Insta-What?

Instapaper is a mash-up of social web bookmarking, readability and reformatting, and offline reading. It is an “ecosystem” product consisting of the instapaper.com web site, browser bookmarklets and an integration API, and (optional) reader apps for Apple’s mobile iPhone platforms, including a special iPad version. Instapaper users simply submit items they want to read later to the server and can later come back to them on the web site or in the reader apps.

In practice, Instapaper is much more valuable than it sounds. Web fanatics have famously-short attention spans. Folks like me devour online information, cruising through hundreds of RSS feeds, jumping from site to site, and all the while discovering valuable information. Uncovering gems isn’t the problem when so much great content is added to the web every day.

The primary issue is taking time to read, ponder, and act on what we find, and Instapaper helps me do just that. As I work my way through the continual stream of information I encounter, I use the Instapaper bookmarklet and Google Reader’s Starred Items capability to flag the top content for later. I can then go back and properly focus on these when I have time, whether using the computer at my desk, the iPad by the couch, or the iPhone wherever I am. This simple app has allowed me to extract much more value from the web!

Instapaper Integration

Like the best tools, Instapaper doesn’t try to do everything, but it does enough. In order to tag for later, I need it to be present wherever I encounter good content, and Instapaper is there:

1. I’ve installed the simple Instapaper Bookmarklet in the Safari web browser on my Macs, so I can send anything I find to Instapaper for later.
2. Although it was a bit more complicated, I also installed the Instapaper Bookmarklet in Safari on my iPhone and iPad.
3. Although the stated Google Reader functionality (using the bookmarklet) didn’t work reliably, I managed to get Instapaper synced with my Starred Items feed. See below for instructions!
4. My favorite mobile Twitter apps (Twitter for iPhone and Twitterific for iPad) both support Instapaper tagging, and Twitter for iPhone can even use the readability-enhancing “mobilizer” rendering capability of Instapaper rather than Google’s less-functional mobilizer.
5. In a pinch, I can also email links to a special address.

This comprehensive support means that, no matter where I am, Instapaper is ready.

Twitter for iPhone can "mobilize" web pages with Instapaper or submit them to "Read Later"

Pulling Google Reader Starred Items Into Instapaper

One of the neatest tricks added to the Instapaper iPhone and iPad apps is the ability to use an RSS feed in addition to the Instapaper “Read Later” repositories. This means you could add your favorite web site as an Instapaper folder and read it whenever you are ready. It also means you can incorporate Google Reader’s Starred Items with Instapaper. This capability is not present on the web site, but will sync there once you add it on the iPhone!

Here’s what to do on the iPhone:

	In the Instapaper app, tap the upper-left “+” icon to add a folder.
	This will bring up the “Add Folder” screen. Tap “Go to a specific site”.
	Enter the RSS feed of your favorite site, or for Google Reader Starred Items enter your Reader Shared RSS feed. It will look something like the following: “http://google.com/reader/shared/sfoskett“
	Tap “Go” and Instapaper will add your Starred Items or other RSS feed as a folder both in the iPhone or iPad app and the web site.

Stephen’s Stance

Instapaper brings awesome new functionality to my web workflow, and adds real value to my professional and personal life. That’s not something you can say about most apps on the web or iPhone/iPad. It adds a calm, reflective element to the hyperactive online hypertext experience.

The service is free, as is the basic Instapaper Free iPhone app. But I recommend spending US $5 on the upgraded Instapaper Pro app for iPhone and iPad: It removes the ads and brings killer features including full-screen iPad support, a dark mode (seen above), tilt scrolling, and storage of 250 articles for offline reading. It’s well worth the money!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Instapaper for iPad and iPhone Enhances My Web World
This post was categorized as Apple, Features, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Why Do They Hate Me?

Last week I wondered out loud about this: When did everyone get so cynical and disillusioned with Google? It’s ironic that answers rolled in on Twitter and FriendFeed even as Google was stomping into their turf with Buzz. What response did I get?

1. Google’s corporate censorship moves, especially in China, look pretty evil to some
2. Google’s lack of innovation outside search, especially its repeated attempts to “take over” social media, soured many
3. The poor and informal customer support provided by Google is notorious
4. Many just don’t “get” Google’s mission anymore – are they a search engine, an advertising platform, a software or hardware vendor, or what?

Companies are going to make mistakes, especially massive and aggressive ones like Google. It is inevitable that their compromised position on freedom of speech in China (and India) would raise hackles, but the company apparently decided it was acceptable to gain entry there. But many of Google’s other moves are more troubling to some.

Paved With Good Intentions?

Almost every penny of Google’s prodigious revenue comes from personalized advertising. Google plainly states this in their annual reports: “Advertising revenues made up 99% of our revenues in 2006 and 2007 and 97% of our revenues in 2008.” The company spends about 13% of this revenue on research and development, 9% on sales and marketing, 7% on administration, and 5% on stock-based compensation. I imagine many of these numbers will come as a shock to average Internet users, many of whom probably assumed Google was less dependent on advertising revenue and spent much more money to employ and house so many great software developers.

Google’s stated mission may be “to organize the world’s information,” but that’s not what the company actually does. It runs a massive collection of Internet properties which serve to collect personal information and serve advertisements. Many of Google’s employees seem to be genuinely interested in making the world a better place, or at least organizing the world’s information, but good intentions don’t pay the bills. Shortly after launching its eponymous search service, Google began gobbling up the lucrative advertising market it now dominates.

Not everyone is bothered by this. Many, including myself, are happy users of Google’s excellent products, including search, Gmail, Reader, News, and Maps. I’ll knowingly put up with targeted ads to subsidize these services because I trust that Google really is anonymizing and protecting my information. I’m sure most users don’t really think much about privacy and freedom when searching the Internet or sending an email, but even those that do have been content with Google.

Yet even Google fans have to admit that not every product is excellent. Many, like Wave, seem half-baked while others, like Orkut, seem more like misfires. Google almost missed the boat on the social web and now seems desperate to catch up. Core technology like PubSubHubbub is heading in the right direction, but Google has been unable to stitch it all together. Perhaps Buzz will be able to ride Gmail’s coattails to success, but we have seen so many failures before.

What Is Google?

I think the core criticism of Google is more fundamental than concern about censorship, advertising, privacy, or failed products. Instead, alarms are ringing at Google’s repeated and well-funded attempts to be much more than an organizer of information.

In 2008, the company tried and failed to muscle in on wireless spectrum, a move many thought was a carefully executed trick to force open the United States mobile phone market. They then introduced their own mobile phone operating system, Android, putting themselves in direct competition with Symbian, Microsoft, and especially Apple. This intensified with the Google-branded Nexus One, the removal of CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple’s board, and the launch of multi-touch features. Google seems to be stepping up to directly challenge Apple for dominance of the new mobile computing world.

The company is also moving into fixed broadband, offering temporarily-free Wi-Fi at major airports and announcing a plan to give free gigabit fiber optic service to communities in the United States. They are becoming a telecom company with Voice, and some have suggested a buyout of T-Mobile or the launch of Google-branded phone service. Google is also a cloud computing company, a hosting provider, and even an electric power company.

Even if all of these moves are taken as support of the company’s core mission, they do lead one to question Google’s corporate mission. If their advertising business wasn’t the limitless cash cow it has historically been, I’m sure Google’s investors would be asking some hard questions. What business does an advertising company have supporting blimps, gene sequencing, and electric cars?

Even if you are not worried about the money or the wisdom of these investments, it begs the question, “what is Google?” I believe this is the source of Google’s buzz-kill. In dominating the Internet, Google has tapped into a vein of confusion, concern, mistrust, schadenfreude, and downright hostility. I suppose it comes with the territory.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Google’s Evil Buzz Is Building
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Google keeps rolling out the improvements

Google Reader has long been my RSS feed reader of choice, but using it was never much of a social experience. The earlier attempts at community, from shared feeds to comments, just fell flat. Good thing the solo experience (not to mention the iPhone version) was so solid or I would have given up a long time ago.

Today, Google announced improvements to Reader, making the experience somewhat more social.

• The ability to search for shared feeds is great! I’ve already located three solid shared feeds from folks I don’t know.
• The old string-of-digits shared URL is now (optionally) replaced by your google username (mine is http://www.google.com/reader/shared/sfoskett for example)
• It’s no FriendFeed, but the “Like” tag (keyboard shortcut “L”) ought to help discover other folks with good shared items to follow.

All in all, this might be Google’s most useful Reader upgrade. I’m pleased! But of course I can think of a raft of improvements!

• Why is it always so hard to use Google’s products? It’s a web (pardon the pun) of accounts, settings, and profiles. Who can figure out which products are linked and which aren’t?
• It would be cool to highlight, search, or categorize “liked” posts, allowing others to act as a filter and highlight better content. Or maybe I just haven’t figured this out yet!
• I still don’t get the value of comments…

Finally, I have one suggestion to help you get more visibility: ”Find people” searches for “name, location, occupation or interest”, and treats your list of interests as search keys. So it’s probably best to enter simple, short comma-separated keywords for interests in your Google Profile. And it’s definitely worthless to write a nice long sentence.

Find me in Google:

• My profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/sfoskett
• My shared items: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/sfoskett

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Reader Gets More Social
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Note: This post is about Google, because it is by far the dominant search engine, advertiser, and “portal” in the English-speaking world. Nearly everything mentioned here applies equally to other search engines and advertising providers.

Ranking Pages

Google’s relevance comes from their historical ability to present a quality searchable portal to the entire Internet. The majority of Google’s revenue is also derived from quality information, giving them the ability to present more-compelling advertising to web users.

Google’s core success is based on its ability to discover and rank the quality of Internet content. Gmail, Reader, Picasa, Apps, and the rest of the Google properties are surely excellent sources of information on the preferences of individual users, but they contribute only slightly to the other side of the coin: Information about Internet content. For that, they still rely on the core technology invented at Stanford a decade ago: PageRank.

Every time it encounters a link, Google’s software “spider” follows it, adding the content of the linked web page to an index. Google, like other early search engines, counts each link as a vote for the quality of the page. The genius of PageRank is that Google weights each vote based on the quality of the page it comes from. Although PageRank is not the entirety of Google, it is a singular key element.

Put simply, Google’s success depends on its ability to gather and rank the links we all make and match them to the data we provide about ourselves. Without this, Google will fail.

The Changing Web

The graphical Web is not the Internet. My first experiences online came well before graphical hypertext clients (what we now call browsers) dominated the user experience and became the web. Although the network we call the Internet now supports a very wide variety of traffic, Google’s preeminence comes only from the Web. They have little or no reach into the massive streams of corporate data, multimedia, and other non-hypertext content streaming across the ‘net.

When it was first developed, the web was manual and links were hand-selected and carefully put into context. It was difficult to put together a web page, and those pages that were developed were were static. The social networks of the time (USENET, IRC, and email mostly) were not integrated into the web, did not generally include links. So the first search engines, and later ones like Google, focused on this relatively small pool of pages and links.

But the web soon became automated, subsuming most other interactive services. Social (user-generated) interaction moved into the web in a big way, with blogs, wikis, and discussion forums enabling rapid content creation and reference by users. Sharing links in the social web, and through social bookmarking services, generally replaced the manual pages of old.

At first, this explosion of user-generated content was a dream scenario for Google. They could harvest the collective intelligence of us all to identify and rank content. But as the number of pages and links exploded, the notion of a “web page” was radically shifted from a stable and predictable set of data to a dynamic portal into a vast store of content. Where everyone once saw the same content at a given URL, now each of us has his own experience.

Spammers and scammers realized the value of Google placement and flooded this dynamic social web with links. This threatened not only to undermine the relevance that supports Google’s search (and advertising) business, but it also threatened these new social services themselves. Each honest, relevant link added to a Wikipedia article, included in a Slashdot comment, or shared on a service like Digg was dwarfed by the thousands or millions of spam links injected to boost the PageRank of “client” sites.

I Don’t Follow

Google and the social net fought valiantly against this wave of link spam, but it became clear that something more radical was needed. The only way to fight spam was to make it useless to the spammers. Thus was born a simple but highly-effective tool: Nofollow.

Webmasters long had the ability to tell the Google spider to ignore a certain set of hosted pages through the use of a server-side list called robots.txt. But spammers wanted the exact opposite. What was needed was a client-side way to specify that a link was not worthy of being spidered and ranked by the search engines. This would eliminate the primary benefit of link spam.

Implementing client-side spider blocking was trivial: A simple tag, “rel=nofollow”, was added alongside the url in a web link. This way, Google’s spider would simply ignore every “nofollow” link it encountered, and they would never be searched or ranked in the index.

But spammers would never put the nofollow tag in their own links. So sites quickly began implementing blanket nofollow policies: Every link submitted by users in any form would receive the tag by default. The idea would be that links that had not yet been vetted by users would get the nofollow tag and those that were deemed acceptable would not. But most sites never figured out the right process to allow the nofollow tag to be removed. Today, nearly every social service, from FaceBook to Twitter to Digg to StumbleUpon, permanently marks nearly every link this way. Even Wikipedia, a long-time holdout, finally switched to a default nofollow on all but the English site.

The Nofollow War

What does this mean for Google? If the vast majority of user-generated links are tossed into the spam category as far as the search engine is concerned, it means that their entire system of discovering and ranking links is in jeopardy. The major social services, most of which attract the majority of end-user traffic, content, and links, are rendered useless in generating relevancy.

But these are the exact sources that Google ought to be focusing on the most. Many have noted that they hear about news more rapidly through real-time sources like Twitter than through less-dynamic traditional news sites and blogs. Even if Google had the ability to spider a service like Twitter in real time, which is doubtful, they would gain no insight from the links included in these sources. Social bookmarking sites like Digg are chock full of user-vetted links and should be gold mines for Google, but the nofollow tag makes them invisible.

This scarcity of user-generated links has made the links that are followable even more valuable. Scammers constantly create fake blogs of scraped (read “stolen”) content and users are paid to include followable links anywhere they can. Sites with a high PageRank value are constantly inundated with offers and attacked by hackers to siphon off high-value “votes”.

High-profile content providers are circling their wagons, drastically cutting down on outside links in order to focus PageRank on their own properties. Smaller publishers and blogs are striking back at the big guys, decrying their dearth of external links. Some even go so far as to initiate blanket nofollow policies against these big, respected, but non-linking sites.

This leaves Google with even fewer useful links with which to examine the Web. It also leaves the biggest content providers and networks and the savviest search engine optimization (SEO) pros with a bigger slice of the valuable top-of-Google result real estate.

The Fix Is In

Google is left with a looming nightmare scenario: As smaller, alternative, social, and real-time content providers disappear from the search engine, its overall relevance and value declines. Soon, a tipping point will be reached when users would rather rely on Twitter, FaceBook, and the rest for their Internet interactions than the old-fashioned search engine, email, and RSS readers that Google currently dominates. This house-of-cards collapse can only be avoided by including user-generated content in the Google index.

Search engines could simply ignore the nofollow tag, wading into the social stream and combatting spam in other ways. But this would lead to another rapid upswing of link spam, shifting the burden to content providers once again. And it might also expose links that actually should not be followed, leading to technical and even legal trouble.

The best solution would see the social networks designing in some method of removing the nofollow attribute once links are verified to be relevant and correct. But there is no incentive for them to help drive Google traffic to other sites. Indeed, Twitter recently took the next step, arranging the titles of user pages in an attempt to SEO their way to the top page of Google searches for user’s names. Only altruistic systems like Wikipedia are likely to design in this type of response.

Another possible scenario (to be explored another day) is the usurpation of today’s social web and its content by a new next-generation service. A web-based social client like FriendFeed could rapidly siphon away both existing and net-new content and users in the guise of openness and interoperability. Although new web spiders like Cuil have failed, perhaps old-fashioned crawling capability is no longer all that valuable in the social web.

The most likely fix is both predictable and pragmatic: Google must buy all successful source of social links (like Twitter, Bit.ly, StumbleUpon, and even FaceBook) and integrate them into their search system. Owning Twitter would enable Google to decide which links to follow and which to ignore. The reward of improving search results would be the incentive needed to add “re-follow” capability. Buying these services would also give Google an open pipe of the real-time traffic flowing through these services, a critical resource that they currently lack.

Google simply can not afford not owning the real-time web, and they must continue to buy up similar sources of content as they appear. Yahoo was unable to extract value from StumbleUpon, but Google’s other competitors will certainly try to undermine the search giant. Frankly, I’m shocked that Microsoft, FaceBook, or even Baidu have not yet snapped up services like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Digg even if only to keep them and the information they contain out of Google’s hands.

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Is Heading For A Cliff; What Will They Do?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

What’s the problem?

In case you didn’t happen to notice, here’s the change in a nutshell:

When a user “tweets” in reply to another, they normally put that user’s name (with an “@” sign) at the front. For example, consider the message, “@3parfarley you just went nuts over this twitter update!” This lets the world know I’m addressing my “tweet” to 3parfarley, but it’s not a private communication (what Twitter calls a “direct message”). Everyone else who follows me would be able to see that message, as would anyone visiting my Twitter profile or using search. This was described in detail by @ev last year.

Now, Twitter has always long had an optional setting which would hide this kind of “@reply” when they were sent to someone I don’t follow. So if brento doesn’t follow 3parfarley, he wouldn’t have to see that particular tweet from me if that’s how he wanted to set his account. This would cut down on the conversational nature of Twitter, returning it more to its initial vision as a broadcast-type micro-blog. But this option was off by default was confusing, so many users didn’t even know they could hide conversations between their friends and strangers. @Ev claims that 98% of users didn’t even use this.

The change was a simple one: Twitter now hides @replies to people you don’t follow. Effectively, Twitter switched this simple setting on for all users. The problem is, they made this mandatory: It’s on for everyone, and there is no longer even an option to turn it off!

Although some initial reports suggested that Twitter was hiding all “mentions” of other users, effectively killing the #followfriday meme, this turned out not to be the case. But the core issue remained: This minor change stifles conversation and discovery of new users to follow.

Why did they do it?

My first question on waking up to this new Twitter environment was “why?”

They couldn’t possibly have done it to respond to user confusion, as Stone initially indicated. Twitter is darn confusing as it is, and this change is minor in comparison to the weird and wonderful way of speaking that has evolved there.

The fact that they eliminated the option is one clue. Twitter could easily have simply turned this option on for all new accounts (or even for all accounts) but allowed us to switch it back off if we wanted to. No, they must have believed they had to get rid of this option for some reason.

The real reason is lurking in Stone’s mea culpa: “there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt” and “a new, scalable way to address this need.” In other words, exposing @replies was taking up too much computing power, so Twitter wanted to turn it off to help meet user demand.

I don’t know anything about Twitter’s underlying architecture. But this seems both weird and plausible to me. Since @replies show up even to folks who aren’t following you, there must be something special about them in the Twitter software. And whatever this is, it must take much more CPU power than merely exposing a stream of updates.

The problem is that Twitter’s Stone was entirely disingenuous about this change. He blamed the newbie users, suggested that @replies were bad, and called this kind of tweet “fragmented.” He did everything but admit that there was a technical reason to shut them down.

Out of control

This is called not being honest with your customers and it is the real reason people should be mad. Twitter is desperately trying to keep up with the exploding use of their system, but this wasn’t a good move.

The nature of this change exposes something else about Twitter that I’ve been trying to put my finger on for a long time. We’re all using Twitter wrong! It was never meant to be a global “stream of consciousness” conversation. It was supposed to be a tiny blog! We were supposed to post fully-formed thoughts and links and read the same from others, not hold conversations with @replies.

But history has shown that companies can’t control how their customers use their products! Ever use duct tape on a duct? Or masking tape for masking? Or bailing wire for bailing? You get the picture.

Once people get familiar with a tool, they tend to figure out a way to use it that makes sense to them. And these are often at odds with the originator’s intent. The most successful companies accept what their customers want and adapt to this reality. They realize that their health tonic can be sold in bulk as a popular soft drink or that their farm vehicles are popular for dropping kids off at school.

Twitter didn’t intend for us to use @replies all that much, so they didn’t build it to scale. But most of what we post are @replies today, stressing the system. The answer is not shutting them off. The answer is making them work!

Update: Twitter has sort of reversed course, in the most confusing way possible!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Twitter Loses Control Of Twitter
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Nirvanix management understands that enterprise IT is very different from other potential customers for cloud storage, so they’ve invested in services talent to help bridge the gap between the data center and the cloud. Part of the recent series-A2 round is going to fund the hiring of enterprise services folks, for example.

Nirvanix is also trying to engage with enterprise customers to move their businesses forward. With that in mind, I’m pleased to introduce my new blog at Nirvanix, Enterprise Storage Strategies! I’ve already launched the blog with two posts my Pack Rat readers might be interested in:

1. A Fork In the Road, where I talk about the impact of virtualization and cloud services on enterprise IT strategy
2. Doing More With Less, where I outline the budget pressures faced by IT groups and suggest a few ways to move forward

This blog is not a marketing or sales vehicle. Rather, it is an attempt to better understand and interact with the enterprise IT world and provide feedback between Nirvanix and its large corporate customers. If you’ve enjoyed reading my work for Storage Magazine, my seminars, and my posts here and at Gestalt IT, I think you’ll benefit from this new blog as well. I’ll occasionally post summaries here to my work on other blogs, but if you want to keep up to date I urge you to subscribe via RSS or follow via Twitter or FriendFeed.

So now I’ve got three blogs with three distinct characters:

My friend Sunshine says it’s all so confusing with multiple blogs, and she’s right. I welcome your suggestions on how to keep this all straight! Should I cross-post? Link to each post? Occasionally post a digest of links? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Introducing the Enterprise Storage Strategies Blog
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The genius of WeFollow is that there’s not account to create and no complicated setup. You simply send a tweet to @wefollow with up to three hashtags and your account is added to the list for each. For example, I sent “@wefollow #storage #apple #virtualization” last night, and my account was added to these lists. If I send a different tweet, presumably, my account would be re-categorized in the directory.

There are lots of twitter directories, but this is by far the simplest to use. It’s also viral: I saw my Twitter friends tweeting to @wefollow, so I decided to do the same thing myself. Brilliant!

I’d love to know how often one can re-categorize ones Twitter account. I’d also want to know how WeFollow decides which tags to use, since it apparently ignored some of my later re-categorization tweets. I also agree with @stu that three might be too small a number, and it would be useful to search on more than one tag.

One more issue is standardization: Already @MattPovey has suggested using “#itstorage” instead of “#storage” for us enterprise storage folks. It looks like the server virtualization folks have settled on “#virtualization“. But what about Cisco-style networking, as opposed to social media folks? I suggest adopting “#internetworking“. These things will probably work themselves out fairly rapidly. And we’ll be left with a useful Twitter directory. Nice!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | WeFollow: The Passive Twitter Directory
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Attention bloggers! I've got a whole disk of whoopass aimed at your head!

I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds, and read them religiously. According to Google Reader’s statistics, I read about 200 items per day out of over 700 posted to all of those feeds. As you might expect, I’ve got some strong feelings about blogs and news sites after reading that much.

So this message is aimed at all of you content providers out there: Fix your darn blogs and feeds so I won’t be so grumpy anymore!

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

1. Use full-text RSS feeds! If you’re still cutting off your posts after a few sentences, you’re losing my readership. I hardly ever click through on two-line feed items, and I feel burned when I even bother to subscribe to these. Half the time the heading and excerpt promise more than the article delivers anyway. Switch to a full-text feed so I can read your content right there in Google Reader without clicking through to see your interstitial ads for every post. I promise I will visit and comment if you have valuable things to say. What’s that? I hear you boo-hooing that you will lose readership, visitors, and AdSense revenue? You’re wrong. The best audience is an engaged audience, and readers of your feed are the most engaged folks you will find. They’re also a tiny TINY minority of readers (about 11% last I heard) compared to real search engine and referral-driven traffic. You’re only going to increase loyalty by switching to full-text feeds, whereas your refusal to syndicate more than 11 words is likely to drive people like me away.
2. No more me-too posts! Here’s a hint: If one of your peers already posted pretty much all you have to say on a topic, then don’t post at all. If you’re a worthwhile writer, there has to be a unique angle you can use for any story. Get your own voice! Bonus hint: Make sure you are reading your peers’ blogs so you know what they are saying, too! And a link back to them wouldn’t hurt either!
3. Don’t write about your stats! I don’t care about your monthly readership stats or AdSense revenues. Unless your blog happens to be about AdSense or search engine optimization, that is…
4. Kill the ads! Face it: You’re not getting rich with banner ads on your blog. Yes, I admit that I do run a few AdSense ads on my blog pages. Although the payout is tiny, it’s enough to keep the lights on. But I don’t force ads on everyone all the time – I use Ozh’ excellent Who Sees Ads plugin for WordPress so only search engine visitors see my banners. And I will never pollute my feeds with ads: Treat your (very few) subscribers like the loyal friends they are instead of trying to make a dime from their clicks. And yeah, a dime is about all you are making from your blog anyway, right?
5. Trim the fat! Are you illustrating your articles with 300k high-definition PNG images? Unless you’re a photographer or graphic designer, do us all a favor and limit your inline images to about 300 pixels wide. I know it’s non-free and all, but JPEG speeds up load times! And do you really need to embed flash animations, auto-playing YouTube clips, and other such junk? I’ll happily click through if I care. Keep the number of illustrations down, too. If the vertical space of your post is more than half graphics (especially cheesy Excel charts) you need to refocus it before you lose your readers.
6. Edit and format your writing! If I can’t read your post, I won’t read your post. Start by turning on spell check. Then learn the basic rules of grammar. You may be a computer genius, but I’m not going to put up with incorrect homonyms and eggcorns forever! Perhaps consider learning what a paragraph is, and even create some yourself. You can still use bulleted and numbered lists, but how about some context and headings to assist the reader?
7. Quit moving around! If you’re blogging, you should control your own destiny: Have your own domain name, your own install of WordPress, and your own feed URL. It’s hard for me to take “whoever.typepad.com” seriously, especially when, three months after I subscribe, he moves his feed to “whoever.blogger.com” and makes me re-subscribe. Often, I’ll just unsubscribe and forget him. Don’t want this to happen? Register your own domain name for your blog, set up a hosting account and install WordPress (it’s the best, hands down), and don’t bother me. While you’re at it, private-label your feedburner feed so you can take that with you when you move around, too.
8. Make commenting easier! Comment spam is a fact of life. Despite using Akismet, Bad Behavior, and clever tricks, I got more comments from spammers than actual readers on my blog. Then I heard that, although I added OpenID, commenting was still too hard. So I switched to Disqus for blog comments to try to make life easier, and have had a much better time of it since. If you’re still using native commenting, you’re missing out on a lot of readers who would like to comment but won’t jump through hoops to do it. Bonus hint: Use BackType to follow comments on other blogs, too!
9. Let me contact you! Everyone should have their real name and contact information prominently available on their blog. If you’re covering topics that intersect with work, you should disclose your employer, too. If you want to engage your readers, add in a link to your LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook account, too. But don’t go crazy – no one needs to connect to you in 800 places. That’s what FriendFeed is for!

Finally, here’s a bonus tip: No more top-ten lists! You’ll probably get to number nine and run out of things to say anyway!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Nine Blog Suggestions from a Grumpy Reader
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Lots of the top folks in the enterprise storage community are now using the microblogging service, and a regular community has evolved. It’s really taken off over the past few months.

If you’re interested in enterprise storage, here’s a short list of the top folks to follow, in alphabetical order:

• Tony Asaro
• Barry Burke/The Storage Anarchist, EMC
• George Crump
• Chris Evans/The Storage Architect
• Marc Farley, 3PAR
• Dave Graham, EMC
• Brian Greenberg
• Mitch Haile
• Jolene Hajj
• IanHF
• Christopher Kusek/CXI, NetApp
• Stuart Miniman, EMC
• Michael Moeschler, NetApp
• Beth Pariseau
• Eric Pederson, NetApp
• Matt Povey, HDS
• Kostadis Roussos, NetApp
• Ed Saipetch
• Greg Schultz
• Steven Schwartz/The SAN Technologist, Dell
• David Spencer, EMC
• Pete Steege, Seagate
• Storagebod
• Storage Monkeys
• Andrew Storrs
• Steve Todd, EMC
• Mark Twomey/Storagezilla, EMC
• Barry Whyte, IBM
• And ME!

Plus there are a few official company twitterers:

• BlueArc
• EMC
• HDS
• IBM Storage
• NetApp

While you’re at it, don’t forget to check out FriendFeed:

• Enterprise Storage
• EMC
• NetApp
• BlueArc (linkblog)
• Greg Schultz
• And ME!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Storage Folks Are Twittering
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Disqus and Intense Debate proposed to close this comment hole by replacing the comment capability of participating blogs with a centralized system. Automattic, maker of the popular WordPress blog software, even recently acquired Intense Debate. But these systems merely add another destination to check for comments and replies.

I wished for some ability to follow comments automatically, right within Google Reader, and now I (nearly) have it! BackType is a clever service that tracks blog comments, associating them with their authors through the URLs many people use when posting. Users of this service can then “claim” their comments (via these URLs) and associate them with their account.

But that’s not the part that hooked me. Once you have an account, you can look up your favorite comment authors and “follow” them through BackType, subscribing to an RSS feed to follow the comments they leave in the future. This even works for people who don’t have a BackType account – anyone using a common URL can be followed in this way. And BackType integrates with nifty network-of-networks lifestream aggregator, FriendFeed.

BackType isn’t perfect, but it’s constantly being improved. It only checks certain blogs. You can submit them through a bookmarklet, but it would be nice if it had a wider set already. I’d also love to be able to automatically “follow” any comments left for a blog post after I comment. In other words, add all comments, no matter who writes them, to my feed for that one post.

But BackType is good enough already that I heartily recommend it. Follow me!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | BackType Is Closing The Blog Comment Hole
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.