Google Reader just released new features such as people you can now follow, liking a post, grouping of people you follow, finding publicly shared items. Features seems familiar? Yes, you got it right. They’ve been features of FriendFeed for quite some time now.
Your move FriendFeed.
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Ted Roden of enjoysthin.gs sent me stickers last winter and I’ve totally forgot to thank him. Hey Ted, thanks for the stickers, and for the awesome effort! I really appreciate it. My notebook is “enjoying” them!
Send me your address and I’ll send some tokens your way.
Talk to you soon!
AJ
Visit Ted Roden’s blog, take a look at enjoysthin.gs and subscribe to his FriendFeed here. He’s really one cool guy!
Here’s my enjoysthin.gs and my FriendFeed is here.
From my 319 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I have read 19,662 items, starred 64 items, shared 131 items, and emailed 43 items.
Here are my January 2009 top most read RSS feeds:
FriendFeedLinks – Home
Hacker News
Engadget
Gizmodo
Google Video – Top 100 New Videos
CrunchGear
The Inquisitr
Startup Meme
Boing Boing
YouTube :: Most Viewed Videos – Today
Design You Trust. World’s Most Famous Social Inspiration.
VentureBeat
Lifehacker
TechCrunch
FeedMyApp
Dvorak Uncensored
Tech Blog
Design Float / Popular Entries
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
KillerStartups.com – all
Cult of Mac
FirstShowing.net
Mashable!
Css Creme
ReadWriteWeb
Mployd.com – Where hiring happens
CSS Globe | Web Standards Magazine
Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome
Search Engine Watch Blog
swissmiss
GigaOM
Photo Basement
The Apple Blog
Web2List
launch feed
Hot Chicks with Douchebags
Abduzeedo – design inspiration & tutorials -
The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.7) is now available for download! It sports a new interface and it just got a lot more intuitive.
I’m an avid subscriber of NETTUTS. A popular tech blog that covers a wide range of topics about web development such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails. I was curious how many of their pages are actually indexed at Google and I tried to learn more.
Let’s take a look how many pages at NETTUTS are indexed. Note that this will vary from one location to another, as well as ISP used and nearest datacenter used by Google (I’m currently testing this in North America and the count is going to be variable and approximate).
Let’s hit “site:nettuts.com” at Google. They have approximately 588 indexed pages. Now let’s see how many backlinks they have. Let’s hit “link:nettuts.com“. They have approximately 1,400 links going back to them.
The numbers above are not really that much. However, what matters here is when you look at their RSS feed subscriber count, they have 14,400.
So, what’s the point? Sites like NETTUTS still proves that content is king. It doesn’t matter 100% how many pages of your site are indexed at Google, what’s really important is that you deliver quality content to your visitors.
The rest follows.
BlogRush, a free service that was created to help bloggers get more readers for their blog just decided to shut down.
This is the email from John Reese:
After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service. If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.
When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web. Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web. During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.
BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.
Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs. This was our primary focus. Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else. BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue. We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later. Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped. (It happens.)
I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them. We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.
We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route. While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users. Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money. In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice. There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.
Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work. Without trying there can be no success. And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.
On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.
Sincerely,
John Reese
I’ve used BlogRush once but never found it helpful to my blog. It was a cool service though. However, even the coolest service these days cannot survive without a bullet-proof business model.
It’s just sad to see another free service go to the dead pool.
Good luck to John and the rest of the BlogRush team.
Holy Shmoly! posted an update on WordPress MU that is already version 2.6 beta 1.
Download wordpress-mu-2.6-beta1.zip
For the geeks out there, here are the changes.
I get feeds from Ajaxian daily and love the posts there. It was surprising to see today that I got a post marred with Viagra and Cialis links. (See below)
Were they hacked? Or did somebody accidentally copy/pasted a JS code or a hidden div on the post? In any event, hope they can fix this soon.
Oh and one more thing to note — Google Reader allowed it to show. Ungh!
