line of site: October 2006 Archives

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October 30, 2006

» Halloween Playlist Spectacular - Yahoo! Radish

Looking for music to play tomorrow whilst you sit on the porch, get drunk, and hand out candy to kids? Look no further...

Link to » Halloween Playlist Spectacular - Yahoo! Radish

Posted by Steve at 11:56 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

October 24, 2006

Toronto Zombie March

DSC_2605

Originally uploaded by fotograf.416.

never saw this when i worked in Toronto, but it looks pretty wild.

Posted by Steve at 08:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 23, 2006

Intesting way to work the Starbucks pricing system

We go through a lot of pricing excercises in our business. I stand by my continual statement that people always find the cheapest way to use your service, even if it means a little bit of inconvenience. They then feel cheated when you close those loopholes.

It reminds me of an old Starbucks loophole when they first released Starbucks cards. In their system, they only kept a monetary value and no currency code. So those of us that travelled frequently to Canada could pay Canadian dollars to our starbucks card, and come home to the US and spend them as big American dollars at par. They closed up that loophole pretty fast, but it was fun while it lasted.

Link to Starbucks Gossip: A reader asks: "Is it fair for a customer to order a 'ghetto-latte'?"

Posted by Steve at 09:29 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 21, 2006

major nelson: the most commented blog

Major Nelson, an evangelist for Xbox Live, probably has the most commented blog around. He can write one sentence and get over a hundred comments!

Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/majornelson

Posted by Steve at 06:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 20, 2006

The beast has awoken; or, The beginning of Web 2.0 at FactoryCity [Chris Messina]

There's some pretty profound statements in here by Chris Messina. I like this post for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it is genuine, on the level, and there is absolutely no technology bigotry that could be present in this situation.

I personally have been using IE7 thoughtout its beta stages and upgraded to the final minutes after its release. Good stuff for the most part. It's become my most used feed reader for now.

Link to The beast has awoken; or, The beginning of Web 2.0 at FactoryCity

Posted by Steve at 07:56 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 14, 2006

Amazon aStore FeedBurner FeedFlare

Amazon Associates has a pretty cool new feature called aStore that allows you to create a store (get it? "aStore") really easily from products you select. Amazon is already on their second revision of this feature that allows bloggers to easily add recommended products to their blogs.

You can embed the aStore into your blog via an iframe, or just link to it. If you want to link to it, a FeedFlare is the perfect way to do this.

Here's how it looks, and it appears with every item in both the feed and my site:

The code for this is pretty simple. You can learn how to make your own flares here, and I recommend using the scratchpad which makes it super-simple to test. It is a static flare with the following example code:

<FeedFlareUnit> <Title>See Products I recommend</Title> <Description>See Products I recommend </Catalog> <FeedFlare> <Text>See Products I recommend</Text> <Link href="http://astore.amazon.com/persisteoptionsf"/> </FeedFlare> </FeedFlareUnit>

And you can probably just save your FeedFlare as a template with your blogging software. Templates are just files, after all.

Here's how you do that in Moveable Type:

Finally, to add it to your feed and site, you just need to go to http://www.feedburner.com and add it to your feed:

Enjoy!

Posted by Steve at 05:59 PM | Comments (45) | TrackBack

October 12, 2006

10 things i got wrong about FeedBurner

the pr machine is really cranking up here at FeedBurner, so much so that a good part of our week is now giving interviews, taking pictures, speaking at conferences, doing podcasts, and so much so that we've had to start saying no to a lot of these requests. gotta get some work done. invariably, being one of the founders, i get asked a lot about "web 2.0", what i think it means, "is there a bubble?" then there are a lot of questions about advice for other "web 2.0" entrepreneurs.

one piece of advice is "know your strengths and weaknesses. make sure you surround yourself with people who can supplement your weaknesses. admit when you are wrong and move on." i say that, because well, my weakness is that i'm not particularly good at predicting what or won't be successful from a software service perspective. when it comes to doing what is right for most users, i'm wrong a lot. luckily, my other cofounders are usually right about the things i'm wrong about.

surely, some of the things i have been wrong about were because in the early days of FeedBurner, i was cranky for sure. it was hard to fund the first year of a new venture ourselves (that is, before we closed our A round of venture financing), but clearly worth it in retrospect.

so what the hell are my strengths? i don't really know. people tell me i have a sixth sense. i see dead people. i guess when i'm in a room with someone, i can read their mind. that's useful in some situations.

anyway, here were some of the things i was wrong about in the creation of our business over the last 3 years (so far):

1. i didn't want to create an ad network, because i thought it wouldn't be fun - actually, creating an ad network has been pretty fun. making money is fun for sure, and building an ad network from scratch to optimize for this new medium of RSS feeds has been a great combination of technology and business, and obviously has is still evolving. mostly though, it's clearly the part of our business that where we are just miles ahead of any competitor in what we know, and in what we have planned. creating an ad network has made me learn a lot about how the media business works that i had never realized before, and i find it fascinating whenever i find out about a new ecosystem that you just never realized was there. and did i mention making money? watching the business start to really make some serious money is great fun. watching the average order multiply by a factor of 10 is exciting.

2. i thought RSS could be monetized by a micropayments mechanism charged to the subscriber. one of my original ideas was that we could create a micropayment marketplace for content where a subscriber got charged a fraction of a penny for reading rss content, we would take a small tax and handle the collection and settlement on the publisher's behalf. this may still evolve someday, but the RSS/Atom world is just still too fragmented to support this right now or for any forseeable future. there is no such thing as a private feed these days. you can search MyYahoo and find all sorts of private feeds out there if you know the right searches. how can you pay for something that gets immediately shared and becomes public? more than anything, i hate paying for anything. if a medium can support advertising to help subsidize its cost in a non-obtrusive way, fine. (Skype should figure this out for skype in/out internationally. I hate paying for Skype!)

3. i didn't think i wanted to code anymore. i remember telling the team "i'll do 'the RSS thing', but i just want to run business development". well, i kinda do that here, but i've been programming ever since my dad brought home a stolen IBM XT (he didn't steal it, but he bought it from someone who did - a better phrase would be "hot IBM XT") or perhaps when i got my Commodore Vic 20, so it was silly to think i wouldn't want to write code. so i still try to do that when i can. it helps me understand what we do a lot better. i wish i had more time to write code for feedburner.

4. i thought someone would create an open-source version of FeedBurner that could be installed locally and stifle our business. even if someone did this, and i fully expect that someone will create a something with similar features to what we offer sooner or later, it wouldn't matter. that's because the value of the business is in the scale and quality of the network of publishers and advertisers we've created, the efficiencies we gain by managing hundreds of thousands of feeds, and the absolutely rabid customer service and insight we've provided to all the users of our network over the last 2.5+ years. there's a lot of myopic skeptics out there that just don't get that. i won't expand on all of it here, but there's more and more features coming soon that can only be used by members of such a large, diverse network of publishers.

5. i thought publishers (bloggers mostly) would just modify their RSS templates to do a lot of what we do. a lot of what FeedBurner offers can be done by a blogger who modifies his/her blogging software, but it turns out it's a really, really small percentage of bloggers who actually have the know-how, the time, or desire to do this. some of that small percentage are in the vocal minority, so you hear a lot about that, but the reality is, most publishers don't want to modify the core in their templates beyond design. furthermore when it comes to advertising, there's a lot of good reasons not to modify your rss template - it's really hard to control the user experience to do such things as spacing out advertising in a user-friendly manner, or optimizing the impressions according to what the advertisers want. we've discovered quite a few things that you simply cannot do by modifying your template as well. just inserting a text link advertisement in your content is a really, really, bad idea. some bloggers will find this out the hard way.

6. i thought people would only want to get RSS as email. i remember telling Eric that i thought rss to SMTP was the killer application, and that i would never want feeds delivered any other way. boy was i wrong about that one. i still like getting RSS as email on my E61, mostly because the on-board RSS reader is so sucky, but otherwise, i much prefer getting RSS in a portal or homepage view, and it turns out so do most other people. not that feeds-as-email doesn't have its place. it's actually a pretty successful service we offer, but it's not the leader, and with the advent of RSS support in IE7, Outlook 2007, and Vista, it never will be.

7. i thought mobile takeup of RSS would happen a lot faster than it did. i still think rss is a killer app for mobile. the RSS integration on the SonyEricsson K790 / K800 is excellent. really excellent. (of course, i also think they stole some of their ideas from me and a project Matt and i did for Blogger) - but anyway, there still hasn't been a large intersection between the consumers of RSS and the people who have mass-market phones. this will change soon,

8. i thought we could use a third-party search marketing network in rss feeds. it turns out ads and ad networks optimized for search and contextual-content don't perform equally as well in feeds and blogs. this makes a lot of sense in retrospect. a) feed subscribers are a totally different audience than those people performing a search. they have a totally different intent. these are people you are reaching every day, not people who are performing a search looking to find something. b) you start splitting the pie too many ways, and no one is happy. building the FeedBurner Ad Network was the right choice. RSS advertising is a totally different animal than AdSense or YPN. we sell audience, not intent, to advertisers. this is a big difference most people don't get.

9. i didn't think i could work with the same co-founders and have a more successful company than our last company. the best analogy i can make with the FeedBurner founders is that of a rock band. now, which rock band is open to debate, but one thing holds constant: we all have complimentary skills that we add to every song. sometimes i play guitar, sometimes i play bass. we can all sing. i used to compare us to pearl jam, but i actually think we're a lot like the Beatles. we've certainly had our fallouts over the years for tons of reasons (actually, more similar to the Beatles than you might believe), but it pretty much always comes back together for something bigger and better. next we plan to travel to india, drop lots of acid, and see what happens.

10. i didn't think commercial publishers would adopt RSS so quickly. we kind of all expected commercial publishers to embrace RSS sometime around Q1 of 2006. the wave came much earlier than that. about six months earlier, in fact. i wish i could say this was serendipitous. if this were called "11 things i got wrong about FeedBurner", number 11 would be "i thought if we built it, they would come." now, that has certainly been true to a large extent. every week i look and see a commercial publisher you all know and had heard of convert their feeds to FeedBurner that my business development team has never talked to. it has happened a lot (in which case we start talking to them immediately!). but the vast amount of our publisher acquisition has been because of personal contact and lots of hard work. it also has to do with hiring the right people who have skills that i do not. i couldn't give a rat's ass about politics. i've never read the daily kos or instapundit. but Rick and Jake do and have, and guess what? political blogs are pretty popular. and they've got them all. i hate talking on the phone. i'm unable to process spoken audio without visuals. Don knows everyone and can spend all day on endless conference calls, thank God. Likewise, Eric Olson can cold call anyone and talk them into using FeedBurner, for the benefit of everyone involved. All that aside, my team has blitzkrieged the publisher market and it goes to show you that with the right talent and hard work, that you can accomplish the impossible.

next: 10 things we all got right with FeedBurner. hey, i'm not a total moron.

Posted by Steve at 10:15 PM | Comments (131) | TrackBack

10 things i love about the Xbox 360

with all the hype of the late release of the Nintendo Wii and the PS3, i thought i'd recap all the stuff i love about the Xbox 360 platform. to be clear, i'm not a game platform bigot. i'm equal opportunity. i fully expect to own all 3 of these platforms before this is all said and done, and i expect them to all coexist peacefully in my home neighborhood.

1. the controller - let's see, let me go through all the gaming systems i've owned - pong, atari 2600, sega genesis, sega game gear, ps1, ps2, N-gage, PSP and the Xbox 360. the 360's controller blows them all away. it fits perfectly in your hand, and just becomes a part of you. how come no one else could do this before. and the wireless works great too. it's RF, so there's no need to have line of site[sic] open to the console.

2. xbox live - xbox live is done right on so many levels. yes, having to pay to play other people sucks big time, but for the $50 per year, i think it is well worth it. surely, xbox live has forced Sony to think very hard about how they would go to market with multiplayer gameplay, and i see this as Sony's hardest challenge in marking up feature for feature with Microsoft. this is because xbox live is so much a part of the gaming experience on the xbox that it doesn't even make sense for me to play without it. the fact that it is recording achievements (see #9) while i am playing is actually a big motivation to play in addition to the fun of playing. when playing my PSP i long for having achievements or something similar on this platform.

3. the graphics - well, compared to pretty much anything else currently available, the 360 blows everything away, and that's on the first generation games. it always takes developers a couple generations to learn how to tune a platform. this will only get better.

4. the sound - i come out of a game of call of duty 2 with my heart racing and wide awake. adrenaline is clearly racing through my body. i think this has everything to do with the 5.1 sound coming out of the optical port on the xbox 360 cable.

5. the media player - i've had a number of solutions for my stereo that allow me to stream music from a server on my network and play music. the xbox360 does it better than all the others i've had. AND, i can also play a slideshow of pictures from any computer in the house to the TV while playing this through the stereo. i can play music off of one server, and pictures off of another, no problem. no media center PC required.

6. making my own soundrack for any game - i am the type that usually has the stereo on while playing video games. i love the fact that i can be playing a game, and also streaming my music collection from any computer in the house in the background to the game. given #4, i don't do this a lot, but it is nice to have the option.

6. the demos - it's awesome to be 10 minutes away from trying any game. over a cable modem, downloading a 1GIG game demo is pretty effortless, and you can now do it in the background while you play. this online marketplace feature is a winner.

7. the arcade - sometimes you just need a simple, mind-numbing game. sometimes you just don't have time to take on an entire level of oblivion or game of NCAA football. that's where the arcade comes in. a quick game of Zuma or Hexic can be a blast and boost your gamer scrore to boot. and the kids love Marble Blast Ultra.

8. platform compatibility - games on the pc are great, but i'm flat out tired of compatibility problems. half the games i get for my kids' pc do not work out of the box because of some system incompatibility, lack of disk space, what ever. what a pain. platform gaming is just so much easier for the average joe, and people who just don't have time to pimp their ride. the backward compatibility of the 360 leaves something to be desired, however, having to have the team at MSFT issue a patch for any original Xbox games.

9. achievements - every game on the 360, whether it be on disc or the arcade, has "acheivements" that add to your "gamer score" in Xbox Live. this is a remarkable concept, and is remarkably addictive. you don't feel like you've had an attractive gaming session unless you've upped your gamer score. achievements vary greatly based on the game, from scoring a rushing touchdown of more than 30 yards in NCAA 2006, to winning the war in Call of Duty 2.

10. the stats - i'm a stats junkie. whether you know it or not, every XBox 360 game is required to log some set of stats to the Xbox Live server as you are playing. there's numerous services that have partnered with Xbox Live to give you stats on what you've played, how long you've played it, as well as your "gamer score" and "achievements." i expect them to open this up a little more in the future to other third parties to develop additional services.

all in all, the Xbox 360 rocks. i could probably find 10 things i don't like about the Xbox 360, and maybe i will post those soon. but for now. i highly urge you to go out and buy one so i can play you.

Posted by Steve at 10:12 PM | Comments (1583) | TrackBack

At Yahoo, All Is Not Well - New York Times

boy, that is just not a good prognosis. you would think they would be more aggressive.

Link to At Yahoo, All Is Not Well - New York Times

Posted by Steve at 04:53 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 09, 2006

Google AJAX Search API Playground

Wow, really neat example of what you can do with AJAX on a blog. All using the Google API. This is a great example of how to create an API, and then create some killer uses of your API, that just drive more traffic to you, which is in this case, Google.

I can barely get this blog to layout correctly (the MT templates aren't exactly simple to understand) but perhaps someday I can aspire to add this...

Link to Google AJAX Search API Playground

Posted by Steve at 05:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 05, 2006

Mobile Adult Content Congress + 724 Solutions

oh, funny. i remember when 724 wouldn't touch adult content with a 10 inch pole. now they are sponsoring the MACC.

my favorite guideline: "The Mobile Adult Content Congress does not allow pornography or profanity in any presentation"

i remember we chastised an employee once for naming his windows box "RonJeremy" - and it looks like Ron will be in attendance:

Link to MACCongress

Posted by Steve at 09:57 PM | Comments (1700) | TrackBack

October 03, 2006

FeedBurner Stats Google Gadget

Thanks to Google Gadgets, you can now get the FeedBurner stats widget for your own display purposes...

Link to Add Gadget to Your Webpage

Posted by Steve at 09:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 02, 2006

YouTube - Male Restroom Etiquette

The first half of this video is hilarious. For those of you who don't how a cell phone picks its channel, it's exactly the same as the etiquette for picking a urinal. You never want to occupy a cell channel next to an occupied one. Always pick the channel that is furthest away, and repeat.

Source: YouTube - Male Restroom Etiquette

Posted by Steve at 11:45 PM | Comments (579) | TrackBack

Jesus Beer

I'm not sure why, but I did a google search for "jesus beer" and i got this topical story. Pretty funny prank. Turns out someone defaced this Budwieser ad with their own art. Tee Hee.