Month: May 2005

Scoble ranks types of RSS feeds by what they include, but he misses a few points along the line. Headline-only feeds with ads are his worst. I would ask… worse than no feeds at all? As fast as things are changing, the lack of a feed or feeds is still an issue for many, many information resources of all sorts (not just news).

There are various resources where I do not want full-text, with or without ads. Scanning is almost as important as reading… and reading takes longer! No matter how many feeds you subscribe to, you don’t read every word of every feed. I suppose you could, but why would you want to? My point: I appreciate some full-text feeds, but where Scoble ranks partial text feeds without ads as “barely passable,” I find that type a competitor for the most valuable offering. Some variation on full-text is undoubtably attractive for the right content, but only for that content where (to stretch Scoble’s analogy) I’ve moved beyond dating into a long-term relationship. I don’t think an initial subscription to a feed is a deep commitment. Part of the attraction of feeds is that you control the connection, and anything that’s one way isn’t much of a relationship, even if ideas still spread wonderfully that way.

Getting back to the spectrum… I haven’t seen statistics on this, and haven’t scoured our own data to catalog feeds this way, but I would have to guess that the vast majority of current feeds are partial text without ads. I think the feed world is a heck of a lot better than “barely passable,” even if there is still a long, long way to go (Phil Collins alert ;-).

Returning to the “worst case” … in many cases, a linked headline is enough. Either I learned what I wanted to know, or I learned that I don’t care at a deeper level than the 6-12 words provided. Athletics beat Red Sox, 13-6 — a fun game this afternoon, by the way — is enough 98% of the time.

Side note: of course, my example falls through, because the San Francisco Chronicle used a more interesting headline than my fake example. Long before RSS came around, newspapers learned the value of writing great headlines. Some publications still have folks who specialize in this ever-more-important skill.

Ads will bring these choices into clearer focus, and the spectrum of feeds will evolve further. I can’t wait.

I’m not politically active, and I rarely share my opinions in a public forum, though I vote every time. But I do find the occasional issue which rouses me. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, please join me (and many others) in opposing a pedestrian/bicyclist tax on the Golden Gate Bridge. The link is to the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s advocacy page, with background, details, and steps you can take to politely share your opinions with the legislative bodies that are contemplating this short-sighted manuever. Be polite, but be firm. Vehicle tolls to cross the bridges around New York City are significantly higher than here in the Bay Area, but the Brooklyn Bridge is a recognized city treasure because of its pedestrian and bicycle access. The Golden Gate Bridge is the same, yet more so in a city which doesn’t have as much competition in the landmark department. I don’t know whether this tactic has been attempted in the past, but I do know I’d like to avoid this failure of imagination here.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Brooklyn Bridge and other NYC bridges have undergone similar threats in the past — the smell of money passing into city coffers can do strange things — but I don’t know of any current pedestrian/bicycle tolls. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I also have a long-term hope that I might one day ride my bicycle from San Francisco to Oakland. Those hopes get longer-term every time I read the paper. If we (the Bay Area, the State of California, etc.) cannot agree on how to finish a new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, how much longer will it take to get a pedestrian/bicycle lane/extension added to the western span? Maybe in my lifetime… or maybe my children’s? I won’t hold my breath, but I’ll do my small part to keep supporting those efforts, too.

Time to jump back into some fun reading, so I polished off Sharpe’s Company in a couple of days. These Sharpe novels from Bernard Cornwell are so straightforward, with few surprises, but I still enjoy them. I turn pages almost as fast as I would with a Dick Francis novel (the gold standard, in many ways) and I get to pretend I’m learning something. Can hardly ask for more in mental recreation.

Jon Krakauer‘s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith sat on the to-read pile for quite some time. Then, once started, it lingered a while as I tried (in vain) to keep up with the daily flow of blogs and newspapers as well as the weekly/monthly flow of magazines. (Yes, for all my online time, I haven’t given up on print.) Yesterday, I finished this inquiry into the Mormons, seen through the lens of a vicious murder in 1984. The crime itself really isn’t the point, although until you get into the book, that’s hardly obvious. Krakauer is more interested in:

I was irresistibly drawn to write about Latter-Day Saints not only because I already knew something about their theology, and admired much about their culture, but also because of the utterly unique circumstances in which their religion was born: the Mormon Church was founded a mere 173 years ago [at time of the Author’s Remarks in 2003], in a literate society, in the age of the printing press. As a consequence, the creation of what became a worldwide faith was abundantly documented in firsthand accounts. Thanks to the Mormons, we have been given an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate — in astonishing detail — how an important religion came to be.

Not a bad thing to try and understand, even today, even (especially?) for the non-religious.

I’ve read Krakauer in Outside magazine for many years (though not recently), and — like so many — devoured Into Thin Air, the book that made him famous. This book intrigued me, but I think I’d rather start with Wallace Stegner’s history of the Mormons or another more historical survey than this weave of a present-day religious fundamentalism gone wrong with the broad history of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. That said, I learned quite a bit, and I recoil at the blatant censorship efforts practiced by the LDS, both against this title and more broadly. Information may or may not want to be free, but ideas in contrast undermine fanaticism — and that’s a good thing.

Nothing against Salon, but I haven’t been there in a while. Maybe their link-up with Technorati for showing what’s being blogged about will remind me to visit more often. [Via Rich] I think this blog roundup page works well, taking a single-site page like The Pulse (most talked about stories on-site at News.com), and using the power of decentralization to bring more people to the party. Only gap appears to be that the conversation isn’t surfaced on the story page itself, unless I just missed it?

Jim Fallows, writing in the New York Times article “Finally, Sisyphus, There’s Help for Those Internet Forms,” explains why real people should be interested in Ajax, or whatever Microsoft, Macromedia (Adobe?), or any other company wants to call the combination of technologies which is making the web more like desktop applications. For those in the web development arena, nothing new beyond a reminder that (a) everything old is new again and (b) every platform player wants to make sure their developers are seen as having the best tools for delivering this kind of experience. But it’s not the tools, it’s the experience. Closer to home, I think registration systems at work could definitely benefit from this hypothetical example Fallows describes:

For me at the airport, the difference might have been a box that let me try out user names and have them immediately approved or rejected, without affecting the other data on the screen.

Simple stuff matters, especially when it means getting through registration!

Today’s Thomas Friedman column, “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?,” continues on his globalization theme, and reinforces that America is falling behind in many ways. He quotes a sentence from this CNET News.com article U.S. slips lower in coding contest.

On April 7, CNET News.com reported the following: “The University of Illinois tied for 17th place in the world finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest.

When I looked at Friedman’s column last night (the print newspaper comes online at 9pm PT the night before), the words CNET News.com linked directly to the article. Since then, someone changed the online version of the column to link only the words News.com to the CNET News.com home page. Wonder why they changed the link to the more generic instead of keeping the direct link to the cited article?

Ten days ago, I noted that the BBC was going to pour petrol on their RSS efforts. Today, the official announcement came out. The license terms are reasonable, if still a bit long. I wonder if Creative Commons has an appropriate license which fits the desired needs here? I’ve often wondered why CC doesn’t expand its efforts further… I think a few more machine-readable licenses which are less antagonistic to commercial enterprises would offer some comfort to those who want to encourage responsible use/re-use of content. But that’s a topic for another time.

A tidy stat from the BBC article:

Mr Clifton [Pete Clifton, BBC News website editor] said that RSS had already proved to be a big driver of traffic to the website.

Figures for April 2005 showed that 18 million click-throughs – the number of hits generated by links to the site – were driven by the feeds to the news and sport websites.

Please tell us the breakdown between news and sports… please?

The revolution, which Clifton alluded to in his earlier note, comes from backstage. Bravo. From Ben Hammersley:

It’s actually a symbol of something much much bigger: it’s laying down the gauntlet for the rest of the world. It highlights the point that on the internet, hiding your content is suicide. It says that you can either open up, and we can all flourish together; or you can remain closed, and die alone.

Nothing like a bit of melodrama to make a point, but I appreciate the thrust.

So Charlie Cooper reacts (negatively) to the podcast hype, welcomes a tip, and exchanges views with Dan Bricklin. Then I get home and see that Vin Crosbie offers a new business model for podcasting, tongue firmly in cheek. I know the news cycle is accelerating, but now we have the backlash almost before the phenomenon even has some noticeable growth. To stay on target in a world of naysayers takes some serious focus.

Of course, I’m not much of a podcast fan myself, but I’m not much of an audio person anyway (too slow!), so I’m not the customer.

Talk about your high-end geekery… I’m listening to an audio recording of Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist at Google Inc, from his WWW2005 talk “News in the Age of the Web.” The recording is courtesy of Kathy Gill from the University of Washington. Her blog is WiredPen. Audio really isn’t enough… low-fi, and a mild accent. Seems like it’s a bit over 30 minutes… I’m 22 minutes in, and losing interest… but if anyone has the visual part of the presentation, or blog reports, I’m curious. Technorati and Blogpulse and Google (ironically) have nothing for me, yet.