I got the following email from a friend today that I hadn’t talked to in a year or so (see – email isn’t dead…). Brad, Just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know I am planning to start using Rally on several projects I am working on as a “Rent-a-cto”. Blog + Marketing = Blarketing I got turned on to these guys from reading about them in your Blog. ...
I stole Matt’s subtitle because it’s so cute. If you are part of either side of the “email is dead, no it’s not” debate, go read Matt’s post on “The Rumors of Email’s Demise …”. I couldn’t have said it better myself – so I won’t – just read what Matt said.
Dick Costolo and his gang at Feedburner have been on the front lines of the podcasting explosion. They’ve got great metrics on the growth and dynamics of podcasting and just put up a post on RSS Metrics, Podcasting that’s must reading for anyone that’s into RSS and/or podcasting.
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 .) ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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: ...