Say something sucks to get on Memeorandum

Use the word “sucks” in a headline and it seems you’ll be more likely to get on Memeorandum. Dang. It’s weird. I think that my post on attention that I wrote the other night is far more important for the industry to read and think about than any of the posts I wrote that use the word “sucks” in the headline. But that didn’t make it to Memeorandum cause it didn’t capture the attention of enough bloggers. ;-)

But, it does get to what I told the audience yesterday: write great headlines. Why? We’re getting thrown so much information that we skim headlines. Plus, many of us are doing headline searches. Still others are visiting sites like Delicious. All of which make writing good headlines more important.

Update: now the attention article is on Memeorandum too. Great, I have three articles on Memeorandum. Will someone link to someone else, please? Of course, this just shows that when I write something new instead of linking to the same stuff everyone else is that it gets more attention.

TDavid notices that WordPress.com sometimes redirects

TDavid notices that my blog sometimes redirects to WordPress.com. Yes, I notice that too.

WordPress.com is in beta. It is a new service. It’s run by 21-year-old Matt Mullenweg and a band of others. I’m sure it’s going to have some rough patches. I note that Six Apart is going through a rough patch of its own and it is older and better funded than WordPress.

Yes, I’m a guinea pig. Lots of people want to know why I don’t go on my own server and do all that. My coworkers at Microsoft are even offering to give me server rack space and help me do a super dooper blog.

The thing is, I know that 99% of people who blog will do so on hosted services. Most people will not see the value in setting up their own server, or co-locating it. In fact, most businesses won’t do that. Look at the popularity of TypePad.

But, I am learning there are severe disadvantages to going with a hosted solution. It’ll be interesting to see if WordPress and TypePad overcome these disadvantages. If they do they’ll see robust businesses build up around them. If not, there’ll be companies like Blogmatrix, What Counts, or Telligent who’ll be happy to jump in and get you setup with your own blog server.

Atiki has cool tag-based interface

It’s fun to watch Web designers play with different interfaces to try to make things easier to use. Atiki just came out with a tag-based interface. Here’s a look at their tech news. It won’t displace Memeorandum, but I’m certainly intrigued!

How are people finding blogs? It’s not blog search engines

Inside Microsoft we have interesting discussions about our blogs. Today Michael Rys sent around his stats. 72.86% of his traffic (about 2500 visits today) came from search engines. 25.84% came from Web sites, including other blogs, .89% came from email. .41% came from news groups. Of the traffic that came from search engines, 94.56% came from Google. 2.49% came from Yahoo. 1.83% came from MSN Search. Does Google have a monopoly in search? I’ll let you answer that question, cause I’m not a lawyer.

Oh, and he also has a blog on http://blogs.msdn.com but that one gets far less of its traffic from search engines, which tells him that not all blog URLs are being rated the same.

Also, blog search engines like Technorati aren’t bringing him any noticeable traffic. That matches what I’m seeing in my referer logs too. I wonder if Google’s blog search is going to change that much. I doubt it. Time-based search isn’t as easy to use as link-based-relevancy-search like what Google’s main engine gives us.

Ajay’s car revealed on TechCrunch

Remember when I was bragging about getting a look at the technology in Ajay’s Juneja’s car? Damn it’s the coolest car I’ve ever ridden in (my son thinks so too, he got a look at it recently too). Well, today Michael Arrington of TechCrunch got a look and brags about the car too. His natural language speech processing system is really superb. I hear Microsoft has something similar in the works. I wonder how it compares? Is this stuff important? Oh, yeah! Bill Gates has been promising this kind of stuff for years. We’re about to see an explosion of voice recognition systems. Ajay says his is lightweight enough that he could run it on a small MP3 playing device, for instance. Oh, now you’re starting to see the commercial value of voice. “Play Black Eyed Peas Shutup” you could say. And it’d start playing.

Ken feels Blogniscient isn’t getting a fair shake

Ken Yarmosh feels that Blogniscient isn’t getting a fair shake.

Ken, the thing is I’ve been using Memeorandum ever since early summer. Blogniscient just got on my radar screen in the past month. It takes time to get a fair shake. I know what Memeorandum does and how it works. I’m not that comfortable yet with Blogniscient.

I’ve been watching both. Sorry to say this, but Memeorandum blows away Blogniscient in the coverage +I+ care about so far. Now, Blogniscient has value. It does sports and entertainment that Memeorandum doesn’t do, but I don’t care about those. I care about the tech industry and so far Memeorandum is one of my “must read” sites along with sites like Digg, Slashdot, Google News, etc. Blogniscient has not yet come up that level for me.

If that means I’m not giving Blogniscient a fair shake, sorry.