Nick Bradbury

Moved to WordPress.com

I've been meaning to change blogging platforms for quite a while, yet somehow that always fell off my to-do list. But now that I've joined Automattic, I've finally switched to WordPress.

You can find my new WordPress blog at NickBradbury.com. Importing years of TypePad posts turned out to be shockingly simple, so my new blog already has all the posts & comments that first appeared here.

Sometime soon I'll redirect this blog's RSS feed to my WordPress feed. If you follow my feed, you'll probably see duplicated posts in your RSS reader when that happens.

I Joined Automattic

Monday will be my first day working at Automattic.

In the past I've worked on consumer software and enterprise software, but this will be my first time working on open source software. It'll also be the first time I've joined a company without my existing software coming with me. FeedDemon is going away soon, and I no longer work on either Glassboard or Social Sites. I'm starting fresh with Automattic, which is a very welcome change.

When I talked with Matt Mullenweg about Automattic, he mentioned being proud of the company he helped build. At the time I didn't know too much about the company, but the more I looked into Automattic the more I realized why it's something to be proud of - and why I wanted to work there.

They treat their employees the same way I try to treat the end users of my software. As a developer, I've tried to provide a great experience to those who use my software. As a company, Automattic tries to provide a great experience to those who work there. People stick with you when you provide a great experience.

They also, of course, make great software. I'm looking forward to a chance at helping them continue to do that.

PS: Yes, I recognize the irony of a TypePad blog post announcing that I'm joining the WordPress people :) I've been wanting to move to a different CMS for quite a while - this gives me even more incentive to finally do so.

Identical Cousins: Partners in Crime

Last week I joined Brent & Michael Simmons on their Identical Cousins podcast.

A-Listers Are Late to the Stream

Lately the geekosphere has been buzzing about how RSS is being replaced by the real-time stream.  Instead of getting our information from syndicated blog feeds, we’re now getting it via streams from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, et al.

This isn’t new.  The only thing that’s new is that “A-list” bloggers are finally getting wise to it.

Outside the geekosphere, people have long relied on RSS to bring them a real-time stream.  But this stream doesn’t flow from Twitter or FriendFeed – it flows from the companies they work for and from the feeds they rely on to do their job.

Since introducing FeedDemon back in 2003, I’ve talked with countless people who are subscribed to feeds which tell them when their company (or a competitor) is mentioned anywhere on the web.  They’re subscribed to intranet feeds which let them know when a customer sends a complaint or compliment.  They rely on internal feeds to bring them the latest information about other projects going on inside their company, or tell them when an HR policy has changed or when an impromptu company-wide meeting is taking place.  More recently, they subscribe to SharePoint feeds which involve them in a real-time conversation with their co-workers.  Some of them even have feeds which alert them to the status of their web servers.

These people have relied on RSS-based real-time streams since the first day they used an RSS reader, and I count myself as one of these people.  For example, I’m subscribed to several feeds from NewsGator’s FogBugz server which are absolutely critical to me -  especially right after a product release – because they bring me error reports that customers send from FeedDemon.  If I get several similar error reports, I have to drop everything and focus on figuring out the problem so I can release a fix as soon as possible.

BTW, this is also why the river of news approach doesn’t work for everyone.  If you’re subscribed solely to feeds from popular blogs and web sites, a river of news is ideal – you get a flow of information that you can scan for stuff that looks interesting.  If you miss a story, no big deal – it’ll float by later if it’s important.

But if you’re also subscribed to feeds critical to your business, this approach is unacceptable.  You don’t want a flow of uncategorized, unprioritized information that combines articles from Boing Boing with items from your company’s internal feeds.  You need separation between the stuff you read for fun and the stuff you read because it’s critical to your job.

NewsGator Powers USATODAY.com's Widgets

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know NewsGator as an RSS aggregator company, so you may not have heard about NewsGator Widgets yet. Our widgets have been used by sites such as Discovery.com, MacWorld and CBS News - and now they're being used by USATODAY.com as well.

According to this articles on Forbes.com, this makes USA Today the first national newspaper to offer widgets that can be added to your site or blog. Right now it looks like the widgets are limited to travel-related topics, but my understanding is that more widgets are coming.

Fact Checking (My Ass)

Several years ago, Ken Layne famously warned the media that on the Internet, "we can fact-check your ass." Sadly, many bloggers could use some fact-checking, too:

• A few days ago Valleywag claimed that the recent 365 Main datacenter outage was due to a drunk employee - a claim they've since retracted.
• Last week Robert Scoble posted erroneous statements about FeedBurner and the RSS Advisory Board. Robert soon updated his post to correct his misstatements about FeedBurner.
• Read/WriteWeb's recent claim that "Desktop RSS Readers are (Nearly) Dead" included incorrect assumptions about feed statistics, neglected to consider behind-the-firewall Enterprise customers who can't use web-based RSS readers, and was based on a survey whose audience is far more likely to use a web-based reader to start with.
• And of course, Engadget's claim a few months back that Apple was delaying the next version of Mac OS X caused Apple stock to plunge. This claim, too, was later corrected.

Now, I should make it clear that I respect Scoble, Read/WriteWeb and Engadget - I list the posts above solely because they're high-profile examples of poor fact-checking, not because I dislike these blogs. There are many more examples, and I'm sure I've made my share of mistakes, too. But when a blog with a large audience makes a false claim, the potential for harm is great enough that fact-checking should be more of a priority.

Many of us in the geekosphere have a low opinion of the "mainstream media," but we bloggers suffer from the same faults that we saddle the MSM with. We shoot from the hip without checking our sources, do little research to back up our claims, create sensationalistic titles for our posts, and generally do everything that the MSM does to increase readership.

Now that blogs have clout, perhaps we should spend a little more time fact-checking our own asses before we post?

Ten Years of Scripting News

Happy 10th anniversary to Scripting News, the longest continuing running weblog on the 'net.

Glenn Slaven's Noembedder WordPress Plugin

In response to my post about providing alternate content when embedding video in your feed, Glenn Slaven has created a WordPress plugin that automatically adds a <noembed> section for embedded content.  Nice one, Glenn!

Twittering at SXSW

I'll be at SXSW for the next few days, and I'm giving Twitter a try while I'm here to keep up with other attendees. If you want to keep tabs on me, my Twitter name is "nbradbury" (and here's my Twitter RSS feed).

Note to the Twitter devs: When using IE, mousing over someone's avatar shows the name of the image file instead of their user name.

Update: I'm leaving SXSW soon, and I'm no longer Twittering. It was fun while I was here, but at least for now, Twitter isn't something I'd really want to use outside of a tech conference.

White Hat Wikipedia

Last week I blogged about editing your own Wikipedia entry, and this week Wikipedia is being discussed all over the geekosphere following Microsoft's attempt to pay someone to edit an entry about Office 2007's new XML format.

I had planned to write a much longer post about this, but it turns out that my Nashville neighbor Rex Hammock has already said what I was going to say:

"If Wikipedia has become the platform of record for web-based knowledge, then having a voice there is going to be a requirement for corporate America. Wikipedia either needs to find an accepted “white hat” way for this to be done directly and transparently (and not some “in the discussions, off the website way), or dark-hat, Rube Goldberg solutions will naturally follow."

So I guess if you want to know what I think about the whole thing, just go read Rex's post :)