Who Voted For These Top Blogs?

Time.com just released their annual blog index featuring their list of the 2008 Top 25 blogs. The blogs were picked based on poll results ranging from 1 (abysmal) to 10 (indispensable.) Strangely, their list featured 11 blogs with an average of 5 or below. These are top blogs? I don’t think so.

For some better choices, I have to point you to a few other sources instead. Coincidentally, this news from Time.com comes out on a day where several bloggers have put out their own personal lists of blogs:

• Corvida of SheGeeks posted her A-List here.
• Steven Hodson of WinExtra adds to his A-List here.
• And Louis Gray posts about 5 More Blogs You Should Be Reading, a follow-up to his previous 5 Blog Candidates to Tomorrow’s Techmeme Leaderboard.

I can’t imagine narrowing my list down to 5 or even 25 blogs top blogs, and it seems, thanks to lists like those above, I’m finding even more great blogs every day. Of course, I highly recommend both Corvida (a Grand Effect blogger!), Steven, and Louis - some of my fav A-Listers!

And to complement their offerings, I can only point to the link bar above and the other Grand Effect network bloggers. In addition to SheGeeks, we have David of xfep.com, Martin of gHacks.net, MG of ParisLemon, and Frederic of The Last Podcast.

I’m so proud that my A-List is only a click away and all available from the top of my blog!

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

The Guardian, which always offers an interesting perspective on UK web trends, posted an article today that caught my eye: "Home copying - burnt into teenage psyche." According to a new study by the industry group British Music Rights, 95% of 18-24 year-olds have engaged in "home copying," which includes things like copying files from one hard drive to another, making copies of CDs, and even the old-fashioned kind of copying - taping songs off the radio.

Although the record industry has focused on combating file sharing, as it turns out, "offline copying" is actually more prevalent. In fact, the study showed that two-thirds of this young crowd copied 5 CDs a month for friends. That’s a lot of free music. When kids share their files in this "offline" way in addition to online via file sharing networks, the result is large collections of unpaid-for music. The findings state that half the music in an average MP3 collection haven’t been paid for.

But I wonder: do these large collections of shared music really represent lost revenue for the record labels? Sharing music has been easy to do, ever since the invention of double-decked boom boxes - insert blank tape, hit play, hit record. With CDs, it was rip and burn. And with MP3s, it’s copy-and-paste. I find it hard to believe that the "new" medium of these digital files has prompted any more "offline" file sharing than that which occurred in the days where I was dubbing the latest Madonna tape for my poorer friends.

Kids are always sharing music, especially teens. They’re at an age where they’re discovering who they are, figuring out their identities, trying different personas on for size…and something about music helps them through this process in ways in ways other things can’t. So kids sharing music with friends? Nothing new here.

Granted, online file sharing brings in another component - sharing music with their friends, and, oh say thousands of others, but even then, it’s not necessarily causing lost sales. The kids wouldn’t have had the cash for their entire music collections anyway, so stifling sharing wouldn’t mean more revenue for the labels, it would mean less exposure for new artists and smaller, less diverse collections for music buyers. Sharing music means we get to sample more and have our eyes opened to bands and singers we would have never taken notice of before. I’d argue that sharing music is GOOD for the industry.

What this industry needs to grasp, both overseas in the UK, here in the US, and worldwide, is that the game is changing. Forerunners like NIN’s Trent Reznor have the right idea, giving away some tracks for free to the casual users, but providing something of value to the core fans via "deluxe" packages. I mean, the dude made $1.6 million in 9 days, you know?

Oh, that’s right. He doesn’t have a label anymore. No wonder the industry is scared. Well, they had better find their value and find it fast, otherwise, they’re done for.

An email today alerted me about the latest FriendFeed clone, Lifestream.fm. Like everybody’s favorite social app du jour, Lifestream also lets you aggregate your various online services, be it twitter, your blog, StumbleUpon, or whatever else, into one continuous stream. But unlike FriendFeed, you can’t comment or "like" people’s items, filter out or hide items, or interact with a stream in any way.

The interface, if anything, is less FriendFeed like, and more twitter-like, showing your followers and who you are following in nearly the same way as Twitter.

One thing I noticed about Lifestream is that everyone I found on there seemed to be from Ecuador, so maybe it’s just going to be FF for Spanish folks? That’s OK I guess…if they want their own thing…but what a pale imitation of the real thing this is.

Wow! I’m really excited and surprised that our little tech blog network, Grand Effect, has now been covered on Mashable! And all this before we’re even done building our homepage! Thanks, Mark, for the shout-out. Stay tuned - over the next few months, we have big plans for Grand Effect. You’ll soon see a new homepage, a combined Grand Effect RSS feed, profiles on our members and their sites, and much more.

Thanks for checking us out!

I recently wrote a post on Read Write Web about how "Blogs Comments Still Matter," which, among other things, highlighted the issue of blogs getting more negative comments than positive ones. In the post, I mentioned the FriendFeed/WordPress plugin, created thanks to the fabulous Glenn. One of the commenters, as it turned out, was Nick Halstead, creator of Fav.or.it (and Tweetmeme). Despite the fact that the post was about negativity, his comment (below) came across as just a little negative, beginning…

Cannot believe that a hacked together wordpress plug-in gets coverage on RRW…

Hmm…was that a tone, I detected? Now, I had been interested in Fav.or.it up until this point, in fact, even had it flagged as something to research for a post, but couldn’t decide if it was more RWW or Channel 10 material. But then, his comment turned me off a bit. Corvida picked up on this and mentioned that this was bad PR for Fav.or.it.

Today, Louis Gray gives the Fav.or.it service some feedback on his site, in a post entitled "Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite."

Nick responds in the comments, saying:

Franky I have no idea why I gave you the time of day Louis, you have no understanding of what we are trying to do to move the blogosphere into a much wider market….

And then Nick went to post on the Fav.or.it blog, but he still couldn’t just address the issues, he also had to insult Louis personally:

So Louis I am happy you do not want to try out service again - you missed the point completely and I doubt you will ever be able to have the imagination to see the future that we see.

I was really hopeful for fav.or.it - I mean, it looked cool, but this type of negativity just isn’t right.

Maybe Nick is just new to having to be both the creator/developer and the marketing guy, and he probably views the service as his baby. When that’s the case, it’s common to take the critiques of a service personally. However, instead of drawing attention to the service and debating its strengths and weaknesses, he’s drawing the attention to himself.

This is not good and it certainly detracts from the product and its potential, which is, by the way, a way to bring the blogosphere and feed-reading to the masses. I mean, hey, Scoble liked it, right?

I’m still curious about Fav.or.it, having yet to have a chance (an invite) to try it out for myself, and if it truly is designed for the masses, and not us web geeks, well, that’s fine. I worked in IT for some time and I’m pretty familiar with the varying levels of tech-savvy that some people have. (It’s actually quite shocking, if you want to know the truth).

But to get insulted for having an opinion on the service? That’s not for me. So if anyone asks me to review fav.or.it, I think I’m going to pass. 

Earlier this week, Frengo, a mobile media company that provides games and social networking applications for your phone, announced the availability of its OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit. This toolkit will provide developers with a way to take their web apps from OpenSocial-compliant social networks and make them mobile.

The Frengo OpenSocial Mobile Toolkit includes SMS alerts and notifications and mobile web services like WAP site hosting, handset recognition and transcoding. And for developers looking to earn money from their mobile apps, Frengo will also offer traffic monetization, advertising brokering and premium billing services.

Frengo partner, RockYou, kicked off the launch with their mobile app, "Horoscopes," a web app that is available on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, hi5, and now is mobile, too.

Additionally, the infamous LOLcat site, I Can Has Cheezburger, is  also offering a mobile app built on the Frengo platform. You can text "LOL" to 44566 to start getting funny cat pictures delivered to your phone thanks to Frengo’s rich photo and image handling capabilities. (Or just sign up here.)

The Frengo platform will support all the major U.S. carriers and the majority of the global carriers, reaching more than a billion phones worldwide.

What I’m curious about is where does this leave Facebook? OpenSocial was originally designed to combat Facebook’s popularity and offer an alternative to their closed platform. Now with an OpenSocial-compliant mobile toolkit available, will Facebook feel compelled to join the group or will they just build their own toolkit for developers?

The Facebook mobile site (m.facebook.com) and Facebook Mobile applications, like that available for the Blackberry, both do a nice job of connecting you with friends, events, messages, news, and photos. However, Facebook’s slew of applications are not available when mobile.

Although some would argue that not having the ability to throw sheeps at each other is a good thing, the fact is many users enjoy the social network’s apps and would love to see them go mobile.

Imagine if you could access your favorite Facebook apps from your phone? Who wouldn’t want a little Scrabulous while waiting in line at the DMV?

Grand Effect network member and social media blogger, Corvida of SheGeeks, sent me this cool badge today. The badge was her way to say thanks to all the bloggers who have supported her lately as she develops her…err…awesomesauce blog!

Thanks, Corvida!

If you haven’t checked out her blog yet, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in web 2.0 and social media: shegeeks.net.

Or just subscribe here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Corvida.

Our little tech blog network keeps growing - just last month, we welcomed social media blogger SheGeeks to Grand Effect. And now, we’re welcoming not one, but two awesome bloggers to our network: MG Siegler of ParisLemon and Frederic Lardinois of The Last Podcast. Both bloggers provide insightful looks at tech, new media, web 2.0, and the blogosphere. You can subscribe to them here:

• The Last Podcast - RSS feed 
• ParisLemon - RSS Feed

As far as Grand Effect goes, now that we have a good member base, we’re going to update the homepage, provide a combined network feed, and put together our ad packages for those interested in partnering or sponsoring our content.

As always, if you’re interested in becoming a Grand Effect advertising partner, you can reach us at our main address: advertising@grandeffect.com.

Read more about this news from our other Grand Effect bloggers: SheGeeks and The Last Podcast.

As I mentioned, sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all the things I’ve been wanting to blog about, so I decided that I would give my Firefox browser a break from having to keep all those tabs open and I’d just one-off everything via a link list. I know, not as good as a regular post, but here you go…

1. ili.st: Love Twitter? Love lists? ili.st lets you make lists in Twitter.
2. The Photo Stream: boredom buster site brings you the news via photos. Better than reading RSS feeds? You decide.
3. simplebucket: ‘Cause people still think they can one-up flickr. Simplebucket’s take is that they are easier, i.e. simpler.
4. This site discontinued OpenID support…in favor of Clickpass. Which is actually powered by OpenID, it’s just easier to use. Must research this.
5. Socialblade: see a snapshot of a story’s stats at the time it hits the front page of digg.
6. Arkayne: it’s like Outbrain without the ratings. Now someone please just tell me which one is better.
7. bub.blicio.us is that blog I’ve been meaning to subscribe to, but never do. I realized today that it’s probably because their RSS feed is listed as a link with no orange icon. I probably always miss seeing it and just close the tab.
8. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with finding new music on Hype Machine. I just need some friends with good indie tastes. You?
9. I’ve been wanting to look more into fav.or.it for some time now, but this turned me off. Thoughts?
10. I don’t even know why I opened this page: 103bees.com, but it sure looks interesting.

Social media maven, Corvida (who, by the way has a new URL: http://shegeeks.net/, learn why here) twittered to me today about gReader comments. I just had to laugh because I’ve had the exact page she referred me to open in my Firefox browser for days. That’s how I remember what I want to blog about.

Clearly, it’s working, right?

OK, perhaps not.

So, thanks to SheGeeks for the reminder!

Yes, gReader Comments is one of the more awesome Greasemonkey-script-turned-Firefox-extensions that I’ve ever seen, and right up my alley since lately I’ve been concerned about how blog commenting and commenting in general seems to be broken.

Not for much longer, perhaps.

What gReader does is add the Disqus comment system, like the one running on my blog now, to every entry in Google Reader. The comments are stored by the URL of the blog entry, so you’ll also be able to see the comments made by others using this extension.

Here’s what it looks like:

Highly recommended!