plaxoed!

hi everyone, i’ve been gone for the past few days and i haven’t been blogging. i went up to seattle to do some interviews (you can probably guess who) and stayed for the weekend. it was a pretty fun trip and i got to spend some quality time with my girlfriend and other seattle friends - and of course, it’s always great to make a visit on the corporate dime .

i hadn’t been keeping up on reading my feeds so right before my return trip this morning, i synced up onfolio. with only 35 feeds, i had a whopping 600+ unread items! granted, i subscribe to a few linkblogs and news feeds, but still, that is quite a backlog for only 5 days. i can only imagine what scoble’s aggregator looks like when he goes on vacation (he supposedly subscribes to over 1000 feeds).

i spent the entire plane ride reading through the stuff i’ve missed the past few days and i recognized a few interesting things:

• most events/products/ideas are covered simultaneously by tons of bloggers
• at least 75% of posts are just links to other posts, sometimes with a short comment or two
• feeds that only send synopses are really annoying

sometimes, as is the case with google’s autolink feature controversy, people are actually having conversations through posts (as in, they write posts in response to other peoples’ posts and so on). while i recognized the conversational nature of blogging due to the comments feature, i hadn’t really seen a conversation happen between blog posts.

this led me to thinking about how the commenting features work. perhaps instead of comments residing on the original blog, what should happen is comments on posts should actually become new entries in the commentor’s blog. then there should be an infrastructure where you can move through a blog “hyper-thread”, tracking the conversation. in other words, let’s turn the blogosphere into a big bulletin board but instead of being centered around threads, it would be centered around individuals. in this system, comments are obsolete and trackbacks can serve as the glue behind the scenes that ties blogs together. in this world, maybe sites like technorati will serve as directories of these “hyper-threads”.

sorry if this idea has already been done or is already underway and i’m just not in the know. if that’s the case, send me a link so i can check it out!

back to the original topic… being able to catch up on blogs on the plane was a killer experience. client side aggregators really shine through here but there are a lot of cool things about having a web based solution as well. i’m patiently waiting for a hybrid online/offline solution; i hope someone comes through sooner rather than later - and if anyone is working on one of these, let me know, i’ll definitely be willing to help out.

many news sites are reporting today on apple’s update to the ipod. being an industrial design nut, i’ve wanted to buy one for quite a while. however, there are two things holding me back:

1. there’s no way they are going to get me to use itunes
2. it only plays mp3s (believe it or not, i have quite a bit of music in wma format)

regardless, the pricing for the shuffle and ipod mini are dangerously approaching impulse buy range for me. i may be a convert soon… although if i end up working for microsoft again, i may need to sneak around with it.

speaking of the shuffle, when i met scoble a few weeks back, he had one. he’d had it for over a week and hadn’t loaded any music on it nor had he even plugged it into his computer. the problem was the fact that you have to load software from a CD. his argument was: if the shuffle is a storage device, why doesn’t the device contain the software and bootstrap itself when plugged into the usb port?

oh, and he was clearly content using the shuffle for its secondary purpose: a fashion accessory.

update: a company called jens of sweden has a new player called the mp-120. i want one really bad, but they aren’t sold in the us yet. argh!

ran across this awesome list of in depth .net questions on scoble’s link blog. having worked on indigo for over a year, i thought i had pretty deep knowledge of .net, but i must admit, i started having a little trouble on the “senior developers/architects” section - nothing a little msdn couldn’t fix though

checking out these questions took me back to my interviewing days. after going through round after round of interviews during my senior year in college, i started at microsoft and flipped to the other side - i started running the interviews. personally, i really enjoy interviews; i have a passion for finding good people and building great teams.

anyways, if i’m ever running interviews again and a candidate’s resume claims they have .net experience: watch out, i might just fire off a few questions from scott’s list. although i suppose if they’ve read my blog, they’ll conveniently have all the answers…

for anyone out there who is nervous about an upcoming microsoft interview: relax, it’s not that bad. check out one candidate’s recent experience.

“feed me”

i’ve now subscribed to approximately 40 feeds, including a few pubsubs, and the number is growing steadily - needless to say, i’m an rss/atom addict.

a few years ago when i first heard about this technology, i gave a typical response: “so what?” at the time of course, i had no idea what this whole blogging phenomenon was all about and i was happy hitting news.com and slashdot daily through my browser to catch up on tech news. going around hitting a few pages each day isn’t too bad, but when you start to explore the blogosphere and want to keep up on tens if not hundreds or thousands of blogs, you really start to appreciate feeds.

then, i discovered pubsub - this service is pure joy to a tech maven. if you need to know the buzz about anything on the blogosphere, this is the tool to use. in a nutshell, you choose a search term and pubsub will aggregate all posts containing that term to a convenient feed you can subscribe to. truly a market researcher’s dream come true.

unfortunately, as scoble points out, many are still clueless as to the real power behind these technologies. if you’re trying to grok this stuff and would like some help, feel free to e-mail me; i’ll try to point you in the right direction!

on a related note, i was happily using bloglines until i realized that it doesn’t refresh my feeds as frequently as i’d like. thus, i was in search of a new aggregator and i found onfolio. so far, onfolio has proven itself to be an awesome tool. since it’s a client-side tool, i can refresh my feeds as often as i like and it will also work offline. it’s got a great “deskbar” interface which gives me a little standalone RSS control center and it links into my browsers as well. i currently only have one workstation, but i wonder if it synchronizes my subscriptions between clients too - that would be hot.

i’ve also become aware of the fact that i need to set up a link blog. it’s been added to my long to do list.

p.s. the title of this post is a reference to this book

i saw a great posting on the long tail blog about how we might think about blog spamming. before starting this blog, i had no idea there was such a problem known as blog spamming; after reading through some of the comments here, i’m all too familiar the symptoms.

to help alleviate the problem, i see blogger is already implementing the “nofollow” tag on all links left in comments. i think that’s an awesome first step. next, i see blog hosts putting up other defenses, similar to the multiple e-mail spam detection systems in place today. as anderson puts it, this is the low hanging fruit and i’m glad to hear that six apart already has solutions under way.

now that i’ve gotten a jump start into the blogosphere, i’ve started collecting various feeds that i find particularly interesting (see my bloglines blogroll). perusing these feeds, there’s a theme that’s making its way out of the woodwork: effective marketing through blogging is a delicate art - if not handled properly, it may very well backfire on you in the worst ways possible.

along the way, i was linked to the following blog via scoble’s link blog. i thought the post scoble linked was quite interesting and started reading the rest of the blog. it took me a while to realize that this was actually a blog put together by a group of authors heading up a new o’reilly group called head first books. as i clicked through and definitely wanted to buy their books - despite the fact that none of their currently available books cover new subject areas for me.

breaking this down, i’d say the crucial play here was that the authors created a real blog about their thoughts and experiences, thereby making a connection to me, a potential customer. then they made sure there were easily accessible links to pull me through to amazon for a purchase. brilliant work!

the real kicker of course is that their blog actually contains real content; it isn’t just another corporate blog that pretty much serves as a thinly veiled attempt at getting the blogosphere to give a new product free PR. i wonder if other companies will take note and adjust their blogging strategies accordingly…

i just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”. personally, i liked it even more than tipping point - and tipping point is already on my list of favorite books. i guess i’m just simply fascinated with thinking about human interactions and communication.

over the past few weeks, i’ve been meeting a ton of people and going through a lot of interviews. i’ve always had a “gut feel” about people i meet and now that i’ve read blink, i’m actually conscious of where that feeling comes from. i’m also weary of scenarios where it might go wrong. hopefully, i can fine tune my abilities and become cognizant of all the snap judgments i make everyday. thin slicing… very cool stuff.

it also made me think about the hundreds of thousands (maybe millions of people who have blinked me. hundreds of people’s impressions can be found in my blog’s comments and even more across the blogosphere. it’s really interesting how certain people focus on some things while others pick up something completely different. the real kicker is, people are so used to making snap judgments about others around the internet that it seems to be almost an involuntary reaction. if you’re in any sort of profession where you need to interact with a large number of people, i would say this book is a crucial read - if you can’t tell, i’m a huge gladwell evangelist now

next up is “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond. this book has been heavily recommended to me by both colleagues at microsoft and people around the blogosphere. i’m not much of a history nut, but everyone assures me i’ll enjoy this book anyways.

someone also recommended “Disciplined Minds“, a book about how the corporate system affects its employees. sounds like an interesting read given the events i’ve gone through, but i’m curious as to whether it really applies in the internet/tech industry. anyone have opinions on this book?

i just realized (and it’s been pointed out by various other people around the web) that if you’re browsing at barnes and noble and you click the autolink button, it turns the ISBN number into a link to amazon. i’m sure amazon is thrilled by this, but i would have to say that it sounds eerily similar to gator.com’s offercompanion program. widely regarded as spyware, offercompanion would sometimes pop up ads for competitors while users were browsing and making purchases at other sites.

while doing this might be legal, i would have to say that when i checked it out it made me a bit uneasy.

i’ve spent all morning playing with search engines and toolbars. it had been a while since i’d checked out the various major search engines and i figured it was time for the all-powerful “me” search test. for those who don’t know, this my term for when you plug your name into a search engine and see what comes up

so i went to the big three: google, msn and yahoo. i searched for my name in quotes, took a look at the results and what follows is my analysis on these engines based on their current performance:

yahoo was the only search engine to come up with this blog as the first result; this blog was number two on google and somehow, i’m not anywhere to be found on msn at all. all three engines return a large number of other random sites that have made commentary on the events of the past month, so i consider them equal at delivering the background noise that makes the web so great. jeremy must be pretty popular, since his account of meeting me ranks in the top few entries at each engine, but scoble seems a bit less popular. thus, in my opinion, yahoo beats out google ever so slightly in relevancy. figure in that yahoo also has cool features like links to my RSS feed and guess what? google is no longer my default search engine. hats off to yahoo.

for those of you wondering: no, the fact that google canned me didn’t factor into my decision. i still use gmail and google maps; i simply use whatever i think is the best solution for what i’m trying to accomplish. the exception to that rule might be blogger, but i’m doing my research on that as well

although as far as all three search engines are concerned, i have to ask: where are the “wow!” bits? it seems to me that there’s a lot of cool functionality that could be delivered but is currently missing today. for example, what about pre-fetching search results? or what about allowing me to tag results? searching is great, but i’d also love the ability to sort - sort by date, sort by author, sort by popular demand, etc. msn’s got a great general idea with their search builder feature, but the options currently in there leave a lot to be desired. where are yahoo and google on this front?

i’m not saying these options should all be there by default - after all, we still have to consider people without broadband - but i wish i had these features at my disposal.

switching gears, nowadays you can’t really do an analysis of search engines without running into their partners in crime, browser toolbars. so i also downloaded each engine’s toolbar as well.

diverging a bit, there’s been a lot of controversy in the past few days about the new autolink feature in google toolbar 3 beta. normally as far as i’m concerned, if it makes the user’s life easier, it’s overall goodness. however, in this case, i see where it sparks up a healthy debate.

although autolink is an optional feature and a user actually has to both enable it and click on it before it does anything to a page, it is very scary that it modifies the page so that the link is almost indistinguishable from other links on the page - aside from a tiny change in the mouse cursor. while i wouldn’t go as far as calling this webpage hijacking nor will i get into that argument, i would comment that it is rather convenient that the default mapping service is google maps. although i can change that option, i think it’s pretty obvious that a majority of users just live with the default. given the outcry against microsoft setting msn.com as the default homepage, i find it ironic that google would resort to the same strategy. i’m really curious as to whether the public will simply let this one go, much like they turned a blind eye to the privacy concerns brought against gmail.

what i think might be interesting is if google positions autolink much like vibrant media’s intellitxt, an advertising service that adds sponsored links onto specific keywords on a page. for intellitxt, the publisher voluntarily signs up and allows their webpage to get hijacked for a cut of the click through revenue. if autolinks were only available when publishers specifically allowed it and the publishers got some sort of kick back for the links, maybe they would shift their opinions on the feature .

the whole autolink feature aside, the google toolbar has a few other nifty features such as being able to navigate through search results without returning to the result page and going up a directory level on the current site. i almost thought they had overlooked page translation, but then realized they had slipped it into the context menu - not where i would think to look for it. the only thing that’s blatantly missing is a mozilla/firefox version, which i have to assume is in the works.

next up was the yahoo toolbar. the only major toolbar that currently has a mozilla/firefox version, it brings some unique features to the table as well. specifically, the yahoo toolbar has a ton of content tie-in buttons - there are buttons for each major sports league, shopping research sites and even one for “the apprentice.” there were so many options, it was almost overkill.

in contrast, msn’s toolbar is almost a lesson in understatement. the current version of msn toolbar serves up basic functionality pretty well, but seems to lack most of the bells and whistles other toolbars provide. i also tried the beta, but from what i could tell, it just added a link to msn spaces and packaged desktop search with it (i know you can install just the toolbar, but i wanted to check out the full experience). one thing i thought was nifty was that with the new msn toolbar, you can specify default search settings such as how you want to view results, your location and your default language. in general, i like msn’s clean interface and neat integration with their desktop search offering. however, i do wish that using the deskbar’s web search wouldn’t open up a browser window; i think it should just show results in the little preview pane.

i have to wonder if google and yahoo are also thinking about packaging their tools together like msn has. it seems to be a pretty logical step…

anyways, after a morning of playing with this stuff, i now have way too many toolbars in internet explorer. i use firefox most of the time though, so i’m safe from the toolbar clutter and yahoo toolbar wins by default.

all this exploration got me thinking: are toolbars the future? what happened to the idea of rich functionality through browsers? i wouldn’t be surprised if internet explorer 7 had most of the msn toolbar features built-in, which would severely diminish the value of these other toolbars. additionally, although google maps proves that hacking dhtml can produce good results, is that really the way to go? i would happily download a new browser if it meant getting a richer google or yahoo experience, but maybe that’s just me. msn seems to be with me here (they provide a full fledged msn explorer), but they are still ramping up on a lot of the cool services google and yahoo already provide. will i fire up a google or yahoo browser one day? i hope so.

just saw an interesting essay posted in favor of having governments provide broadband access - check it out at wifinetnews. the author gives a fresh look at the debate by framing it in the dilemma of rolling out electricity to the masses at the turn of the last century.

i don’t really care if it’s government or private companies that provide it; i just want cheap, fast, ubiquitous broadband as soon as possible