Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Scoble on Corporate Blogging

Robert was speaking today at Tomlinson Zlisko LLP, a Silicon Valley law firm. About 30 people have come to attend the talk. Our host, Richard Hornig, explains that the firm organizes this speakers series regularly, and mentions when introducing Robert, that they are representing one of the bloggers recently sued by Apple. This post is a rough transcript of today's discussions.
Robert starts by showing the latest cover of BusinessWeek, which talks about blogs (gee, yet another one) and quips about the fact that he did not expect when starting his blog five years ago that he would tell Ballmer what to do (on the gay rights issue, that is).

The word of mouth network is building up, thanks to technology like Instant Messaging, Skype,... The new communication paradigm is for blogs to break news, and then see them appear on the front page of traditional media.

Robert uses the aforementioned incident, that was originally pointed to him by a few of his readers, linking to this piece from the Stranger, a small Seattle newspaper, from Thursday last week. Other bloggers linked to it thanks to the exposure given by Robert (and others), and then that news was on the front page of the New York Times three days later, on Sunday. On the Friday, Ballmer, who was called off by Scoble, sent a global email to Microsoft employees on the issue. Robert asked Microsoft PR about the right to publish the letter, and a rant. Then on Sunday, 3 guys from the US, Europe and Australia did a podcast on the topic. This demonstrate how quickly news show up and go across the blogosphere, and the rest of the media.

This also shows the challenge faced by PR professionals, who now need to track proactively the blogosphere for positive, and negative, news about their product/company in order to prepare appropriate countermeasures, just in case.

Blogs developed quickly both because it is easy to produce, and easy to discover. Robert shows the original ping server, Weblogs.com, and explains that at the very beginning of the blogging movement, Dave Winer was using it to read every posts - where there were 200 blogs or so, and point to them. Way back when, it used to be very difficult to be referenced by Yahoo or Google, even if one had a lot of readers and relevance. Now Google, Yahoo and the new search engine crowd (Pubsub, Technorati, Feedster) discover blogs as they post.
Blogs also provide real-time information about referrers, as opposed to periodic traffic reports offered by website hosters. Robert called this "cross domain conversationability", and uses it to figure out who is sending him traffic, starting by the smallest referrers in order to discover up-and-coming bloggers.

Robert then explains the basics of Permalinks, allowing one to point to a precise piece of information, enabling a more granular access, and Syndication, provide the ability to easily integrate large amounts of information. He then goes on to RSS, the protocol allowing for the syndication of any content to happen, and lists COTS RSS aggregators, predicting that IE 7.0 will have a RSS reader embedded.

Even though the blogosphere is still relatively small (20+ million blogs), watching the topics mentioned provides a good indication of what is happening, and allows one to project trends based on the early traffic. The buzz that started around Halo 2, the Apple Shuffle,... were such indicators.

Because blogs are amplifiers and the amplification happens through links, the linking behavior is what provides visibility through search engines like Google. Robert showed that Tomlinson Zlisko does not exist per se  because it does not show on the first page of Google for "Silicon Valley Law Firm".

Robert predicted that as long as Google will keep on providing "fuel" to the blogosphere, blogs will maintain their growing importance.

The questions session then begins:

• The first is about legal implications, as to what can be said, video-ed, etc. Microsoft PR watches carefully IP and trade secrets, and checks "Channel 9" videos to make sure they comply. But Robert's blog is his personal production which is not moderated or reviewed.
• The second deals with disclosures and SEC issues. Robert responds that there are checks and balances in place to make sure that no "secret" information is leaked or disclosed (example of a Jim Allchin interview during which no demo was allowed).
• I asked about the Microsoft blogging policy. Robert said that most was already in the employment agreement: "The same rules apply as to what can be talked about in the bar or in the blogosphere". Number one rule: "Be smart". He explains that corporate culture is like a membrane, it can be pushed a bit, but can also push back. He relies on co-workers to help figure out the boundaries, and where/when they can be challenged.
• Blogging has changed the way companies develop and market products. He shows Channel 9, which is the first site implementing "Open Source Marketing" - showing executives in their office, filmed with portable cameras, and limited editing. And then customers can comment directly on these posts, and share their views.
• Someone asks about blogging demographics or geographies. Robert uses "Les Blogs" as example that this is an international trend, without any specific age group - though there are products specifically targeting the youth audience (LiveJournal, Skyblogs).
• Another question is about how blogs can be leveraged for a business. "Be passionate and authoritative". Go out there, be helpful, informative, get people to link. Robert gives the example of the English Cut, the blog of an English tailor who used to sell less than 4 suits a month, and now is over 40 suits in the same period of time. Just because he created a blog demonstrating his skills: creating very high quality suits, at over $3,000 a piece.
  I also mentioned the blog of Dennis Crouch, Patently Obvious, which focus on Patent law and interesting cases. By building that brand, I ventured that this must have brought quite a bit of business to his firm. Another example is Steve Rubel and his employer, Cooper Katz.

Because the audience was not blog savvy (only 3 bloggers were in attendance), Robert had to stick to basics. But this is also how blogs can be evangelized.

More:

• A wiki setup by Rebecca Mc Kinnon: Blogging basics
• An interesting post listing corporate blogging resources
• A wiki on the same topic: The PR Wiki
• Neville Hobson (a PR man himself, and co host of the For Immediate Release podcast) comments on the BW article.

BusinessWeek Online has real blogs now

When BusinessWeek Online launched their "blogs" last January, I pointed out that they were missing real comments, trackbacks, RSS feeds, etc. They added feeds a week later, and very recently (04/19 based on that post from Andy Lark) moved to a new MovableType-powered template which features, yes, comments and trackbacks.

I had not spotted the change, Stowe Boyd from Corante mentioned it to me when we were in Paris, as he got involved in setting up BW's blogging strategy. This is good news as I value DealFlow,  TechBeat and more recently Blogspotting's content and we can now properly engage into a conversation with their respective editors.

It would be great if they could send full posts in their RSS feeds, but that might be too much asking until they figure out their feed advertising model.

Les Blogs Conclusion: I had a fantastic time in Paris!

What a week! I am typing this from the plane flying back from CDG to SFO, and this is sort of the first time I have had to reflect on what happened over the past few days, let alone write about these events. The good news with 11-hour flights is that they leave you a lot of time to catch up on email, rss feeds, podcasts, magazines and sleeping (in no particular order). And since that Air France flight is not full, I have managed to get 3 seats to make this whole trip quite comfortable.

Les Blogs was obviously the week's master piece, and I am so glad to have participated to this first edition. Besides a few minor logistics issues (power, network, long security checks, no coffee during the day - OK that one was a bit nasty but it was forced upon us by the French Senate which did not want to damage their carpet), it really went well and meeting with European startup entrepreneurs and bloggers was a particular treat for me. I am grateful to Loic for having me involved and share the moment. I have a special mention for the quality of the buffets we had for lunch and dinner (and for serving a glass of wine for lunch - so much better than Iced Tea :-). The wonderful Geraldine (Loic's wife and business partner, at the right on the picture) did a fantastic job keeping all this (and us) under control.
The coverage of the conference is quite substantial: tag, flickr and Buzznet. And do check out Doc's final keynote presentation, the best of the day. The wiki's coverage page has been edited to include a very well structured lists of posts and podcasts, per session. Whoever did this, awesome job! This is what we should get for all conferences in which bloggers get involved.

The speakers had a private dinner on Sunday night to get acquainted, and we ended up with a "small" party of 36. Even though this was a seated dinner, everybody moved around to chat with the largest number of people. I got to meet Darren Barefoot, a well known blogger from Vancouver who runs a PR consultancy with a number of North American and European clients. I also spent time with Jochen Wegner, the Science editor of Focus Magazine, who happened to be one of my panelists. Jochen briefed me on the German blogosphere, actually its relative non-existence. Also chatted with Stewart about flickr's upcoming relocation to the Valley, and with Ross and Eneken Mayfield about their long week-end in Paris, where they have been to many of the "must visit" places.
I met for the first time Andrew Carton from Treonauts fame, Paolo Valdemarin and his partner Monica, Gaby Darbyshire from Gawker, Guillaume Dugardier who runs PR Planet and the CEO Bloggers Club. And last but not least Charlie Chick (famous for lending the latest Nokia phones to bloggers and make all the others damn jealous). We even had an engagement announcement that we can't blog about (yet) is now official: Jason (Calacanis) has proposed to Jade on top of the Eiffel Tower and she has accepted. This picture shows Ross Mayfield breaking the great news, and asking us not to blog it (just to make sure that families hear it from the "principals" first).

The party after the conference was also very nice. The Alcazar, a trendy restaurant in the latin quarter,  had been booked only for us. The buffet style dinner gave a chance for everybody to mingle with a very large number of participants, which was great. I got to meet a number of French entrepreneurs, having just formed a company or about to do so. Also caught up with Meg Hourihan, Halley Suit, Mary Hodder, Greg Reinacker, Joi Ito, Stowe Boyd, Jason Calacanis, and finally spent some time with Loic once he could relax.

The following couple of days were spent in meetings, doing a bit of shopping (be ready for a change in shirts colors - french style) and a great walkblogging "session", walking from the Musee d'Orsay to le Sentier taking a bunch of pictures.
The other highlights were our bloggers dinner (post forthcoming), and a breakfast with Yossi Vardi. Amongst other things, Yossi mentioned that he was trying to get VCs interested in investing in companies he is working with in Israel to accept Common shares in order to align investors and management (i.e no Preferred). He also showed us that snails are faster than ADSL.
I also got to spend a bit of time with my parents, who I had not seen for eight months.

Two final thoughts: I was pleased and encouraged by the number of young entrepreneurs I met this week. They have bold ideas, want to make them happen, are asking the right questions, and I sure hope that they'll get the support they need. Which is a segway to the next thought: Where on earth were the local VCs (French, English, German) ? Rodrigo and Marc were obviously there, and I got to catch up with Andreas Schlenker from Partech International. I know that Regis Saleur from Galileo was there as well, though I unfortunately did not get a chance to meet him. But that's it ? Less than 2 percent of VCs in the audience ? Tad disappointing, to say the least. I hope it does not mean that European VCs are ignoring Social Media.

It was good to be back to the place I used to call Home.

Oh, I almost forgot: Marc Canter, Dude, you are so wrong with that rant of yours about not being invited. This was no typical A-lister exclusive get together - like the ones we have in the US. And you would have enjoyed the company, had you gotten your butt down to Paris as opposed to turning your back on us pretending you were offended. And the only "ring kissing" that happened was from Doc to Dave Winer, pointing out his contribution to blogging and RSS. Funny, ain't it.

Technorati tag: lesblogs

Fact check your sources before posting!

This post has been sitting in my Draft folder for about a week, but since it is of general relevance, I am posting it anyway (do you have that feeling that unless you react to something within say, 48 hours, it sort of becomes moot ?). I must preface this post that I am not picking on Steve on this one, it is just that his post was the catalyst for coming around to writing something on the topic.

On Friday 04/22, Steve Rubel posted this on Micro Persuasion:

Google has consistently denied it is working on a web browser, even as Firefox's developers openly discuss how they are jumping to go work for the search giant. Well now comes word from MarketingVOX that bloggers have spotted the browser in their server logs. Why doesn't Google just come out with it on their sleepy corporate blog that they are getting into the browser game?

The post refers to a "scoop" intially written by Nick Aster over at Silicon Valley Watcher, stating that he had spotted the Loch Ness Monster in their server logs. Did I say the Loch Ness Monster ? Sorry, I meant the Google Browser. In true blogosphere fashion, that post was linked quite a bit, in multiple layers. This output of BlogPulse partially shows the depth of linking. Steve's post was 3 links down from Nick's.

What's the issue ? Well, Nick wrote a second post 4 hours after his original piece, explaining that a number of SVW readers had helped demonstrate that there was no GBrowser in his logs. Still, Steve Rubel's post was written two days later, two days after the scoop had been, well, un-scooped.

What is the lesson here ? First that updating the original post might be more appropriate then posting the update in a new one, because it makes it easier for readers to follow the action. If a new post is required, then the original post should contain a link to this update. Even if it might satisfy your ego, you can't assume that people coming across a post of yours have subscribed to your feed, and will see an update coming through another post.
Then, if you credit a post for a given piece of information, it might be wise to follow links back to the origin of the information. And finally. check whether the same information has been posted by others to get a different or complementary perspective.

Posting might therefore involve more time to research and fact check (though in this case, a quick check would have led to not posting), but after all we owe it to our readers. And I'd rather get quality posts then quantity, thank you.

Because the blogosphere is a giant "tam tam", it has a strong tendancy to self-reinforcement. I recall a post from someone about the flickr acquisition rumour (scooped by Om), who listed all the blogs on which he/she had read about the rumour. So it had to be true! Well, all these posts referred directly or indirectly to Om's original one. So there was not a multiplication of rumours, just an amplification.

For example, the "Become.com controversy" was dealt with quite properly: SiliconBeat wrote a piece suggesting a potential issue, many of us chimed in, Michael Yang - the CEO of Become.com clarified the situation, everybody posted an update to reflect this additional information, case was closed.

Googlebot's timing (hilarious) side effects ?

Mike Torres, one of the Program Managers for MSN Spaces, just emailed me to let me know that my blog was #2 on Google for "MSN Spaces". Reading that note I went "Cool! What ? WTF ?". It just so happens that the blog Mike was referring to is my MSN Space, which I opened to test the service and  provide some feedback on. It therefore is supposed to have zero juice (or close to).

Investigating a bit, I did link to it a couple of times, my friend Mary Hodder also linked to it (mistakenly I guess), which did increase its juice. But being above Boing Boing, Scoble, Dare Obasanjo,... Duh ? I am not even the first "clavier" on Google (yet, but working on it ).

I then checked Bloglines and Technorati for the list of incoming links. The Technorati results showed a few bizarre results, that might hint at a potential reason: a handful of other MSN Spaces seemed to link to mine, with no obvious reason, and these links were all 92 days old. I then remembered that MSN Spaces includes by default a short linkroll of recently updated blogs. Which means that the Technorati crawler was going through these blogs as I updated my MSN Spaces 92 days ago (with this post), and my blog happened to be listed as "Last updated".

Could the same explanation apply to Google ? But instead of a handful of blogs, they would have picked up many (many many) more Spaces listing my blog in their linkroll ? Leading to this very strange (but quite amusing) situation. Since TypePad has the same (optional) feature of showing most recently updated blogs, has anyone seen a similar behavior ?

Any SEO guru reading this, and having a different explanation, please comment...

Since MSN Spaces' linkroll has gone "nofollow", I assume that this will disappear after the next Google dance. But who knows, I might get stuck there . This might be a new trick to game Google's index, but it is probabilistically very difficult to engineer (or is it not?).

Les Blogs: Product Panel

First post regarding Les Blogs. The start of the conference was challeging: limited network coverage, very long process to get all attendees through, etc. So we got going almost an hour late, but that's fine. After a welcome message from "Le Club Senat" and Joi's comments, we got going on the Product panel, which was loosely moderated by Loic and engaged almost immediately with the audience: Were on the panel:

• Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart
• Meg Hourihan, consultant & co-founder, Blogger.com
• Caterina Fake, Flickr
• Charlie Schick, Nokia

Since the panel was not too structured, I am just mentioning snippets of what everyone said.

Caterina: Photographs are easy to produce, share and consume. More and more people will have a blog that will be comprised mostly of photos, shared with a few people, with tagging and social networking features. Videos are more challenging to produce, consume and search.

Meg: Evolution of the concept of "blogging", which will evolve towards the democritization of content production, distribution and remixing. It is a new way of conneting with the world.

Charlie: Growth will be in leveraging media distribution as an excuse to connect and engage in a conversation.

Barak: It is not about Media. Study: "Bloggers are people with too much time on their hands, thinking way too much of themselves". SixApart wants to change this image, and has therefore a large platform strategy.

Stewart: "The Cat blog is fine" (Meg had sort of downplayed the personal blog). And points to Scoble as a unique brand that will make it difficult for Microsoft to "unload".

Caterina: "If I was to have another career, I would want to be fired for blogging - it is a big career blogger".

Caterina: "Key for success: open APIs, be blog friendly, and integrate well with the rest of the ecosystem."

Barak: "There is a huge need for independance, outside of the walled gardens (AOL, Yahoo,...). Hence the possibility for SixApart to thrive. And blogging is a powerful asynchronous communication mechanism.

Question: on fear of changes in the legislature that would stiffle communication. There are a few suits going against bloggers (Joi, Apple suing,...), and there is a debate around providing bloggers with the same legal protections as journalists. Barak points out to the fact that sometime bloggers behave as if they were not subject to law, and then are "chocked" if they get legally challenged.

As a bonus, a few of my pictures of the conference:

Technorati tag: lesblogs

Yet another panel on MSN vs. Bloggers ? Hopefully not.

I am now en route to Paris, to participate to "Les Blogs", the conference put together by my good friend Loic Le Meur. I am actually typing this from a Mac (eewwwww) in the Air France lounge at SFO. The buzz around the conference has grown over the past week thanks to the great work Loic has been doing (of note, this Wired article stating that French is the second most used language in the blogosphere - duh ?). About 300 people will attend the event at the French Senate, and that's really because the two rooms the Senate made available to us could not host more people.

I am really looking forward to this event, one of a kind in Europe, and meet/catch up with a number of European bloggers and executives who will attend the conference or the dinner I am hosting with Marc Goldberg on Tuesday. I will try and blog a few sessions, mostly in the morning, and post a bunch of pictures on our "Les Blogs" gallery (just tag your pictures lesblogs to add yours).

I will also have the pleasure to host the MainStream Media panel of the conference. And unlike so many I have seen or read about in the US, it won't be a "We say, They say" type of debate, based on the conversation I have had with my panelists. Let me introduce them:

• Neil McIntosh, Assistant Editor - The Guardian
• Yann Chapellon, CEO -  Le Monde Interactif
• Jochen Wegner, Technology Editor - Focus Magazine
• Pierre Bellanger - Skyrock & Skyblog

Leveraging their respective experience, we'll actually talk more about how Le Monde, The Guardian and Skyrock have integrated blogs and blogging tools in their ecosystem to add value to their editorial content, and interaction with their users. And I am *really* looking forward to Jochen's view of the german singularity when it comes to blogging.

I will conduct the panel as a fireside chat, and will definitely seek the participation of the audience. I was also hoping to get questions from the backchannel - though the conference won't use am IRC chat room, but a Java application. We'll see how that goes.

See you in Paris!

Technorati tag: lesblogs

PS: I'll add links when I land, this &^(*&$#( Mac has been "castrated" by blocking the multi-windowing features (i.e only one Internet session max). Done.

X1 goes the "Let's build it" route with $10M from USVP

SiliconBeat announces that X1, the company providing desktop search technology to Yahoo!, just raised $10M from Sand Hill Road's USVP. This is a substantial financing which shows tha X1/Idealab executives have signed up for building the company "the old way". There were probably some M&A discussions with Yahoo - easy since Idealab also incubated Overture - but this one did not end up in a flip.

X1 sells a Desktop Search product for $74.95 and an Enterprise Edition that looks like a competitor of Verity's search product.

Paul Kedrosky offers a similar analysis: Bill Gross Gets Some Search (X1 is not a burger company to flipped). And here is the press release.

MSN Spaces: 7M blogs in 5 months

Dare Obasanjo  points to a WSJ review (sub req') of MSN Spaces by Walt Mossberg. Based on excerpts, the review is quite positive albeit pointing at the limited customization capabilities offered by Spaces. Dare also refers to two quite stunning numbers: Spaces has 7M blogs roughly 5 months after launch, and is adding about 100,000 new Spaces per day (3M a month ?). This number brings them close to Blogger (8M ?), and over LiveJournal (6.5M ?).

I spent just a few minutes looking at recently updated spaces, and most of them, not surprisingly, had just a couple of posts, a few photos, a list or two. As blogs become more widely known and read, it is not surprising to see people "give it a try". What would be really interesting is to get some statistics of active blogs, ie Spaces that have been updated less than three (or less ?) months ago, as well as the number of posts and comments.

I can't wait to see the response of the Spaces team (which has done an awesome job at engaging with their users and being prompt at fixing issues in the early days) to Yahoo 360. As Marc Canter puts it, Y!360 is much closer to the concept of a DLA (Digital Lifestyle Aggregator) than any other product out there, and given the wealth of functionality of MSN, it is only logical to expect a similar integration at some point.
And I know that they have been watching since the Spaces boys registered the first day Y!360 became available, and I saw a lot of traffic in my referrer logs coming from Microsoft  on my review.

Stacy over at PaidContent.org also posted on the topic.

Rojo - The Return - As a Taggregator

As mentioned by Susan a few days ago, a happy few got a preview of the new UI and functionality of Rojo, which I must say are great improvements from the one I had tested back in Nov 2004. Seeing the UI for the first time, I thought that this looked like a typical Adaptive Path work product (it turns out it is).

So what is Rojo ? Well it is an RSS aggregator, with a few twists (as previously noted, twists are very important). It belongs to the web-based aggregators category, led (until now ) by Bloglines. As you would expect, Rojo integrates RSS/Atom feeds, displays them in your web browser (working great in Firefox PC), display individual posts, search through the feed archive, etc. It also provides a simple directory of blogs, which has been implemented using a limited taxonomy/tagsonomy maintained (as I understand) by an editor.

Like other RSS readers, you can also pre-populate Rojo with pre-defined category (ex: Venture Capital) and sources (CNET, NY Times)... Signing up is actually a breeze and in a few minutes, you are rssreading away. An advice though: be easy on the topics and the sources, because you might end up looking like Scoble very quickly with hundreds (and hundreds) of feeds to read. I actually wish that you could see which blogs are included in the topics in order to choose a subset.

The search works well, too well almost. It would be appropriate to aggregate the different blogs pointing to a given entry (a la Feedster or Technorati) as opposed to having multiple entries at the same level. And I would move the search box above the list of feeds.

Now the interesting stuff:

• Tags: Rojo allows you to tag post AND feeds. And in plain English, unlike del.icio.us. This means that I can organize my feeds much more flexibly than my NewsGator folders. Nice. And I can read all posts related to a given tag, or all posts of all feeds related to a given tag. When available, related tags are also displayed (tags used for similar stories, I assume that there needs to be a minimum occurrence to appear).
  One thing though: it sounds as though - unlike Technorati - that my own tagging, as defined by my TypePad categories, are not used. I know that there is a big debate as to whose tags are to be used, but I do categorize my posts, and would want to have the option to have my categories used as tags.
  But overall, this is great taggregation functionality.
• Social Network: Yep, another one (expect another round of "Connect to me ?" emails - though these can be turned off, to be fair). This functionality was already available in the November release, but I did not go beyond inviting a few contacts.
  Rojo's implementation is similar to Buzznet's and Flickr's: I can add someone to my watchlist to see what he/she is reading, but the relationship does not need to be bi-directional.
  Privacy issue: once I have added someone to my watch list, clicking on Contacts > Manage allows me to tag the person (neat) but also see their email address. This should only happen if the person has accepted me as a contact. Issue solved, see below comment from Michael Eakes.
• Sharing: Once a person has accepted me in their network, I can see their profile, their tags, feeds, etc. And I can see what stories they have shared with their network. Attention(.xml) is creeping up here (as hinted by Steve Gillmor). This is quite interesting, but will only be useful if people tag as well. Check Chris Alden's shared stories, there are some relevant to me, and some which are not. Had he tagged them as well, I could have used the "Sort by tag" view to go through them (I know I am a pain).
• Recommendation/Discovery: Similar to the Top Links feature of Bloglines, Rojo recommends posts based on the number of incoming links. Recommendations can be produced on a one to seven day period. This is cool, but I would like to be able to filter recommendations by topics/tags. Otherwise many of these recommendations will be totally irrelevant to me.
• Other neat features: list of stories I have read, marked and shared.

Overall this is a great job compared to the initial version that was shown around at Web 2.0. Still not enough to get me out of NewsGator, but certainly quite competitive to Bloglines feature-wise (needs to scale in terms of UI and back-end now). Who said that the Web-based aggregator market was done and dusted ? (Me ? Naann). I can't wait to see the rumored Yahoo!Mail client resulting of the integration of Bloomba and and Oddpost.
Oh yeah, and it is now officially out of beta. And as usual Om beat me to it. You can take a tour of the product here, and check out their blog here. Interestingly, their corporate site is implemented using a closed Wiki (JotSpot actually).

A few issues now, in no particular order:

• The version I used was really slow, but eh, it is just the beginning and I am sure that more servers will be provisioned.
• At the end of the day, a lot of time is spent by Internet users tagging posts on del.icio.us, furl, etc. I think that these tags ought to be integrated and displayed somehow, and likewise Rojo tags ought to be made available through other tagging services. This raises the issue to del.icio.us single word tag limitation, but I do hope that this will eventually get changed.
• When you follow through a link to the post itself, I would do it in another window as opposed to reusing the Rojo one (or is there an option) ?
• Manage Feeds: In the Tags view, having a maximum of 4 or 5 tags to manage as a set, and then having to click individually on others is a bit of a torture. Why not manage all of them on that one page, or at least multiple ones ?
• As a general point, I think that the UI is nicely designed, but seems to target casual users, as opposed to RSS maniacs. Otherwise there would be more space for viewing stuff and less space taken by UI controls (icons, etc.).
• When you upload an OPML file, a bunch of feeds appear as "Unnamed", as if they had to be processed before the feed title could be displayed.