derek abdinor

RSS is recognised as one of the salient tools that enables the distributed nature of the Web, allowing users to get the news pushed to them (who can browse for news on all the world’s websites?). However, this feature did not answer the same problem it sought to address – what happens when you have too many RSS feeds to monitor?

AideRSS came up with PostRank (not only similiar in name to Google’s killer PageRank, but also in methodology). It takes all your feeds, monitors the trackbacks and you can view popularity of posts at a glance.

I’m still a fan of email newsletters in some cases. Why? I probably would never have found this story be glancing over popular RSS feeds as its still early days.

I blogged last week about techpresident.com and the impact Elections 2.0 is having on the campaigns. Well, YouTube has just upped the ante by getting in on a debate where voters are sending in video messages to presidential hopefuls (much like sending an sms to a live panel show). Read it at the Guardian.co.uk

“YouTube, which did not exist during the last presidential campaign, has already had an impact on this one. More than 2.5 million people have viewed the video I’ve Got A Crush … On Obama since it was posted last month and a follow-up about women fighting over Mr Obama and Rudy Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner, has been watched more than 500,000 times since it appeared last week. A Hillary Clinton campaign spoof on the final episode of the Sopranos was also popular.”

“YouTube effectively knocked the former Republican senator George Allen out of the race . A video of him last summer referring to a dark-skinned Virginian as “macaca” cost him re-election to the senate and a tilt at the presidency.”

Update: August 2, 2007: cynical, media-aware opposite viewpoint | Guardian

Wasn’t HTML meant to move gracefully over to XHTML so that we had a seperation between:

• structure (html)
• design (css, images)
• layout (css, html)
• business logic (php, asp, visual n++)?

You know, death of the <font> tag parties and no more bgcolor, tables tables tables etc. Well, HTML is being revived as version 5 by the w3c. I’ve read some of the debates, but I haven’t got the exec summary, please share. Will love to know what will happen to web standards now <sigh></font></blink>

Update August 9:

First view of the new tags: Slashdot IBM

TechPresident is an online aggregating service about all the US Presidential candidates’ use of online social media. You get to measure their effectiveness, or newsworthiness, on Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Technorati.

Votojournalism
The excellent portmanteau of Voter and Photojournalism, for voter-generated content where users post pictures of the candidates on the campaign trail, online. I think the term will be hijacked to come to mean the use of social media by voters, or by candidates (see below) to run an effective campaign.

Microblogging
I was suprised to find that Barack Obama microblogs (blogs constantly from a computer of mobile device, usually one-liners of his movements) on Twitter, and does a really handy job. In fact, he has raised over 40% of his funding online! Funding is key to success in US politics, and Barack’s online strategists have been on the money.

I feel this would have an impact on business, after the elections. You could never bring microblogging to business, but it would be excellent for wannabe celebrities to grow an active stalking community.

Update: this was fleshed out into an article for BizCommunity. Read/Write Web has some interesting stuff on this, although they seem to be looking at the metrics of voting at first blush:  a lot of users in the world deperately want/need the US to change its policies and are following the campaigns, or lending their online presences to candidates they hope will bring about meaningful change.

No time to Digg or Muti or Reddit:
Heinz writes with an article in Forbes on how [0]advertising in techmedia is drying up and going — where else? — into specialist blogs andGoogle. “Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech media,there’s blood on the floor. Take Red Herring. It hung onto its officesafter getting the eviction notice earlier this month. But gossip siteValleywag is breaking story after story not just on its beat — but aboutits woes. Meanwhile, bigger publications are hurting too: Time Warner’sBusiness 2.0 saw ad pages drop 21.8% through March from the same period ayear ago; PC Magazine’s editor in chief walked out the door after adpages fell 38.8% over the same period; and one-time online powerhouseCNET is reporting growing losses even as the companies it coversflourish. It may be happening in tech first, but there’s no reason thesame thing won’t happen, eventually, in every media niche.”Discuss this story at: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/07/17/0110256Links: 0. http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/07/16/redherring-print-blogs-tech-media-cx_bc_0716techmedia.html

Disappointment with South African broadcaster Carte Blanche, choosing to focus on Wikipedia and Creative Commons through the lens of Old Media. Not Newer Media, Not even New Media. Old, offline Media. Follow the link and read about it. Bullard must be chortling into his claret.

It is held that MySpace and Facebook are inhabited by different classes, in America at least. America does not have a historic class legacy, so this paper is quite interesting as it allows one to point to the attributes of a phenomenon in order to describe it better.

Facebook= college, university, white, networking professionals = hegemony
MySpace = the Other

More? The US military bans access to MySpace and not Facebook. Soldiers who may be college-educated are of the officer class and use Facebook. MySpace is popular among the recruits from poorer areas who are most likely to swell the rank and file.

Interesting map showing prevalence of social networks around the world.
However, the comments are flaming: the data seems inaccurate in some of the other countries that are not the US (duh). Take this as a good start but don’t rely on the date. For more accurate data , see below:

Microsoft has managed to persuade influential bloggers (in the US) to say favourable things about their catch-phrase “people ready“. For payola, of course. (I can’t bring myself to link to any of the sites in this post).

Related thoughts in time and out of season:

• There I was thinking citizen journalism was impervious to the pitfalls of old media
• Very sad to see Read/Write web there too
• Great marketing strategy, but only as a one-off. Like the papparazzi, you have to be first to market and deflect the heat until 2nd2market catches up