A lot has happened since I blogged a long-form. This year’s resolution is to write more than just a short stream of 140 characters.
Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Happy New Year!
Tuesday, January 4th, 2022Marketing R Us
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008“Us” as in the blogosphere, people who are contributing via blogs, twitters, groups, etc. People who are in top 100,000 list. When we talk about Word of Mouth, we think of getting the word out to the (“they”?) A-list bloggers. Fast Company has an interesting piece which debunks the theory that a select few “key influencers” matter more than “the rest of us.”
“Is the Tipping Point Toast” is an interesting read. The article is based on the work done by Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research. According to Watts:
It [achieving marketing success through influentials] just doesn’t work. A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart.
Guy Kawasaki, comments further and says:
Spend more time and effort pressing the flesh of real customers and less time and effort on industry events and other focused PR and marketing that involves sucking up to journalists, analysts, and experts.
As Blogosphere explodes, Blog search implodes
Sunday, January 20th, 2008Blog search engines are tracking billions of blog posts. Some posts are mindless, some are fun and some are purely spam. As the size of blogosphere grows the quality of discoverable content from the blogs through the search engines is falling way behind. We saw a similar problem with the regular search before Google came up and wooed the online users away from Altavista. I recently searched on blog posts tagged as “digg”. Majority of them were spam. Some were good but they were beyond the first few results pages.
Microsoft Launches Annual Awards for Indian Language Blogs
Saturday, April 15th, 2006
Trophies, Gift vouchers, watches, and other goodies are being given away. Interesting way to make inroads. Now, I need to order my Hindi keyboard.
[Etech 06] The RSS & Atom cat-fight: Did you have a premonition?
Wednesday, March 8th, 2006I’m sure Tim Bray had a premonition that a war of words is going to start after his “Atom as a case study” presentation. I hopped into the ballroom, expecting to learn a little bit more about Atom (which I was avoiding for a long time) — but, it looked like an open declaration of war, kinda “KMyA”. It did reach a positive note during the later half of the session, which was informative (When to use Atom? RSS? etc.)
The session started as an open criticism of RSS. Dave Winer (sidenote: Don’t know, but seldom hear about Dave presenting at conferences like this) the man behind RSS picked up and shot back at O’Reilly, Tim & Microsoft.
I heard by reading a bunch of blogs that Tim Bray said some unkind things about me and my work at his Etech presentation. This is what happens when you try to create a monoculture; it has to demonize those who have differing opinions. That’s why O’Reilly conferences so lack substance, because they always only present one side, the side that Tim has invested in.
In the session Tim brought up the fact that RSS has failed (sic.) because of it’s non-rigorous specification. The point being missed here — the charter of RSS was to have modules; wherein it could be extended as desired. On one side, there is openness, collaboration and extensibility and then on the other tight control by a working group. Making both to co-exist can be impossible. Analogy: You can either be Microsoft (tightly controlled Windows APIs) or you could be Linux (derive and add your own flavored logo).
Funnily enough, in his presentation, Tim had a cute photograph of two kittens fighting under the toilet. Note sure if that’s Atom vs. RSS or Dave vs. Tim, after what’s being talked about in the blogosphere. Hopefully, its the former and not otherwise.
FeedBurner might be happy seeing this — maybe they will come out with their own canonical model!
[Etech 06] The RSS & Atom cat-fight: Did you have a premonition?
Wednesday, March 8th, 2006I’m sure Tim Bray had a premonition that a war of words is going to start after his “Atom as a case study” presentation. I hopped into the ballroom, expecting to learn a little bit more about Atom (which I was avoiding for a long time) — but, it looked like an open declaration of war, kinda “KMyA”. It did reach a positive note during the later half of the session, which was informative (When to use Atom? RSS? etc.)
The session started as an open criticism of RSS. Dave Winer (sidenote: Don’t know, but seldom hear about Dave presenting at conferences like this) the man behind RSS picked up and shot back at O’Reilly, Tim & Microsoft.
I heard by reading a bunch of blogs that Tim Bray said some unkind things about me and my work at his Etech presentation. This is what happens when you try to create a monoculture; it has to demonize those who have differing opinions. That’s why O’Reilly conferences so lack substance, because they always only present one side, the side that Tim has invested in.
In the session Tim brought up the fact that RSS has failed (sic.) because of it’s non-rigorous specification. The point being missed here — the charter of RSS was to have modules; wherein it could be extended as desired. On one side, there is openness, collaboration and extensibility and then on the other tight control by a working group. Making both to co-exist can be impossible. Analogy: You can either be Microsoft (tightly controlled Windows APIs) or you could be Linux (derive and add your own flavored logo).
Funnily enough, in his presentation, Tim had a cute photograph of two kittens fighting under the toilet. Note sure if that’s Atom vs. RSS or Dave vs. Tim, after what’s being talked about in the blogosphere. Hopefully, its the former and not otherwise.
FeedBurner might be happy seeing this — maybe they will come out with their own canonical model!
Atom graduates to 1.0
Saturday, July 16th, 2005Anand Jain reports the release of Atom 1.0. Here’s the summary of comparison with RSS 2.0.
FeedBurner: Employees, Entrepreneurs, (E)Investors energized, everyone expecting Exit
Monday, April 11th, 2005Feed Burner’s press release was aptly titled — FeedBurner Fully Financed For Future Feed Formatting Fun. Nice title, eh 🙂 How about this signature at the end of the release — “Employees, Entrepreneurs, (E)Investors energized, everyone expecting Exit” ?
Last week, Feed Burner announced the completion of a second round of $7m. Draper & Mobius are now joined by new investor Sutter Hill. Feed Burner manages 40,000 active feeds, including mine.
The company is still in the process of figuring out the right business model. Thing to consider — if the feed items are teasers (i.e. first few lines of the item), the feed drives traffic to the website. However, if the feed items are complete entries then there is little or no traffic to the website. Aggregators and users will shy away from the service if the non-feed content in feeds turn out to be intrusive. This will be an interesting space to watch with “ads in feeds”.
Publicizing your Blog
Monday, September 13th, 2004Ganesh has some interesting ideas about promoting your blog.
But, the killer idea came from Peeyush. He changed the “My Display Name” property in his MSN Messenger to his blog URL viz. www.ranjan.us. The property is available under Tools > Options > Personal of your local MSN Messenger.
I was quick to monkey it. Hey, I like the idea.
…and here’s the ROI within 12 hours!
Need suggestion for Yahoo Messenger? Easy. Create a “New Status Message” pointing to the blog URL!