Laughing Meme » blogs

3rd Party Comment Systems

Kellan — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:51:30 +0000

Talk about from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.

Fred’s got a post up talking about the “mainstreaming” of 3rd party comment system. His graph compares their portfolio company disqus, with a bunch of companies I’ve never heard of.

Made me wonder what HaloScan was up to. Remember HaloScan? From back before Grey Matter or Blogger had comments? It popped up in that nasty little window, and generally sucked. And we all received early painful lessons in outsourcing control of pieces of your infrastructure. And then Moveable Type shipped with decent integrated comments (and just about the slickest looking admin interface anyone had ever seen anywhere on the Web) Apparently they’ve been acquired by this (js-kit)[http://js-kit.com] company. And their traffic is still growing!?!?!

Here’s a graph looking at disqus, HaloScan and js-kit:

With those numbers I’m not sure we’re talking mainstream here, though its interesting to see WordPress picking up intense-debate. I like WordPress’s corporate culture and they seem well suited for not stifling innovation in acquisitions.

But really all I wanted to say is whether or not this stuff is interesting to mainstream, as a hacker a 3rd party comment system is golden. Because we’ve all rolled our own blogging systems, and you either never built the comments, turned them off, gave up and went back to an off the shelf system, or are running some sadomasochistic social experiment. The great thing about decent 3rd party comment systems is you can go back to your bash/Perl/XSLT/file tree based system, and still have comments. (Leonard was the first alpha geek I noticed doing this)

And Disqus even has to start of a decent API. More focused at “forum owner”, individual commenters could use some love, and of course the whole thing could benefit from a standardized delegated auth model, but those are nits.

(btw. where are the Wikipedia articles on that early blogging era tech, our legacy is being lost! OMG!)

Google Analytics, Solving Someone Elses Problem

Kellan — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 09:08:00 +0000

Still frustrated and disappointed that MeasureMap has gone away, even if it never went as far as I wanted it to go.

Finally got around to trying out Google Analytics, maybe I’m doing it wrong, but I’m bored by it. Doesn’t answer the questions I’m interested in, though it did flag the interesting statistic that 94% of my visitors are “first time visitors”, which I imagine could also be dubbed the “I’ve got full content feeds” usage profile.

I guess I try Mint next, though the demos don’t look like a lot more then a (very) pretty face on my old analog install, and $30 seems a bit much to pay for that. And really I think stats for blogs need a domain specific package. But there seems to be an active plugin community around Mint which is promising.

Sigh.

update: Checked back today, it’s interesting to note that with a few more days of data IE’s percentage has already fallen from 42% to 37.6%. Maybe it wil fall to a 1/3? I, for one, have never believed that 95% market share number folks like to throw around.

SF Techsession, Vast, April 1, and Verticals

Kellan — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 00:01:00 +0000

SF Techsession 2: Communities and Interaction was a vast improvement over the previous one. Better presenters, better products, better questions, better venue, better food, better open bar.

I confess that I was mildly disturbed that I was able to make it two instances of a monthly even in SF given that I love 3000 miles away, but I can’t imagine there is a third topic as close to my heart as community or calendaring.

Vast on April 1st

Apropos, one of the participant, Vast, the “vertical search platform” has the only funny April Fool’s gag I’ve seen. (I’m not a fan of the holiday) They announced their Credit Cards vertical search today, and its a nicely done implementation. (Vast’s trademark low budget web design adds credibility to the whole gag)

Vast is making noise by “giving it all away”, they’re catchy “Steal this Site” link at the bottom of each page captures the imagination. Except they aren’t giving me the one thing that would be most valuable for both of us. I want to build vertical of data I care about, and Vast wants to learn about new segments, talk about an architecture of participation waiting to happen.

My take away was an idea with the same sense of inevitability that Epinions had, and I worried about similar deep conceptual flaws.

Home Rolled Verticals and Blogs

Speaking of which why aren’t any of the blog search engines distinguishing themselves by providing a search platform ala Amazon’s Alexa Web Information Service? While its relatively challenging to figure out how do something cool with Alexa’s raw index (hence the need for DIY interface to Vast), everybody seems to have a story about what they would do if could convincing crawl the blog/conversation space.

The Others

Skobee is a slick and simple as it seems, built by ex-PlumTree’ers (the folks who also built O’Reilly’s Connection. Also presenting Songbird, and Mozes

50 Most-linked Blogs in September 2000

Kellan — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 07:25:00 +0000

Late 2000 is when I started reading blogs. Then I read 17 blogs from the list, currently I read 4. Of those gone defunct, I miss Tomalak the most.

http://beebo.org/metalog/

Favorite NYC Blogs/Bloggers?

Kellan — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 18:53:00 +0000

I make a point of subscribing to a smattering of regional blogs wherever I might be living. Got any New York favorites?

Yahoo and del.icio.us: A bit of speculation

Kellan — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 03:45:00 +0000

So the Yahoo acquisition of del.icio.us hit every tech blog on the planet this weekend, and hardly needs more rehashing. But a couple of ideas I haven’t seen elsewhere from one of my mailing lists.

It was pointed out that

[Yahoo] recently hired all the IBM people that worked at the WebFountain project.

And that the del.icio.us database of tagged website would be an awfully juicy source of data to start analyzing. Yahoo is the obvious player to build post-search interfaces, browsable and discoverable like Yahoo of old, but this time built to Web-scale.

Meanwhile is anyone watching the Flock’s future? What with its APIs to Yahoo’s Flickr, Yahoo’s del.icio.us, and integrated editor for all those new MT blogs. Just a thought.

Brand and Culture: Jasmine got a blog!

Kellan — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 08:02:00 +0000

So much happened in the last 3 weeks while you’ve been deprived of my piercing insights, its hard to know where to begin catching up.

To me the most exciting news is that Jasmine now has a blog, brandxculture (pronounced ‘brand and culture’). Truth be told she has had it for a while, but only recently officially launched it.

My favorite posts so far are