We are semi-back from vacation now. I say semi because we are taking the kids to a water park in Idaho this weekend.

As planned I didn’t touch a keyboard for an entire week or go anywhere online. At the bottom of the rainbow pictured above shows some of what’s waiting for me as I type this. On the left bottom is the number of moderated comments for this blog, to the right is my primary email inbox (under 2,000 emails, not bad) and above that is my RSS reader (reBlog) sitting at 5,722 posts (and by the time I pushed the publish button it had risen to 5,781). My guess is this all will take me at least a day, maybe two days to sift through. Before publishing, I already went through the comments and approved the non-spam/splog comments first, so that number under the rainbow is at zero.

The last week I didn’t completely forget about hmm-worthy things. I took lots of pictures and even a few videos. It was Hot August Nights in Reno, so we popped in there to check out a few cars, including this one:

We also took a train ride along “The Lonliest Road” in Nevada. We stopped by some hot springs in Idaho and I collected hats from a number of places. All in all, a very relaxing time and my batteries are now pushing 110% power. I’m eager to dig into what’s been happening online the last week.

AOL and the thought police
Among the stories I’m reading already are AOL releasing some of their user’s search data. I went to one of the mirrors, downloaded the data [details by Greg] and later plan to dump it into a MySQL database for some direct querying. I’m sure a few others will do the same just to see how much privacy is really at risk with making our search query data public.

We’ve all heard privacy advocates declaring this search data exposure to be the end of the world, but I wonder how many will actually go through the data and make up their own minds? AOL already issued a public apology and took the data down, stating: “it was a mistake, and we apologize. We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.”

Me? I’m not an AOHell fan, but I’ve written here before that I don’t mind my search query data being shared. Don’t mind the stats of this blog being shared either. And what’s to say that user 17556639 on AOL searching for how to kill his wife is actually, really contemplating this abhorrent act? Maybe this is a horror fiction writer researching his current book? I’ve researched some heinous things as part of writing some of my horror fiction. Stuff I would never dream of doing in real life to any human being but needed to learn more about for plausibility. Why should search queries instantly make somebody guilty?

The day we bring in the thought police we’re all screwed.

Google inks MySpace advertising deal
Google has inked a $900 million dollar deal with News corp to provide search and advertising services for MySpace. Expect to see Adwords alongside MySpace pages soon. This was the logical choice.

A week’s worth of posts, can we keep up?
Out of those 5,722 posts sitting in my RSS reader there will be plenty to explore and talk about, but I was curious looking at the summary numbers to see the post flow for the week. Check out the top 12 weekly summary numbers of posts below, of which I put the percentage of the overall posts in parenthesis:

1. 700 digg (12.2%). Wow, do not subscribe to digg unless you want a barrage of about 100 posts a day. Even though the posts are very short, I might drop the digg firehose (or switch to more targeted category feeds) in the coming days because this has become too much content from a single site for me, a lot of which has become videos on YouTube and Google. And if you get lost in the comments of a digg post major time can be absorbed. I’d rather subscribe to most popular lists relating to those sites instead of following another third party link. Too much click a link, and then another link, and then another link before you actually get to the source material. I prefer either going directly to the source or catching on a blog and going to the source. Long term this could prove to be a weakness in the digg model.
2. 450 del.icio.us/popular (7.9%). Another heavy post source but fortunately most posts are titles. I like a lot of what’s here, even with the duplication between digg and, to a lesser extent, slashdot.
3. 364 Version Tracker (6.4%). I like seeing when new/upgraded software is available. Wish I could target this a bit more because 50-60 posts per day is too much. Will have to check into this one. Any readers subscribed to Version Tracker RSS feeds know if this possible?
4. 247 CNET News (4.3%). More than USA Today and CNN.
5. 191 Make: Blog (3.3%). Phil Torrone and company are busy. Like the photos. Find stuff here that I don’t see (often) elsewhere.
6. 158 Yahoo News: Technology (2.8%)
7. 143 slashdot (2.5%). Slashdot waters are calmer, only sending readers 20 or so new posts a day. Compared to digg this is a much easier feed to keep up with and you won’t find it filled with videos.
8. 135 CNN (2.4%)
9. 126 Podcasters Yahoo Group (2.2%)
10. 119 Techmeme (2.1%)
11. 118 Lifehacker (2.1%)
12. 112 KOMO News (2.0%). Keeps me informed of local news. Who needs TV news?

More posts doesn’t necessarily mean a source is better
Listed above are any source from my reading list with more than 100 posts the week I was gone, which is a totally unrealistic pace for a single blogger. I think this pace would drive more readers away than help grow traffic but those who claim posting more is the answer would probably disagree. As written before, I don’t believe it’s about posting more quantity as it is about posting more quality. Group sources tend to crank out shorter posts in higher frequency. Clearly group blogger or news territory are for sources targeting 100+ posts per week, but maybe somewhere out there a single blogger is consistently generating 100+ quality posts a week. Linkbloggers don’t count.

The current sweet spot for this reader is no more than 50 posts a week from any single entity. If a source is averaging more than 50 posts a week, every week, the content had better be extraordinary. Even from the group sources listed above I’d be hard pressed to point to more than 50 posts a week from any source, including digg, that could be classified as extraordinary. As a means of comparison, TechCrunch which is considered by tens of thousands of readers one of the current shining blog stars had 44 posts this last week.

Maybe if you feel the need to prune your reading lists, cutting off some of these higher volume group-generated sources would be a good place to start. In my reading list the week we were gone these type feeds made up over 50% of the total posts in my reader. That’s significant mind and eyeball share for a relatively small group of feeds.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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