Tag: pubsub

Blogging, office 2.0, Photo Sharing, Podcast, PodLeaders, RSS, Web, Web 2.0

Your top Web 2.0 apps?

If we ignore the fact that the term Web 2.0 is controversial for all kinds of reasons and concentrate on the applications themselves, which Web 2.0 apps (using the broadest possible definition) do you use most?

I use:

  1. my blog and podcast software all the time (they are run out of WordPress)
  2. my Flickr account regularly to post photos
  3. Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets frequently for collaboration or sharing of documents
  4. Google’s Calendar to synch with my laptop and mobile phone calendars
  5. Technorati, PubSub and Google’s Blogsearch to subscribe to RSS searches
  6. Flock as my main browser of choice (primarily because of the Flickr and Del.icio.us integration) – I also use Firefox, Camino, Safari and IE7
  7. Feedburner to burn and track my feeds
  8. NetNewsWire, Google Reader and iTunes to consume my feed list
  9. TechMeme, Megite and TailRank for keeping up with tech news
  10. Del.icio.us very occasionally to store URLs for items I have found interesting

What cool Web 2.0 apps am I not using that I should be using? What are your favourite Web 2.0 apps?

Search Engines, Technology

Brief blog search engine review

I have been trying a number of blog search engines recently.

I have subscribed to searches for the same terms in Technorati, Ice Rocket, PubSub and Sphere.

Sphere is the newest player on the blog search engine block, only coming out of beta last weekend. The search is adequate – I searched for “technorati blocked by China“, a story I broke here and was heavily linked to and quoted as a result, but my post on this is not found by Sphere. The searches I subscribed to using Sphere again didn’t return as many results as the other search engines and did contain some spam!

PubSub produced the lowest number of results of the four compared and often the results were late i.e. they were found by the other search engines much earlier (often days earlier).

Ice Rocket produced by far the most results of any of the search engines but those results were full of spam – finding the real information amongst the spam was difficult!

And Technorati was still the best of the four. Very timely results and very little spam.

Conclusion
It is always advisable to use more than one blog search engine for subscribed searches. In this scenario I would advise using Technorati and Sphere. Although Sphere doesn’t yet have as many results as the others, it does appear to be improving.

Also, I had an issue with Sphere earlier in the week so I contacted the CEO, Tony Conrad – he replied to my email and had Steve Nieker the CIO follow up – it is great to see companies getting directly in touch with their users in this way.

Ice Rocket needs to seriously address the spam problem it has and PubSub, I’m sorry to say, looks like it is no longer at the races.

Blogging, Business blogging, Technology

Launch of Structured Blogging

I see Jeff Clavier has a post about the launch of StructuredBlogging.org at the Syndicate conference. Structured blogging is

a way to get more information on the web in a way that’s more usable. You can enter information in this form and it’ll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.

For more see the structuredblogging.org website.

The announcement is being made by Marc Canter, and Salim Ismail of PubSub.

This is very fortuitous timing – Salim pre-announced the structured blogging initiative in his amazing podcast on this site last week and co-incidentally, I am interviewing Marc canter at the end of this week for a podcast to be published next week!

Are these podcasts topical, or what?

Blogging, Interviews, Podcast, Search Engines, Technology

Salim Ismail interview podcast II

As promised, here is the second interview with Salim Ismail – Salim is chairman & co-founder of PubSub and he very kindly agreed to come back on the show to follow-up on some of the things we talked about in the last podcast – if you haven’t listened to the first interview I did with Salim, I would strongly advise you to listen to that podcast before listening to this one.

In this podcast Salim outlines his thesis that businesses will move away from being data and report driven towards an event driven model – using a publish and subscribe event server and event aware client software. It makes for absolutely compelling listening.

The audio on this podcast was quite poor at my end – there was a horrible echo so I had to delete and re-record many of my questions.

Here are the questions i asked and the times in the interview at which I asked them:
What kinds of content will be and should be structured in structured blogging? – 1:30
What other kinds of applications do you see for structured blogging [apart from book reviews]? – 4:49
Is structured blogging going to be primarily a commercial tool? – 8:35
When you talk about Event Management, do you mean the Financial Controller being alerted whenever an invoice goes over 30 days, for example? – 16:07
Will you need a smart RSS reader to receive this data? – 21:33
Currently there is no event management server software available, is this all in the realm of speculation? – 23:17
If a company wanted to roll this out tomorrow, what would they need to do? – 27:24
I can’t go down to my local software store and ask for an Event Server and 5 client access licences though… – 28:37
So are PubSub offering their event routing engine for sale to companies? – 31:49
Will Ebay and Craigslist come along and aggregate the content of structured blogs? – 35:33

Download the interview here 8.5mb mp3.

Interviews, Podcast

Salim Ismail interview podcast

Salim broke my head in this interview!

This was one of the most informative podcast interviews I have yet done – Salim introduced me to the concepts of structured blogging, and the feed mesh. Structured blogging is a whole new concept in web publishing which literally blew my mind – PubSub will be officially announcing Structured Blogging next Tuesday with Marc Canter (there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for Structured blogging yet – I got the scoop!).

If you publish on the web (if you are a blogger, for instance) you need to listen to this interview

The questions asked and the times in the interview I asked them are below:

Who is Salim Ismail and what is PubSub? – 0:32
What is PubSub? – 1:19
Is this something similar to Technorati’s Watchlists? – 2:01
What kind of people are using PubSub right now and what are they using it for? – 5:14
If a company (BUPA Ireland, for example) wants to use your service for brand management, they do what? – 7:27
You publish full feeds whereas Technorati publish partial feeds (presumably to bring people to their site), so how are you monetising this? – 9:22
No-one left any questions for you on my blog – is this due to PubSub being below most people’s radar? – 11:42
So if you are a job seeker or house buyer looking for houses or jobs with particular criteria…? – 18:30
What is structured blogging? – 19:32
So have you just destroyed Ebay‘s model? – 27:27
The feed mesh? – 31:37
How soon will the tools for publishers be available? – 35:00
How are you going to monetise this? – 38:23
Do you listen to podcasts? – 40:22
Do you have any particular favourites? – 40:57

Download the interview here 9.7mb mp3.

We didn’t get to cover all the topics we wanted to cover in this interview so I will be publishing a follow-up next week – stay tuned!

Interviews, Search Engines

Salim Ismail interview coming up

I will be interviewing Salim Ismail, chairman & co-founder of PubSub in the next couple of days. Pubsub is a blog search engine or as Salim likes to say a “matching engine”.

I was amazed to learn, from talking to Salim here at the les Blogs 2.0 conference, that Salim lived and worked in Cork for around a year and Salim is another fan of Murphy’s stout!

If you have any questions you’d like me to ask Salim – please leave them in the comments