The Bee Blog

Another New Release!

Should I say "second test flight?" We have put another engineering release up at www.personalbee.com. This release primarily fixes bugs, and improves usability but there is one big new feature for our readers: My Feeds.

Every new registered reader (and old readers in the next few days) now has a "My Feeds" Bee. This is our first step toward letting every reader become a beekeeper. You will only see this Bee if you are a registered reader on the site. Once you have registered, the My Feeds Bee is automatically created.

Registered readers can:

1. Put any feed into the My Feeds Bee

2. Organize the page so that certain feeds are shown by default in the left and right reader columns

3. Recommend articles within this Bee

4. Personalize the Bee with a new name and a banner image

5. Share this Bee with other registered readers -- letting others join as fellow editors or just as readers

6. Tag, comment, and make public (in reading lists) any article in any feed added to the My Feeds Bee.

What readers cannot do (yet!):

1. Use our automated phrase analysis tools to generate a phrase map for the My Feeds Bee

2. Make the My Feeds Bee public

3. Create additional private or public Bees

So, where are we going from here? My Feeds is a first "private" Bee -- that means, you'll control who accesses the Bee. The next feature we are working on is to allow you to create additional private Bees. The idea behind a Bee, after all, is that it is narrowly focused on a particular topic.

Once readers can create private bees, we'll start turning on the phrase map analytics -- which work best when they can process a narrow topical feed collection, not the widely varied collection of feeds we expect readers to add to their My Feeds Bee.

Finally, once we have refined the process for creating Bees, we'll let anyone take a private Bee and make it public!

As always, let us know if you have any questions or comments for us -- feedback (a) personalbee.com

Old Media: Past Tense?

Always on our mind: Where media is going.

Exhibit A: Ted posts on a discussion with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, who posits that the rapidly advancing abilities of Web 2.0 entities like Memeorandum (and perhaps even The Personal Bee) will doom old media companies stuck in their top-down relationship to audiences and markets. Ted begs to differ, arguing that some of the established companies will get the new paradigm and benefit from it.

Exhibit B: Dan posts on a valuable insight from David Carr of The New York Times on the bedrock value that old media brings to the table in this discussion of the future: "I think people assume that, "Oh, we'll be able to use the web to assemble a portrait of the world beyond our town," and the fact is that Google News or whatever RSS feeder you've got, most of it is just annotating coverage. Somebody has to make phone calls somewhere in order for news to function. ..."

Even More Stats

It's a banner day for statistics reporting here at The Personal Bee. Some of our early test Beekeepers have asked when we'd be able to give them an idea of how many users and visits their Bees are getting. The answer is: right now. We've set up a brief report on Bee activity by registered users -- we don't tell you what domain visitors came from, their IP addresses, what they clicked on, whether they're vegan or full-on BBQ fanatics, or whether they prefer to relax with red wine, white wine or mineral water. Maybe some day day we can convey all of that information.

Again, the current report (see example below) is limited to activity by registered users. That will likely change soon to reflect activity of all visitors, but we're not quite there yet.

Our First Stats

Don't get all excited, but early Beekeepers now have access to our first public stats. If you're curious how many people in the Personal Bee community have subscribed to your Bee, click on Admin, then on Membership (under Editions Settings). Beneath the right-hand blank that says "Add a Subscriber," there's a line in faint gray print: "Named Subscribers" with a number in parentheses. OK -- that number is the number of registered users who have signed up for your Bee. As I (Dan) said, it's a modest beginning. But never fear -- more stats are on their way.

Interview with the Apiculturist

A look inside the hive (courtesy of Dan): We're at the stage of our project where ideas and energy abound. We've got a site up and running, though none dare yet call it a beta. There's plenty of competition out there, but even more possibilities. Now all we lack is a few more (or a few hundred more) good test users to pound on the tools we're building to show us what works and what doesn't.

Discussing the situation with Ted, he points out one rather simple tool we lack that might encourage more people to engage: traffic statistics. Several of our early test users have asked if and when they can get stats. It's the pebble-in-the-well principle (trademark pending): You drop a pebble into a well to hear the splash come back out of the darkness. For our Beekeepers, a little data out of the darkness would be welcome feedback on their efforts.

So that little project is a high priority for us -- something we'll try to roll out in a not-too-distant feature release.

Test Flight

No, we're not there yet! Not to the point where we are comfortable calling this a "beta" that is... But if you visit us at the Personal Bee home page you'll see what we have been calling internally, a "feature release."  Which is to say, a completely updated Bee which allows you to actually register as a reader, tag and comment on articles, export your comments to your own blog via a nifty Bee Widget...

Someday you'll also be able to create your own bees, design your own personal newspaper, visit Mars on a budget... We know we have a lot of work to do, but we'd love to have you join us to help evaluate, critique, break, and otherwise enjoy our work in progress.  Along the way we'll work to be transparent about our plans and let you help set our priorities for the next set of work that we need to do to make this your preferred place to discover news online.