Audioblog, which is not just for audio, announced unmetered bandwidth pricing last week.

This is a really great service for podcasters and video bloggers. Audioblog makes it easy for your visitors to consume your audio and video content by wrapping it up in a customizable player that can be embedded right into your blog content. You can record to your Audioblog account right through a web browser, or upload files you created on your own. Even cooler is the fact that you can call a special telephone number and create recordings that will be automatically posted to your blog – podcasts on the go! It's easy to use and compatible with almost all major blog platforms; we first documented how to use Audioblog on BlogHarbor back in May 2004.

So the big news here is that Audioblog is offering pricing based on unmetered bandwidth plans from at $9.95 per month with 500 MB of disk space storage. This is a fantastic value for podcasters or videocasters who were concerned about the affordability of popularity. Highly recommended, free trials are available.

Yeah, this reads like an ad. It's not, I'm just a fan and we have lots of podcasters at BlogHarbor who have been looking for something like this for a long time. They're creating podcasts but are hesitant to get serious about it out of concerns that they can't afford the cost of bandwidth of even a moderately popular podcast or video blog, and are hesitant to use one of the free file downloading services, since they understand there's probably a legitimate reason that the phrase You get what you pay for was coined. Now there's a real player out there, one that knows this space better than any other, that has a solution for them.

MP3 File

News about Edgeio is trickling out, Business Week says the following about this upcoming service:

…Edgeio is doing just what its tagline says: gathering “listings from the edge”–classified-ad listings in blogs, and even online product content in newspapers and Web stores, and creating a new metasite that organizes those items for potential buyers.

The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word “listing” (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag and index them on Edgeio.com.

Sounds great. Exciting and cool in fact. But reread that last line there: constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag. When will the weight of all these search engines indexing blogs start to affect the price of blogging?

Yesterday on this obscure blog 15% of the access was from RSS readers and aggregators, 28% from search engine robots. 18 different crawlers visited yesterday alone. There are more than a few of these robots that come in daily and hit 60-80 pages whether anything’s been updated or not, and I’m sure there are bloggers who are seeing higher ratios of access from robots and crawlers.

If as Dave Sifry of Technorati says, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5-6 months, will services requiring blog indexing grow at the same rate? Will 70+ crawlers be visiting this site daily in a year’s time? 300 crawlers a day 2 years from now?

Bloggers pay the cost for the bandwidth consumed by all of this search engine indexing either directly or indirectly. Bandwidth is not free, a blog hosting provider has to pay for it and must recoup the cost of bandwidth (and the other costs associated with blog hosting) either by subscription fees or by placing advertising on their blogs.

Doesn’t it seem inevitable that the explosion of blog indexing services will eventually have an effect on the price of blog hosting services?

Maybe there’s a better way to do this… Bob Wyman said the following last year on this post:

I’m hoping that Yahoo!’s support for the FeedMesh will convince folk that services that might otherwise compete can see clear advantage in cooperating to ensure that the task of discovering blogs and updates to blogs is shared among all parties. We’ll still compete… It’s just that we’ll compete based on the quality of the services we provide rather than just on how many blogs we monitor.

If this idea was extended to not only the discovery of blogs and updates, but the nature of those updates, perhaps the bandwidth pressure on blogs can be alleviated? What if there were a mirroring service, a Blog Cacher, that monitored the FeedMesh for update notfications and stored a copy of the blog pages and feeds for use exclusively by the blog search services?

Access to the cached or mirrored copy would be restricted to blog indexing services, ensuring that the general public only sees the “original”. Make it opt-in, let the blog owner choose to request that search engines access the cached copy, maybe via a simple file uploaded to the root directory of the blog, a robots.txt style service.

And how would this Blog Cacher service pay for itself… How would it monetize itself? Hmmm… That’s a good question, I can see a few different models… And I’m sure you can too… I’d be surprised if we didn’t see such a service by the end of the year.

Update: Blog Cacher sounded pretty cool, I couldn’t resist registering blogcacher.com. 😉

Update 2005/02/24: Looks like there’s been some work done on an API called the RSS Cloud interface, which would allow updates to an RSS feed to be sent to “interested parties.”  Would be a great place to start for blog caching service…

There you have it, my Super Bowl prediction: Seahawks will win 31-28. I am not predicting any major wardrobe malfunctions.

Update 2/6: Good thing I didn’t put any money on the game. One thing: Is it just me or has there been an outbreak in the use of the phrase “perfect storm”?

Via the Blog Herald, I came across this article Imagining the Google Future on CNNMoney:

U.S. companies still devote more ad dollars to the Yellow Pages than to the Internet (which accounts for less than 5 percent of overall ad spending). Yet Americans now spend more than 30 percent of their media-consuming time surfing the Web. When the ad dollars catch up to the trend, a mountain of cash awaits, and Google is positioned like no one else to scoop it up.

Hmmm… According to this research, total US spending on advertising in 2006 is expected to be around $152 billion, with Internet ads taking about 9.1% of that which would be around $14 billion.

Online: Where The Growth Is from BusinessWeek on Dec. 26, 2005 called the Yellow Pages market “among the hottest media bets” and noted it was $15 billion a year market. The article noted:

Analysts at Kelsey Group forecast that $5 billion of locally targeted, small-business advertising will move online by 2009. But Yellow Pages companies have two things Web companies like: Internet-like margins of 40% or more and armies of local sales reps — which portals don’t have — to sell advertising to small companies that lack tech savvy.

So it looks like the market size of the two is similar at this point in time, with Yellow Pages having a slight edge. Will the presence of sales reps be enough to transform Yellow Pages into a gateway to online advertising?

Performancing for Firefox is a Firefox extension which builds a blogging client right into your web browser. Version 1.1 was just released, which fixed some bugs with the MetaWeblog API support so now the extension can post to BlogHarbor weblogs. The software is described by the company:

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browser and lets you post to your blog easiy. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as well as post to your blog.

I’m posting this using the Performancing for Firefox extension… Works well, though I’d love to see them replace their rich text editor with the far superior Xinha (check out an example of the Xinha web-based HTML editor here).

Technorati Tags: Performancing, BlogHarbor, Firefox, Xinha

Guy Kawasaki is blogging. Sweet! I’ve been a fan of Guy for a long time, and his writings are both inspirational and informative.

Today, Guy writes about the The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists. Lie #3:

 “Show us some traction, and we’ll invest.” In other words, “no.” This lie translates to “I don’t believe your story, but if you can prove it by achieving significant revenue, then you might convince me. However, I don’t want to tell you ‘no’ because I might be wrong and by golly you may sign up a Fortune 500 customer and then I’d look like a total orifice.”

 Guy lied though, there are only 9 lies in his list. His PowerBook ran out of juice before he could finish.

BlogHarbor only scores a 3 on the Web 2.0 validator. This blog fares slightly better with 6 points. Need to add some more references to RDF and the Semantic Web…

Thanks, Zoli.

Mark Cuban throws out so many multimillion dollar business ideas on his blog that the VCs must be printing out his blog regularly and passing it around as if it were a prospectus:

The entire content industry is missing a unique opportunity to eliminate most content piracy and more importantly, to generate a whole lot more revenue by offering revenue sharing. If the NYTimes, to use them an example, were to offer 50 pct of the revenue generated from traffic delivered by affiliated websites, not a single website with half a clue would steal your content. Instead, every blogger, splogger and small content creator would look to find ways to link to your content and drive you traffic. Companies like LinkShare offer revenue sharing programs for product sales, why not offer the same for advertising sales?

OK, why not offer the same model for advertising sales on content? If linking to Mark’s post could line my pockets, or at least fill them up with a little loose change, wouldn’t that be a cool thing?

Surely Adsense has this up their sleeves already… Right?

As you may or may not be aware, Typepad has been experiencing some troubles as of late.

Since I run BlogHarbor, a hosted weblogging service, and our service is in roughly the same space as Typepad, I thought I’d take a few moments to run down my reaction, as one excellent customer of our BlogHarbor service asked me privately – jokingly – if I would want to gloat over the troubles they are having…

I would not want to gloat over the troubles, not merely because we’ve had our own performance issues in the past, and I certainly know how difficult it can be to solve them quickly and provide timely information to our customers during such times.

In fact, we’re currently in a development cycle aimed at increasing the performance, scalability, and reliability of our service for this very reason: individuals and businesses depend on their sites. These are not vanity weblogs; they are run by people who are serious and passionate about their weblogs, regardless of whether they are for personal or business use.

But I would not want to gloat mainly for the reason that I think some bloggers are drawing the wrong conclusions from this situation.

Some Typepad users are asking if Typepad is the wrong tool for business bloggers. I think these folks are asking the wrong question.

First, the alternative that some people here are proposing is that business bloggers should switch to WordPress… And they do in fact mean WordPress the “find a hosting company to host it and then download it and install it and make sure you maintain it” WordPress, not the hosted version.

That really doesn’t make sense at all.

I’ve been a web developer for over a decade and doing all the downloading and installing and debugging and maintaining would certainly be within the realm of my expertise.

But how about the typical small or medium sized business that simply wants a reliable blogsite: the do it yourself WordPress may be free as in speech, but not free as in beer. It will still cost you money to host your blog.

It will now cost someone some time – and that someone will likely be billing for their time – to do the downloading and installing. When a vulnerability is discovered or a bug found and that Word Press install needs an upgrade, someone is going to have to do that maintenance.

Don’t forget most Word Press installs will be on a shared hosting server. Any of the other users of that shared server start hogging CPU time and the performance of your site will suffer. Are you sure you would want to take that risk? Isn’t that why you claimed leaving a hosted blogging service was necessary for your business?

On a hosted platform like ours which is built to handle thousands of simultaneous sessions for hundreds of thousands (or more!) of blogs, your blog will not be affected by someone else’s sudden popularity.

If another user of your shared server affecting your site’s performance or availability is not something you want to risk, then you should probably get yourself a dedicated server, right? ServerBeach, EV1 Servers, Rackspace are all great companies which can lease you a dedicated server. Expect to pay $150/month for a small server or $300 to $400 a month and up for something with lots of RAM and a redundant RAID drive array. I mean, it is your business, right? You’re not going to skimp here. That RAID controller is a necessity in the event of a drive failure!

And if you’re not already experienced in managing a dedicated server, don’t forget to factor in the cost of having a professional Linux admin manage that server! Wait until you have to wake them up in the middle of the night because the server is getting flaky. You’re going to love that bill.

Our administrators are already monitoring your site around the clock.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many folks for whom WordPress (or any other download-and-install-it software) will be a perfect fit. It’s a great product. I met Matt, the Word Press lead developer, at Gnomedex this year and I was amazed at his commitment to doing the right thing for his users and the net in general. But just because WordPress is right for some people doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for you.

Typepad burped for a few days, but that is not a reason to dismiss hosted blogging for your business out of hand. If you’re a very large company that is already paying an IT staff to be on call 24/7 and manage hardware and software, then very little of this applies to you. Your business has already made the investment and can amortize it accordingly. Word Press or Movable Type may be right for you.

But chances are a good managed hosting provider is going to be able to give your blog far more attention and work harder to keep it online and performing well than you personally would be able to, and for orders of magnitude less money per month.

And if your provider can’t do that, then look around for another managed hosting provider who can… Our BlogHarbor service can import your Typepad content. 😉

Technorati Tags: BlogHarbor, Typepad

“Multitentacled giant jellyfish of up to 200 kilograms and with diameters of up to 2 meters” are invading Japan. Seriously.

Coming out of my blog hibernation to link to this article from the Asbury Park Press, explaining how students at Pope John XIII Regional High School in Sparta, NJ were told to remove their “Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs” or their they would face suspension.

An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks that “the real motivation for school officials was to suppress negative comments about the school posted by students.”

What do you think? Do schools have a right to ban students from blogging?

(Saw this link via Blogging Baby. Yes. What can I say, I want to be a good dad.)

I’ve been asked a few times now by journalists about the NOFOLLOW attribute and whether it has had any effect on blog spam… For the record, here’s my opinion…

There seems to be a general misconception about the NOFOLLOW attribute, that implementing it would somehow reduce comment or trackback spam.

The sole purpose of the NOFOLLOW attribute is to let search engines know not to follow and index a given link. It lets the search engine know that the link is not trustworthy, so don’t give it any extra “PageRank” as a result of being here. So a link tagged with NOFOLLOW on the comment section of a blog with a high ranking at Google does not bestow any extra status to the target of that link. The theory was that if spammers or abuser knew that the comment would not help them gain ranking at google, they would simply stop spamming…

Google had a problem – it’s search engine results were being thrown off by the commenting system on blogs. Comments were being spammed, and this was throwing off their ranking system. So they got the bloggers to fix it by effectively deleting those links from the page (at least as far as the search engine sees it) through the use of NOFOLLOW…

NOFOLLOW will not significantly reduce comment or trackback spam.

Some of the “a list” bloggers talk about NOFOLLOW being of benefit to them since they can now link to sites without necessarily helping them increase their ranking in Google, but the typical blogger won’t be affected by this at all. The average blogger doesn’t really care about giving his so-called “Googlejuice” to an undeserving linker, he doesn’t have much to begin with.

That typical blogger just wants to know if using NOFOLLOW will reduce the amount of spam heaped on his blog. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Won’t help at all…

Woah. I’ve been trying to be more of a thinkblogger than a linkblogger but saw this post where Rubel throws down the gauntlet at Microsoft.

Dear Microsoft, I am Dumping You:

Today, the Web is where the action is. It’s the new OS. This means I can safely return to my old flame – the Mac – and yet still experience most, if not all of the hot new applications that are being built on AJAX on my new 15″ G4 PowerBook. In addition, I don’t have to put up with patches, viruses, spyware, slowdowns, bloated registries anymore. And if I need to have a one night stand with you, I always have that option. You’re on call.

This may just be a post for the ages. Steve Rubel clearly makes the statement that Web 2.0 is where it’s at, the appliance you use to get at Web 2.0 no longer matters…

This is a defining moment, my friends. Let’s have fun and don’t forget to enjoy the ride!

I attended a lively discussion on Friday night 6/24/2005 at Gnomedex on the subject of the FeedMesh. There were some questions and concerns raised at the get-together, as well as the feeling that there were other parties interested in the concept besides the developers of blog search engines and aggregators who might wish to know a little bit more about this project, so I decided to write a little piece about what I know about FeedMesh with the hope that anyone who can provide additional information or clarification will do so by commenting or trackbacking. I hope that this article provides a little background for both developers and content creators and I am very much looking forward to hearing from anyone who can clarify any of the points in this article. Perhaps some of the FeedMesh members who are more active with the technical details will post on their blogs and send a trackback if they can provide further details about the workings of the FeedMesh.

To be clear, I am not sure if you would say that I am a member (though I did get a nice t-shirt – thanks Bob!) or our company is a member of FeedMesh; though we do contribute pings by the nature of being a blogging service and also consume them for business processes. Better to describe us as supporters of the idea and volunteers to help facilitate its success as we feel that the idea behind FeedMesh has the potential to be of great benefit to the entire blogging community.

Introduction

Bloggers inform the various blog search and aggregation services that their blog has been updated by sending these services a ping, a simple form of notification that says, essentially and quite simply, Hey! I just updated my blog. Check it out! Once a service has received a ping, it can access the blog and index any updated content it discovers.

The process of pinging alleviates the need for blog search engines to regularly visit blogs to discover changes; Pings allow the blogger to notify the search engines when changes have occurred. This helps search engines be more efficient, as they can distribute their resources to index blogs in a more timely fashion.

It didn’t always work this way. Back in the beginning of blogging history, Dave Winer’s Weblogs.Com began compiling a publicly accessible list of updated weblogs. He allowed bloggers to register their weblog, and the Weblogs.Com server would periodically check the blogs which had registered for updates to their RSS feeds.

As the number of blogs became too numerous for this approach to continue, a new design was needed. Dave defined the concept of a ping in September 2001 and on October 23, 2001 redesigned Weblogs.Com to use pings in order to learn which weblogs had been updated. So it was now the blog/blogger’s responsibility to send notification via pings that it had been updated rather than wait for a service like Weblogs.Com to visit them for updates.

Changes.xml

In addition to receiving ping notifications that blogs had been updated and publishing them on the Weblogs.Com site, Dave Winer also created an XML specification and published a list of the changes he had received in XML format; that file is still being published to this day at http://www.weblogs.com/changes.xml. The file is updated at regular intervals and lists recently updated weblogs and the time that their ping was received

Another service called blo.gs was created by Jim Winstead in 2002 as a directory of recently updated weblogs. This service was also pingable, and thousands of blogs began notifying this service when they updated. Blo.gs also began publishing a changes.xml file listing blogs which had been updated.

Many services began using the data in these changes.xml files to determine which weblogs to add to their search indexes and aggregation services, and other services such as Blogrolling.com also started publishing changes.xml files. The distribution of update notifications via changes.xml files provided the initial data for companies like Feedster and Technorati to create their services.

The Cloud interface

Blo.gs later created an alternative to the changes.xml format which allowed them to pass along real-time notifications of the pings they had received. Blo.gs called this their cloud interface and published some sample code for receiving that data in November 2004. At the same time, they announced that they would no longer publish updates via their changes.xml file; updates would only be sent through the cloud interface in 2005.

PubSub also began deploying the cloud interface in December 2004 and released open source software for both reception from and transmission into the cloud interface. In January 2005 they began working with blo.gs to share information about blog updates.

PubSub currently maintains a publically accessible streaming list of notifications via the cloud interface. Blo.gs’ cloud interface was publically accessible until June 14, 2005 when it was officially announced that the service was purchased by Yahoo; access to their cloud interface now requires submission of a form requesting the ability to access this stream.

Enter Feedmesh

Unfortunately, as more services are created which can benefit by ping notification, and since bloggers also welcome these new services for the benefits they provide, it becomes increasingly unrealistic to expect that individual blogs will ping tens or hundreds of services as they create new content. What is needed is a way for new and existing services to share with each other the update notifications they receive.

The concept of the Feedmesh apparently originated at an event called Foo Camp in September 2004. Sam Ruby was a participant, and he called the FeedMesh a “peering network” for decentralized web(site|log) update notifications and content distribution. The initial description for such a service posted by Sam called for a single URI for people to ping (feedmesh.org?) which would be backed by the members of the “peering network” via round robin DNS.

Current discussions seem to center around the concept of peering arrangements, where services who become FeedMesh members share the pings they receive with other members. This would allow bloggers to ping one service, and be assured that their ping would be passed on to all the FeedMesh members.

Ping-o-matic debuted on April 20, 2004 as a way to solve these same problems that the FeedMesh tries to solve, but to solve them from the users perspective rather than the aggregator’s. Ping-o-matic could be described as a “repinger”, as they will receive a ping notification from an end user and use that notification to ping dozens of other services on that user’s behalf.

So what is the FeedMesh?

I don’t believe that question has been fully answered yet. That seems to be what is being determined right now on the FeedMesh discussion list.

It may be safe to say however, that services which publish data via changes.xml or more likely the cloud interface going forward exhibit the characteristics of FeedMesh services. Whenever blog search or aggregator services share updates, it seems to me that is a FeedMesh…

• Is Ping-o-matic a member of FeedMesh? I won’t speak for them, but it does appear they are sharing update notifications, and are in fact dedicated to doing so.
• Is Weblogs.com a FeedMesh member? I doubt that Dave Winer would say that it is, but it does receive update notifications and pass them along for any service or individual who wants them… It walks like a duck…
• Is PubSub a FeedMesh member? I would have to say that by words and actions they are; they receive pings and make them available to anyone who wants them.

I choose these services only as an example, not to imply anything at all about who might or might not in fact be a FeedMesh member.

It appears that the goal of FeedMesh is to provide a more efficient method for users and developers to distribute ping notifications. Ping-o-matic on the user side and the cloud interface on the developer side look to be the first steps at creating a more efficient ping process.

Perhaps the next steps will be to more concretely define what it means for developers to participate in the FeedMesh, and subsequently to make users aware of the benefits of pinging FeedMesh member services.

Where to learn more about the FeedMesh?

The group discusses the future of FeedMesh via a Yahoo discussion group, and one member has created a Wiki.

Some posts arising from the FeedMesh meeting at Gnomedex on 6/24/2005 include:

• Gnomedex – FeedMesh by Dave Hodson
• FeedMesh 101 by Jason McCabe Calacanis
• FeedMesh Initiative Aims to Streamline RSS Updating by Podcasting News

Kathy Gill from the Communications Department at the University of Washington presented on Blogs in the Classroom at Gnomedex. Her slides are very useful for educators.