Jason Clarke

I’ve been woefully remiss in following up on my posts last week regarding my switch from Technorati to IceRocket (if you missed it, CEO’s of both companies commented here last week).

Now comes a post from that other Jason (hehe), Weblogs, Inc. network prez Jason Calacanis. He’s not only fed up with Technorati, he’s asked his partner, Brian Alvey, to remove all embedded links to Technorati across all 80+ of the Weblogs, Inc. network sites:

Brian: Can you take Technorati out of the Linking Blogs link across the Weblogs, Inc. network and replace them with IceRocket?

So, last week I announce that I’m flipping my Technorati links over to IceRocket links…then today, Jason Calacanis, one of the world’s most influential blog publishers, announces the same!

Jason goes a bit further and offers some good advice to Technorati:

I think the company has a focus issue. They always seem to be busy doing odd side projects like mobile, Live8, the redesign and CNN. If I was running that company I would focus on one thing and one thing only: the quality of the search results. That’s it. That’s the only reason Technorati exists and that’s the thing they are doing worst.

I said something quite similar, but not as eloquent, in my first post on the topic:

If you’re going to shift your strategy towards mainstream, make sure you’re hardware/infastructure is 110% FIRST…Please, Technorati, don’t try to be Yahoo: don’t be the public service of the living web.

Just deliver results.

To be honest, I’m a bit surprised the changeover at the Weblogs, Inc. network didn’t happen sooner. After all, Technorati’s performance has been quite awful for some time now, and as Jason says in his post, he’s been complaning about them since February or so. Besides, if I’m not mistaken (don’t you find that people who write that often are?), Weblogs, Inc. blogger and investor Mark Cuban is also an investor in IceRocket.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve swapped out my Technorati search results link on each post over to an IceRocket search results function.

There’s more to it: I’m also dropping my 10+ Technorati RSS feeds (Customized RSS feeds of my blog’s name, my name, and other topics of interest as they flow into Technorati). In favor, I’ll be replacing all these feeds with feeds on the same subjects, except these will be sourced from IceRocket’s search results.

The trial is on: Over the next few days, I’ll be keeping an eye on IceRocket’s search results and closely monitoring (like Wolf Blitzer) the results. I’ll report back soon.

Not having much experience with their data, I will say that the company is off to a great start PR-wise though: In my previous post, Blake Rhodes, IceRocket CEO, left a comment thanking me for trying out the service.

How did he find this site? Well, I’m just guessing here, but I checked my referral logs and noticed a recent visitor came in from http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=Icerocket…that’s circumstantial evidence suggesting that perhaps Mr. Rhodes was using his own service to track word about his service. The owner of a company who uses his own tool- that’s always a good sign!

…because right now, my favorite RSS feed is my SlickDeals.net feed.

I’m adding a new personal tag to my del.icio.us habit/space: “toread”. It’s, obviously, stuff I want to read later on. So then I’ll use the automagically generated del.iciou.us feed of that tag to dump back into my RSS reader (making sure to set the feed *not* to expire after I open it) so that I have a one-stop place to return to read stuff that I don’t have time to dive into when I first happen upon it.

Taking it back to the social angle (although del.icio.us is primarily a social tool, I think it’s myriad personal uses are equally huge and vastly undervalued - or at least vastly un-discussed), I can then add a new section to this site called “what I’m reading” and use BigBold’s RSS Digest to output the feed dynamically onto this site.

The web is pretty cool right now, huh?

Thanks to my affiliation with the Media Bloggers Association (disclosure: I am a board member and web developer) and the organization’s book review copy distribution program, I came home the other day to find a free copy of Ben Hammersley’s new book, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, waiting for me.

I’ve only glanced at the book, but I hope to start reading it sooner than later. More on it when I get there. In the meantime, thanks to O’Reilly publishing for the book, and for joining MBA’s review copy program.

I’ve been following some “Service” blogs and RSS feeds of late (my definition for a “service” blog or feed is one that provides some time of factual info, such as movie releases, weather forecast, dvd releases, etc).

Recently, two new sites along these lines launched, and both look to be quite interesting:

* Chicago Crime: Built in part by Adrian Holovaty (one of the people who inspired me to pursue standards-compliant design), Chicago Crime is a thorough and thoroughly usable datbase of crime in Chicago, organized by neighborhood, time of day, and many other factors.

The site has two key features: Outstanding Google Maps integration, and a wide selection of RSS feeds. If I lived there, using this site would probably make me too paranoid to subsribe to- but it would be great to know it’s there if I need it.

* The second new “Service” site is StormTrack, built in part by Jordan Golson of the Cheese and Crackers blog. StormTrack is pretty self-explanatory- using weather data, the site will track and report on various summer-season hurricaines and other weather patterns. Since the site isn’t automated, it’s value will depend on how frequently (and consistently) the authors can keep it updated. Pending updates, it should be a useful tool, whether you live in the south or not.

While Chicago Crime is a combination service/hyperlocal site, it is also one whose readership value should remain fairly constant. On the other hand, it’s interesting to note that StormTrack, besides being a service-oriented site, is also capitalizing on the niche element that made many highly-targeted political blogs (like one of my own) highly successful for short bursts, depending on how much and how often their subject matter made the news.

Mark Glaser, one of the best writers out there covering the web/blogging beat, has posted a great wrap-up of BlogNashville over at OJR.

Glaser summarizes the key points coming out of the conference by offering up a list of “Seven big ideas (and one pet peeve)”…and lo and behold, the list includes one item created by me!

5. BlogNashville site aggregates blog posts and photos from conference. OK, it’s the ultimate self-referential move, but that doesn’t mean it’s not helpful. The conference’s Web site includes a page called “Discussion,” that’s not really a discussion but actually an aggregation of all the BlogNashville blog posts via Technorati, photos via Flickr and Web links via del.icio.us. Not only is it a great running tally of the post-convention commentary, but you can also subscribe to RSS feeds to get the latest in your newsreader. This is the type of page that should be a requirement for all conventions in the future.

Thanks for the kind words about the BlogNashville Discussion page, Mark.

Reading through my RSS inbox today, I noticed that Tom Biro’s excellent AdJab- a member of the Weblogs, Inc. network- is sporting Google’s all-new AdSense-In-RSS feature.

A quick check at Jason Calacanis’ (Weblogs, Inc. founder) blog revealed that the entire Weblogs, Inc. network- more than 70 blogs- is now one of the earliest adopters of Google’s new AdSense-in-RSS program. Calacanis provides some details about the program:

In case you didn’t notice, some of your favorite Weblogs, Inc. blogs now have Google AdSense in the RSS feeds.

What does this mean?
Well, it means we know we can make money off of our RSS feeds and that we can justify providing you—our readers—with free “full” feeds to our content. Many folks are moving to headline only feeds so that you have to click through to the Web… I can understand this, how else is a publisher going to make money? Well, that question is answered and we’re psyched to be part of it.

What it also means is that people who have been stealing our content are now going to be stealing it with advertisements in it… so, while we don’t allow others to re-publish our full-feeds to the web (headlines only please!), at least we will make some money off it when they do!

As a big RSS’er himself- he regularly follows over 300 feeds- (see my earlier interview with him), I figured AdJab’s Tom Biro (disclosure: he’s a friend) might have some thoughts about his publisher’s new advertising model. He did, and he was kind enough to send me an email with some thought-provoking commentary on the whole RSS dealie:

As someone who subscribes to a large amount of RSS feeds a day, I’m not sure that this will change any of my habits, personally. WIN has had ads in RSS before, as have other publishers. Google’s involvement is just the latest evolution in the market, and it happens to be coming from one of the largest (if not the largest) contextual advertising provider. WIN isn’t the only site with ads in their RSS feeds, either. PaidContent has had a post per day that shows up, is labeled as advertising, and allows Rafat Ali to monetize the site’s feeds (discussed here).

As a blogger, you’re always concerned about the perception that people have of the distribution channel through which your writing is seen. Site design, RSS feeds, browser compatibility are just a few of the things to think about. RSS has become a way of the world of sorts, and when sites are publishing full feeds or extended feeds, there are definitely subscribers who hit the feed and don’t click through as often as before, hence the advertisements. I understand that there is a need for advertising in the feeds, and while it may not always be perfect, a contextual advertisement is probably better than anything.

Think about it this way: let’s say there never was the Web in the manner in which we currently surf it. If RSS had started as the prominent way in which content was published, and it evolved into having advertisements, people would “complain” about it the same way they did when other websites began having ads. You can never please everyone all the time, so it’s about finding the happy medium, or medium that makes the most sense for your site.

With regard to the community at large, this again isn’t really the first foray into RSS advertising (for WIN or anyone), it’s just one that people have shown an interest in because of the players involved. Yahoo’s Overture offered a similar service a few months ago, in fact. WIN co-founder Brian Alvey points out that the sites have even had their feeds “sponsored” before.