Diving into edgeio

I’m starting to dig into edgeio to better understand its services and potential. I’ll likely be posting some listings tonight or tomorrow. Watch this space for an update.

origami

is coming…

iPod boombox coming?

ThinkSecret: “The iPod Hi-Fi boombox will mark Apple’s first foray into significant iPod companion products, as the company seeks to capitalize on the iPod economy it has created, valued today at several hundred million dollars. To date, Apple has released only minor accessories for the iPod with its logo, including remotes, cases, earphones, and docks.”

If RSS is broken…

Dave Winer: “If RSS is broken, give me more broken things.”

No matter what you believe about the syndication skirmishes, Dave makes a great point here.

St. Louis blogger lunch- thoughts and ideas

I had lunch the other day with a group of St. Louis bloggers. It was a small event with Dennis Kennedy, Marianne Richmond, George Lenard and Michelle Golden. It was a nice change for me to get out of the tech blogger/IT professional echo chamber that I reside in. It was also interesting to speak with some savvy bloggers that were not technologists. It really changed my view of how effectively our blogging and search tools are working for us today and what we can do to make them better.

I’ve listed a few of the highlights from the discussion:

• George talked about his history with WestLaw (going back to ’83 I believe) and his frustration with the early Internet and its kludgey (my word, not his) search capabilities. I have some experience with WestLaw and wish to this day that I had it as a research tool. I haven’t used it since ’97. The improvements at this point are probably dramatic.
• We talked as a group about how to assess traffic trends on your blog based on feed reader stats, page view stats, and referrals from search engines and meme finders or other aggregation sites. From my view as the technical guy, this is actually a pretty hard problem. You can really only make educated guesses about what is going on, and even then you’re aren’t likely to be able to conclude much about your traffic unless all of the metrics grow (or shrink) at a fast pace.
• Meme finders. I thought that everyone who knows about blogs was all over these, but apparently I was wrong. A few folks at the table had not seen (or did not recall) memeorandum, digg, Megite, and TailRank. I’m using these sites as much as I’m using my own aggregator. I’m also looking at referrals from these sites as an indicator of the growth in my readership and the relevance of my content in certain topic areas.

I can’t wait for the next blogger meetup in St. Louis.