Emily Chang – Designer

Powercast and its first major partner, electronics giant Philips, are set to launch their first device powered by electricity broadcast through the air.

Most Americans believe that if you play fair and work hard, you’ll get ahead. But this notion is threatened by legislation passed Thursday night by the U.S. House of Representatives that would allow Internet service providers to play favorites among different Web sites.

Eleven days ago, 23-year-old Justin Kan was just another no-name startup guy with big dreams of the small screen. Then he and his friends launched Justin.tv, an Internet reality show chronicling their adventures as young San Francisco entrepreneurs that, at least for now, is proving to be a smash hit with online viewers.

We’ve now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded.

The US is now ranked seventh in the body’s league table measuring the impact of technology on the development of nations. A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall, the report said. The top spot went for the first time to Denmark, followed by Sweden.

Thanks to FranticIndustries for including both EmilyChang.com and eHub on his list.

FeedBurner is a popular RSS feed manager, with over 600.000 feeds in their roster. One of the advantages it offers is tracking the statistics for your RSS feed usage. Publishers can also choose to go public with this data, and many of them are displaying the number of their RSS subscribers, according to FeedBurner, on their site.

However, FeedBurner, for some reason, isn’t trying to be a popularity measuring tool. They have the data. They have the capabilities. Yet, they’re not maintaining any sort of top list of feeds with the most subscribers. The number of RSS subscribers is not the ultimate way to measure the popularity of a website, but it’s a really important metric. If FeedBurner were to maintain such a top list, it would be at least as important as Technorati and Alexa’s top lists.

Besides waiting for FeedBurner to actually do a top list, the second best thing I could do is to create my own list of top blogs according to their FeedBurner RSS subscriber data. Maybe this experiment encourages the folks at FeedBurner to do the same thing themselves.

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