David Hornik has a great post on the power of blogging:

That is the power of blogging and it is why I spend as many hours as I do wandering around the blog “library.” Moreover, it is precisely why so many smart people are focused upon the hard question of how to abstract that temporal proximity from the blogs themselves. I am convinced startups will solve this problem, not the Googles and Yahoos of this world, and look forward to seeing (and perhaps funding) the different approaches that emerge.

“Temporal proximity” is the technical term for “Tom likes what Steve likes”. This hidden power of hyperlinking is set to explode in the coming months and years, as many people are hard at work on this “problem”.

This is also part of the reason that I believe many ’subscriptions’ in the future will be based on aggregations of items in temporal proximity to one another. My 1500 subscriptions give me a lot of great information, but with over 15 million feeds out there, I am outnumbered by 3orders of magnitude.

I could conceive of the ability of aggregators to make up one order of magnitude in the near future, possibly 2 within a few years, but by that time, we will still be behind 3 orders, as the blogosphere continues to grow. The only way to make that up is to help the user find what they want using some sort of temporal proximity technique, be that cross-linking, keyword search, folksonomy, you-name-it.

It is going to take some serious outside the box thinking to satisfy this informavore (sounds a lot like information whore).

Popularity: 30%

I guess the lack of sleep on the plane allowed me to sleep fairly well in the hotel room. I managed very near 12 hours, with only 3-4 wakeups in the middle. Maybe sleep deprivation is a necessary thing for my while I travel. I guess it will need more testing to find out.
One thing is sure, I am definetly not eating well enough when I am on the road. I need to go out and pick up some vitamins, to keep the old immune system healthy.

Popularity: 23%

I have been serving ads to IE readers for about 6 months now. I chose IE readers because:

• I am not one, so I don’t have to see my ads (hypocritical?)
• I wanted to test the performance of this ‘ad’ thing, without violating the first choice.

So, after 6 months, what have I learned? Basically, the ads are not contextual enough for my blog. I am ‘all over the map’ in blogging topics, so I don’t make the big bucks like Russell Beattie.

I am leaving them for now, but they may be gone soon, as I don’t see this curing world hunger, or even covering my hosting costs in the next few years.

Maybe I need to talk about stuff that is more interesting, or more single subject?

Popularity: 15%