I Saw The Shuttle! (Where'd It Go?)

The DC region was treated to a historic flyover by the Space Shuttle Discovery riding atop a 747 earlier today, en route to its final home at the suburban Dulles annex of the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum. And, while I may not have impressive capital region views from my office, I conveniently (?) work across … Read more

AOL, Google, The News, & I

In the last couple of days, two respected Engadget editors have resigned (details here & here). Amongst their publicly disclosed grievances, both cited the AOL Way – which appears to favor assembly line content. Quantity over quality, current, and search engine optimized. While Engadget hasn’t yet been subjected to the AOL Way, these defections make many wonder if the writing’s on the wall. Instead of continuing to evolve as a largely independent (and loved) entity, will Engadget be consumed Borg-like into newly appointed Huffington’s AOL media empire?

Along with this discussion is a renewed debate over ‘blogs as journalism’ and eHow Google might deemphasize the likes of low quality content farms. From a blogger with stints at Mashable and Engadget:

Almost everyone uses Google to find out more about news that’s happening right now, whether it’s tech industry stuff, celebrity breakups, or political revolutions. Unfortunately, the rules Google uses to determine which websites gain strong rankings — and thus frequent traffic, high impressions and strong ad revenues — betray journalists and the people who need them at every turn. Google’s algorithms and the blog linking customs built around them favor those who write first, not those who write accurately. I have no qualms about producing entertainment and other products to meet demand. But journalism must not function this way if it is to remain useful.

And it certainly seems like many pander to Google. For example, TechCrunch (another AOL property) was once a blog purely dedicated to Web 2.0. They were extremely successful and I was a regular. But I suspect it’s been even better for business to expand their reach by covering Apple’s every move.

Yet, building a business around Google’s indexing and oversized influence shouldn’t necessarily be burdened with negative connotation

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Photo Fun at CES

CES is over for another year, but the photos live on. There was the minion who visited the blogger lounge, the Panasonic sand sculpture, and the masses of entirely non-goofy-looking people wearing 3D glasses. I also snapped a pic of a dude named Mo, who was selling solar chargers in the middle of the night … Read more

The Technology Super Heroes (of 2010)

You may know of the Avengers or Fantastic Four, but how well versed are you in the ZigBee Alliance and HTML5? When you stop to think about technological labels a bit objectively, our chosen lingo can be pretty bizarre. (Roku, Vudu, Hulu, oh my.) At grad school, in the mid 90s, I ran with a pretty … Read more

Hands on with Bit.ly Pro (aka Zatz.TV)

We can’t say Zatz Not Funny really needs custom link shortening. But it’s kinda cool in a vanity plate sort of way. And at only $35/year (for .tv Tuvalu domain registration), why not? I’ve been a long time bit.ly proponent as a way to shorten links for sharing on Twitter, given their high availability and pretty … Read more

ZNF: The Year in Stats

znf-2009-browser-stats

Following in Brent’s GeekTonic footsteps, I’d like to point out a few fun facts from 2009 ZNF blogging as we enter our 6th year rocking the suburbs.

Despite my earlier assumption, given our evolving strategy of fewer but more meaningful posts, blog traffic was actually up about 30%. We averaged 66 posts a month in 2007, 48/mo in 2008, and hit an all-time low of 42 in 2009. I’ve yet to crunch the numbers, but suspect revenue growth was flat year over year as the global economic situation negatively and significantly impacted advertising during the first half of ’09. ZNF is a largely labor of love, so we’re not really sweating it.

In terms of visitors, as you can see from the Google Analytics query up top, nearly 70% ran Windows (at least some of the time) in 2009 and were pretty evenly split between Internet Explorer and Firefox. And there’s still too many on IE 6 – 18% of total ZNF traffic to be exact. I imagine a portion of those also account for the 1.32% who visited via dialup. Dialup?! Which brings us to source referrals. Like most websites, a vast amount of our traffic comes in via search engines. Well just one in particular:

znf-search-traffic

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PVRBlog.com eBayed for $12,110.00

pvrblog

Matt Haughey recently unloaded his PVRBlog.com domain and content on ebay for $12,110.00 at the conclusion of a 7 day auction. As with most items that attract seasoned bidders, the reality was closer to a 20 minute event — during which time we saw PVRBlog‘s price more than double. However, the week-long listing provided plenty of time to mull over a purchase. And to be approached by a variety of folks looking to team.

But how do you value a website? In it’s heyday, PVRBlog held an amazing 9/10 Google PageRank. And despite hardly any new content (8 posts in 2009), the site still sees several hundred visitors a day. Perhaps most impressively, PVRBlog may have over 180,000 RSS subscribers thanks to some early Google promotion. Yet Matt says his revenue maxed out at $3,000 a month (and currently brings in about $100/mo). Given those top flight numbers, I would have expected significantly higher cashflow. I’m not entirely sure where the disconnect is, but it did give me pause.

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Being Efficient With RSS

yahoo-pipes

As most of us probably know, RSS is set of XML-based protocols intended to make web content a bit more portable. The most common usage is aggregating blog/news content into feed readers. While RSS itself has made me more efficient in consuming information, it hasn’t been enough. And as I ponder a return to time consuming highway commute, I’m looking for ways to get things done (GTD) faster. (Which, ironically, is time consuming.)

A few months back, I migrated away from Google Reader when they refreshed the UI. I’m not quite sure what all the problems are, but the very white/bright look isn’t pleasant. Since then, I’ve been pleased with NewsGator’s free NetNewsWire (OS X) desktop software. Two features in particular are very useful, when used together: full screen mode and the built-in web rendering engine. The typical folders, post flagging, and keyboard shortcuts are present and appreciated. Subscription status is also synced back to m.NewsGator.com for mobile access, although my experience hasn’t been flawless. (There’s also a NetNewsWire iPhone app… which I don’t care for.)

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