On Wednesday, I was pleased to announce my beginning a new, formal, relationship with the ReadBurner team as an advisor, where I'll be looking to help provide guidance and strategy and be more of a colleague with the already-successful team, who is looking to make the site a one-stop destination to find the most popular content online, today starting with RSS feeds, and maybe tomorrow, much, much more. Who knows?

In advance of this announcement, I reached out to a pair of folks who I perceive to be competitors of ReadBurner, and told them exactly what the plan was - that I was going to be helping ReadBurner out, and that I wasn't going to be paid, but instead, would essentially have a small potential equity stake, just like any employee, advisor or board member at a private company. ReadBurner's success, essentially, could be my success as well, should the stars be aligned.

Crossing the chasm from a completely neutral party to a biased party, or at least having the perception of bias, isn't something I'm used to. My enthusiasm for ReadBurner, as well as my enthusiasm for FriendFeed, AssetBar, Social Median, Feedly, Ballhype and other services over the last few years, has been seen here, and in each case, it has been done so without compensation, or expectation of compensation. Now that this has changed in one specific example, it of course raises questions. Will competitors of ReadBurner ever talk to me again? Will other companies try and guess where ReadBurner is headed, and trusting me less, go a different route? Maybe they will, and that's a risk that's assumed.

Only hours after my first post did I get a question like this from one developer, asking if ReadBurner should be considered competition to their work, and should they "be careful about sharing things we're working on"? Well, in all truthfulness, you should always be careful about sharing pre-release content with anyone, to start with, and second, you should always think about whether that person will have pre-conceived biases, or will be abusing your trust. And it makes sense to protect your proprietary data.

With that said, over the last few years, I have tried to be as transparent as possible, and it is important to me to be trusted. I have never written a single post on this site for pay, or in exchange for goods. I've also tried to be reachable by anyone, occasionally to my detriment. My cell phone number and personal e-mail address have been on this blog since early 2007, and even in the footer of every RSS feed. In one example where I was concerned there could be a perception of bias, I told you when I won an iPhone from Social Median and asked you to judge me to see if I unequally gave praise to the site as a result. And I expect to keep telling you if I can be found in any way to be uneven in how I view a site, person or anything else.

In 2008, especially, I've worked with developers and entrepreneurs, getting early access to sites sometimes weeks or months ahead of their roll-out, and have done so without leaking their information early, and often, worked to provide informal QA to help get their product ready for announcement, with Feedly being the best example. As I said this evening in a fun ReadBurner podcast, if I can help make the products and services we use online better, then I've done my job. I often want these products to succeed, even if I'm not their target demographic and am more than happy to keep things close to the vest, and often offer advice for free. It's what I'd been doing with ReadBurner off and on before they asked for more of my time and make it official.

But truth be told, in the online space, sites that look completely different today could look similar tomorrow. The LOUD3R family of Web sites offers many different topic-driven news aggregators, as did the Ballhype/Showhype/Beltway Blips family, each of which I covered. SocialMedian, similarly, can offer an aggregation of news on the same topics, and sites like MyBlogLog, Fav.or.it and Technorati use topics to bring similar bloggers and posts together. In theory, so could FriendFeed, ReadBurner, Feedheads or RSSmeme. And each of the last few sites could be rejiggered to take on more horizontal plays like Google News or Techmeme.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, on the podcast, made it clear that if he were a competitor to ReadBurner, not only would he not want to share any information with me, but he recommended to us on the call that we should be especially careful, so no entrepreneur could claim we had stolen their ideas. Allen is a smart guy whose ideas I respect, and he's right. But you shouldn't expect that overnight I'm going to start saying ReadBurner every other word and talking smack about their competitors. And I've never received anything like a confidential roadmap from anybody - so that's not an issue.

To help with clarity, I am going to add details about the ReadBurner relationship to my "About" page, and I'm going to get even more transparent so that anybody who does have questions can get those answers. There is one more small company I've been helping in an advisory role since early this Spring, and soon, they will be public, so I can talk about it, and again, be transparent. But that's in a space I don't write about, so much of the above doesn't apply.

Since starting this site, I've very visibly eschewed advertising, and haven't been making any money for what I write or where I participate. Maybe working in a consultancy or advisory role to companies like ReadBurner is where I end up "monetizing the blog", even if that isn't my sole goal for being here. As previously mentioned, I enjoy the conversations and the camaraderie, and have been doing a lot of "advising" for free for a lot of different sites. That's why I wrote "10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader" back in March of 2007, and offered "10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn" that same month, as well as 10 Suggestions for FriendFeed last December. That's why I asked What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?. In none of those cases were my suggestions requested or compensated, and I hope to keep thinking out loud and offering advice for free.

My activity with ReadBurner, in actuality, will be very small, compared to everything else I'm doing. But if there's ever a chance where I could be seen as being biased, or needing to disclose that relationship, I will absolutely do so, and I both expect you to and want you to keep me honest - as I've tried to be so far. And if or when I screw up, call or e-mail. Transparency is the best policy.

If you've been a long-time reader of this blog, you'll know that one of the most frequent topics I've discussed is that of RSS readers, and innovative tools to determine "hot" or most popular items - either on a broad measure, or by specific topic or vertical. One of the most fun stories to follow, for me, this year, was the stealth debut of ReadBurner, followed by its rapid ascension into visibility, its later changing hands and continued efforts to add new features and make it a standard for determining the best content across the Web.

As of today, I'll be taking a more direct role in helping the team at ReadBurner succeed, working with them in an advisory role, where I can spend a few hours each week talking strategy.

So what does this mean for the other companies in this space, who have played a crucial role in our coverage this year, such as RSSmeme, Feedheads, and LinkRiver? To me, it doesn't change a whole lot. I've made it clear that I really like this arena, and see that it has great potential, and I've maintained a good relationship with the developers at each site.

In fact, I reached out to both Mario Romero and Ben Golub in advance of this post to let them know of our making the ReadBurner affiliation more official, in case they felt I had a new conflict of interest, or would be treating them differently going forward. As I told both of them, I would absolutely love to keep being updated and spreading the word, but understand if they felt more competitive, and if any future coverage of either will need a formal disclosure of sorts.

So why ReadBurner? Because the team of Drew Olanoff, Adam Ostrow, Thomas Connors and Alexander Marktl has recognized the potential in a democratically-oriented site that can bring the day's top news to people, regardless of its source, or its topic. They are looking to springboard ReadBurner out of the hobby phase and help it grow. I'm hoping I can help, and I'm honored they extended the opportunity.

And in case you're curious, this doesn't impact my day job, which remains the same, as outlined on LinkedIn. But even if I can help the ReadBurner team in a small way, I'm excited to try. It's already been fun watching the site grow from its infancy earlier this year.

You can follow our efforts at http://www.readburner.com/. Looking forward to updating you with more, including on the ReadBurner podcast, tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Pacific. (Watch the official blog.)

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)

Identi.ca, the open source and Federated microblogging platform, could very well put Twitter out of business as other businesses begin realizing how they can adopt it. I think the answer could very well be in the "group Twitter" concept that everyone keeps talking about and the fact that Laconi.ca, the code that powers Identi.ca, makes this very easy for anyone to do.

I realized this today when Jay Ridgeway was able to show how to set up a simple Federated instance of Laconi.ca in just 7 steps. The idea behind "Federation" is that I can sign up for Identi.ca, or any other Laconi.ca-based platform and be able to follow anyone on any of the other Laconi.ca-based platforms all on my prefered service of choice. Today I began imagining how others could begin utilizing this technology - essentially it is a technology built to allow other similar systems built on the same technology to talk with each other.

Sound familiar? Laconi.ca is building an actual Protocol underneath it all where other types of software can also communicate with Laconi.ca. This would put it almost in the same realm as Sendmail, which communicates with other mail server software via the SMTP protocol, or even Apache, which communicate with other web servers via the HTTP protocol, or even Bind, which communicates with other DNS servers via the DNS protocol. I could go on and on - Evan Prodromou, the founder of Identi.ca, is not just building another microblogging service. He's developing a standard, along with software that adopts that standard so that you, too can build software that communicates with that standard! This is profound, and in my opinion we haven't seen such innovation and selfless development of new communication techniques since the invention of the web itself. Identi.ca is in many ways building an entirely new, open layer of the internet.

Federated Communities

Now, back to the groups concept. Well, actually, it's more of a small community concept I'm refering to - your business can actually build communities off of this protocol, starting with the software that Identi.ca has provided. Identi.ca and Twitter are both very broad communities. People of all types and tastes are on those services. Those services are good for that - it's a great way to build relationships, meet new people, and find information. However, there is no way currently for me to associate only with those of like tastes and culture. For instance, if I am into college football and you are not, you aren't going to be interested in the details of the games I'm watching. You may be interested though to know I have an interest in college football. So both types of communities have their place.

Now, what if ESPN were to launch a version of Laconi.ca just for sports lovers? It would just take a simple install of Laconi.ca and a little cobranding of their logo, look, and feel and soon an entire community of sports lovers would be sharing their love for sports, communicating back and forth, and showing their other sports-loving friends what they're doing in their sports-loving life. At the same time, they could still follow all of those same friends they follow over on Identi.ca and even other interest communities, all while still on the ESPN sports community, remaining on the ESPN site. Imagine if this same technique was launched for Moms, Dads, religions, or even just your local city or town?

Laconi.ca is not a service, but rather a technology, and the founder and developer, Evan, of Identi.ca I think recognizes that. We're seeing this as so many other microblogging services have come up recently, some others even open source. Identi.ca will evolve as it builds around this basic technology of microblogging and finds new ways to use it. What's great is that they're sharing the basic technology so that others can do the same and build their own creative services around the technology! (Evan was quoted as saying one of his monetization strategies is consulting on the technology he's written, so there's no doubt he expects to see others embrace it, as it's to his benefit) Add to that the shared API built around the service and the fact that any software written for Identi.ca will work on almost any other Laconi.ca platform with just the change of a host name and you can quickly see the power of Identi.ca and the software that powers it.

Twitter seems to be completely ignoring this as they shut the doors on developers, try to develop entirely in-house, and build an entirely proprietary system. Businesses will quickly realize this, build software on the Laconi.ca platform, and as the customers and communities that follow those communities flock to their platforms, they will also naturally join other supported services such as identi.ca. Users will soon have no reason to be on Twitter any more if nothing is done. I always said developers would begin the demise of Twitter, and Laconi.ca's making it awfully easy for that to happen. Unless Twitter adopts and opens up in a major way, they will fail.

In case this convinces you to switch, you can find me on identi.ca at http://identi.ca/jessestay. Join Louis at http://identi.ca/louisgray. Looking for tips on how to switch? Check out http://ohidentica.com/.

By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira of Shakespeare I Ain't (E-mail / Twitter)

There appears to be an interesting trend appearing more often on FriendFeed: comment moderation. Users have been able to moderate comments on their own FriendFeed threads for as long as I've been using the site, and most use it to remove any spam that makes it through and trolls. But increasingly, I've seen incidents where thread owners are using the moderation feature to control the conversation and remove comments that are contrary to their stances on an issue.

This form of censorship online really isn't anything new; many sites, especially personal blogs, moderate all comments so that only those that agree with the writer. Seeing it happen on FriendFeed, however, isn't the same as seeing it on a personal blog.

The FriendFeed fans have always maintained that FriendFeed is an equalizer, giving everyone from A-listers to the most unknown tech afficianado a level playing field for conversation. The reality, however, may not be so egalitarian. I can't count the number of times in the past week I've seen comments that I read suddenly vanish, or viewed comments on a thread that don't seem to reply to anything.

I have always had a policy that anything but spam or truly offensive commentary gets put through, whether it's on my blog or a FriendFeed thread or a forum that I've hosted. There's no sense in writing anything if I'm going to silence my critics, and while I may not agree with some of the comments, if I view things only from one viewpoint, I won't learn anything, and certainly can't consider myself to have a true understanding of any issue.

I'm beginning to wonder if the ability to moderate comments on an individual basis needs to be taken away. While I appreciate the ability to moderate a comment if I really needed to, the ease with which it can be done seems to be used far too often to skew conversation and make it appear that only one point of view is the norm. When I posted this past weekend about a mob mentality resulting from group think on FriendFeed, I realized that there are many times when I just seem to have a completely different viewpoint than the one prevailing on the site. Now I wonder if I'm actually not the only one thinking a certain way, but rather, am the only one creating my own thread, or have enough visibility to not have my comments deleted.