Tom Markiewicz

Performancing released a FireFox extension today that allows for blogging right within FireFox 1.5 (via Micro Persuasion). This is impressive stuff. Flock built an entirely new browser based on this concept. All I could think about when I tested Flock was why someone didn’t just write a FireFox extension for this functionality. There are a few polishing touches I’d like to see before I’d use this on a daily basis (primarily the ability to specify draft vs. publish status on a post), but this is amazingly useful. Good job guys.

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One of my must-read blogs, TechCrunch, has a recent post entitled “Google Analytics Swings at Measure Map.” Though I love this site and its coverage on everything new and cool happening around the web, I have to take exception with that headline as it assumes something I don’t quite think is there yet with Measure Map. If these two services were to compete head to head, I think we all know who would win. Measure Map and Google Analytics are definitely targeting different crowds.
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I’ll be the first to admit I’m a little behind with tagging. At first I didn’t get it, but I’m starting to see benefits. I can’t articulate them entirely yet, but after I play with them a bit more and really start to use the concept across some applications hopefully I can define the usefulness of tagging a bit more.
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Popularity: 8% [?]

I just tried accessing several Typepad blogs and I’m getting the same error for each:
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PaidContent.org reports that Weblogs, Inc. has been purchased by AOL for as much as $35 million. Congrats guys. The acquisition is interesting though from a large media versus the traditionally independent blogger point of view. The Weblogs Inc network, despite having many great blogs, was itself “big media” in the blog world. You just have to wonder what will happen to the overall network of sites. If you have enough cash to pay for more “professional” bloggers, don’t you become just another news outlet and lose some of the charm that are blogs?
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Well, I saw this one coming (and really, who didn’t?). Google launched its Google Blog Search today (via Steve Rubel, Charlene Li) and it looks impressive. Using a ping server to primarily update its results as opposed to its web crawlers, the Google Blog Search will be competing directly with Technorati, BlogDigger, Feedster, DayPop and the like.
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Nielsen//NetRatings has posted the results of an interesting study showing that 11% of blog readers use RSS technology to manage feeds. Some of the stats from the survey (PDF):

• I use a feed aggregating Web site to monitor RSS feeds for blogs - 6.4%
• I’ve heard of RSS and know what it does but don¿t use RSS feeds - 23.0%
• I’ve heard of RSS but don¿t know what it does - 15.7%
• I’ve never heard of RSS before today - 50.0%

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I’m not sure I understand the point of this new (to me at least) form of blog spam I’m seeing on my sites. I have numerous comments on my posts by anonymous users with non-spammy wording and no URL at all. An example of this can be seen in the comments on the following post on this site: http://www.tmarkiewicz.com/mit-enterprise-forum-events/

I can see a few of these types of comments occasionally, but several of every single post? Is anyone else seeing this? I’ll be tweaking some of the settings for my comments in WordPress to prevent these from occurring, but the bigger point is WHY? They are obviously spam but with no useful purpose (i.e. no links, no advertising, no nothing!). Am I missing something here?

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Well, the news is spreading the morning - Newsgator has bought FeedDemon. This looks like a win win situation for Newsgator, Nick Bradbury, and consumers of both products. As nick mentions in his blog, one of the biggest feature requests he was as yet unable to provide was synchronization between multiple computers. This was one of the biggest issues I grapple with as a FeedDemon user. With FeedDemon in the fold, Newsgator will be able to integrate some server-side solutions for the product.
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I’m wondering if ChangeThis is dead? There is a tremendous amount of great content on the site contained in their “manifestos”. I see no update since February and in the blog biz, that’s a lifetime ago. I hope they start publishing again as I was impressed with what I had read to this point.

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