ScobleFeeds A-Z: The R’s

This is part eighteen of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

There are tons of R’s, and here are the best ones:

I am utterly uninterested in politics, but I find Ratcliffe Blog extremely interesting, even though (and perhaps because) I don’t agree with everything Mitch Ratcliffe writes. But he writes well and makes me think.

Raw is Danny Ayers’ blog about various internet and tech stuff. Good mix of topics and good writing.

Rexblog is Rex Hammock’s blog. Good range of topics, with some local Nashville coverage. As an ex-Nashville resident, I enjoy both the marketing, tech, music and local stuff.

Honorable Mention:

None

ScobleFeeds A-Z: The Q’s

This is part seventeen of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

There are very few Q’s and I didn’t find one that knocked my socks off. So no Q.

There are lots of good R’s so I’ll post that installment right now.

Dave Does Otis

Maybe Dave read my post yesterday, because he seems to be looking for some middle ground.

Rogers Cadenhead responds, in Dave’s comments and on his blog.

Maybe these guys can get this worked out and then move on to the real issue: protecting RSS from the predators.

The Doctrine of Slow and Old: Big Business and New Applications

oldandslow

Stephen Bryant posts 5 reasons why Web 2.0 and big business don’t mix. I think he’s right and I think his post is a must-read for any Web 2.0 developer who is aiming for the corporate market.

One of my themes, of course, is that big business doesn’t care about Web 2.0.

Let’s take a closer look at one of Stephen’s reasons.

Enterprise software needs to be personalized for each company, and enterprises have also invested heavily in legacy software.

This may be the truest thing I’ve read yet on this issue. You could found a religion based on that statement. Most big companies are using old versions of old software, with a bunch of customized stuff (or stuff they think is customized) layered on top.

All this extra stuff makes it a royal pain to push new operation systems and new versions of applications. The party line is that some of the allegedly custom stuff (much of which is bloatware, but they don’t know it) won’t work with a new operating system or a new version of an application. The real reason is that (a) it’s hard to push new stuff out to thousands of computers and (b) corporate risk aversion. Regardless, the effect is that big companies fall way behind the new application curve.

And of course some new applications don’t play well with older operating systems, so you get caught in a cycle of obsolescence.

Which results in slow and old computers running slow and old applications.

Which means that big business is a long way from caring about the lastest and greatest Web 2.0 application.

New Phone and More

Somehow I managed to lose my cell phone in Galveston the other weekend. It was on our bed when we left for a wedding. Cassidy remembers seeing it on there while we were gone. But when we packed up the next morning, it was nowhere to be found.

So I did what any right-thinking guy would do: I went out and bought a better one. My firm uses a Blackberry server to push email while we’re out of the office, so I had to beat back my Treo lust and get another Blackberry.

I got a Blackberry 7130e.

7130e-764795 I was with T-Mobile, but when my firm’s T-Mobile representative decided not to follow up on my two calls, I decided to move to Verizon. Unlike the first time I moved my mobile number to another carrier, which was a huge hassle, this time it took about 45 seconds. I had service with my number before I walked out of the store. Nice.

The other reason I decided to go with Verizon is its national wireless broadband network. While many people buy the computer card to get this service, the 7130e can provide the same network coverage as the computer card via a USB cable that connects the phone to your laptop, and the cost is only $15 a month extra (as opposed to $59 a month for the computer card).

When I got home, I tried out the wireless broadband connection and it was fast and reasonably reliable. I’ll know more once I get back from some upcoming speaking engagements, but this seems like a really good deal to me. The one drawback is that you can’t use the phone while it’s being used as a wireless modem, but that’s not that big a deal when you consider the cost savings.

I’m sort of sorry I lost my cell phone, but as is the case with any gadget upgrade, I’ll get over it.

This and That

A few things in no particular order.

Disqualification

After seeing this indescribably juvenile ad, I regret and retract all the nice things I had to say about Tagworld.

stupidad-784420

If that’s the sort of brain-dead, lowest common denominator advertising they are doing, I want no part of it. So what if they are targeting young people. What kind of message is this sending them?

Tagworld won Round 4 of the Web 2.0 wars, but it’s just been DQ’ed for stupidity. Runner-up Tailrank will take its place in the playoffs.

Blogging Round-Up

Susan Getgood has a great roundup of recent posts talking about the evolving nature of blogs. She also says some nice words about a couple of my posts, for which I am deeply grateful.

Susan is doing a Blogging for Business Workshop at the University of Wisconsin on March 17.

The Argument for Partial Feeds

Amy Gahran explains why she streams partial RSS feeds. I’m on the other side of this debate, but if anyone in the world could talk me into using partial feeds, it would be Amy.

Otis Redding and Battle Over RSS

But the soft words
That are spoke so gently, yeah
It makes it easier, easier to bear…
-Otis Redding

I’ve been mildly following the great RSS debate, mostly via Mathew Ingram‘s posts. It seems Dave Winer and some other people involved in the development of RSS are fighting. I can’t tell who’s right, but it makes for some interesting reading.

I actually emailed Dave and asked for permission to email him a few short questions, like I do in preparation for many articles here. But he never responded (of course), so I’ll have to try to figure all of this out second hand.

On the one hand, Dave seems to share my skepticism about advisory boards. Put a check in his column.

On the other hand, either the other side is so off in left field that Dave has thrown up his hands or Mathew’s correct when he says Dave needs to take the Otis Redding approach and Try a Little Tenderness. Pending further review, I’m going to have to put a check in the other column for unnecessary fighting.

So the best I can tell, Dave says this Advisory Board doesn’t exist (which clearly it does, but its authority is in question), while the board keeps on doing its thing, taking votes and whatnot.

I’ve said before that I have no problem with people who are direct and speak their minds, even if it means they tell me I’m wrong about something. But extreme directness works a lot better in a dinner table conversation about current events than it does when you’re trying to get something done as part of a group. Whether that group is an advisory board or a board of directors or the human race, if you want or need people to be invested in the process, you simply can’t yell at them and call them stupid. Even if they deserve it.

I’m not interested enough in this squabble to try to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong.

But I will say this Dave. Sometimes you can be right and still be wrong.

If you’re not careful, the issue will become one about personalities as opposed to issues. Once that happens, all that will matter to the sides is attacking the other and absolutely nothing will get done.

So let’s all sing a little Otis, shall we?

Sorry Duncan, But Steve Does Get It

I really enjoyed The Blog Herald and am sorry that Duncan Riley sold it, but he (or whoever wrote this post) is simply wrong.

Just because no one has devised a profitable way to cram a bunch of RSS ads down our throats is no excuse for partial RSS feeds. Particularly when we can read another paper that provides full feeds.

Matter of fact, I suspect that part of the reason why RSS ads don’t work is because (a) no one clicks on them, and (b) the advertisers know that. Just because they don’t work the way publishers wish they would is no excuse for forcing readers to the web site for the full story.

Newspapers who understand this will provide full feeds and take readers from those who don’t.

As Steve says, in the future, “we will look back and laugh how quaint it was that we received our news on dead trees.“

We will also think it quaint that publishers tried to drag us back to their ad-infested web sites by dangling half of an article in front of us.

New Technorati Features

Technorati

Now that my link count problem has been at least temporarily fixed, I can resume my role as a self-appointed customer evangelist for Technorati.

Dave Sifry just announced some cool new features.

Technorati Favorites: You can add you favorite blogs (up to 50) to a personalized Technorati page. For some reason some of the feeds in my opml file wouldn’t import, but that may be a problem on my end, since I had to use Bloglines’ brain damaged export function.

Here’s my current Favorites page (the first 40 blogs in my opml file, plus 10 that didn’t quite make it). It’s a cool idea, but I wish you could have more than 50 feeds.

You can also search your favorite blogs via the Favorites page. Technorati has created widgets and buttons you can put on your blog to allow someone to easily add your blog to their Favorites.

OPML Exports: There are now little buttons at the bottom of each Blog Finder search that allow you to export those blogs into an opml file.

A New Memetracker Club?

Adam Green has announced his desire to create some sort of a group blog about memetrackers.

I have very mixed thoughts about this, but most of them are not positive.

On the one hand, I use the memetrackers a lot and would be in favor of anything that helps them become even better. On the other hand, Gabe and Kevin seem pretty active right now when it comes to talking about memetrackers whenever they are discussed (and I’m sure Matt and others would join in if asked), so why do we need a central place for them to talk about this?

I was a part of the conversation here and on Steve Rubel’s blog that Adam cites as the inspiration for this new group blog. If these conversations are already occurring naturally in the wild, why do we need to try to grow them in a lab?

Isn’t the nature and goal of the blogosphere to promote distributed conversations? Maybe if Adam allowed comments on his blog some of the conversation would be occurring there right now.

Would those guys really want to blog together about the future of a space they are battling to own? Would Coke and Pepsi do a soda blog?

The bigger problem I have with this concept, however, is the potential for exclusion. Perhaps unintentionally, but the potential is there. For crying out loud, they have formed an advisory board to decide who should be able to participate.

That takes a second, not a committee. Gabe, Kevin, Matt, Laurence and anybody else who has built a memetracker.

Not yet addressed, but looming large over all of this, is who else gets to participate in this group blog? Just the memetracker founders or a select group of other people? If so, who selects them? The same advisory board or another one?

What happens if we need to change a lightbulb?

I hate to rain on someone’s parade, but I don’t like where this seems to be going.