mSpoke’s Chief Scientist Paul Ogilvie has the first post up in a series of research he’s doing focsuing on what makes a blog post popular. The first analysis looks at reading difficulty as a predictor of popularity. His conclusion follows, but go read the entire post:

When I set out to write this post, I hoped to find some interesting correlations between feed item popularity and other features of the feed items. I wasn’t naive enough to believe I’d find strong correlations, but I was hoping to confirm some common sense wisdom. This post looked into some crude surface features of reading difficulty and post length in an attempt to understand whether a “well-written” post is more likely to be popular than poorly written posts. I failed to find any correlations between these features and popularity. Does that mean that I personally believe that the writing of the post doesn’t matter? Absolutely not.

I’ve really enjoyed talking about this research with Paul. Hopefully, you’ll subscribe to mSpoke’s Blog feed and follow along.

I’ve been using an RSS reader for about 2 years. It’s the only way I’m able to keep up with all of the information that I need to read to do my job well.

However, over the last month I had begun to feel overwhelmed and often was unable to keep up with my feeds. This was very concerning to me, because the company I co-founded mSpoke has created a tool called FeedHub to eliminate RSS information overload.

After reflecting on it, what I came to appreciate was that my information consumption needs had evolved and I hadn’t adjusted my feed management to evolve with them. To be more specific, two things had change:

1. While I’ve always traveled a lot, in the last 3 months this has amplified significantly. I feel like I’ve spent more time in an airplane than on the ground.


2. My interests have become slightly more diverse in terms of the feeds I’m reading.

First Change: Switching to Suite of NewsGator RSS Readers

I’ve pretty much always used a web based reader, because I like the feel of them. Over time I’ve switched back and forth between Google Reader, Bloglines and NewsGator Online. With my new travel schedule I’d like to be able to keep up with my feeds in the air (no wifi) and even Google Gears + Google Reader doesn’t seem to really support this use case well.

Therefore, I’ve switched to using the suite of RSS Readers from NewsGator and am depending much more on NetNewsWire so that I can say informed when I’m flying effectively and then just synch back up when I hit the ground and go back to NewsGator Online.

(We do have a strategic partnership with NewsGator, but our focus is primarily on their Widget Offerings.)

Second Change: Divide and Conquer Feed Sources

I’ve been segmenting my feeds into two buckets for quite sometime: those I read every item published and those I want FeedHub to filter for me when I can’t keep up with them. However, based on the increasing diversity of my feeds I really decided that I needed to break each of these down into multiple folders.

For the ‘read all the items’ feeds, I’ve created the following folders:

• mSpoke Vanity Searches
• Sean Ammirati Vanity Searches
• Family / Close Friends
• mSpoke Employee Blogs
• Work Related Content - Must Read
• Partners & Competitors

For the ‘vanity searches’, I use a combination of Twitter Search, Ice Rocket and Technorati to make sure I’m reading all of the content written about me or mSpoke. The rest of these are pretty self explanatory and total about 25 sources.

For the sources that FeedHub is filtering for me, I’ve broken those into 5 categories as well and create 5 personalized feeds in FeedHub. Those categories are:

• Market Analysis
• Entrepreneurship
• VC Blogs
• Online Advertising
• Gadgets

This is a very common FeedHub use-case and one we even highlighted when launching FeedHub over a year ago. However, personally I’ve always felt one large personalized feed worked better for me. I think this was true, but with my content interests diversifying it had become less effective. The reason is that some of these subjects I’d like more / less content on everyday and one of them (Gadgets) I frankly can just let accrue content until the weekend.

Anyway, that is how I’m now managing my RSS Reading. I’d love to hear your approaches in the comments below.

A few months ago, I went to Grove City College (my alma matter) to talk to a group of about 50 computer science students during an ACM meeting. I offered some brief remarks about what I did for a living (very brief.) Then we had a really interesting hour plus interactive discussion where I instigated some of the early topics by throwing out some themes I thought would be interesting.

We talked for quite some time about how social media was changing the job applicant process. While I was more focused on the positive things they could do, I also mentioned they need to pay attention to what stupid negative things they could be doing online.

One specific thing I encouraged them not to do was put pictures or other media on their Facebook or other social network profile pages that are in anyway unprofessional. (Note: I wasn’t implying it should all be professional, but at least keep in mind professional contacts will be looking at it.)

Today, Nick ONeill’s excellent All Facebook blog published a report from NPR on a survey Career Builder just released which states:

one in five employers check Facebook profiles when researching a potential job candidate. Additionally, one third of those that checked Facebook found a reason to reject an applicant due to photos with alcohol or drugs.

(Here is the link to the NPR audio)

If you aren’t conscious of your online brand — now is the time to start regardless of what phase of life you’re in.

I spent some time over the last two weeks consulting with a group of professionals at a large media company. I’m pretty confident everyone in the room (beside me) had started their career by going to journalism school. Even if that isn’t the case, they clearly had grown up before the merger of media companies becoming tech companies and tech companies becoming media companies.

Given that context it was fun to discuss with them the ways that technology could transform their business. I think we came up with a number of very powerful ideas! As they launch, I’ll point out a few of them here.

However, even more interesting to me then the ideas we came up with was their view on ‘the IT department.’ While I certainly understand their perspective, it was interesting to hear how compelling solutions delivered as a software as a service were.

It did remind me that the future of media is hosted! In many ways this is just an extension of the larger software as a service trend. Yet for traditional media companies it manifests itself in some interesting ways. For example, consider the following examples:

• Why try to develop your own widgets for virally distributing your content when you can partner with NewsGator?
• Or why install an ad server, when you can let OpenX or DoubleClick host the ad server for you?
• These first two examples are probably pretty obvious, but it is also true for ‘full website properties.’ For example, why host your blogs, if you can outsource it to someone like Automattic?

I realize this is not a new thought. Umair Haque’s Bubblegeneration presentation on on micromedia a few years ago is the first time I thought about it. However, I will say my interactions with my client over the last few weeks has been a good reminder.

[Photo: akakumo, King Cloud / Flickr]

I have some friends from college who get together every six months to catch up on life and have fun wide-ranging conversations. It’s great because we are each on completely different career paths. I mean seriously different: a professional model, rock star, a renaissance man (lawyer / politician / music industry exec), the Treasurer of the Yankees, a pastor, and myself.

As our careers have started to take shape, it’s really interesting to see us wrestling with many of the same issues. Obviously, part of this is because we’re all relatively early in our respective careers. However, another similarity is that we all have a very vested interest professionally in the evolution of media and it’s intersection with society.

As a technology entrepreneur, I always finish the weekend with a renewed deep sense of responsibility and excitement for the products my peers & I create. Therefore, I was particularly interested in an article that Fred Wilson linked to a few days ago - ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond‘ in Philosophy Today. The author, Alan Kirby, states:

The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

He goes on to discuss how this has ushered in a new generation he calls ‘pseudo-modernist’ and defines the delineation as approximately people born after 1980. It’s a really good read and I plan on spending some more time thinking about it.

Interestingly, my friends are also coming to Pittsburgh this weekend to hang out for one of our semi-annual times together. Between spending time with the guys and contemplating the fact that I’m helping create products that change society who knows what I’ll be thinking about by next week! However, I’m guessing a few think out loud posts are in this blog’s pipeline. (Consider this fair warning if you want to unsubscribe now.)

Matt Freeman is a well known digital advertising thought leader. He has been the CEO of Tribal DDB for some time and speaks at all the big advertising conferences. Advertising Age has a story on him moving to head GoFish a really interesting ad network for kids and parents.

What I found most interesting in the Ad Age story was his quote on the ad network business and specifically how Microsoft and Yahoo are missing a great opportunity:

Mr. Freeman in an interview said there is an opportunity for digital ad networks like GoFish to pick up a ball he believes Yahoo and Microsoft have dropped when it comes to online brand advertising.

“As Yahoo and Microsoft and others are trying to beat Google at Google’s game — search — they’ve taken their eye off the most valuable ball they had in their court, which is online brand advertising,” Mr. Freeman said. “Even though Google has a terrific business model, it’s not a panacea for brands. Brands can’t build equity by buying keywords alone.”

As I commented in March, the ad networks and exchanges are going to be fine. However, I still feel they need to throw out the crappy CPM metrics improve the inadequate metrics they sell against. Hopefully with Matt’s connections on Madison Ave he can advance this.

Brad Burnham has a post on the Union Square website about The Weird Economics of Information. It’s very much inline with a theme my friend Charlie O’Donnell (also the first analyst at Union Square) has pushed in his startup Path 101 calling it ‘anti-stealth’.

Almost a year ago I did a few posts on how an open ethos can re-invent an industry. It’s something I continue to think a lot about and enjoyed reading Brad’s post today.

(Found via Fred Wilson)

Jesse Vincet gave a presentation at Ignite Boston last week titled ‘Web 2.0 is Sharecropping’. I wasn’t in Boston, so I didn’t get to see the talk. He proposes a specific solution around an P2P database he’s working on called Prophet, I’m sure there are other solutions as well. More importantly I really like the issues he raises in the ‘rant’. Check out the slides below …

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(found on Jesse’s blog)

Those of you who know me well have probably heard me try to pretend I’m still a New Yorker, even though I haven’t lived in New York for more than 2 years. And these days due to shifting focuses, I spend significantly more time in Silicon Valley / San Francisco then I do in Silicon Alley (New York). While I’m beginning to accept that Pittsburgh is home for me and I may never get back to Manhattan, I will always LOVE NYC.

That is why I took so much offense at Paul Graham’s post today on Cities and Ambition. In it, Paul explains:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message …

So far I’m good and actually in agreement. However, he contrasts NYC, Silicon Valley and Cambridge as follows:

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money … What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter … As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

This is flat out not true! I am well aware that Silicon Valley is special for tech / web startups. In fact, it’s so special that at some point my wife and I may move to the Bay Area. However, the contrast between New York, Boston and Silicon Valley is flat out wrong. To me the biggest difference is that you find true diversity in New York. A vibrant group of artists, financiers, dancers, marketing professionals, musicians, professors, models, and yes entrepreneurs in New York all interact together. It’s the group my former Carnegie Mellon colleague Richard Florida calls the ‘creative class.’

My buddy Charlie O’Donnell does a great job dissecting Paul’s arguments and offering perspective. Charlie is an entrepreneur in NYC and also the founder of NextNY. He points out:

By saying that “New York tells you, above all: you should make more money,” Paul Graham is basically admitting that he’s never been north of Central Park, on the Lower East Side, or out into the Boroughs. I grew up as a finance major in NYC and I made the same mistake that Paul makes. It wasn’t until I finished school and got about three years into my career that I soon realized that there was a lot more going on in NYC than just Wall Street.

Couldn’t agree more Charlie! I came to New York because my company was focused on selling our technology to asset managers. After arriving in Manhattan, I realized the city had much more to offer than I ever would have guessed. For the things I learned and experienced, I’ll always LOVE NYC!

Richard Waters and Chris Nuttall at the Financial Times have today published an article explaining that ‘Web 2.0 Fails to Produce Cash‘. (not surprisingly the blogosphere has responded) A good summary of the article comes in the opening sentence, which states:

Many members of the Web 2.0 generation of internet companies have so far produced little in the way of revenue, despite bringing about some significant changes in online behaviour, according to some of the entrepreneurs and financiers behind the movement.

Interestingly, I have to wonder if it’s easier for FT.com writers to criticize all these ‘web 2.0′ applications, instead of acknowledging that part of the issue is probably due to deeper and more systemic problems with current online advertising. (After all, FT.com would have to acknowledge having the same issues and maybe even lead to the fair response from readers - “doctor heal thyself”.)

That said, Richard and Chris do touch on a theme, highlighted over the past weekend by Alexander van Elsas and Scott Karp about the current state of web advertising. Scott points out:

As media companies struggle to figure out their digital future, the elephant in the room is that they have only been able to monetize online audiences for pennies on the dollar compared to traditional media. Here’s why: Traditional advertising formats FAIL on the web. By traditional advertising formats, I mean display ads, video ads, and any other ad whose format and value proposition approximates or imitates that of an offline advertising format.

Scott also points out this problem is effecting newspapers (yes I’m sure this includes the FT) and magazines as well:

Just ask newspapers and magazines about their ad pricing power in print vs. online. Can you imagine a print publisher getting $1 for 1,000 times an ad was seen? You’d go bankrupt after one issue.

I was preparing to move apartments this weekend and so I had ample time to reflect on these challenges for online advertising while packing. Scott & Alexander highlight some important concerns, but I don’t draw the same conclusions. I’m far more bullish on the future of online advertising and the web.

After thinking about it through the weekend, I continue to believe what I predicted at the turn of the year on ReadWriteWeb:

Non-search advertising on the web will increase in value significantly. This will be done through a lot of innovation in the ad targeting systems (both behavioral and contextual) and new metrics being adopted by Madison Ave beyond CPC and CPM.

Both of these steps (improving targeting systems and adopting new metrics) will take time and energy from relevant entrepreneurs. However, the web is a platform where people are spending more and more time and providing more information about themselves. Therefore, marketers will develop the appropriate ways to deliver relevant and engaging messages to visitors. And when they do, effective CPMs (probably derived from another metric) will reflect this.

Finally, a note going back to the FT.com piece, others have pointed out that there are great web applications built on revenue streams other than advertising. I think it’s great some entrepreneurs are choosing this path and don’t want to discount this at all. I am just reacting to the fact that most web properties, like media before will be ad supported and positing there will be a path to profitable revenue for large online properties soon.