No fun to read that CNET Networks is shutting down some print journals in Asia. Today Online has the story: CNet Asia closes down print arm to focus on online portal.
IN A move that has shaken up the tech news industry, CNet Asia will shut down its entire print arm and focus on its core business as an online tech news portal.
I certainly agree online is where it’s at, but the more media, the better!
While I’m fond of time here at clock, other metaphors and words strike a chord in my non-musical brain. One of them is filter, so I have to enjoy filtered, the blog of Mark Jones, Deputy Managing Director at IDG Communications in Australia. Then, when Mark writes a post titled 2005: A year of attention seeking (Via Doc Searls), I am more inclined to pay increasing, well, attention, even if (or especially because?) IDG is “officially” a competitor. Subscribed.
Mark recognizes and reinforces that readers’ time is their own, and loyalty is sliced ever thinner.
We have to fight to get people to read every single word.
He wraps up the attention post with:
As the noise blog/podcast/vlog noise rises, we (IDG) must continue to remain part of that conversation – and shout louder if necessary.
I’m a bit confused by “shout[ing] louder,” but absolutely, it’s a challenge for anyone, even larger publications, to continue to earn a sliver of people’s time. Separately, I also appreciated the pointer to Trevor Cook’s post on Here comes everything: Can technology solve information overload?
The surprising consequence of these technologies is that its users are relying on people to be their guides more than ever before. Instead, of heading towards a fully-automated solution, today’s online leaders are replicating human communities and networks as the best way to sort the (informational) wheat from the chaff.
Note, I went so far as to listen to a recent podcast interview with Mark Jones. I dearly wish all podcasters would detail the length in time of their file. Knowing it’s 20MB is partially useful, but how much of my life am I commiting? This one is 58:17, per iTunes.
Amusing that Mark had to admit that IDG in Australia doesn’t yet have RSS feeds, though he’s “working on it.” I understand the concerns. He points out the problem all publishers face… the business model. IDG, it seems, is concerned about its e-mail business, specifically. I don’t know if he’s speaking of Australia alone or not. Definitely, with RSS, as he says: “The traditional model is broken when it comes to RSS.” He also talks about the difficulty of talking to the agency buyer with so many caveats around measuring RSS audiences, a topic I tend to follow.
On a CNET News.com note: about 20 minutes into the podcast, Mark talks about how a group blog at Infoworld (US) broke the news of a bomb scare at Oracle World at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
I think we were the first with the news on the bomb scare, and I think we even beat CNET, which was quite an achievement.”
Here’s the Infoworld scoop he mentioned. Glad this isn’t behind the Infoworld reg wall. I wonder why they treat the blogs differently for registration? Here’s the News.com story on the same event.
Later, one of the hosts ask Mark why his blog is called filtered. His answer:
It’s kind of a philosophical thing really. It’s the idea that’s it my point of view and I’m filtering out the crap and giving you the good stuff, hopefully. Or you could take it the opposite direction, I don’t know. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about… blogs are an extension of opinion columns in one regard. We’ve been used to corporate brands and magazines like Computerworld being the brand, and what’s happened over time, we’re seeing that individuals are the brand, and you get thing filtered according to a particular world view, so to me that was the word that encapsulated what was going on.
Turns out Mark recently relocated back to Australia after living in San Francisco for three years. Sorry I never met him while he was here. Thanks to Mark for including CNET News.com in his blogroll. Hope we continue to earn that slot. I wonder which feed he follows, and in what newsreader?
Via Tomalak’s Realm, I found this history of the tab at Technology Review, which gives a bit of background on card catalogs as part of the article “Keeping Tabs.”
The tab was the idea of a young man named James Newton Gunn (1867š1927), who started using file cards to achieve savings in cost accounting while working for a manufacturer of portable forges. After further experience as a railroad cashier, Gunn developed a new way to access the contents of a set of index cards, separating them with other cards distinguished by projections marked with letters of the alphabet, dates, or other information.
Apparently Gunn also went on to help found the Harvard Business School… which is a more lasting legacy?
OK, this is a theoretical question, because I don’t have a single iPod, and even with the new iPod Shuffle I don’t plan on getting one. But I wonder what happens if you have more than one iPod per computer? Does the new lower-priced Shuffle coexist peacefully with its more expensive brethren? Aren’t there some protections built in expressly so you can’t share more than one iPod with a single computer, or vice versa, to avoid people sharing their entire music libraries indiscriminately? Yes, I’m clueless on the details, and partially informed is probably worse than uninformed here. But someone let me know.
Is it a problem for an industry when there are more caveats than statements about one of its key measurements? Yes, though I suppose it’s an opportunity, too. Dick Costolo on the FeedBurner blog put out their current information on RSS aggregator market share, leading with the many, many caveats that are necessary. It’s still sure to spark some feedback, including other speculations… which is a good thing. I’m mildly curious if Bloglines’ position at the top is enhanced by other client developers using the Bloglines services? I know Bloglines reports in its user-agent how many Bloglines subscribers there are (a practice all aggregators should emulate, where possible), but how are the requests made for Services partners considered? Probably not at all, but I’m curious all the same.
In response to the FeedBurner post, Tim Bray posted his numbers for ongoing. He sees growth over 2004, but wonders about the variability. Maybe I’m being too simplistic, but looking at the timing of the dips, I would say that many of his readers had their client aggregators shut down over Thanksgiving and the year-end holidays.
I haven’t been keeping systematic track of new aggregators, but even in my scanning, I notice new ones all the time. FeedBurner quantifies and confirms that feeling:
RSS Client market is not yet consolidating, it’s expanding. There were 409 different clients polling the top 800 FeedBurner feeds in September and now there are 719 different clients.
Just this morning Scoble noted the public release of Lektora, which integrates into Firefox or IE 6 on the PC earlier this morning. This beta is free, and they plan to charge a “competitive price” when they are done. Pardon my skepticism, but good luck raising the price from free. The numbers show you’ve got some competition, and of the top 20 listed by FeedBurner, only NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, and NewsGator (Outlook edition) require payment… and NetNewsWire has a Lite (free) edition, too. (I’m a paid customer of NNW, still using 1.07 and waiting for 2.0 to be final.)
The next slice I’d like to see is operating system. Ignoring the web-based aggregators, the Mac looks over-represented. Another sign of early-adopters, to be sure.
In order to avoid another overwhelming linkdump, here’s a few that caught my eye recently, or otherwise.
I send myself a ton of links to note at work, too, but the context isn’t always public, and I don’t want to run into confusion about where to draw the line. After all, you can get fired for blogging. (Note: I’m not concerned. As I’ve written before and I’ll repeat, I am well aware that this is all part of my permanent record. Has to pass the spouse/boss/CEO test. So far, so good!)
Per my usual, I called home right before leaving work, so the family has a clue about my arrival time. Tonight, the boy came on the speakerphone and asked “Did you play with the football today?”
The boy has visited the office a few times, and each time, we play with a small Nerf football, at least briefly. Apparently, he thinks that’s is why I go to work each day. If only…
Earlier this week, I raced to the end of Sharpe’s Triumph, by Bernard Cornwell. This novel is set in India in 1803, where the British General is Arthur Wellesley, whose fame as the Duke of Wellington still lies in the future. Our hero Sharpe saves the general’s life (of course) in a furious bout of fighting, where the well-drilled British troops assault — and defeat — a much larger force fielded by a group of Indian princes. In real life, Wellesley/Wellington called this battle (for Assaye) his proudest victory.
I’m going to try the library for the rest of the Sharpe series, rather than buying them all as I did with Aubrey-Maturin. San Francisco Public Library has a powerful website, and it’s much faster/better than the last time I tried it several months ago. I’ve requested the next three books… hope they come in reasonable order.
I’d never understood the reasons for grouping infantry into squares, as grouping all your targets in one place seemed counter-intuitive. But that’s only for defense against cavalry. I didn’t understand a detail that make all the difference. Cavalry in this era still depended on their swords — the firearms of this era were unwieldy on horseback. Officers would still carry pistols, but firing while galloping wasn’t likely to do much intentional harm. So, if you’re a troop of infantry, the only way to stand up against a galloping horde (disciplined or otherwise, soldiers on horseback trying to kill you are a horde) is to team up with other infantry into a tight, defensible square, where your muskets (rarely rifles) could pick off horsemen who could only attack each person from one side.
In the book, a group of Scotsmen hold off an incredible assault by holding a square, and using corpses as barriers. (Ah, the glory of battle.) The square shrinks as men fall, but they lasted long enough for reinforcements to arrive. I bring this up because all I can think of when I remember the American Revolutionary War stories we were taught is how the British would march along in groups in their red coats, and the Americans were more guerillas, hiding in the trees, etc. Yes, a vast oversimplication, but that’s what I remember of the earliest tales I was told. Nice to get a bit more depth in the picture.
During the holidays, I finished Children of the Mind, another novel by Orson Scott Card in the “Ender Quartet.” This wraps up this half of the eight-part series. Honestly, I’m hoping the other half of the series is more even. The pages turned fast enough, but I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the others I’ve read from Card.
However, the Afterword intrigued me, as Card explains some of the background reading which helped drive his thinking, including a Japanese historian I’ve never heard of, Kenzaburo Oe, and his book Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself. Oe is a Nobel Prize winner for literature (1994). Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself is the title of his Nobel lecture, which was included in the “small book” of the same name that Card came across. I don’t know if Card’s Afterword for Children of the Mind would be of interest without reading the book, but I appreciated the glimpse of the depth of Card’s thinking, beyond what’s in the novels. And maybe in the distant future, I’ll try some Oe.
I follow the New York Times technology feed via RSS (feed link). For the last couple of weeks, whenever the feed updates, NetNewsWire is convinced by some change in the feed that all the items in the feed are new to me. Since, as of this writing, there are headlines going back 4 days, to January 4, that is misleading. I’m not sure what the NYT is changing in their feeds to cause this blip, but it’s annoying. I think it’s because of the decision to mark the GUID “false” for the isPermaLink value, which probably pushes NNW to use the link value as the hyperlink. The content management system at the NYT changes the link value every time it generates the feed, it seems, or at least once daily. I wonder why the NYT made that decision.
I’m familiar with some of challenges of what should be a simpler process. For CNET News.com RSS feeds, the link and GUID URLs are identical (and therefore slightly redundant) because different aggregators have different rules (it seems) about which field to use as the hyperlink. Also, the GUID is marked as false for isPermaLink. I still don’t know if that’s the best decision technically, because the URL given is a permaLink, as far forward as I can predict given content management systems. At one time, we tried a slightly ‘cleaner’ version of the URL as the GUID, but then different aggregators started doing different things, so we sighed, and went back to current practice.
What is it about accepting the things you cannot change? I’ll let you know when I get there.