Surfarama

This is the longest I have ever seen gmail down for…it has been atleast 3 hours since I was last able to login, urgh.

Would a tool that made it drag and drop easy to map existing XML feeds (in whatever format) to RSS2.0 be useful?

I am thinking about all those industry XML feeds used in large enterprise…think of an industry and they probably have their own XML schema. Seems like there might be use cases for RSSalizing these.

I am back aboard Lufthansa flight 776 from Frankfurt to Singapore, blogging again from 30,000ft…although at this stage my enthusiasm for it isn’t real high. Aside from the poor service, I just want to get home and see the family. This is one leg (11 hours or so) of about 30 hours non stop travel back to New Zealand from my last port of call Vaasa, Finland…which brings me to the real point of this post.

Finland is cool.

This was my first time, and while I didn’t get to explore Helsinki at all, I really enjoyed the few days I had in Vaasa. I was there for work of course, but I still got to experience some fabulous Finnish hospitality in a very cheap hotel, sauna in a lighthouse (both a regular and a smoke sauna), swim in the sea separating Finland and Sweden, and that same night we got a display of the northern lights (apparently unusual for this time of year).

On top of this the country is very green (parts of it reminded me of NZ), and without exception everyone I met was really friendly. Finland is totally a place I would like to spend some more time. The only way I could have been more impressed would be if Nokia had called up to invite me for an exclusive all access tour of their operations…that would be neat.

I remember reading something Jason Calacanis wrote early on in the development of Weblogs Inc…can’t find the orginal post, but he said straight up that he didn’t expect all the blogs to work out and that he wouldn’t hesitate to kill those that weren’t going anywhere.

So my question is how long does it take for that to happen?

A pointless question really, and I shouldn’t really care…it’s just that the The RSS Weblog really rips my undies. It started off with a hiss and a roar, but has been a lame duck for ages now. I have remained subscribed in the misled hope that someone who really cares will come on board. But no…more often than not I cringe when I read any new posts, and that’s if they’re actually about RSS and not the routine “Best of Weblogs Inc” posts, or vaguely related cross posts from other Weblogs Inc sites, which seems to be the main content these days.

There…with that off my chest, here’s the best place to get all the RSS news you need, Randy Charles Morin. He gets it.

Just picked up a link to the new Yahoo! Local beta from Waxy, who made the comment that it is a very impressive alternative to CitySearch…and he couldn’t be more right. What with Google Maps (and all that mashing up fo web services), Yahoo! local, and the new A9 search features, there must be a lot of hand wringing going on in the CitySearch board room.

Well here I am…enjoying the inflight wifi onboard Lufthansa flight LH777 from Singapore to Frankfurt.

It isn’t full noise broandband, but it is perfectly usable and I am pretty happy about it…this is a much more productive way to spend 11 hours. Rather than watching movies, I’ve responded to some customer service email, fielded some inquiries from potential customers, and I’m about to dive into my bloglines account…yipee. Really ought to try that wordpress install I mentioned before.

Actually, it is quite lucky for Lufthansa that they’ve got the wifi service and a reasonably new fitout, because the inflight service experience has otherwise been a bit of a let down (my first time on Luftansa)…talk about surly. It’s times like these I wish I had an hReview plugin for wordpress so I could post a formal review which could then be easily indexed and discoverable by anyone else.

…imagine if this guy had an inflight wifi connection, a digital camera, and a blog!

I’m heading off on a business trip tomorrow for the next 10 days, so normally I’d say posting will be even lighter than usual :)

But this time my flight from Singapore to Frankfurt is one of the Lufthansa flights with the new inflight WiFi service, Connexion, so I might even get to post more than usual (which wouldn’t be hard).

My normal inflight routine is to try and do some work in the first couple of hours, and then catch a flick and rest, and the timing of this flight means I should definitely be trying to sleep…but I suspect that will be all screwed up with a broadband connection. Hours of uninterrupted web. I’d better add some more subscriptions to Bloglines.

Actually, here’s a thought…I have been meaning to set up a new blog so maybe I’ll perform the first ever install of WordPress from 35,000ft!

I signed up to be notified about the beta launch for Flock the other day with out really knowing what it is about…just sounded cool :)

Now unmediated have blogged about an early demo, and provide a few juicy hints…Flock definitely sounds killer. Can’t wait to try it.

PC Magazine has just done a nice review of three desktop RSS feed creators. Sharon Housley’s FeedForAll deservedly gets good marks.

But what if there was a really simple online RSS feed builder that let you export your feeds to your own site, and had some other cool features that only a web based system could provide? That would be pretty neat too eh! Hmmmm…

About three years ago I created a blog directory, Blogarama. I sold it a while ago now, and ever since I have pondered the idea of creating a directory specifically dedicated to cataloging the business blogosphere.

Why? Markets are conversations, and blogs as part of the marketing mix represent a new opportunity for organizations to engage their markets. A directory of business blogs would be facinating as a window on industry, and a great way to discover what works and what doesn’t. It would also serve as a discovery mechanism for industry pundits and so help stimulate the conversation.

Anyway, after a lot of thinking about it I was finally prompted to action when I discovered a new open source project, phplinkdirectory, which seemed like the perfect platform for a simple, but robust, directory of business blogs…

And so it is I am pleased to announce the public launch of Industry Blogs, a directory to catalogue the burgeoning business blogosphere.

Industry Blogs is a simple directory, with the simple goal to be a clean and comprehensive catalogue of the best business blogs out there. If you are a business blogger please go ahead and submit your blog to the directory, and subscribe to the category RSS feeds so be notified of new blogs in your industry. You can also get a feed of all the latest links here.

The directory structure is purposefully high level at this stage, but I expect to add more depth to it on suggestion from bloggers in particular industries. So if you have a specific category suggestion please let me know. Otherwise, enjoy and remember “markets are conversations“.

Just helping out Randy Charles Morin with an experiment.

Jason Calacanis turns up the heat on Technorati by offering a pretty resonable prize pool for a better list of the most influential 500 bloggers.