I find online blog-related survey’s peculiar since they have so much selection bias built in (e.g. the bloggers are going to be the ones responding, who pass around the surveys, just like I’m doing here.) However, as my mother says, I’m shameless, so it’s with little trepidation that I make it know to readers of my blog that Fast Company is doing a survey on best venture capital blogs. Vote early and often.
Feedburner continues to impress – they just announced some new features, including FeedCount. Dick, Eric, and crew have taken “Keep It Simple and Sloppy” to heart – they release early, often, and incrementally – trying lots of stuff to see what works, how it works, and why it works.
If you have a blog and don’t use Feedburner to manage your feed, you should take a look immediately. It’s by far the best feed analytic engine and – with all the new functionality they are adding – quickly become a core part of the blog management infrastructure. FeedCount is an example of how they can quickly leverage what they’ve built – with a single HREF, I can add a chicklet to my blog listing the current number of subscribers.
I’ve been enjoying watching my Feedburner stats increase steadily. However, recently I put a web stats package on my web server to see what was going on. I was completely surprised to see my “old” RSS feeds (the defaults from my Movable Type installation – index.xml, atom.xml, and index.rdf) showing up as frequently visited pages.
Dick Costolo at Feedburner called me a knucklehead (in a kind and generous way) and pointed me to the solution on their site. Since I’m a Linux-lameo it never occurred to me that I needed to either delete or redirect my old files since (a) I didn’t realize they were there and (b) it didn’t occur to me that all the random feed readers in the world would pick up different RSS feeds (rather than the one that I wanted folks to get – my Feedburner one.)
So – now whenever subscribes to my blog – 100% of the feeds should run through Feedburner. I’ve already seen a nice jump in the last hour so it looks like this is working.
If you have are having trouble with my feed, simply subscribe here.
As a hardcore NewsGator user (and investor), I’ve been a heavy user of several of the NewsGator plug-ins.
As the number of feeds I monitor has increased, I have found that one of the more annoying things with some feeds is that rather than provide all the content of the article, they provide a very short description. For feeds that I skim or watch headlines, this is no big deal. However, for feeds that I read religiously, this is truly annoying. In a lot of cases, the feed publisher could easily change this (for example, Typepad feeds commonly default to 40 word digests, but it’s easy to change it to the entire content) – however, my guess is that many people don’t know this and it’s not obvious in the setup. In some cases, I imagine this is deliberate on the part of the feed publisher to drive traffic to their web site.
Fetchlinks solves this problem. It’s a simple, free plug-in to NewsGator that retrieves the entire web page for the feed. It’s simple to install (takes about two minutes) and can be configured by feed within NewsGator. You turn it on only for the feeds you want to download the full page for – the rest of the feeds remain unchanged.
Technical Note: If you are already a NewsGator User and want to know how this works:
If you aren’t a NewsGator user, try it free for 14 days (shameless promotion acknowledged).
I just got my first RSS Feed Ad via my eWEEK Technology News Feed.
ADV: Learn more about a Xerox Phaser (R) 8400 and WIN a 50″ HDTV
eWEEK Technology News [Matthew_rothenberg@ziffdavis.com]
Conversation: ADV: Learn more about a Xerox Phaser (R) 8400 and WIN a 50″ HDTV
Posted: Tue 7/6/2004 1:58 PM
Posted To: eWEEK Technology News
https://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;7197092;5913751;r?https://clk.atdmt.com/DEN/go/zffdvopb00100667den/direct/
Get sizzling performance at a brilliant price with the world’s fastest color printer at 24 ppm. Best for small, frequent print jobs.
I guess it’s time to create an Outlook rule to junk anything with ADV: in it.
Feedburner implemented an upgrade to their statistics page today. It’s solid progress.
I’ve written about the issue of blog stats in the past. This is an area that both as a blogger and an investor I’m particularly interested in because of my historical involvement (and success) with several analytics companies (I use the phrases analytics, stats, and metrics interchangeably). Fred Wilson and Pamela Parker have also posted recently on the issues of stats and Matt Blumberg, Fred, and I have had several discussions about this in the past few weeks as we try to figure out what our reader adoption looks like.
Feedburner has come up with a new concept called circulation as their core measurement. Their definition of circulation is “an approximate measure of the number of individuals for whom your feed has been requested in the last 24 hours. Circulation is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Circulation is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.”
So – rather than struggle with hit counts and trying to correlate to a measurement that doesn’t mean anything, the Feedburner guys have done something that is fundamentally simple and smart. Whether they realized it or not, they’ve used a concept Jerry Colonna coined in the mid 1990’s called “the analog analog”. Whenever Jerry and I talked about a potential investment, one of the first things that he’d ask is “what is the real world, non-digital analogy” (later shortened to “what is the analog analog”). A decade later I still use the concept regularly (ok – I stopped for a few months – er – a year or two – around the turn of the century).
Feedburner’s analog analog is – circulation stats in the publishing industry. In Dick Costolo’s post about Feedburner’s New Detailed Statistics Page he states the analog analog clearly as follows.
“The key is to think of circulation in much the way, well, commercial publishers think of it. It represents the best current approximation of how many people you reached today, via the various agents reporting back to us through feed accesses. This number is particularly interesting as a trend over time.”
Nice job Dick and the Feedburner crew – my stats are more useful today then they were yesterday.
It’s Sunday evening and I’m sitting at my computer catching up on email from the weekend listening to The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking by Roger Waters. Amy is upstairs watching The Horse Whisperer, which I have no interest in.
I receive an email from john.wiley721@bigblog.com with the subject line [Feld Thoughts] New Comment Posted to ‘What do my blog stats really mean?’. I know this is an email to approve a comment. A little warning light goes off in my mind since this is an old post, but I hit Reply and send back an email that says “Thanks for the comment.” I then go to approve the comment and as I’m doing this, notice that the comment info is as follows:
IP Address: 140.131.117.6
Name: オンラインカジノ
Email Address: john.wiley721@bigblog.com
Comments:
Wonderful work. I enjoyed read your site a lot.
href=”https://casino-jp.com”>オンラインカジノ
While I’m thinking about https://casino-jp.com and why it would be in the post (duh…), my email thank you bounces:
john.wiley721@bigblog.com on 6/13/2004 8:13 PM
You do not have permission to send to this recipient. For assistance, contact your system administrator.
mail.hotbank.com #5.7.1 smtp;550 5.7.1 john.wiley721@bigblog.com… Relaying denied
Then – nine more emails show up in my inbox – same drill – but comments for different posts. The emails are from john.wiley721@bigblog.com, johnhanco@myblog.com, nathanbartrim1939@hotmail.com, and john_hopkins@joeblog.com.
A pattern clearly has emerged.
I delete the emails and go to Movable Type and delete the comments. It’s pretty clear where this is going.
There are probably some deep sighs at Six Apart. Hopefully it stays up :).
It appears Typepad has been down for a while (since last night?). On 6/11/04, Everything Typepad! posted a “Scheduled Downtime June 12, 2004” which said the service would be down for maintenance from 12:00am to 2:00am – likely less. It’s 8:12am EST and it’s still down. Oops.
In my experience, all hosted software providers experience unexpected downtime – often early as they are ramping their service. I remember Ebay’s 12 hour outage, Critical Path’s two day outage, and a variety of hosting services taking thousands of sites off-line. You can almost see the technical people staring at the computers mumbling to themselves “Oh shit – I can’t get this back up – something’s toast and I can’t figure it out – beepers going off – panic sets in – sweat – focus – the magic reboot dance and incantation – nothing – guess I’ve got to call the boss in the middle of the night and share my stress with him”.
Hopefully the folks Six Apart / Typepad do the right thing after the successfully restore their service. IMHO, the right thing is:
1. Apologize profusely to their customers.
2. Provide one month of free service if it’s down for a substantial period of Saturday.
This would generate huge goodwill. Acknowledging a problem like this is important to building long term trust with your customers (I saw some posts on Trust yesterday, but alas, they are on Typepad hosted sites that I can’t link to right now). Typepad should be clear this is not an “entitlement” in the future, but instead should thank their earlier users with this type of acknowledgement.