DISQUS

Scoble,

On the one hand, this service could be handy, must like Akismet and so on.

On the other hand, you are wrong on so many levels :
- you said "Any site that copies your stuff in an automated way should be shut down." : if you believe in this just a second, then don't post a RSS feed, and make it hard to scrap your web page
- you also said "one guy created more than 600,000 sites without writing a single word of content" : tell me how your GR shared items fit into that too. Are not you republishing content from others? Sure, the way you view it as, by sharing items, you are intentionally voting for something that may be of interest to your readers. But in REALITY, that would hold true if you were just linking, not republishing their content under Google's umbrella. Whether you want it or not, you are siding the evil side here too...

Let me know what you think.

I too started using GR to share items, but I find it too easy and certainly a lack of respect for the authors behind the posts.

I think it's the best right now. Fast and has the features where you expect them.

Better, it does cache blog items making it less a pain for blog hosting providers. Caveat : a lot of trend/profile power is being sent to Google.

Have you noticed how useless is the tree view?

In fact, where it shines is in its ability to decrease the number of clicks and actions.

Where it could be better though :
- the obvious one : provide a full Google Reader experience when clicking a link. I want Google to transform the link to a temporary RSS feed for me and make me read. No reason why the burden should be on readers with them forced to visit web pages. Caveat : those who have ads and other widgets on their blogs might not like this idea.
- improve speed for adding a subscription
- auto-update the main view when new items arrive (perhaps I haven't set the right option, but I find myself often clicking the browser's Refresh button)
- add Ajax sticky notes to shared items
- allow shared items to be split in more than one blog. I'd like, under the same umbrella, to share "professional" items, and "personal" items

Sorry Scoble, partial feeds is a click away from full feed, whether or not the publisher has a full feed at all. What you only need is one of those scraping services which grabs the actual full feed for you. This is purely technical, so stop whining.

As for link blogs, I think this is the future of blogs. Now, if only Google could add support for Ajax sticky notes so that the author can add inline visual comments, that would be it.

It's the same in France, with the presidential elections heating up. After a couple weeks or so, it is obvious that candidates are re-creating TV channels, i.e. one-way, and using it to just touch a segment of people out there.
Ironically enough, most relevant voters are not those likely to enjoy a DSL line and so all those videos are irrelevant for the most part.
At least in France we still do vote with paper, perhaps the last time before EU-force-fed legislation forces us to use the folkloric e-voting machines.

It's no coincidence that bloggers are now credited with influence that resonates a lot like impression. Impression as in "ad impression" with more evidence every day that old media is not only catching up but using bloggers to meet their objectives.

Powers that be are so boring (self-censoring, never address damaging topics, conflicted interests, ...) that they need this new gig to move the attention elsewhere.

All of that is actually free labor that others make money with.

I am not sure one wants to participate in the whole thing. Take Second Life as the caricatural example of what's wrong with the whole thing.

"Gabe needs to pay his rent. You got a good way for him to do that?"

I guess having an ad block has nothing to do with screwing algorithms so that sponsors are given gratuitous links. Those ad blocks don't decrease the value of the service. But gratuitous links in the main conversations do.

Also, it will be of interest to follow whether Microsoft buys their way in the "conversation" (or lack of) for another month. That'd be ridiculous and quite telling for a company that should instead be talked about by others.

Speaking of distortion field, have you noticed that Channel 9 is linked over at techmeme in the discussion about how Vista is screwing game developers?

See the actual link : it's a post with one comment.

Hmmm...

Whatever (techmeme) sponsorship buys you.

Shame on Gabe on that one.

And shame on the Redmond lunatics, obviously.

Gates hectic moves, fast forward to

Minute 29:08

and Minute 38.45

;-)

Relaxed Bill Gates?

Watch his hectic moves when the guy asks about Spam (which Gates once said would be long gone by now). And also towards the end. Eh eh...

I like the interview with Om Malik.

"Microsoft is gonna edge ?"

Are you talking about that company that has to buy their way through techmeme sponsorship just to "be part of the conversation"?

Take a look at MSDN blogs : so many blogs, and yet virtually no comment anywhere.

Give me a break, Scoble.

I understand you are willing to save an endangered specy though.

Why bother AOL massive user search query leak when you have a tool like this? It should be pretty obvious that any blogger does vanity read (for validation sometimes), and this pretty much gives his identity.

Of course, since anyone sharing his read items pretty much gives his identity anyway (as in Robert Scoble's link blog), this does not seem to matter much at first sight.

But, look the bigger picture, and see how all this information from Google Reader users could be aggregated by Google (or some other company) yet still retain the finest granularity level. This my friends competes with AOL massive user search leak.

It smells a bit ironical that so much people careful of their privacy would want to give it away like that...

Whatever happened to the "one topic per post" mantra.

Makes you wonder how Google is supposed to index this thing.

Scoble, what a load of B.S. from you here.

The dominant Microsoft analogy? Come on, who forces you to use Google?

Matt Cutts is a PR person doing damage control. Take a look at most anti-Google posts out there, you'll see him often first in the comment sections. Hmmm. Also, this week's questioning of "Google tips" can be juice to appear nice, open and get a conversation going on, don't you think?

What Google does is subject to interpretation. Mine about "Google tips" is that, following the SOAP API mess and the fact that screenscraping may be just the better way to get raw Google results now, those added tips I see as a warning from Google that screenscraping algorithms will have to be made much more sophisticated to do just that. A way to encourage people to stick to the Ajax widget API.

As for being open, learning and all that, I think you don't get the point at all. Let me explain. Let's assume for the sake of the discussion that most algorithms are one way or another weighted sums, and that they change those weights daily in order to avoid SEO people gaming them too much, sploggers and so on. Where is Google secret here? What is the thing you want to know? You want to know the weights? What's the point, they'll be changed tomorrow. You want to know the algorithm? What's the point, the algorithm is public for the most part, and at any given day, you can reconstruct it by putting enough effort into that. As long as you understand that next day, due to the changing weights, your efforts will have been made a waste of time.

What do you think is so secretive you are DYING TO KNOW in all this?

I am talking about products and stuff that are sneaked into posts without a link. That's in a sense the next-gen ads. First we had ad banners, then Google came with text links. And now most product placement is just text. But the effect is just the same.

Scoble, you are doing product placement all the time. You know, if WordPress would automatically add a tag in your blog posts for every mention of a product or company, that would be funny to see sometimes the tag line thicker than your own posts...;-)

The reality is I think it's up to Apple to provide native support for Flash in Quicktime, or ipod sizes, or to allow audio-only streaming without having you doing the work separately.

As for transcripts, it's a whole another thing. But it does not have to be you doing the work either, it's a perfect opportunity for a company to emerge in this niche.

Anyway, in short, it's 100% automated technology we are talking here. Don't do the work by hand.