July's Jewels: Five Obscure Blogs that Sparkle

Near the beginning of each month, I try to highlight five bloggers who have recently caught my eye, who I think you should take a look at, who are offering good insight, especially into the world of tech or social media.

While there's no specific criteria for naming what's well known or what's obscure, each of the blogs mentioned don't get mentioned often alongside so-called A-List bloggers, and rarely, if ever, have made the rarified air of Techmeme. Prior editions can also be found for March, April, May and June.

1) Bob Warfield / SmoothSpan Blog (smoothspan.wordpress.com)

Focus: Web 2.0, Cloud Computing, Enterprise
Recent Highlight: The Rule of 10’s Makes the Internet an Early Adopter Amplifier
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2) Jesse Stay / Stay N' Alive (www.jessestay.com)

Focus: Social Applications, Twitter, Networking
Recent Highlight: Developers Bailing on Twitter
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3) Franklin Pettit / FPettit.com (www.fpettit.com)

Focus: Microblogging, Firefox and Extensions, Web Applications
Recent Highlight: FriendFeed Temperature Taking
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4) Nathaniel Payne / NerdFlood (www.nerdflood.com)

Focus: Video Games, Social Media
Recent Highlight: What the hell is Toluu? And does it require a prescription?
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5) David Risley / DavidRisley.com (www.davidrisley.com)

Focus: Social Media, Early Adopters, RSS
Recent Highlight: Scoble is Wrong About Blog Comments Being Dead
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Sarah Comes Home, Making Our Family Whole

After a seemingly long ten days of seeing Sarah, the smaller of our twins, in the special care nursery at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital, we had the good fortune to pick her up yesterday morning and take her home, meaning our family of four is now complete. The doctors' concerns as to Sarah's low weight, small appetite and inability to regulate her own temperature were largely alleviated, and we now have the great opportunity to set into a routine of feedings, changings and alternating between our two small children, at least until I head back to work.

I announced Sarah's coming home yesterday on Twitter and shared early photos on FriendFeed, but as I know my last message, saying Matthew had come home alone, had raised some worries by avid readers of this blog, I know the right thing to do is complete the story.


Sarah modeling from home this afternoon.
Both Sarah and Matthew remain quite small. Sarah is about 4 pounds. In fact, with her weight below two kilograms, she wasn't eligible to receive a Hepatitis B vaccination, which will have to wait. And Matthew has only gained one ounce, to 4 pounds, 11 ounces, since he came home a week ago. Together, my wife and I are working on over-feeding both these kids and plumping them up, both for their health, and of course, so that they finally fit in the myriad of cute outfits they've acquired. Surprisingly, even the newborn sizes are too large, as both Sarah and Matthew are practically swimming even in their smallest onesies and caps.

I won't be wholly turning the blog over to family updates in lieu of tech and other news, but I thought it important to let you know Sarah's home, and we're very excited. So far, the kids have been absolutely great. I know there'll be days in the future where I won't think so, but it's exactly what we were always hoping for.

Want to help out? Now that we're a bigger family, we're going to need a bigger car (or two). If you've got experience in this area, help add on to the great FriendFeed conversation on what to do next. There are also rooms there called Babyfeed and Schwag Magnets, where I'll be posting more baby items going forward.

FriendFeed Doubles Share of Comments in 2nd Month Tracking

Last month, in Has FriendFeed's Comment Activity Eclipsed Native Conversations?, I reported that comments on blog posts and Twitter post notifications on FriendFeed represented about 40% of the total comments I received on the same number of posts, natively, on louisgray.com, for the month of May.

As June drew to a close, the issue of FriendFeed owning the comments flared up again, with Robert Scoble claiming "blog comments are dead". I can report they're not dead, but for the month, conversations on FriendFeed jumped to more than 78% of the comment activity here. This trend, if it tracks for just one more month, will see that FriendFeed has the majority of my comments.

All told:

* There were 493 comments on the blog.
* There were 254 comments on the blog posts on FriendFeed.
* There were 133 comments on FriendFeed via Twitter "blog post" announcements.

On the 38 posts:

* On 1 occasion, no comments were on either site.
* On 2 occasions, both sites received the same number of comments.
* On 4 occasions, FriendFeed blog posts had more comments.
* On 31 occasions, more comments were on louisgray.com.


June's Comment Counts for FriendFeed and LouisGray.com
(Click for Larger Image)

You'll note that the overwhelming majority of posts saw more activity here. So why the jump from May to June? Because, due to the more family-oriented updates, FriendFeed's very real community got engaged. While 14 of my more tech-oriented posts got absolutely no comments, I had 40 responses to my sad news of our dog passing away, 31 on a post saying our twins would be on their way in weeks, and 26 more when they finally showed up. For as much talk as there is at times about sites like this being circular in how they celebrate themselves and their underlying technology, when it comes to people and family, the community there is very real.

Also a change from May were a few discussions that struck around my Tweet updates, rather than waiting for the blog post to arrive. The mioNews story, which so far, has no comments here or my stream, has 22 comments on my Tweet, and there were 39 more around the same for Feedly's arrival.

Source data:
* louisgray.com
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=blog
* http://friendfeed.com/louisgray?service=twitter

As I noted last month, the data set of followers on FriendFeed and louisgray.com is actually quite close. As of tonight, there are 2,543 people following me on FriendFeed, and 2,336 RSS subscribers on louisgray.com, so in theory, with those two measurements being close, there is an equal opportunity for viewers to comment on either location, with there being some significant expected overlap.

Will FriendFeed grow to the point that I should close down Disqus and rely solely on the service to get me the conversations? Absolutely not. But I've made extra effort to participate and engage, and the result has been a more diversified discussion, wherever it makes sense, without demanding it be here. I'm looking forward to seeing just what these numbers look like at the end of July.

State of the Blog: June 2008 Recap

June 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,389

Total stories published in June: 38
(About 1.3 per day, down from 1.5 in May)

Total stories in June with comments: 37
(97% of all stories, from 43 and 91% in May)

Total comments on June posts: 493, approx. 15 per post.
(From 456 or 9.7 per post and 10.6 per commented post in May)


June statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 788 (up 129)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,212 subscribers (up 181)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 56 subscribers (up 9)
MyBlogLog Members: 280 (up 34)

Twitter Followers: 1,257 (Up 148)
FriendFeed Followers: 2,542 (Up 544)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter):
2nd overall, behind only April '08.

Month over month growth: 12.7%
Year over year growth: 1,074.5%

Top Five Most Visited June Stories (According to Analog)

1. Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter.
2. The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior
3. Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next
4. Feedly Brings New Social Experience to Start Page, Leveraging RSS
5. What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations

Others receiving votes: Are Blog Comments Really Conversations, or Are They Just Replies?, The Gray Family Doubles Overnight. Welcome Matthew and Sarah!, Disqus' Downtime Reminds Us of Woes for Data In the Cloud, RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares, LOUD3R Launches Massive Semantically-Driven Network, and OneSpot Makes Publishing Personalized Memetrackers Simple...

Most Commented-On Articles, According to Disqus:

1. The Gray Family Doubles Overnight. Welcome Matthew and Sarah! (57 comments)
2. All Dogs Go To Heaven. For Molly, It Took 18+ Years. (41 comments)
3. Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter. (37 comments)
4. Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next (34 comments)
5. RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares (27 comments)

June of 2008 was a month I'll never forget, obviously - for reasons much bigger than this blog or any dumb statistics. The month started off sadly with our 18 year-old beagle's passing, and culminated in the arrival of our twins. While some thought the doubling of our family overnight would dramatically impact my ability to keep up on the blog and elsewhere, it hasn't yet happened. There are definitely more distractions, and there will be gaps in publishing, thanks to family obligations, but my goal is to keep going. Should be a fun ride.

In between all the changes to the family, it was a great month, where we saw the debut of Feedly, mioNews, NoiseRiver, twitAbit, Loud3r, OneSpot, and FriendBinder, to name a few. Some you will hear about a lot in the coming months, and some, maybe not so much, but they're all trying to make a name for themselves, and they shared part of their stories here.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on the shared link blog!