Torres Talking: Blogging

More blog goodbyes

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 05:24:10 GMT

Omar has the right idea here:

I unsubscribed from every blog that has "staff". This includes longtime favorites like LifeHacker. Seriously, most of the stuff there has nothing to do with Life Hacking any more. It's just tech news. Long ago I unsubscribed from Engadget. Don't miss it one bit.
Bottom line is this. If I don't read my RSS feeds for a week, and there are > 100 posts from you to sift through then you've just lost a reader.

shahine.com/omar/ - More Posts = More Money

He and I had been talking about this over IM a couple weeks ago, and I decided to follow his lead on this. I unsubscribed from any blog that generates more than about 30 posts/week (Omar chose 100) whether they have staff or not, and I plan on using TechMeme, CNET News.com, and hopefully someday a better meme aggregator to keep up on things instead. Some great blogs, itching to make a living off of the medium, have fallen victim to quantity over quality. I don't need to know about every new memory card coming to market or hear more about why Facebook is the shiny new thing this week.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago - a post that was linked from TechCrunch (pretty cool) and ended up causing some stir (likely thanks to Dare's "oh so true" link and commentary) - I had already unsubscribed from a bunch of A-listers. My 350+ feeds are now down to well under 180, which means I'm able to get through them in about 15 minutes just a few times/day. I'm going to continue to use Google Reader's trends feature to see which feeds produce the most content and unsubscribe to more every day. I mean really, what's the point in reading the same thing fifteen times, all sourced from one of five "press blogs" who got an exclusive?

If you told me a year ago that an information diet was in the cards for me, I would tell you you're nuts. I love information. But there has to be a better way. Which leads me to the question of the year: what happened to the "innovation" in RSS? Where's the "information agent" that doesn't treat RSS items like emails that have to be cleared out, but instead groups "like" items, bubbles up the most important, and doesn't make "reading the paper" feel like a complete chore? As much as I love my reader, there are better ways to do this.

A-listers don't always "get it"

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:43:33 GMT

It used to be fun watching the "A-list" bloggers discover the obvious things that folks outside the U.S., little kids, and even big companies have been tracking for months; sometimes years. It was hilarious when they first discovered YouTube or MySpace, and it's even funnier to see them all up in a tizzy about Facebook now like it's a new thing.

It's as if they don't realize they're the ones who have been missing from the scene, not the other way around. It's just so uninteresting. Ah well. Unsubscribed!

Gizmodo - Unsubscribed!

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 19:22:27 GMT

For the umpteenth time, Gizmodo has offended my sensibilities between 9-5 and published content that is very much "not safe for work". I view reading Gizmodo (and other gadget/hightech blogs) as a critical piece of my job in the industry, but their recent "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Wearing Nothing But an iPod" post did it for me.

I just clicked Unsubscribe in Bloglines. Forget this. I'm not going to offend my co-workers just so I can read Gizmodo. Thanks, but I'll just stick to Engadget instead.

How to track comments (finally!)

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 22:51:10 GMT

I've been blogging since 2002 - first on my own hosted blog powered by Blogger, then on Strengthjournal.com using .Text, and now on MSN / Windows Live Spaces since our release in December 2004. And the single, most annoying thing about being a quote-unquote blogger to me is tracking the "disconnected conversation".

It used to be easy back in the early days of the Internet. I frequented the same boards just about everyday... and everything was threaded. So if I replied to someone, most NNTP applications provided a way to flag the conversation so that I wouldn't miss it when someone replied back. Boards were frequently integrated into email clients (provided you knew how to set that up) so everything was sort of in your face all the time. Well, times have changed. Not a week goes by where I don't leave a comment on someone's blog and think to myself, "fantastic - now I have to remember and check to see if someone replies back".

Sure, sometimes the blog service has comment-level RSS feeds... but I really don't want to flood my RSS subscriptions with a bunch of comment feeds. And some services provide email notification, but that's pretty rare. I've talked to Dare about the need for RSS Bandit to support disconnected conversation tracking, and it looks like he's trying to sneak into the next verson of Bandit dubbed Nightcrawler. Yet Bloglines (still my reader of choice despite its stagnation) doesn't have a good way to track conversations, so I'm out of luck no matter what.

Because of this frustration, I find myself commenting a lot less than I normally would. Or I leave a comment and never return back to the source to see how the conversation progresses (except in the case of Scoble's blog; whenever I comment there I can't help myself from bookmarking the page and returning every so often).

So today, I decided to try out Commentful after seeing a link on Digg to see how well it meets my needs.

So far, it's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Here's how it works and how I intend to use it:

When I leave a comment somewhere (Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr photos, even MySpace profiles) I can use the Commentful bookmarklet in either IE7 or Firefox to add the entry to my Commentful watchlist. This list is the list of permalinks I've commented on - or just those I'm just interested in watching.
I then have the option of tracking the URL for any number of days, minutes, or weeks. I will probably leave the default of 3 days for most of the threads I track... but the auto-removal of entries from the watchlist at a certain time is really nice.
I use the Commentful Extension for Firefox (on both my PC and my Mac) which puts an orb in the Firefox navigation bar and "blinks" when a thread I'm watching changes. Given that I don't use Firefox at work, this won't really work all that well when I'm not sitting in front of Firefox.
Because of this, I also subscribed to my watchlist in Bloglines via the RSS feed. This will help me keep on top of threads while not using Firefox and it will place the conversations in the spot where I like them: along with all my other feeds. One of the great things about Bloglines is that it's always there when I need it - but it doesn't bug me all day like Outlook does.
And to take it one step further, if I really wanted to get crazy (and I think I might) I could add my Commentful watchlist to my Windows Live Space via the Feed Module so all of you can see where I'm leaving comments. Having the ability to do this in just a couple of mouse clicks is pretty darn cool.

Overall, Commentful seems like a pretty elegant solution and I'm excited to see just how well it actually works for me. It functions well with Spaces (thanks to our <slash:comments> support in RSS) and they even use The Space Craft in the sample screen on their homepage. So this could be a good way for all you Spacers out there to track the comments you're leaving on other Spaces. Give it a shot at www.commentful.com!

There's also another service out there that I've heard quite a bit about: coComment. I haven't tried it out yet but it looks a little heavier.

tags: blogging, commentful

Web 2.0 Revelation #2: Still Del.icio.us

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:06:24 GMT

Del.ico.us has been around for quite a while and has seen a bunch of challengers to the bookmark throne come and go - but it's still considered king of the hill for Web 2.0 folk. I used it extensively back in early 2005 to maintain a linkblog but stopped posting to it.

I think I stopped primarily because I didn't think anyone was getting any sort of utility out of it; I wasn't promoting it or talking about it, and I wasn't going back to look at my links... ever. So there wasn't really any reason to maintain it. But I kind of liked keeping it up, so I'm going to try again. But only if people actually subscribe to it ;) So the goals of this post are to a) let you know that I'm maintaining the linkblog again, and b) see if people actually subscribe to it.

If you don't want to subscribe, I also added it to the sidebar of my space via the Feed Module --->

So you can always see it there.

Linkblog: http://del.icio.us/mtorres

And here are some easy links for your favorite news reader:

Live.com: http://www.live.com/?add=http://del.icio.us/rss/mtorres
My Yahoo: http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://del.icio.us/rss/mtorres
Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://del.icio.us/rss/mtorres
NewsGator: http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=http://del.icio.us/rss/mtorres
Desktop Reader (i.e. FeedDemon, Outlook 2007, RSS Bandit): feed://del.icio.us/rss/mtorres

What defines a blog?

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 04:09:58 GMT

Scoble is trying hard to convince people (here and here) that in order for something to be a blog, it must meet certain criteria. It's an interesting discussion - not because of Scoble's definition, but because 95% of the comments attached to his posts disagree with his definition for various reasons. Oh well. Times are changing.

Me: I really don't care what people think the word blog means. I just want people to have tools that allow them to communicate with friends, family, and the rest of the world. Not everyone wants to be "famous", so it's important that these tools promote privacy, safety, and control to the meet everyone's unique needs - and that they aren't limited to text, but incorporate other types of media as well. Call it a blog or don't. Whatever. As Bruce Lee used to say, "it's just a name, don't fuss over it."

Bloglines weirdness?

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 05:07:04 GMT

Is anyone else seeing weird things happen in Bloglines?

Like items showing up as unread when they really aren't? It isn't scoped to Spaces feeds (it happens all the time with www.techcrunch.com and others) but I am seeing it on my feed pretty consistently now. Only in Bloglines; not in any other readers.

Taking a look through the RSS details, nothing is jumping out at me as the culprit. If anyone else is seeing this - or if anyone else has determined the cause - please let me know.

Note: There is a known issue with items containing photos. If you attach a photo to a blog entry, that URL refreshes every so often in the RSS item description (for authorization purposes) and Bloglines thinks the item has been modified. Determining "newness" in an RSS item isn't standardized; every reader does it a little differently.

To get around this, we introduced a new field last month (dcterms:modified) that Bloglines can check to determine if it's a user-modified entry or a server-modified entry. We (Dare Obasanjo and I) sent it over to Bloglines to evaluate using. If you would like to see this fixed in their system, please shoot them some feedback as well.

Naked Conversations

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 07:55:38 GMT

Melinda and I attended the first Naked Conversations launch party tonight at the exquisite home of John and Alison Dillow in Medina. We got to meet and hang out with a bunch of great people, watch some amazing magic tricks, eat some cake for Robert's 41st birthday, and pick up a signed copy of the book. I also finally got to chat with Maryam about her use of MSN Spaces!

All in all, it was fun to be able to congratulate both authors (Shel & Robert) at the same time in the same place... Congrats again guys, it's one huge accomplishment!

Next up: Share Your Story: Blogging with MSN Spaces. We may not have quite the same kind of launch party... :) but it won't be long now before you'll be able to get your hands on it! (plug: you can pre-order it now - delivery is just a few weeks away I hear!)

Removed photo albums

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 20:44:32 GMT

Due to the annoyance of Bloglines marking items new when the author hasn't actually changed them, I have removed my photo albums from my space temporarily. That way all you Bloglines readers won't keep getting phantom unread entries on photo albums.

On social software

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 00:22:50 GMT

Scoble:

Luckily Yahoo hasn't quite figured out what the center of the social software world is gonna be. And I'm not gonna give them a roadmap to figure it out.

Bill and Steve? Where are you? When are we going to get seriously into social software?

Jeremy:

Great, that's more time before Microsoft takes it seriously...

Me:

We are taking it VERY seriously, guys. Trust me.

Technorati's Blog Finder

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 03:45:58 GMT

Technorati's new Blog Finder is a great concept in theory. But in practice, it's having a little trouble.

I just did a search for MSN and the most authoritative blog in their system is Dave Sifry, their founder and CEO. The #5 most authoritative blogger on MSN is Niall Kennedy, Technorati's community manager. Huh? My space, despite being in the top 350 on Technorati, isn't even listed under MSN, Microsoft, MSN Spaces, or MSN Messenger (all tags I added days ago.)

Either Technorati agrees that MSN is hot and is trying to game their own system, or their indexer is having a little trouble keeping up. My bet is that it's the indexer... but I wouldn't be offended if they were really that into MSN.

Update: This is fixed now. Looks like Technorati's indexer thought I was spam :( Thanks to Tantek, Niall, and Dave who helped troubleshoot this - it only took them about 3 minutes from the time I hit send on the email to be listed in the directory. Talk about customer support! (PS. sorry Overdo!)

Misinformation

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 04:52:29 GMT

Thanks Scoble.

I needed that.

Quote (emphasis mine)

Geek News Central
So today when I read the ComputerWorld article, from what is supposed to be a fact based news organization I immediately jumped all over the Mike Tores comments, and said to myself are we now seeing a classic bait and switch. Which resulted in the underlying article. It seems that their so called quote is not a quote at all but maybe more like creative writing on someones part.

Talking about the "Name Blame"

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 00:28:19 GMT

Multiple feed formats

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 19:56:56 GMT

Scoble just posted a link to TechBlog: What's wrong with RSS?

Here is what's so ironic about this post and its title. Having read a few of Dwight's previous posts on Start.com, Microsoft and RSS, I found his blog interesting enough to subscribe to it. So, I clicked my "Subscribe in Bloglines" toolbar button.

I was presented with three different feed formats. One with an xml extension, one with an rdf extension, and one called atom.xml. This isn't the first time this has happened to me, so I wasn't entirely surprised. I usually just randomly pick one and continue on with my day (although I shouldn't have to pick!)

Here is where it gets interesting though. The one I picked only offered partial content in the feed, so I quickly unsubscribed. It took me to two more tries to get the feed with full content.

Once I finally did, I took a glimpse up at the subscriber # in Bloglines. 42 people have subscribed to the feed with partial content, and only 21 have figured out how to get the feed with actual value. Which means there are twice as many people who failed at this task (unless they are actually interested in only reading two sentences at a time for some reason...)

Forget the naming nonsense, this is exactly what is "wrong with RSS". 4 minutes of my lunch time completely wasted just trying to subscribe to a feed.

Others and RSS naming

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 17:58:56 GMT

I did about three minutes of digging this morning on what companies not named Microsoft call "RSS feeds". I didn't spend more than three minutes because after about three minutes, I realized Microsoft isn't trying to rename RSS and I stopped. RSS stopped being used long ago...

Firefox calls them Live Bookmarks. They use a cool little feed icon when a site contains a feed and they have no mention of RSS anywhere in the subscribe process.
Bloglines calls them "feeds" everywhere. RSS isn't even mentioned in the "Add a feed" page. I don't see any mention of RSS anywhere other than a single line on the "My Feeds" page indicating that you can subscribe via XML/RSS buttons on some web pages.
Newsgator Online calls them "feeds" everywhere. Similarly in the "Add a Feed" page, I don't see any mention of the term RSS. RSS is mentioned in the FAQ.
SixApart uses "Syndicate this site (XML)" on TypePad blogs. LiveJournal calls it "Syndication". RSS is mentioned in helper text.
Not surprisingly, Blogger's only mention of RSS is in their FAQ, "If you would rather have RSS, give Feedburner a try." Millions of BlogSpot blogs don't have any sort of RSS branding by default (or RSS feeds, but that is a different story)

Looks like millions upon millions of people are using RSS:the technology but not RSS:the brand. And this was long before IE7 "web feeds" were a twinkle in Jim Allchin's eye. But attacking Microsoft is just so much fun, isn't it? :)

So to quote Richard McManus, "The people have spoken - feeds is it." I could spend more of my Sunday morning explaining why I think RSS and XML are both fantastic technologies yet faulty brands, but Ed Bott summed it up quite nicely yesterday. So I'll quit now.

(For what it's worth, appx. 20 million MSN Spaces have an orange RSS button on the page AND the word RSS in the header. We also have an overview of RSS in the "pretty printing" of the RSS feed when you click on those links.)

More on Microsoft & RSS

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 19:43:20 GMT

You've got to be kidding me.

Dave continues: "Some at Microsoft complain they don't like the name RSS and propose to change it to something they like better."

Would anyone like a lesson in how FUD spreads in the blogosphere? Start here, then go here, here, here, and then finally here. When you are finished, email me a list of the people (with URLs) complaining they "don't like the name RSS and propose to change it to something better."

Good luck.

While you are it, subscribe to some of the RSS feeds supported by Microsoft. Or import your OPML file into Start.com/3 and check it out.

Microsoft & RSS

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 03:25:58 GMT

Dave posts about big companies trying to mess with the RSS "brand".

Sorry, Dave, but this is actually not the case with Microsoft.

As I just posted on Read/Write Web:

Almost 20 million MSN Spaces have an orange RSS button on them and the word RSS at the top.
MSN Search results pages have an orange RSS button on them.
http://rss.msn.com references RSS and has orange XML buttons everywhere.
There are at least a dozen other examples of this (MSNBC, MSDN, Microsoft Mindshare, etc.)

Just because one team at Microsoft (in this case, the IE team) is grappling with the naming of a single feature in a single product (that does a lot more than just RSS), it doesn't automatically mean we are trying to "reinvent the technology". Of course, I can't speak for Google ;)

MSN Filter & RSS on a SPOT watch

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 19:51:01 GMT

Wow, this is cool.

RSS feeds on your wristwatch (with MSN Filter feeds used as the example) from Phillip Torrone @ MAKE magazine.

Read more -> MAKE: Blog: HOW TO get MSN Filter news (or any RSS) on a SPOT watch

Talking about Going to Blogher

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 03:46:01 GMT

Karen is heading to the BlogHer Conference on July 30th and will be leading a discussion on "the other side of blogging - the tools". Having worked on MSN Spaces for a long time now, there really isn't anyone more knowledgable than Karen when it comes to building blogging software at scale from ground zero.

And with the future of blogging wide open, there are lots of opportunities for growth in the space - it should be a lively discussion. So, check it out and say hello to Karen if you are attending!

Click the link below to learn more.

Quote

Going to Blogher!
...

Women around the world are leveraging blogs to get their message across - whether it be to share their experiences, promoting their business or voicing their opinions. But changing the blogosphere doesn't just happen from blogging about it - change can also happen from the source - those who are building the tools and software. Technology isn't as male-oriented as you might think.

Did you know that many of the big-name blogging tools have women helping to design and build them? Ever wonder how decisions get made or why things are designed or work the way they do? We invite women interested in helping to shape blogging tools and those currently building blogging tools to participate in this forum. You don't have to be a techie - share your thoughts and gripes on blogging tools today.Tell us what you what to see happen.
Help us shape blogging from the inside out. You're more influential than you think.

Crossposting. Ugh.

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 05:46:31 GMT

Note to Weblogs, Inc.: Please, please, please stop posting the same exact thing to dozens of your blogs every day. I subscribe to about 11 of them, which means I have to "clear" each post 11 times in Bloglines. In order to do that, I have to actually click on it, look at it, and waste half a second determining if I have already read it elsewhere. There is nothing that makes me want to unsubscribe more. I have already bolted from 3 of them - they were far more trouble than they were worth.

Which raises an interesting point - shouldn't all posts utilize truly global IDs in RSS? That way you can identify if they are actually copies of posts and not whole new ones? This seems like a pretty straightforward thing to do - just use the existing GUID field in RSS 2.0 (i.e. the permalink) but keep the GUID the same in each place the post appears. Aggregators can then detect dupes and clear them out.

Another generally annoying thing is having to read a bunch of posts covering the same news article with only one additional comment added. How many posts did I read on iTunes this week (including my own)? Probably 20. Would have been nice to consolidate these posts based on topic (i.e. source URL - or some cool heuristic) and do a bulk "I'm not interested in this topic" action.

Some of these more simpler syndication issues really can (and should) be fixed. But there hasn't been much change in aggregators out there for years. Most of them still treat a blog post the same way they treat a blog comment (an area ripe for innovation), a news article, or an email (!?) Who is going to be the first one to fix the more common (but tricky) problems?

Yahoo 360

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 09:37:03 GMT

Welcome to the blogosphere, Yahoo!

Quote

Yahoo jumps into blogosphere with 'Yahoo 360' | CNET News.com
Yahoo is stepping into social networking and blogging, with a new service that promises to offer a simpler way to keep in touch with people.

Based on this News.com article, it looks like Yahoo is taking the wraps off of their blogging/social networking service this month. If Y! 360 is anything like the trial they have been running overseas, it should be a fun year for everyone. I sincerely wish Yahoo the best of luck; they are a fantastic company with a great history of smart integration and innovation. We'll see what they have come up with.

Hey, we aren't the new kid on the block anymore!

You know, it's a shame they didn't take the opportunity to announce this at ETech though - or maybe it was planned but leaked ahead of time. The past few days have been great getting to chat (sometimes briefly) with folks from all over (Six Apart, 43things, Flickr, etc.) We would love to sync-up with Yahoo 360 folks before heading back to Seattle on Thursday. If you are around (and you happen to be reading this), shoot me an email (mtorres at microsoft) and let's grab some drinks or something. If not, maybe next time - but shoot me an email anyway, there's lots to talk about ;)

Why I dig Bloglines

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 08:05:58 GMT

Over the last few years, I have tried just about every RSS aggregator/reader out there – NetNewsWire, My Yahoo, RSS Bandit (written by Dare), NewsGator for Outlook, SharpReader, and so on. Each of them had something unique to offer… but for some reason, I just never got into the “groove” with any of them. A few days would go by, my number of unread entries would start to climb, and I would actually dread firing open the app and changing all those bold entries back to normal. A number of times I didn't even read all the entries, I was just in a race to make myself believe I did before I went to bed.

(What is RSS? Learn more here. It is worth it.)

Part of the problem for me is that applications that look and feel like Microsoft Outlook tend to make me feel like I am working, and I am immediately in "information overload" mode (we get hundreds of pieces of email each day at Microsoft.) Catching up with friends, reading Scripting.com, or checking out Engadget shouldn't be tedious. But for some reason, it was. Until I switched to Bloglines.

I had used Bloglines once for a couple of days but abandoned it because it didn't feel "rich" enough. It didn't have all the bells and whistles of a NewsGator, and I mistakenly thought it would take me out of task to fire open IE or Firefox to read messages when I could just as easily do it from within Outlook.

Now, sometimes with software (or anything, for that matter) you end up thinking you need more than you really do. And you commit to something - or purchase something - because of all the times you might need to use it, instead of all the times you will use it. That is how I felt when I bought every possible accessory for my Pocket PC, and that is how I felt before Bloglines. Everything that wasn’t critical to reading feeds turned out to be inconsequential; I never used those features. The simplest solution is many times the right one.

Anyway, here is what I like about Bloglines:

It's free.
It's fast, responsive, and almost always available.
It's design is minimalist - focused solely on the task at hand; reading RSS feeds.
It is accessible from anywhere - so it works on my Mac, my PCs, and even my Audiovox Smartphone. Roaming read/unread status makes all the difference in the world.
It supports sharing of my feeds (check it out in the right-hand pane)
I can scan dozens of feeds in less than a minute. With NewsGator for Outlook and other Outlook-style interfaces, it just simply took longer. Probably because Bloglines shows me the feed in the way it is supposed to be presented - reverse chronological order on a single page. Not as individual messages that I have to click through.
They have an API. I like that.

And here's what I want from it - if these things are already possible, pls. let me know:

XMLHTTP to pre-cache unread items as I am navigating down the list. 9 times out of 10, I am going to click on the next bold link. It would be great if it was already waiting for me when I do. This isn't a huge concern though, because it is normally snappy enough not to matter.
Enhanced keyboard shortcuts. This is almost a must-have for me - I don’t like switching from mouse-mode to keyboard-mode constantly. And given the option, I would rather be in keyboard mode than mouse-mode. At a minimum, providing a simple way to go to the next unread feed would be great. If this is already possible, I haven't figured it out.
Easy offline reading. This is undoubtedly possible with IE's offline mode, which just downloads the site itself, but does anyone actually use that feature? Even providing a button or a quick tutorial in the Help section on how to do this would be great. CDF anyone? Why doesn't anyone use the Smart offline Favorites feature in IE5+?
Private feeds (username/password). This is probably difficult for them with their cache as-is, but it isn't really complete without it. I can't read Cassie's blog!

Give it a whirl at www.bloglines.com. It is quite cool.