Thursday, November 24, 2005
RSS Package Tracking
Man, this is a good idea. Simple Tracking interfaces with UPS and the Post Office ()not with FedEx, alas) to track packages, and provides an RSS feed for continued tracking. It’s a no-brainer when you think about it, eliminating the need to repeatedly check UPS or USPS every step of the package’s itinerary. DHL and FedEx support is promised.
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Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Reading RSS in iPods with iFeedPod
For Mac users only: iFeedPod allows downloading of OPML files (indexes of RSS feed collections) to iPods for offline, portable reading. It’s free; PayPal donation of five dollars is requested. I’d like to see something like this for PSP and other multipurpose devices. [via HB3R3W]
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Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Feedster Top 500
The new Feedster Top 500 blogs list is out, and it makes an interesting browsing section, especially if you skip past the headline acts that everyone knows about. Speaking of those headliners, though, I can’t stop myself from mentioning that five of the top ten are Weblogs Inc. properties. the RSS Weblog in slightly further down: number 238, to be exact.
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Xbox 360 Fanboy Opens
Pardon this bit of network promo. Our Joystiq gaming site has opened its first affiliate—Xbox 360 Fanboy—and we’re jazzed about it. Go to it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’ll become a part of you. In fact, you might have to scrub it off in the shower.
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Monday, November 21, 2005
Technorati Update
After taking flak for months about Technorati performance issues, David
Sifry find reason to brag. He has been promising (see his comment
here) a big infrastructure upgrade to be completed this
fall, and now that it is finished, speed tests show off Technorati in a good light. A graph shows Technorati completing
searches as quickly as Google’s Blogsearch and a mysterious entity Sifry
calls “Yahoo Blog Search.” I’m not incapable of horrendous oversights, but I have searched both my memory and past
entries, and see no such product offered by Yahoo!—save the mixed news/blog search results at Yahoo! News, which can
hardly be called a blog search engine. Is Sifry talking about the
unofficial Yahoo! blog search engine put up by
Threadwatch?
Anyway, Sifry’s blog post notes some bragging rights:
”Technorati’s index is the most comprehensive, and has the fastest updates. The index is over 3 years old, currently
21.5 million blog posts and over 1.7 billion links are indexed. Our median time to index is now under 3 minutes from
the moment a blog post is created.”
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Saturday, November 19, 2005
It’s the weekend again? Time for the best of the Weblogs, Inc. Network
The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs. Each week we ask our bloggers to choose their top posts, which we bring to you in one easy-to-read weekly post. You’ll find links to the hottest posts from the past week after the jump including a contest to pick a name for our Design Blog, how to sell your Mac, and a little Jolie voodoo. Enjoy!
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Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Podcasting and the Supposed Death of Radio
The BBC is running a background/forecast piece about
podcasting replacing radio. It’s a popular angle; I’ve made noises like that myself. But the comparison of podcasting
to radio is too simplistic, and the forecast is probably too focused on content over distribution. Quality issues
aside, podcasting cannot replace radio in its current distribution method; radio is just too easy to turn on and its
installed base is too ubiquitous. Of course, the music-licensing issue is important, too—if podcasting is to supplant
radio it will supplant talk radio.
I’m thinking that podcasting and radio are each too distinct for the former to destroy the latter. But it’s not hard to
suppose that podcasting has already fragmented the listening market, and will drive an even bigger wedge as time goes
on. Radio will have to press its advantages and synergize (as many producers, stations, and personalities are already
doing) with podcast technology. As disruptive technologies go, podcasting seems relatively benign, unlike MP3 and other
compressed file formats which could feasibly eradicate CDs.
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Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Blogarithm Adds Search
The RSS notification service Blogarithm, first covered here about a month ago, has added a search engine to help users find feeds. It seems to be a fairly simple tool, in which search operators and even moderately complex keyword strings bring the results down to zero. A search for riaa brought in one result, in which the string of characters was in the site title; in other words, Blogarithm did not recognize the acronym and apparently did not search entry bodies. Such a basic engine might be productively replaced by a hand-built blog directory. But no matter; I am continuing to enjoy and find useful the daily delivery of RSS updates via email that Blogarithm offers.
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Saturday, November 12, 2005
Gather ‘round for the best of the Weblogs, Inc. network
The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs. Each week we ask our bloggers to choose their top posts, which we bring to you in one easy-to-read weekly post. You’ll find links to the hottest posts from the past week after the jump including an Engadget Meetup on the west coast, a way to get a free plasma screen in politics, and even a full day in Prague. Enjoy!
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Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Join our team: we’re hiring web developers and tech gurus
Note: this is not a call for bloggers. I’m not looking for someone to write for this blog. If you want to do that, apply here. This is a call for developers.
If you’re reading our tech blogs, you probably know someone — or are someone — who works on web applications. We’re
expanding our Weblogs, Inc. tech team, looking for web developers and technical web designers for full-time
positions.
The exact skills are less important than these traits: bright, energetic,
blog savvy, great communication skills (email, IM and in person), organization and problem solving.
I’m not looking to fill a specific role like “MySQL developer”. I want to find two or three people who know how to keep
this giant blogging platform flying along and contribute to our always-changing stream of web projects.
But just so we don’t get people expecting to work on something else we don’t use, here are some real skills we
need:
- Apache, PHP and MySQL
- ASP/VBScript, Microsoft SQL
- experience with blogs, blogging, feeds, tagging services, CMSes, forums, Web 2.0, Web 3.0
- Windows Server, Linux OS, Mac OS
- regular expressions, JavaScript, AJAX
- FTP, remote control (terminal services, ssh) and file management
- experience administering DNS and email servers (Windows Merak Mail corporate mail server, qmail on Linux)
Does that sound like you or someone you know? Let me know.
Some of our team members work from home and some work from offices. We’re looking for people in the NYC area, but
we’ll consider talented people from other locations.
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