You know when you write an email message and click 'Send' to immediately feel like you shouldn't have done it? It's like an instant remorse thing. With email you still can recall the message (some times), or ask the recipient to forget about it, to not forward it, etc.
Blogs are very dangerous in regards to that because they give you the *false* impression that you can control its content.
What I mean is that once you publish a blog post, it is like sending an email to the world in which you cannot recall, delete or hide it! You might think you can, but here is how you works.
You write your blog post and click Publish;
If your blog software or service is any good, it will immediately notify blog search engines like Google Reader, BlogLines, Technorati and others.
These blog engines, for the most part, receive that notification and will retrieve the feed of your blog with your new entry.
They will index, store and display that blog entry to anybody that visits their site and is reading or searching your feed -- forever!
The problem is that between steps 2 and 4 it could be as fast as one second (or less), and even if you regret posting about it and go back and delete that entry, you'll never be fast enough.
Now, deleting the blog post is actually the worse thing that you can do.
Most blog engines will replace existing entries with their updated versions. So, if instead of deleting the blog post (which blog engines have no way of knowing that you deleted) you modify the text that existed before, you have a higher chance of people not seeing that content.
This is not going to work for people that are subscribing to your content via some e-mail service, because they will have two emails on their inbox, one with the original content, one with the modified content. Although, I think most people will read just the last version of a blog post, so your chances of people not seeing are still better than not doing that or deleting the post.
I just wrote about the traps of writing a blog post and thinking that you can delete it later (short answer: no you cannot erase from the Internet).
The problem with RSS is that is not a fully implemented protocol to notify content changes in a blog. If you think about a change notification system, you usually have three types of notifications: Add, Modify and Delete. RSS only supports the first two.
To be correct, RSS only supports "Add", but with the "dc:dateModified" extension it also supports "Modify" notifications.
Since RSS doesn't have "Delete", there is no way for you to control what Feed Readers or Search Engines are displaying to users.
Page vs. Blog Post
If you have a regular page on your website called "mypage.htm" you have many way to control Search Engine behavior. You have robots.txt, you have META tags to prevent search engine from Caching it (or even indexing it), and you can always delete that page and the next time a search engine crawler comes looking for it the page will be gone and it will be removed from the index.
With blog entries, you don't have that. Bloglines, admirably, is working on ways to improve that but allowing users to control how search engines will surface blog content, but that is about it.
What is missing..
RSS needs to improve by providing the following:
Support for "deleted" post;
Support for Search Engine control (nocache, noindex, nofollow) on a per-post basis that can also be used to change the settings of old blog posts (not only the last X posts).
Some type of authentication so blogs can control what is served. At least an "anonymous" vs. "authenticated" granularity.
Support for Time-To-Live and real support for "Don't Publish Before [Date]".
I'm not a top expert on RSS/Atom, but I'm implementing a service that makes vast use of RSS and we need a better way for users to control their content.
I want the users of Sampa to be able to control if a blog post is for "family" only, and any member of the family can be using any RSS Reader and just enter their authentication info for that blog.
We are going to present to a Seattle VC tomorrow morning. I've done that quite a few times.
The interesting dynamic of presenting your business plan to a VC (or any professional investor) is that for you is a big deal, for them, is just another Startup.
For the Startup, it takes days if not weeks preparing for the presentation. Documentation, financial projections, balance sheet, slides, support docs, etc.
For them, you are probably the 18th Startup asking for money this month, out of which half were completely stupid ideas, and at least one of them resambles your business. Though.
Rick Segal writes about www.wesabe.com that has a "Talk to Jason, CEO of Wesabe" text on the Homepage and how out of the ordinary that is. He continues and says:
"... I doubt most web start up companies will ever take this approach..."
I agree.
Here is a cool thing about Sampa: The CEO (me) answers all support and help messages. We ask you to send email to feedback@sampa.com because that is a distribution list where other people are also listening in to learn what customers are asking for.
At one time, we had a customer write a nasty feedback to Sampa. I politely replied to her agreeing with some of her comments and pointing out that some were incorrect. Always talking on the first person and, as always, using my own email address to reply to her. She was surprised that a "real person" was reading the feedback and was much more willing to give us even more feedback -- of course, she apologized for her language on the original feedback.
I just came back with another presentation to a VC. I don't think he is going to invest in us, but it was an interesting talk.
The most important thing that I've took out of this conversation is that despite a fairly uniform way of measuring revenue and success, each investor likes to divide the data differently.
Some investors, just talk in terms of Page Views as in "How many Page Views you got per day?" and "How many Page Views you expect to have at the end of 2007?". Those are the Ad-business investors. People that are familiar with Web 1.0 and worked on/with Google, MSN, Yahoo.
Then, you have the Web 2.0 investors which always ask you "How many unique users you have?" and "How much revenue do you generate per Unique User per month?".
Finally, there are the investors that understand traditional businesses and ask you questions in terms of "widgets", as in "How many sites do have?", "How much revenue do you generate per site per year?" and "How much does it costs for you to acquire a customer?".
Those are all pretty much the same data, just displayed differently. I like more the "traditional investor" that thinks in terms of widgets. It seems more obvious and less likely to manipulation. Page Views and Unique Users can be easily manipulated upwards. It alwasy depends how you count it. Sites are sites, and they only way to manipulate is if you change your definition of Active Sites. In our case, we use a industry standard definition.
Seattle still behind Silicon Valley in terms of the number of technology startups. They have TechCrunch, they have Valleywag, they have 10 times more VCs and money than us, but there is a lot going on in Seattle right now that gets covered up by all the noise news coming from down below.
That said, I decided to create a simple Blog List of Seattle's Startups, their founders & CEOs, reporters, investors, and other people working on the new Seattle Startup scene. To begin with I added about 20 blogs to the list. You can access the live list on this address:
The list is also available in OPML for those that want to easily import into their Feed Reader.
Send your blog
If you want your blog listed, just send an email to seattlebloglist@sampa.com with the address of the blog. Or, if you know somebody that has a Startup in Seattle, send him/her this information. Check out the link above for the criteria to be included.
Google Analytics w/ Google Adwords information was supposed to be it! IT! But IT is not.
In a rare moment of marketing clarity, we decided to stop talking and start doing it.
We just started a small Adwords campaign last week. It has been very exciting. We are not that interested on the new users (sure, all users are welcome). What we really care about is the incoming data. And in just a few days it has been overwhelming.
So, when you expect to go to Google Analytics and see if they integrate well... Oh crap! It is broken. Not the good broken where you don't get the data, the bad broken where the data is wrong!
We are giving it a couple of days to see if it Google Analytics needs time to "catch up" or whatever with the Adwords data, but at this point we are implementing our own conversion tracking.
No, I'm not kinding, I found many (dozens) of startups in Seattle that don't have a blog! [gasp]
And this is not the worst part. These are technology startups! [double gasp]
Well, it is much easier to hire a VP of Marketing that will hire a PR firm, to charge a few thousand dollars to write and distribute a press release to try to get in some print or online media to try to see if they can reach your customer or partners. Much easier than having a blog (and faster too, uh?).
There is more.... VCs in Seattle... So far, there are the total amount of 1 (one) VC from Seattle that writes a blog -- Steve Hall's Nortwest VC -- and, on the last 6 months he wrote a total of 5 (five) posts!
Fluke, Frazier, Ignition, Madrona, OVP, Second Avenue, Voyager, Vulcan... Nope, no blogs. To be fair, Ignition claims that it has a few VCs that are bloggers, but if you don't write a post in about a year I don't think it counts.
Rich Tong from Ignition Partners is almost a professional blogger, but his blog is not about VCs, Investments, or Ignition. It is about him, so that doesn't count.
There are Widgets that you can use on your blog (I found one for Wordpress) that you can set to display this list. [Reader: if you know other Widgets for Blogger, Typepad, MovableType, MySpace, let me know]
2) Use the HTML version of the OPML (requires programming)
You can fetch the raw HTML from http://sampa.com/Seattle-Blogs/bloglist.aspx and insert in the middle of your page. The only thing that you'll need is to define the CSS to make it fit your site design. The HTML is quite straight forward. (Please, remember to cache the results for at least 15 minutes)
3) Parse the OPML result (advanced)
If you want you can retrieve the OPML, parse its content and display on your site whatever way you want.
Holly ****! I can't believe my eyes. This month, Firefox has surpassed IE in numbers of visits to Sampa.com.
Just 2 years ago there was "no" competition for IE, it dominated the market with 90+% market share and then... Firefox happened.
I'm sure this is not what the people in MSN (Windows Live, whatever) are seeing because they have a more "low-end crowd". People that come to Sampa are a notch above on technology expertise.
Here is the data for Sampa.com for the month of November and in parenthesis the month of October:
Firefox: 47.79% (38.98%)
IE: 45.66% (54.93%)
Safari: 2.98% (3.22%)
Opera: 2.33% (1.81%)
Mozilla: 0.48% (0.41%)
Netscape: 0.27% (0.18%)
Camino: 0.14% (0.26%)
Konqueror: 0.14% (0.09%)
I wonder if what happened to IE could happen to Windows as well? Linux is not going to be it because it requires too many paradigms shift for users and developers. But if somebody could create a descent OS (even if built on top of Linux) and a decent compat Win32 layer.... Boy, MS would be in deep trouble.
When a term becomes popular enough, it will be hijacked by marketing to stretch its definition to include whatever pleases them.
Look at AJAX for example, about a year ago a company release a product that had "Ajax" on its name (I think it was AjaxWriter), but it didn't use AJAX at all! They made so much noise that they've got about 500K users visiting their site on the first week. Very impressive.
I'm a technologist, and I like things well defined. AJAX for me is AJAX (Assynchronous JavaScript and XML). It won't buy any marketing talk about FLEX being AJAX, or Flash being "Ajax-y", or XUML, or whatever.
But I'm not a marketing person and I see what this is appealling.
John Cook is talking/asking today about Zillow being a wiki or not. Heck, I don't even consider Wetpaint a Wiki. A Wiki for me is what Wikipedia is built on top of. Anyone can sign up and start editing. When you need authorization, then it is not a wiki anymore, it is SharePoint or any other CMS tool out there.
Here is my strict Wiki attributes:
It has that funky Wiki language;
It allows anyone to edit its content;
It automatically links to other definitions;
Here is my strict Blog attributes:
It is a list of text in reverse chronological order;
A lot of people, like Dave Winer, has an even more restricted view of what a blog is (like having comments and syndication).
Now, let's not confuse Technology Terms with Marketing Terms.
UPDATE: Scot French points out that I didn't answer explicitly John Cook original question. No, Zillow is not a Wiki on my view.
This week I clean up my email Inbox. A lot of people never delete the email from their Inbox, they keep it there until it is months or years old and then they delete everything that is older than X months.
I'm not like that. I always delete what I don't want, what is not important or that doesn't require any action from my side, however, I keep all the emails that I need for reference, or need to read later or have to reply at some point.
That is why I was shocked this week when I saw I had 770 emails lingering on my Inbox waiting for my action. It took about 2 hours, but I went from 770 to about 24 and then to 14 emails.
Since I was on a clean up mood I did the same with my personal email account. It went from about 350 emails to 7.
I don't know when was the last time I had so few emails on my Inbox. It feels soooo good.
Take this extended weekend opportunity and do the same.
On the last year or so there has a been a lot of people talking about WebOS, and even calling some web services a WebOS.
From a Computer Science point of view, a WebOS makes as much sense as a C++ compiler written in JavaScript.
First of all, people must understand that Windows, Linux and MacOS are not just an OS, they are an OS plus a bunch of other layers on top of the OS, plus a bunch of applications on top of those layers.
An Operating System is responsible for managing the resources and applications of a computer (see Wikipedia). In other terms, it means a way to manage Processes, the File System, Memory, Hardware drivers abstraction layer, networking, etc.
How do we translate that to something that lives inside a Web Browser?
The worst part of a the WebOS talk is when people talk about window management. Why would I want a set of windows inside my browser that is already running inside a window-based OS? The interesting part about companies doing that is that they implement interesting stuff like Calculator, Clock, Calendar, Notepad, etc. Really, when was the last time you were browsing the web in a computer that didn't have that?
That is why I compare WebOS with C++ compiler in JavaScript. It can be done, but why?
This is another example of words being hijacked because they are popular. WebOS is a marketing ploy. It is not an OS.
But there is a cure...
Mainstream always win over purists when defining terms. WebOS has been coined, expectations have been set and, surprise, surprise, it is not an OS. It is some weird thing that still being defined. It could be something like Zimbra, or PageFlakes, or Sampa. We don't know. It will take about 5 years for us to better comprehend what it is... Meanwhile, live with the hype.
Pierre De Vrieswrites on his blog that you can buy a decent PC for $330 and that Windows Vista will cost $240. He extrapolates that soon, Windows will cost more than the hardware it runs on.
I agree that it will happen, and that it will pressure Microsoft to lower the software price, and it will eat some of that amazing profit margin that Microsoft has enjoyed over the last two decades.
However...
Isn't that how it suppose to be? I mean, I don't buy a PC for the PC sake (although, Intel, Dell, HP, etc., want you to believe that). I buy a PC to run Windows. It is the application that matters.
As Pierre clearly points out, Apple figure it out a long time ago by selling the solution, not the hardware or the software. And that is what matters. Microsoft should work closer with OEMs to get that going. I think the Windows Media Center was a good start, but it turned into a replacement for the existing Windows/PC instead of becoming the solution on itself.
I spent about $1000 in a Home Theather system that I wasn't happy with. If the right form-factor and the right benefits would be in place, I would have another "PC+Windows" running on my home.
XBox is better positioned to achieve the 'solution' deal than any other piece of software in Microsoft. Zune is not a solution because it does require a PC with Windows, otherwise how do you get songs into it? (note: you cannot do it through its built-in Wi-Fi).
The current problem lies when using the new MailMessage. Before, you would use the MailMessage implemented on System.Web.Mail, which was quite limiting, but did the work. The .NET Framework 2.0, introduced the new MailMessage from System.Net.Mail. It is an order of magnitude better.
So, you go about converting your code and it is pretty much a simple game of changing a few method names and you're done. There lies the problem.
The new MailMessage needs to be disposed!!!
In a long time, this is the first leak that we had in Sampa. It is pretty hard to have memory leaks in C#, but not that hard to have Handle Leaks. Just forget to Dispose or Close a network connection, or a file handle, or a Bitmap and you have a Handle Leak.
Sampa makes extensive use of email. Every time people sign up, register to the newsletter, or somebody leaves a comment on a Sampa site, or a user is added/removed, an email is sent. There are another dozen cases where we send email. We were leaking a Handle each time an email was sent.
The worst case was when we had Attachments on the message. That leak was worse because it held a handle to the file to be attached to the message. So any attempt to rewrite or delete that file (which was usually a temporary file) failed and it meant that we are leaking multiple handles in a single call.
Subscribe to this Site
that makes vast use of RSS and we need a better way for users to control their content.
October, 2007