Google Buys Then Kills Urchin

If you’ve been tracking the ‘Most Popular Episodes by Downloads/Day’ way down on the far left column of the website, you’ve probably noticed it hasn’t been updated in a while.

I know I have.

The great guys at TextDrive moved servers and as such needed to revise their licensing on the Urchin – the server log analysis tool Google bought a while back.

Prior to the server move, I’d grab the mp3 download numbers via Urchin and update the ‘Most Popular’ list.
After the move. Nothing. The people at Urchin won’t return TextDrive’s phone calls.

TextDrive hosts 5000 domains, 1 of them is this site. None of them have any idea how their sites are performing because Urchin is “re-evaluating” their pricing model. In the mean time, all their existing customers are left in the dark. Not cool Google. not cool.

For more, check out the Where’s Urchin? thread on the TextDrive Forum

First Crack 62. Online Communities 1.0 with Chuck Hermes

Back in the 90s Chuck Hermes and Michael Koppelman (from the lolife podcast) built the Bitstream Underground BBS. This is Chuck’s presentation on the history of Bitstream Underground from MIMA’s Online Communities Salon held on September 14, 2005.

Listen to Online Communities v1.o with Chuck Hermes [16 min]

Reflections on Bush’s New Orleans Speech

I do agree with Bush the one of the few organizations capable of handling a logistical nightmare of a natural disaster the size of Katrina is the Army. The other one is Wal-Mart. Next time don’t turn them away.

Three notes to President Bush;

  1. Good job on not giggling during your speech. I’m sure it took a week of practice. Also, you did a good job holding back that ignorant, mocking, smirk.
  2. Unfortunately, you’ve run out of political capital around 9/11 or WMD. Stop talking about them. Unless you can convince us Al Queda is connected to Katrina.
  3. Another hurricane like Katrina won’t hit New Orleans again, there won’t be another terrorist attack like 9/11. Don’t spend too much time looking backwards to prevent it from happening again. Look forward and plan systems that will prevent all disasters. Not just the politically sexy ones.

I’m torn, should the people responsible for making a mess be responsible for cleaning it up? Maybe. I believe you did your best, and your best caused this mess. So, I think someone else should be responsible for the clean up and rebuild. You’ve got a bunch of other stuff to wrap up anyway (Iraq for example).

One final thought, everytime Bush says ‘citizens’ he should say ‘we’. ‘We’ is more representative of the impact the New Orleans has as will have on all of us. I know Bush doesn’t want to impose any discomfort on ‘us’. His keep-America-at-arms-length attitude makes me think leading a nation makes him uncomfortable. But, that’s his job. Maybe if he thought of it as clearing really big brush from a really big ranch.

Laptop Killing TV and Stereo

I had a post on my personal blog about wanting my favorite movies and TV shows available as digital downloads, rather than DVDs. Looks like I’m not the only one considering my laptop the all-in-one media and communications center. PSFK points to an article on British youth not owning televisions. I picked up a Tivoli iPAL this weekend to replace the bulky 5 CD stereo system we haven’t turned on in months (because there’s no line-in jack for the iPod).

How to Blog for Higher Search Engine Ranking

Blogging, aside from being one of the easiest ways to publish online, is also one of the easiest ways to increase search engine rankings.

Search engine spiders like Google’s GoogleBot expect websites to change and be updated frequently. Blogs are (or should be), so the spiders come by more frequently. Once the spiders are at you’re weblog, they look for keywords in 4 places:

  1. Window title (in the window, above the address bar)
  2. URL (in the address bar)
  3. Article title
  4. In the article itself

WordPress, the weblog system I prefer, sets the window title and URL from the article title. Then, it’s just a matter of writing a title representative of the article and writing an article worth reading.

Listing your category archives and recent articles as links in the sidebar automatically increases the keyword count on the page – automatically increasing your google juice.

Multiple Languages, Same Message – A Reason for a Comment-Cast

When I was developing WP-iPodCatter, it seemed straight-forward enough to tie WordPress’ enclosure detection with the Comments RSS feed to create a comment podcast, or comment-cast.

I didn’t have a personal need for this feature (so it’s not as fully developed as the others) but I thought it’d be neat and it was easy to do.
Plus, the thought of a podcast with distributed hosting, on topic, created by fans of another podcast seemed like an interesting way to bring the threaded comments to audio.

Then, listening to Mike’s latest Sex and Podcasting, Katrina – multi-language podcasts, I realized that’s not the interesting bit.

Here’s the scenario, I publish a podcast. You take it, translate it, record it into a language you know well, and republish it as a comment to the original.

Subscribing to the comment feed will automatically deliver the translated files as fast as they’re published.

Could be helpful. Could cause more and bloodier wars.

Ad Agencies are Paid to Make the Uninteresting Interesting

After the MIMA Online Communities Salon tonight I overheard;

“Ad agencies are paid to make the uninteresting interesting.”

Reminded me of something Hugh said;

“For marketing hand-made cheese that was matured in sixteenth century stone cellars, blogging is a no-brainer.
For marketing Velveeta, it’s trickier. Maybe impossible.”

The sleight of hand ad agencies perform is brevity. Even lame Velveeta can be cool in 30 highly-controlled seconds. Unfortunately, one-night stands are not how people get married. Blogs, podcasts, and other online communities, are permanent, direct, on-going, cumulative, relationship-building tools. The hand-made cheese matured in 16th century stone cellars is a commitment. Like a blog. Like a lifelong relationship.

This is the difference between making the lame interesting and making the banal interesting.

But you know that.