I have meant to post about AideRSS for months now, but I have been so busy at Suited Media gearing up for the launch of Pokerspace that I have completely disregarded this blog and its readers. Rest assured I will be able to put more time back to this blog in the coming months.

For those that are still listening, there is a something you should check out. Simply put, I am very impressed with some software, a web application, created by a small team of local professionals including a fellow UW graduate, Ilya Grigorik, the Chief Architect of AideRSS, Inc.

AideRSS may be the first tool I have found in a long while that has the potential to significantly improve on my Bloglines experiences. Bloglines has been my tool of choice for blog reading for years, but as past posts have detailed I have found some difficulties navigating and enveloping hundreds of feeds a day, many of which post a lot, some of which post rarely. I used to subscribe to almost 500 feeds, but I am now cut down to about 335.

After meeting Ilya I knew he was creating innovative and potentially important software. I met Ilya at my UW graduation ceremony a few months ago. We exchanged some of our experiences and entrepreneurial interests. Conversing with him before the ceremony confirmed my initial impressions that Ilya was a very interesting individual. We exchanged contacts and I actually added him to my LinkedIn, which is something I have never done with someone I have known for such a short time. Now, a quick glance at his LinkedIn profile shows he is linked to more than 100 very interesting people - I not surprised in the slightest.

I played with his site for a few hours one night after work and found it to be a very well designed web application. I explored the site throughly and found it be an exemplary example of modern web design. I imported my entire OPML feed of into the site and it performed flawlessly. The interface was clear and easy to follow. I especially liked the quality feedback it gives the user at the apprioriate times and places. Looking at the CSS confirmed my guess that it was a cleanly coded site. Without any hesitation I subscribed to the AideRSS blog.

I am also impressed with their technology, PostRank. In fact, I use a lot of the same ranking techniques myself and have
experience with most of the sites (Bloglines, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.) that enable the AideRSS application. I still use a lot of these services to run what I call “tracking feeds” for myself, my company, and other key words I care about so that I can hear immediately whenever these terms are mentioned online. I used to love PubSub (if you remember of it… if not, research it). I wish it was still around. Wow, apparently it is coming back…

PubSub is undergoing redevelopment at the moment. We’ll be relaunching as PubSub 2.0 this winter with a host of exciting new features and services.

Anyways, I suggest you check out AideRSS.

Although I have not made any posts in a while, I still continue to follow a large number of blogs. So, just how large you may ask?

Matt Galloway hits on many great ideas in his post about influential bloggers.

It is quite simple: (good) bloggers = Influentials

To stay ahead of the curve:

1. Find your blog influentials
2. Listen
3. Repeat step 2

Why I blog this? Now that we have this huge blogosphere to play in we need to start data mining the meta-data it generates. Information overload is my new problem - high quality information at that. I am reading over 500 feeds now. It is become overwhelming - too many blogs to remember/manage in my head. So, how exactly should I be identifying blog influentials? This I do not know. As far as I can tell, identifying blog influentials programmatically is an as-of-yet untapped area with growth potential.

How exactly do we identify blog influentials?

via The Basement, BusinessWeek, RatcliffeBlog

It is good to see that Mitch is still keeping busy playing with interesting ideas. I posted about Mitch’s RatcliffeBlog and MyDensity a couple of times (1, 2) back in March.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites, tag them, and share your collection of links with others.

What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

I have subscribed to del.icio.us/popular since November 2004.

A few days ago I used a tool called del.icio.us linkbacks to investigate Echo Generation. I was able to find more people that have added Echo Generation to their del.icio.us bookmarks.

There are many del.icio.us tools, linkback is just one example.

del.icio.us is also a subject of recent research on social practices in a distributed classification communities.

Working within the constraints of a very limited data sample, this study attempts to identify some of the information management and meaning construction practices of an online distributed classification (a.k.a. free tagging or ethnoclassification) community. Specifically, this study seeks to investigate the social and communicative practices that emerge when users are encouraged to share web links with one another by using a metadata keyword, or tag, to demark a social group, apart from using other tags to classify links according to an emergent taxonomy.

On April 10th, del.icio.us owner Joshua Schachter announced (via delicious-discuss) that a group of investors has taken a minority stake in del.icio.us. The investment is lead by Union Square Ventures, and the team of investors includes Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young. Joshua will remain in control of the business. He says his first priority is improving reliability and responsiveness, followed by adding new features.

Why I blog this? del.icio.us is simple and effective. While I do not use it to manage my bookmarks at this time, I do benefit from the links others have bookmarked. I will likely use del.icio.us (or a similar service) in the near future. The linkback tool is quite cool too.

via Mindjack via Joi Ito

Here is an example of another java graph visualization, Tree by Texon. Quite pretty. Looks like they are using Processing for the smooth visuals.

tree accesses the source code of a webdomain through it’s url and transforms the syntactic structure of the website into a tree structure represented by an image. this image illustrates a tree with trunk, branches and ramifications. first each tree is initialized, than all html links are detected, chronologically saved and finally displayed.

the first tree corresponds to the domain; according to the syntax of the website each further tree that builds up represents a subpage including all existing elements. the color of these trees reflects the color values of the domain and its subpages.

The image below is the tree for this blog.

And this is the forest that appears after leaving it on long enough. (I am one of the trees on the right side)

The forest is built in real-time without any noticable refresh. Looks like an interesting art project, but there is no interactivity from what I can tell.

Why I blog this? Mark added a comment to my previous post about his visualization tool, MyDensity. I think he will enjoy the link - it seems to be fairly good example of a similar Java visualization. And to answer your question: I want it to be real-time, interactive, and visually pleasing. Basically, let me hunt with ease through the mass of data. And find subtle ways to give me more information on that data, such as using different colours, sizes, etc. But keep it simple :)

via Josh Robin via Protein

My prediction was correct - Mitch did notice my posting about MyDensity. Check out his recent RafcliffBlog post entitled Bolstering our maps.

So, how has my MyDensity graph changed? Let’s take a look:

The results are quite different than the results from a few days ago. Last time it only returned a few sites that linked to me.

The results are different than what I expected. It just seems to be a graph of the sites I link to. I was hoping to see new sites (like his) that had linked to me since I posted about MyDensity.

So I became bored and decided to use the Fengshuinate box, which I had not noticed last time. I had no idea what it did, but here is the results:

According to his 1-minute-guide:

use the Fengshuinate box to see the map of how all the sites are interconnected, which rearranges the map to show the most central sites in the network. Unchecking Fengshuinate will freeze the map in its new arrangement; the longer you leave Fengshuinate checked, the more dispersed the map will become.

It is kinda cool, but each iteration takes a while and Java visuals are hurting. The applet also consistently crashed my Opera 7.54, but Opera 8 seems fine.

Why I blog this? It relates to my previous post about MyDensity.

Mitch Ratcliffe is the founder of a small company named Persuadio. Persuadio was recently featured in Esther Dyson’s PC Forum - one of hottest annual events in the technology and venture capital worlds. Why? Because Mitch is an entrepreneur with an innovative piece of software. His company has created a free blog social relationship exploration tool called MyDensity. MyDensity maps the first two degrees of the social network around any URL. People can use it to figure out where they are and how people find them. The basic idea is to increase understanding of how people’s sites are rising and falling in popularity and where those changes start in the market.

What we hope to let you do with our tool is let you see where [on the Web] you are compared to all of these other kinds of interests and then measure how much value is somewhere and who you need to influence in order to get people to start paying attention to you.

I found out about MyDensity thru stories Mitch is posting about his ongoing entrepreneurial experiences. See his Red Herring posts entitled We’re talking real money now (Mar. 9/05), Crunch Time (Mar. 17/05), and The extraordinary lightness of entrepreneuring (Mar. 23/05).

Also check out RatcliffeBlog, his personal blog, where he announces Persuadio LLC.

Why I blog this? Because I think he is on to something.

We need more ways to visualize the heaps of metadata the Blogosphere produces. The picture below (created about 24 hours ago) shows the results of a search for this blog. This is a young blog so I did not expect any results, but I had a few.

Searching with MyDensity returns a graph that you can dig into. Needless to say I am impressed with the application. The visual interface and navigation need work but can be upgraded later - innovative functionality comes first. When the resources are available a better visual interface can be built and MyDensity could be set to kick ass. But hey… maybe I am biased?

Why I really blog this? As you may have guessed, the primary reason for this post is to attract Mitch’s attention. I would hazard a small bet that he notices. Maybe this post will help increase Echo Generations popularity. I guess I will just have to check in from time to time using MyDensity to see if it does.

If he notices this post I wager mucho dinero that the next time I use his search engine the results for this blog will be worth posting about… again. :)

via ZDNet - Startup Persuadio visualizes opportunity in the Internet’s long tail. ZDNet also hosts an audio interview with Ratcliffe (mp3).