Category Archives: Tools

Feedburner frees their TotalStats and MyBrand services (previously part of the PRO subscription)

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image It would seem that those of us who use Feedburner are seeing an early payoff of the acquisition by Google – per the Feedburner blog announcement today:

Beginning today, two of FeedBurner’s previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free. Not in the sense of soaring high above the clouds or recently sprung from the hoosegow, but free like you’ll no longer gladly be billed on Tuesday for a burned feed today.

Very cool to see!  I’ve already activated what is now called “Feedburner Stats PRO” on my main feeds and am looking forward to seeing what other stats I wind up getting.

I’m also VERY pleased to see the “MyBrand” service being made free.  One of my biggest concerns about using Feedburner all along is that people subscribe to the RSS feed at Feedburner’s site.  They are essentially all now Feedburner’s customers (well, now Google’s!).  If for some reasone I ever want to move my feed to some other site, or to host it myself, I basically lose all those folks who have subscribed to the feed via Feedburner.  I have to somehow get them to re-subscribe to my new RSS feed.  The beauty of “MyBrand” is that instead of having an RSS feed set up as:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DisruptiveConversations

I can instead have the feed appear off of my own domain name like this:

http://feeds.disruptiveconversations.com/DisruptiveConversations

While this URL does look a bit repetitive, the point is that should I need to move the RSS feed elsewhere – or should Google someday shut down Feedburner (which I can’t see happening) – the feed URL is under MY control!  I might need to do a web redirect to point “/DisruptiveConversations” to some file like “/rss.xml” but that is something that I can do on my server or service provider.  I’m no longer locked into Feedburner’s service and systems.

Now, I have no reason whatsoever to leave Feedburner.  I’m a very happy user who is not paying a dime and enjoying the stats and all the other many capabilities that Feedburner offers.  But that’s today… and who is to say that sometime in the future I might want to move my feed to somewhere else?  The MyBrand service gives me this flexibility and “insurance”.  Sometime in the next few weeks I’ll make the time to make this transition for all of my feeds.

Thanks, Feedburner team, for making both of these services available to all of your users!

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Pownce pummels you with email notifications… and the inevitable comparisons to Twitter

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On Day 2 of using Pownce – and remembering that it is in “beta” – my initial reaction was one of complete disgust at the sheer number of email messages that the site generates by default.  I mean, who in their right mind would think that people would want email notifications for basically everything that happens on the site?  Now, maybe there are people out there who don’t get as much email as I do, but sheesh…

image Thankfully there is a way to turn off the notifications to reduce the flow.  I think the “Plain message received” is the biggest culprit.  It seems that anytime any of your “friends” send you a message you wind up with an email message letting you know that you have a new message!  Get more than a few friends and… ta da… your email inbox is deluged!  So here would be my #1 feedback item to the developers:

Turn most of the notifications OFF by default!

Maybe just the “Pending friend request” and “Event invite received”.  Or put the notification screen as part of the signup process so that when someone is joining Pownce they see all this and can specify what they want.  All I know is that my initial reaction on opening up my personal email this morning was that I almost immediately wanted to get out of Pownce!

As the bright, shiny object chasers keep moving to Pownce, there are the inevitable comparisons to other darling, Twitter, and while I don’t have the time to write up my own thoughts today, a blogger named Tamar Weinberg posted a nice  comparison: “Twitter vs. Pownce: Who Pwns?” that captures a lot of the differences very nicely, complete with screenshots.   I agree with most of her points.  The biggest difference to me seems to be APIs.  With Pownce you must use either the (non-auto-refreshing) web page or the separate Pownce application.  With Twitter, you can use the (auto-refreshing) web page, but there are now a ton of other apps that allow you to update Twitter.  You can also connect to Twitter from other applications/devices that fit within your normal daily workflow.  So, for instance, when I am in my home office, I use “twitter4skype” to read tweets from friends directly in a Skype IM chat window and post my own updates to Twitter.  When I am on the road, I use my blackberry to SMS in updates (and could read them on my BB via SMS if I wished to do so).  I have also updated Twitter from within Facebook.  The key point is – I don’t have to run yet another app on my PC, or be limited to having to go to a specific web page.

We’ll see.  I like the “Sets” that are part of Pownce, and the idea of sending files is interesting (but, gee, I can do that with any of my IM clients!)… but I really don’t like having to go to the one web page (or using the app).

Noah Mittman also chimed in with a post comparing the two and offering the view that Twitter is aiming at being a multiplatform messaging system while Pownce is aiming to be a multipurpose “sharing” system.  I understand the difference he’s making, but it seems to me that right now people are viewing Pownce as primarily a better version of Twitter.  It still to me is a micro-blogging/status/presence system.  As to the “sharing”, my ongoing thought is that we already have so many different ways to share files and links (as I count the number of IM clients I am running), that I’m not sure we really need yet another.

I think both Pownce and Twitter are stepping stones toward something else that amalgamates all these different communication needs…. I’m not sure what precisely that is (or I’d launch a startup!)…

Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook… and the perpetual quest for the next bright, shiny thing…

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Does this sound familiar?  There is suddenly a site about which absolutely “everyone” you know is suddenly talking.  Suddenly, you have just got to join that site – but of course you must have an invitation and they are hard to get.  You are, though, being asked by all sorts of people you know… who keep telling you how great it is and how this new site will completely revolutionize the Internet and fundamentally alter the way in which we communicate.  Once you give in and join you suddenly find yourself deluged in requests to be added as a “friend” by some people you know and then also by many others you have no clue who they are.  It’s the “new” Internet.  It’s the end of everything old and the start of everything new.  It’s the best invention since sliced bread.  You just gotta see it!

What site am I talking about?

Hmmm… how about Orkut in 2004?

That was certainly the view in those days…. everyone was madly adding Orkut friends, filling out their Orkut profiles… wildly creating “communities” within Orkut and finding new communities to join.  Just like today’s Facebook Groups, you could learn a great amount about someone by the communities they joined.  Private messages were flying back and forth and it was just the place to be, even if many were uncomfortable with the focus of the site on dating.

But then somewhere along the way a good number of folks, myself included, were off to chase the next bright, shiny thing and we stopped checking in to Orkut all that often.  Spam increased within the site, the Brazilians took over … and the rest is history.  There are obviously still a lot of folks using the site, and occasionally I get a message in email that reminds me I need to go visit (usually to remove the “scraps” that spammers leave).

The pattern repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats….

After Orkut, the place to be was LinkedIn… Friendster… Xing… LiveJournal… MySpace… today’s darling seems to be Facebook.

Over the past months “presence services” have seemed to be the rage.  First it was Twitter… then there was a “great migration” over to Jaiku…. then some folks started thinking Facebook status updates were the best… meanwhile all the IM addicts were wondering how these new services were all that different from the IM “advisory” or “mood” messages people had been changing for some time.  (And fundamentally they really aren’t different, except that you can get them via RSS or on a web page and thus have a history.)

image Now, today, some of the Twitter-addicted seem to be convinced that Pownce is the next bright, shiny thing and it will solve all the problems with Twitter and bring us to communication nirvana.  Naturally, being a professional chaser of bright, shiny things, I had to sign up for Pownce.  First impression is that it’s a lot like Twitter with better replies and a way to have both public posts and also ones only visible to your friends.  (Which, of course, I’ve had from a blogging point of view with my LiveJournal account since back in 2004.) Okay, and it has its own desktop software.

Of course, to use it means that I have to rebuild a list of “friends” similar to the lists I already have in all the aforementioned presence, IM and social networking services.  I will, naturally, because there is something in my mental makeup that compels me to try out new services like this.

Meanwhile, of course, someone else is telling me that Hictu.com is really the place to be… if I’ll just go there and sign up, the mist will be lifted from my eyes and everything will be amazingly clear.   Hmmmmm…..

Ken Camp starts a new series of posts on Jaiku and the new client for Nokia S60 phones

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(Originally posted over on my Disruptive Telephony blog… but I thought it made sense here as well.)

imageI have not really written about Jaiku here at all… I have been meaning to explore it a bit more, but just haven’t had the time.  What limited time I have had lately has been more focused on Twitter, Facebook, Skype and the evolving mashups of all of those.

But Ken Camp has been writing and advocating Jaiku, and is starting a series of posts with his one today: “Unveiling the new Jaiku Client for Nokia – Part 1”  Ken is going to talk more about the new client for Nokia S60 phones.  But this part of his first post is perhaps more revealing:

First, if you aren’t a Jaiku user today, you need to understand that Jaiku is what I call a lifestream aggregator. When you build your profile, you have complete control over what you wish to share of your lifestream of information. For many, that’s simply their Jaikus. Using this approach, a used can share brief snippets of information – current status, pose a question, leave a thought – for others to see.

Digging more deeply into Jaiku, we find you can also import RSS feeds of all flavors into your lifestream. For me, this means if you read my lifestream, you see blog posts from three different blogs, Flickr photos, blip.tv video posts, even Twitter posts. I’ll explain more about why I think this approach is revolutionary and exciting in a post tomorrow or Friday. It’s taken me a while as a Jaiku user to develop an appreciation for just why this is apprach to aggregation is really important. I think it’s positively revolutionary from a social networking perspective.

I agree with Ken that this type of “lifestream aggregation” represents a direction in which social networking is evolving.  The challenge, I think, really comes back to where you do that aggregation.  Jaiku would like to be your aggregator.  So would Twitter (which can bring in RSS feeds through sites like Twitterfeed.com).  And so indeed would Facebook which now includes an RSS application as part of its platform.

So which do you choose?

All are, to varying degrees, walled gardens of some sort.  Ken can’t follow my status updates because I primarily use Twitter.  Alec Saunders does most all his updates within Facebook.   We do need to have some kind of common aggregator.   We need to tear down the walls so that we don’t wind up in isolated islands of communication.

But in the meantime, if you want to read about how pretty and nice it is inside of the walled garden of Jaiku, head on over to Ken’s post to read more.  This is Part 1, with the others to follow soon thereafter, I would expect.

Technorati – where has the "Sort by Authority" gone for search results?

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Am I missing something?  Prior to Technorati’s recent redesign, I was rather sure that there was a way to sort your search results by “Authority”…. I seem to recall using the feature many times to find out who were the most “authoritative” bloggers talking about a particular topic.  While Technorati’s Authority measure isn’t perfect, it does at least give some sense of how popular a given blog is.  Sorting the search results by authority gave you a sense of which blogs to perhaps take a look at first.

I am, however, questioning my own memory – was this feature there before the redesign?  Or did I just imagine it?

Today, post-re-design, I can’t for the life of me find that ability in any of the search results.  Yes, I can filter the results based on authority (i.e. specify the amount of authority to be returned: “any”, “a little”, “some”, “a lot”) which can help, but I can’t seem to find any way to re-order the search results.  I get them in reverse chronological order (newest first). Period. End of story. 

Am I missing something?  Or is there no way to do this in Technorati?

If not, does anyone have any suggestions for how to do it? (or other sites that make this easy?)

Microsoft rolls out "Silverlight" to compete with Adobe Flash… can it succeed with Flash’s huge installed base?

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Yesterday Alec Saunders’ “Silverlight vs. Flash: the battle for the platform” was where I first learned that Microsoft was officially releasing “Silverlight“, the product previously known as “Windows Presentation Framework/Everywhere (WPF/E)” (and yes, I’ll agree that “Silverlight” rolls off the tongue a bit better than “WPF/E”…. (although not quite as easily as “Flash” but perhaps all the good one-syllable words have been taken)).  The press release shows some pretty impressive support (but you would expect that) and it’s definitely great to see Microsoft also providing a version for Mac OSX as well as the other browsers of Firefox and Safari.  To quote official materials:

Microsoft Silverlight will enable content providers to deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications that incorporate media, graphics, animation, and much, much more with full application functionality on both Windows and Mac platforms and inside IE, Firefox and Safari. Silverlight users will also enjoy compatibility with the broad ecosystem of Windows Media (VC-1) enabled tools and solutions, including existing and upcoming IIS and Windows Streaming Media server technologies.

Microsoft blogger Tim Sneath provides more details which definitely sound interesting…. I need to investigate XAML more personally, but I like a lot of what I read there.  The ways in which video are to be supported are also intriguing to me.   As hinted here and other places, there will be more announcements at Microsoft’s upcoming (and sold out) MIX conference April 30th.  There has obviously been a ton of blogging about this since the announcement, but here are some links I found of interest:

With, as Alec says, Adobe Flash already installed on 84% of desktops, how good are Microsoft’s chances of success?  Flash has been out there for many years now, has a very strong developer community and has a great number of tools to help in Flash creation.

Despite that, I have to say that Microsoft’s chances are probably quite strong, for several reasons:

  1. Microsoft has an incredibly strong developer community, and looks to be integrating this Silverlight into its development tools, including the .Net framework.
  2. Microsoft has incredible desktop and browser penetration (which leads to #1).
  3. They are making this available for other browsers and for MacOS X with apparently the identical capabilities.
  4. They are stating support for
  5. They are being very open and transparent about all that they are doing.

To this last point, I would reference Tim Sneath’s followup post about feedback to the Silverlight announcement, where he talks about the fact that he’s left intact all the blog comments and addresses several points directly and ends with this:

Our success or failure with Silverlight is contingent on whether we satisfy developers like yourselves – time will tell how we do, but I hope that you’ll at least give us a chance to earn your trust.

Kudos to Tim for the openness and honesty and yes, they’ll have to earn our trust, but at least in the mind of this writer (who has a very strong Linux and open source background) they are certainly off to a good start.  Let’s see what comes next…

P.S. And yes, Adobe also announced their Media Player to further increast the battle between the two companies.. but I’ll take a look at that separately in another post at some point. And yes, it would have been great if MS also announced a version of Silverlight for Linux desktops, too (which Adobe does have)… but, hey, I do give them credit for providing a Mac version and also supporting other browsers.

Technorati Authority Widget does NOT do what I thought…

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Hmmm.. so the “Technorati Authority Widget” I mentioned in my previous post (and described on the Technorati blog and Tools page) does NOT do what I thought it would do.  Based on this:

What’s your Authority? Are you considered an authoritative blogger who’s fluid prose rakes in link love by the bushel? Now you can proudly display your official Technorati Authority with our new Authority Widget.

I assumed that the widget would return your Technorati “ranking”.  Instead, it returns “the number of blogs that link to you”, which is an okay thing to display… but not my expectation.   It’s also the opposite of the “ranking” in that you want a higher link count.

It seems to me that Technorati needs to clarify, at least for this widget, what they mean by your “official Technorati Authority” because they have two (well, really three) measures in their stats (example – stats for this blog):

  1. Technorati Ranking: lower is better – ranking of your blog against all others based on some metric Technorati developed. Down side is that widget could get quite huge due to large numbers and there is also little incentive for someone who is #1,891,345 to put it on their blog.
  2. Number of blogs that link to you: higher is better – number of blogs that have linked to your site in the last 6 months.  Appears to be a major input into “ranking” and is a good sign of potential “authority” of blog.  Widget size is probably no issue because count grows up and realistically won’t get too high (top blog list currently has high of 26,866). More bloggers might use it because again it is counting up and not on such a massive scale as the “ranking”.
  3. Number of links from other blogs: higher is better – number of links to your blog from the blogs counted in #2.  Useful in that some blogs might link to you many times.  The challenge is how to interpret the number.  Knowing that a blog was linked to several times by a highly-regarded blog is useful information.  Having it linked to many times by a spam blog (or one of the author’s other blogs) is not terribly useful.  This number would seem very easy to game.

Obviously they have chosen #2 for this widget… but my feedback to the Technorati folks would be to clarify in the text on their Tools page exactly what this widget is showing.

Technorati rolls out new widgets for blog authority, tag clouds, top searches…

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UPDATE: See my follow-up post about how the “Technorati Authority Widget” does not work like I thought it would. 

I enjoy the fact that the folks at Technorati continue to roll out new tools of interest to bloggers.  This month brought new sidebar widgets for tag clouds, the top technorati tags and also for blog authority.  While I haven’t yet decided whether I do want to add them to my sidebar, they are interesting to consider.  I’m going to try posting the “blog authority” widget here in an entry, primarily because Technorati’s tools page says that it may take a bit to generate the widget:

View blog authority

I will be honest, though, and wonder how many people will actually use it outside of the truly “top-ranked” bloggers. I mean, currently this blog is ranked around 42,000, which, out of 71 million blogs, is admittedly quite good.  But is it good enough that I really want to clutter up my sidebar with something like that? (As well as adding yet one more thing to delay the loading of my page?)  I don’t know…  I’d need to think about that a bit.

I also don’t know about adding the tag cloud… but I’m thinking about the top tags, if for no other reason than the fact that it’s interesting to see one way to view “the pulse” of what people are talking about.  (And I see my own blogs whenever I post, which means that I would see the list of top tags, which might then make me curious about what people are writing about.)

P.S. And yes, regarind the “authority widget”, I fully realize that Technorati rankings are a very imperfect way of understanding how “important” a blog may or may not be… but until someone else comes along with something better, it’s one of the few tools we have in our arsenal, IMHO.

Is OpenID really secure? Can you trust it? A Security Round Table podcast explores the issue… and provides a ton of links

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What is OpenID? What are the security issues around it? Should you trust using it? What do you have to be worried about? What are the main security threats to it?

While I’ve mentioned here why bloggers should care about OpenID (and written more about it over on DisruptiveTelephony), I really wanted to understand more about the security issues around OpenID, so I got together with two other members of the Security Round Table, Michael Santarcangelo and Martin McKeay, to explore the issues around OpenID and security to a far greater degree.

We have shared the resulting conversation as a SRT podcast, and have also published as the show notes the large body of links that we accumulated during our preparation for the show.  I’d encourage you to check out the SRT site purely for the links alone, as I think we pulled together one of the more comprehensive lists of links I’ve seen related to OpenID.

In the end, the three of us came aware quite impressed with the possibilities of OpenID with regard to the specific piece of the identity puzzle that it is aiming to solve.  We hope this podcast helps people understand both the potential benefits as well as a few potential challenges with regard to security and OpenID.  Comments and feedback are very definitely welcome.

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Trying to kill a buzz in a podcast with Audacity

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Frustrating night tonight… I was doing the post-production on a Blue Box Special Edition podcast of the 90-minute workshop that I did along with podcast co-host Jonathan Zar and security researcher Shawn Merdinger out at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference last month.  Unfortunately, even though I’d jacked into the mixer provided at ETel (or perhaps because I was connected into the mixer), I wound up with an annoying buzz throughout the recording.   I can only guess that it was something with one of the audio components in the setup for the room out there at ETel.  I’ve seen a buzz be created by something as simple as a bad wire or a connector not fully inserted into a jack.  In any event, I wound up with a buzz.

Since I had solved (and blogged about) a similar issue before using Audacity, I spent literally a couple of hours trying to kill off the buzz.  I used hi-pass filters…. notch filters… equalizer effects… all sorts of things.  Searched the web, the Audacity wiki and more.  Unfortunately, this particular buzz seemed to be located right down on the end of the frequency spectrum where our voices are also located!  So when I used a high-pass filter to allow through only frequencies over, say, 300 Hertz, you could hear the effect on our voices.  If I moved the high-pass filter down to say 100 Hz, there was no impact on our voices, but the buzz was still at full strength.  Move it up to 500 or 600 Hz and the buzz was reduced… but so was the quality of our voices.

Wanting to get this episode posted today, I finally gave up and ran it as it was recorded, which was not overly appealing to me.  I always strive to have the highest audio quality possible, which is why I spend the time I do on post-production.  But in the end, there was just no way I could figure it out.  Perhaps with better tools… or more time… perhaps not.  Fun, fun, fun…