Licensing is available reBlogger

reBlogger is a poduct that is destined to become a standard component of every “backoffice”.

Every company with bloggers must have a way of tracking those bloggers and managing their output. Many other companies will also use reBlogger to track industry news and still more companies will create internal R&D depatments to slice and dice the valuable comments made within their industries. For these reasons and more reBlogger is a product whose time has come.

Sell us into your vertical market

We’re looking for sales companies who are interested in licensing our engine from us. Because our product has such broad appeal, we need partners in all vertical markets:

• government
• military
• motor
• sports
• science
• industry
• etc.

If you’re a consulting company or a software vendor, our reBlogger software might make a good fit for your product offering.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

It’s hard to be the leader because quite often the second mover has a clear goal to replicate and improve upon. The first mover has no road map to follow, only innovaion, vision, gut feel, customer feedback and instinct.

We’re already aware that we are being cloned by another company (right down to the design of our web pages) thanks to a user from that company spilling the beans. Someone once said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess this is flattery then?

The truth is when they see reBlogger 4.0 they will perhaps give up and go find another less innovative product to copy. If not, the innovations in reBlogger 5.0 will put an end to their aspirations once and for all. 5.0 will introduce features that will cause a storm on the internet, they are truly world-first never-been-seen-before features.

So why license our software?

We have two major advantages over any competitor:

1. IP laws protect us. This means that - as the first mover - we can slow them down and besides that, what they are doing (cloning) is illegal. At the very least they will owe us a % of their revenues if they make money.
2. Copying is not innovative, leadership is innovative. We have a big vision of where this is all going and although I have shared some of the future vision on this blog, I have not shared the truly ground breaking stuff.

If your company sells into major vertical markets and you have existng company sals relationships - then please contact me about purchasing a license to sell reBlogger into your industry. Contact me: markwilson at topxml.com

Responding to expresso’s forum comments

Hi expresso

Thanks for your comments in our forum.

We really appreciate your comments, it’s wonderful for us to have such excellent and raw feedback. Keep it coming! We’re beginning to pick up contacts in very large organizations (who have figured out the value of trackng bloggers) and we’re also being approached by a company doing due-diligence on us.

Things are happening in the reBlogger-sphere!

But you made some good points… so it’s confession time. reBlogger is obviously the first product of it’s kind and we’ve been building it for 18 months and running it on our own websites, one of which has 15k unique visitors per day: TopXML. We’e very fortunate to have users like Tony John and yourself who give us frank, honest and useful suggestions about how to improve RB.

But because reBlogger is so ground breakingly new, it’s very difficult for us to know just how people plan to use it. So we’ve had to build the bridge over the river while we’re actually walking on the bridge - does that analogy make sense?

What I’m saying is that we’re building it as fast as we can and the more feedback we get, the more we can figure out what the priority is to build next. We have improvements and features for MANY years and versions to come… we just need to figure out what people need more… improvements (like performance) or more features? I think the demand is for both. So we’ve decided to work on improvements for a time, then switch to features for a time, then back to improvements - and so on. You’ll be happy to know we’re working on improvements right now.

Of course, you’re not interested in our “problems” you just want to know when you’re going to get a more usable product.

We are about to launch a minor update which has:

• an improved or more robust install - based on your suggestions about what confuses you and what details are missing
• a simpler install which removes the need for keywords before it begins to run
• improved scalability for massive installations
• improved robustness (debugging etc.)
• improved fetching based on Tony John’s suggestions

Then in the next iteration of development, focussed on features we will be building some o the things you mentioned like calendars and gadgets. We’re also working on very easy drag and drop redesign of the look and feel, draggable reordering, search and much much more.

So I hope you’ll accept this as

• an apology for what is not working as smoothly as it could
• a request for you to continue sending us raw and honest feedback
• a promise that great and wonderful things are coming in time

It’s not possible for me to put a date on when these things will arrive because we prioritize fixing things and responding to customer problems as higher than building new features. But reBlogger is stabilizing very well - after all it’s almost 18 months old - and so we can begin to build new features more and more now. The next version (RB 4.0) will be simply stunning, a work of beauty.

The irony is that we don’t want too many customers right now because we need to keep coding rather than doing too much support. But sales would bring revenue and that would help us grow. But growing takes time. I think this is a problem all self-funded startups face, the chicken or the egg.

I hope this post has encouraged you to purchase RB as it is and stick with us as we grow.

Thanks,
Mark Wilson.

Bubble 2.0 begins to deflate - 9 lessons

Do you remember the way we used to be? Our lives untainted by memories. And we laughed and we cried and we…. yeah yeah yeah. You know the song.

Well it had to happen. Bubble 2.0 is starting to deflate. Just as the new economy resulted in effed company which tracked the fall from dizzy heights and good companies with good people became road kill… in the same way Bubble 2.0 has deadpool and the body count is rising.

Well, the inevitable is starting to happen - a few new web startups are starting to close up shop as they find that building an application is a lot easier than getting users to try it out, and keep coming back. - Fold.com…Folds

Never a truer words has been spoken. Well, ok. Very seldom has… well yes… many truer words have been spoken. But still. This is a good word.

In our company we have been trying to focus on certain strategies and to avoid certain things for some time now. The acid test for me was not the hype, not the investment, not the long tail, not the ideas, not the talent, not the committment nor the features or buzz or excitement… it was the income.

You can’t take home and eat excitement. The proof of the pudding is still in the eating. Do people want to eat what you are offering… more specifically, will they pay for it? If someone doesn’t pay for it, you have NO business model.

Here are some really good posts about a recent startdown called Kiko:

• Kiko in the deadpool
• Actual lessons from Kiko 1
• Actual lessons from Kiko 2
  
• Kiko Flatlines

As Richard White, member of the Kiko team, wrote:

I agree with the 37signals argument that having paying customers forces you to hone in on what that market wants, and that probably would have done us a lot of good - Actual lessons from Kiko 2

As Justin Kan blogged about Kiko

Stay Focused. … snip… If you’re a creative person, it’s very easy to get side-tracked on side ideas when you really should be working on your main one. This is bad. Bad, bad, bad. We did this a lot with Kiko, and it caused many delays in getting the product out the door.

Cute hacks can cost you time. Take the time to do things right from the beginning. Seriously.
Build incrementally. We tried to build the ultimate AJAX calendar all at once. It took a long time. We could have done it piece by piece. Nuff said. - Actual lessons from Kiko 1

These simple pieces of advice can absolutely mean the difference between earning an income and just getting by and never actually being able to make a difference in the world. The cute hacks one still drives me absolutely nuts as I struggle with moving us forward while having to undo the junk legacy code that was written in the past.
Some other lessons worth considering

Too many features killed the cat - It didn’t look it at first, but if you played around with Kiko 1.0 for 15 minutes you found out that there was a *lot* of functionality under the hood. Problem was that we felt we needed to bring *all* of that functionality over to Kiko 2.0. I mean you can’t cut features between versions, right? Wrong. We should have cut features, probably about 40% of them and launched.

You must have a plan for escaping the Technosphere - To a degree, it didn’t matter how many posts we got on TechCrunch, LifeHacker or Scoble; we would still be stuck in the same Technosphere duking it out with Google, 30Boxes and everyone else. You can make a nice living just pimping your wares in the technosphere (which is what I’m attempting with SlimTimer) but if you ever want to gain any real traction as an online calendar service you have to target the cubicle dwellers and their Outlook calendars that only exist outside the sphere. Techie users are fickle, transient and demanding. You can spend all of your time implementing ATOM feeds and hCalendar export and never be the better for it. We didn’t have a plan for how to go mainstream, which, in hindsight, was a prerequisite for our success.

I would add one more thing: know when to stop. If you’ve been pouring money into something and it’s just not happening, not finishing, not there… its always “just” this or “only” that and if the issues keep shifting (even if it’s FOR A GOOD REASON) then you might need to swallow the loss of your investment and regain control of the direction of the company. We recently did this too.

So in summary:

1. Buidling the product /= gaining revenue from it.
2. Be cashflow positive. Earn more than you spend. Live within your means.
3. Work on the main idea, not on all the “great” (but peripheral) ideas
4. Do not hack in things badly, they will cost dearly you later
5. Build and release incrementally (3.1, 3.2, 3.3… 4.0)
6. Launch with the features that are complete, don’t forever delay the launch for “still to come” features
7. Business is where the money is, not the technosphere - have a plan to reach the cubicle dwellers in companies
8. Know when to stop going down a wrong path. Stop wasting money and accept the loss.
9. Find a way to charge for your product because this produces realism. If no one buys it… then no one is buying it, there is no future… you can then change products, diversify, cutback and try again. If they are buying, then keep on keeping on.

These are the strategies to keep out of the deadpool.

Kilo is currently for sale on eBay. 40,000 monthly visitors… being sold for $50k.

The reBlogger tech stack

reBlogger has been under development for over 18 months now. There is nothing else like it out there and we’re confident that it’s maturing into a very useful corporate product.

The growth so far

There have been many hurdles along the way, for example having to write very robust code to handle the non-conforming RSS feeds out there and the different versions.

Once we had built this robust engine, we moved “up the stack” to build our publishing engine, which publishes in a proven search engine optimized format.

Once we had that, we needed an administration system that only needed the very minimal attention (fire once and forget). Then we built an installer that works through ftp - making it the easiest possible.

After that it was finally time to look at the social services and the user-interface components - which is where we are busy now.

Our tech stack

Our tech stack looks a bit like this:

Still to come are the following “higher up” features in the “social” layer:

• Layout drag and drop gadgets (coming in the next version: 4.0!)
• A smarter way to find the web feeds you’re looking for
• More powerful reports showing relative activity of keywords
• World-first social features
• More targetted product differentiation with adapted functionality to suit your exact needs

Hosted application and partnership

We are keen to establish a hosted application, but to do that we’re looking for a partner who can provide the servers etc. If you’re interested please contact me markwilson at topxml.com

Steps to testing out a corporate reBlogger

5 simple steps to trying out your own reBlogger:

1. Download the reBlogger 30 day trial zip. In the zip is a readme.txt that explains how to install it to your website via ftp
2. Add up to 5 web feeds of any type for free
3. Add your search terms to look for; and the keyword/headings to publish the content under
4. Run “Get blog posts!” to collect the web feeds and filter them
5. View the results

reBlogger is especially useful for the following situations:

1. Finding banned words or pre-release information in corporate blogs
2. Collecting the industry news on a daily basis
3. Collecting competitor’s blog posts for research
4. Raising alerts for keyword activity in the general blogger population

Enjoy!

Launch of new website and new pricing

Yesterday we launched the new look and feel of our reBlogger website and our new pricing structure.

5 new versions

We also have 5 versions of reBlogger: one to meet every need.

We are particularly excited about the introduction of the Corporate and the Research versions!

Personal Use

This is the free edition for small scale personal use.

Hobby Website

Do you run a small hobby website where you want to collect the news feeds from around the web and publish them to your Windows website? This is the version for you.

Small business

If your business has a small number of blogs to publish to your website, this version of reBlogger is ideal for you.

Corporate Blog Manager

For a company that has hundreds of bloggers, this version of reBlogger will track the blog posts, filter them and notify the managers when a blog post has swearing in it or discusses pre-release information. This version of reBlogger manages the content for the manager, so you don’t have to.

Market Research

This version is typically used to track competitors employee blogs and to research trends and explore market positioning. The so called “social” features of reBlogger enable an internal corporate discussion to slice and dice the blog posts of the competing employees.

Blogging is not just a new wave, we think of it more as a tidal wave which will redesign corporate communications. We’re riding the leading edge of that wave.

We have recently decided on new innovations (like a free Ajax/Atlas Lab) and an improved direction for the company, so be prepared to see still more change and innovations from us.

Check out out reBlogger website and let me know what you think.

reBlogger 4.0 is on it’s way!

We’ve launched the reBlogger.com website and development continues on the reBlogger 4.0 version (although we shipped 3.31 fix and we will shortly ship 3.4 as a small feature enhancement).

Every previous major (RB 1.x, 2.x, 3.x) version has been a quantum leap forward. RB 4.0 is no exception. Our per-version feature enhancement list can be found here.

The goals for RB 4 are:

• Simplify the customization of reBlogger for administrators
• Improve search/filter engine
• Improve and ease certain administrative tasks
• Add social context to reBlogger

Look and feel

The look and feel of reBlogger 4.0 is totally revamped and is entirely configurable through the new gadgets feature! Put ANY gadget ANYWHERE on the page and design it in a visual editor.

This is what reBlogger could look like on your website. Click on the thumbnails to view the larger images.

Now it’s totally customizable. You do not need any knowledge of Atlas/Ajax or HTML. You simply drag and drop the gadgets right there… in the page!

Coding Microsoft Atlas blog

Meanwhile our Microsoft Altas coding blog is picking up serious steam as we explain how to use Microsoft Atlas - something that appears to be a mystery to almost everyone.

• Using Atlas:AutoCompleteExtender to simplfy browsing large lists
• Use UpdatePanel controls to quickly ajaxify your existing Asp.NET code
• Darken the page and set focus on the user input
• Getting a DataTable from server and working with it in Javascript (VB.NET)

Coding reBlogger blog

And we’re also putting effort into describing the next version of reBlogger on our coding reBlogger blog.

• Adding yet more templates…
• reBlogger 4 - two additional themes
• reBlogger 4 - introducing themes
• reBlogger 4 - goals

So although this reBlogger blog has been quiet for a while, we haven’t been. We’re beavering away at making a better reBlogger.

Partnership

If there is a company reading this who is interested in partnering with us to create a free online social version, I’d like to talk to you. We don’t have the $ to buy the hardware to set the service up, but we certainly can provide the code to do it.

Contact us if you’re interested in sharing the potential advertising revenue of such an adventure. (markwilson at topxml dot com)

The Spot 4 Oracle

Sick of collecting hundreds of web feeds to cover all the Oracle blogs? Now get all your Oracle news and blog posts in one place: theSpot4Oracle.

It's built with reBlogger. 

What will you do with your reBlogger?

reBlogger 4.0

Ivan has posted about the status of reBlogger 4.0

DRM in RSS 2, OPML 2 and ATOM 1

DRM, Digital Rights Management

DRM handles the description, layering, analysis, valuation, trading, monitoring and enforcement of the usage restrictions that accompany a specific instance of a digital work.

Any blog post is a "digital work" and as a creator of aggregation software, the rights of the author is important to me. But I'll go beyond that and say that I want authors to earn from their work and I want our software to handle that for them. I'll go even further beyond that and say that our software can encourage and enforce correct usage restrictions too.

To what extent do the existing web feed specs make provision for DRM? Or… to put it another way, if our software was to implement DRM on behalf of the authors, which spec has the features we need and which ones don't?

I've posted about the need for extensions to RSS in order to safeguard the content creators rights. As a creator of an aggregation product, I think it's very a important topic. Here are some of my posts that contain practical suggestions:

• Blog content ownership and control February 8, 2006
• Why Google is extending RSS April 19, 2006
• Blog revenue sharing - paying the content creator May 2, 2006

Although these posts are not in the same focus area (rights protection) as my own posts, I've found quite a few comments about the limitations of RSS and the inability to influence the "owners" of the spec who will take charge in dealing with the changes that are needed. Here are some of the posts I have found:

• The feed validator is dead to me April 15th, 2006
• RSS feeds: valid, useful or accurate April 16, 2006
• Conventional RSS April 21, 2006

Clearly we need some changes, otherwise companies (Microsoft?) and people will just begin to implement their own changes as they see fit, on behalf of their customers. Another wild west scenario.

OPML

Dave might be onto some of the things I am looking for:

I'm leading a lunch discussion today about Identity in RSS and OPML, particularly OPML 2.0, which has a element for the author's identity. It's specified in 2.0 as a URL, and should plug into the work being done in this community.

The OPML 2.0 spec has some really useful information in the <HEAD> area.

<dateCreated> is a date-time, indicating when the document was created.
<dateModified> is a date-time, indicating when the document was last modified.
<ownerName> is a string, the owner of the document.
<ownerEmail> is a string, the email address of the owner of the document.
<ownerId> is the http address of a web page that contains an HTML a form that allows a human reader to communicate with the author of the document via email or other means.

Dave is clearly interested in taking the long view by including this element:

<docs> is the http address of documentation for the format used in the OPML file. It's probably a pointer to this page for people who might stumble across the file on a web server 25 years from now and wonder what it is.

But OPML is not designed to contain content, but rather to link to content - and perhaps to link to the content which is linked to by that content (recursively). It's very good and useful at that. OPML is not what I'm looking for.

RSS

The RSS 2.0 spec contains only 1 author related element and it's an email address:

An item's author element provides the e-mail address of the person who wrote the item (optional).

I don't think it's sufficient because email addresses change over time. So RSS would not provide enough information for the protection of the rights of the author.

ATOM

The W3C Atom format spec (not Atom 0.3) has far more useful information than either RSS or OPML in terms of tracking the lifetime of the "item" (content) and in always being able to find the original author. Atom even hasa "rights" element. No wonder entire sites are converting to ATOM.

The "atom:author" element is a Person construct that indicates the author of the entry or feed.

The "atom:contributor" element is a Person construct that indicates a person or other entity who contributed to the entry or feed.

The "atom:id" element conveys a permanent, universally unique identifier for an entry or feed.

The "atom:published" element is a Date construct indicating an instant in time associated with an event early in the life cycle of the entry.

The "atom:updated" element is a Date construct indicating the most recent instant in time when an entry or feed was modified in a way the publisher considers significant. Therefore, not all modifications necessarily result in a changed atom:updated value.

The "atom:rights" element is a Text construct that conveys information about rights held in and over an entry or feed.

I really like the foresight of this next element!

If an atom:entry element does not contain an atom:rights element, then the atom:rights element of the containing atom:feed element, if present, is considered to apply to the entry.

Atom does a far better job of giving the elements that can be used to protect the authors of the content. In the two specs above the main author element which is intended to contain an email. But email addresses change over time - and in this way an author could lose touch with the ways in which their content is being used.

Atom uses this word "person" throughout ther spec. What is a "person" in Atom?

A Person construct is an element that describes a person, corporation, or similar entity (hereafter, 'person'). This specification assigns no significance to the order of appearance of the child elements in a Person construct. Person constructs allow extension Metadata elements.

The "atom:name" element's content conveys a human-readable name for the person. The content of atom:name is Language-Sensitive.

The "atom:uri" element's content conveys an IRI associated with the person. Person constructs MAY contain an atom:uri element, but MUST NOT contain more than one.

The "atom:email" element's content conveys an e-mail address associated with the person. Person constructs MAY contain an atom:email element, but MUST NOT contain more than one.

Overall I can imagine Atom providing us with enough elements to be able to implement some form of protection for the rights of the initial author.

What is the issue here?

If we don't take action now, we will have a situation where people earn off content in the same way as people earn from paintings. If I paint a wonder piece of art, I sell it - and that's the end of my revenue. The artwork can be resold 20 times and increase in value 100 times… but I make nothing. Speculators make everything, I get nothing.

Without protecting the author and providing them with income, we really cannot expect to see the emergence of professional authors who create great content over the long term.

Specs

Here are links to the specs:

• RSS 2.0 spec
• W3C Atom format spec
• Atom 0.3 format spec
• OPML 2.0 spec

This is an important issue to me because we're building the reBlogger website based aggregator and I want to honor the digital rights of the author… but I can't programmatically determine what their rights are!

reBlogger past, present and future

Yesterday I completed our first interview about reBlogger with Robin Good. It will be published next week on his excellent site.

I had great fun doing it - a lot more fun than I expected. I've realized that I (and our team) are very passionate about what we're doing.

In essence I sketched out the existing reBlogger 3.x and the forthcoming Next Gen version and the corporate version after that. I'll share the extremely short version here. (I look forward to reading Robin's take on our discussion)

Background to reBlogger: We began to build reBlogger almost 2 years ago for our own internal needs on TopXML. It was about a year ago that we made some copies of reBlogger available to other websites that we have close relationships with. By the end of last year reBlogger was in it's 3rd version and we had moved it to .NET because of the massive increase in development productivity over Classic ASP. As I travelled in Europe at the end of last year I was in beautiful Venice (Italy) and I read Robin's website (also in Italy). Robin wrote passionately about newsmastering. Amongst other things he wrote:

We need something of an entirely new order of magnitude to manage all of this information.

Search engines, open directories, and millions of bloggers are not enough.

We need a multi-layered, self-organizing approach that allows the load to be highly distributed and the focus and depth to be guaranteed by the combined result of many highly focused individual efforts.

As I travelled around Venice along the grand canal (and went to a wonderful masked opera), I began to see a much larger picture of what our existing reBlogger can be used for. I saw that we could provide the answer that Robin had been looking for.

I bought newsmasters.com for a small fortune and ever since we've been gradually building reBlogger into something that will help people and companies manage the torrent of data that is flowing past them - in Octber 2005 it was called a river of news but these days it's a tidal wave of news.

reBlogger 3.x is predominantly designed for SEO companies and websites that want to track blog content in tightly grouped themes. This product is described in this post covering the "reBlogger engine" and you can view many existing websites that are built our of reBlogger 3.x One of the great things is that right out of the box reBlogger gives you excellent ranking in search engines because of it's focus on creating themes. In this way reBlogger 3.x is similar to a content manager (CM).

reBlogger Next Gen is designed for building meme or web 2.0 websites. It's an engine with a far higher level of functionality than reBlogger 3.x. It's basically DIGG-in-a-box. With the mushrooming number of 2.0 sites out there (all containing voting and Ajax coolness) there is a big need for standardization and componentization. Atlas brings that at a technology level, but we're making DIGG sites (meme, web 2.0) into a commodity that anyone can buy. By using our reBlogger Next Gen you can easily have a DIGG site working on your website. It's got all the functionality of reBlogger 3.x plus all the existing Ajax goodies that most 2.0 existing sites have - and then some extra innovations that have not been seen yet on the web, for example Hover Comments.

reBlogger corporate version is designed for… corporates. When you have 1,000 bloggers in your company, you have major headache looming. How do you track the bloggers? When you can get the blog posts of your competitors employees you have a major opportunity! What can you extract from their blogs? Sales departments want to track buzz about a product, is it increasing or declining? Marketing departments may want to generate buzz about upcoming products and compare that graphically to buzz about upcoming competitor products (think XBox 360 and PS3).

We think the enormous volume of blog content is a whole new addition to the lives of people who are connected via the internet. Everyone wants to track something of interest to them. Everyone naturally has a desire to play and explore. We have the long term vision to enable it.

The reBlogger engine

I think that what we see in the next version of Windows - the RSS platform - is just one layer in a typical "feed stack" or "RSS Stack". I call it a stack because there are different things happening at higher and higher layers of abstraction above the previous layer, rather like a protocol stack where the lowest stack can be Ethernet > IP > TCP > HTTP.

Ivan mentioned that he is building the next generation reBlogger over the existing engine. In that post look for the words: "No changing original reBlogger code".

In the existing reBlogger 3.x engine, we have a stack of sorts - each layer has a greater level of functionality that depends on the previous layer:

1. Find, track and manage feeds (all versions of RSS, ATOM, RDF etc.)
2. Manage types of resources differently (podcasting, blogging, flikr images)
3. Aggregate the content intelligently (collate/merge a bunch of feeds together - like the engine in Windows RSS Platform does)
4. Mixing (combining posts into a single feed, from across different sources)
5. Filering (to remove off topic posts, adverts, Google bad neighbourhoods and profanity)
6. pre-Publishing (only publish newest items, avoid duplicates)
7. SEO-friendly publishing (create highly optimized content on your own website)
8. SEO-friendly site navigation (insert highly optimized navigation structure including URLList and Sitemaps)
9. Automation (do all of the above automatically with no administrator involvement)
10. Extensive administrator tools
11. Allow customization of the look and feel

Now in the next generation reBlogger we will be adding significantly to this engine. In fact rather than replace it, we will simply add over what is already there.

How to: roll your own reBlogger

Let's say you run a website about sports. Do you want to collect blog posts on various sporting topics? What do you do if you can't afford reBlogger ($500)?

You can roll your own reBlogger for free! Yes! You can build a subject collection on your own website or intranet in a few manual steps:

1. Find a bunch of feeds you want to track
2. Use RSS Mix or Feed Digest or Feed Blendr or Feed Shake to collate/merge a bunch of feeds together
3. Use Feed Rinse or ZapTXT to remove the rude words and exclude off topic posts
4. Use an RSS Parser (choose from list 1 or list 2) to extract posts based on keywords or topics
5. Use RSS Cache to keep a track of which items you previously posted to your website and only let you have the newest items (no duplicates)
6. Use Feed Digest (or RSS to JS converter) to get the feeds transferred onto your website
7. Automate some scripts to insert forward/backward navigation into the new pages (indexes, categories)
8. Mashup (automate) all of that hourly

Or… simply buy reBlogger and get all of that integrated into one suite… with great administrator features!

English isn’t the biggest language of the blogosphere

Also from the Technorati blog:

The following chart show the relative volume of blog posts based on the primary language of the post, on a month by month basis:

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

Also very interesting! That has a significant implication to any company making blog-related software… like reBlogger.

Just how good is this design?

Take a look at this online customization tutorial for reBlogger. The expand/collapse and Ajax panels are simply brilliant. It's all in one place and it's all intentional (meaning that you only view only what you want to see). We should have an Ajax design competition. I think Ivan would win!

New reBlogger.com site is almost ready

We're readying our flagship website for reBlogger. But it's not the hosted site yet… sorry Al. It is the site where you can download the 30 day demo of reBlogger (see the release notes and features) and play with it on your own site. Until now reBlogger has been living off space on other sites, but now it will have a home all of it's own.

I've seen the pre-release of the site and it's waaaay cool. Ivan has used Ajax (Microsoft Atlas) very intelligently, for example he has an Atlas slide show so you can explore reBlogger! The site is very attractive and very interactive for visitors.

After this launch we'll issue another version of reBlogger (3.4 probably) and then we'll focus on the hosted site version.

To all the paparazzi… warm up your pens and pencils… here she comes!

1% of site visitors create content, 10% synthesizes it

In terms of our company, this might be one of the most important posts. The summary at the end I hope will drive home the 3 different focusses we must have.

Here are two great posts:

The 1% Rule: Charting citizen participation

in June 2005 Wikipedia had a total of 68,682 total contributors. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is reported to have told a library group that month:

• 50% of all Wikipedia edits are done by 0.7% of users
• 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles

If we also add evidence from Bradley Horowitz that roughly 1% of Yahoo's user population starts a Yahoo Group, we seem to have The 1% Rule: Roughly 1% of your site visitors will create content within a democratized community. (Horowitz also says that some 10% of the total audience "synthesizes" the content, or interacts with it.)

Are you a 1 Percenter?

The overriding lesson: Avoid marginalizing the 1 Percenters as statistically insignificant, unrepresentative of the total audience or simply the lunatic fringe. If anything, the 1 Percenters may represent the leading indicators of how well your brand is being adopted, synthesized and vocalized.

This post Are you a 1 Percenter? does a fabulous job of summarizing all the responses and input from other posts around the web. No need to re-create that here, just go there.

The part that says 10% of your site visitors synthesize the content is something I've been driving at for a while. Our software needs to accomodate three types of visitors:

1. The writer
2. The synthesizer (editor, masher, cross-linker)
3. The reader

Each type of visitor has a very different kind of perspective, attitude, expectation and need.

Tracking future Windows releases by using reBlogger

Have you seen Google trends yet? It tracks search activity and compares it to the preceding events.

I spoke about the inverse concept in the interview I did with Robin Good reBlogger: Digg-In-A-Box. The key differences are that I would track blog posts and not searches. Why? Searches are consumer oriented, but posts come directly from the source! It's obvious that consumers don't know the actual release date, but the bloggers inside the company's software team do. Their blog activity can give hints of what happening in the team. Even if the content they post doesn't specify the data - their activity could indicate something.

So Google tracks the number of searches and maps the news event that caused the surge in interest, but I'm suggesting mapping the blog activity and project that to a future event. We sometimes see predictive activity in searching, but it's only for a very widely known upcoming event: for example Christmas.

You can use reBlogger to track the activity of a particular group within a competing company. The value is huge for a business which tracks it's competition. Most company programmers blog (and have an OPML file) so I'm thinking that all we need is to find all their bloggers, group them and then count their post activity - and then generate a graph. Watch for any irregular change (a drop or a spike) and you know something is happening. It's so easy!

You can get the reBlogger 30 day free demo and install it (requires Microsoft SQL Server or SQL Server Express).

25 Things I Learned on Google Trends (humor)

Steve Rubel does some fabulous investigations.I particularly like:

15) Blogs have caught up to newspapers

1 Digg caught up to Slashdot.

19) Interest in blogs and RSS is much higher than in podcasting and wikis

Enjoy!

New reBlogger.com layout - what do you think?

I've posted a LOT of items previously about good looks and feels and I've researched how everyone else does it. Now it's our turn to face the music and put our money where our (my?) mouth is.

We've got the product, got a good feature set, a great vision, great team… we even already made some sales! Now all that is missing is… the actual branded website. But no more!

We're about to launch our reBlogger.com website and we're playing with the look, feel and functionality. If you read this blog (and I know you do!) then post me a comment and let me know what you think of the new reBlogger.com new front page layout (360kb file size). Be sure to zoom in on the picture if it shows up as a thumbnail. It's all Ajaxian (Microsoft Altas) goodness.

Feeds 2.0

In a recent post (Different kinds of social/meme/news sites) I described the different kinds of news sites. One of those types is an online feed reader.

Enter stage from left: Feeds 2.0 (blog). This is their look and feel. Nice. Simple. Clear. It screams out "read your feeds on this page!" They innovate by personalizing your feed for you.

Different kinds of social/meme/news sites

I have been thinking about what makes reBlogger different to the other sites. I've nosed around for an analysis of the various sites and strengths and weaknesses of each offering.

Much research is focused on Ajax and the look and feel of the sites. This post is about broader strengths and weaknesses of the sites.

I think there are three ways people commonly read the internet:

• Passive news - you visit the sites you like (Yahoo, CNN) and read them. They inform you of what you need to know.
• Searching news - You go to Google and find the information you know that that you want.
• Notification of news - have a site that scans the enormous number of blogs out there and collects together the more interesting information for you.

Of the notification of news websites, I think there are four basic types:

 

• Meme sites - tracking the hot (high profile, popular) conversations on the web
• Social sites - user submitted content (sometimes highlighting esoteric past items)
• Online news reader - read your web feeds online
• News tracking sites - after submitting your keywords, view only the blog posts that interest you

 

Meme sites

Sites:

• Chuquet
• Techmeme (was tech.memeordandum.com)

Overview:

They automatically scan the news and find the "cool" topics that are in vogue in blogs around the world.

Strengths:

They find and track "conversations" about the news and watch them for a limited time period as they develop and evolve. To track an evolving political story this is a great kind of site.

Weaknesses:

• They track only a relatively small number of hot and active topics. They tend to ignore small threads, ideas or posts that are not popular enough to become memes.
• They tend to only track blogs (or information available as a web feed).
• By nature, they have a short attention span of a few days.
• 99% of the posts that a visitor would also have found useful and interesting are completely missed because they were single posts (or short threads) and never attained "hot"ness - and therefore never surfaced and became a part of the herd consciousness.
• All meme sites offer a search, but none ask me what keywords I want to see in every meme, so I am assaulted by many memes that are of no interest to me
• The memes that are displayed do not correlate to my personal interests - unless I specifically choose to visit a tech meme site (see: techmeme) or a sports meme site - otherwise I am served what the meme algorithm has determined interesting - without being aware of my interests.
• The cost of a server farm to track all 40 million blogs is very expensive - even with OSS software.

Competitive advantage:

The algorithm defining "interesting" or "hot" is the competitive advantage between these sites - the better the algorithm, the more compelling the site is.

Example of this post:

This post - although it is a useful for many people - is highly unlikely to become popular enough to become a "meme" and therefore won't enter into the herd's collective awareness as they forage for information.

 

Social sites

Sites:

• dotnetKicks
• Findory

Overview:

These sites rely on user submissions to identify stories and to vote on them. It also tracks coolness, but unlike meme sites, the visitors decide what is important, not a software algorithm.

Strengths:

• Individual posts that might be missed by an algorithm looking for coolness are more likely to be highlighted by individual visitors.
• The more users which interact with the site, the more useful the site is.
• Easy to set up, lower hardware cost.

Weaknesses:

• Too few visitors will result in too few submissions to the site. dotnetKicks has this problem, 1 submission today and 1 submission 6 days ago - nothing in between.
• No focus on "hot conversations" - for example the top post on DIGG right now is called "What the font?" (Ever wanted to find a font just like the one used by certain websites or publications? Well now you can, using the WhatTheFont font recognition system.) with 62 diggs. This site is very likely being gamed for attracting visitors and making sales.
• Social sites tend to encourage tagging by the submitter and searching for keywords, but again an enormous amount of information can be lost if the post is incorrectly tagged.

Competitive advantage:

Cheap startup costs, users submit the content (no need for an expensive server farm to automatically collect all 40 million blogs).

Example of this post:

This post, if read and valued by someone, may be highlighted as useful on such a site. But the readership of this blog is so small that it is unlikely that enough people will bookmark this post on any social site in order to raise it's profile, so it will also fail to be highlighted to the herd as suitable grazing material.

 

Online news reader

Sites:

• Bloglines
• Megite (blog)

Overview:

An online feed reader. You upload an OPML file or a list of blog feeds and the service collects those feeds regularly and you read them online.

Strengths:

Very inexpensive to run because the user submits their web feeds.

Weaknesses:

• They don't collect all the news and track it, they rely on user to list their own blogs that they want tracked. Therefore they online have a subset of the news.
• Even with this subset of blogs they may have too many off-topic posts, because they do not appear to offer keywords or filtering to track only the posts you want to track - and hide the posts that are off topic.

 

Competitive advantage:

This is probably the broadest active market containing the most people (not passive readers of sites) and these users have the simplest needs. The software is understood by the most number of people.

Example of this post:

This post is unlikely to show up on a news reader site because my RSS feed is unlikely to be in their list.

 

reBlogger sites (News tracking or news mastering)

Sites:

• SEOData (SEO reBlogger)
• TopXML (BizTalk and XML reBlogger)

Overview:

reBlogger is a combination of social and online news readers. By using keywords this site only displays the information you want to read, regardless of the source of the information. User-voting also ensures that better content is more easily discovered.

 

 

Strengths:

• A stronger emphasis on context (evolution over time exploring historical information)
• The visitor can filter the news by specifying sets of keywords to track (such as climate change, PS3 or XBox) and the software watches for those keywords and notifies the visitor when the keywords are found, regardless of which blog it was found on
• The sources can be more than blogs (such as newsgroups) and the methods of notification can be quite proactive (email etc.)

Weaknesses:

• With 50,000 posts per hour, even with keyword usage, there is a potential problem of having far too many posts showing up to be read. To deal with this problem, we encourage voting where users assist each other by voting content up and protect each other from bad content by voting content down.
• The site is useful as an online news reader for individuals users (and keywords make the reading even better), but for voting to be effective many users must use the site (the more the site is used, the better it is)
• No focus on conversations and "hot" topics (unless voted for by users)
• Because of the focus on historical data to provide context, the effectiveness is limited to the age and completeness of the archive of data

Competitive advantage:

A strong emphasis on historical context. A focus on encouraging the user to buy their own copy of the software, hopefully off-loading the demand to other people's servers.

Example of this post:

This post will automatically be collected by a reBlogger. If the user has indicated an interest in the keywords which are used in it (such as "social" or "meme&quot then it will show up for the users who have said they want to track these keywords.

Revenue streams?

In all cases the revenue stream is advertising, except for reBlogger, Chuquet and Megite:

License Megite Software: Email us for more info if you are interested in licensing Megite software to create Megite like web2.0 service.

The end

If you have read to the bottom, you're probably a very committed person… committed to building the perfect social/meme/news site. This post from a VC firm makes an interesting point that I hope will broaden your thinking beyond the very small number of people that you may now be targeting. Dave has a thought on it.

Get the 30 day demo of reBlogger (Windows only, requires .NET and SQL)

 

Why is reBlogger 4.0 going to be a hosted solution?

Any user of the current version of Microsoft Office could suggest tweaks and improvements. One word: clippy.

Users are fabulous at providing feedback to software they use and are familiar with. Software companies rely heaily on user feedback to improve the existing product that the users are already famliar with. Users are not good at describing how to improve products they don't use or don't understand.

reBlogger has that exact problem. No one can help us build it, because they have never seen it before! It also has the problem of requiring to be installed, WordPress had the same issue and decided to offer a hosted solution called WordPress.com. I like their explanation of why they started the hosted WordPress.com to complement their original WordPress product:

WordPress was famous for its 5-minute install, but as simple as we could make it the barriers to getting a WordPress blog were still fairly high and technical. Enter WordPress.com, a more limited version of WordPress that is hosted and completely maintained. Thousands of people every day are creating blogs on the WordPress.com service, which has just begun to explore its capabilities.

Many people have played with the online services of memetracker, technorati and the other services - but even these people struggle to understand what reBlogger does for them. We tried providing online videos and a release notes page but this has still not resolved the problem.

reBlogger has three problems:

1. it requires installation and specific pre-installed software (.Net, MS SQL)
2. reBlogger solves problems that most companies perhaps don't yet know they have
3. We use too many nouns that aren't in wikipedia (haven't gained a large enough audience)

Is there a market for what we are building? Absolutely!

The blog wave is gathering speed - it doubles every 5.5 months - so this problem of managing information is only going to grow. The need for reBlogger is going to become intense. But unless people can get their hands on it and play with it - we're not going to break through.

We can see the same problem for every innovative product. Back when everyone was riding horses, Henry Ford was building something the people didn't know they needed and could not have described - until they saw it and used it. Henry said:

“If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’ ”
- Henry Ford, apparently as he is quoted in the London Observer

Hehehe. People didn't know they wanted cars - but they did. This is a significant problem for any first mover. While Henry got the next generation big picture right, he vastly underestimated how important the feedback from users us. He obstinately said:

"You can paint it (the car) any colour - so long as it's black."
- Henry Ford

That was a huge mistake: everyone wants cars in their own shade of color!

In the social/blogging world what people want is to express themselves and to get some level of control over the software that they use. That's the reason for the success of WordPress widgets and TypePad widgets. Combine that with open source (wordpress.org has the free PHP GNU source) and the end result of user extensions and playing around is quite unexpected: a WordPress Comic theme. Read From Weblog to CMS with WordPress.

Users are phenomenally good at giving advice about products that they use. A company that doesn't listen to feedback and act on it rapidly will lose out. We must strive to listen to what our customers want.

If you're interested in how revolutionary reBlogger is, listen to this interview with Robin Good Digg-In-A-Box… the interview. He makes some interesting comments about our functionality and how it plays into the whole blogosphere and newsmastering.

Blog revenue sharing - paying the content creator

Redux - I'm revisiting the revenue sharing topic.

DotNetKicks has an interesting solution to sharing the revenue. They have combined their revenue generation model with a model to encourage submissions by using your AdSense ID. How it works is this: 50% of the times your story submission is displayed you earn that money.

So the revenue is shared between the site ID and the editor ID (the person who listed the post). But what about the content creator (the author of the post)? Shouldn't we be sharing the $ with the owner and author? Yes of course. But this raises the problem: how do we get the YPN ID of the owner so we can pay them?

I have a suggestion on this. Before you read this I suggest you delve into my previous suggestion about blog content ownership and control where I suggest we should extend the RSS spec to include a "robots.txt" kind of idea so that the owner can exert control of the content throughout the life of the content, no matter where the content goes or how it is used.

Now, as we develop the next version of reBlogger, I am wondering how I can share revenue with the creators of the content that we republish.

Here is my idea: you've probably seen how to claim your own feed on Feedster and Technorati? Now what if a publisher (an athor) could place their YPN ID somewhere (in their feed?) and whoever displays their content can/must/should use their YPN ID and share the revenue. The issue of can or must or should would be stored in the RSS version of a robots.txt (you really should read: blog content ownership and control)

If there is an uptake of this idea, then YPN or Google AdSense or whatever could easily become the main vehicle of revenue flowing around the internet. PayPal is the current mode of small payments, but the use of YPN/AmazonSense IDs would quickly overhaul that… simply because of the sheer speed of growth in the size of the blogosphere and the amount of republishing that is happening through products like reBlogger.

Here are some of my previous posts on revenue sharing:

• A huge vote for us
• FeedFlare - building longevity into blog posts
• blog content ownership and control
• Content theft or revenue generation?
• Sharing affiliate revenue

New Interface - going stealth to protect the IP

After poking our head up a bit in the Coding reBlogger blog (and on Flikr) we've decided to go stealth. I'll keep blogging, but Ivan's work will no longer be public.

We've always thought we were onto something big and we began building it. As we built it, we refined it and discovered we were onto something even bigger.

We've begun to see that it has the potential to significantly shake the web. It should change the nature of:

• hyperlinking
• tagging
• commenting
• user generated content

It's an evolutionary shift in the nature of the web. Evolutionary, not revolutionary… but it will be so pervasive that it will be rapildy included into more and more products. As it's use becomes widespread, it will force new extensions to the HTTP spec.

Some would think that developing this stuff in public will create buzz and that's good for our company, but I've realized that we need to be a bit more strategic and protect what we have invented.

We are now approaching what we're building in two parts:

1. the products - reBlogger, reNNTP, various websites - which will use the new interface
2. the IP - which has tremendous potential in itself as intellectual property/patents.

I have no doubt our IP will be bought out and I am planning for it. Possible buyers of the IP/patent include Microsoft, Technorati, WordPress and any other cashed-up blog-related IP company.

Why take this approach? It's simply because we don't have the ability to shepherd the idea, shape the IP and help with implementations.

Feeding on Pheedo

One of the signals I look for in a company that will eventually have ongoing and lasting success is this: they keep on pumping out changes, improvements, innovations and products. They don't stop. One such company is Pheedo (blog). Pheedo just keeps on keeping on.

We know that FeedBurner (blog) (API) offers ads in your RSS feed. But you then have to have your RSS feed "hosted" by their website. So if I placed ad in my RSS feed, I can no longer point to my own RSS feed, but I'd have to point to their copy of my feed on their website. Sucky.

Enter stage from left… Pheedo. Easy RSS Advertising From Pheedo. Now I can have ads in my own RSS. Yeah! That's nice. But what I'm really drawing your attention to is their blog and in particular the posts about the state of the RSS industry.

I've often linked to the fairly basic Technorati graphs showing the upward curve of the blogosphere see: Times they are a-changing… and Technorati - State of the blogosphere April 2006 and Technorati - State of the Blogosphere, February 2006.

But now Pheedo are sharing some of their own really excellent statistical research. Here are some excellent posts related to RSS-based advertising (CTR ratios, best placement, best frequency etc.):

Pheed Read #2 - Standalone RSS Ads Perform, Ad-to-Post Ratios Clarified

Standalone RSS ads are far more successful than inline ads.
A standalone RSS ad (the entire post is the advertisement) generates, on average, a 7.99% click-through rate - over nine times more clicks than an inline RSS ad (an advertisement within a publisher's post).

When ads are placed in every other feed post, users clicked on the ad 3.24% of the time. This is over three times more effective than placing an advertisement in every post in a feed, where the CTR is 1.04%

"Pheed Read" No. 1 - report on the state of RSS advertising.

Tuesday is the most active day in RSS; Saturday least active.

The “morning scanners” view most content; late night readers click through more.

Pheed Read #1 was just the basic info, but Pheed Read #2 contains really valuable information. I find it quite rare the a company will publish truly useful stats with truly useful graphs. If you're into RSS-based advertising, you should DEFINITELY subscribe to the Pheedo blog.

(Found through SEOData using the reBlogger aggregation product)

Digg-In-A-Box… the interview

In a previous post reBlogger past, present and future I mentioned that I had completed our first interview about reBlogger with Robin Good. I'm very pleased to point to the interview (available as audio, MP3 and text): Digg-In-A-Box? Automatic News Filtering And Aggregation? Newsmastering Engines Keep Growing: reBlogger Is Next

Here is a short quotation from the page containing the 40 minute interview. Robin says:

There is a huge, infinite market for quality, filtered information on specialized topics out there.

Why?

Because, everyone on the edge of using new media technologies today knows that the amount of information that is ALREADY coming our way now, it is just too much to handle. Tech Memeorandum, Digg, Personalized Google News, Start/Live are great, but they are only a small part of the solution.

We just need to scale up more. And that means doing ourselves the dirty work of filtering, selecting and aggregating the very best content out there on any specific imaginable topic. This is why, this is truly the job of the future, and watching only blogs, as they are today, maybe a too limiting view.

And when we say aggregate it should not mean just to aggregate blog posts, but also and evidently news, comments, video and audio clips, relevant products and services and relevant ads and commercial info on that very content theme.

And what tools do we have today to do this kind of work?

Few. In fact too few to really satisfy the soon to explode demand for these kind of publishing services that the content market will see.

And this is why I took the time to skype up Mark Wilson, CEO and founder of one of those very few, but also very promising companies already moving its early steps into this soon-to-be-blooming newsmastering industry.

reBlogger a server-based software that Mark and his team have released over a year and half ago, is a newsmastering engine that allows the creation of highly thematic and relevant newsfeeds on just about any selected topics of interest. You feed the engine with enough news sources in the format of RSS/Atom feeds and then you specify the "themes" or topics you want to be output. reBlogger does the rest.

Not only.

As you can learn by reading through, Mark and his team are working right now on the upcoming release of a full "Digg-in-a-box" type of tool, which allow any online publisher to recreate the popular and highly effective Digg-functionality on their sites to create their vertical information portals fueled by their readers.

Here, for example, is a good example of what reBlogger could do, if you wanted to build a site about the upcoming World Soccer Cup in Germany.

Read or listen to the mp3 online: Digg-In-A-Box? Automatic News Filtering And Aggregation? Newsmastering Engines Keep Growing: reBlogger Is Next

Analysis of comments threshold and post voting

I have written quite a bit on meme sites and UGC (User Generated Content). You may also have noticed I am fascinated by the Slashdot vs DIGG comparison.

Below is a typical layout of reBlogger posts for a given day. It's not inspiring. But that's ok, we were targetting SEO companies who are not focussed on the user experience (ajax, voting etc.)

But as we prepare the user-theme-website reBlogger (a tool to build meme/DIGG websites) which is under-construction here and here I am exploring more and more in this blog the ideas surrounding relevancy, user-generated content, user-interaction, community involvement, exploration, semantic web, tags, research and user-context and blog-post-context (and trying to match them).

In this post I am exploring thresholds and voting. First let's look at some leading examples of each.

Haven't we figured out that the crowd is generally smarter than any one individual in the crowd? - Jeremy Zawdony

Here is a screenshot of Slashdot style "below threshold" ranking of items. The users get to vote on what is useful and what is not… but it's for comments on posts. For anyone who has tried to read the MASSES and MASSES of comments on a slashdot post, this threshold stuff is invaluable.

DIGG implemented a "below threshold" concept in their system too… but it's also for comments only.

So thresholds work well for a big flow of comments. Yay. But when you have an enormous flow of posts, could we also use this threshold concept?

Of course in terms of matching my user-context and the context of the voter, if a visitor votes down any post covering a team they don't like - that should not affect my view if I like that team! Sigh. So I really should only see the effect of votes from people who have similar keywords to mine. They like the same things as me, and therefore their votes are far more likely to be relevant.

Below is my very unattractive rendition of what user-voting combined with thresholds could do for blog posts. If you add in changing background colors to highlight the items that match their selected keywords - then a visitor can FAR more easily scan a page to view items that match their keywords and are voted hot by visitors who perhaps have more time on their hands to read and vote on everything!

In my imagination I could visit the World Cup 2006 site and quickly scan for hot stories that match my interests (south african or australian teams).

It would be great if unread items were bolded and read items weren't. Heh. CSS already does that. Woohoo.

OK, I user-tested this with Joel. He didn't get it. Let me try again.

Below is a typical reBlogger page on TopXML - in amongst all those posts, some are clearly better than others. How do I (a reader who is interested in the topic) determine which item to read and which to skip?

Enter stage from left: thresholding.

In this page we have hidden the items which other users have voted down, or (inversely) which have not been voted up. Now only the really good stuff is displaying and I can get to the other items if I want to.

I added three extra goodies in the picture above:

1. faded background highlighting to draw the eye to the hidden info
2. if some of the voted-down posts contain my keywords I have specified that I am interested in, I am notified
3. I inserted a star in the top most post, to somehow indicate that this post is truly a winner. We have all seen these kinds of posts, they are just head and shoulders above the rest. They should get a star, so when I view the page I can immediately click on that post with the certainty that I will see a cracking-hot post.

One concern is: because this is ordered by date (not by vote) the newest posts will always have a vote of 0, and I guess 0 should be above the threshold? But that kinda defeats the idea of hiding the complexity. Sigh. Hmmm… some users will want a threshold that includes 0 (view all new items) and some will want 1, 2 or 3 or whatever. Some may even want to view all - including viewing negatively rated items.

Some sites also use grouping of similar topics… but we aren't doing that yet. Here are some examples of that.

Cloudee (below) groups similar posts, but doesn't have voting + thresholds

The ever-wonderful Chuquet (below) also groups items and handles information overload by hiding it all and saying "(45 linking articles in the last week…)" and giving a link to all of the items. Quite effective! They don't provide voting.

I see that everyone thinks that thresholds is for commenting and voting is the way to solve information overload for posts - but I think that voting can result in thresholds for posts - it's the ideal way to sort the wheat from the chaff in blog posts.

Ivan codes more reBlogger engine goodies

Ivan has had a hard day coding the next generation engine. I definitely see the wisdom of separating reBlogger 3.2 (and 3.3) from this product.

• RB 3.x is really for SEO sites and is easily built and installed, minimal fuss
• Our next generation product is for