I haven’t used Last.fm since I wrote this post in June noting that Last.fm were not joining the industry wide National Day of Silence. I still think, as a CBS owned company, they are not community players and really not worthy of being lauded by many in the space.

However, everyone has kept using them. A bit like Twitter I guess. You know they suck but they offer the best package…well in Twitter’s case until perhaps recently.

So I’m back on Last.fm and I feel like I need a shower to clean off the dirt. Ultimately I hate missing out on things and Pandora’s still georetarded so Last.fm it is. Not for the on-demand stuff (Grooveshark + Seeqpod does a better job of that) but for the customized radio side. That, and Last.fm is supported in FriendFeed

Today marks 1 month since The Inquisitr launched. I was going to write something over on the site about the 1 month mark but the last time I wrote a post about the site people used OutBrain to rate it poorly, besides, I don’t do self indulgent well anyway…well my personal blog aside

Having said that being transparent to a point is an important part of blogging/ publishing 2.0 so here’s some numbers from 6pm AEST June 6. Some constantly fluctuate so hence the proviso in terms of when the figures apply to

Page views

Awstats 5 May- 4:15 5 June: 415080
Google Analytics 9 May - 5 June: 136,768 (note missing the opening big 4 days)

Subscribers
Feedburner: 2155 across 4 feeds.

Technorati
Authority: 339
Rank: 12505

Techmeme
Leaderboard 51st
Bloggerboard (30 day rolling) 51st, (7 day rolling) 32nd
Writers: me (30 day rolling) 29th (includes two TC posts), (7 day rolling) 10th

Webstats
Alexa one week: 36,041 3months: 349,347
Compete: 129,714 “people” for May
Quantcast: predicts a monthly unique of 82,426

Services running on the site
Disqus
ValueClickMedia
BuySellAds.com
Adsense (one unit only…and not for long)
Lijit
FriendFeed (via WordPress plugin)

Services tried but down
Pubmatic
Outbrain (subject to review)

Sponsor(s)
The Metaverse Journal

Widgets Running
Display: Techmeme, BlogCatalog
Available for users: iGoogle | Netvibes | Opera | webpage/ blog

There’s probably other things as well I’ll think of later. My thanks to those who have supported myself and the team along the way. After a low second week the site is starting to trend upwards, not huge overnight growth but sustainable, solid growth. More next time.

JustAddMe offers a simple sidebar widget with links to social networks. My only gripe is that the list is a little limited, but please feel free to add me as above. Also FriendFeed here

If anyone knows of a deeper alternative leave a comment. I’m lazy so I like the idea

This post needs to be at the top of Techmeme. That is all.

Twitter Fail

Macworld Keynote (my pics)

I know the new me isn’t overly negative, and I’ve got to say that the last couple of weeks personally has been amazing. I’m discovering new things, seeding great conversations about the new wave of blogging, and I’ve perhaps never been more excited about the 2.0 space since my days at the Blog Herald.

But every now and then you have to call a spade a you know what.

This post from Twitter makes me feel ill.

Lets see, here’s a company that just took $15m, a company that sees itself as a utility player, which is a fair call, and yet we get this

We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts.

I’m sorry, but WTF???

Ah, but there’s a solution, apparently it’s about usage widgets:

We’re busy working on instrumenting and adding meters to provide visibility into what’s slowing Twitter down. We’ll use this data both to alleviate the current woes and to help inform our long-term architecture work to make Twitter a utility service people can count on

I noted in the Inquisitr post the argument that people who complain about Twitter downtime will never leave, and that’s a fair call, but how can Twitter, this far into the process, have zero idea as to what is going wrong? More importantly, how can VC’s invest in a startup that is apparently completely clueless?

I’m all for transparency, and the post from Twitter is beyond overdue, but at the same time admitting things are going wrong is one thing, saying you have absolutely no idea why this is the case should scare small children.

It’s like the X-Files, I want to believe, but I read this and I see complete and utter bollocks.

More here. Some really nice words from Michael.

The thing that’s surprised me about this is it didn’t leak in a month. Probably helps that I didn’t tell all but a few people, but it’s cool knowing that in the age of uber-gossip it never leaked.

The video below covers more (serious NSFW language warning…I no longer have to watch my f*cks quite so much). The key points: 1. I want my weekends back (although it wont happen for sometime, but at least I have control over that aspect 2. I’m a little tired (the whole Louis Gray thing being case in point) 3. I feel that if I’m going to kill myself doing this (blogging) it should be building something I own or have a stake in.

The other news is that I’ve soft launched the new site The Inquisitr. More details here. It still needs some tweaking and I wont be going hell for leather posting until the morning (still clearing up some TC stuff…and I need some beer ). It goes without saying that I’m excited about it, and I believe the mix of tech, pop and funny stuff is pretty unique. We’ll see how it goes and I’ll have more to say on that in the coming weeks.

My thanks to all those people who sent well wishes across when the news broke. I’m stoked and humbled by the response.

I’ve never once tried to interfere with my old site, The Blog Herald. I sold it and that was the end of the matter. It did well under Matt Craven and the folks who bought it from me, but a year later Splashpress bought it and turned it into a poor mans Problogger with little or no news and I completely stopped reading it. The site always did advice, even before Problogger, but it was an occasional special that complemented the core news function of the site, it was never meant to be the main source of content. The original motto (since dropped) was more blog news more often, and I always prided myself on being the first with news from the then new blogging world.

Fast forward to this year and some sanity has prevailed. I believe Thord Daniel Hedengren is editing the site now and I’ve always thought highly of him, and he’s bought back Matt Craven and David Krug. Suddenly The Blog Herald has become a decent read again (news wise…I still don’t like the self help stuff, but it’s not dominating anymore) and I re-subscribed to the RSS feed.

Then someone decided it would be smart to switch from a full feed to a part feed. [insert loud WTF here]

I know in years gone by that I took a side in favor of this, but I always looked at it from the publishers viewpoint, which in short is all about preventing your feed being scrapped, but I never really considered it from the user/ readers viewpoint. Put simply, to me today a part feed is as useless as tits on a bull. The jury has long since decided that full feeds are the way to go.

So here’s my little bleg: TDH or who ever made the decision, please go back to full feeds. I know the scraping sucks, but it sucks that your readers cant read all the content in a feed reader either. Just as the site was getting good again, you’re now turning people away, and that makes no sense at all.

This is staggering.

Congrats to Michael on a position well deserved. I cant remember if a blogger has ever made the list before, maybe Drudge but he’s never counted himself as a blogger. It’s perhaps a watershed moment that a Blogger can be counted in the Top 100 most influential people in the world, next to world leaders and uber-celebrities.

I’d say blogging has come of age, but that was really 2004. It’s something big though: a new level of maturity perhaps, an acceptance that blogging and bloggers have a major role in todays media landscape.

I was suppose to be at the Future of Journalism summit in Sydney today but I’ve got too many things on to have made it, but I would have love to have bought this up. Perhaps someone will.

Mark Rizzn Hopkins writes over at Mashable how he’s pissed off with Firefox. He’s not alone. I dumped Firefox 2 and switched to Flock after trying Safari for a short time (it doesn’t play nice with WordPress). Then I tried Webkit for a while, super fast, and now I’m back at Firefox 3 as everybody told me they’d finally fixed Firefox and all was good again.

It’s not good. It’s better, but its better than crappy. FF3 still crashes, still leaks memory (not always, but particularly on streaming video sites), and has other bugs that don’t make my day miserable, but they’re not a positive contribution either. Just going to write this post and I couldn’t type in FF3: had to close one tab (had less than 10 open) to get FF to allow me to type again. Maybe I’ve got rose colored glasses, but I think FF 1.5 will be remembered as the last great Firefox release, because I never remember having any of these problems then, even going back as far as 0.8 beta.

To answer Rizzn’s poll question: yes, I’d happily pay for a browser that was stable, quick and bug free. Note though that it would REALLY have to be all of those things, and so far I just haven’t seen a browser able to meet that criteria.