Feedburner Users: 2 days before Google gets your data

If you logged into Feedburner in the last few days, then you would have surely noticed a change in their login screen. It looks like this now:

The fine print at the bottom says that, if you want to stop Google from getting your data then opt-out of the service before June 15th 2007. In essence this means that ‘The privacy policy of Feedburner becomes null and void from 15th June 2007 and Google’s Privacy policy becomes enforceable on all Feedburner users from June 15th 2007‘.

If you opt-out then

• Account gets deleted
• Feed is nullified
• All statistics are lost

First and foremost, this is wonderful on the part of Feedburner that they are willing to provide an opt-out clause like this. The trend that I have observed is that if a company X buys Y, then all data which reside with Y become part of X, with no say from the users of the service of company Y. This initiative from Feedburner will provide those paranoid anti-Google users a chance to opt-out and ensure that their data doesn’t fall in the hands of Google. I don’t know if providing an opt-out clause after an acquisition can be made a law, but if companies abide by this in principle then it is great.

Frankly, I don’t see too many concerns with Google having access to this data. First and foremost, if you have been a web user for the last decade then Google will most probably know more about you than Feedburner. The biggest issue now is that Google owns the feed and if you don’t want Google to access your data, then your feed is lost forever. This will be a huge loss to blogger’s and publishers who have a long list of subscribers to their Feedburner feeds.

The other concern is that: Will Google add adWords to the feeds without compensating the publishers? I certainly feel they won’t do this without compensating the publishers but only time will tell. This acquisition will no doubt provide Google with better reach for their adwords and adsense campaigns.

Techcrunch Coverage

Googleblog Report

Technorati tags: Feedburner, Google

Desktop Blogging Editor – Windows Live Writer 2 Released

This is a long pending release from the Windows Live Writer team. The improvements are

- Inline Spell Check

- Use of tables. This is something that I was looking for and I hope that the functionality works without breaking on the web pages. The table menu looks similar to the menu in Microsoft Word. So, it should be quite powerful.

- Ability to add pages, categories etc (not sure if this is available for all platforms, but wordpress is supported.)

- Available in 6 different languages

- More options while publishing drafts (Store offline, store online and store online and edit)

- New look and feel. It does look better. Whether it works better is something I can comment on only after using it for sometime.

- On the right hand side top, notice the new addition which displays the Blog Name. Below that are 5 links which take you to your blog Stats, Comments, friend surfer etc. This would be really useful if it didn’t take me to all that information thru’ the browser. Anyway, this is a nice little addition.

- Also notice the boxes at the bottom of the page. Those are useful for changing the properties of the posts.

- Look at the Menu for table creation. It looks very similar to the Word table creation menu.

A few things I would love to see:

- Posting directly from MS Word.

- Integration with RSS readers. (There exists a plugin for GreatNews)

- Autosave by default

There are a host of other features that have been added. Check the Live Writer blog for more information. My previous post on Live Writer.

On an related note, Post2Blog is now free. Their site hasn’t been updated with this news, but check the blog. Go ahead and download it.

But, sadly I haven’t been able to get Post2Blog to work from behind the firewall and with a WordPress.com hosted account. It always returns an error saying “Blog not found” or “Unable to connect…..”. I have checked the Proxy settings and they are fine. Also, my blog address is correct and so is the username and password. But, still I am not able to get it to work. Any ideas??

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, Live Writer, Post2Blog, Desktop Editor, Blog, Editor, Microsoft

Clipmarks – Good software to post clips

Have started using this software recently and suddenly in the midst of other things I found the urge to post something to my blog using this tool. Hence the small intro to Clipmarks using the software it provides.
Try it. It has a add-on for Firefox and a clip-to-blog utility.

clipped from clipmarks.com A smart way to discover the web By seeing what people are clipping, you’ll discover all sorts of interesting things you wouldn’t normally stumble upon. Search any topic or be surprised. What would you clip? Save your clips privately, email them to friends, post them on your blog, or share them here for others to see. �Install �Learn more ClipSearch – Our memory on the web Create your own searchable library of things you want to remember from the web or contribute to our people powered search engine. Learn more Clip-to-Blog and Clip-to-Email Posting things you find on the web directly to your blog or emailing them to friends has never been this easy. More about: Clip-to-Blog �Clip-to-Email

Technorati Tags: Clipmarks, Firefox

Yahoo Messenger on the Web

Yahoo is playing catch up again and this time it is with the release of the web messenger. This release comes a few weeks after the Google Talk gadget became popular. This is a pretty nice thing to have considering the bloat of the Yahoo Messenger download. Check out this post at Yodel which talks about the release.

The web based messenger has an interface similar to many of the other flash based apps and has some good features built in. I like the tabbed interface, the availability of the emoticons (I feel the non-availability of emoticons is a big drawback on the GoogleTalk gadget) and notification feature. But, this occupies a full window in comparison to the googletalk gadget which can nicely sit in the sidebar. (or someone should do a simple hack to make it work properly from the sidebar. If I set it to open in the sidebar, it doesn’t even show me the login screen.)

The URL is http://web.im or http://webmessenger.yahoo.com
Happy chatting.
(Picture courtesy: Yodel)

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Messenger, Yodel, Flash

RSS in plain English

Click To Play

The video is pretty well made and is around 3:30mins long. This is for explaining what Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is in plain english.

And this is where the problem lies? If I take 3 and a half minutes to explain what is RSS, then it will remain a niche and never become a killer application. You can ask the same question about E-Mail. Try explaining what is E-Mail and you might take around a minute or so. That is still a long time as a minute of explanation can be confusing to a layman, but once you create a e-mail id, it is up to you to share it and you will go that extra mile as it helps you converse with someone else who is close to you and you feel happy doing it. RSS doesn’t have this personal feel and neither it is intended to have a personal appeal and this is precisely where the problem is. We have to find a way to make people go that extra mile so that they start using RSS. The benefits are obvious, but so are the problems that comes with it. People can get startled with the information overload and this can potentially lead to a block while using RSS. Maybe RSS with filters or behavioral tracking software is the killer app that is required to get it to become mainstream. Basically, try moving the masses one step at a time. At this moment they go and look for what they want. Start providing them what they want and then give them the option to pick and choose.

Provide access, but to what people look for. I feel this should be the mantra in a world which is moving from the consumer seeing what a producer wants to a consumer choosing from a producer what (s)he wants to see.

Technorati Tags: RSS, filters consumer, producer, commoncraft

“Comic” Blogging break

Had a good laugh looking at this presentation. Or maybe I should call it a representation of what the Web 2.0 world has done. At times it is good to step aside and have a laugh at what you are doing to yourself and others.

My favs. are Slide 22, 24 and 26. Have fun.

Technorati Tags: Comics, Blog, Blaugh

Desktop RSS Reader’s – A comparison

My quest for a good (or almost) RSS reader has nearly ended. I have tried umpteen RSS readers right from Feedreader and Sharpreader to the likes of Omea and Greatnews. (If you aren’t familiar with RSS please read this.) Initially,

I was happy using web based readers, but as soon as the number of feeds to be monitored touched 200+, it became a hassle. Not that I wasn’t connected all the time, but the fact that every refresh took time and it was slightly cumbersome to be logged in all the time. So, I stopped using Google Reader, though I maintain my account and and update it on daily basis so as to keep track of the feeds when I am not using my laptop. (There are portable versions of desktop based readers available, though I haven’t tried them.) A good comparison on Web-based feed readers. (Slightly old) My requirements from the RSS reader are:

• Allow me to import my OPML (I exported it from Google Reader). It should retain the tree/folder structure that I was using. (and export it also)
• Good design of the reading pane and customization of the reading pane. Provide 3-pane, 2-pane views etc
• Ability to sort the unread posts by date, alphabetical order, by feed priority etc.
• Should be stable and not hog memory.
• Watch for keywords in the posts and show them separately
• Ability to mark all posts read
• Ability to store some posts for reading later and also ensuring that those posts don’t get deleted during cleanup
• Should have a configurable cleanup wizard.
• Should provide the choice of reading the first few lines of a post.
• Keyboard navigation
• And a few more like tagging, rating of posts. But, I could do away with these things if most of the above conditions were met.
• Synchronization across PC’s. This isn’t a must but it would be great if this can be achieved. Even a file based synchronization is fine.
• It should work from behind a proxy which require authentication. This is a must.
• And above all, it should be FREE.

I went about looking for feedreaders and the ones I seriously looked at are:

• Omea Reader (Omea Pro 2.2 is available for free now)
• GreatNews
• Feedreader
• Awasu Personal Edition
• Blogbridge
• Newzie
• Snarfer

I also tried RSS Bandit, Sharpreader, YeahReader etc. But, these weren’t satisfactory.

I might have missed out a few things or there might be something that is wrong in the chart above. If you find something, please revert. I will also update this sheet when the newer versions of the software are released.

Of the above readers, my personal pick is Newzie. I was a big fan of GreatNews, but the biggest pulling factor for newzie for me was the Keyboard customization and display. Being someone who has worked in Unix for a long time, keyboard commands are preferred most. Also, the design of Newzie stands out as different and also slick compared to others. The other features of Newzie which I found to be attractive are:

• Ability to Colour code the feeds based on the arrival of articles

• News Slideshow: This is an awesome feature. Check it out and the articles can be customized based on their state, priority or arrival time.

• Newsbar and Today Panel
• Misc. stuff like Pop-up notifier, Stats and Priority levels etc.
• Customizable Display. You can basically remove everything apart from the main window and even at that time, it doesn’t become as helpless as the full-screen view of some other applications.

So, I would recommend Newzie for a wholesome RSS reading experience. If you aren’t happy with Newzie, then I would recommend Greatnews. Others follow after that.

A few of things for Newzie to do:

- Please don’t differentiate between Unread and New messages. Currently, Newzie has two states and this can be combined into one.

- Display count of unread messages in the tree listing.

- Newspaper or river of news view would be great, but the Slideshow compensates for the lack of these features.

- Usage of Spacebar to move to the next message. This is sort of a de-facto standard across other readers.

- Customizable key for the option of “Mark all as Read and Move to next slide”. It takes two mouse clicks now, as you have to click on the message window to read the message (if it is more than a screen) and then again click on the button again. Instead the preferred operation would be having the message window respond to all commands and a keystroke or mouse click doing the job of moving to next slide.

Note:

1. Awasu personal edition can handle only 100 feeds.

2. I wasn’t able to synchronize with Bloglines for both Snarfer and Greatnews. But, the features include synchronization. [Update: I think the problem of updation was due to the fact that I was behind a firewall. Update from Snarfer seems to work fine. Haven't tried Greatnews still.]

3. Blogbridge offers storage of your feeds and keywords. They don’t synchronize read states.

Technorati tags: Newzie, Bloglines, Awasu, Feedreader, Greatnews, Omea, Blogbridge, Snarfer, RSS, Google Reader, Sharpreader, desktop RSS readers, RSS bandit, Yeahreader

Desktop Blogging Editor – Windows Live Writer

My search for a decent (and free) desktop blog writer tool has ended. I was basically looking for a tool which would allow me to post from my desktop, was able to allow a reasonable amount of formatting, support image uploading and above all, was free. (I missed the Blogjet download from Giveawayoftheday ).

I was using Performancing for Firefox all this while, but wanted a change and also a tool which doesn’t run in the browser but is a standalone application. My biggest grudge was that I wasn’t able to keep Performancing open and also browse at the same time. I had to keep two Firefox windows open to do this. If there is some plugin which can help me run Performancing as a Pop-Out from FF, that would be great. So, I started trying out different desktop blog editors and it started with a look at what problogger recommended.

The tools I tried were:

- Performancing: I would recommend this for people who are starting to blog and want only a simple application for blog editing.  The latest edition has the ability to upload pictures directly from the desktop.

 

 

 

 

 

- W.Bloggar, Blogjet, Qumana, Zoundry, Post2Blog: None of these worked for me. There were a couple of reasons for the same. I wasn’t able to get any of these tools working from behind the proxy. Though Blogjet asked me for the proxy details, it still wasn’t able to connect. Also, these failed to detect the end point of my blog which Performancing and Windows Live Writer were able to do without any hassles. I didn’t try Ecto. (Blogjet is a paid tool)

- Blogdesk: Well, this didn’t even run properly. It was cribbing about a DHtmlEd extension even though I use Windows XP.

- RocketPost: This program looks impressive but the free edition supports only one Blogger or Livespaces account. So, I wasn’t able to try this.

 

- Windows Live Writer: I tried this after reading about it on techcrunch. The first edition was buggy and it used to crash quite often, but the latest version is quite impressive. The most impressive thing about this product is that Microsoft has built this to work with most of the popular blogging platforms and not just with their live platform. This is a significant move from the side of Microsoft.

I am writing this post using the beta version of the desktop blog editing tool Windows Live Writer. (Maybe this is obvious, but just to reinforce, Mac/Linux versions are not available.) This tool offers most of the facilities that I wanted and it has a WYSIWYG editor. So, I can write/update any post directly from this and not bother about running my browser or the editors which are provided with wordpress.

The initial setup and configuration was as easy as it can be. It prompted me for the proxy address and authentication and configured the settings for my blog without any issue. I typically face some issues as some editors don’t allow posting to the wordpress (free) blogs. I used to get the “Unable to find the blog” (or something similar) error.

A few advantages of this tool:

- It tries to work with the stylesheets that are being currently used in your blog. And believe me, it actually produces good HTML code.

- It has a good image editor and also uploads images to the correct locations on the blog. This helps as you needn’t upload pictures separately. It also helps in positioning the image correctly, which was sorely lacking in some other editors.

- It also provides an Firefox Extension. This extension allows you to blog directly from the browser.

- Like MS Word and Excel, this also has the hyperlink autosuggest feature, based on what you have browsed or linked earlier.

- It has an autosave feature and the time can be configured.

- It also have an in built spell checker.

- The tool has the provision to automatically insert MSN Maps. I have never used MSN Maps, so I cannot comment on how useful this is.

- It lets you save drafts of posts directly to your blog, which can prove to be very handy.

- And like any other desktop blogging tool this also provides interfaces for adding tags and downloads the Categories from your blog.

Biggest grudge: It opens a new window everytime I open a Post or want to post something new. Hmmm.. Is there any option which can change this??

Everything else aside, this tool hasn’t crashed so far and hasn’t slowed down my system. I felt this is one of the big factors that has drawn me towards this desktop package.

The next step for Microsoft would be to integrate this functionality into MS Word and make blogging directly from MS Word a reality.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, Blog, Editor, Desktop Editor, Blogjet, Qumana, Zoundry, Performancing, Blogdesk, Rocketpost, Microsoft

WikiSeek – Search Engine for Wikipedia

Wikiseek searches (or at least prioritizes) Wikipedia and the articles which have been linked to in Wikipedia articles for the search queries. At least on first impressions it looks much better than the internal wikipedia search engine.

Because of the fact that it only has the Wikipedia and related sites indexed, the quality of results returned might be better. (I am assuming you are already happy with Wikipedia). It can also search deeper for articles compared to other search engines as the topics in Wikipedia are limited in comparison to the gargantuan web. (On the lines of what vertical search engines want to do and some country specific search engines are trying.) It also provides you with a tag cloud of related topics which would prove to be useful for research work.

They are also providing search plugin’s for Firefox, Opera and IE. And last but not the least they are donating a part of the money generated from these searches to the Wikimedia foundation.

The majority of the revenue generated by Wikiseek advertising is donated to the Wikimedia Foundation.

[Update: Techcrunch has a better review than what I could manage.]

Technorati Tags: Wikiseek, Wikipedia, Search, Wikimedia

Widgets – Transforming the web

Now-a-days with the widgetization of the web in full swing the necessity to spend time on a lot of websites has decreased dramatically. The start pages like Netvibes, Pageflakes etc, have the necessary widgets to retrieve information from other websites and this reduces the necessity for me to visit that website. As far as I can see, start pages offer the functionality of nice to see RSS readers with some extra things like a to-do list, storage and a couple of other misc. things. (Oh, I like to Sudoku offered at Netvibes. No idea if Pageflakes also has it.)
Once these widgets are set up in your start page, the necessity to go to other pages decreases exponentially. You can get everything from Maps to your mail to weather to live scores on these widgets. These widgets offer you a peek into what is available at the site and if you like what you see, you go to the site or else you just move on. (Since RSS seems to be the most dominant factor in most of the start pages, the web is being pulled by you rather than being pushed towards you by the publishers.)
The next question that arises is that of transformation and what are these tiny tools transforming? The idea of having a widget is to let users access the content that the publisher provides from anywhere. Basically you can be on any page or even on your desktop or on your mobile. As long as you can download the widget you have access to the content. (Assuming other things that are required for accessing is in place). ‘Transformation’ comes from the fact that with more and more widgets becoming available the necessity to go to the content providers page will decrease. Currently, if you go to youtube and watch a video it generates a page view (or engagement) for the publisher. But, if Youtube publishes a Widget and you use it on your blog or start page to watch videos, then it doesn’t generate page views for the content publisher. This scenario is very disruptive as it is hitting straight at the most direct revenue source for most of the internet companies, Advertising.  Advertisers would start demanding a reduction in rates as the number of page views starts decreasing. 
As far as the content providers are concerned these widgets are a double edged sword. If they don’t have their own widgets, then their competitors might create them and get more users and if they create the widgets then they risk losing traffic. So, the best way for content providers would be to create widgets and also start pages of their own. Fox released SpringWidgets and the few widgets that are available showcase the content from Fox. This is a starting point in the journey.
Widgets will change the way web operates and this is just not going to affect the web based companies but also traditional media companies. The next few years can be a very rough ride for a few companies which were only relying on page views to generate revenue for their business. Also, companies which monitor traffic on the web might have to come up with some innovative metrics to handle the traffic generated by these widgets.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, Widgets