Tag Archive for 'michael_arrington'

How to make your website more indexable by search engines

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/11/2005
in Technology and Web Standards
. 2 Comments

I see Michael Arrington has a post on TechCrunch today about Dipsie dCloak - this is a product which is supposed to help websites make their content more indexable by search engines.

That sounds laudable enough I hear you say - but wait a minute, I know two words which can help you do that without the aid of any product - the words? Web Standards. Build a site which is web standards compliant and search engines will have no problems indexing your site - also, you site will load faster, will be cross browser compatible and will work predictably on most mobile browsers!

Don’t know if your site is web standards compliant - check it out using the free validator on the W3C site.

Michael Arrington interview

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/11/2005
in Interviews
. 5 Comments

I was talking to Michele Neylon last night and he was in great form noting that the number of subscribers to his site had passed the 100 hundred mark - I’m afraid I punctured his balloon when I mentioned I had just been interviewing Michael Arrington - Michael only set up his TechCrunch blog reviewing Web 2.0 products last June and he already has over 15,000 subscribers! That’s right, 15,000 subscribers in less than 6 months!

I had a fascinating chat with Michael - he spoke about his background before TechCrunch, his famous BBQs, and his plans for the future. Michael really impressed me with his breadth of knowledge of what’s hot and more importantly what’s coming down the line - he was easy to talk to and generous with his knowledge and time.

As we are coming up to the American holiday season (Thanksgiving), I am going to hold off on publishing this podcast until next Monday - put it in your calendars! Oh! and for those who thought the previous interviews were a shade long, this one comes in at a shade under 30 minutes.

Upcoming podcasts - get your questions in!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/11/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging and Technology
. 4 Comments

Great news! I have some extremely interesting podcast interviews coming up soon that I am very excited about - in the next few days I plan on recording interviews with:

If you have any questions you’d like me to ask any of these interviewees, feel free to leave your questions in the comments and, as always, I’ll ask them for you during the interview.

New Audible podcasting format - why bother?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 14/11/2005
in Podcast
. 10 Comments

I have recently started to take an interest podcasting again - I produced a few podcasts during the summer to dip my toes into podcasting but I had to stop when the soundcard on my PowerBook blew.

Recently, I have recorded a couple of my talks and podcast them with generous help from FrankP and NearFm and even more recently, Robert Scoble has agreed to let me record and podcast an interview I will do with him by phone tomorrow evening.

So I have been following the world of podcasting with increasing interest and was surprised to see a war breaking out there over the weekend!

The war is about what audio format to use in podcasts - traditionally the audio format has been mp3 files but a company called Audible has proposed a new .aa format. According to Mitch Ratcliffe (an Audible consultant), the main advantage of the .aa format seems to be that it is possible to audit how often they have been downloaded - this is, of course, important from a monetisation point of view! However, Mitch rather lost the head (and thereby the argument) when not everyone agreed with him.

As Michael Arrington put it:

Instead of embracing the bloggers that would normally talk about this, Mitch Ratcliffe (an Audible consultant) went on an unmitigated, unprovoked character assasination romp (with follow up attacks) against Dave Winer (â€?he’s willing to stealâ€?), Om Malik and others. This sure is an interesting way to engage the sneezers. As Om puts it, Mitch “goes after the dissenters with a verbal baseball batâ€?…. If you find yourself on the other side of a debate with Dave Winer, Om Malik, Doc Searles, Jeff Jarvis and others, maybe you should rethink your position. Because it is very likely you are wrong.

Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Michael Arrington and others have been mounting a robust defence of mp3’s.

In my own case, I don’t see myself shifting away from mp3s any time soon. As far as I can see from reading about Audible’s new format, you upload your podcasts to Audible’s servers, they convert to .aa and host the podcast there. It is a paid service.

My podcasting is pretty basic - I record the sound, convert to mp3, upload to archive.org (free hosting and bandwidth) and then link to the archive.org file from within my wordpress blog. Wordpress recognises the .mp3 file as an audio file and creates the correct enclosures transparently for me so I don’t need to worry about the tech side of the podcasting. How would WordPress deal with .aa files? I have no idea. I suspect, it wouldn’t recognise them as audio and therefore podcast subscribers (listeners) wouldn’t know you had published new podcasts.

I think Audible’s strategy is wrong here - I think they would have been far better served coming up with a mechanism for measuring stats on mp3s rather than coming up with a new proprietary file format. What do you think?

UPDATE:
Post updated after comments from Mitch and Pete informed me that .aa is not a new format - sorry ’bout that guys.

Microsoft 2.0? Yawn.

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 2/11/2005
in Technology and Windows
. 4 Comments

The online world is buzzing with the news of Microsoft’s conversion to Web 2.0!

Tim O’Reilly is quite positive about it:

Overall, leaves me with a lot of optimism that Microsoft is fully engaged with the right problems, and we’ll be hearing a lot more from them.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch said:

After what I saw today, I despair for many a silicon valley startup. Seriously.

And Om Malik, in what has to be one of the more original posts on Microsoft’s announcement reckons:

A little nip-and-tuck, some hip-hop and a $500 haircut with highlights to hide the 40-odd summers. Its a midlife crisis you can see from a mile. Trust me!

What are they all on about? Well, yesterday Microsoft announced two new services - Windows Live and Office Live - these are not, as the name might imply, online replacements for Windows and Office (more’s the pity - but i guess that’s one cash cow not ready for the slaughterhouse just yet!) - they are more like portal sites.

Windows Live, for example, is Start.com but there’s loads more coming to it we are promised - just look at the Windows Live Ideas page.

The announcement was made by Bill Gates himself, and by Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie - and it is being claimed as another “turn on a dime” moment (remember the last one was in 1995 when Bill realised that there was something out there called the Internet and people were using it without paying microsoft anything?).

Personally, if it weren’t for Michael Arrington’s enthusing, I’d fail to be even slightly whelmed!

UPDATE:
I just spotted the Live.com team have a blog

Further Edited to add:
Of course, if you have a Mac, don’t bother trying to view live.com - as usual microsoft’s developers live in a monocultural Windows only world - the chances of them taking over the web when they stubbornly refuse to develop for other platforms are, thankfully, small!

Yet another update:
I see Joel Spolsky has also rounded on Live.com’s poor Firefox support and DHTML issues

Flock fails to flabbergast!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/10/2005
in Browsers and Technology
. 4 Comments

I struggled for alliteration with that title, didn’t I?

Flock is a new browser which was launched overnight - it is still in beta (isn’t everything these days? 1.0 versions are so 90’s!), and it is billed as a browser for Web 2.0! Michael Arrington from TechCrunch broke the story of the launch.

I have been playing around with it this morning and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it is a very slick interface on OS X - I haven’t tried it on a PC yet (see screenshot below), it has some nice functionality, and it appears to be fast and stable for a beta browser.

New Flock Browser screenshot on OS X

Like Firefox, Flock has the ability to add Extensions and when you browse to the available extensions for Flock, my three favourite Firefox extensions are available for Flock too (Adblock, Web Developer and Greasemonkey) - yeah!

Where Flock is supposed to differentiate from existing browsers is in support for Web 2.0-type apps. It does this by connecting to del.icio.us, Flickr and your blog software of (limited) choice (it has a built-in blog editor).

However, Flock was written on top of the Firefox codebase, so it should be stable and fast and it should support Firefox extensions - so no great shakes there. The blog editor is poor enough, it doesn’t support WordPress Categories, for instance, it doesn’t have a Quick Link for blockquoting and most importantly, it doesn’t seem to allow you to view/edit previous posts or drafts.

I found a very minor bug when adding my blog to the blog editor - notice in the dialog box below:

Flock Blog add bug

The explanatory text says “Click Finish to save your settings” whereas the button you need to click is labelled “Done”

The del.icio.us integration is nice - click the star button beside the uri and the address is automatically added to your del.icio.us account. You can turn on the ability to tag your del.icio.us bookmarks - this should be on by default in my opinion.

The Flickr integration I can’t really comment on as I don’t use Flickr much at all.

All in all, Flock is a nice browser but it underwhelms and I can’t see myself moving from Firefox to Flock just yet.

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