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TechWatching.com v1.5 is Live

I mentioned earlier that I might spin off my relevance algorithm as a standalone site - which I’ve now gone ahead and done at TechWatching.com. TechWatching is a blog/news aggregator that competes squarely with TechMeme.

TW is divided into 4 sections:

1. Hot Topics: TW maintains a keyword index of the blogs it follows. When a keyword shows up more frequently than average, it can be promoted to a Hot Topic - in which case it will show up at the top of the page with closely related keywords and relevant stories.
2. New Stories: Immediately under the Hot Topics resides “new stories” - stories that are getting attention in the tech blogosphere, but that don’t fit into a specific Hot Topic. This area is analogous to the TechMeme presentation.
3. Below the Fold: Under New Stories resides BTF: Stories that have fallen out of the New Stories area because they are aging and haven’t gotten enough momentum behind them to stay “new” or to be promoted to a Hot Topic.
4. Must Read: The right-hand column contains a list of the most-clicked on stories of the last 24 hours, collected from the site and RSS readers. Presumably lots of people are reading these - and thus, so should you.

That’s it in a nutshell. Its only refreshing hourly right now, but I’ll be ramping up the rate tonite.

Below is a screenshot, or click over to http://techwatching.com to see the real thing. Feedback is welcome and appreciated!

aggregators, blogs, techmeme techwatching

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My spare time TechMeme competitor

I have a rudimentary knowledge of a lot of things: statistics, programming theory, php, mysql, consumer behaviour, and so on. Individually, I’m an expert in none, and could not do any professionally to save my life. Taken as a package though, I know just enough info about just enough disciplines to have a little bit of fun.

In that vein, over the last week, while recovering from a flu/cold/lackofsleep, I glued together a clunky TechMeme competitor as a conceptual exercise for myself to see if I could apply the bits and pieces that I know to generate relevant results.

You can see the system’s (live) output here: http://hddb.net/techstream_index.html

(hddb.net is a different venture of mine, and a convenient development box)
(”techstream” is just my internal development prefix, not branding)

It refreshes every half hour, and as of right now, is actively following 167 blogs in the technology sector. It uses MagpieRSS to cache and check feeds, so hopefully if you’re on the list you’re not seeing weird spikes from hddb.net.

Once it picks up your post, it does a bunch of brute force, ugly stuff to it to try and place it in a larger context. It looks for other posts that yours links to, and other posts that link to yours. It splits up your post title into tags, and searches for other posts that share common tags. When all is said and done, it stitches together tag relevance, links to and from, how long the post has been kicking around, click-through popularity, etc, and through magic that I can’t even really follow any more, its spits out the output that you see.

The algorithm takes about a minute to run during low post volume times (like Sunday evenings), and swells to up to 5 minutes when the blogosphere is cooking.

The result? Not bad, IMHO. Its not as balanced as TechMeme, in that hot items will cling to the top of the page for longer than they should. The page is also longer than it should be. It also doesn’t have the breadth of TechMeme - I imagine Gabe’s algorithm is following more that 167 posts. I’m also manually adding feeds - one of TechMeme’s greatest strengths is that it (I think) picks up new blogs to follow automatically, based on link volumes that it sees. I’d like to get there eventually. I’m also missing any RSS output - there’s nothing to subscribe to yet, and I’m not even sure what form such a subscription would take (I’ve never really followed TechMeme’s bulk feed output).

Anyway, enjoy. Your thoughts/comments/etc. are welcome. If you’d like your blog added to the index, let me know.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs techmeme

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How To: Be a Successful Blogger

Jerry Bowles on the FASTForward Blog has the best post I’ve seen on “how to be a successful blogger” yet. His list includes the old standby’s like “be true to your self” and “be passionate about whatever you’re blogging about,” but also goes into some good specifics, like keeping posts at 500 words or less.

Has anyone built a word count widget for Wordpress yet? I see this one that does overall word count stats, but a javascript word counter that sits next to the text-editor box and counts as I write would be really neat.

bloggers, blogging, blogs success

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For love of money: the death of the blogosphere

Scobleizer chimes in after the Federated Media / Microsoft dustup over the weekend, asking why its “ok” for some tech-pundit types to sell their voices and not for others. Roberts asks the key question: would Leo Laporte be talking about GoToMyPC if they weren’t paying him? Likely not.

Blogging and the blogosphere began with an implicit promise: that those who participated did so for the love of their community and interests, not for a paycheck, and that what they wrote was an honest snapshot of their opinions.

That promise defined the blogosphere: it created a fifth estate characterized by passion, opinions, and a chorus of overlapping, contradictory views - all in marked contrast to the dry, “objective,” produced mainstream media. That promise has encouraged millions to join “the” conversation as authors, free to be honest to themselves; those honest author’s personalities, opinions, and insights have created the world’s biggest reader base.

There are successful bloggers out there, however, that seem to have lost sight of what it means to be a blogger - presumably swept up in the opportunities of success. Can Leo Laporte sell his voice? Sure - I consider him MSM, living principally in TV and Radio, and thus compromised by the very nature of those industries. Can Michael A. and Om Malik shill whatever they want? Sure - go ahead. But when you do, your failing yourself and your readers, breaking the promise that you made to the blogosphere to speak your mind - not advertiser’s. Its disappointing to see.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs, federated+media, fm, gigaom techcrunch

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Twitter Quibble

Why do so many people maintain a Twitter account to which all they ever post are their blog’s headlines and TinyURL links back to posts? You know who you are. Am I missing something here?

blogs, quibble twitter

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eBay launches embeddable listing widgets

Good grief - eBay is actually doing something useful. Today, as covered by TechCrunch (I copied their widget, btw), eBay has released embeddable flash widgets. Anyone can widget any auction, and any widget you see can be easily cloned for embedding in your own site (as I did with the one on TC, it was about a 5 second process).

The widgets, are slick, useful, and easy. The are created through togo.ebay.com, and can take a variety of formats (single items, search results, slideshows). The process is very straightforward, with the exception of the fact that you need to manually enter an Item ID.

That Item ID part is the big opportunity that eBay is missing with this: IMHO it would just make sense to embed the creation tool in each listing page so that anyone can promote any listing without the need to copy and paste Item ID’s between eBay sites. A single click, in-listing widget creation tool would get much more utilization. Hopefully this is in the cards.

blogs, ebay, embed, togo widgets

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Thanks, priestofmemory: the “Civil Anyway” Badge

Blogger priestofmemory has a great post about the ongoing Blogger Code of Conduct flap. He’s of the same mind as yours truly on the issue, and was kind enough to create a badge to symbolize his adherence to a reasonable, un-regulated, self-applied code of conduct: no nanny badges, just a declaration that you’re an intelligent, reasonable, non-troll.

I wear the badge at the top of my right-hand column. If you’d like to do the same, warm up your right-click-save as - here’s the badge:

And feel free to link it to:

http://techfold.com/2007/04/09/an-alternative-to-oreillys-politeness-manifesto-the-un-code/

…which is where priestofmemory pointed his, or:

http://priestofmemory.livejournal.com/57566.html

…which is his post.

Either way, the message gets across that its OK to be a nice normal person without adhereing to anyone’s arbitrary assumptions of what “nice” and “normal” are. Just to quote quickly from my original post, here’s my “Simple Test” declaration:

THE BLOGGERS CODE OF CONDUCT: A Simple Test

1. “Do online as you would in person.”
Before every post or comment you make, ask yourself whether you would be comfortable shouting it out loud from a well-lit lectern in an auditorium full of 300 people that included, friends, family, and a whole lot of strangers. If the answer is “No,” revise and retest before posting.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs, code, oreilly, sierra techfold

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An Alternative to O’Reilly’s Politeness Manifesto: The Un-Code

As Mike A. lines out effectively on CrunchNotes, the stink around the Sierra blog attacks from a week or two ago is now being perpetuated by Tim O’Reilly, who has surfaced a fluff-ridden “Blogger’s Code of Conduct.”

Out of all of the huggable, do-gooder posturing in the Code, there’s only one line that really makes any sense: “We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.” That is to say, don’t be an jerk in your posts or in your comments. Or, if you are, expect to be banned/ostracized/etc. the same way you would be in the RW.

Other notions about banning anonymous comments, chasing commenters to get them to apologize to each other (puh-leez), aim to do nothing more than turn the blogosphere into the same padded, supervised, politically correct, injury free, la-la-la happy land that has replaced school playgrounds. For crying out loud, let’s put on our adult-hats, take the good with the bad, and move on with a newfound sense of awareness that (a) there are jerks on the internet and you probably don’t want to be one, and (b) the web community is very effective at calling out jerks without the need for codes of conduct.

Of course, I certainly don’t condone what happened to Sierra or any reprehensible behaviour like what took place in that context. Nor, however, do I think the appropriate response is the nanny-fication of the blogosphere or the introduction of a vigalante politeness corps. Instead, I propose a revised manifesto, based on O’Reilly’s pt. 4, like this:

THE BLOGGERS CODE OF CONDUCT: A Simple Test

1. “Do online as you would in person.”
Before every post or comment you make, ask yourself whether you would be comfortable shouting it out loud from a well-lit lectern in an auditorium full of 300 people that included, friends, family, and a whole lot of strangers. If the answer is “No,” revise and retest before posting.

I think that really sums it up. It leaves plenty of room for freedom of speech, and leaves “regulation” in the hands of individual bloggers and readers. That is to say, if you’re comfortable shouting out offensive stuff in a roomful of people, expect to be heckled, and then the auditorium to empty quickly.

blogging, blogosphere, blogs, locke, oreilly sierra

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