Incremental Blogger

Although we’re still working on the Tablet PC micro-conversation tracker, you can give it a try live at its temporary, developer home here.

Update: We have a new home for the micro-conversation tracker. Check out http://www.thredr.com.

(Note: This is just a temporary home while we work out bugs and fix up features.)

There are no permalinks in this version so don’t bother looking for them. When we move things over to the real server, we’ll enable those. No reason to collect a bunch of URLs that’ll go bad we figure. So best to leave that feature out for now. You won’t find the RSS feed button yet either. Sorry. Did I say this was a dev version?

How often will the data update? Well, since this is a developer test server as much as anything else, you won’t see much change for the next several days or possibly a week or so. We might update the content a couple times a day or maybe not at all. The changes will most likely be driven by our dev needs. Hope you don’t mind.

Want to see what conversations might look like for another topic? How about conversations underway by the Microsoft developer community? Give it a peek here.

Let us know what you think. Fonts too small? Too big? Too ugly? Not enough links? Bad format? Not useful unless it has XYZ? You name it. You can post your comments here.

Good news. The “conversation tracker” that Bob and I have been working on is now able to group news, blogs, and YouTube videos as well as–drumroll–”active” threads on Gottabemobile.

Here’s a snippet of what it looks like:

As you can see in this snapshot snippet, a couple Gottabemobile forum posts made it to the conversation list–one on Inkseine and the other on Bluetooth headsets. Both are active topics on Gottabemobile. (The entry between these two forum posts is a YouTube link to a similarly active video.) 

The idea is to collect up active forum posts that aren’t necessarily linked to from outside bloggers or news sources. To make it to the list, the thread has to meet some criteria such as recent activity, a minimum number of posts, and the like. We’re still working on what balance works best. We don’t want too few posts, nor too many. And we want to give them the attention they deserve in the list by ranking them as high as reasonable. There’s still more experimentation to do here.

So far, only Gottabemobile is supported. I need to do some futher tests to see if we can support other forums at this time.

By the way, two thumbs up to the Gottabemobile team for making their platform so accessible. Nice. You wouldn’t believe the number of other tech forums I’ve looked into that have essentially closed door policies. Oh well, I guess they don’t want traffic pointed their way.

One of the other things we’ve been testing out is collecting and rendering online conversations for other topics, such as for digital photography, all things Apple, and finance. There’s no magic to any of these micro-topics other than these are some the topics we or our friends actively follow. We figure, why not start with topics that we’re interested in?

Here’s part of one timeslice of Apple conversations, for instance, that we captured today:

And here’s a snippet from a collection of digital photography conversations:

as well as a slice of the conversation that was underway today on a variety of finance blogs:

I have a friend that tracks finance blogs and news like a hawk, so it’s going to be interesting to see if this turns out to be useful for him.

So what other topics are on our to do list? Like the ones so far, we have a couple in mind that make the most sense to friends and family, but hopefully others too. I’ve learned that to make a good conversation collector–especially for micro-topics–you need a fair amount of content with ways of easily measuring what might be compelling to people to look at. If links are one measure, then it means that people need to link to each other. If there are no links, then you have to rely on other criteria to get to the “hot” topics. As you can probably guess, organizing the content in the “best” way is probably an endless art.

[As a reminder, the pages aren't public yet, but we're getting closer. I'll post a link as soon as we get a couple more rough edges worked out...aka....fix bugs ]

We made a slight change to the blog grouping content I posted about today and yesterday. Now it includes ”popular” YouTube videos that have been recently posted which are on topic. Up to this point, the only way to get YouTube videos to show up was for at least one blog to link to them. Now, a popular YouTube video can makes its way to the list even if there’s no referring link. The YouTube RSS feeds/API really help out here.

I do see one thing I have to fix here: The list picked up the non-English video entry “Asus Notebook KickOff 2008 Munchen.” Hmmm. I’ll have to see if I can restrict the content to just English.

What’s going on in the Tabletsphere this morning? Here’s a snapshot courtesy of the converstation grouping service we’ve been working on:

(Click on the image above for a better view.)

I’m enjoying dabbling with on this “conversation tracker” app. Although there’s much more to do to make it robust and compelling across a wide range of domains, it’s interesting enough to see what it generates up to this point.

I’ll be curious to see after using it for awhile how “sticky” the application is. Will I naturally go to it each day? Or more than once a day? Or will it slowly become more and more idle, gathering dust in the bit bin?

No matter. At least I’m learning something along the way. Here are just a few of the things I’ve noticed so far:

1. RSS feeds are all over the place in terms of how closely they follow the standard. And it’s not just small developers that don’t adhere to the format correctly. Some of the big name news sites fall victim to format errors. It takes a lot of trial and error to get things working well. It really shouldn’t be this way.

2. Feeds that redirect links are getting more and more popular. It gives an RSS tracking service a chance to see if a link has been clicked on. The tracking service then redirects the link as needed. It means that you have to be careful to get the correct link when trying to build a system that analyzes links though. The original link is what you really want–not the tracking link. Currently there appear to be two sites that are the most common in providing this kind of “service:” feedburner (most popular) and pheedo. What if there become more and more of these services? It means more and more special cases.

3. Some feeds are overly complicated–that’s just my opinion. MSDN blog feeds are a case in point here. What’s going on? Is formatting that much of a problem?

4. After working on a system that reads RSS feeds I appreciate even more all the work that the browsers do to properly handly mal-formed HTML or XHTML, even when the content has significant errors. You have to be able to intelligently handle all forms of bad syntax. What do you do when an anchor tag contains jibberish for an href (url) attribute? Well, that’s simple enough–ignore the link. But, what do you do when CDATA sections are missing? For now, the code tries to fix things up, but if the challenge is too great, that article in the feed is skipped.

5. I would have thought by this time that everyone understands how useful full feeds are. Many of the major publications are culprits here–providing partial feeds. Some go further. Apple’s PR feed, for instance, is just a list of headlines. Why not have a full feed? I don’t get it.

6. A system like we’re building here is based in part on the number of links–so links are important. Too few links and the generated list gets less interesting. The workaround is to leverage other metrics, but in some ways

7. Links are a sign of conversations. However, for some topics there don’t appear to be all that many conversations going on–even when there are lots of bloggers. Take digital photography, for example. There are many great sites and blogs, however, the bloggers don’t seem to link all that much. Instead, other metrics, such as number of comments, become more and more important.

Bob and I have been working on a tool for keeping track of the various conversations going on in the Tablet/UMPC/MID/ultra-mobile space. Although each of us has our favorite feeds that we check multiple times every day, we know we’re missing some great threads. Ultimately we know we need to read more content in order to find those conversation gems. The tool we’re building tries to make this a bit easier.

The idea is to collect the various RSS feeds from Tablet/ultra-mobile sites/blogs and group their content based on things such as who’s linking to whom, how many comments there are, the time of the post, and so on. Here’s a snapshot of what today’s Tablet talk is about:

(Click on the image above for a full-sized view)

This is just a partial screen capture of the items listed, but it gives an idea how the sites are shown. Actually, since this screenshot is a bit small, here’s a better look at the top of the page:

Here you can see that two Digitimes articles made it to the top of the list and various sites are linking to the articles.

As you can see, this is more than an RSS reader. We’re trying to organize the RSS articles so that we can quickly and easily get to the most compelling and “active” stories. It’s like TechMeme in that respect, however, this conversation viewer is tuned to conversations of the scale that go on in markets such as the Tablet PC/UMPC space. In fact, the tool is architected so that other sets of links covering other domains can be used instead.

The ordering of the list and links is still evolving. In fact, I imagine that the algorithm will be tweeked for as long as the tool is being used. That’ll be the nature of this kind of tool. It’ll “never be done.”

Anyway, there’s still lots to do: bugs to fix, feeds to add, server to set up, and so on, but so far so good. Step by step.

Robert Scoble: “Going to Davos is a career changing event for me. I need a few more days to really understand just how much it’s changed me… It’s not so much what I learned, but the relationships I made.”

Watch this self-recorded video of Robert and you’ll at least partially understand.

Great looking ink blog by Nick.

Reminds me–I need to blog with more ink.

[Found via Gottabemobile]

TabletKiosk is blogging here (http://tabletkiosk.blogspot.com/). Cool.

“Thanks for visiting the new TABLETKIOSK Blog. I put this site together to keep Tablet PC owners and fans updated with all of our latest product announcements as well as describe some of the cool ways our Tablet PCs and UMPCs are being used.”

When you’re writing a blog post, wouldn’t it be cool if there’s was a widget off to the side, that based on keywords/tags/links you typed a list of “public” photos or artwork would show up in thumbnails that you could select from and quickly add to your post?

A “search box” would be useful too.

You want to add Gumby to your post? Type Gumby in the search box, click on one of the returned images and whala Gumby is placed into your post. Writing about an Engadget video? Type the URL and instantly the image widget goes off and acquires the images and videos linked in the URL you mention. Click on one and it’s added to your post.

TechMeme has just launched a “top 100″ blogger list, called Leaderboard.

According to the site, the Leaderboard “…corresponds to the 30-day period ending October 1, 2007. Sources are ranked by Presence, the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period. “Discussion” links are not taken in to.”

What would be really cool, would be able to filter the list by topic. Who are the top Linux bloggers? Or iPhone bloggers?

If you read Robert Scoble’s blog, you’re not getting the whole story. You’re missing quite a bit of his blogging. Huh?

Yep, more and more I’ve noticed that to really follow along, you need to watch his Twitter feed (very active) or his link blog (very active) or become a friend of his on Facebook or watch his videos on Kyte.tv. And then of course, there’s his work on Podtech.net too.

Robert may be the most prolific “distributed” blogger out there.

No matter what you call it, if you’re looking for more Scobleizer, I recommend adding his Twitter feed and link blogs. Be prepared though if you elect to “follow” Robert on twitter, you’re going to get a screen full.

This is a follow-up post about the Social Networking site Quechup. Please do not sign into this service.

It will take all of your email addresses and send invites to all your friends whether you think you are doing so or not.

(Some people report there is a way around this, but be forewarned and tell your friends to be careful.)

Many, many people are getting tricked into spamming their friends.

It’s very reminiscent of the email worms that spread through the Internet in years past. Yes, it’s that bad. I’ve received these false invites as have others. Robert Scoble posts a warning too. Lora has her cautionary tale also.

The reason I’m posting this again is because it’s important to educate as many people as we can about sites that are out that will mine your data and use it for whatever they want. Evidently, Quechup isn’t the only one that’s employing a technique like this. The are so eager to grow their service or who knows sell your contact list, that they’ll take advantage of people’s trust. This is not a good sign. I understand from other posts that technically the agreement you sign allows them to do what they are doing. This reminds us how we all need to be a little more careful accepting agreements before really understanding them.

My guess is that we’re going to see the end of invites–or a decrease in them. I know I won’t trust them. It also reminds us that we should all be careful with the information we hand out. Is all the information being posted on Facebook really a good idea? It comes down to a matter of trust. Facebook has mine right now, but at least for now, others won’t.

Anyway, once more I just want to remind people to be careful. It’s time to educate all your friends and family. Be careful.

If you receive an invite for the the Social Networking site–whether it’s from a friend you trust or not–please read what others are saying about this service before signing up yourself. You may wind up spamming all of your contacts with an invite.

There are many threads on the Internet about this. Here’s one.

Boing Boing has this to say:

“While you were Burning / vacationing / spacing out offline this Labor Day weekend, many folks online were hit with invitations from a social networking service called Quechup that violates your address book, and abuses user trust by spamming all your contacts.”

Interestingly, it appears that Quechup is not the only social networking site doing this.

My advice: Be very careful sharing your contact list with any service. I realize Facebook and the like have been polite about this so far, but it doesn’t take much to imagine how this could get out of control.

I know that IE has some phishing features that warn you about giving away personal information that you probably shouldn’t, but it doesn’t seem to have any warning messages for Quechup. Should it? I think so. You be the judge.

A new beta version of the blogging tool Live Writer is out. I just tried to install it, but it didn’t go too well for me.

First off, watch out, there are lots of things turned on by default which I hate in apps. If I’m installing product X, that’s all I want. You can ask me if I optionally want to install other stuff, but don’t enable other products by default. It’s rude. And the Live Writer install is plenty rude. It wants to change your search default as well as install other stuff.

Not only that, even if you turn everything off, it apparently wants to also install Messenger and Mail. I didn’t notice if there was any opportunity to not install them. Fortunately for me, the install seemed to spin endlessly trying to figure out if I had these apps already installed so after five minutes of waiting I cancelled the install getting a warning that the install app might not be able to clean up after itself. Very, very rude indeed. Isn’t that like one of the cardinal rules that’s requred of all certified Windows apps? Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

Robert Scoble says he gets about 1,000 spam comments a day. He even suggests that the spamming may lead him to remove comment support.

You may have noticed that my comments aren’t working here. I had to pull them several weeks back. There was way too much comment spam coming in each day. It was a huge problem. 500+ spam messages each day was common. For awhile, I switched over to manually OKing each valid comment. However, this wasn’t good enough for the hosting company. They didn’t like the excessive traffic. So I pulled the comments for now. I’ve been too busy and lazy to come up with a way to better prune out the spammers. One idea is to move the blog where we could get more robust spam blocking.