Surfarama

I’m posting about Tagalyzer again because we made some tweaks, which I think make it much more useful…

Now you can link to the home page which will display the news tab by default, or link to tagalyzer.com/blogs, /links, /pix, or /products, which will display the blog, bookmark, picture, and products/services tabs respectively.

These urls will also work when embedding Tagalyzer in your blog template, eg. use this link format, http://tagalyzer.com/links?referer=[post_permalink], to tagalyze specific posts with the bookmarks tab displayed by default.

And don’t forget you can Tagalyze any page you read using the TagIt! bookmarklet (drag it, or save it, to your browser links bar).

As usual feedback is encouraged.

UPDATE: One of the Dogster crew, John, just posted about the Dogster ‘niche’ and he pointed out something that I was guilty of in this very post…the word ‘niche’ understates the market size. For sure it is just semantics, but the pet ‘niche’ is huge, and the Dog and Cat niches therein are massive in their own right. And as if to prove the point they’ve just broken the 200,000 unique user mark across Dogster and Catster, w00f w00f indeed.

Back in 2004 I was able to attend SXSWi. Needless to say is was a great event, and one of the high points was the Blogger party where I met a bunch of cool folks including Ted. It was early days back then for Ted and his social networking site for Pets, Dogster.

Fast forward a couple of years and Dogster has grown steadily by design, focussed hard on the community, and getting the basics right. Ted and the team have done a really good job without a lot of fanfare and it’s fully paying off. 141K dogs online, with over 400 new profiles being set up on an average day. Dogster is a brilliant example of a niche community site done well…your average dog owner is pretty passionate about their pet and this is reflected in the strength of the community at Dogster.

And now the Dogster team are sharing some of their experiences and insights on the Dogster Company Blog. Nice one fellas.

Last October I posted about the serialized RSS feed I set up for Cory Doctorow’s novel, Someone comes to town, Someone leaves town. It got posted on Boing Boing so subscriber numbers for the serial feed shot up to over 600 almost immediately, before dropping back as those early subscribers got to the end of the book a month later.

That was cool. But just as cool, I think, is that since that time the subscriber numbers have remained steady at around 200 subscribers, so as people finish the book over 30 days there’s still new people subscribing. And the comments have been pretty positive, making me think that people quite like getting fiction in their feed readers. Perhaps it is still a novelty thing, or perhaps a little fiction delivered along with the news to your aggregator is quite a nice diversion.

In any event, I am bouyed by this success and am working on providing more serial content in this way. I am fully employed again now, so it’ll take me longer to do this stuff, but any suggestions would be welcome.

UPDATE: BTW, you can subscribe to Cory Doctorow’s previous novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, here:

[subscription link won't show up in your feed reader]

OK, here’s something. Publi.sh is a service to create RSS feeds. It is super easy and super cheap (free actually), but has some good features:

• Post new items on site, via the browser bookmarklet, or via email.
• Sweet WYSIWYG posting interface for rich text formatting (with a full screen mode)
• Supports time zones and future posting dates so you can publish items at certain (local) times. Use it to create a personal reminder feed.
• Supports enclosures so you can use it to create a podcast feed
• Post by email means you can use Publi.sh to turn a mailing list into an RSS feed
• Browser friendly styling with ‘one click subscription’ chicklets for the major news readers
• Feeds are disposable in the sense that if no one subscribes to them they’ll automatically get deleted after 14 days

It could do with some UI improvements, but it works pretty well. Love to know what you think…or, building on my last post, what you think it might be useful for.

Richard McManus reminds me that I was working on a post about disposable and personal feeds…actually it builds on a previous post about wider uses for functional feeds.

The point being that I don’t think we have yet scratched the surface when it comes to RSS, which is going to permeate our media consumption habits and public/private interactions to a much greater extent than it already does and probably in ways we havn’t thought of yet.

I already subscribe to 150+ feeds to stay abreast of stuff I am interested online (there’s probably only 10-20 must read dailies), but of these only a small number are what I would describe as functional…feeds that provide some utility other than as a channel for consuming content. Think persistent Technorati searches, UPS package tracking feeds, or perhaps persistent eBay searches. This is where I reckon it starts getting really interesting.

Here’s a few things I have recently wished were available to be subscribed to:

• Our family calendar (so I can subscribe at work)
• Site traffic reports, campaign reports, and sales reports at work in such a way that they’re accessible on my PC or mobile device
• Project feeds at the office to keep up with what is going on in different parts of the business (and be able to filter these for keywords etc to cut down the noise). This also means getting documents via enclosures auto downloaded to my desktop. This should be totally possible today with the right client.
• A feed of the best airfares on routes I am interested and within price points I choose
• Coupons/discounts for stores in my neighborhood (by zip code), and maybe one for lunch places around where I work.
• A feed for any persistent relationship I have which involves regular info, e.g.. utility companies (water, power, gas, phone etc) or my bank for the delivery of statements (downloaded via enclosures perhaps). Of course some of these will require a client capable of handling robust security.
• RSS available for every trackable purchase I make. You can do this already, but I’m looking forward to vendor supplied solutions which make it drop dead simple…they should send me the RSS tracking url (a ‘disposable’ feed) when I get my confirmation email. Or better yet, how easy would it be for Amazon to give me a personalized RSS feed (which could include tracking info) instead of sending me loads of email related to any of my purchases.

This is a very short list. Just think of all the persistent relationships you have with other parties…I bet there’s a million instances when RSS would be a simpler way for information to flow. And feeds can be easily personalized, it is not just one to many (as with regular media). Anywhere you have a persistent relationship with a 3rd party there’s a basis for personalization. I just don’t want this stuff via email anymore because it is important to me, and RSS is more robust and trustworthy (cause I drive it).

Of course subscribing is one thing, but what about publishing?

RSS is baked right into just about all content management systems today, and certainly any blog software worth using offers feeds out of the box. So with these we can easily publish a feed for pretty much anything we want. Still I have a feeling that RSS as a transport mechanism might be quite useful in itself, without a blog even…I mean why not use RSS to send yourself reminders, or leads to your sales team members, or to deliver a training materials to your staff or customers.

Wide spread personal publishing of feeds for personal and public use won’t happen until we get a certain ubiquity which we havn’t yet reached. But when Outlook ships with a reader built in we’ll get ubiquity very quickly. And at this point I think we’re going to want to publish RSS as easily as we can subscribe to it, which is not to say that RSS is a messaging protocol (although it could be I think)…just that there’s loads of instances when RSS is probably better than email, simply because of that trustworthiness.

Anyway, in summary, there’s a tonne of scope to improve the flow of info in our daily lives with functional feeds, while the publishing of feeds (for public and personal uses) is going to become much more common when feed readers hit the mainstream. They are not there yet.

I’ve brought my fair share of stuff from Amazon and have never had a problem until now.

I ordered four books in early December. Some were for Jennifer for Christmas but I never actually expected them to get there in time knowing I had left my shopping a bit late. That accepted I kinda thought I’d get them early(ish) in the new year, I would have been happy with late January…

Well, they still havn’t arrived (the first will be here in March sometime), and I have received no fewer than 5 (yes, 5!) emails from Amazon asking me to accept progressively later delivery. WTF!

It’s kinda cool that their supply chain sends out automated notifications and updates everytime there’s a delay, but ‘fer crying out loud people…5 delays is about 3-4 too many. At the very least make sure that a real person gets involved at somepoint after say 3 delays so that your customers arn’t tearing their hair out (I can’t afford to lose any more).

I want the books, but I also want you to know that I am very unsatisfied with waiting so long (and finding out now that one isn’t available!). Automated followup is cool the first time, causes a sigh the second time, but after receiving 5 automated “sorry, but we’re going to have to delay your shipment” emails, I’m pretty unhappy.

Seth Godin wonders where’s the ethernet jack in his Toronto hotel room. My guess, there isn’t one.

(Someone else already guessed in the lamp stand, which would’ve been my first guess)