New blog URL: www.michaelsevilla.com

Ah vanity.

I’ve owned my url for a few years with intentions of building a website.

Time (or rather the lack of), kids, and the need to work have lead to the realization it ain’t gonna happen.

What’s a remotely tech savvy guy to do? Set up another blog!

Yes I know blogs are so 2005. Once in a while I just might have something interesting to say. At least in my mind that is. And I do need to get things done during the day, hence you won’t see me hanging out on Facebook or responding to Twitter.

All new musings are on: www.michaelsevilla.com

The Battle at Kruger

This is an AMAZING video. 

Watch the 8 plus minute battle unfold, it gets really interesting around the 4 minute mark.

The first thing that struck me was how this event is a metaphor for life, business, competition, starting a new venture, take you pick.  Make sure you can hear the commentary as events unfold.

The Dawn of Intelligent Aggregation

This past week AideRSS and RSS Mixer announced services I’ve needed for quite a while. Both companies offer users the ability to define parameters for their RSS feed aggregation.

I, like many people, struggle to keep up with my daily blog reading (a*hem, research). Even though I often prune back my blog reading list (based on what I’ve determine to be frequency and continuation or origination of “interesting” ideas), I attempt to keep up with 70 feeds a day.

While both services allow you to aggregate your RSS feed and put levels of filters and prioritization, AideRSS shows the biggest promise.

AideRSS filtering service is built upon a proprietary ranking system called PostRank to determine the best posts on each blog tracked. PostRank uses the collective input from digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket and Bloglines. But what I really like is one feature that exists now, and one that will be launched in the near future.

NOW: So how does AideRSS handle a blog posting from Techcrunch vs. Glass Bottom Brain? By normalizing the PostRank system: “I look at the number of comments, number of bookmarks the visitors made, and the number of trackbacks. I collect this information from the internet and then normalize each post against the average for the blog in question – if you always get 15 comments, then you getting 17 comments doesn’t affect the ranking as much as, say getting 15 comments when you usually get 2.” (Ilya Grigorik)

After playing with AideRSS I emailed AideRSS and asked about near future enhancements. This is the part I love, and I’ve unabashedly scooped this one.

SOON: In the near future, AideRSS will more than likely allow you to enter keywords/phrases to track in addition to the existing aggregation and ranking functionality. That means if I want to follow software start-ups funded in Colorado, those posting can be prioritized and would get my attention first.

Fire Fox crossing the Rubicon with Coop

Yesterday’s announcement is going to dramatically change the way we view, interact, and directly interface with the Internet. And not just on a literal level. If the Fire Fox browser and the past evolution of plug-ins is indicative of future development, companies like Me.dium based here in Boulder are facing a competitor with millions of embedded and highly engaged users. And to make a gross generalization, the type of people that use Fire Fox (geeks, technology forward, whatever you want to call us) are more likely to experiment and ultimately adopt wide scale usage of Coop and future social browsing plug-ins.

But the biggest news is Mozilla’s recognition that the way many people engage the web is driven by the crowds they associate with. Kudos to them for Coop. Many have written about RSS and information flow streams. I like this 2/19 entry from Emily Chang. A browser that enables a user to enter the data stream without drowning is a huge improvement. Add social filtering to that data stream and you have a real game changer. It’s not the semantic web, but it is a huge improvement to how browsing and discovery is done today by many users.

On to Rome!

How will RSS evolve?

Great article on the near/short term evolution of RSS into a fundamental communications tool by Alex Iskold.  As the ubiquity of RSS grows, companies like Feedburner and Pheedo will play an instrumental role in the advertising of that communication stream.    RSS must evolve to expand its utility by becoming more than just a dumb messenger.

Good idea, terrible execution is spelled mymuv? Who cares!

Mymuv.com (pronounced: my-move, how the hell do you get the u sound from that spelling? ) is the worst company/website name. In fact, although it is barely April, I’ll go out on a limb and proclaim mymuv.com the name-dog of 2007. In ten years when we think back to web 2.0, we’ll laugh at that name. Just like we laughed at 1.0’s non revenue generating billion dollar valued company.

This tragically named company has, at its foundation, a good idea. Harness social opinion on issues of importance to you. Yet they rely too much on creating new social content and opinion from scratch. In essence, the folks over at mymuv.com are (for the moment) mandating new community creation in order to make their site relevant. Great, let me spend more time creating new content for somebody else *sarcasm intended*.

If I were them this is what I might do. Don’t start from the beginning, start from the end.

Why not aggregate collective opinion into a search engine like format. Aside from the fact that their most recent discussions border on banality (at best) they could provide a real service to those wanting to know what (in the aggregate) people think about say Ipod vs. Zen (sorry MS, Zune is dead). Not some dumb-ass star/rating system that can be gamed (digg anyone?). But the absolute aggregated consumer opinions of both Ipod and Zen Mp3 players. Show me a trend line of discussion preferably using sentiment, and let me see some of the major issues that bubble up.

Come on guys, it takes a certain level of creativity to derive “move” into “muv”. Guess you should have spent the creativity capital on the business instead…

;~)

Ground Breaker Alert: Google offers TiSP

 If only it were true…

;~0

http://lifehacker.com/software/google/google-brings-broadband-to-bathrooms-248734.php

Out for beta: Newsgator Online. Try it!

Somebody has been *reading* my mind (pun intended).

About 1 month ago I switched blog readers from the tragically out of date bloglines to Newsgator’s online service.  My reason for switching was purely subjective.  I felt that any service that won’t update and improve its service doesn’t deserve my attention.  All self-importance allocation aside, bloglines web 1.0 just bummed me out, it was not fun to look at, although it was fast.

I settled on Newsgator (nice UI, Colorado company, etc…) and made the switch.  My only beef with the service was the slow load time of the feed summaries.  I’m not an impatient guy, but they were really slow.

Today I saw Greg’s posting (ok, i’m a bit behind) and immediately switched to the beta.  MUCH BETTER!  Newsgator, thanks for reading my mind.

The Best Windows Machine Ever Built*

Without blatantly dating myself, I was once the source of envy (happened once) in college. My freshman year I had the greatest computer, a Macintosh. While it was not new to the market, it was safe to say that most students at the University of New Hampshire did not have access to one. I was in a crowd of one (as far as I know); a non-CS major, I was viewed with some degree of awe (again, a unique collegiate experience for me) that I had the inclination to learn how to use one.

While most people were using typewriters (remember those?) a fairly strait forward processing program allowed me to hunt/peck my way through any paper.

Fast forward, grad school, work world, bye-bye Apple. Life dictated adherence to Windows OS. I bought lots of grey boxes, both desktop and laptop. Windows OS got bigger, slower, and quite frankly a bloated mess of software overkill.

The title of this blog is a direct quote from David Cohen* (minus the quotes), so I can’t take credit for the origin. I can, however, take note that I am part of a growing number of people making a switch.

Give me a clean OS, visually appealing with lots of great features that I care about, not some engineer  (oh look, how exciting, excel has more cells).  Please give me a platform that works with my entire life, not just my work life.  Make it fun to use, it needs to run PowerPoint, Excel, and Word.  If you make it grey, please make it look somewhat cool.

The best Windows machine ever built? My Powerbook G4.

Twitter and Micro Attention

Just heard Evan Williams discuss Twitter.

I must admit, the jury is still out for me regarding wide acceptance of Twitter. For those that haven’t heard, Twitter is a mash of dodgeball, IM, and a blog that is designed to answer the question “What are you doing”?

At SxSW Twitter made quite a stir (techies + booze + music + wireless devices = FUN).  Apparently Twitter acted as a self reporting geo-locator.  I heard one podcaster say it was like high school: trying to figure out whose parents are out of town and have the best booze :-p

While I was considering how Evan plans to make money on Twitter (If I can track him down I’m going to ask him) it dawned on me that Twitter is a good tool to self report and parse out information in a micro attention social interface and easily digestible (albeit constantly interrupting) manner. It may in fact be the next evolutionary step for blogging.

Blogging tends to be a stream of consciousness, topically driven (at least at first).  Twitter limits user input by a 140 character cap.  This mandates pith.  And judging by the comments on Evan’s friends, it dramatically changes the nature of what is being shared among a friend network.  While we listened, updates flashed across his screen like: eating an orange, late breakfast, I HATE PHOTOSHOP,  checking emails now.  One guy even used his post to announce that he updated his blog.  Guess he doesn’t trust RSS.

 Stan James CTO of lijit has a different angle.