My picks: The best content on the web
July 19th, 2007 § 5 Comments
My buddy Will recently asked me what feeds I subscribe too, so I thought I would post what I pulled together for him here in case anyone else is looking for the good stuff. I subscribe to tons more feeds, but these are the ones I find myself consistently reading. I’ve found myself helping people set up NetVibes accounts recently, and this is generally what I put together, with each header being a separate tab within the same account. I’ve linked to the sites when possible and included the feed addresses below them. If you want to subscribe to one, copy the feed address and paste it into your aggregator (“Add content” >> “Add feed” in NetVibes). I’ve included feeds from my sites because I read that stuff too.
Tech/VC News
Venture Beat
http://venturebeat.com/?feed=rss2
Barron’s Tech Trader Daily
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/feed/
TechCrunch
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch
http://www.valleywag.com/index.xml
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/atom.xml
http://www.digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml
Analyst’s Edge: Venture Capital News
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-VentureCapitalFirmNews
Entrepreneurs
Marc Andressen: Ning
http://blog.pmarca.com/atom.xml
http://www.informationarbitrage.com/atom.xml
Keith Schacht: JobCoin/Freshwaterventure
http://www.chicagobeta.com/feed/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/okdork/tZRC
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SteveNewcombBlog
VC Blogs
Jeremy Liew: Lightspeed Venture Partners
http://feeds.feedburner.com/lightspeedblog
Ask the VC (Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson: Mobius Venture Capital/Foundry Group)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/askthevc
http://feeds.venturehacks.com/venturehacks
Econ
The Big Picture: Barry Rithholtz
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/index.rdf
Freakonomics Blog: Levitt & Dubner
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/feed/
Private Equity/M&A
NYTimes: Dealbook
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?feed=rss2
http://usmarket.seekingalpha.com/by/type/mergers-acquisitions/feed
Analyst’s Edge: Private Equity News
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-PrivateEquityFirmNews
Hedge Funds/Public Equities
Infectious Greed: Paul Kedrosky
http://paul.kedrosky.com/index.rdf
http://wallstfolly.typepad.com/wallstfolly/atom.xml
Controlled Greed: John Bethel
http://www.controlledgreed.com/atom.xml
Analyst’s Edge: Hedge Fund News
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-HedgeFundNews
Traditional News
WSJ
http://feeds.wsjonline.com/wsj/xml/rss/3_7011.xml
Economist
http://www.economist.com/rss/printedition/economist_printedition.xml
NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml
Legal
WSJ: Law Blog
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/feed/
http://www.abovethelaw.com/index.xml
Sports
Townie News
http://feeds.feedburner.com/fitzy
Boston.com Red Sox (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)
http://syndication.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/red_sox_rss/?mode=rss_10
Boston.com Patriots (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)
http://syndication.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/patriots_rss?mode=rss_10
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news
Enjoy! Also, let me know if you think I missed anything…
crispyideas
June 25th, 2007 § Leave a Comment
I have been looking around for a Digg clone and came across a cool company called crispyideas that lets subscribers create customizable user generated/submitted content sites with voting features. You can see crispyideas in action on the Salesforce.com customer feedback page and news sites like PutVote and OSViews. Rates are a bit steep though. It looks like crispyideas started as crispynews, which allowed anyone to host a user generated news site like one can host a blog with Blogger, etc. but they recently switched focus to enterprise customers. I’m guessing the hosting costs got to them. I’m still looking for an open source customizable framework to use for something like this if anyone knows of one…
Edit: Found it.
Digg implosion
May 2nd, 2007 § Leave a Comment
I read a Valleywag story earlier today about how Digg was banning users that posted a hexidecimal number used to unlock DVDs. The Valleywag story noted that users were getting upset because Digg never bans anyone and the way the site has built community is through the premise that what gets voted to to top or voted down from the top is completely up to the users. Digg admins didn’t interfere…until today. My buddy Joe just gave me a heads up that Digg is complete chaos right now. Every post on every front page either contains the hexidecimal number or is about the number.
It will be interesting to see if they can recover from this one. They have built a huge loyal user base, but they may be at the point where they can loose the diehards and keep flurishing. The only issue they may have if that is the case is the fact that their diehards are hackers who may just mess with them for a long, long time.
Maybe Stumbleupon will get an exit just in time? Their userbase of bizarro but very docile 38 year old single female gardners in Sioux City, Iowa never looked so good.
Update: Digg founder Kevin Rose posted to the Digg blog last night that the users had spoken and that Digg would no longer delete posts about the encryption key. So the Digg users won, and Digg has basically told them that posts about hacking and stealing content will not be moderated. I think this is going to hurt Digg in the long run, especially if they ever want to sell to a larger PR sensitive media company.
Welcome StumbleUpon readers!
February 22nd, 2007 § 1 Comment
At first I was convinced that my site counter had screwed up and the 560 viewers my blog got yesterday was a glitch, as this is a big increase from the 3 to 7 I usually get. A little investigation through my FeedBurner stats shows that the visits are real and everyone is coming from StumbleUpon.com, where my blog currently on the top of their blog buzz list. I’d never heard of StumbleUpon, so when I saw this, I thought I was stuck in some weird spam site that could ID me and make me think my site was at the top of their list…but the paranoia subsided when I saw that, according to TechCrunch, StumbleUpon is legit and has 1.65 million members in 139 countries who “stumble” 4 million sites per day, much like Digg and Reddit. Apparently intelligrad saw my blog, liked it, and submitted it to StumbleUpon for other people to see. Thanks, and I hope all you Stumblers stick around!

