Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

02.10.05
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Ask Jeeves acquires Bloglines

Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, confirms that they have been bought by Ask Jeeves, in a deal both he and Ask Jeeve’s Jim Lanzone are very happy with. Mark says:

So what will change?

We’ll have a lot more resources available to us. For example, we’ll be integrating Ask’s killer Teoma search engine technology within Bloglines. This will vastly improve our blog search capabilities. We don’t think that world-class blog search exists yet; with Teoma and Bloglines that will happen.

Sounds good to me!

Bloglines used to be my aggregator of choice until I hit a usability limit caused by too many feeds, at which point I changed to NetNewsWire which works really well for me now. NetNewsWire and Bloglines are working in concert, however, so that I will soon be able to sync my posts between the online and offline readers. Which would, I have to admit, be rather cool.

So, yay for Bloglines!

02.10.05
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Another one bites the dust

Another blogger fired for blogging – this time Mark Jen got the sack from Google after just a few weeks for blogging about how he didn’t like his remuneration package, amongst other things.

What surprises me about this is that I thought Google were savvy enough to have a clear blog policy and that they would have ensured that all employees understood it. They are a truly geek-laden company, after all, and geek-laden companies should be amongst the first to realise that employees will blog. Maybe not all of them, maybe not all the time, but they will have people blogging and some will be blogging about their work and about the company.

For Google, that should have been a no-brainer, particularly in the light of the fact that they own Blogger. How on earth the concept of blogging guidelines could possibly have escaped them, I just do not know.

Neville Hobson has some good commentary, as does Scoble.

02.10.05
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According to Google, the rest of the world does not exist

It’s no real surprise, although a little disappointing, the new Google Maps feature only covers the USA and the bits of Canada they could squeeze on the page. If you scroll east, for example, in order to locate the rest of the world, you just get lots and lots of blue.

I know the Atlantic is big, but it’s not that big.

Now, I know there’ll be lots of terribly valid arguments about why this is so, but I still think there’s a fundamental mental block regarding the rest of the world from a lot of American companies and developers. Ok, yada yada stating the obvious. And yada yada Google search localisation. Ok, so I can use Google in Welsh. That’s nice. But why can’t I set the time in Gmail to GMT? Why must all my emails be stamped PST? [UPDATE: Problem explained if not solved.] And why isn’t there at the very least a note on Google Maps to say that they know the rest of the world exists, they just haven’t quite got round to adding the data in yet?

So much for the internet being a global village.

02.10.05
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Fighting ‘feed intimidation syndrome’

Tammy Green takes my post about RSS overload and turns it into a great guide for people who want to start using RSS but really aren’t sure where to start.

I agree with Tammy that the blogosphere, and RSS, can be very intimidating for those who are just starting to feel their way, and think her suggested methodology is eminently sensible:

  • Start with a list people or authors whose opinions you know and respect, and then check if these folks have blogs.
  • Subscribe to their feeds, if they have them…
  • Live with the feeds you’ve found for a few days and then ruthlessly delete those that don’t add value to the topic you’re pursuing.

Tammy has some other intermediate steps, but that last one is the one that I think is both the most important, and the hardest.