August marks the sixth month where I've tried to highlight five lesser-known bloggers who are quietly toiling in relative obscurity. Each of the bloggers highlighted each month has been added to my Google Reader list, via Toluu, and has, to date, been consistently informative, interesting or entertaining. Most are focused on Web applications and social media.

There's no simple rule for determining obscurity, aside from the fact their content consistently outproduces the number of comments they receive, or likely, traffic. They don't rank highly on common measures, such as Technorati, and have, to date, avoided controversy. As this is the sixth month producing this list, don't forget to check out the archives and find 25 other sites who have been featured. Prior editions can also be found for March, April, May, June and July.

1) Chris Baskind / ChrisBaskind.com (www.chrisbaskind.com)

Focus: Environment, Technology, Social Networking
Recent Highlight: Dear Twitter: It’s Over. And It’s for The Best
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2) Mona N / Pixel Bits (pixelbits.wordpress.com)

Focus: Wikipedia, Social Networking, Humor
Recent Highlight: Screw Facebook, I’m Learning How to Unclog Toilets from Knol (Google’s “Wikipedia”)
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3) Kyle Lacy / KyleLacy.com (www.kylelacy.com)

Focus: Social Media, Web Applications, Marketing
Recent Highlight: How to be Productive with Social Media!
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4) David Griner / The Social Path (www. thesocialpath.com)

Focus: Social Media, Marketing
Recent Highlight: In a Free Online World, What Are You Willing to Pay For?
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5) Justin Korn / Justin Korn’s Blog (blog.justinkorn.com)

Focus: Photography, Social Networking, Technology
Recent Highlight: The Online Participation Factor
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To see even more new blogs I'm adding to my reader, or get a sneak peek for September's highlighted blogs, follow my activity on Toluu. If you don't have a login to Toluu, send me an e-mail to [email protected] and I'll get that set up right away.

July 2008 In Summary (Archive Page)

Total stories published to date: 1,443

Total stories published in July: 54
(About 1.7 per day, up from 1.3 in June)

Total stories in July with comments: 53
(98% of all stories, from 37 and 97% in June)

Total comments on July posts: 783, approx. 14 per post.
(From 493 or 15 per post in June)


July statistics from SiteMeter, with that service's numbers.
(Why show real data? See blog post)
Technorati Authority Ranking: 978 (up 190)
Feedburner Peak in Month: 2,989 subscribers (up 777)
Feedblitz E-mail Subscribers: 64 subscribers (up 8)
MyBlogLog Members: 311 (up 31)

Twitter Followers: 1,569 (Up 312)
FriendFeed Followers: 3,268 (Up 726)

Monthly Traffic Rank in Last 12 (via SiteMeter): 1st overall.

Month over month growth: 42.6%
Year over year growth: 1,197.9%

Top Five Most Visited July Stories (According to Analog)

1. Seeing the Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking
2. How Silicon Valley Heavy Are Web 2.0 Consumers?
3. TinyURL Adds Custom Alias Feature To Shortened URL Service
4. The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining
5. Twitter Chokes Unauthenticated API Requests By IP, Sites Gasp for Air

Others receiving votes: TweetDeck: New Twitter AIR App With Summize Integration, Groups, Nine Ways to Enlarge the Social Media Audience, July's Jewels: Five Obscure Blogs that Sparkle, As I Get Older, Some Online "Friending" Gets Creepier, Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence, and To Blog, or Not to Blog - That is the Question...

Most Commented-On Articles, According to Disqus:

1. As I Get Older, Some Online "Friending" Gets Creepier (61 comments)
2. Seeing The Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking (59 comments)
3. Bloggers' Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence (53 comments)
4. The Importance Of Blog Linking Seems to Be Declining (52 comments)
5. Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail (32 comments)

July of 2008 could have been a challenging one. The first month after having twins, some thought, as did I at times, that the new family obligations could make efforts here come to a screeching halt. Needless to say, that didn't happen. Being on paternity leave for most of the month helped, as did the addition of some great voices as guest bloggers, who I've enjoyed having profiled here. In June, there were guest posts from Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, Jesse Stay, Hutch Carpenter, Colin Walker, Mark Dykeman, Rob Diana, and (jeff)isageek. I hope to see their names here quite a bit going forward, and maybe some new names as well? Stay tuned.

Product news in the month saw new Twitter clients TweetDeck and Posty get some solid traction, the opening up of SocialMedian in beta, AssetBar's launch of FanFlow, the acquisition of Ballhype and launch of Beltway Blips, not to overlook the controversial launch of Cuil, and rollout of the new 2.0 software for iPhone and iPod Touch.

To keep on top of things, subscribe via RSS, via e-mail, follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter, or keep watch on the shared link blog!

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

FriendFeed seems to be the source of most of my interesting conversations these days. Sometimes the benefit of FriendFeed is not even the conversation itself, but finding a link to a blog post that I normally would not read. This happened this week when Jesse Stay shared a post to a story on newspapergrl.com. I read a lot of what Jesse shares, but this site is one I had never read. I found the post interesting because it was about tech news and how slow things are:

I just got off the phone with my friend Chris and we talked about how we hardly blog anymore. Also about how nothing seems that exciting in tech lately. It's mostly about Google and the iPhone over and over. Are we just cynical or have things quieted down considerably?

I had no idea that this is what people thought. This was not written during the iPhone hype, this was written a few days ago. So, I decided to look and see what news was posted on Thursday, July 31st.

First, let us look at what TechCrunch had to offer.


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Out of 16 stories in our selection, 4 were tech financial news, 3 streaming video stories and the remainder (9) were about various sites and their features. For a technology news site, that seems very reasonable.

ReadWriteWeb tends to have more opinion and review posts than TechCrunch and their stories reflect that.


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You can not tell from all of the headlines, but of the 16 posts, 6 were opinions and reviews. 4 of the posts were about video, image or mobile devices. The remainder were about various sites and their features. Again this is a reasonable breadth of information.

The last "heavy" technical news site I want to look at is Mashable. They tend to be not as news-heavy as TechCrunch, and have more of a social application focus. So, what did they post?


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Out of Mashable's 16 posts, 5 were about video, audio or images and 10 were opinions or reviews of various sites. Lastly, there was 1 self-promotion post. Given the specific content focus, this is also reasonable. So, we have looked at the 3 popular tech sites that many early adopters read. In order to contrast what a mainstream user might read, I took a look at what stories Yahoo Tech News listed for the day.


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For Yahoo, we again sampled 16 stories. Of these stories, 5 were financially related, 2 were about cell phones, specifically controlling kids use and cancer risks. 3 of the stories were about server products (VMware, Microsoft "Midori", and SharePoint). 3 more stories were about video games, 2 of which were about WordScraper/Scrabulous. The last 3 stories were the Chinese internet censorship, a Blu-ray player for Netflix, and 6 Ways to Save on Groceries. A simple breakdown does not really show the difference, except for the groceries story. The 3 stories on server products were mostly business related. VMWare giving something away, another product trying to replace SharePoint, and what "Midori" could do for Microsoft.

Most of the stories on Yahoo contain little or no technical detail. You do not see anything about social networks or other social applications. There was no announcement for the SocialMedian release or the redesign of Delicious. So, why is this important? It is important because most people are not reading about the same things that an early adopter is reading. Obviously, there will always be some overlap, but the mainstream users care about very different things. Given the various discussions about passionate users, early adopters and mainstream users, maybe we need to take a step back and think about how we bridge that gap. If you do not agree, then find your most non-technical friend and explain why they need to use Twitter and FriendFeed. Do not be surprised if they ask whether they could find more than 6 ways to save on their groceries.

Much of the impact of Twitter's frequent downtime has been anecdotal. Amid some saying they're leaving the service for greener pastures, or developers pulling up their stakes in the Twitter community, statistics show that some of Twitter's most prominent and active users have dramatically reduced their activity on the site over the last two months.

The drop in total tweets by virtually every top user who was measured could be part technical - due to their simply being unable to login, or psychological, a result of lower activity and lower conversations which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. While none abandoned the site altogether, what could have been an "up and to the right" activity graph has largely stalled, and in many cases, reversed.


My own activity, rising month by month after I finally started using the service in January, stalled in June, and is still well below what it likely would have been had stability not been impacted.

Using TweetStats, a site which can show your total tweeting activity, who you most frequently message, and which hours and days you use the service, I polled ten top Tweeters to see how their June and July activity compared with April and May. Here's what I found:



Chris Brogan / @chrisbrogan
April and May Tweets: 2,896
June and July Tweets: 1,070
Change in Tweeting: Down 63%


Corvida Raven / @corvida
April and May Tweets: 2,669
June and July Tweets: 1,065
Change in Tweeting: Down 60%


Danny Sullivan / @dannysullivan
April and May Tweets: 1,281
June and July Tweets: 551
Change in Tweeting: Down 57%


Dave Winer / @davewiner
April and May Tweets: 1,535
June and July Tweets: 527
Change in Tweeting: Down 66%


Drew Olanoff / @drewolanoff
April and May Tweets: 2,131
June and July Tweets: 909
Change in Tweeting: Down 57%


GeekMommy / @geekmommy
April and May Tweets: 6,030
June and July Tweets: 1,419
Change in Tweeting: Down 76%


Jason Calacanis / @jasoncalacanis
April and May Tweets: 1,017
June and July Tweets: 562
Change in Tweeting: Down 45%


Leo Laporte / @leolaporte
April and May Tweets: 363
June and July Tweets: 237
Change in Tweeting: Down 35%


Robert Scoble / @scobleizer
April and May Tweets: 3,579
June and July Tweets: 746
Change in Tweeting: Down 79%


Michael Arrington / @techcrunch
April and May Tweets: 1,587
June and July Tweets: 1,079
Change in Tweeting: Down 32%

Across the board, Twitter's issues cut activity to the site by about half or more for some of the most visible users of the site. Others, like Kevin Rose of Digg (TweetStats) and Pete Cashmore of Mashable (TweetStats) saw only a less than 20 percent reduction in their Twittering activity between the two time periods. While there's no doubt many people, like Steve Rubel and Allen Stern, wish discussion of Twitter's problems would just go away, the impact it had on the site over the lsat few months has been very real, and we're just now able to take a step back and measure its impact.