If you had nothing else to do on a Tuesday, here’s a list of RSS feed and blog directories.

There are quite a few services that I’d never even heard of. Some of them are useful, some of them not so. Some of them you have to be active on like RateItAll and Blogazoo (good luck with that). Some of them have broken sign up links. And some of them are old fashioned link exchanges. Most of the earliest listed services I’ve been using for the past few years. Out of the new services I’ve discovered via this list, BlogSearchEngine has actually given me the most referrers so far.

I’m not quite sure that listing with all of the services mentioned will help blog or feed popularity in the long run, but hey, it’s an experiment for someone interested in SEO.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, blog directory, blogosphere, RSS, RSS directory

A not so hypothetical question for my readers: What’s worse, getting an email about a store grand opening or putting said grand opening on one’s social calendar?

Since I mentioned the Apple Store Suburban Square Grand Opening a few days ago, I somehow found myself in Ardmore, PA at the ungodly hour of 10:10am this morning. Not only was there a line out the door, it was around the corner and snaked along three sides of the building. At least I was there in time to get an official Apple Store (hugely oversized for my petite frame) t-shirt.

The line was so long (and oh yes, there was a security guard outside directing traffic) and regular people who were shopping at Suburban Square didn’t get what the hubbub was about. In fact, a middle aged couple had the misfortune to ask a few people in line around me what the occasion was.

Middle aged couple: “What is going on?”

People around me in line: “The Apple store just opened today.”

Middle aged couple: “No, really, what’s going on? What are they doing?”

An excited person in line replied with “It’s the Apple Store Grand Opening!”

Middle aged couple looked at each other incredulously and walked away.

Among the sights in the store, ooh shiny Mac Minis, 30 inch Cinema Displays, Video iPods and hot MacBookPro action. I spent about a good 45 minutes in the store, egging on a Video iPod purchase and people watching. The activity died down about 11:30ish, when the t-shirts ran out. Oh, and there were lots of bloggers. Bloggers taking pictures and video - like the quicktime movie below (hint, click on the image).

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple Store, black plastic framed glasses

Update: 5/15/06 Two things, first, in case you were wondering there’s a whole Web site devoted just to Apple Stores…now you know.

Secondly, a certain blog author made an appearance in this video about the Grand Opening.

The number of RSS readers and feed aggregation services is just amazing, especially considering how many of these did not exist even a year ago. Here’s a sampling of RSS related agents I’m seeing in my site logs now.

Agent: Megite/0.1 (http://www.megite.com)

Agent: RSS-SPIDER (RSS Feed Seeker http://www.rss-spider.com/fsb.php)

Agent: FeedOnFeeds/0.1.9 (+http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/)

Agent: YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide)

Agent: MagpieRSS/0.72 (+http://magpierss.sf.net)

Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1; aggregator:TailRank; http://tailrank.com/robot) Gecko/20021130

Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Google Desktop)

Agent: Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)

Agent: kinjabot (http://www.kinja.com; 3 Readers)

Agent: FeedLounge (http://my.feedlounge.com/), 1 subscribers, next refresh in approx. 14400 seconds

Agent: JetBrains Omea Reader 2.1.1 (http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/)

Agent: NetNewsWire/2.1b17 (Mac OS X; http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)

Agent: Syndic8/1.0 (http://www.syndic8.com/)

Agent: MagpieRSS/0.7 (+http://magpierss.sf.net; No cache)

Agent: Bloglines/3.0-rho (http://www.bloglines.com; 18 subscribers)

Agent: Feedster Crawler/1.0; Feedster, Inc. (2 subscribers)

Agent: PluckFeedCrawler/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://www.pluck.com; 1 subscribers)

Agent: NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 5 subscribers)

Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1; Rojo 1.0; http://www.rojo.com/corporate/help/agg/; Aggregating on behalf of 5 subscriber(s) online at http://www.rojo.com/?feed-id=2508476) Gecko/20021130

Agent: AppleSyndication/52

Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050922 Fedora/1.0.7-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.7 [Newsonfeeds]

Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Topix.net; http://www.topix.net/topix/newsfeeds)

Agent: SharpReader/0.9.4.1 (.NET CLR 1.1.4322.573; WinNT 5.1.2600.0)

Agent: rss-bot/1.0 (http://www.plazoo.com)

Agent: AttensaOnline/1.0 (http://www.attensa.com; 1 subscribers)

Agent: RssReader/1.0.88.0 (http://www.rssreader.com) Microsoft Windows NT 5.1.2600.0

Technorati Tags: RSS, Internet, Blogosphere

Nothing like taking a quick check at site stats to discover that someone from a .mil IP address with a Baghdad Time (BT) timestamp was looking at your picture.

I wish I had seen this WP plugin for Update Linkroll earlier.

The plugin is used in WP 1.2 to update the linkroll. For some reason in 1.2 the one line of PHP used to update the linkroll had not been included in the index.php template.

// Uncomment the next line if you want to track blog updates from weblogs.com
//include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.’/links-update-xml.php’);

Anyway, my linkroll should be updating now. We’ll see.

Update: I hadn’t realized that weblogs.com/changes.xml isn’t working anymore so I’m trying to use the blo.gs updating service http://blo.gs/changes10.xml.

From NY Times

Earlier this month, Warner became the first major record label to ask MP3 blogs to play its music. The blogs - which are relatively new but increasingly popular - are personal Web sites that offer music criticism right next to the actual music, in the form of downloadable MP3 files.
But as is sometimes the case when marketers try to insinuate themselves into online communities, the company’s approach did not go as planned. Warner… ran into a culture clash with the small world of MP3 blogs, annoying some of the very people it wanted to win over, especially after one or more people at Warner apparently posted anonymous messages to make it appear that ordinary music fans were defending the label.
…
In the week after the song was posted on Music for Robots, a message board on the site attracted some thoughtful commentary on Warner’s move. But a few comments, posted under several different names, stood out because they looked like something one might read on a teen-pop fan site.
…
A check of site records by Mr. Willett revealed that all four of the suspect comments had been posted from the same Internet Protocol address, indicating that they came from the same computer or from a computer within the same company. That address was also the source of two e-mail messages that Ms. Bechtel sent to a reporter, as well as the original messages sent to the bloggers.
The entertainment industry has for some years been going into chat rooms and message boards to promote its products. But Ms. Bechtel said this kind of activity was not part of the Secret Machines campaign. She said the comments could have been posted independently by fans of the band who worked at the company.
…
Mr. Willett said that it was obvious the favorable comments on his site had not been left by “real people,” and that they had soured his opinion of Warner Brothers’ Internet efforts. “I know we’re dealing in relatively uncharted territory here, but I’d expect a slightly different level of participation,” he said. “We’re not an AOL chat room.”

Hehe. The article summary could be written as “Music blogger pays attention to site stats, exposes amateurish attempts of BigMusicCo to gain blogger cred.” It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who looks at site stats. After a bit of googling, I have found the Music for Robots Sells Out post for your edification and intellectual curiosity.

(One would think that the NY Times would maybe perhaps link the darn post they’re discussing, but apparently the idea of “contextual hyperlinking on the Web” hasn’t reached their online editors yet. )

Stupid comment spammer left a comment in an old story that attempted to appear somewhat legit but the one URL he used went to a site for pain meds. Interesting user agent.

Host: 61.30.47.21 Url: /index.php?s= Http Code : 200

Date: Aug 13 21:44:03 Http Version: HTTP/1.0″ Size in Bytes: 41677

Referer: - Agent: libwww-perl/5.800

From the Guardian

They were once seen as the preserve of the geek, but nowadays personal opinion and diary pages - weblogs or “blogs” - are so powerful that huge corporations are taking an interest.
The sites that started as observational home pages for enthusiasts have become so powerful that they are starting a new industry of blog monitoring in which media companies scour the net to advise brands on how their name is being talked about online, away from the traditional newspaper and broadcast media sites.

Lord knows that I’ve written about my experiences with corporations large and small here. To be fair, I usually write when I really really like something or I’m completely disillusioned.

Via Instapundit

From CNN

IBM sees blogs as a way to revolutionize employee communication, one executive said on the sidelines at the July 23 conference, which attracted about 300 attendees. “It’s about decreasing social space between employees, and increasing the amount of knowledge shared between people,” said James Spohrer, director of IBM’s Almaden Research Center. An example of an employee blog, he said, might contain elements of a resume, some of an individual’s educational background and work experience, along with information on product development strategies colleagues and customers can view on a round-the-clock basis. Company interaction The sharing of such information between company employees and customers promises to speed feedback on efforts to produce new products and improve business processes, Spohrer said.

OOOHHHH, just saw this in my referers…..a geolocation page for WordPress powered blogs. Similar to the earlier GeoURL.

James at OTB has a summary of a Chicago Tribune article discussing the impact of blog advertising. The article is a good read about how blog advertising works and why it works so well for bloggers with healthy blog traffic.

In a similar vein, here’s this Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) article about a lawyer who bought a Google AdWord on a competitor’s name.

To all of those blogging evangelists (cough cough) who repeatedly say that blogging will save the world, feed hungry people, transform political discourse, bring democracy to Iraq and cure cancer…you probably didn’t get this note, but James at OTB (and presumably others) recieved an invite to blog the GOP Convention this summer.

Will this transform politics as we know it? Probably not. Will it increase GOP blogging Google results? Most likely.