Is it imitation, or is it flattery? Is it theft, or is it coincidence? - August 2, 2004—
Last night I was going through my very comprehensive "baby and parenting" topic in Jyte. I use it for fun, and for writing posts for 
.
Up popped this little gem from The Oregonian's travel section. It was eerily reminiscent of my Blogging Baby post on the same topic.
Meeting with Dan Gillmor - July 27, 2004—
We're meeting with Dan Gillmor today to pitch our Jyte "information finder". He's in town for the Open Source Convention and to sign his book at Powell's.
PR Blog Week followup, PDX style - July 19, 2004—
Last week was the Global PR Blog Week, which coincided with my very own PR experience here in Stumptown. We at Jyte are investigating hiring an actual professional PR agent (or consultant, or whatever they're being called now).
Up until now, I've been doing the "PR" in a soft-serve, viral-style campaign, mostly via blog with a little bit of email thrown in for good measure. ...
Yahoo!'s purchase of Oddpost firmly underscores their webmail strategy, leaving RSS questions open - July 12, 2004—
We in the IMAP email business have been eyeing the machinations of Gmail and Yahoo! carefully, waiting to hear if any major players will enter the IMAP business. We know they've trumped part of our strategy with the large storage capacity (sure, we go up to 3 gigabytes, but we're not free). But we still win on the ability to download your email and work offline without fear.
Apple's plans give RSS the "M" rating (that's "M" for "Mainstream") - June 29, 2004—
There's been lots of talk. Lots. Apple unveiled its new Tiger operating system (planned for 2005 release) at the Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday. The big news to me was the new Safari RSS reader.
VCs investing in RSS - June 24, 2004—
So, yesterday NewsGator announced they had closed a "round of funding" with Mobius Venture Capital. They're using the money (no telling how much) to "expand their product set and market position in both consumer and enterprise content aggregation." Other companies with a foot in the RSS world, notably Technorati and Feed Burner, have also received a bit of venture funding. Again, I'm not sure how much, but I'd be willing to bet that none received upwards of $5 million. Update: according to Red Herring, NewsGator received seven figures in funding - wow, that's a lot of $5 per month accounts.
There was a lot of buzz about the funding.
Two Linux(s) releases in the same week - June 22, 2004—
I'd like to announce the second of two Linux releases in my company this week. Today's release is Jyte's Linux version - if you're working on Linux, please check it out! Sunday's release was Linus, the son of one of Jyte's creators, named after Linux' creator. Cute huh?
Recognized by About.com's very cute Heinz Tschabitscher - June 19, 2004—
Heinz Tschabitscher, About.com's guide to the world of email, reviewed Jyte fairly, thoughtfully, and constructively. It's a big "win" for me...
My contribution to Dave Winer's "Bootstrapped" directory of aggregators - June 7, 2004—
Dave Winer, in his cool "Really Simple Syndication" site, wrote an invitation to review our favorite aggregators.
Like any good "friend of Jyte," I wrote a review there. Here is an excerpt (full post is now here):
Jyte is a news reader designed using the theories of RSS but with an interface that even the non-techie user can understand. Jyte uses "continuous searches" rather than "feeds" as the organizing concept. (Robin Good called them "news fountains", which I kind of like :)...
WSJ fame is a little different than the dream - May 24, 2004—
Isn't life ironic. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, was an article about this "new" RSS technology. As I'm marketing an RSS reader, Jyte, I tried to sell the reporter on our product when he interviewed me months ago.
The reporter, a nice Scandanavian man, was pretty clueless about RSS at the time so I patiently explained the niceties to him, and described how great Jyte was in comparison to the others. Of course, we were still in beta mode at the time, but I thought he would at least mention the name of the product. I even got him an interview with an RSS "success story," one of Jyte's engineers.
Offer for bloggers - May 21, 2004—
We are working hard to get Jyte, my company's news reader software, off the ground. I'm offering my services to create a "custom" Jyte for any blogger who asks me by Sunday. The idea: you give me your favorite feeds and searches, I'll create a link for you to put on your blog. If you already have a blogroll on your site, I can work with that, too. You have a cool tool to offer your readers, we get more users, everyone wins ;). You can see a sample download here.
Jyte 1.0 released, news search and feed aggregator combined (and free!) - May 7, 2004—
Jyte 1.0 was released a few hours ago! This is big news for my team, and for you: from now on, finding, reading and following the news could be much, much easier. Jyte acts like a news search engine combined with a feed aggregator, totally customizable, and your searches are continuously updated. If you know what this means, you'll be impressed: Jyte is a slick client written in Python and QT.
The rise of the hyper-local blog ad (and what I'm doing to contribute) - April 25, 2004—
Are hyper-local news blogs the wave of the future? I'd like to think so, and it seems that OregonLive is ahead of the crowd. This article from CBS MarketWatch (requires registration) reports that, in a American Society of Newspaper Editors panel session on blogging this week, only five of the 200 participants said that their papers published blogs, and only a handful more were even thinking about it. Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com, one of the panelists, spoke of his vision of a network of volunteer "hyperlocal news blogs," and how these could attract smaller neighborhood businesses to online advertisements.
Two major new products in my "spaces" - April 1, 2004—
Today, April Fools Day, we had big news in the two spaces in which my company's products are competing: aggregators and email. When I first started downloading the news in Jyte, I was fearful that the competition for Jyte and my soon-to-be-released email product, Big IMAP, was going to be much tougher than it was in March. Kinja, I learned, had been featured in the New York Times technology section, while Gmail was giving away the same amount of storage we want to *sell* for FREE. I wanted to run for the hills.
...
Now for something completely (not) different: Kinja. Kinja has a cool logo, some great PR, and nice people working behind it. Someone mentioned that it was a year late in coming out. For something so carefully developed, I was certain Kinja would solve some open problems (that we're hoping Jyte will ultimately be recognized as solving): the ability to create consistently refreshed custom keyword searches through both blogs and news, the ability to read news on and offline, the flexibility to change the way you communicate your favorite news with your friends, clients, and colleagues.
Why content providers should care about RSS - March 24, 2004—
Some comments on Dan Gillmor's eJournal got me thinking about how RSS can be useful to content providers. The standard criticism is something like "I want visitors to see my site the way I designed it, and I want them to visit often." Here was my response to that:
Having been experimenting with RSS readers of all shapes and sizes for several months now, I find that I am far *more* likely to visit the web sites of content providers whose content interests me. That is for really one reason: I am far, far more likely to *find* the content that interests me using an aggregator than random surfing.
Upcoming Jyte features - March 15, 2004—
We're aiming to release several major feature upgrades near the end of this week, including among other things:
- the ability to discern between blog content (personal syndication) and major news content (public syndication) when creating feeds;
- an interface for creating "default" jyte.exe files, which would include an individual's favorite feeds and searches and could be hosted on your own web site - when your friends or clients download Jyte, they will automatically have a few searches already created; and
A little about JYTE for people who don't know RSS - March 10, 2004—
Some of my coolest friends, classmates and family have no idea what RSS is, and can't be persuaded to care. So why should you try Jyte? It's just an RSS reader, right?
Umm, no. Jyte's origins go way beyond RSS. When we first started talking about what we variously called "News Junkie" and "Magbox" and "News Tiger" and "the News Fix" (among lots of other silly things), I didn't even know what RSS was. JYTE, in essence, is a tool to find, read and follow the news. You define news: whether it is from major news sources like Reuters and CNN, or totally out of the mainstream sources like slashdot (for techies), the Onion, your local Indymedia, or your friend's blog or newsletter.
Jyte version 0.7.16 - March 10, 2004—
Jyte now searches 1000s of feeds from blogs and other sources that offer RSS or Atom syndication, allows you to add your own RSS feed, and thanks to some feedback from eager users, has an OPML file import. For those of you who don't know what OPML is (I didn't until a few days ago) it is, according to the OPML site:
- a file format that can be used to exchange subscription lists between programs that read RSS files, such as feed readers and aggregators
Jyte RSS reader update - March 6, 2004—
JYTE, as of about 12:02 a.m. pacific time today, now includes an RSS reader and is already getting dozens of blogs (we know, there are millions, we're adding them every day). Kudos to the engineers who promised it in two weeks and delivered in three days. Must have been daring me to reach my lofty goals in user numbers. I hope, if you're visiting, you're trying it out!
Why Jyte is right - March 5, 2004—
JYTE is the news software my company has been working on for almost a year now. It's finally been released and I'm so caught up in marketing it that I just have to share some of the great bits.
If you're a dedicated techy, you will have heard of RSS, and seen the headlines - "Next Big Thing" and "The Coming Revolution" but also a "Big Success in Danger of Failure" and "Not Ready for Mainstream." In an extremely simplified definition, RSS is a way of distributing news of any kind (online newspaper, magazine articles, blog entries, etc.). Using a "reader", either internet-based or downloaded onto your computer, you "subscribe" to RSS "feeds" that update you frequently on what the new headlines are. Typically the information that is transmitted via RSS feeds includes a headline, date of publication, author and article summary, along with some other technical data.
