So… some random surfing led me to Scoble’s “post”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/04/06.html#a9821 about why Google might be syndication shy.

This lead me to Steve Rubel’s post on that “subject”:http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/04/why_google_is_s.html which, in turn, lead me to an article on how Overature is working with Feedburner to deliver “ads”:http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3439321 within RSS feeds.

That’s the important point.

“Feedburner”:http://www.feedburner.com… Yahoo! or Google should either re-create this service (unlikely) or purchase Feedburner (more likely). Since Feedburner’s business model places it as an intermediary between blogs and their readers (readers that use RSS anyway) Yahoo!/Google would be buying reach into blogs. Oh, and they get a _little thing_ called reach into RSS feeds. “Clearly”:http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home RSS is looking like it will be a mass-medium… ie, everyone will use it in the future.

Perhaps in a few years RSS becomes a big part of how users interact with the web. Heck, you can already get a Gmail RSS “feed”:https://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13474&query=atom&topic=0&type=f&ctx=search, do “package tracking”:http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/04/03/22.18.02/ via RSS, so why not? Being stuck in the “old school” of browsing-only ad serving — ie, not offering RSS reach and ad-serving technologies — could be a huge shortcoming for web media companies.

The Feedburner model is pretty cool… publishers get ad revenue from their RSS feeds by merely letting Feedburner “serve”:http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/create the feed, and advertisers get reach into RSS via a targeted, contextual ad-serving technology. Right on!

“History Flow”:http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/index.htm is a tool created by IBM’s reseach team to study the history of collaborative documents. Specifically, they study how subjects on Wikipedia evolve over time. I found out about History Flow over at Nate Koechley’s “blog”:http://natek.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/wikis_rss_and_w.html. As the IBM folks say…

bq.. history flow provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text’s evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?

p. Here’s a screen shot of one of the History Flow displays for term “_Islam_”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam.

“!http://www.zoinger.com/img/history_flow.gif!”:http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/gallery.htm

This and Jon Udell’s “screencast”:http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/02/27/19.14.47/ looking at how the the heavy-metal umlaut page on Wikipedia evolved give a good overview on how the Wikipedia community is working.

I used to work at a company that had access to all sorts of marketing and metric reports from the likes of “Jupiter Research”:http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/home, “Forrester Research”:http://www.forrester.com/my/1,,1-0,FF.html, etc. These types of companies can supply you with just about any metric that you’d like in areas that they cover, which is great to get a “feel” for a market. Now, I have access to none of these reports.

However, not all is lost thanks to the power of the web. There are a couple of sites out there (and probably more) that let you roll your own metrics: “Alexa”:http://www.forrester.com/my/1,,1-0,FF.html and “Intelliseek”:http://www.intelliseek.com/.

Alexa, which is owned by Amazon, has a service called _Alexa Traffic History Graph_ found “here”:http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup?mode=graph. This allows you to create traffic graphs in various time domains for any URL on the web. I created one in a previous “post”:http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/03/28/10.04.46/ for WordPress.org to show their rapid growth over the past few months. Below I’ve created one showing Flickr’s reach over the past six months.

!http://www.zoinger.com/img/flickr_alexa.png!

With Intelliseek’s “BlogPulse”:http://www.blogpulse.com/trend you can create a graph that illustrates the percentage of blogs that include your search term vs. various time periods. For example, here’s one showing the percentage of blogs that mentioned “Flickr” over the past six months.

!http://www.zoinger.com/img/flickr_blogpulse.png!

Together these two graphs help illustrates why Yahoo! acquired Flickr.

Spring is here! To celebrate, I borrowed a friend’s “Bissell”:http://www.bissell.com/ ProHeat ProTech Steam Cleaner that he picked up at “Costco”:http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?prodid=11026784&whse=BC&topnav=&cat=107&hierPath=89*107* for just under $200. The ProHeat is pretty impressive. You load it up with hot tap water in one chamber and carpet cleaner (available at most major supermarkets) in another. Plug it in, turn on the heater and suction, and you’re off. It’s well balanced, so pushing it around is really easy. A trigger on the handle turns on the water/cleaner which you can see getting sucked back up into the dirty-water reservoir (and I mean _dirty_).

My friend said that he had hired a professional to clean his carpets before he purchased the Bissell. He really didn’t like the job the “pro” did, so he picked up the Bissell which he said did a much better job.

The Bissell did a great job on my carpet which had several food stains here and there. I don’t think that I’d buy one for myself, since I don’t have own a house, but it’s great to borrow. If I did own a house that had a lot of carpet, it’d probably be worth it.