I will be interviewing David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati this weekend for a podcast on podleaders.com – as always, if you have any questions that you’d like me to ask him, feel free to leave them in the comments or emil them to me at tom@tomrafteryit.net.
Tag: technorati
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!
Riya is a company I have mentioned previously – they have an incredible application which combines text and facial recognition with photo uploading, so that once you tell Riya who is who in your photo albums, it will recognise those people from then on out in any photos it sees! Riya also has tagging built in to the application – like any half-decent web 2.0 application. Riya is due to launch tomorrow.
Now comes the rumour/news that Riya is being bought by Google – before it has even launched! I have to stress the news that this is still just a rumour – and the way rumours grow legs on the blogosphere (remember the Technorati buyout rumours?), it may well be completely untrue.
However, given Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr, Google needs a cool photo app like this to maintain a presence in this space – then again, so does Microsoft! Anyone want to start a Microsoft is buying Riya rumour? Funny, Robert Scoble didn’t mention it in the interview of him which I podcast yesterday… then again, he wouldn’t, would he? 😉
UPDATE:
I see Michael Arrington and Dave Winer and others have picked up on this story as well.
Steve Rubel has written a Ten Blogging Hacks post.
There are some interesting suggestions there like using Writely as your blog editor (I have written about Writely before) – Writely has a spell checker and allows for online collaboration in writing so if you want to collaborate in the drafting of a post, Writely could be a useful blog editor for you. One disadvantage for me is that I use a WordPress plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior to add Technorati Tags to my posts – this functionality is unavailable within Writely.
Some of the suggestions are a bit trivial – like the “Blog from your cell phone” suggestion – how often do you need to do that?
Still the list is well worth checking out as at least one or two of the suggestions are likely to appeal to you.
Technorati recently announced that they are now tracking some 20 million bloggers and the number of bloggers is doubling every 5 months!
Now Forbes Magazine has a cover story titled “Attack of the Blogs” (registration required but thanks to Steve Rubel’s article I found that the bugmenot login/password “forbesdontbug” worked for me).
The article almost comes across as a spoof – indeed if it were not in Forbes magazine, I would have assumed it was a spoof, so outlandish are some of the claims in it. For instance it says:
Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.
And it goes on to elaborate:
Google and other services operate with government-sanctioned impunity, protected from any liability for anything posted on the blogs they host. Thus they serve up vitriolic “content” without bearing any legal responsibility for ensuring it is fair or accurate; at times they even sell ads alongside the diatribes.
The article’s main thesis seems to hang off the case of one Gregory Halpern who was hounded by a blogger called Timothy Miles. Mr Miles wrote some allegedly defamatory posts about Mr Halpern under a pseudonym and has now fled legal proceedings against him to Slovenia. The salient point here is that the blog was seen as libellous and was taken down and the author had legal proceedings taken against him (from which he fled!).
Dan Gillmor says it best when he says:
Do bloggers sometimes go too far? Of course. But if the best-read bloggers typically did work of the lousy quality shown in the Forbes stories, they’d be pilloried — appropriately so.
As the article itself points out, Microsoft has 2,000 bloggers – does Forbes really believe that Microsoft is partaking in a lynch mob? And what about the other 20 million bloggers? Are we all part of this lynch mob “spewing lies, libel and invective.” to which Forbes refers?
I think Forbes owes bloggers an apology for this lazy reporting and these sweeping generalisations.