This is an FYI post. I thought about sharing my way of using RSS for various purposes that regard to staying informed about market trends or specific companies. I have used this simple method while interning at a cash-strapped company. Early-stage startups or just people with ideas may find this useful.

The gist of this is filtering your RSS feeds. I am assuming you are a user of RSS. If not, and you are reading this blog, then it would probably be a good idea for you to get started. Get the free FeedDemon and start saving time.

Let’s say you have an idea for a product, and you want to see what’s going on with other companies. So you subscribe to an RSS feed of an industry publication. But you want to know only about some specific companies, without having to go through every feed every day.  That’s where you can use Yahoo Pipes. They have a great graphic interface which kind of reminds me of wiring that you would do between modules in a music application. Your pipe should be extremely simple. You fetch a feed or as many feeds as you like with the appropriate module and hook it to a filter containing conditions on what words you want to see in the title, description or author of the feed. The last step is to hook the filter to the feed output. Then all you have to do is run it, and add the feed to your RSS reader. This is virtually creating a feed off of a search engine of a specific site, since sites don’t offer that kind of customization to their RSS feeds. This can be used for many purposes.

Yahoo pipes offers much more functionality, with many different modules and operators that you can run on RSS feeds. For instance there is a pipe marking a ship’s route on a map using the ship’s coordinate feeds and Google maps, and a bunch of neat stuff. There’s a host of user-created examples, with the source piping included to help you understand what’s going on, as well as simple tutorials.

I realize that this is a geeky post, but I wanted to expose something that I found useful. Let me know if you find this useful as well.

Unfortunately sometimes you do things first, but you learn later. In this case, I wrote a comment on TechCrunch’s MG Siegler’s Free to Use. Pay to Play, but now I am realizing that I could do the same in my blog, and employ a trackback. This is just great, because now I have to write new stuff in order for MG to accept my trackback. Well, there is always a first time. I hope you still accept it MG. If you are a beginning blogger like me, and don’t know what a trackback URL is, here’s a great article (there are many out there).

Freemium means that there is a set of features in a product that are free, and when you want to upgrade, or add some premium features, then you have to pay. The easiest example is Gmail. If you go over your ~7Gb of storage you have to pay a fixed amount per year for additional storage.

And now to the subject matter. Mr. Siegler writes accurately about the advantages of the freemium model as was first brought up by Fred Wilson on his blog, I absolutely agree with the article and the advantages of the freemium model. However, this still doesn’t solve the question of the new startups mentioned in the beginning of the article who can’t get positive cash flows. They still have to invest sometimes a lot of money in order to achieve that service/product that will build a huge user base. Yes, a subscription model could always enhance an ad-based model, but how do you get to the point that Siegler is describing, citing Pandora as an example, of being a service with an already huge user base, that can start employing the freemium model?

Moreover, as Yuval Ararat mentions in his blog, he quit last.fm when they started demanding subscription money from him. Same thing happened to me with BSPlayer, when they started making their software shareware. Evidently this model does not always work, and even when you have a big user base it doesn’t necessarily mean that users will stick around if you change the rules. There is a fine line here, and you have to be careful with your demands. If you don’t have any real competitive advantage and there are low switching costs, then virtually nothing prevents your huge user base from becoming very, very tiny.

I haven’t blogged in about a week. I was away on some boot camp for a new job, so I was not in contact with the outside world on a regular basis. I will probably get to write only once a week, but I’ll try to keep up. Still feels great to be back.

As far as blogging goes, I am a noob. But I already feel myself that blogging teaches you many things that will be useful for later. Some examples from my own short-lived blogging experience:

1. Staying up-to-date – This has two parts: feeding your curiosity while managing your time. These clearly contradict. You constantly search for new information, but can’t get off track for too long. When I started posting I started constantly looking for themes for my blog. It became a commitment for me. Like a faithful journalist whose living depends on it, I started looking deeper for more interesting stuff to read on the internet, and attending more events and interesting meetups. Just to get ideas. But be careful,  internet searches can easily throw you off focus. So if you want to stay focused and get things done, you have to remind yourself what you are doing this for. You find a cool subject, you dive into it, digging information conscious of your time constraints. This forces you to learn how to skim a lot of reading material and also know in advance where you are going on the internet in order to get more done with your time. At the end you have your sources of information and you know better how to pick your battles, and this is invaluable.
2. Structuring your thoughts – Internalizing the fact that other people may read your blog makes you think differently. You suddenly gain this “air of reponsibility” in what you put out. So it definitely forces you to think if you have anything to say. Once you find that thing, you take all the analysis you did and structure it into a nice piece.
3. Developing originality and creativity – I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. But I never took the time to do it. I thought that I have nothing original to say to the world, so the blog would be worthless. Adding value does not mean that everything you write or talk about has to reinvent the wheel. You can just start by reacting to some things that you read on other blogs or websites or see in your life. You can share about experiences, or you can just tell your friends about links to cool new things you found out about. That’s what I do mostly in this blog, because other people do it. I realized that you don’t become Einstein or James Brown from day one. It takes time and practice. And I sure love this kind of practice
4. Save, don’t erase – This is actually something I learned from my time as a musician, and not from blogging, but I try to apply it to my posts as well. A friend of mine who is a musical producer would always record tracks, and even though they sounded really bad in the beginning he just saved them. I erased mine, because my sense of self-criticism and shame would not let me keep them even in the drawer! In the meantime I didn’t become a producer, and he went on to produce some acclaimed works and develop his own unmistakable original sound. Since he saved his work, he advanced little by little and learned from his mistakes. Every time he powered on his workstation he would already have something raw to begin with. Something to which he could add or from which he could remove. And he kept on perfecting it iteratively. This also relates to creativity. Yes, it’s true, it takes some talent, but it’s much more of an iterative process. It’s something that you hone by providing your mind with the right environment and the freedom to create. Your field of interest doesn’t really matter, you just get out there, jump in the water – you can always change things later. Companies constantly change their focus and their business models. Managers are not and should not be afraid to make mistakes or come out with a sub-perfect product, that maybe people from the engineering team are not comfortable with. They realize that a statement needs to be made to the outside. There is experience to be gained, and the only way is to learn from mistakes. Don’t be afraid to create something, and just leave it lying out there, until you come back to it the next time.

I am sure that all of these skills will walk with me to the future and will prove themselves useful at some not-so-distant point.

To summarize, blogging gives us a platform to get out there and say something to whoever is willing to hear. It keeps us conscious, and it’s a great practice in creating. If you are intersted and not sure how, or have any questions about any of the technicalities involved, feel free to reach out to me at james at sir-james-a-lot dot com

Since Twitter came around, the whole world is crazy about real-time search. A nice article from two days ago on Techcrunch on real-time search benchmarked different services two of them completely new. As Google is trying to move toward searches more synchronized with real-time, it reminds me a little bit of Google and Microsoft in the older days of the start of this century, when Google was just a small search engine, but expanding very quickly to what it is today, and Microsoft as usual, very slow to respond. Google is now trying to respond to Twitter. Being the giant that it is does not necessarily play in its favor. Twitter has a huge advantage over Google in that its infrastructure is made for real-time by the very definition of Tweets. If they are not able to acquire Twitter, maybe they will come up with their own twitting service? Sometimes it’s just better to focus on the one thing that you have going for you though. Just a thought…

Actually with this post I meant to introduce Magma, another aggregator (or “aggravator” as Howard Morgan, a very colorful partner at First Round Capital, calls them) which “aggregates & tracks online videos from the top video hubs & tastemakers.” You could consider it as Twitter search for videos. It presents neat opportunities for marketers and advertisers who want to track trends in what users are watching online (mind you – not only youtube!). At this stage the service is in beta testing, but it’s possible to register and experience it.

The man behind this is Andrew Baron, the founder of Rocketboom, a site I strongly recommend watching. Rocketboom features a daily 3-minute-or-so internet culture news show, with interesting facts. Mr. Baron’s got an interesting blog as well, and this is an excellent post on entrepreneurship.

Last but not least, just a tip for those of you publishing videos, there’s a neat place to publish all at once to 12 sites (again, contrary to just youtube), with a single dashboard to control everything. http://www.tubemogul.com/ 

Ultra-kewl!

Ting Chen, a classmate of mine, is part of an exciting startup that outsources radiology 3d post-processing services. Apart from it being something really neat, to render 3d images out of those ugly x-rays, they are participating in the DFJ East Coast Venture Challenge, and you can help by voting for them and checking out the company.