The Progress Bar

The Progress Bar read by people interested in emerging Internet marketing, technology, social media, reputation, virtual environments, blogs, the Boston Internet scene and much more. If you like what you see you should subscribe to my RSS feed or via email in the sidebar. Thanks for visiting!Google’s Webmaster Central robots.txt analysis tool now recognizes sitemaps [...]

[Read more →]

There are a whole slew of new features in the Quantcast Quantified Publisher Program.
Video and Widget Measurement: Modify your Flash files to call the Quantcast API. You can download the specification and API for their ActionScript tags. Modify your Flash-based files to call the API, and Quantcast will begin collecting audience statistics as you publish [...]

[Read more →]

I love Oddcast SitePal. My friend Dave works there and I’ve used the product on and off for years. They even created a custom avatar for me. The problem I’ve had with my SitePal is that it’s not exactly been blog-friendly. Site Pal has announced a new feature; Your avatar can now be inserted in [...]

[Read more →]

Readers know that I am strongly behind any company who improves the relationship between bloggers and their audience.  SezWho has been on my radar for some time now, and I’m a big fan of MyBlogLog, which you can see in the sidebar.
Look at what Movable Type 4 has in store:
They have also released a new [...]

[Read more →]

For most people, blogging is writing for a few minutes a day and going on to their other tasks. I like working on the blog system and tweaking templates and doing custom installs for clients as much as I enjoy the blogging process itself.
I’ve been blogging since 2002. I started on Movable Type and stayed [...]

[Read more →]

Color-coded Wikipedia entries indicate trust.
A new program developed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, aims to help with the problem by color-coding an entry’s individual phrases based on contributors’ past performance.
The program analyzes Wikipedia’s entire editing history–nearly two million pages and some 40 million edits for the English-language site alone–to estimate the trustworthiness of [...]

[Read more →]

Don Dodge on Y Combinator Demo Day, or summer camp for startups.
Tech Cocktail is coming to Boston, brough to you by Zoominfo, Compete and Northbridge.
93 South, covering the Boston Web 2.0 world and has a good overview of the Boston mobile scene.
KickApps kicking ass, raises $20 million. Correction, $11 million. That was [...]

[Read more →]

Here I am, a week into my new digs and I still don’t know much about the town I’m living in. Sure, it’s old and I live in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument, but what makes Charlestown tick?
Thankfully my neighbors were able to tell me about garbage, recycling and where to park my [...]

[Read more →]

Apologies for the 3.0 moniker, but blog readers are brutally selective when searching for interesting headlines.
I’ve been thinking a lot more about  identity, attention and reputation. These reoccurring themes keep popping up in my consulting work and the blogosphere has no shortage of pundits who opine about the role of identity from time to time.
I [...]

[Read more →]

There is a popular science fiction book (I forget the name) that talked about a celestial Usenet, with billions of people across the universe chiming in on news stories and the most valuable voices becoming the loudest.
Someone at Google must have read that sci-fi book, because today the blogosphere is abuzz with news that Google [...]

[Read more →]