Nov 25

US goes on holiday, the internet goes bye bye

By Stefano Buliani Thoughts, WWW No Comments »

Does the blogging world revolve around the US? This blog statistics seem to confirm it.

I had a look at the statistics for both my blog and other websites I work on (charts below) and it would seem that most of the internet traffic for blogs is generated by the US. Everything stopped for thanksgiving. There’s no denying that even in Europe we’ve seen the internet boom and the whirlwind of activity and startups ensuing from it, but the traffic, the user-base, seems to be still mostly US based.

Are we European still a bit behind in terms of internet-mentality? With China being still pretty much behind a great-wall internet-wise and broadband connections not being quite as readily available in most areas of Asia as they are in the west is the only big “market” the US?

The Big Deal - statistics

chart2.jpg

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Nov 21

More kindle

By Stefano Buliani General Babbling, Technology, Thoughts 1 Comment »

So it turns out very few people agree with what I said about the kindle just two days ago. In fact, according to Amazon, the gizmo sold out in five and a half hour (source: Engadget)

Regardless I stick to my initial opinion. 399 bucks is allot of dough to cough up for something that has neither the charms nor the solidity of a book, I can throw a big book to make a big noise but if i throw a kindle it’ll just make me 399$ poorer – a futile point but I thought that with my incredible ability to knock books off my bed-side table had to be mentioned. Moreover I don’t recall ever having to plug a book to recharge it for a few hours to be able to read, if I want to read I want to do it right now.

Jeff Jarvis makes a very good point in his post today about the much advertised blog content availability on the kindle. Why would I pay for something that is free on the net?

I violently agree with him. As I said already I’m very passionate about my book collection and a kindle would be of no value for me from that point of view. Either you give me a device capable of accessing any kind of content on the net (for free) or you provide me with a cheap e-book reader – Not a stupidly expensive internet-impaired Frankenstein.

At least this is my view, but it would seem that there’s a generation out there who is still not used to free blogs on the net and is quite happy to pay for the device and the content. It’s a cultural fact, they just don’t know any better.

update: Arrington bashes the Kindle 

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Nov 18

FaveBot – RSS aggregation unleashed

By Stefano Buliani Technology, Thoughts, WWW No Comments »

I recently came across FaveBot. The site aims at aggregating and filtering RSS feeds from the most renowned news sites and blogs all over the internet and has recently received a major update functionality-wise.

The site doesn’t exactly look beautiful but its minimalistic simple interface makes it incredibly easy to use.
Once the really brief signup process is completed you are all set to go. Through the “My Trackings” tab you’ll be able to specify search keywords and the categories of feeds you want the site to search in. Results are immediately accessible from the “MyDiscoveries” section.
The categories currently available on the site are blogs, books, DVDs, events, music, news, photos, podcasts and videos.

Another spiffy functionality is the possibility to upload your iTunes library file and let the site aggregate for you all relevant news about your favorite bands.

The only thing I find quite confusing is the fact that while you’re allowed to create multiple tracking filters the results are then all mashed together. the only way to access the outcome of a single search is to click on the number of results in the Trackings summary page.
The site would, perhaps, grow at a considerably faster pace by letting its users add new fees to its database. At the moment the list of feeds to be spidered seems to be “hard-coded”.

The idea looks solid and fairly useful. With just a few fixes and usability improvements it could probably turn into a profitable business in its niche between Feedburner and Digg.

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