Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Really odd but since I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 the number of subscribers to my blog has roughly halved. Today it is reading 632. It hasn’t been below 1,000 in at least 6 months never mind down at the 600 mark.

I realise that this is likely due to my moving to the newer FeedBurner (FeedSmith) plugin which required me to setup a new feed in FeedBurner but as you can see from the screenshot above, the old feed is reading 0 subscribers!

I put a 301 re-direct on the old feedburner plugin’s feed from this blog but what I am curious about is that the Subscribe address for this blog (tomrafteryit.net/feed) hasn’t changed at all. Do people subscribe directly to the FeedBurner feed address?

Sean McNamara alerted me via the comments on this blog that my RSS feed was broken (thanks a million Sean). I sorted that out this morning so it should be good again and Google Reader is certainly having no problem seeing my posts now.

So what happened? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure (!) but I think it had more to do with my FeedBurner account than WordPress, per se.

The sequence of events was along the lines of

• I checked the WordPRess 2.3 plugin compatibility page and realised my old, fully functioning FeedBurner plugin needed to be updated
• I uploaded the new plugin and activated it (having deleted the old one)
• I did the rest of the upgrade and fixed issues as they arose

Then I saw Sean’s comment. Uh oh! I went over to Google Reader and sure enough no posts for the last couple of days were present, d’oh!

I checked back my FeedBurner Plugin config and while all seemed ok, when I checked the “create a FeedBurner feed for …” link, it looks like that the updated plugin created a new feed for the blog.

This meant I had to head over to the FeedBurner site and set up the new feed from scratch – a considerable annoyance. All my stats on my old feed are no longer associated with the new one.

Strictly, this wasn’t a WordPress issue, more of a left-field issue associated with upgrading the FeedBurner plugin. However, the lack of support by WordPress for older plugins is the only reason I upgraded – triggering the loss of my RSS feed.

If we ignore the fact that the term Web 2.0 is controversial for all kinds of reasons and concentrate on the applications themselves, which Web 2.0 apps (using the broadest possible definition) do you use most?

I use:

1. my blog and podcast software all the time (they are run out of WordPress)
2. my Flickr account regularly to post photos
3. Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets frequently for collaboration or sharing of documents
4. Google’s Calendar to synch with my laptop and mobile phone calendars
5. Technorati, PubSub and Google’s Blogsearch to subscribe to RSS searches
6. Flock as my main browser of choice (primarily because of the Flickr and Del.icio.us integration) – I also use Firefox, Camino, Safari and IE7
7. Feedburner to burn and track my feeds
8. NetNewsWire, Google Reader and iTunes to consume my feed list
9. TechMeme, Megite and TailRank for keeping up with tech news
10. Del.icio.us very occasionally to store URLs for items I have found interesting

What cool Web 2.0 apps am I not using that I should be using? What are your favourite Web 2.0 apps?

Apologies for the short notice on this one but I only got notice this morning that the interview I am doing with Steve for the Podleaders podcast is taking place this afternoon so you will need to be quick getting your questions in!

Steve Olechowski is the co-founder and COO of FeedBurner – FeedBurner provides an online feed management suite for anyone publishing rss feeds, as well as services for anyone who wants to advertise in their rss feed.

As I mentioned previously, I interviewed Michael Arrington of TechCrunch last week as part of my ongoing series of recorded and podcast phone interviews. Michael really impressed me in the interview with his humour, his obvious intelligence and his humility.

This is definitely one of the most stimulating interviews I have recorded yet – despite stiff competition from Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and TJ McIntyre.

These are the questions I asked Michael and the times in the interview they were asked:

• Michael, for anyone who is not familiar with your name can you start off by telling the listeners who is Michael Arrington? What is it that you do? – 0:15
• How long has TechCrunch been running now? – 3:58
• I was interviewing Robert Scoble last week and he said he’d never heard of TechCrunch 6 months ago – now it is the first site he looks at every day – 4:09
• Feedburner reports Techcrunch has 15020 subscribers – to what do you attribute the success of techcrunch – 4:46?
• Since TechCrunch is a success you must be really busy, is it a full-time job? – 7:29
• You don’t have ads on the site – how do you fund it? – 9:32
• You have recently joined John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing – can you explain what that is and how do you see this changing TechCrunch? – 11:46
• How is it different from Google’s AdWords? – 12:54
• What’s the story with the BBQs? how did that tradition get started? – 13:13
• TechCrunch is part of the Web 2.0 Workgroup – What is the web 2.0 workgroup? – 15:50
• What is Web 2.0? Is it just another catchall buzzword like ‘interactive’ designed to grab the attention of vc’s? – 17:14
• What web 2.0 app(s) could you not live without? 19:56
• Ad supported sites seem to be becoming the norm – is everything headed that way? do you think we will one day see an online version of Office/Windows supported by ad revenue? – 21:27
• Are you a Mac or PC user? – 23:27
• What kind of world do you want your kids to grow up in? – 27:27

The full interview is 29 minutes and you can listen to the interview here (6.6mb mp3).