Feed Crier Acquired By IMified

Adam Kalsey hipped me to the acquisition of his Feed Crier business into IMified recently, and he’s announced it officially today:

[from Feed Crier climbs into bed with IMified :: Feed Crier]

For the last couple of months, we’ve been talking to IMified, sharing war stories, and helping them out with some ideas on how best to manage the signed on bot portion of the service. The more we’ve talked, the more we’ve liked each other. We started exploring ways we could partner and work together, with IMified providing a publishing backend for Feed Crier and us providing an alerting service for IMified.

The more we talked and planned the integration, the more we realized how much more we could do for each other. One thing led to another, and today I’m happy to announce that IMified has acquired Feed Crier.

I have switched over, happily, to getting my RSS feeds via IM bot, but I certainly want more. Even though I am trying to use Feed Crier as one element of my overall traffic stream (or lifestream) it is not enough today. I want to be able to pull up a log of RSS emelemnts I might have missed while offline, and I’d like to be able to query the stream app to get all sorts of information that I can’t today. For example, I’d like to be able to say ‘show me the last 20 posts from Brian Solis’ stream’.

I hope that IMified will be pushing in this direction.

Performancing Metrics: A Solid Start

I have tried a slew of blog metrics tools, including MeasureMap (my fave), Blogflux (my former choice, which just stopped updating one day), BuddyMap, SiteMetrics, and I don’t know how many others over the years. Now Performancing has entered the fray with its newly announced metrics tool.

So, I tried it, and it failed for me immediately. My blog is “/message”, but it keeps resolving to “http://www.stoweboyd.com”, ignoring the “message”. Ok, but then I am getting no metrics, despite putting the javascript into my templates.

No one else seems to be complaining, so I will ping them.

This is just another example of how things don’t fit together in the blogosphere. Here’s another recent annoying example. I wanted to take the most popular post RSS feed from my Measuremap account. The RSS is secured by password, but they allow your to embed the password in the URL like this —
http://stowe.boyd%40gmail.com:password@alpha.measuremap.com/syndicate/1271/popular_posts
— with the word password replaced with my real password. So I tried to paste that URL into the Typepad feed capability so I would be able to display the most popular posts in the margin of /Message: it barfed, without an error message. I pasted a Feedburner feed into the Typepad feed, and that worked, so I tried passing the Measuremap feed into Feedburner: their parser barfed. (They say they will tweak it to accept this form of URL, sometime in the future.) I tried to pass the Measuremap feed to Feedigest, and it did not barf! However, I was unable to get any sort of useful output from Feedigest’s various options, since the Measuremap RSS doesn’t look exactly like the typical blog RSS, although it is apparently well-formed.

What I would really like is for Measuremap to just give me a javascript I can plug in to display the 10 most popular posts at /Message, today. Theoretically, RSS is supposed to be really simple, isn’t it? But none of these commercial companies — these aren’t kids fooling around in their garages — can get this stuff to work consistently.

Good luck to Performancing, though, and all the others. There is clearly a long way to go before all this stabilizes and maturity shows up in the tools we are all relying on on a daily basis.

Kent Newsome on The Blog Commons: What Is Uncommon?

Kent Newsome really likes my recent response to Seth Godin’s Tragedy of the Commons lament.

Stowe Boyd nails the whole noisy blogosphere thing. He says it perfectly. There’s nothing I can add so let me quote reverently one passage:

It has become the conventional wisdom to reel off those sorts of pronouncements in conference halls and hallways, and lament the loss of… what, exactly? A halcyon era when the front page of the regional paper and the news anchors on the three major channels fed us their take on the news? A simpler, more bucolic blogosphere a few years back when only a few hundred people were posting?

And his conclusion is even better.

Stowe’s post has my vote for post of the year so far. Go read it.

Jeepers, Kent. Thanks, brother.

Attensa Meets Performancing: Something Has To Go

I got a demo of the brand spanking new Attensa RSS products — one integrated into Outlook (which I don’t have, being a Machead), and an online version — and immediately after trying some of the apparently cool features, ran into some stumbling blocks.

Here’s a screenshot of the Outlook version (click for fullsize):

Here’s a screenshot of the Online version (click for fullsize):

The problems I had?

1. First, the Firefox plugin that would allow me to automagically discover RSS feeds on pages I am viewing doesn’t come with the free Online version. Apparently you have to have/buy the Outlook version. So I guess you have to manually find and insert the RSS feeds. I have learned that Attensa plans to unbundle this, but at the moment, you’re stuck.
   
   
2. So, I did add some feeds manually, including importing an OPML file. Seems to work, but creating folders (“categories”) is very counter-intuitive. Apparently the only way to do this is to move feeds to a new “category”?
   
   
3. And then, the headaches started. I was using the neato web view, which displays the post being looked at in the native HTML, not the RSS stream. I saw a piece I wanted to post about, selected some text, and cnrl-clicked on it — this brings up the Performancing blog editor (which despite its bugs and flaws, I still use all the time). However, the link pasted into the new post in Performancing was to the Attensa Online Reader, not the post being displayed in Web view.

Here’s that screenshot (click for fullsize):

I am a bad test subject, though, since I really don’t want a reader, anyway. That’s a rude approximation of what I really do, which is wandering around, as a forager. But if new tools don’t play nice with the ones I am already comfortable with, they never find a place in my world. I will suspend judgment on Attensa’a attempts, here, until I can see what the toolbar for Firefox holds.