Big apology to everyone who subscribes to my feed. I should have tested things out more thoroughly before peppering your feed reader with hundreds of posts. If I haven’t lost you already, please hang on. I think it’s stable now. And if I already lost you, please consider either coming back or subscribing to my blog-only feed or my bookmarks feed. Thanks for your patience.

Reid Hoffman reminded me the other day that I needed to take a look at the LinkedIn Answers service, the peer-to-peer Q&A service for business. It obviously emulates much of the Yahoo! Answers product, particularly the user experience, so I thought I’d do a little test.

It surprised me in a way that I didn’t expect…

I wondered what would happen if I posted the same question in both LinkedIn Answers and Yahoo! Answers. Of course, I posted a work-related question. This would make the test as nearly apples-to-apples as it could be.

I’ve been wanting to know more about the API market, size, share, segmentation, and all that good market data that defines an industry. The web services market is pretty loosely defined still, and I want to know where the best research is. So here’s what I asked on both sites:

“Where is the best market research on APIs and web services?”

LinkedIn:
- 2 answers within a day
- Both pointed to John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb
- The 3rd post came in 5 days later listing a few relevant blogs in addition to ProgrammableWeb

Yahoo!:
- 2 answers in less than an hour
- The 1st answers also pointed to ProgrammableWeb
- The 2nd listed 3 more sites that were sort of relevant

I kind of expected this behavior, but I certainly didn’t expect that I would get the same answer in the end. Yes, ProgrammableWeb is very good. It’s a highly relevant answer to my question, though not exactly the answer I was hoping for.

In some ways, I expected LinkedIn to give me better answers given both the focus and also how broad the Yahoo! Answers demographic must be, but this shows how participatory media can reach incredibly deep into the micro niche even when it’s a mass consumer service.

So, who won this test? I’m inclined to believe that speed matters more, particularly if the answers turn out to be the same. What do you think?

Jeremy Zawodny and I produced another screencast last week, a look inside Pipes with Pasha Sadri and Ed Ho. The Pipes guys shared their insights while we asked a few questions and recorded the screen and the audio.

I’ve been trying to improve on each screencast with a new trick or some efficiency. This time I tried to mix in some relevant still shots in the editing process to support the voice over.

Camtasia was a little stickier here but still very easy to use. After setting up the production and editing out some bits, I used SnagIt to capture web site screen shots and crop them to focus on a small area. I imported them into the production. Then I added the screen shots to the Picture-in-picture track. Lastly, I zoomed in on each PIP file so it took up the whole screen and slid it along the timeline to get the right positioning with the audio.

There’s a segment toward the end of the video where Pasha is saying some really interesting stuff, however I didn’t have anything relevant to splice in visually. So, I didn’t quite get this right. But you’ll see that it works nicely in certain parts of the video. It keeps the pace going while people are talking. It also allows you to grab additional media that you didn’t think to pull up while recording the original video.

For example, Pasha mentions that there are several sites that have begun creating tutorials for Pipes, so I grabbed screensots of 3 that I found and layered them in.

I don’t think this is what the software was intended to do, so please tell me if you know a better way to accomplish this same effect. Here is the screencast which is also available on Yahoo! Video:

I started playing around with Pipes a bit more the other day and then found this handy tip via Lifehacker for nicer looking ways to link splice in your blog feed.

You can already splice del.icio.us and flickr directly into any Feedburner feed, but Pipes allows you to do things like isolating the saved bookmarks from tags and groups of tags. You can also prepend each item in your feed with things like “link”, “blog post”, and “photo”. You could also splice in other feeds that Feedburner doesn’t support like your Last.fm tracks, for example. I thought I would try offering foreign language versions of all this, too.

I apologize if my feed here gets squirrely on you as I work this out. Coincidentally, I saw this post yesterday that pointed out the number 1 reason people unsubscribe from a particular feed is information overload. I’m definitely becoming an overload offender here. Sorry.

If you want to be sure you’re only subscribed to my blog posts, then here is the blog-only feed.

UPDATE: As I suspected, it was a snap to create foreign language versions of my feeds. I’ve added several translations using the BabelFish operator. I can’t vouch for the accuracy or quality of the translations, but there are now Spanish, French, German, and Japanese language versions of my feed. More on the way.