Ever see a Web service go from zero to infinity in no time? If you were watching Monday morning, when I broke the story of ReadBurner, you could have seen this happen. Just three and a half days after the site was forcefully debuted, ReadBurner is in the Web 2.0 consciousness, racing to nearly 12,000 results in Google, up from a big zippo on Monday. The would-be hobby of Alexander Marktl, first anticipated to remain in secret, yet promoted on some incredibly prominent blog sites, has not cracked under the pressure, and is an amazing test case for a very raw service, as we can watch his work - live.

As mentioned Monday, I pretty much stumbled on ReadBurner by accident. I was stunned that this interesting service, filling a gap in Google Reader's offerings, had never been heard of before. It had no domain name. It had no owner. But it had promise. And the early adopters jumped on it.


A screen capture of Google from 8:30 this evening.
After 20 solid hours of coding Monday, which kept Alexander up well into the Austrian night (my last e-mail from him came around 5 a.m. local time Tuesday), ReadBurner had its own domain name. It had a new blog, a real "About" page, and multiple cosmetic updates. Now, the site has debuted much-requested RSS feeds for most popular items, and we're seeing an unexpected wrinkle - significant traction from sites in non-English speaking countries, which could be over-represented by these first adopters, or showing us a side of the blogosphere we hadn't considered.

And a quick search on Google, as of 8:30 p.m. Pacific time Thursday night, 3 1/2 days after my initial posting, shows 12,800 results for ReadBurner. Boom.

So how did that happen? Word of mouth, RSS, Del.icio.us, and some prominent posts by other bloggers.

Look who's talking about ReadBurner:

BlogTipz:
ReadBurner - Aggregating Google Reader's Shared Items

Download Squad:
ReadBurner: Meme tracker based on Google Reader shared items

KillerStartups.com:
ReadBurner.com - Tracking Google Reader Memes

Library Stuff:
ReadBurner and More on ReadBurner

Mashable:
ReadBurner: Google Shared Items Memetracker

SearchBlog:
Readburner

VentureBeat:
Readburnerlets you see what is shared on Google Reader

WhiteSoap:
Readburner

And beyond the feeds:

There's no doubt my hitting ReadBurner with StumbleUpon sent them some folks. My quick review got 8 fans of the Web site and 3 reviews. Each stumble can generate hundreds of unique visitors.

Others posted ReadBurner to Twitter. (See the Google Search of Twitter.com for ReadBurner here)

No less than Matt Cutts of Google logged on to give Alexander praise, saying, "Great stuff! This is a really fun project."

Want to get a product noticed online? It's no longer about advertising dollars. It's about making something cool, and getting buzz. Alexander got his for free. He definitely offered background detail to Mark Hopkins for to the Mashable story and to me, but aside from that, the ReadBurner phenomenon has been all due to word of mouth and passing it on. After the initial hype fades, it should be interesting to see if it can organically sustain the momentum.

If you had asked me if I was using Google search more frequently now or less frequently, compared with my past history, I would have guessed less, as I so heavily use my RSS feeds, bookmarks and news aggregators to navigate the Web. After all, for all my constant talk about Google Reader, I've been relatively silent about Google's core offering - search.

But, according to my Web history, Google shows me that my search activity has not only not decreased, but it is growing dramatically, more than doubling from the beginning of 2007 to the end of the year. By December, Google reports I was searching their index more than 50 times per day!


My Google search usage doubled in 2007

Despite my support of Google and their many products, I haven't seen much need for me to turn on full "Web History", for the company to follow my every page visit, click and download. It seems a bit much. But while that data's not tracked, as long as I'm logged in with my Google ID, Mountain View knows when I'm making calls to their database, what I'm looking for, and if my searches were successful - leading me to click on either a search result, or one of the company's ads.

All told, Google reports I used their search engine more than eleven thousand times last year. And my addiction to simply entering a term into the Google search box in Safari and return got more intense as the year went on. While in the first quarter of the year, I had only racked up 1,930 searches, by the fourth quarter, we tallied 4,116 over the same rough time period, more than doubling.

Why the increase? I'm honestly not sure. My guess is that I'm getting lazy in my URL typing, preferring to enter a keyword and hitting return, knowing Google will get it right. Often, I'll put a pair of words together, or a full story title, to be sure Google's #1 result is accurate, rather than guess at the URL and search the destination site itself.

But Google is, without a doubt, my gateway to the Web, at all hours of the day.


If awake, I'm likely searching Google...

While the above graph is quite small, you can see Google can pretty much tell you when I'm awake, and when I'm not. I made about 600 to 700 searches at every hour between 9 a.m. and midnight last year, with the exception of noon, which dips down, likely as I'm at lunch. Google also reports that I only search half as much during the one a.m. hour, sleep until 7, and search at half the rate from 7-8 a.m. I can't argue with those statistics. They're undoubtedly accurate. But the consistency from hour to hour through the year was astounding. I'm hooked to this Google drug, and constantly need a fix.

So far, I haven't yet tried to convert louisgray.com to any kind of real brand, despite my previous comments that your blog is your brand.

Many of the sites I frequent on a daily basis have done a good job to separate the brand of their blog from the individual behind it. MG Siegler converts to ParisLemon. Jason Kaneshiro turns into Webomatica. And Steven Hodson wears a cape reading WinExtra. But I haven't done it. I've had the domain name forever, and keep plodding ahead.

This gap in my self-branding has opened up the opportunity for others to try and define who I am and what the blog stands for. I saw a few great attempts in the last few days, from some influential blogs.

Mashable was very kind to me Monday night, in their ReadBurner coverage, when Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins said the site "is currently seeded with the linkblogs of several thought leaders in the tech blogging community, such as Louis Gray..."

OK ... Thought leader. I like that.

Then, today, VentureBeat had an outstanding write-up covering FriendFeed, and its growing momentum. The author gave a lot of credit for FriendFeed's rise to its initial users, saying: "It’s used by early Googlers and their many friends. The company was founded (and funded) by former Gmail team members Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh together with Google Maps engineers Bret Taylor and Jim Norris. It’s also getting championed by early-adopter bloggers like Louis Gray."

OK... Early-adopter blogger. That's good too.

And later this evening, Chris Brogan, writing on the challenges of Social Media, reported he often hits a firewall at work, restricting his access to some sites, including mine.

He says, "I’m blocked 3-7 times a day, and almost always with an incorrect blocking message by the firewall company. For example, Louis Gray was blocked as religion. Only if tech geeks are now a religion, and then, I’m praying."

Line up at the altar, Chris. We're right behind you.

So, way back in February of 2007, I was called a friendly neighborhood geek. It looks like the geek label hasn't changed, but now, we're also being acknowledged as an early adopter with a unique approach to the tech blogosphere.

While I haven't worked on enhancing my personal brand, others are setting it for me. Right now, that's okay, and I just might start borrowing their words. Your friendly neighborhood early-adopter tech geek blogger, signing off.

Sorry, Technorati, but while I want to root for you and give you praise, it's just not going to happen tonight. Because tonight, Google Blog Search is giving your behind a serious bruising.

Google Blog Search is easily proving to be the best way to find out who is talking about a topic, and who is linking my way, much more than you are. While you were once my go-to for so many things, my every click through your site is now like strolling through a museum, hoping not to touch anything, for fear it may fall down and become damaged.

The Case Against Technorati:

Once the premiere site for tracking tags, topics, and blog popularity, Technorati could be counted on to see who was discussing a story, or linking to the blog, ahead of anyone in the world. Now, Google Blog Search not only is indexing stories more quickly than Technorati, and getting them into Google, but it's doing it more effectively, in more quantity, period.

Tonight's Example:

Source: Technorati

There's no question the hubbub around ReadBurner, and my unveiling of it, has been noisy in the last day and a half. But if you checked Technorati, the only way you would even know it had taken place is through a single note from the official Readburner blog, titled "ReadBurner Updates", where Alexander writes, "The unintended alpha leak of ReadBurner through louisgray.com gave my “hobby project” the boost it needed, development-wise."

Elsewhere, we also see positive comments from Oliver Thylmann, who discusses an older article in his summary, "A few interesting predictions for 2008". He kindly says, "(Louis's) 10 Predictions for 2008 rock, especially as they are really clear, and sometimes weird." Bob Stumpel of Everything 2.0 also liked the predictions in a list he titled 500+ Technology Predictions for 2008 and Beyond.

And that's all we've got from Technorati. Thanks, Technorati! Now... let's check Google.

Source: Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search also found Oliver Thylmann's post, but interestingly, not the ReadBurner blog or that from Bob Stumpel.

Meanwhile, Google did more accurately, and more fully, index other pages, including a piece from JeffIsAGeek called ReadBurner : Aggregating Google Shared Items, explaining ReadBurner's functionality, and the story of how it was "discovered and outed".

Google also found John Battelle's coverage of ReadBurner, where he says, "This looks really cool." He's right, of course.

Meanwhile, keeping with the Web services theme, Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica finally discovered FriendFeed, and says simply, Interesting: FriendFeed, adding "It may actually prove to be useful." I can promise that it is.

Google isn't done. They also found comments from Bill Wishon on last week's argument of the month, Scoble's deletion from Facebook, and who owns whose data. He writes, in Scoble/Facebook Incident: It’s Not About Data Ownership, "Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody?"

And lastly, in the Google trumping Technorati theme, we have Steven Hodson's excellent rant against the blindness of A-Listers who spend too much time admiring their stats and not enough time writing. As he notes in Stopping the Lazysphere? … Maybe when Pigs Fly, we're not really looking to the A-List for serious conversation. We're instead going elsewhere. He very flatteringly includes me as one of his "go to" guys for Technology and Apple specifically, and we're honored to be included.

Tonight, and for just about every night in the recent past, I think Technorati has lost. It's unfortunate, and drives me a little bit nuts when I see a smaller, would-be innovative company losing out to a bigger company with seemingly infinite resources. But it looks like this fight is coming to an end.