It's good to have friends trying to save me from perdition. :-)

Nokia just introduced a bunch of new phones in their Nseries, and suddenly my 6630 looks old and boring. The 6630 has been my first phone which could actually be used to do more stuff than simply calling people. I use every day it to surf the web (in particular I ping quite often the mobile version of bloglines), I use it to upload pictures on Flickr, I use it to get on-line with my Mac when I'm on the go.

These new phones are improving web surfing and multimedia and adding lot more (I'm quite curious about a wifi enabled phone).

Looks like I have found my new phone :-)

Tags: Nokia

A couple of days ago John Tropea found something I wrote last year and I had almost forgotten about:


Now... isn't this one of the probems that GData is trying to solve?

I have been trying to convince my friend Riccardo to blog for almost a couple of years now but he's just too busy (or lazy ;-) to write on his site. Recently I managed to convince him to podcast, or better, to post some of his music on his blog, old stuff or just musical "thoughts" he bumbs into while playing.

Since Riccardo is part of my Italian network I was going to post about him on my Italian blog, but I then I realized that what he is doing is not in Italian anymore. Even if you can't understand his posts in Italian, you will definetly love his music.

Finding a new song in my aggregator from time to time is a great way to start the day, this is a highly recommended feed.

Why do I still get Chinese or Russian spam in my gmail mailbox? By analizing all my email in order to put the right kind of ads in my window (btw, yesterday I clicked for the first time on an ad found in gmail), by now google should have figured out which languages I can read. If they haven't, I would be happy to tell them.

Tags: Gmail, Google, Spam

David Sifry's numbers on the blogosphere are always impressive. The number of weblogs is doubling every 6 months, meaning that a geometrically increasing number of people is starting to write on the web.

But who is reading all these weblogs? Considering the social networking side of blogging, my bet is that the vast majority of these blogs are read by their authors' friends. We read blogs because they are a good way to keep track of people we care for.

I don't think that this huge number of blogs is competing with mainstream media in terms of credibility (only a few blogs are), but sometime they will start competing in terms of time. For example today I'm spending much more time reading my friends sites and less time reading mainstream media sites. Considering that we all have only a limited amount of time available, will we get to the point where we will spend most of our time reading stuff written by people we care for?

Tags: Technorati

During the last weekend I was involved in a very interesting initiative organized by Libero, one of the major Italian portals, and SWG, a company specialized in polls and market research. During the election days Libero and SWG run an on-line exit poll, trying to demostrate that you can gather enough data on-line to predict the whole population trends (of course, applying advanced statistical techniques).

To document this experiment they invited five bloggers to SWG offices, to let them tell the story. Both the president and the ceo of the company spent two days with us, explaining their work, describing what was going on and answering to our many questions. We had good wifi, water, coffee, pizza and plenty of information.

So we told our story on our blog and Libero used some of our posts on their main portal. At 3pm on Monday, when the polls were officially closed and we were allowed to disclose exit poll data I had the all-time traffic peak. For a few minutes mainstream media sites went down overwhelmed by the huge number of users trying to figure out if Berlusconi was still our prime minister.

Libero and SWG had been quite happy with the blogging experiment: we were able to tell the story and to answer to many question from our readers in a fresh, "un-pr" way. The statistical side of the experiment was partially unsuccessful: while the forecasts based on on-line submission was quite comparable with the ones based on traditional methods, giving a 5% lead to the left-wing, real voters gave an amazingly close 0.07% lead to the Left, giving us our little Florida moments.

Forrester Research has released the results of a study on podcasting and listeners' habits. Interesting.

But if you want some real data, here's my very little and very indipendent study. At the end of my last SundayPodcast (in Italian), I asked to my readers to send me an email just to check how many of them are actually listening to my rants and not simply downloading them. The data I gathered follows:

• according to the log files, the podcast has been downloaded 103 times in the last 5 days
• 76 users downloaded the AAC version (linked in the RSS feed), 34 the MP3 version (made available as a link in the post)
• 50 users downloaded it with iTunes
• 23 listeners sent a confirmation via email
• some members of my family listen to my podcasts
• nobody in my company does

Tags: podcasting

My last posts have triggered a few comments, more posts and email messages from people saying that I should not quit blogging. This wasn't my intention before and it's even less my intention after all these nice messages. :-)

I guess I'm simply waiting for the next wave.

Maybe, as Gary pointed out, we drifted away from the center. I think that we are moving towards a multi-centered blogosphere and we simply don't have the tools to analyze it yet. The 100 top blogs are not significant for us as they used to be, but most probably they are not significant for anybody anymore. We'll need new tools to find new centers and keep conversations flowing.

Meanwhile, best wishes to Dave for his 9th blog anniversary. :-)