PubSub Sandbox

The Syndicate Conference is coming to the big apple from May 16th -> 17th, taking place at the Roosevelt Hotel. A bunch of PubSubers will be there to welcome you to our hometown. Our CEO, Constantine Gus Spathis, will be particpating in a panel discussion on Structured Blogging, which will also include Chad Dickerson, Eli Chapman, and Jen Consalvo. Scott Abel will be moderating.

You can follow all of the discussion before, during, and after the conference by grabbing this PubSub subscription, which will also be sucking in all content posted to the Syndicator Blog.

Over the past few days, you may have noticed a few odd pieces of LinkRank data flowing through the system. There has been some backend issues that we are working diligently to fix. In fact, once we deal with these issues, LinkRanks will probably work alot better than ever.

We know how important correct statistics are, especially in the blogging community. Our users are very important to us and we continue to strive to provide the best data possible.

Thanks for your patience while we work on the issues.

Steven Cohen
PubSub Concepts, Inc
scohen@pubsub.com

The following message was sent to the Structured Blogging mailing list this morning:

Dear Structured Bloggers,

Since the official launch of Structured Blogging at the Syndicate Conference in December, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We have been steadily working on promoting the plug-ins, fixing bugs, and getting feedback from the community.

We am proud to announce that we are ready to take things even further. Today, we launch a new website for Structured Blogging. We hope this one will better convey the message of Structured Blogging. On the website you will find a link to the ‘Roadmap’, which outlines where we want to take Structured Blogging and how we’re going to do it. We consider this to be a living document and feedback from all is encouraged and appreciated. It is very important this remain a community initiative.

Your comments, feedback, and suggestions have been great thus far. Keep talking, blogging about and promoting Structured Blogging in your communities and industries. Our biggest promoters are our users and developers.

We have also placed a link on the page if you are so inclined to provide donations for future development.

We would also like to thank the following individuals.

* Richard McManus for helping create the content on the new website.
* Zoran Markovic for graphic work on new site.
* Phil Pearson for all the work he has done with fixing bugs and responding to your questions.

And of course a big thanks to all who have supported the initiative thus far.

Spring training is over and it wouldn’t be the first week in April without Major League Baseball’s opening games. Also, it wouldn’t be baseball season without PubSub Baseball. Whether you want to track your favorite player or team, PubSub can help.

PubSub Baseball is a collection of free, pre-built subscriptions providing customized delivery of baseball content from the blogosphere and syndicated Web sites. PubSub Baseball enables sports journalists, baseball fans, and enthusiasts to follow what is being said about American League and National League teams and players. Our baseball offering can also help fantasy baseball coaches get a leg up on their competition.

Check out the recently updated Baseball feature page at www.pubsub.com/features/baseball. The green plus signs can be used to easily add individual player subscriptions to your personal PubSub account. Don’t have an acocunt? Get one.

Don’t miss the stories you are interested in because of time wasted refreshing your screen or constantly checking for updates. The PubSub Sidebar is a free tool that lets you view your PubSub subscription results right in your Web browser, in real time. With the Sidebar, you’ll get links to any news stories, blog posts, or other items that match your interests, just as soon as they’re published on the Web.

Based on the same open-source technology that powers the popular Jabber IM platform, the PubSub sidebar offers instant notification of matches for your PubSub subscription, right in the place where you do all of your Web work: your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser. With the PubSub sidebar, any of the results for your subscriptions will be delivered in real time, seconds after they are published.

We have just released a new “beta” version of the Sidebar for Internet Explorer. Please give it a try, and let us know what you think!

In addition to many brand-new improvements, the latest version of the Sidebar for Internet Explorer also offers some features already found in our Firefox sidebar. The changes include:

+ You can now delete unwanted messages from the display.

+ Are you a LinkRank fanatic? Do you find yourself staying up past the midnight hour to find out your new LinkRank score? For those that can’t get enough LinkRank, there is now a built in LinkRank feature in the new sidebar. It displays the LinkRank of the currently viewed page in a small window at the bottom of the Sidebar. Why is this useful? If you click on a displayed result you can find out right away whether the information is coming from a well-respected site, based on PubSub’s LinkRanks.

+ Do you move around with your laptop and get disconnected from wi-fi networks? With old versions of the Sidebar, you had to manually reconnect to the Sidebar. The new version detects dropped connections within 30 seconds and reconnects itself. As one of our staff members put it: “I was working from home and went to Starbucks. I was reconnected as soon as I logged onto the network at the coffee shop.”

+ We’ve added new connectivity features that allow the Sidebar to connect to our servers from behind many corporate firewalls, and will be addressing any lingering issues over the next few days, based on beta-user feedback.

+ The new IE Sidebar now allows for logging in automatically when opened.

+ There’s a new “preferences” page, offering the following options:

* Allow local deletion of unwanted messages (true back-end deletion is a much bigger deal and is still down the road).
* Headlines-only display.
* Automatic login.
* Fetching/display of Linkrank data.
* New-message counter: Lets you know how many results have been delivered since you last logged in.

You can download the IE Sidebar beta (version 2.018.07) here.