How I Follow Blogs on the Open Internet

Colin Devroe’s post about Fred Wilson’s post about how hard it is to follow blogs on the Open Internet is interesting to me.

Ok, before we go any further, yes, this is very meta. Yes, I could have written this entire thing as comments on Colin’s blog (no, it doesn’t support comments) or Fred’s blog (has nice disqus comments) but I didn’t because that’s the point of blogging. I can write this ‘commentary’ on my blog. Sort of like Greek philosophers writing entire books just discussing each other’s books. Very meta indeed. Continue reading

On Google Reader

Ever since the Google Reader news of day before, I’ve noticed a marked increase in traffic to my blog posts regarding Fever as an alternative RSS reader. In fact, I’ve seen my previous record for views in a day of 495 was broken yesterday with 539 views. I’d like to comment on a few things while I have your attention.

First of all, yes, Google Reader was a free service and yes Fever is not. You pay $30 upfront and if you’re not able to get free Appfog hosting, you end up paying about $4-6 per month for hosting it on a fairly cheap host like NearlyFreeSpeech. Why is it variable? Because Fever’s hosting costs you based on how many feeds you want to add to it (my Fever MySQL database is 200 MB at the moment). But even though Fever is a paid solution, I’d still make the case for it. Continue reading