It’s very interesting watching someone use an RSS Aggregator for the first time. Maryam finally got interested in it after hearing me talk for the past three years about how much more productive it is to read people’s blogs in a news aggregator.

She just frustrated me asking “how come I can’t find a feed on Anita Rowland’s blog?” I answered back “if your feed reader was decent it should just tell you that there’s a feed there.”

But, personally, I hate blogs that don’t have an orange icon to explain they have a feed. Here are the two icons you should have on your page if you have a feed (choose one — I like the “old-school” XML icon, but that’s just me — the trick is to have at least ONE of these on your page so that visually your readers will know instantly that you have an RSS or Atom feed to subscribe to):

The BBC goes with an “RSS” orange icon, which is OK with me, since it’s still simple to figure out. I LOVE how they handle the icon (far better than how I do it on my blog). They put a “What is RSS?” link next to the icon. I should do that here.

Anyway, Maryam finally whined enough to get me to pull up Anita’s blog in both IE and Firefox, looking for a freaking feed. NewsGator and Attensa can’t find one. I can’t find one.

Blogs without RSS feeds piss me off. But now I remember why I don’t read Anita anymore even though everytime I’m at her blog I like what she writes about.

Non-English bloggers have another problem: they might have a feed but their feed might break RSS News Aggregators. For instance, this Persian blogger’s feed breaks Apple’s Safari, which is how Maryam is trying to subscribe to various feeds.

If you don’t make your RSS feed easy to find and use, you’re losing readers.

Oh, and please do subscribe to my feed.

BoingBoing posted an update on that jailed videojournalist (he also does a video blog), Josh Wolf. Turns out there’s a fundraiser tomorrow night in San Francisco.

MySpace went to Google.
Facebook went to Microsoft.
Who’ll get YouTube?

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7.0 team detailed the CSS/Web Standards changes that are being made and also discussed the Web Standards Project’s participation.

Google just announced a new Google Base data API. This is significant for developers. Will be interesting to see what happens becaus of it. Thanks to Richard MacManus for letting us know.

Now we know why they hired Vic Gundotra. You can see that Google is going to build a whole developer program.

Diego Rodriguez writes about how General Motors is using Flickr.

Here’s one thing I learned from Thomas Hawk, though. He says if you want a lot of traffic from Google Images that you have to upload your images using Google’s Picasa instead of to Yahoo’s service.

Sounds like Google is penalizing Flickr, right? Well, probably not explicitly Thomas told me. Instead Google’s algorithm biases on URL names. So, if you are searching Google Images for “Cool Cars” then Google will bring back images with the name in the URL. Picasa, when it uploads, includes the file names you give your photos in the URL. Flickr changes those to numbers.

Oh, and the melons? They were in the Stanford Mall today. Nice melons, huh?

Heheh. I just wanted to write a post with a cool car photo in it.

If you think Michael Gartenberg is joking about his three laws for marketing consumer electronics, I’ll guarantee you he isn’t. That dude has more gadgets than anyone I know except for maybe Vic “gadget ho” Gundotra. Love this thought: “Getting the first 50,000 is a milestone. Getting 500,000 and 5,000,000 is where it matters. Enthusiasts won’t get you there but influencers will.”

Yikes, the MyKin bus (I’ve written about their cross-country trip before) burned up. Yeah, I missed that, but there’s more on their blog.

One thing I’ve come to appreciate about blogging is that people I trust write me stuff and it comes to my RSS News Aggregator. Here’s an awesome example. Scott Hanselman is a developer I’ve known and come to trust (he works with my brother, for instance) and here he raves about FinePrint — says “I literally can’t overstate how much this application has changed the way I use my computer and my printer.”

Who am I? Everytime I forget I just go to Wikipedia and it reminds me.

Seriously, I’m suprised at the amount of data in Wikipedia about me. I haven’t looked for a while and it’s all up to date. Disclaimer: not a single word here has been written by, or edited by, me. Thanks to everyone who has put something on this page about me!

Juha Saarinen notices that IE 7 says that my blog is not secure. Is it my bad breath? My egotistical rantings? My attempt at defining the undefinable. Speaking of which a bird has been leaving a blog on my windshield lately. How do I know it’s a blog? It’s in reverse-chronilogical order (newest “post” is on top of the older “post”). Oh, and it is even publicly-discoverable. I can even permalink to it, if I had a Flickr photo of it. It must be a blog, right?

But, back to IE 7, not sure why I’m not secure. I’ll try to fix something on my side, if there’s something I’m doing wrong.

Todd Bishop, in the Seattle PI, compares sales of Xbox 360, PS2, and GameCube sales, both before Xbox 360 came out and after. That reminds me, I gotta get our Xbox back from Patrick so Maryam can play Pacman this weekend. Heheh.

Update: TDavid talks about wading through Seattle’s “Maddeniacs” last night. I love the smile on his son’s face too! Can’t wait to hear the review.

Lots of movement on the new Zillow API (130 new sites). The Zillowblog has the details and a list of cool mashups.

I love listening to Tom Raftery speak about podcasting and tech. Makes me pine for a pint of Murphy’s stout (local drink in Cork, Ireland). Tom runs the IT@Cork conference and talks about what’s happening in the tech industry in Ireland. Oh, and one of Automattic’s developers, Donncha O Caoimh, lives in Ireland (Automattic makes Wordpress, which is how I publish my blog). I like their “about page.” This interview was done by John Furrier, who gets interviewed by Tom halfway through the interview too and shares a bit about what he’s thinking about for PodTech.

Don Dodge answered back my earlier post with another post. Who said blogs aren’t conversational?

He said something interesting: “Advertising is the game, and you need HUGE numbers to make that work.”

Wrong!

I know of a conference that charges $10,000 (or more) to get on stage to talk to about 700 people. Not a huge audience. But they always seem to have a full deck of sessions. That’s an advertising model.

In fact, didn’t the Search Engine Strategies conference sell for tens of millions of dollars? For a tiny audience! And some conferences, like the defunct Comdex (which had an audience smaller than we had at Channel 9) sold for hundreds of millions. Right?

In fact, didn’t 7,000 people come to Microsoft’s conference and they paid more than a grand a piece to be there? Not a huge audience and advertisers paid big bucks to get in front of that audience.

Some blogs (not me, yesterday I had 17,818 HTML views and 30,575 RSS subscribers) already are seeing millions of visitors per day (hello Boing Boing!)

Not to mention that Huffington Post, which is what got the $5 million in funding, is obviously not a single-person blog.

I remember working for a company with a magazine that had tens of millions in revenues and only around 100,000 subscribers.

Translation: get the right audience and you can make things happen.

But, political sites are seeing nice trend lines up and wait until the next Presidential Election!

Speaking of which, most plays of any kind are not bankable. Just ask Bill Gates to take you out to the product graveyard out by building 16 up in Redmond. There are hundreds of products listed there and I can only remember a handful making money. Most aren’t even around anymore.

Something is happening in media and the VCs just want to be involved.

Or, did you miss that Digg has built an audience somewhere around a million per day and it’s not even two years old? Kevin Rose, last week at the TechCrunch party, told me that just their podcast, Diggnation, gets 250,000 downloads per show.

Would you invest in Kevin Rose? I sure would.

There will be more Kevin’s. And Om’s. And Michaels.

Who’s next?

Paul is our VC. He lives upstairs above us in PodTech’s temporary headquarters inside USVP’s headquarters on Sand Hill Road (aka: the money bubble). I’ve just sent him this video from BetterBadNews that calls on Venture Capitalists to compete for their business. Hell, I’m gonna beat him to it. I just called the number and left a message.

Anyway, I love this line from the video: “ScccSssscccoble was going tell everybody about it.” Heheh, I should charge for THAT, if I had any business sense. After all, I just told all my competitors about this cool video show that, if I had any freaking business sense, I should keep as quiet as possible about.

But what fun would that be?

I bet that Venture Capitalists Rick Segal or Fred Wilson or Brad Feld or Jeff Clavier or David Hornick already called them.

Take Digg + Ruby on Rails + Entertainment Weekly and add them all up and you get PopCurrent, which is just about 60 days old now. This is site that copies Digg’s look and feel but that focuses on entertainment media rather than tech stories. Lots of entertaining video and podcasts rated here.

I was just talking with master developer Ray Slakinski (he did one of the first podcasting aggregators, iPodderX) and he was showing me around PopCurrent and explaining to me the challenges of running a Web 2.0 business that’s less than two months old.

He says most of his traffic comes from MySpace.

Not much traffic comes from traditional search engines yet, but he notices that he’s seeing growth there. He says he is getting tens of thousands of unique visitors per day. The bands there, he tells me, are always trying to find new ways to get noticed and so they talk up when they are high on PopCurrent. Also, people who have podcasts who might have 500 to 1,000 listeners talk it up as well.

Two programmers, who live in Toronto, did this site in Ruby on Rails. It’s been open since June.

One of his favorite video shows that gets featured on PopCurrent? HopeIsEmo, which is a show done by a goth girl. A sad goth girl. But, it’s funny. Thanks Ray for letting me know about that!

What makes eBay special? To me it’s not the technology, although that’s pretty damn impressive, especially now. But what sets eBay apart is the community of buyer’s and sellers. I was wondering when we’d see a search engine that’d add both a community of recommenders with an indexer like the one Google has and I just saw what could become just that in Evaal.

It’s very raw, and very early, but I like the impulse of Timothy Anyasi, founder of Idpact, Inc. who makes Evaal, a search engine that matches the power of an indexer , along with the community power which makes a better search experience (in theory).

He called me and asked what I thought. Here’s the scenario. You want to search for a Rolodex Watch. Go to Google and instantly get lost. Too many choices. There’s no way for you to pick out who is good, credible, or who won’t steal your money.

So, instead you go to Evaal. Here’s a search on Evaal for “watches.”

Why won’t someone game this and send me to their brother instead of sending me to a good retailer who’ll treat me well? Well, same way you can tell eBay sellers who are good or not. The community rates them.

The problem? There aren’t enough community members. So, most pages don’t have experts to ask.

The other problem with Evaal? The base index isn’t nearly good enough for me to take it seriously and the UI isn’t good enough to get my recommendation (I HATE frames, for instance, and it doesn’t have the polish that a modern Web site requires for a mass audience — they need to hire a designer who can at least get them up to parity with, say, Digg’s UI).

But, this is an interesting idea and one I’d like to see explored.

The advantage for you to get involved early is that if they fix the UI and index issues they’ll start getting an audience and if you’re the first “recommender” on a page you’ll have a lot of power to help refer search users elsewhere.

Why is that important? Well, say you refer someone to a realtor. Did you know that many realtors will pay a referral fee? Same with Amazon. Same with hosting companies and a whole host of businesses.

Interesting idea! I wonder why anyone hasn’t put an eBay style community onto a search engine before?

Don Dodge doesn’t understand why anyone would invest $5 million in a blogger.

Here’s a question for Don: would you have invested $5 million in Howard Stern? How about Oprah Winfrey? Martha Stewart? Rush Limbaugh? Jon Stewart? Back when those five people were nobodies?

I would have. Oprah alone is worth more than a billion. Not too shabby of a return. Don’t think any bloggers could become worth that much?

Well, I remember when Rush Limbaugh was a ”nobody” only on one radio station in Sacramento, CA.

Why did I like WetPaint and PBWiki? Because they were drop-dead simple to get in and setup. Just enter a URL. I didn’t like Jot because they forced you to look at too many choices before you got to that stage. But, Jot just shipped a new version and WOW it’s a lot better and once you get in it has a ton of features too. I like how it shows a normal, non-geeky user, what’s possible once inside too.

What wiki tool passes your “Blink” test? What is important to you in a wiki tool?