Topix Weblog

August 27, 2004

Roundup

by skrenta at 7:47 AM

Jason Calacanis announces a redesign for Weblogs, Inc., and the addition of Google AdSense for monetization. The redesign looks great.

John Battelle riffs on evolving ad models and sparks a lively discussion.

Topix.net and A9 have the same amount of traffic. They're cheating with all of those amazon.com links though. ;-)

We've added a new education hierarchy to topix, with a pilot Standardized Testing page. Planning to add pages for school vouchers & charter schools. Other educational topic suggestions are welcome.

Mark Fletcher of Bloglines analyzes a blog meme propagation experiment and concludes that he has 42% market share for his web-based RSS aggregator.

Blogs by Google employees (via Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion).

Greg Linden: Microsoft personalized search by December?

NewsDesigner: An amusing not-for-publication mockup slips onto a newspaper's live site.

Two introspections from the grey lady: What to Do When News Grows Old Before Its Time, and What Belongs on the Front Page of The New York Times. We're constantly trying to improve the editorial/time/magnitude mix on topix's front page, so getting in the head of real journalists and editors to understand how they think about their publications helps us better understand the tradeoffs and goal-space. Of course, our "mix" on the news is a different sort of animal entirely from a print newspaper's front page, but it's fascinating to see how small tweaks to our algorithms noticeably change the character of the site.