I’ve been heads down coding for what seems like 8 years now when in reality it’s just a few months, so I’ve been a little out of touch with what else is going on in the Boulder start-up scene. This also explains my spotty blog posting, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to post a bit more frequently soon. Josh from MadKast recently contacted me about installing their product, so I decided to give it a whirl. (On a side note, I have no affiliation with them at all, I just like to support fellow start-up companies.)

What is MadKast? I guess I would describe it as the FeedBurner of social bookmarking & discovery– it gives your blog readers a way to share your posts, and also supposedly gives you a way to see other sites that your readers are viewing, analytics behind what your readers are sharing with other people, etc. I haven’t yet received any sort of confirmation e-mail about a way to login and view this information, but maybe that happens automagically once they have some data to work with. Until then I don’t have a good idea about the latter parts, but the concept seems cool at least.

Just thinking about how functionality similar to this usually works, I fully expected to have to go download a Wordpress plug-in, unzip it and SCP to my server, then enable it in Wordpress and have to edit my post templates, etc. I never really looked into it because I just assumed I’d have to go through all of that work and I honestly just don’t have the time or interest currently for that. I’m just spending an hour today to try and get caught-up on personal e-mail and decided to give it a whirl. When I saw that I just needed to include a link to their script, I was still a bit skeptical thinking I would still need to edit my post template to get it to work. Not so– it literally took just a few seconds to get up and running on my blog, so color me impressed.

I’m interested to see what sort of information I can gleam from the analytics portion of MadKast, and hopefully I can start blogging somewhat more frequently soon to make that sort of thing more valuable to me. I do feel like my site is starting to get a bit widget heavy, but it still seems to load quickly for now.

Have you tried MadKast? What do you think about it? Have you seen the analytics portion of it?