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I get the feeling that this is a practical joke/troll by Jonathan Avidan - the person who is editing this new specification, the person who maintains the website linked to, and who submitted this article to Slashdot.

Agreed. It's highly unusual that no blogs in the Technorati index (of apparently 15.4 million sites) link to it. If this was a real community effort, you would expect to find some discussion/rumours on the new "standard".

Perhaps it's just somebody trying to irritate Dave Winer or somebody suffering from severe "not invented here" syndrome. Either way, this is not the first time that a RSSv3 has been proposed.

I find it incredible that nobody here grasps why blogs are so important. It's not the individual blog that's important - it's the "blogosphere" (although I'm not a huge fan of that term). It's the immense collection of interlinking sites, with built-in mechanisms for notifying each other of links (trackback/pingback) and of notifying central services of updates (pings, RSS/Atom).

It allows for incredible things to be done - real-time monitoring of the entire internet for anybody writing anything on a particular topic or keyword being one example. It's no longer necessary to have a search provider (i.e. Google) crawl the web periodically and only be able to get updates on the current state of the net weekly or monthly or whatever. As soon as a post is written on a blog on, say, the shuttle landing, services such as Technorati notice it, and you can be notified of this post the next time your aggregator updates your "shuttle" search feed .

So it's not the individual blog that's interesting - most of them (like most of everything) are crap. It's the aggregated state of all the blogs that's interesting. It's being able to tell what's on millions of people's minds at this very instant. It makes the web a much more real-time medium.

But TBL is right - what makes all this work is the fact that blogging software is simple enough for somebody with little or no knowledge of HTML to be able to post and be an equal participant in the "blogosphere."

Start.com was well under way before Google's personalized home page was released. Google's Personalized Page was released in May, but Start.com was up in March. See this post from March 20th by one of the developers.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/steverider/Blog/cns! 1pk-KGuQJt62IHSwXT8uY1HQ!378.entry

Also, Bloglines Citations of Start.com dating back to March 9th or so

http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www. start.com

And technorati of course:

http://www.technorati.com/search/start.com/1/?star t=140

Since we're on the topic of "start" pages, I thought I would mention my own project, fyuze.com, which was mentioned here on slashdot some time ago. It started out as an RSS aggregator, but in it's latest incarnation is an API aggregator. What does that mean? Well, it means that in addition to pulling RSS/Atom feeds it will also run queries against web-services such as Flickr, Amazon, Technorati, Upcoming.org, and Yahoo (with more to come). It also allows you to post good links directly to your del.icio.us account (hit the settings page).

It doesn't yet sport the nifty Ajax effects of Google and Microsoft, but with prototype and Rico, it is only a matter of time. Anyway, we're trying to push the idea of an aggregator beyond just RSS headlines and weather. So, if you're interested, we'd appreciate it if you gave it try and told us what you thought.

Wait a second... his site gets a piddling 3000 page views a day (/. gave it that many in the last hour, in the middle of the night!), and he claims to be making big bucks?

WTF?

Technorati has 16 links in the last three days (many of them this current story), which is nice, but not exactly Boingboing, is it? Alexa has it at a nice, but not spectacular, rank of 32,764 (compare to TalkingPointsMemo's rank of 19,893 or Juan Cole's 19,776), and it barely shows up on Daypop. I don't see where the money comes from with those types of numbers.

Look! it's M0nk3y Man!

Check out the rest of the inbred fat ass miscreants on their staff page:

http://technorati.com/about/staff.html

Look! it's M0nk3y Man!

Check out the rest of the inbred fat ass miscreants on their staff page:

http://technorati.com/about/staff.html

and just use Technorati and del.icio.us and the like to do "blogosphere market research" I could make a mint!

e.

Changing the medium doesn't automatically make better content.

Yes, but: the medium profoundly alters the range of possibilities for communication, which enables better (and worse) content.

This is why blogs actually matter. As our means of communication change, so does our culture.

Maybe a million monkeys at typewriters can't produce Shakespeare after all. I think blogs are like almost everything on the Internet. They start out small, get hot, mainstream, and they are all the rage. Then people realize they aren't really adding value.

Ah, but they are adding value, in equal proportions with most other media. The best films are rarely the highest grossing ones. The best television is not often the most watched. The best books are rarely bestsellers. The best music doesn't top the charts. The best blogs probably aren't the ones in the Technorati Top 100.

What isn't adding value is the hype -- the pronouncements that it's "the next big thing" (as if "big" implied anything about quality or meaning), that it replaces "old media" (whatever that is). -- and the dismissiveness -- the idea that they're "nothing new", or have no value whatsoever (using the medium doesn't automatically make worse content, either.)

I think the problem lies in the definition of the term "garbage". I definitely hear what you're saying, but my guess is that my definition of "good blogging" is slightly different than yours, which is slightly different from that of your neighbor, and so on.

But to me this is an issue that could be dealt with through a variety of means. For one thing, blog indexes are becoming more useful. I find a lot of really useful information with Technorati. For example, I was interested in reading a variety of opinions about the concept of peak oil. So I ran this search and quickly found The Oil Drum, a site full of information on the topic.

I think your fears of spill-over will be eased as search filtering capabilities become more robust and long, undifferentiated blogrolls on the more useful sites become replaced by shorter lists of related blogs. Just as the early days of "web pages" were a morass of links to other lists of links, many bloggers are still giddy about linking to as many other blogs as possible. This will die down in time, as they realize that the quality of the links matters more than their number.

I still think that even if filtering mechanisms don't improve much more and it remains a bit more difficult to find "quality" (as defined by me) blog content, I'd rather have that than a blogosphere controlled solely by the usual suspects. To me, avoiding consolidation of media ownership is worth a little inconvenience. The last thing I want is all of the best blogs to be bought out by Big Media and unpopular views (be they about kitty litter or peak oil) utterly marginalized.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is absolutely the ideal entry. Many bloggers love nothing better than to compare status and talk about blogging. The Blogebrity site panders to both of these desires, plus, it has the added benefit of offending some people, thus guaranteeing plenty of linkage.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is absolutely the ideal entry. Many bloggers love nothing better than to compare status and talk about blogging. The Blogebrity site panders to both of these desires, plus, it has the added benefit of offending some people, thus guaranteeing plenty of linkage.

...but I agree that there's a need for more. For example, hCalendar has some merit being XHTML compatible and can be nicely embedded in any XHTML (or even HTML) page. Distribution of calendar files (.ics) isn't the problem. The real problem is that it's hard to discuss events outside .ics format so that applications are still able to automatically extract the information. hCalendar is nicely submerged inside the real content as demonstrated by the example. Throw in hCard and we can finally talk about usable metadata embedded in a web page.

...but I agree that there's a need for more. For example, hCalendar has some merit being XHTML compatible and can be nicely embedded in any XHTML (or even HTML) page. Distribution of calendar files (.ics) isn't the problem. The real problem is that it's hard to discuss events outside .ics format so that applications are still able to automatically extract the information. hCalendar is nicely submerged inside the real content as demonstrated by the example. Throw in hCard and we can finally talk about usable metadata embedded in a web page.

...but I agree that there's a need for more. For example, hCalendar has some merit being XHTML compatible and can be nicely embedded in any XHTML (or even HTML) page. Distribution of calendar files (.ics) isn't the problem. The real problem is that it's hard to discuss events outside .ics format so that applications are still able to automatically extract the information. hCalendar is nicely submerged inside the real content as demonstrated by the example. Throw in hCard and we can finally talk about usable metadata embedded in a web page.

Does del.icio.us (or the lesser known Open Source de.lirio.us) feature spammer protection? Or technorati tags, for that matter? How do people filter out spammers?

I keep thinking: "One of these days, the spammers are going to mess up this system."

The only reason they are still useful is that spammers haven't found them yet. When they start spamming in earnest, you can bet that del.icio.us will rapidly become next to useless for many things. Look what's happened to Technorati.

Some links on Wave Energy
http://www.darvill.clara.net/altenerg/wave.htm
http://www.wavegen.co.uk/
http://www.technorati.com/tag/wave+power

Yeah, can you beleive getting information on this stuff is as easy as googling it?

Technorati works by reading RSS feeds and then letting you search the feed item descriptions and content. Will Technorati end up being a minefield of Google ads? I assume they'll start parsing them out, and maybe banning feeds that use them. Maybe. Maybe not, since their profit model is based on Google ads as well.

Google has banned some spam blogs from their seach listings, but really, what's the difference between a spam blog with an RSS feed that makes money with Google ads, and Google droping ads directly into a feed?

Someone help my simple mind grok the difference.

From BoingBoing:

Right wing blogs go ape over George Lucas article in Wired
Steve Silberman's excellent story about George Lucas in the current issue of Wired is inciting a good deal of mouth foaming and carpet chewing on conservative blogs. Says Steve: "My Lucas story has blown up on right-wing blogs like Instapundit and the National Review Online, after being referenced on a conservative forum about film called Libertas. What's strange is that -- with the exception of Libertas -- Lucas' 'statements,' particularly re: Fahrenheit 9/11, are being condemned with no link to the story or the online QA, as if Lucas' supposed opinions are just in the air somewhere. And while Lucas critiqued F911 in the interview, the wingers are characterizing him as a 'Moore-loving liberal.'" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:51:45 AM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post

I have found that answers.com is a quite good alternative to Google at times when I *know* what I'm looking for. It may be I want a definition of a word, want to know when a certain historic event happened, want a translation or similar.

It also has quick links to Google, Google images, Google news, Technorati if I want to find a blog and Amazon if I want to find a product. All in all a very nice alternative, and I have quite grown to liking it a lot (and hence using it a lot too. :)

Well, for starters, check out the OpenSolaris Community Manager's Blog and Technorati's OpenSolaris "tag" (category) site...

You might find the stuff Tantek and I have been writing about the 'lowercase semantic web' interesting:
Real World Semantics
Can your website be your API?

These outline the principles behind these new XHTML microformats we are building on at Technorati,

Technorati search becoming outdated

I have this problem on several sites with Firefox on Windows XP and SuSE 9.2. On SuSE the only extension installed is FlashBlock, though this problem occurs with no extensions installed as well.

Off topic? Sure, mod me down. But I would like to be pointed in the direction of a solution, if available.

I've been a strong advocate of the social bookmarking service named del.icio.us since it started (check here for an example). And almost every single day, a new tool appears and enhances the use of this service. This new one, DURL , written by Robin Millette , lets you type an URL and see if some other people already "delicious'ed it." And this is very efficient because it leads you to people who not only bookmarked the URL, but also assigned to it some pertinent keywords or tags, giving you new and fresh ideas. Services like Bloglines or Technorati among others certainly can return hundreds of links, so they are good for 'popularity contests.' But for building social communities and introducing you to sources you wouldn't have thought of, they don't compare to del.icio.us. Read more for lots of examples...

As I'm not sure if I convinced you, let's start with a real blog, Smart Mobs .

If I feed the URL http://www.smartmobs.com/ to Bloglines by submitting the search string "http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http://www .smartmobs.com/&submit=Search," I receive 3358 unsorted results.

If I do the same with Technorati , I find 1,614 links from 1,234 sources, sorted by date.

In both cases, this produces a number of references which is hard to browse. Why a particular site has quoted Smart Mobs? It's not obvious to find an answer.

So, it's time to use DURL, which returns a more manageable number of 45 results from del.icio.us.

http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_1.jpg

Here is a screen capture of the page returned by DURL. You can see that some people are reading Smart Mobs because they associated it with the concepts of "creativity" or "ubiquitous computing". Others are using tags such as "collaboration," "mobile" or "community." (Credit: Robin Millette/del.icio.us).

Let's check for example the tag "Social Software."

http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_2.jpg

It brings us to del.icio.us/hbryant/social_software . (Credit: del.icio.us). Wow! Exciting! New tools for del.icio.us! Let's visit Soooo del.icio.us people can't stand it! .

In a summary, with only two clicks, I found a gold mine. Do you know another service which is that efficient?

Now, let's return to the previous page and check the link to the "community" tag.

http://www.primidi.com/images/durl_3.jpg

This time, this leads us to del.icio.us/oubiwann/community . (Credit: del.icio.us). From there, I can now read a "definition of Mundialization" or discover what is the "World Government of World Citizens."

The more I use del.icio.us, the more I like it. This doesn't mean I'm not using Bloglines or Technorati, but I'm using them for 'exhaustivity,' not for 'discovery.'

[And here is an additional note for Robin Millette, the author of DURL. In fact, you can do the same search on del.icio.us by adding the string "http://del.icio.us/url?url=" (without the quotes) before the URL you want to see if it has been delicioused. But it might be too geeky for some of you.]

Source: Robin Millette, December 20, 2004; and various websites

if you want up-to-date results, screw google and try Technorati, then you'll know who's talking about you...

still, it seems that you are the only one talking about you! :D

Over at Technorati we are counting blogged votes by vote links - explict rel="vote-for" or rel="vote-against" links.
Blog your vote today.

Isn't that what technorati.com is continuously failing at?

I don't do it on my blog, but I hear that a popular way for bloggers to pretend to be in the know is to use the Technorati Current Events list to find things to post about. Then they pretend as though they found it themselves or an insider on the event emailed them the link.

If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply, without the chance for a fair peer-to-peer discussion, and in particular without the chance to publish such stories yourself

Completely false. You are free to reply, you are free to publish that reply, and there are sites that will help people who care find your reply, even if the original source doesn't ever point to you.

Your problem is...

of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)

You seem to think that you have some sort of right to be heard... that if ABC News publishes an article and you have some comment that you have some sort of right to make ABC News distribute your opinion on the same footing as their own. This is flatly false. They may acknowlege your opinion or not as they see fit.

The true benefit of the RSS-style of communication is that it provides you with a channel of communication that is yours. Your RSS file has no trolls. Your RSS file has no spam. Thus, if people care about your opinions (or whatever you are posting), they can subscribe with confidence to your feed. The technology exists then to bring your content to those who are interesting.

Odds are, you won't get thousands or millions of subscribers. That's because, odds are, you aren't one out of a million. I say this as someone who has had a feed since Jan. 2000 and have not exactly raked in the fame. However, this is the way it is.

It's not like the alternatives are any better. Do you actually read the feedback forums on ABC News? Sure, I do intermittently, but there's just no way around the fact that when you create that "right of reply", it's flooded and you can't help but be uninterested in it.

Fundamentally, you see this "one-way communication", but what you don't see is that (nearly) all communication is one way. You are not allowed to modify this message, but you can post a reply. You are not allowed to modify somebody else's RSS feed, but you can post a reply. The fact that I don't have to read every last schmoe's reply to some article, but only get the ones from the people I care about, is a feature, not a bug.

The ideal communication technology is a compromise between the readers and the writers. RSS feeds are one of the best we've created so far, with low binding on both the writer's and the reader's side. (Even posted an unpopular opinion and been deluged in hate mail? Unless you're a sociopath it gets old. RSS is one of the few ways for a writer to be able to deal with that, because they are not forced to read the flames in the same forum they themselves are posting in.) In the end, RSS-based communities are one of the best matches to the real principles of free speech: That you can say whatever you like, and people are free to read whatever they like, and there is no binding between the two: You do not have the right to be heard, and you do not have the right to censor anyone else, even by "shouting them down". In this way, RSS feeds surpass even real-world communication.

Practically speaking, it is undeniable that this plays out as I've described, and not as you've described. I've participated in many conversations via RSS, so I have empirical proof they exist, no matter how you might theorize that they don't. And plenty of people comment on all sort of things, many of whom I find interesting and many of whom I don't. You obviously don't use it, if you have so many misconceptions.

RSS is the exact opposite of TV on the web. Everybody gets to compete on a level playing ground for attention, and is rewarded according to their social merits. Some people don't like this and prefer forums where they (falsely) think this doesn't apply. Even the big networks and newspapers don't have much adv

It's a bit of a pain to get news from a wide variety of sources though. Takes quite a bit of time. I've found a couple resources to be useful for this.

Google News and Technorati pick from a wide variety of sources and allow you to search news articles. But I sometimes find it hard to find what I want in all the clutter. Plastic provides moderation and discussion of news, but doesn't have broad coverage. Various RSS aggregators allow me to create your own news feed, but they don't have good coverage of mainstream news sources and they're a bit of a pain to set up. There's a couple recent attempts at personalized news -- Findory News is one -- that try to pull news from a broad variety of sources targetted to your interests.

What do you use?

That doesn't mean that the small fries are to be discounted. There are tons of truly interesting, but small, blogs that are out there that give a varied view on topics with a personal touch. If you separate the wheat from the chaff, just like the rest of the WWW, you can find some real gems.

On that note, here's a shameless plug for my new blog, .: Bent Double :.. Lacking in content, but only because it is still very new.

I see this a lot on Slashdot - "who reads blogs?". The people who ask apparently are only familiar with a few obscure blogs, and never bother to actually visit any major blogs and check their sitemeter stats. Here's a suggestion: before asking the question, check something like the Technorati Top 100. Take a look at the blogs listed there, the number of links into them, and their pageview stats (if they keep track of them). Then make up your own mind about whether anyone reads blogs. And who knows, maybe you'll find something there that actually interests you!