Today is the last day of school.
We had Jessica’s graduation this morning and we are hosting two backyard barbeques this afternoon for Josh and Emily and their friends to say goodbye before they all take off for the summer.
Josh and his band, The Four Fellas, played a short set at the end of his party. They played Wild Thing, American Idiot, and Rebel Rebel.
And they rocked.
Jessica graduated from Litte Red today and is moving up to Elizabeth Irwin.
The "moving up" ceremony was great and very emotional. Many of these kids have been together for nine years.
The best part was the school let the kids program the ceremony.
There were speeches (Jessica and Thea did one). There were songs. There were videos. And there were lots of tears.
The final part of the ceremony is where the kids walk out the door of the old Little Red building onto Bleecker Street and get their certificate.
It was a special moment and I loved it.
One of my favorite AVC posts was "It’s the feed, stupid".
It was written in May 2004, after I had that "aha moment" about RSS feeds.
Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time using RSS, thinking about RSS, and meeting interesting companies that use RSS in some really important ways.
One thing I’ve come to understand acutely is the sense of ownership that publishers have of their RSS feeds.
I have done a fair amount of due diligence with large and small publishers in the process of looking at various companies. And the thing I have heard loudest is that publishers understand that RSS is a new channel to their audiences and they want to control it as much as possible.
I feel the same way. Whether its an RSS feed of my blog at Typepad, a podcast feed of Positively 10th Street, or an RSS feed of my delicious account, I want to control how its used, how its measured, and how its monetized.
All three of these feeds are simple RSS feeds with very little done to them to make them useful to me.
But that’s OK, because I have the right to do things with these feeds. In each case, I’ve "burnt" these feeds at Feedburner. The reason I do that is I get some really great stats at Feedburner and I have the option of running Google and Overture text ads in my feeds with Feedburner. And when I publish the availability of these feeds, I point readers to the feedburner feed by actively publicizing the Feedburner feeds and "depublicizing" the simple feeds.
Depublicizing the simple feeds is tricky and not entirely achievable. One thing I highly recommend (and just got around to doing myself) is changing the autodiscovery code in the typepad templates to whatever feeds you want to publicize. Here’s some instructions on how to do that.
If you don’t do that, you’ll end up like me, supporting three basic blog feeds. I have roughly 4500 subs to my feeds in total, with about a third each for the .rdf feed at Typepad, the atom feed at Typepad, and the feedburner feed. That’s a mess.
So, that leads me to my final point. The service providers who we use to do all of this feed stuff need to recognize that if we create the content, then we should be able to control the feed. Because its MY feed.
Feedburner showed last week that they get this fact. They rolled out a "redirect" service for publishers who want to leave Feedburner. Helping customers leave a service is a "we company" move if I’ve ever seen one and these guys get huge credibility with me and surely everyone else for doing this.
I’ll end this post with a shoutout to Six Apart/Typepad to do the same. Please provide your users with a "redirect" service so that if we’ve built sizable audiences for our Tyepad feeds, we can redirect them to Feedburner or anyone else we choose. And please do it soon. Because its MY feed.
The most common request I get on this blog is for an RSS feed to just my VC and technology posts.
Typepad doesn’t support category specific RSS feeds, but with some Moveable Type hackery and a little help from my friends, I was able to figure out how to do this.
So if you want to subscribe to just my VC and technology posts, unsubscribe from your current AVC feed and add this feed instead:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AVcVentureCapitalAndTechnology
Please let me know if you find any problems with this new feed and I hope you all like it.
PS: Since there is now a way for people to subscribe to only my VC and Technology posts, I am going to stop self tagging with the avc/vc/tech tag on delicious.
I added Google ads to my feed (via Feedburner) at the beginning of the month.
One great thing about Google Adense is their stats are as good as anyone’s these days.
So look what happened to the number of pageviews my Google ads are getting since June 1st.
Page views jumped about 3x since June 1st.
And I am only running Google ads in my Feedburner feed, which makes up about 1/3 of my total feeds. Imagine if I were able to turn on Google ads in all my feeds. I’d be serving something like 15,000 Google ads a day.
Now, the interesting thing is that my dollars per day have not increased very much, if at all, which indicates that very few people are clicking on the ads in my feeds. Google doesn’t yet break out the ads by where they are run so I can’t see exactly how the web is performing vs the feed, but its pretty clear that the web is peforming a lot better.
It’s Wilco time again.
Longtime readers of this blog know I am obsessed with Jeff Tweedy and Wilco.
Other music comes and goes in my world, but Wilco hangs around.
A couple things happened this week to bring Wilco back to the forefront.
Bead Feld finally took the plunge and listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and he liked it and emailed me to tell me. Then I put it on and loved it as much as I always do.
Then Sunday morning I was driving around in Long Island listening to WEHM, possibly the best radio station in the country, and their awesome acoustic sunday morning. I heard Jeff Tweedy sing Brian Wilson’s wonderful Love and Mercy. I had never heard that before. So when I got home, I googled a bit and found out that there’s a bootleg called Outta Print Outta Site that has Love and Mercy on it.
I’ve listened to that song about 10 times now and it’s featured on last night’s Positively 10th Street show.
So I haven’t found out where to get the Outta Print Outta Site collection and if anyone knows where I can find it, please leave a comment or send an email.
But I have found the song list and was pleased to see that it has one of my alltime favorite Wilco tunes on it, At My Window Sad and Lonely.
So in honor of all things WIlco, that will be my MP3 of the Week.
I am tagging these MP3s of the week with my fred’spodcast tag on delicious as well.
We’ve got a new show up.
Emily was absent from this week’s podcast as she spent the weekend with some friends upstate.
This week’s podcast features a bit more talk than the previous ones and comes in at 40+ minutes.
We’ve got movie reviews (3 of them), restaurant reviews, concert reviews, and a hilarious moment when Josh cuts the cheese.
Here’s the song list:
Josh’s Song – Staple It Together – Jack Johnson
Jessica’s Song – Talk – Coldplay
Joanne’s Song – Teen Spirit – Nirvana
Fred’s Song – Love and Mercy – Jeff Tweedy
Emily’s Song (by consensus) – Let There Be Love – Oasis
Our Positively 10th Street show was picked up by KYOU, the "podcast only" radio station in San Francisco.
You can listen over the air in San Francisco at 1550 AM or listen live over the Internet here.
According to the schedule, Positively 10th Street is playing at 5am, 1pm, and and 9pm.
I assume those are San Francisco times, but I am not positive.
