Category: Uncategorized

CNET Networks makes the top 10 of this year’s Media 50, as designated by B2B Magazine. Chas gets quoted in the CNET write-up. Only weirdness is the web navigation on the B2B site, where each of the top 10 shows up as a link labelled Media 50 in the right-hand navigation… not very informative. I had to click through several links to see who made the cut… Google, Forbes, BusinessWeek, WSJ, Fortune, etc. Other than WSJ at #1 and Google at #2, I can’t actually tell the rankings. Did I just not see the right link?

Pete Clifton is the editor of the BBC News website, and he’s promising a “revolution” in RSS after the UK election.

We’ve been a bit cautious about [RSS] up to now. “Personal use only” has been the mantra, but after a lengthy discussion with the BBC’s editorial policy department we are about to free things up.

So in May we’ll be happy for outside websites to dip in and take our headlines. We’re also adding new feeds, like one with the most recently published stories, and still to come will be an RSS search telling you when reports have been published about particular topics you are interested in.

Not to be glib, but the various terms of service on RSS usage, including the one I’ve written, are (perhaps) spitting into the wind. I don’t know of anyone who has attempted to limit other websites, commercial or otherwise, from using RSS feeds, at least in the headline/brief summary model. If you put something in an RSS feed, you’re opening the door (and the can of worms). Also, there is no way for the Terms of Service (TOS) to travel easily with the feed itself, so most people can honestly say they’ve never seen or heard of a feed’s TOS.

So, while I applaud the BBC, and I think they are doing the right thing, it’s also an acknowledgement of the world as it is today — which should not be underestimated, I guess, from a big organization.

Interesting statistic from Clifton:

In March, we registered 16.5 million click-throughs to reports from RSS feeds, and our target is 10% of our traffic driven by RSS by the end of this year.

As a semi-governmental agency, the BBC releases its stats publicly. Here’s the relevant details from the 2004 report. Scroll down to Tables 10 and 11 in this large text file. News and Sports add up to 535 million pageviews/month. (Would love to see News and Sport broken out separately!) 8.9 million unique users/month. 60 pages/user/month in 2004… not bad. I’ll assume that BBC traffic is going up, let’s say to 700 million pageviews/month (bigger? much bigger?), so that’s 70 million clickthroughs from RSS in December 2005. Wonder what Yahoo or the NYTimes will do during the same month? In any event, big numbers, worth the focus and attention at the top level.

Via Dennis, I see that TechDirt was chronicled in the, well, Chronicle. I missed this in the paper edition, so I’ll have to check the recycling bin.

Dennis, I know we all share a lot on these blogs, but I don’t think anyone wants you to get TechDirty, no matter where you are working.

The ill-named FreeNews is a mobile RSS reader for phones which support Java. But it’s not free. Read this thorough review from Robin Good, which has a list of other readers, too. Cherish his comment in the “To Improve” section re: FreeNews:

Find a catchier, less common and ambiguous name for the product.

Guess we need to add a mobile-friendly stylesheet to Newsburst at some point. CNET Mobile Feed Reader is an option for those with BREW phones (Verizon customers, coming soon…).

A welcome result from my Technorati search: finding Ken Norton’s new blog. And, through that, Suzanne Galante’s blog. Subscribed!

I missed the lunchtime concert today with The Court & Spark, but happy first birthday to Download.com Music. Maybe I’ll find something to put on the shuffle…

According to BlogPulse, part of Intelliseek, News.com is #9 in the list of most cited sources in the blogosphere. That’s nice to see. BlogPulse.com Detects Shift in Top Personalities, Blogs, News Sources Cited by Bloggers. On the list there’s one portal (Yahoo News, at the top), five newspapers (led by NYT), three television stations (led by CNN), and News.com. Many thanks to the readers and bloggers who find the site link-worthy. Until vote links prove the real situation, I’ll trust that most of these links are because the news satisfied readers’ needs. Feedback is always welcome

I didn’t catch the press release until this evening, hours after the fact. Thanks, Simon Waldman… follow Simon via Newsburst if you don’t go direct.

On a related note: perhaps it’s impolite of me to do this publicly, but I’ve asked privately more than once. It’s about time David Sifry corrected his March 17 blog post and the accompanying graphic. I have it from Technorati directly that News.com actually should have been on this list, at #11, between BoingBoing and Instapundit. Check the numbers for yourself. As I type this, it’s 21,938 links from 10,586 sources.

Last week, I bought the cheapest Shuffle, with the idea of (a) listening to some podcasts and (b) learning what all the fuss is about, both with the iPod and podcasts. Despite coming in a very large box for such a tiny device, the Shuffle is all that I expected. That’s a good thing. However, the headphones are not very comfortable. And I still don’t have a lot of places or times where personal music listening is really part of my life. Three random links, Shuffled.

The authors of Connotea, which I’ve never heard of, write an academic (peer-reviewed?) Social Bookmarking Tools (I) – A General Review. Useful, chock-full of links/examples, and not academic in the dry sense. In the same issue of D-Lib Magazine (also never heard of), the same authors give a more detailed exploration/explanation of their own service in Social Bookmarking Tools (II) – A Case Study – Connotea. Pointer to all this was from InfoDesign.

These folks cite del.icio.us as the inspiration. As I watch Matt McAlister apply that service to InfoWorld, I wonder how far it all goes. It’s all fun, and I think TechRepublic.com’s application of tagging to discussion threads is nicely done. I do wonder when/where it becomes more than fun… guess we’ll see.

Sidenote, but I have to say it. I hate typing that damn del.icio.us URL. Now that Schachter has taken funding for his innovative service, maybe it’s time to buy out the useless domain parker at delicious.com? Sure, the tens of thousands of insiders using the service now might feel that it’s less cool, but wouldn’t it help at least a little bit as the service goes to hundreds of thousands of users, or millions, or whatever? (If my numbers are wrong, let me know… my gossip was high five figures for users.) Of course, my idle speculation about my petty grievance with the service’s URL means nothing if this
Google search for delicious keeps returning the service first.

Oh, and http://del.icio.us/pencoyd is where to find my meager explorations.

Chad Dickerson shares a Treo tip, which I appreciate. I haven’t been inconvenienced by a Treo 650 restart yet, but they are happening occasionally. But it’s a bit scary that Chad “rebuilt” his Treo, meaning (I expect) that he reinstalled all the software from the ground up. Progress is two steps forward, one step back if we’ve brought that complexity from the desktop to the mobile device.