feevy gets exciting, very exciting

for me, feevy was exciting the day david told me about it. but lately, things are getting really exciting.

currently, there are more than 1500 users and more than 6000 connected blogs in the feevy universe. english-speaking bloggers continue to be the overwhelming minority of the feevy community. cool.

a feevy widget is now available for wordpress blogs. i know a lot of wordpress bloggers who have patiently waited for feevy on their blogs - now it's possible. a feevy blogroll for wordpress blogs is coming soon.

and, most exciting, alex has produced a graphic that visualizes the feevy community. david, pablo, and ryan have shared their ideas about what is going on, and i would like to share mine. but first, here's the graphic:


my first reaction is: i have no idea what this means. unfortunately, i have very little training in social network analysis. also, although i use google to translate david's blog posts from spanish into english, the translation is terrible, which means i am missing much context.

that said, it seems to me that feevy users are building networks, not nodes. put another way, we are building concentric communities, not long tails. with feevy, there are no so-called a-list bloggers, or blogstars, or, if there are, their reach is neither farther nor more lounder than the rest of us.

whatever it is, i look forward to seeing more.

wanna be presidents - a new feevy blog aggregator

[crossposted from the feevy blog ...]

wanna be presidents is an aggregator of blogs for US 2008 presidential hopefuls. built with feevy, wanna be presidents aggregates all presidential bloggers (currently 16 by our count) into three categories: republicans, democrats, and independents. wanna be presidents is an easy and effective way to view different campaigns on the same page.



because feevy is built upon RSS, wanna be presidents relies on candidates’ RSS feeds. in building the site, david de ugarte and i were quite surprised to discover that many republican presidential candidates, including john mccain, duncan hunter, and tom tancredo, have not integrated RSS into their web presences. which begs the question - who is advising these guys?

we welcome your feedback on wanna be presidents and look forward to adding more candidates as they join the race.

what is feevy?

i've been thinking and playing with feevy for the last few days and am trying to answer what should be an easy question: what is feevy?

1. blogroll: at the most simple level, feevy replaces the blogroll. feevy is a list, a public list, of some of the blogs i read.

2. RSS reader: feevy serves as a RSS reader. (what's RSS? read lee lefever's "RSS in plain english.") since i've had feevy, i have stopped using bloglines.

3. visiting voices: so much of blogging is narcissistic - here are my daily observations! here, via flickr, are my daily photos! here, via last.fm, are my favorite songs! here, via library thing, are the books i read! through feevy, other bloggers, their words, and their pictures become part of my blog. to a certain extent, the me! me! evolves, a little, to me! me! we! we! we! and that's cool. i really like how, with feevy's help, a significant portion of the words on this page are written by people who are not me.

4. blog portal: feevy is not exactly a blog portal but it makes creating blog portals very, very easy. david has been pointing many bloggers to one example - parlamentarios.info - a portal of spanish representatives who have blogs. excellent! someone interested in the US 08 presidential race should create some similar blog roll with democratic candidates on the left and republican candidates on the right - and with easy scalability to allow for alternatives to the two party machine. with about an hour of work, you would have an easy way to track blog posts from 2008 US prez blogs.

there's more. there's much more deeper considerations like the way feevy changes blog reading. it's one thing to read blogs from bookmarks, it's another thing to read blogs via RSS. well, it's yet another thing to read blogs via feevy. there's deeper considerations like the way feevy changes our tracking of blog visitors. anyone who has used feevy plus some kind of tracker like statcounter knows exactly what i am talking about. and then there's deeper cultural considerations like the fact that feevy was developed not in silicon valley but in spain and that its original base community is spanish speaking.

but it's a long weekend and i'm in santa cruz so family and fun calls.

feevy - a free blogging tool from spain

feevy is a new and free blog tool developed by david de ugarte and the sociedad de las indias electrónicas. feevy replaces boring, static blogrolls with more personalized, dynamic blog bits. by incorporating RSS, feevy feeds the right column of my blog with fresh content from bloggers i read. plus, it's extremely easy to use. sweet.

i imagine feevy can be used quite easily to set up some kind of blog portal. for example, with a relatively small university like USF (around 8,000 students), it would be interesting to try to aggregate all USF student, faculty, and staff bloggers and, using feevy, make a one-stop page for quick and easy USF blog reading.

one night in 2003, in prague, david shared with me his many, many theories, experiments, and actions in contemporary activism and cyberactivism. the metaphor he returned to over and over again was ivy. ivy, david said, has shallow but distributed roots, stays close to the ground, and grows quickly and collectively. plus, he said, it's really difficult to get rid of. feevy, i believe, stands for feed the ivy. nice.