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Nice to be #1 at something Fred Wilson noticed that on the new TechMeme list, his blog is the sixth written by a person. Mine is first. Ben Metcalfe raised a similar question earlier today, noting that TechMeme didn't differentiate between professional publications like the NY Times, Reuters and CNET and TechCrunch, Engadget and GigaOm. It's not clear what the distinction is. I don't see any of those pubs as being blogs, so I think Gabe did the right thing, just lump them all together and let god (or mashups) sort them out. A pragmatic question for people who want to follow the TechMeme LeaderBoard -- it's clearly not practical to look at it as frequently as it could change, every 20 minutes. So what kind of tool do we need to tell us about change? Email notification? An RSS feed for each site? I'm interested in knowing what people think. Speaking of being #1, this blog is first on MSN for bricked iPhone. Needless to say it's generating some traffic. Optimizing Flickr RSS reads
BTW, I've got glue for the OPML Editor, it should work well in Radio or Frontier. I've exported a snapshot of the system.verbs.apps.Flickr, for all to use. It may be included in any distribution. (To be clear, OPML Editor users don't need this, it's already in the update stream, just choose Update opml.root from the File menu.) Anyway, I want to expand the Flickr/Twitter experiment, but before I do that I wanted to check with the Flickr folk because this service does a lot of polling of their RSS feeds. I suggested it might make sense to create a service that would allow a caller to find out which of the feeds its interested in have changed since the last time it checked. They responded with a simpler feature, they implemented a Last-Modified header on the RSS feeds, so that you could skip processing if a feed you're interested in hadn't changed. I've now updated my code so it does that, and everything seems to work. You'll find the script at Flickr.readFeed. Here's a text listing of the script. A new top 100? 12PM: The TechMeme Leaderboard site is live. Like almost everyone else, I keep track of who's pointing to me in Technorati, a service that was created in a Thanksgiving programming binge by David Sifry, based on the output of (my own labor of love) weblogs.com. Technorati grew to become a blog search engine, and much more, but as Mike Arrington points out on TechCrunch, their unique position has been whittled down by other blog search engines who are doing a better job technically. Not hard, since Technorati is famously unreliable.
Last night Mike Arrington got a scoop, as he so often does, that there's a new list coming soon, from TechMeme, that ranks the sites based on some other measure, which is not (yet) understood in detail. Mike also has a screen shot, which teases, by showing that TechCrunch is number 1 (all those scoops make a diff) followed by Engadget and the New York Times. The Techmeme list doesn't pretend to know what is a blog or isn't they rate all sites regardless or race, creed or color. But Mike's screen shot teases, stopping at #30. What about the rest of the list? There are a hundred or more bloggers who want to know if they made the list, and if so, where they are. Brilliant marketing by Gabe, and damn you Mike. So I begged Gabe for the list, and he relented, and sent me an OPML file containing the data which I then turned into the list below. Enjoy! 1. TechCrunch 2. Engadget 4. Ars Technica 7. GigaOM 8. BBC 9. InfoWorld 10. Wall Street Journal 11. The Register 12. Reuters 14. paidContent.org 16. Gizmodo 18. eWEEK.com 20. Computerworld 22. Associated Press 23. TorrentFreak 24. Webware.com 25. VentureBeat 26. The Unofficial Apple Weblog 27. Business Week 28. CrunchGear 29. Business Wire 31. Techdirt 32. Microsoft 33. Bits 34. Rough Type 35. DailyTech 36. Scripting News 38. PR Newswire 39. CenterNetworks 41. ZDNet 42. Guardian 44. PC World 45. Wired News 46. Inquirer 47. AppleInsider 48. Epicenter 50. Washington Post 51. Forbes 52. Bloomberg 53. Times of London 54. Apple 55. BoomTown 56. InformationWeek 57. Publishing 2.0 58. Scobleizer 59. A VC 60. iLounge 61. Download Squad 62. All Facebook 63. Financial Times 64. Boston Globe 65. Electronista 66. Yodel Anecdotal 67. apophenia 70. USA Today 71. Compete Blog 72. AdAge 73. Apple 2.0 74. WebProNews 75. Mashable! 76. New York Post 77. Googling Google 78. iPhone Central 79. Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog 80. NEWS.com.au 81. DigiTimes 82. Digital Daily 83. BuzzMachine 84. comScore 85. Security Fix 86. CNN 87. Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim 88. NewTeeVee 90. Think Secret 92. Reflections of a Newsosaur 93. GNUCITIZEN 94. O'Reilly Radar 95. MediaShift 96. ipodminusitunes 98. Kotaku 99. Valleywag 100. Los Angeles Times PS. This is a snapshot taken last night. The list is fairly volatile, according to Gabe, and will change quickly as stories move up and down the ladder at TechMeme. PPS. The existence of this list will probably make getting stories on TechMeme even more highly valued than before, if this list is taken as gospel, as Technorati's was, even with its flaws and skews. There was no correlation, for example, between flow and rank, a site with very high flow could have very low rank on Technorati, if it didn't get many inbound pointers. It was just one measure, as TechMeme is just one measure. The end of the road for Office?
Tim Berners-Lee understood, before there was a Mozilla and a Netscape, he said the web was inherently a two-way medium. We struggled against the inadequacies of MSIE as a writing environment when blogging was booting up in the late 90s and early 00s. The air was mighty thin, which was no accident, Microsoft deliberately tried to keep us from breathing. Because for them, writing was not something that would be done in a web browser, if they improved their browser as a writing tool, that would be the end of Word, and with it, a big reason for using Office. Synopsis: Microsoft wouldn't let MSIE become a decent writing tool, because they were protecting Office. That eventually had to run its course, they couldn't hold back the inevitable forever. Sooner or later the web would route around their roadblock, and we'd be writing on the web, as we are today. It didn't happen the way I wanted it to happen, with decent writing software built into the browser, rather through the ingenuity and peseverence of programmers who managed to make HTML and Javascript approximate the user interface of a desktop app closely enough to make simple writing tasks work inside the web browser. It probably helps that today's computers have gigabytes of internal memory and several gigahertz of processing power. If instead, Microsoft had embraced the web, and with it the shift in their product line and economics, in 1995, we'd have a much richer writing environment today. Blogging would have happened sooner, in a bigger way. It's hard to imagine how much the sins of Microsoft cost all of us. I won't shed a tear for Office. Good riddance, I say. I use Google spreadsheet happily, even though it doesn't have anywhere near the features of Excel, and is way slower. Every sacrifice I make there is something I'm giving back to the web to heal the Microsoft wound. However, we traded one monster for another. It seems there must always be a certain amount of evil in the tech business. The Java Wars are behind us, as are the Browser Wars. No one is going to fight Google in the next war, I doubt if many will even protest. |
Dave Winer, 52, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California. "The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
My most recent trivia on Twitter. Comment on today's On This Day In: 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997.
 
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There's a lot you can do with the Flickr API, I've pretty much mastered it, and it may look a bit intimidating at first, but it's well designed, and once you learn how to do one set of calls you pretty much know how to do the others. I would have relied more heavily on XML-RPC encoding for uploading pictures, but now that I've been uploading pictures for a couple of months, the pain of developing that glue is fading. 
Since the re-rollout of Office in 
