Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
I’m sitting in the cafe of my hotel in Bilbao, sipping a cortado waiting for my lift to the airport to fly home.
The sun is shining, a refreshing breeze is blowing, I’m looking at the Nervion flowing by lazily and the ediface of Gehry’s incredible Guggenheim Museum is shimmering in the light.
I’m very far from Cork.
I think I will enjoy another coffee in this wondrous setting before I have to leave.
Google has agreed to purchase Feedburner - the rss feed management company for $100m according to Mike Arrington in a post over on TechCrunch.
According to Mike:
The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.
Great news for the guys in FeedBurner but now that Google owns another digital slice of my life I can’t help wondering what other feed management companies are out there (eggs, baskets, etc.) and can I integrate their services into my blogs as easily as FeedBurner?
Technorati have overhauled their site completely. Some of the changes are great and some we could do without, frankly!
The best change is that they have drastically sped up the site. I dunno did they add more servers or simply optimise their queries (I suspect the latter) but the site and particularly searches are now running a whole lot faster.
The next great change is that they have moved the blog searches to a page of its own. You can now find blog searches at s.technorati.com. The searches return relevant results and make subscribing to searches a whole lot easier than heretofore.
On the downside, on the main Technorati page they have a scrolling bar of tags along the top - make it stop! I thought we had killed of the Marquee tag people!!!
Overall, the new design seems to be getting the thumbs up from most reviewers. This can only be good as with the rollout of Google’s excellent Blogsearch tool, reasons for using Technorati were becoming fewer and fewer.
I published my first video podcast this evening over on PodLeaders.com. As it is the first one, I am re-publishing it here too.
The podcast is an interview with LouderVoice’s Conor O’Neill. Conor discusses how the site is based on Microformats (making the data fully portable), how the sites makes extensive use of tagging and how you can subscribe to RSS feeds for almost every aspect of the site.
I see Microsoft are following Google into the Advertising business with their announced purchase of aQuantive for $6bn.
Advertising definitely seems to be where the money is at right now - as Michael Arrington put it earlier on TechCrunch:
Google bought Doubleclick for $3.1 billion in April. Later that same month, Yahoo acquired competitor RightMedia for $680 million. Just yesterday, WPP Group acquired yet another company in this space, 24/7 Real Media, for $649 million.
Just as an indicator of how seriously Microsoft is taking advertising as a revenue stream, this is Microsoft’s largest acquisition to-date. Look to Microsoft to start generating more and more income from advertising and less and less from the traditional software licencing model.
I suspect that we will see an online version of Office, developed in Silverlight, free to use and ad supported in the next 12 months.
Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!
Latest Comments
RSSLaptop Backpacks, Keith Nelson, Laura "Pistachio" Fitton, ShinyRed » Blog Archive » Links for 14.12.07, Francesco, Tom Raftery, Bernie Goldbach, Pete Connolly, Borro
Randy, Snowalker, butter, G4HQ Forum Admin, Authentic Jeans, Tom Raftery, Paul Browne - Technology in plain English, pb., The Code Cave, adam [...]
Philistine, Johnny, Mike, Graham Gosing, fed up, patrick, James, Paul M. Watson, Ronan, minionster [...]
Clayton, bhupendra, Ninj, Aaron, Lance, John, Don, Don, jon, gourav khurana [...]
Joe F. Martinez, Mike, Mike, Kuba, Nathan, McGyvR, Wii News, Oni, machaan, MajorHart [...]
gayle, Ellie, mike, Dee, krishna, diego, Jim Wagner, Joe Public, desa, [...]