Dead 2.0 has the stats, only 9% of Americans know what RSS is. Only 2% subscribe to a feed. I’d suggest though the actual subscription rate would be higher, it would be similar to the blog conundrum: that in the same way people read blogs without knowing they are reading blogs, I’d reckon that people are subscribing to sites without knowing they are using RSS.

Interesting also is what people are using to read the RSS they don’t know they are reading that are. As announced here, b5media now has feedburner stats. We’ve never had this sort of service before, and after a few days we’re finally getting some juicy stats.

What’s really interesting is what people are using: feed readers that don’t necessarily need a RSS feed to subscribe to (or more correctly via): classic example, early stats show Google Desktop and MyYahoo! in the top 4. What’s really interesting though is once you strip away our tech blogs it changes again: Firefox Live Bookmarks and Google Desktop come out in front. Compare to our tech blogs alone: Newsgator comes in a 3, myYahoo doesn’t get a look in.

I’m going to spend some more time looking at these stats, but all in all it’s fascinating to see the differences across different demographics…but it’s also important to remember that the kiddies reading celebrity blogs aren’t going to likely be as tech savy as, for example, the readers of a tech blog. KISS + give them easy ways of subscribing. That’ll do the trick.

So Flickr now allows you to geocode your pictures using Yahoo! maps via drag and drop…great, only that Yahoo! Maps is completely and utterly useless outside of the United States and Canada. This is as close as I could get to geocoding my shots from the Big Brother Live Eviction show:

Thinking that given the satellite photos stop at 1km out, I’d switch to maps only:

Completely and utterly useless. Sure, Yahoo! does some reasonable stuff with their home page for each country, for example I regularly visit Yahoo7 for TV guides as an example, but for all the cool Web 2.0, stuff Yahoo sucks unless you’re in the States or Canada. Now if only Google had bought Flickr we might be able to get a decent map and satellite/ map shot:

Google at 100m. It goes clearly to 50m as well.

Tags: Flickr

There’s some good things happening out in the blog news field of late; competition is good for readers and it’s good for blog news junkies (like me 🙂 ). Each site has some great strengths, and yet none of them look like taking a clear lead in terms of what they are delivering at the moment.

The Blog Herald
My old love in life has taken a different turn since I’ve sold it to BlogMedia. Matt came in for some criticism at first, but it’s never easy piloting a bloody great big oil tanker, you have to learn how to steer the ship, and it can take time. The site is now really kicking again, but in a different way to when I use to run it. It’s become, as I think I read someone else describing it (if it was you, let me know) tabloidish, lots of nice bite size pieces mixed in with some podcasts and personal stuff. It’s become easily digestible.

The Blogging Journalist
Horrible aesthetics, great read. Munirs doing a lot of stuff like I use to do at The Blog Herald, digging and posting about blogging related stuff that you might not read elsewhere…much of which to many might seem boring but I like this sort of stuff…. I’d think of the 3 I’d probably follow links from this site the most.

The Blogging Times
(disclosure, I write a weekly column here) Minic was doing a good job here, and yet the involvement of Chartreuse and others is taking the site to the next level. I absolutely love the layout and the way they are categorizing stuff…and as an extension of this how they are pursuing bringing in different writers as well to write regular columns (ok, I’m one of these, but as an idea I think it’s superb). I’m not party to what their future aims are with the site, but it just continues to improve…it feels like a newspaper and nearly reads like on as well…nice mix of opinion and news posts.

For all 3 though, they are lacking one thing, and as much as I’d rather focus on the positives, call this free advice.

All 3 are failing to break stories.

Sure, very few blogs can honestly say they break stories, and yet as much as great content, be that opinion, podcasts, videocasts, how to posts etc… make for good traffic, breaking news will put the site which does it well, and most often, ahead of the rest.

The biggest posts, the ones that drove new readers and traffic at my days at The Blog Herald were always where I’d break a story first or close enough to first that I was often quoted as the source.

Being in far flung Western Australia always had me behind the 8 ball when it came to being first because unlike sites like Techcrunch today where the bulk of the team is on the West Coast of the US and actually meet face to face with enough people to give them a free heads up, I was far removed from the action, and yet I still managed to break news fairly regularly. The sources were always interesting, sometime it was feedback from conferences (forwarded group emails were always fun). Other times it was disgruntled employees. Sometimes I couldn’t verify the tips (Microsoft with Spaces and Yahoo with 360 come to mind) and I published anyway, other times I published things that I probably shouldn’t have, in retrospect, published. There were also times where I didn’t publish tips (they just seemed to far fetched) and a week later someone else would publish them instead and get all the credit. It’s a hard game but a game that is not only enjoyable, but worthy of pursuit for a news site that wants to be the top of its game.

The Blog Herald has the advantage of incumbancy so is in the strongest position to be the blog news leader (note I’m not talking traffic here because obviously The Blog Herald is a mile in front), and yet if either of the other two start breaking news regularly statistics and readership may well change.

Food for thought.

CNet Asia has a good run down on some leading Indonesian blogs, some in Bahasa, some in English. I noticed some blogs coming out of Indonesia back at my Blog Herald days, but it looks like blogging is really starting to spread amongst our neighbours to the North. Personally I can only say that this is a good thing for both Australia and Indonesia given the many misunderstandings between the two countries…indeed, theres nothing better in building links between two cultures than cutting out the politicians and leaving it to the people.

A new service for backing up photos: Backupr. Another wankr name. I feel sick.

What’s really odd though is that the post I saw in Bloglines about it at Techcrunch has oddly been deleted from the Techcrunch site:

to this:

It’s also not on the main page at the time of writing either…which can only mean that someone has taken it down…I wonder why?

Tags: Techcrunch, Backupr

Steve Rubel makes a very, very brilliant observation on Web 2.0 today…

Quietly, an entire Web 2.0 economy has blossomed. The Web sites and blogs that cover Web 2.0 – sites that I really love – are largely supported by ads from startups that also are hoping to capitalize in the rising interest in online advertising. This creates a vicious cycle that’s unhealthy for the earning potential of bloggers who cover Web 2.0.

Once again I turn to history as my guide. Back in 2001 Yahoo faced a similar problem. It was too dependent on dot-com advertisers…what’s not different is that startups advertising on startups spells trouble. You can’t sustain momentum. If the economy hits a speed bump it will upset the apple cart enough to cause the Web 2.0 advertising economy to sink. And while it won’t spell the demise of these popular blogs, it might mean these bloggers will need to return to their day jobs.

History is a guide, and with a pile of money going into Web 2.0 reporting blogs it really puts the gamble into venture capital funding, doesn’t it.

Congrats to Steve though for being the first to observe this, it seems obvious…indeed one of those thinks that makes you scratch your head and wonder why didn’t I notice this and articulate it in a blog post..and yet I think Steve is the first with this as a posted observation.

Tags: Web 2.0, Steve Rubel

There’s trouble afoot at Digg today, I keep getting this message:

Perhaps it’s time Kevin Rose sold out and let someone with some extra server capacity take over 🙂

Tags: Digg, Digg down, Digg not working

Grouper purchased by Sony for $65m USD, roughly $70 – $120 USD per user. This is seriously, seriously, nuts. The company that does it’s best to ruin music for all of us with its crappy rootkits and DRM technology buys a video sharing service….wonder how long it takes till Grouper dies….6 months, 12 months? with Sony’s track record it will only be a matter of time until they make the site so unworkable, unusable and undesirable that it will die an inglorious death.

Tags: Sony, Grouper, Web 2.0

Chartreuse today suggests that content is dead, but it isn’t because as much as I fear that the rise of the totalitarian nanny state is upon us (socialism meets 1984) content still doesn’t come in one flavour, it comes in many different flavours, and like Ice Cream we all have different favourites, and hence we have content we like and content we don’t like, subjectively put: good content and bad content.

b5media, as much as some have said recently that we are a advertising company, or others a technology company, for me is still primarily a content company. We generate content that we hope people will like, and generally speaking at 20 million page views a month (and growing) so far it seems to be working. Of course, bad content can be good content if you’re the Googlebot and some content generators (sploggers) are seeking search engine traffic…and yet if some are making big bucks from splogging, content certainly isn’t dead here either, although I might not like it’s taste personally.

Robert Scoble reports that there are now 72 million blogs on Windows Live Spaces alone, this when Technorati tracks 50 (odd) million all up across the globe…and people don’t believe me when I say there is 300 million odd blogs out there on the internet because they tell me Technorati says there are 50 million….

Of course, Robert rightfully challenges these figures based on activity and content, but it’s important to note what the question is. If the question is how many blogs does Windows Live Spaces have, the answer is clearly 72 million, in the same way that when I use to count these things over at the Blog Herald I’d come up with figures of around 200 million…if the question is how many active blogs they are given a number of criteria (activity, original content etc) the answer is naturally different. Both are questions that should be made and are worthy of answer, but it’s important to note the difference.