Well, that figures. As soon as I complain about gray text in the comments to Scoble’s rant on weblog design, I realize that I’m guilty as well. And after much gnashing of teeth, I’m trying out a new CSS design. It still needs work, but it seems to be a step in the right direction.

Based upon a sample size of two, every blogger should add their own RSS feed to their My Yahoo! RSS headline widget. My feed appeared in Yahoo search about one day after I added it. And fredshouse appeared about a day and a half after I added it to My Yahoo!

Yahoo – my RSS feed is now showing up in Yahoo search. Less than a day after I manually added my feed to the My Yahoo! RSS headline widget.

Over on SAP Ventures, Jeffrey Nolan is experimenting on how large an imaginary person’s network can grow. At last count, his Fakester network has 20 connections with 18,000 people three degrees away. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.

1. People can game the system by accepting invitations to boost their connection rank.
2. It’s rude to say no.
3. There’s minimal downside to accepting invitations.

I would expect this to be corrected once the network really gets to work. It’s easy to accept invitations when nothing is going on. But the decision will be revisited quickly once requests for connection start coming through. In fact, a rank based upon number of requests and percentage of approved requests might be more effective than a manual rank in measuring unsymmetric relationships.

Everybody is talking about it, so I decided to take a look for myself.

My first query was the inevitable vanity query. And the first thing that I noticed is that it returned the old userland hosted weblog before the current weblog. Since the hosted weblog hasn’t been updated in almost four months, it looks like the temporal side of Yahoo search could use a bit more tweaking.

The next thing that I noticed is that I didn’t see the Add to My Yahoo! link for my RSS feed. So I searched for the shifted librarian – no RSS feed there either. Then I realized that it would help to actually have a My Yahoo! account, so I created an account and was able to find the shifted librarian feed. Went back to my vanity query and still no joy.

I have no idea why my feed wasn’t found, but I ended up manually adding my feed to My Yahoo! I hope to report back when my feed shows up on my vanity query.

I’ve been known to consider my weblog a conversation. But Michael Herman’s comment that blogging is a high-tech version of bathroom grafitti reminds me that conversation is a group activity [via Scoble]. And since soliloquy is the primary form of discourse here, I can’t really call this a conversation.

A weblog may be a good place to start a conversation. And it may be a good way to distribute the results of a conversation. But it’s not a particularly good way to have a conversation – it has many of downsides of email and it’s slower to boot. It’s more of a soap box from which to proclaim opinions.

So welcome to my soap box, where I hold forth on the internet, software, sports and whatever else takes my fancy. Feel free to drag your own soap box near by and join in.

Intent matters. Every time Google modifies their search algorithm, businesses that move down in the results are hurt. But I give them a pass because I believe that their intent is to improve search for everyone not to hurt those businesses. And I believe that they are generally successful in that intent.

Google’s Atom push penalizes readers whose aggregators don’t support it. James Robertson contends that Atom is nothing but a tax on aggregator developers. And Mark Bernstein asks Have you noticed how little new syndication software is showing up lately? So when I say Google owes us an explanation, I mean that Google needs to demonstrate good intent if they want to portray themselves as doing no evil.

I am for applications, not against Atom. Breaking current applications is bad. Providing new applications is good. Where are my new applications?

Scot’s Newsletter is dabbling with RSS:

I can’t promise this will be a good use of RSS, that the newsletter will appear the way it should, or that I will continue this test beyond this issue of the newsletter. I can’t even promise that I will eventually roll out an RSS feed. In other words, this might disappear never to be seen or heard of again.

Scot goes on to ask that readers not switch from email to RSS because his advertising revenue is based on his guaranteed circulation of 41,000. Since I’m the contrary sort who would like to subscribe via RSS rather than email, I’ll just toss my two cents in.

Your assumptions dictate your answer. If you assume that circulation means non-bounced emails, then you’ve already precluded RSS as a revenue producing delivery mechanism. I think that all email based revenue models are suspect in view of the current spam growth rate. And the latest call for email postage is frightening. So I’d consider refinements of the revenue model.

1. Redefine circulation to include RSS – Greg Reinacker has a solution for counting unique RSS deliveries. Something like RSSgenr8 could be used to convert the online issue to a RSS feed [found via Lockergnone]. This might not work in general, but I think that Scot’s advertisers are tech savvy and could be persuaded.
2. Redefine circulation to include views from RSS – Distribute the newsletter table of contents via RSS to drive readers to the online newsletter and extend the unique RSS delivery technique to tie views to the originating feed id. This should provide a conservative view of RSS circulation.
3. Get paid for ad click through – So it doesn’t matter whether the ad is in the email, RSS feed or website. This would be a big [and scary] change, but I think advertisers would welcome it.

Randy Cassingham added an RSS feed to This is True – Wierd but True News from Around the World several months ago. He also sees RSS as an antidote to spam. For me, it’s one down and many to go.

BTW, Scot’s Newsletter covers Windows, broadband, do-it-yourself networking, Microsoft, and the Internet. I’ve been a subscriber for several years. Recommended.

It should have been obvious, but I needed Diego Doval to point out that people don’t always agree on what the relationship means. Combine with Loïc Le Meur’s equally obvious observation that it is too rude to say no. And you realize that managing unsymmetric relationships is going to be a problem.

Your potential benefit from a relationship depends upon your partner’s perception of the relationship. If you must place a public value upon a relationship, then you’re apt to lie to create the perception of a equal relationship. And choices made using that value will be wrong.

Complicating matters, the value is hard to conceal. Some information is revealed every time the value is used determine a decision path. Generate enough decision paths and the value will become apparent. If you’re so inclined, then you could generate paths for the express purpose of determining the value.

It is going to be interesting to see what the Social Networks will do. I can not see them resisting the use of relationship strength since three degrees of strong are more effective than two degrees of weak. But since they can not both use and conceal that strength, they will need to make unsymmetric relationships acceptable.

For a company whose motto is don’t be evil, Google’s drop of RSS support is quite troubling. Atom is both an API and a format. I could understand a move to the Atom API. I could even understand a migration to the Atom format. But I just don’t understand the need to drop RSS support. Readers and aggregator developers are potential losers. But who are the potential winners?