the magic word and so can’t even submit a comment.

In one magic stroke my comment spam has gone from 10 or so per day, to zero. Nice.

p.s. I am also told that the WordPress Akismet spam filter plug-in is now available for Movable Type too and is very effective. But for now I guess I don’t need it.

Technorati Tags: commentspam

Popularity: 2% [?]

The feature isn’t new, it’s actually pretty old. It’s also very poorly documented. But it’s new to me. I’ve configured del.icio.us to automatically create a post to my blog of all the tags I’ve submitted in the last 24 hours.

If you are a del.icio.us user, look under “settings”, “experimental”, “daily blog posting” for the setting. Then ask me or google for an explanation of what the fields mean.

Combined with the Tagging feature in BlogBridge, it allows me to post to my blog (virtually) with almost no effort. So when I am traveling (like I was the last 2 days) I can still show some semblance of activity on my blog. Very cool.

Will it make me a lazy blogger? What’s a lazy blogger anyway?

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us

Popularity: 2% [?]