robwebb2k » Digg

My picks: The best content on the web

Rob Webb — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:24:00 +0000

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

ValleyWag

http://www.valleywag.com/index.xml

The Alarm Clock

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/atom.xml

Digg.com: Technology

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

Roger Ehrenberg: Monitor110

http://www.informationarbitrage.com/atom.xml

Keith Schacht: JobCoin/Freshwaterventure

http://www.chicagobeta.com/feed/

Noah Kagan: Mint.com

http://feeds.feedburner.com/okdork/tZRC

Steve Newcomb: Powerset

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

Venture Hacks

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

Seeking Alpha: M&A

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

Wall Street Folly

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/

Above The Law

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

ESPN

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news

Enjoy! Also, let me know if you think I missed anything…

crispyideas

Rob Webb — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 23:22:00 +0000

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

Rob Webb — Wed, 02 May 2007 03:42:00 +0000

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!

Rob Webb — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:43:00 +0000

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!