I always managed to keep up with local events. I made Montreal and friends feeds a top priority. Then it was the rest of the world. Just like an addict, I always told myself that I could eventually catch up. That I would read all my feeds. I was wrong.

So I declared RSS bankruptcy.

Unlike email bankrupcy which is a more severe form of social exclusion, RSS bankrupcy will only affect me. No hard feeling if I haven’t read your blog, ok? Then again, chances are you will never know…

So earlier today I did what I thought would be impossible. I zeroed all my feeds. I have nothing to read now. I don’t know if it feels good or not yet but I feel like I can move on to something else. I also had to kill some heavy feeds and I had to change the way I management my feeds. I guess I should take some time to catchup with old emails now :)

If you have time then take a look at the “how does it work page” as you’ll see the magic behind reCaptcha. Indeed, if the OCR can’t decipher the text, then how do they know if what YOU entered is right? Read the page to find out.

I invite you to use reCaptcha and at the same time, I invite you to visit the startup listing page to add your own startup if you haven’t done so.

1. Wordpress – Twitter merger

Ah ha! Yes I know there are many widgets for Twitter but what I want has to be chronological and form one whole myoma. It should blend in with the other articles (instead of being lost in a sidebar, along with ads – where no one looks anyways) and be included in the RSS feed as well. Facebook has something pretty close where you can see which groups you joined, set your mood and so on. I don’t really care about moods but perhaps there’s a market for it (teens?).

2. Better MyBlogLog integration (aka turn all blogs in a big social network)

Allow to post using MyBlogLog’s user account and when possible, put a picture of the user who posted next to his comment thus encouraging users to visit each other’s blogs. Perhaps an expandable “last 5 comments” wherever the posts were made would allow users to find out even more blogs although I see some privacy issues here… Perhaps you guys don’t really want to know that I also post comments on a Coconut fetish blog. I also find it very hard to find good blogs so I tend to visit blogs of people who post but this could be automated somehow. MyBlogLog adds blogs you visit often but from memory, and other that “what’s hot”, it doesn’t suggest anything based on your preferences/behaviour..? Last thought: Facebook allows you to have a blog, so why not turn all blogs in a Facebook killer? Maybe OpenID could help solve this although it’s not a planned feature as far as I know…

3. Rateable comments

Not your everyday Slashdot/Digg style comments though. I want the top 5 comments to make it the front page AND the RSS feed. That way, you might get hooked on the great comments and read the whole article and the rest of the comments. I think everything in live should be “rateable” as no one likes to read crap and sometimes comments are more interesting than the actual article. So an article could get a rating/activity boost because of the quality of the comments. I often scan blog articles in my RSS reader and I’m sure I miss out a lot of great views/ideas/etc. Using a Digg icon just doesn’t work (unless you want to be featured on Digg) as the number of comments is not always an indication of the quality.

How about you guys? What would make your life easier?

This made me think seriously about the implications of having a copyright on my site. My vision when I started this blog was to help people like me who basically had no where to turn to and to help the community grow. Sounds good and fair, no?

Quick parenthesis, I’m a fervent defender of free information. Information wants to be free. Information IS free. I’m also totally against software patents, which is basically information processed in a particular way. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the implications of having a copyright while some of the information on my blog is “crowdsourced”. What about comments left by users? Can I claim these as “mine”? I don’t think so. I don’t want to anyway. Is this even enforceable if I wanted to?

Copyright issue is hard and I was actually looking into different licenses for my social news startup (for obvious reasons). However, for reasons that I cannot discuss now, I couldn’t find a license that protected the users the way I wanted to while being inline with the business model that I had in mind. What I need is a mixture of Copyright, Creative Commons and a license between two entities. Information wants to be free but no one likes it when it’s stolen away from you.

Back to my blog, I decided to remove the copyright and to use the Creative Commons “Attribution Share Alike” license. It gives flexibility to the community by allowing everyone to re-use information on this blog.

So if you haven’t really thought about it, I suggest you think about it for a second and rethink the way you control your information. Thanks Sylvain for noticing this!

Personally, I think that blogs (not in the current form though) will take over newspapers so I think blogs are useful. I don’t even see the point of having big newspapers or media companies other than to allow journalists to receive a salary. With a decent blog business model, good journalists will flea their workplace and go digital. Good people get noticed. Some (most?) bloggers are not journalists yet they manage to attract a lot of people. Bad journalists will have to look for other jobs.

Me? I don’t have time to read the newspaper or watch the news. That being said, I think that the current “blog platform” is not efficient for news coverage. I want focused, localised content. I can’t have this right now but that’s something I’m working on slowly (shameless plug).

We’ve seen it with YouTube and Joost: big companies are starting to be nervous and updating your front page is simply not enough to survive… I know I will be telling my grand kids that “in the old days” we used to be reading our news on a piece of paper that they printed during the night which was then delivered by a paperboy. Wow, I get excited. I will have so many neat things to tell my grand kids after all!

I’m also working on a new service for startups in Quebec. Basically it’s a clone of CrunchBase (although slightly improved) for companies in Quebec. And yes, I know YulStart has a list as well, I wanted to make it very detailed and keep control of it. Wiki’s are nice but are too easy to modify (in a malicious way). If you have any feature requests then please go ahead and let me know. It should be ready soon. Just trying to juggle with work, projects, blog and a sick child :(