Category: Uncategorized

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.

Traffic patterns verify the benefit of posting early and often again and again, but interesting to see how Nick Denton quantifies it for his Gawker employees in the course of this NYTimes story where Denton once again tries to de-bunk the hype circle he’s earned (created?).

Each editor is under contract to post 12 times a day for a flat fee, Mr. Steele said. (Gawker has two editors and now posts 24 times a day.) It is best to have eight posts up before noon, if possible, to keep readers coming back, he said.

There a few other cites worth noting, like this one:

[Denton] seems to recognize that he is not up to anything particularly trailblazing, and that it’s only a matter of time before others catch on.

And Kinja will get more attention, it seems.

He also plans to reintroduce Gawker’s “blog of blogs,” called Kinja – a service that even Mr. Denton says was rather badly deployed and even more awkwardly explained in its original form. A team of programmers has been working for the last two years to revamp the service, which allows users to explore and scan their favorite blogs in one place. The new version will be ready in about a month.

On the details side… maybe I haven’t been reading NYTimes.com often enough recently, but do all their articles now have lots of in-body links? This article did, and I thought that was remarkably rare, even now. Was there a shift some time ago and I missed it, or is this just (astutely) employed for a few specific stories where the lack of links would be especially noticeable? I don’t have comments or trackback enabled right now (boring story), so e-mail me if you know more. I also notice that the NYTimes now has (I think) better next/previous links for their multi-page stories. Relatively small changes, but an improvement nonetheless.

Seth Godin identifies a new digital divide, between the digerati and those who follow. Based on his criteria I qualify… should I be proud? More important question: are the digerati as influential as those of us in the echochamber all like to imagine?

As a result, your most-connected, most influential customers are part of the digerati. They can make or break your product, your service or even your religion’s new policies. Because the Net is now a broadcast (and a narrowcast) medium, the digerati can spread ideas.

Does this ideavirus (to use Godin’s term) truly spread beyond the echochamber? There is evidence aplenty that the media is paying attention, whether they are part of the mix or not, so the ideas probably do get more than their fair share of ink/pixels/decibels. But how much transfer really goes on? It’s a critical question when you’re designing services right now. Aim for the leaders, or just a bit behind them? The former is more fun, but getting to the right place too early doesn’t work, necessarily — though being there too late serves no purpose whatsoever. Anyway, answering the question of which customers matter fascinates me.

Walt Mossberg puts his intro to RSS column out there: “A Guide to Using RSS, Which Helps You Scan Vast Array of Web Sites” — doesn’t mention Newsburst, but you can’t have everything. It’s fair and a thorough intro to the concept for people who don’t know what RSS is… and he points folks to Download.com to find most of the readers he mentions.

Well, actually it’s David Sifry who updated his State of the Blogosphere, but he’s CEO of Technorati and uses Technorati data as the raw material. It was about a week ago that was I complaining about the glitch in the data, and that has now been corrected. CNET News.com is listed in the 11th position, as part of MSM (mainstream media). Looking at the PowerPoint, looks like Technorati has a new, brighter color scheme and logo lockup pending… I like it.

FeedBurner is live, out of beta, the successor to their pre-alpha. Congrats to Dick, Eric, Steve, and Matt… and anyone else who’s joined the crew.