There were two semi-related bits of news yesterday that have the potential to give WordPress-powered blogs even more of an edge in Google search rankings. Two small changes that are going to change how we find and use information, and it all comes down to one word: PubSubHubbub (PuSH).

First we got word that all 10.5 million WordPress.com blogs would support not only RSSCloud but also PuSH. That’s a lot of blog content there. Enough to make a serious difference on its own. At the same time Automattic released the PuSHPress plugin to do the same for self-hosted WP blogs (which I promptly downloaded and activated, just like I did for RSSCloud). Sure alone this is major news (hence why RWW and others covered it—10.5 Million Wordpress Blogs Get PubSubHubbub), now WP.com blogs and those who install the plugin will now push their updates out to readers instead of forcing readers to come to them. Ah the real-time web, it’s getting richer and richer. So, while that is cool, it is trumped by the next bit of news…

Google is going to use PuSH to power real-time indexing and results—Google Index to Go Real Time. See the connection? Out of the box WP.com blogs are going to have a serious edge over most other blogs (I’m sure Blogger blogs will get PuSH soon too). A tight blogging network that stomps out spam blogs without mercy, that encourages great content, and now well tell Google immediately when there is new stuff? I think that’s a pretty powerful thing. Now, add to the mix all the self-hosted WP blogs? Man that has the potential to really influence Google results.

This doesn’t mean that people can be lazy with SEO, on the contrary, I think this should push people to take it more seriously. Look, you’re going to get your content right into the Google index, so making sure you use (good) categories, tags, and writing with keywords in mind only serves to push you higher in the results.

With tens (hundreds?) of millions of blogs pushing updates to Google, don’t you think that those results are going to get priority?

Granted, it shouldn’t take long before Blogger, MovableType, and TypePad have PuSH support as well, but let’s consider volume here. WordPress is poised to become the platform of choice for Google.

WordPress, powering the realtime web, with help from Google.

Something has been bothering me about Twitter lately. It has nothing to so with the service, the people I follow, or those who follow me, I think it has something to do with establishing the right atmosphere for me to be productive. I have found it too easy to get caught up in the stream, distracted, but also disconnected. Wanting to be there so I don’t miss anything, but at the safe time wishing I could tear myself away.

It’s not a good feeling. It’s not a healthy state of mind.

And as much as I rely on Twitter to keep me updated, I can’t have it pull me away from the things I that I know mean more and matter more to me. I took a break this weekend from working on Using WordPress. I didn’t really think about it. I didn’t start on Chapter 12 or record anything. I recharged and reflected.

I realized during this time that while I can hammer out a chapter in a day, I’ve been having trouble hammering out a single post a day. I’ve shrugged off considering or commenting on topics or issues I would have jumped on before. And I had to ask myself why.

I remember when I would post 3, 4, 5 times a day. I would read through my feeds and find an easy dozen things I was interested in and several of those would go into posts.

I haven’t been doing that lately. I haven’t been doing that, and I don’t like it.

Tonight, after realizing that gazing into my columns of Twitter lists and groups was hurting more than helping me, I thought that LazyFeed and RSS could fit the void. I realized as well though that my News list on Twitter (it’s public feel free to follow it) was just as important to me as RSS was. The conundrum didn’t last long, the single column mode in TweetDeck does just fine.

Is this a Twitter backlash? Could I be the start of a new trend in backing away from Twitter a bit? I doubt it.

To be clear, I’m not abandoning Twitter or deleting my account. I’ll still keep up and chime in from time to time. What I’m doing is realizing that by watching the flow of others go by, I was somehow losing sight of myself.

And I have far, far too much going on to lose sight of myself, that’s for sure.

I don’t buy terribly many books anymore, or magazines, and certainly not newspapers. A bit of an ironic statement from someone who’s first book comes out in January, but I don’t equate publishing with paper. I assume that my books will have more life in digital editions than in paper ones. I’ve been writing in the digital medium far more than I ever have (or will) in works published on paper.

While it isn’t Earth-shattering news that newspapers, at least in print, are dying off. Local newspapers, the hyper local kind that I used to deliver every afternoon as a kid when I was a paperboy (another causality of the Internet age), seem long gone. If the survive at all it’s as a thin weekly paper. In Vancouver The Georgia Straight and Vancouver Observer have thriving Internet-based content. Often some of the best content in both papers are online only. I found this piece in The Economist comparing how the telegraph didn’t kill newspapers, but actually made them what they are today:

The trouble is that nobody knows how to make money in the new environment. That raises questions about how much news will be gathered. But there is no sign of falling demand for news, and technology has cut the cost of collecting and distributing it, so the supply is likely to increase. The internet is shaking up the news business, as the telegraph did; in the same way, mankind will be better informed about his fellow humans than before. If paper editions die, then Bennett’s prediction that communications technology would be the death of newspapers will be belatedly proved right. But that is not the same as the death of news.

[From Newspapers and technology: Network effects | The Economist]

What has caused the biggest problem for newspapers, until now, is that there was no easy business model for continuing print editions. I see eReaders as the solution to the problem. No, I don’t think that many papers can have subscription models like The Wall Street Journal or New York Times have, but if more content can be delivered more easily and more cost effectively online without the noose of a paper edition around their necks, not as much money needs to be raised through advertising.

Classifieds? No, Craig’s List killed those as a revenue stream. And people do appreciate great content, and might be willing to pay for it. But in the end, it will be the ability to pull up the news on our small, slim tablets that will save news, writing, and journalism. We can gather, analyze, connect, and publish information so much more efficiently leveraging technology. The question will be which newspapers will find it more profitable to ditch their print editions entirely first. And what is the magic number of eReaders in consumer hands to make a digital only edition the best solution?

And maybe the biggest irony of all it is RSS will be the technology that will likely be the way we create and manage our newspapers on our digi-slates.

Who said the RSS reader was dead?

Scoble was always one of the staunchest proponents of full-text RSS feeds out there. Back when I was a pro-blogger trying to crank out lots of posts in a day (or hour), I agreed with him. It was much more helpful (and better for my custom, local feed searches) if the feeds were full-text. I wasn’t as hard core as Scoble and others by not subscribing or unsubscribing to partial text feeds, but I preferred them. Sounds like Scoble has changed his tune of late though:

In 2006 I wrote that I wouldn’t use any news aggregator or feeds that aren’t full text. I was wrong.

See, I often do get it wrong. Or, even if I’m right today, I can be proven wrong tomorrow by market changes.

What changed since 2006?

1. I have moved about 70% of my reading behavior to iPhone and other Smart Phone devices. Why does that matter? Well, on such a small screen having full text is far less desirable than if I use my 27-inch iMac.

[From I was wrong about full-text feeds]

I have to say I think Scoble is missing the whole point here. It isn’t the feed that takes up the screen real estate, it’s the interface that the reader has. For a small screen I’d expect to get the headline and maybe a few lines of text from the feed regardless of whether it was full or partial text. If I was interested in the article, I’d click through or flag it or something. I used to read feeds on my BlackBerry, but I stopped and not because of the small screen (though that didn’t help), it was because the BlackBerry browser sucks and it disconnected me from my RSS workflow. Reading an awesome post on my Berry only means that I have to do something to get in on my laptop for later. I email it, favourite it, something it, but I have to do something to get that item to my machine for later.

Scoble also asks if people are using Twitter more vs RSS Readers. I have to say that I was but am now missing my 900+ feeds I once had. I’m not subscribing like mad to feeds again. Why? Because while I do follow a lot of people on Twitter and a lot of sites that send their latest posts out through Twitter, I feel like I’m not getting the breadth that I used to. It’s the esoteric stuff. The little heard, but extremely sharp voices that you find with a wide catchment.

The whole debate about full or partial feeds is better served by discussing better interfaces. Let’s look at better ways of reading, sorting, and sourcing RSS feeds. My combo of NetNewsWire and Feedly is serving me well … right now. I’m always on the look out for the next iteration that will let me gather more and more information. Yes, the neural implant is on my wish list for the future. Just hook me up to the stream baby.

So, Robert … which iPhone RSS reader are you using that makes you long for partial feeds?

I’ve been a hard-core RSS user since the beginning of my blogging days and I think I’ve tried almost every RSS reader out there. Mashable just put out the Top 10 RSS Readers (as chosen by readers) … good list I think:

Top 10 Mashable Reader News Readers
10. Reeder (iPhone) [warning: iTunes link]

9. Times (Mac)

8. Klipfolio

7. Shrook (Mac)

6. NetNewsWire (Mac)

5. Twitter

4. FeedDemon (Windows)

3. NetVibes

2. Feedly

1. Google Reader

[From Top 10 News Readers Judged by Mashable Readers]

Oddly enough, I’ve used all of these apps. Right now I’m using 1-3, at the same time. Once NetNewsWire started to sync with Google Reader, that pulled two together, but what about Feedly? Thought you’d ask about that. Feedly started as a Firefox extension, but that wasn’t enough, they developed Feedly for Safari and Chrome. Okay, I can use Feedly in my browser so what? The so what is that NetNewsWire uses the Webkit browser… which is what Safari uses. It hit me that all I needed to do to enjoy Feedly and NetNewsWire and Google Reader together was to open a tab in NetNewsWire and open the local Safari-enabled file to get:

Not bad huh? The key to using any RSS reader is finding the way to get the information you need, when you need it. I can just skim things with my Feedly page or read in NNW. The choice is up to me and how much time I have.

Times works very much the same way. I used it for a while, but I just needed more info than I could cram into Times a one time. Sometimes, you just have to step into the fire hose and just hold on.

It’s not hard to get blogging, regardless of what blog engine you use (though WordPress is the best IMHO), but there are tricks and tools that make life easier for you. At WordCamp Victoria I decided to distill and talk about the blogging toolkit that I’ve built up over the years. Tools like blog editors, image editors, RSS readers, note gathering tools, even Twitter clients.

Usually bloggers start out like this …
Domain: check
Web host: check
WordPress installed: check
What’s next? The tools. The goodies. The tools that make the job a little easier. Here are the tools that I like (or know are pretty good):

• Image tools:
  • Picnik – Photo editing the easy way, online in your browser (freemium, web)
  • Welcome to Aviary (free, web)
  • Paint.NET – Download (Free, PC)
  • Seashore – About (Free, Mac)
• Blog editors:
  • Writer – Windows Live (Free PC)
  • illumineX :: ecto – blog editor for Mac OS X ($$ Mac)
  • Blogo: The blog editor for your Mac ($$ Mac)
  • Scribefire: Fire up your blogging (Free, Firefox plugin)
• Screenshots and screencasts
  • Techsmith:
    • Jing (Free, Mac, PC)
    • Camtasia ($$ Mac, PC)
    • Snagit ($$, PC)
  • Skitch.com (Free, Mac)
• RSS Readers
• • FeedDemon (free/pay PC) – NetNewsWire (free/pay Mac)
  • Google Reader
  • Feedly
• Notetaking apps:
  • Evernote (Free/Paid, Mac, PC)
  • Yojimbo ($$, Mac)

If you’d like to try DropBox, now is a great time to check it out. If you tell them I sent you, then I’ll get an extra 250MB storage on my account. Not a bad deal I think

Earlier yesterday I wrote a post lamenting the state of RSS readers–RSS Readers–Why have you forsaken us? Part 1: Setting the stage–and I didn’t have a solid idea of how RSS readers could improve themselves. I couldn’t put my head around a better UI or workflow (besides one-click subscribe), then that afternoon I hit this piece of news–WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud–and some gears started turning. A few hunks of rust came off and the protestations of my brain being forced into gymnastics was audible across the room.

I read through a good number of posts:

• HowTo: River2 is a fresh start
  
• HowTo: Rebooting the RSS cloud
• How to publish and receive blog posts in Real-time
  
• RSS in the Clouds « Blog « WordPress.com

Then installed the RSS Cloud plugin, like Corvida–Installing WordPress RSSCloud Plugin | SheGeeks.net–I was amazed at the simplicity (you turn it on and you’re done) and played with Dave Winer’s River2 for a short bit (not quite the RSS reader I could get into, but that’s fine). This morning I caught up on the news and saw that LazyFeed was already supporting RSSCloud–LazyFeed: 1st Independent RSS Aggregator Declares Support for RSSCloud–which should put pressure on other RSS apps to do the same. The bigger question is: so what?

The so what is that RSS readers have been losing out because they were losing relevance compared to rapid fire, fire hose information streams like Twitter and Techmeme. Dear Lord you had to check the sources for updates and if you relied on Google Reader, those “updates” might not be so fresh or up-to-date! Now, what if …

You combined the persistence of a solid RSS reader with the immediacy of a dashboard or ticker? Have your gignormous list of feeds, but mark a select few as HUD feeds. Feeds that maybe could be pushed to Twitter or tapped into by Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Like your top 20 “I don’t want to miss a single thing” feeds, while in the background the “reader” part is building a relevancy-linked reading list. Find a way to consolidate articles on a topic, meme, headline, or concept into streams of articles. Sure be able to read your feeds like we do now (an interface like FeedDemon or NetNewsWire is good I think), but also have this information stream pulled together. Looking for the days posts on RSS or Facebook or social media or H1N1? Then they are already consolidated for you. Yes, you can build “smart folders”, but you have to know the topic first to do that. Sure you can have a folder with big concepts that you’re interested in, but when news breaks, wouldn’t it be good to have something like your own Techmeme based on the sources you follow?

I see the RSS Cloud giving info junkies like me and the casual news hound ways to grab data faster, in real time with potentially more metadata tied to the items (keywords, tags, categories) than we’ve had before. I also see that putting this all together isn’t going to be easy. More blogs have to support RSS Cloud and/or PubSubHubBub to have a critical mass of near-real time posts to work with, however that might not take as long as we think. If FriendFeed jumped on the bandwagon, well that would launch this data set into the digerati mainstream pretty darn fast.

That’s my idea and vision. I’d welcome the chance to work with someone like Nick or Brent or Greg on this kind of app. I think there is something there to get excited about. I think this is something we could all use. And I know it can be done.

With all of the discussion of whether RSS is dead–RSS: A good idea at the time but there are better ways now | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com–or not–Marshall Kirkpatrick, Technology Journalist » If You Think RSS is Dead Then That’s Your Loss and It’s a Big One–I think we’ve glossed over a key part of the problem–RSS Readers. Dare Obasanjo took this topic head on–Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – The Top 5 Reasons RSS Readers Went Wrong–but I don’t think it go the attention it deserved. As I’ve been getting back into reading my feeds on a regular basis, I had become like Sam Diaz eschewing my RSS feeds for Twitter, etc., I’ve been restless with the crop of RSS readers I’ve been trying.

A dedicated FeedDemon user on my PC, when I switched to Mac I of course chose NetNewsWire. NNW is a great news reader, but I became swamped with the shear number of feeds I was following so I started using Times which has a (literal) newspaper layout…

Times is good for a few feeds, but not more than maybe 10-15 per section. Easy to skim, but a little hard to just dash through. It was the limitation of the feasible number of feeds that could be tracked brought me back to NNW, and this is where things get interesting.

NetNewsWire and FeedDemon now sync with Google Reader instead of Newsgator Online (which is being phased out), a move that I think makes both apps more powerful. The problem is (at this point) I’m back at the point where news readers are all lacking just a little something.

If I start with Google Reader, I have sharing posts (a great social tool for expanding your information reach) and “Send to…” but it’s rather hard to just skim, click, and move on. Google Reader lacks the very simple “Mark all these items read in this folder/feed and move on to the next” option and my choice of titles or the whole post is pretty limiting when you’re trying to consume a medium number of feeds (I’m back up to 300+ from a low of 50 from my once high of close to 1000).

As you know I prefer desktop clients for RSS and e-mail. I know this is rather behind the times, and I have played with site specific browsers, but it’s just how I find working most efficient. Syncing NetNewsWire with Google Reader isn’t a big deal. NNW has good keyboard shortcuts (including the one above for marking read and moving on with one key), but right now the beta lacks Google Readers’ sharing and send to features. I’m sure Brent is working on getting them in, but right now they are still missing so I wander to Google Reader to catch up on shared items. That said, NNW is really good … but I feel like something is missing.

A newcomer on the scene, Gruml, is like porting Google Reader into a Mac interface, but not making is a SSB. Half-way between NetNewsWire and Google Reader, Gruml is pretty interesting. It’s close, but not quite. And this is where I’m stuck.

It’s like we need a new reader. Once, like Dare suggests, allows subscription (and unsubscription) with a click. We need a connector to the rest of our friends, so I can share items with them, read items they share with me, and set the whole “like” thing as just a passing comment. I’d like to be able to skim headlines with a bit of text and then be able to mark that entire group read and move on. Writing a quick post or sending to Posterous should be a quick command, type a bit, and move on.

I think the metaphors of a newspaper/magazine or email client as readers can’t handle the amount of information people like Marshall and I (and many others) need to do our jobs. It also sounds like the folks at RWW have a good thing going there, but I gather they aren’t going to share their golden goose RSS app set up–though I think there could be something there worth paying for.

I’ve set the stage for part 2 of the post, which I still need to mull a bit, which is the “okay what would it look like” post. For now I’m going to look at the readers that have worked for me and the ones that have not (and why). See if I can find a common thread there. In the meantime, leave a comment below with your thoughts on RSS readers. Maybe together we can help picture a new app for all of us.

Since I am an info glutton my ears perked up when I saw that the invite-only beta status had been taken off of LazyFeed. Come on, if Louis Gray likes it …

Posted via email from Tris Hussey’s Lifestream

Sometimes I wonder if the river of information we swam in during 2004, which became something more like a fire hose in the past couple years, has now become one of those super storms that people tell their grandchildren about (I remember the summer of 2009, when data moved faster than computers could store it in a cache…). Reflecting on how quickly something “made” the news back in 2004 (when both Steve Rubel & I started blogging), it might take a day before something reached critical mass. Today Twitter provides a multiplicative effect that truly makes my head spin. The difference now is that whereas in 2004 you had to write a post to build on the buzz, today you just retweet the original post (as I did with Louis’ post I’m citing here). This I think has made us pretty lazy really. Are we not writing? Are we not reading enough?

Or is it as Steve suggests, blogging is “slow”:

Meanwhile, Steve Rubel, author of MicroPersuasion, who has been blogging on that site since early 2004, said that to him, blogging seemed “slow”, when contrasted with the lightning fast communications seen from tools like FriendFeed and Twitter. He made the analogy that when you take the time to compose a blog post and you launch it over the wall, that readers have to look it over and make a choice as to whether they will respond, or if they will simply hit ‘J’ in their RSS reader and move along. In contrast, he said sending a note to Twitter was like introducing ants in someone’s house, making them immediately take action.

link: Today’s Real-Time Web Makes Blogging and RSS Seem “Too Slow” – louisgray.com

Looking at a screenshot from the hot Twitter client Mixero you can see in a glance the amount of information present. News, friends, replies (I hid DMs, sorry guys), all in one place I can skim, click, skim, RT in seconds:

I would wager that this isn’t always a good thing. I would wager that what we need is the web-equivalent of the “slow food” movement. Something where we take a few minutes to read a post, consider a post, then write our own opinions of the post in something greater than 140 characters.

I know that I’m fighting an uphill battle here. I know that even my own info gathering trends fly in the face of the “slow post” movement, however what if we paused and wrote more?

Naw, that won’t work, we might get more original ideas and lord knows that we don’t need anymore of those in this world !

Yeah I love TweetDeck , it’s open all the time and one of the first things I installed on my netbook. TweetDeck is the only way I’ve found I can get much out of Twitter at all. Iain is a very talented guy and eventhough I didn’t “get” TweetDeck at first, now I do.

Om Malik thinks Iain getting $500k in angel funding is a sing of Twitter insanity, I have to strongly disagree.

[From Tweetdeck Funding…a Sign of Twitter Insanity]

TweetDeck freakin’ works. Everyone who I’ve turned on to it wonders how they lived without it. Every-freakin-one. To me that is the mark of awesome software. I should know, I helped guide Qumana when it was the blog editor of choice for many in the pro-blogging community. People just “got it”. This means to me that if people “get” TweetDeck, then there is something to it. I know Iain has plans for the app. I know I have ideas too. I see TweetDeck becoming more and more a central dashboard of information, so lets give Iain the cash to live on so he can make this app rock.

Premium version? Since I already donated to TweetDeck as it is, I’m pretty sure I’ll pony up for new features.

What’s your crazy idea for TweetDeck? Come on, spill…

Since getting hooked on TweetDeck over the summer,it has become an indispensable part of my “infocentre”. In my TweetDeck setup I have a column just for these “news” tweets, just for info streams from posts as Mark describes:

The interesting thing is if you follow enough bloggers on Twitter using an auto-feed service, your Twitter stream starts to look lot like a streaming RSS reader with new posts popping up on a regular basis. Getting notifications about new blog posts is a useful alternative to your RSS reader because blog posts come to you dynamically as opposed to you having to shift through them. In some respects, it’s a way to follow the blog posts of a small group of people, while keeping your RSS reader for a more extensive collection of RSS feeds.

link: Using Twitter as an RSS Reader | Twitterrati

Which started to bring some parts into focus for what could be a very cool addition to TweetDeck: a light RSS reader like Snack.

I know, I know feature bloat. It isn’t what TweetDeck was intended for, but maybe it should be now. How cool would it be to have a few feeds scroll down in the same place as you are reading tweets? How about being able to tweet a headline too? Jump to your browser and then blog it?

This is how the our infostreaming worlds are combining. What we read, how we share, what we absorb is focusing around the attention we want to give it.

I don’t see apps like Snackr or TweetDeck completely replacing something like NetNewsWire, personally I need a much large pool of information to draw from than I’d like to try to absorb in something like TweetDeck, however it’s like the news ticker or headline news. Short bits that you skim and then drill down to details when needed.

Another time when I wish I could code…

Over the weekend we got word that version 0.20 of TweetDeck was nearly done and being sent to early testers (Iain, pls can I be an early tester for the next round) and planned for updating today (ish). True to form TweetDeck told me that an update was ready for me and I quickly said “Yes! Upgrade me!”. Here are the release notes for this new version:

Version 0.20 beta – 17/11/2008 (more info)

* – Added patches 0.19.1, 2 & 3 fixes
* – Added API rate limit info added to top right
* – Added no notifications for your own tweets
* – Added pulling maximum number of tweets on each call
* – Added user added to friend list when followed
* – Added user removed from friend list when followed
* – Added user added to friend list when profile viewed and already followed (and not present in DB)
* – Added Persian character fix
* – Added “clear read tweets” button to column function
* – Added deduping methods for each column type
* – Added control logic on adding columns – can’t have multiples of same content
* – Added unread tweets counter to each column
* – Added “in reply to” link to appropriate tweets
* – Added mark as read in one column now marks same tweet as read across all columns
* – Added deleting your own tweet & deleting a DM now actually deletes from twitter
* – Added your sent tweet immediately added to All Tweets column – live updating
* – Added column specific filter bar for tweet text, username, source & timeframe, both include & exclude
* – Added http://idek.net/about.html url shortening service
* – Added clicking on notification window will close it immediately
* – Added favorites column
* – Added an “add to group” button implemented in certain tweets & profile panel
* – Updated advanced search.twitter.com support – except “near:”, error with API
* – Removed local search
* – Fixed user avatar not showing or updating
* – Fixed display problem with < symbol
* – Fixed bugs with enter key showing new line & sending tweet when tweet panel not in focus

[From TweetDeck]

I am really loving being able to add someone to a group with a couple clicks. That is so convenient. TweetDeck also seems peppier this morning as well. I did have a small hitch in my update, I had a group of tweets from the CBC, BreakingNewsOn, etc (News headlines) that disappeared. I certainly could have accidentally deleted it, but it doesn’t matter I’ve rebuilt the list now (and it was much faster too ).

With the update to AIR this morning as well, it is becoming apparent that TweetDeck is going to be central part of my infostreaming hub. It is almost my dashboard for all info as it is. I still have NetNewsWire for RSS and Mail for email, but that covers it. Amazing isn’t it, moving from so many apps to just a few? Yes, of course Firefox is open to read pages and I’m posting with Ecto now (for the time being, not too keen on it’s spell checker), but when I need info, I rely on TweetDeck and NetNewsWire. Some info comes in via email, but not a heck of a lot. That’s correspondence now.

Focused attention, pulling many streams into one. That’s how to win the day in the new infoeconomy.

Update: Twitip has a review of TweetDeck, but it looks like only 0.19.3b was reviewed.

Last week aideRSS re-launched PostRank and unveiled a new Firefox extension to help you pick and subscribe to a site’s best stuff.

You all know that I’m a huge fan of aideRSS and I rely on it to cull my information firehose to a dull roar. You might have expected me to jump right on the PostRank XPI bandwagon and blog about it. Well I wanted to mull over what I thought it’s real value was going to be first.

Melanie posed a similar question—PostRank Blog › But how is PostRank applicable to ____?—and now I have the answer. PostRank nourishes the RSS ecosystem. The larger its database of feed is, the best aggregate results it can give over the long haul.

I expect that in the future you’ll be able to choose “Best of” feeds from various genre based on the data collected, the data we’re submitting.

After installing the xpi, sign in and such, you’ll notice a little rectangle at the bottom right of the window. I’ll let Melanie explain all the whats and whys there, but one point that I want to stress…if you happen upon one of your favourite blogs and the box says “unindexed” click the RSS icon in the address bar and add it to the index.

You can later come back and subscribe to it through the same button (and choose the filtering level), but the important thing is that the feed and content are now in the ecosystem to be mined later by all of us.

Related to all this, I’ve been playing with Yahoo Pipes and did a little fun thing. First I exported a set of feeds from FeedDemon, then imported them into PostRank. This created a channel (default is “Good” filtering) with the name of the group. I took that new combined feed and then passed it through this simple pipe I made (all it does is filter out duplicates) and now I have a nice concentrated feed. I also did this with a combined feed of all the shared items people set in Google Reader, etc which then gives me the “Great” stuff without duplicates.

Here is the pipe to check out.

The more I play with these new tools, the more ideas I’m getting for new stuff to come next.

Oh how I wish I could code.

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All the brew-ha-ha about the death of blogging last week didn’t really surprise me much (See Mark Evans, Mathew Ingram, Wired and Tish Grier). I had a post percolating in my head about the whole issue, but it wasn’t until Rebecca’s post today that it all clicked together for me:

I think blogging is changing; it’s evolving into something much bigger, allowing for more applications and tools to emerge in the online realm. It’s changing the conversation and allowing for more of a two-way street; you and your audience, wired and mobile, on and offline. Source: Blogging is Dead » Vancouver Blog Miss 604 by Rebecca Bollwitt

This is what I’ve been saying-have said-will continue to say (and you thought verb conjugation would never be helpful!) for years now. Blogging is changing and evolving. Blogging is writing. It’s a tool. At either Gnomedex or Affiliate Summit or BlogWorldExpo over the summer someone said “Saying I blog is like saying I paper.” it’s just one technology that lets us share and exchange information quickly.

Rebecca’s right, live tweeting is overtaking live blogging. Why? I think because there is more immediacy to a Twitter stream of coverage, certainly more brevity, and you can reach a broader audience with less effort. I have something like 2200 followers on Twitter and I know not all of them read my blog, but on Twitter they can get the info easily.

FriendFeed is becoming a hub for information, one that I haven’t been using as much lately because TweetDeck doesn’t have FriendFeed integration, rather than Techmeme or similar aggregators.

All of these tools are based on what we’ve learned and developed through blogging. RSS, remote posting, following people, friends, connections. It’s an evolution, a process, and frankly it’s damn exciting.

I’m still writing here, and will continue to do so until I run out of things to say. Is this a blog or my personal magazine of Tris?

In the end, does it really matter?