Mashalist

Wikimapia

I agree with Mike Pegg: Wikimapia is fun.

If you play with it you'll find there are a lot more entries than you can see from the fully zoomed out view (they certainly have Moscow covered).

Tools From OPML Camp

I discovered a handful of cool tools at OPML Camp in Cambridge on Saturday (here's Wikipedia on OPML):

Grazr – A powerful little widget that pops into your blog and allows readers to browse related feeds.
Opml Search – An OPML search engine.
iJot – A tool that allows you to create content in OPML format.

Why’s all this stuff important?

Jim Moore hit the nail on the head with this comment (I'm paraphrasing): “The web is moving from a network of pages to a network of data sources.”

Instead of browsing pages, we’re going to be organizing and selecting incoming data and content. I’m not sure anybody sees exactly how this is going to work, but it seems OPML will be part of the solution.

Thanks to Adam Green for organizing a great event. I hope there are more. I was sorry I couldn’t come back for the second day.

The Soul of This Blog

Last fall Fred Wilson explained why he blogs about his family, politics and music in addition to just technology and vc issues. As he put it in “The Soul of a Blog”:

 … most people like getting a sense of who I am.  They can quickly scan past the posts they don't want to read. But having those posts there gives them a sense of the other parts of me.

… A diversity of post topics is the soul of a blog. All head and no soul makes for a boring read.

I remember this post because I disagreed with it. I was interested in Fred’s thoughts on web applications and venture capital, not the music he and his family were listing to. I was a trade-press blog reader – I read blogs like Paid Content and Programmable Web that focus on specific niches I cared about.

My habits have changed over the past six months. I still love reading those industry-specific blogs, but now I find myself reading lots of less focused blogs -- Fred’s, Jeff Jarvis’, Brad Feld’s, Dan Gillmor’s and Seth Godin's are some of my favorites.

I read these blogs because they’re written by smart people. I learn things by getting to know them and how they understand the world.

There’s been a similar evolution in the way I view this blog. When I started, I intended to write about ways web applications were being mashed into news reports. As the blog has evolved, I’ve found myself writing about a broader range of topics. 

More importantly, I’ve found that the blog’s key function is not as an information source, but as a view of who I am and what Faneuil Media is up to. 

The daily substance of a blog is conversation on issues. The aggregate body of work, however, is a statement of identity.

This struck me the first time we did a project for NYTimes.com. As we got ready to launch, mashalist.com saw a flurry of traffic from New York Times domains. I assumed the visitors were curious editors at the Times checking us out. 

This was great for us. We’re more likely to get business if people understand who we are and what we care about.

The soul of a blog, it turns out, is important.