donloeb.com

ok, so, if this doesn’t freak you out…. :)

a friend of ours, sachi, submitted a video to youtube a full 7 months ago. it’s a trailer she created to help raise money for a feature length documentary. while it’s fantastic and professionally produced (sachi recently graduated from the graduate school of journalism at berkeley and is a producer at frontline), it didn’t get many views…then, the day chad and steve released their famous “kings of video” piece about the google acquisition, she was selected as a featured video and put on the homepage. she found out because good morning america gave her a call…interestingly, it was also then promoted on yahoo’s homepage…wow…

now the youtube video stats (as of 10/29/06) are a bit different - 407k views, favorited 2418 times, 1882 ratings (nearly a 5 star average), and 734 comments…

hmmm….timing….did youtube deliberately feature her movie (and others) to make sure that the homepage was filled with quality content the day after the acquisition?

no matter - it shows how companies like youtube can be kingmakers. what’s interesting is that this is only the second google service which uses editorial to direct attention (google.com/ig provides default rss feeds). of course, yahoo has been doing this for years - they started by publishing ““yahoo picks of the day/week”” in 1994 (i believe)…

i wonder how google is going to manage this going forward…it’s very different than just relying on algorithms…btw, i wish yahoo would use the homepage more to help people discover the best of the web (blogs, rss feeds, videos, etc.).

lastly, watch the trailer - “crutch!”…it’s great. and, if you want to help fund the movie, shoot me a note and i’ll get you in touch with sachi… :)

they just launched a number of new rss feeds to communicate with customers…

and, they are powered by feedburner. that’s great…

absolutely hilarious…warning: not kid safe…

of course, i found this on another site, not on youtube. i love that they have millions of front-doors across the web - without owning any publishers or platforms (except their own video sharing platform of course!). they are completely CMS agnostic.

ok - nice win today against the #11 oregon ducks. but, i just read this AP article…and, what i love the most is the last paragraph…

Tedford has turned Cal into a football power — but it’s still Cal. Cosmologist George F. Smoot, who won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday, was introduced before the game to the cheering student section, which chanted “Nobel Prize! Nobel Prize!”

so, more on this later…but, it looks like ie7 is going to ship pretty darn soon! this is big news for all of you rss fans out there :)

The final release of IE7 is fast approaching … and i mean really fast … and will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download.

see niall’s post re RSS and ie7…btw, if you’re using feedburner, we’re already stripping out any DTDs (when ie7 requests the feed) so that ie7 doesn’t choke on your feed…cool!

just a quick note to let all the bay area folks know that my wife’s documentary, Reporter Zero, is playing at the Mill Valley Film Festival tonight at 930 pm and then again next saturday night.

it’s a documentary short on Randy Shilts - the SF Chronicle reporter who covered AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s and wrote “And the Band Played On“

Mill Valley Film Festival
www.mvff.com “Reporter Zero”
Fri. Oct 6, 9:30PM, Throckmorton
Sat. Oct 14, 11:00AM, Throckmorton

I don’t know if there are any tickets left…

please pass this on…thanks!

i wrote a post back in june that talked about rss usage…the gist was that rss is just plumbing and so, of course people don’t know what it is. it’s like saying - do you use http? or smtp?

as i pointed out, yahoo did a study (pdf) a year ago (october 2005) on rss adoption / awareness, etc. the conclusion was that while 4% of the US internet population knew what rss was, 31% actually used it…

well, niall just pointed to a study (pdf) that nielsen released yesterday that talks a bit about RSS (from a UK perspective)…the analysts came to the same conclusion…

With the rate of technological change there is a lot of confusion amongst consumers of what is referring to what. For example, 69% of Britons online has never heard of Really Simple Syndication, 67% has never heard of RSS yet 40% say they receive automatic news feeds to their browser or desktop – which is the service those terms refer to!

at feedburner, we’re seeing massive growth in rss usage…and, we expect this to accelerate over the next 6 months. microsoft, google, yahoo, aol, fox, and others are putting a lot of emphasis on aggregation…the key for these companies is to focus on the benefits first and foremost…and, then…to make it really easy :)

rick and eric went to the podcast and portable media expo this past weekend. they ran our booth, did a bunch of interviews, and gave a talk or two. you can read rick’s writeup here.

but, here’s why i’m writing this post -> i love this picture…one of our brand new feedburner t-shirts (woohoo - something other than stickers!) - signed by a bunch of our podcasters…very very cool…

they just launched webpage gadgets…very cool…you can now create a goog gadget that runs on the google homepage, desktop, and the web. the only issue is that the web gadgets use javascript which most social networks ban. in any event, it’s clear that the widget space is heating up…

thanks to steve for pointing it out…

ps - click here to see a google map gadget on my blog. unfortunately, JS doesn’t work in rss either…