Molly Holzschlag asks "where is your feed?"

She raises a ton of good points, including whether or not you should use an orange XML icon to tell your readers that you offer a feed.

One thing we need is a common auto subscribe feature. For instance NewsGator adds a little icon to IE that lets me try to subscribe to any blog. It only works 80% of the time because many weblogs haven't tested their feeds out with Newsgator and other technologies that automatically subscribe to feeds.

Hint: there are more "auto subscribe" technologies coming.

What are the things we (blog service and tool vendors and bloggers) need to do to make it easier for users to subscribe to our feeds?

VentureBlog: The Dos and Don'ts of presenting at Demo. Actually, this is a good list for software developers who need to demonstrate their technology to others to get them to adopt or buy in. Thanks to Buzz Bruggeman for making sure I saw that.

Jason Calacanis loves Google's gmail (and have stopped using Outlook and soon will stop using Word).

I hear ya. Hotmail has been looking a little long in the tooth. Omar Shahine, we're counting on you!

For those that don't know, Omar is one of the guys working on Hotmail.

The real question isn't who'll be first to offer two gigs of space (or the coolest AJAX UI implementation). The real question is: who'll do it for more than 150 million users first?

The race is on.

Oh, and don't forget Yahoo either. This isn't a two-way race.

My thoughts about email? Two gigs isn't enough. My Outlook PST folder is already more than five gigs and that's what I've collected in just the past few months.

John Moore went to the recent Word of Mouth Marketing Summit and saw Guy Kawasaki speak. Guy is the guy who practically invented platform evangelism (which is my day job) so this interested me a lot:

Guy's Top 10 Rules for Evangelism.

Update: apologies for calling John Johnnie.

Dare Obasanjo works on the MSN Spaces team and is watching that service for interesting blogs. Here's a few that he found.

The problem is that they aren't tech blogs. Dare notes that as well:

"What I like most about these Spaces is that their content is [mostly] not what you find in the Technorati Top 100 list which is dominated by men talking about technology and politics or women talking about sex. The above spaces just have regular people sharing the interesting and the mundane in their lives which sometimes do involve technology, politics and sex.

Over on the Red Couch: why let your ad agency write your blog?

I hate daylight savings time. Spring your clocks ahead tonight. Here's some tips from the Houston Chronicle.

There are a lot of changes happening over on Microsoft's employee blogs. Josh Ledgard has a good list.

The blogs are now in two places:

1) Developer and Tech-oriented blogs are at http://blogs.msdn.com.

2) IT oriented blogs are at http://blogs.technet.com.

You can use the Microsoft Community Blog portal to find an employee blog.

And, of course, there are hundreds of employee blogs off on independent sites like mine (even those employees who have their own domains can be listed on the Community Blog portal).

Update: I left out the French Microsoft blogs, which are at http://blogs.microsoft.fr/.

Pito Salas: Robert, if you read this check out BlogBridge.

So, I did. BlogBridge looks like a nice easy-to-use open source RSS aggregator.

Darren Barefoot is not smoking the podcasting dope.

I am to blame for the hype. It's the worst thing I've done to the community lately. Please leave the podcasters alone to develop some art first. We shouldn't have hyped it up. My fault. Sorry.

Podcasters: do it cause you love it. That's why I did this blog. It's what sustains me longterm. I did this blog back when I only had five readers and I'd keep doing it if I went down to that level again.

Shelley Powers, in comments here, just wrote in response to my earlier post:

"You completely misrepresented absolutely everything about that post and what I said. You did so by such a margin that I have to assume that this was a deliberate attempt to smear me and weaken the message of what I was saying.

You didn't link to the first message, where I said we should not treat Matt harshly, and then picked and tweaked what I said in the second until you found the message satisfactory to you -- that Shelley is picking on that poor _boy_ Matt, and let's put the bitch in her place.

And you most likely did so because I was critical of you in the past, and you never forget and you never forgive.

All you've done, is proved out everything I said in that post.

Every damn thing.

Shelley • 4/2/05; 2:12:32 PM

Shelley: wow. I went back and read what I wrote. Then I went back and read what you wrote on your own blog.

But, there's something going on here that I wanted to take on. First, I have no idea what you're talking about. I get attacked by so many people, so often, that I don't remember or take personally those attacks. I'm sorry that you feel slighted. Second, this isn't just about you. My co-author Shel Israel gave me heck for being too nice to my fellow bloggers. And there are others who, in private conversations, bemoaned that I wasn't questioning fellow bloggers enough. John Dowdell of Macromedia, pointed out that I wasn't holding Marc Canter to the same standards I hold myself (on financial disclosure).

And, Shelley, what's this thing about making it the boys vs. the girls? Is that what this really is? Is every conversation argument going to be played like that?

By the way, about the "first post": I missed that. I saw Shelley's blog after someone else linked over to it and didn't see her earlier post about Matt's situation. Sorry I missed that, but that's why I'm putting this post on the top of my page so that everyone can get Shelley's whole story unfiltered by me.

Greg Reinacker, founder of NewsGator, wrote me a note and asked why Bloglines is my #1 pick for new users.

I've been thinking about this for a few days. My mind keeps going back to the day when I spoke at the Northern Voice conference and I asked people what aggregators they were using. Most of the audience said they used Bloglines.

I was just going along with the herd.

I hadn't thought critically about it. Hadn't thought about which product is better, or whether someone else had done something better.

But, then, there was the second thought: NewsGator in my head is still only for Outlook. THAT is a bug in my thinking. I gotta purge that thought from my head.

It is also NewsGator's marketing problem. Because their Outlook-based aggregator was the first one they released and because it was so good, it burned a permanent brand in my brain that is proving to be very tough to get rid of.

Did you know that NewsGator offers a free online service just like Bloglines (in fact, it has some features that Bloglines doesn't have)? Most people don't. Did you know that NewsGator has a version for the Media Center PC? That you can look at another version of NewsGator on your cell phone?

By the way, this is really not just a NewsGator problem. It's an industry problem. How do you get users to consider new software after most of them have decided on something else?

For instance, read the comments on the aggregator thread I started the other day. There are a TON of aggregators out there -- all competing for your attention.

We need a way to review aggregators. Maybe we should do that with video. Do a different aggregator every day so you can get a sense of which one might work for you?

What do you think? How can we help various aggregators get noticed beyond the herd mentality?

Shelley Powers channels Jon Stewart and gives those of us who didn't take Matt Mullenweg to the mat for his response a lot of heck with her "silent treatment."

That's the meme of the week: that bloggers aren't tough enough on each other. Well, sorry, everytime I'm tough on some group or some person I get heck. "Be nicer" is what I'm told. I figured that linking to Matt is enough. I start my morning by assuming that my readers are smart and can make up their own minds as long as they have access to all the information.

I also looked at it and saw that Matt was being treated pretty harshly already, and didn't see that responding with an even harsher comment would help anything out.

I love all the random, weird things that humans do. It's why I enjoy reading blogs so much. I didn't know that Philip Greenspun is a helicopter pilot, for instance. Here he writes about flying "Sky 12," a traffic helicopter in Richmond, Virginia.

He has more, including pictures, on his blog.

Philip first came on my radar screen by publishing a guide to Web publishing back in the 90s.

Ben McConnell writes about our shortcut culture and shortcut marketing.

I see this all the time. People get behind the ball and do things to try to get back in the game that they wouldn't otherwise do.

It's a cautionary tale.

"The "I'm just trying to make a buck" excuse doesn't work anymore. The fast-money, shortcut culture is being more widely exposed now than the mainstream media could ever imagine 10 years ago."

Raymond Kristiansen: Let's Hack the Attention Hierarchy!

Raymond is the head volunteer over at OurMedia. Subscribed! It's fun to watch how people become involved in the conversation. Want to start something? Have a conversation. Let go of control. Kick a snowball down the hill. Maybe it'll become an avalanche. Maybe not. But the only thing you control is whether you throw a snowball down the hill or not. So, start throwing!