Jackson Miller

Michael Arrington has posted that TechCrunch has reached the 1,000,000 subscriber mark on FeedBurner. First off, congrats to TechCrunch; I have never seen someone hit that milestone before.

I don’t know that they really have one million subscribers, but I do know they have at least one… me.

I use NetNewsWire on my laptop and my phone. They both sync with NewsGator.com which pulls the feed for me and reports a subscriber to FeedBurner. Sometimes the NewsGator sync doesn’t work right so I turn it off. At that point my laptop appears to be a second subscriber to FeedBurner. As I go through my day I may check feed from my home, a coffee shop or two, and my office (subscriptions 3 and 4).

Of course, I have tried out many other feed readers. Some of them are web-based and continue to report that I am a subscriber. Off the top of my head I know Google Reader and Bloglines do (subscriptions 5 and 6). I am sure there are more places I have uploaded my OPML file that would each report me as an additional RSS subscriber.

I am in no way doubting that TechCrunch is one of the most widely read blogs on the internet. I just think it is completely within the realm of reason to assume that the actually number of people subscribing to the TechCrunch feed is 20% of what FeedBurner is reporting.

How do I know and why do I care?

At one point in time I added the “number of subscribers” metric to statzen.com. As I dug in and saw what was really happening I realized that it is just a bad number; it does not represent what it portrays to represent. It can be skewed so far in either direction that the number becomes meaningless.

One of the unadvertised features of statzen is that multiple feeds can be merged into a single feed. I have been using this feature to include posts from the statzen blog in the feed for my personal blog. I did this for two reasons:

1. It is probably safe to assume that a majority of jaxn.org subscribers are at least marginally interested in statzen.
2. Jaxn.org has many more subscribers than the statzen blog.

Now that we are starting to actually launch there will be many more posts to the statzen blog. Also, I am not the only one writing there anymore. The statzen CEO (aka my dad) is also writing posts now. So I am thinking about changing things.

Should I…

1. Leave things the way they are
2. Stop including the statzen blog in the jaxn.org feed and encourage everyone to subscribe to the statzen feed if interested
3. Change the setup a little so that only the posts that I write will be included in the jaxn.org feed.

I am on the fence deciding between #2 and #3.

Which do you prefer?

Have you ever wanted to know what statzen actually is?

If so then I have a post for you…

Introducing Statzen.

Invites start going out when I get back from TechCrunch 50.

Bright and early Sunday morning I will board a plane for the first time since March or April. Way back in 2007 it was rare for me to have 6 days at home, let alone 6 months. I don’t miss it much (though housekeeping and room service were nice at times).

This trip is different than almost every other trip I have taken; this trip is for my business, not someone else’s. I have had a couple of Plato’s Closet related trips before, but this is the first one for statzen.

San Francisco here we come!

Oh, and all that traveling in 2007 allows me to fly to San Fran on points. Free cross country airfare rocks!

Do you know how people read your blog? Do your posts get read on your website or in your feed?

It should be a simple question, but with the tools that are available it is a hard answer to find.

Unless of course you have Statzen.

jaxn.org channel overview for 9/2007 – 9/2008

I have this little project I am working on. I am calling it statzen; maybe you have heard of it. As I am getting close to launching I am starting to think about customer service strategies. The recurring theme that I keep coming back to is that I want to make it easy for our customers to interact with us to provide feedback and ask for help. Each customer service interaction is an opportunity for us to really win over our customers. So I want to make it easy for those opportunities to take place.

Granted, I may be a little idealistic in these thoughts, but these are some of the ideas I hope we can implement.

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Sometimes I just stop and realize that I am living the dream and this is really happening.

During the Democratic National Convention there was lots of talk about the American Dream. It is a dream that is getting harder and harder to realize. Somehow, during a very tumultuous time in our nation I have been fortunate / lucky enough to carve out my piece of the dream.

Sure, there are challenges. We have more debt than I am comfortable with. Raising 4 small children is stressful and tough on a marriage. There is no guarantee that I will be able to pay my mortgage in two months. Oh, and I spend too many hours a week working.

Most of my worries come from life as an entrepreneur. I am going all in on an idea and hard work. I could lose it all, but there could also be a huge upside at the end. There is no guarantee in this country that your ideas will be any good or that your execution will be sufficient, but this is supposed to be the land of opportunity. I have an opportunity and I am taking it.

Many of the DNC speeches mentioned that “opportunity” is getting harder and harder to come by. I believe that is true. Knowing that makes me all the more grateful that I am able to do this.

In September, my idea will launch. If I am successful it will mean that I will be working harder and longer in multiple directions at once. It is not an easy life, but it is the life I want; the life I have been dreaming about and working towards for years.

Right now I am sitting in my office (kindly provided by Chuck and his new startup). I am working to make statzen.com ready to launch. I am working on designs, business cards, and marketing strategies while fixing bugs, adding features, and tuning the servers. I am getting to practice a wide skill set that I have developed over years working jobs that would get me closer to this point. I am doing what I love and I am loving what I do. Sometimes I forget to be grateful for this opportunity, but not today.

BusinessWeek is reporting (via WaPo) on National legislation that would restrict behavioral targeting of web advertising. This legislation could impact how web analytics companies track surfers. You might think I would be worried, but I am not and here is why:

• Some web analytics companies are also advertising companies. The legislation is targets at advertisers. I think statzen would be immune because we are focusing on providing great analytics, not ads.
• Most web analytics are tracking visitors. We keep an eye on the visitors, but we are mostly watching the content. The difference here is key. If we were to target ads it most likely not be based on visitor behavior but on targeting the content that gets the most attention.
• This could shake up the web analytics and advertising industry. A shake up gives us the opportunity to redefine some things.

I knew this kind of legislation was coming. I think New York state was the first to propose it. I am pretty excited to see how it plays out.

Man, I have been swamped (in a good way).

Statzen as a business has been continually picking up steam. I have had just enough BI work including last week’s panel discussion. Plato’s has been slammed with Back To School. The Plato’s server crashed. I moved statzen to 2 new servers. Zavier started 1st grade and Carter started kindergarten. Oh, and yesterday was my birthday.

All of that has resulted in me being fairly disengaged from conversational media. I am writing this post from my phone while eating lunch in an attempt to re-engage.

Statzen will continue to escalate, but I am finding my stride. Speaking of stride, I need to go for a run to enjoy this amazing weather.

As you are probably aware I have been working on a big application that I hope to release sometime this year. It is called statzen and it provides a new way for publishers to keep track of what people are reading. I have been making some major breakthroughs on statzen lately. Yesterday I added APML support (XML format for sharing attention data). Most APML uses I have seen are for getting information about what you are giving attention to (i.e. the APML file showing what feeds I give attention to in NetNewsWire). The APML file for jaxn.org (powered by statzen) currently is showing attention data for “concepts” (i.e. tags and categories). The data is based on what you the readers are giving attention to.

The APML file I am publishing is using 3 profiles. The first and default profile shows the combined data from both web and feed attention. The second profile is showing attention from the web site itself while the third profile shows attention data from my RSS feed. This data could be used by search engines, meme trackers, etc to see what my blog is most authoritative about. There are other profiles that I may add in the near future that could be real game changers.

While statzen is my main project, it is not my only project. Last week I launched urlzen.com. It is a URL shortener that provides information about how many times the short URL was clicked and from where (another prime candidate for APML). My goal for urlzen was to create something useful while also testing out the Google AppEngine platform. It has been a success in my eyes, and I think there are some users who enjoy using it (I know it is the easiest URL shortener I have used, but I haven’t used all of them).

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