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I received an entry to this year’s Escape from Alcatraz triathlon via the lottery. Sometimes, you have to be careful what you wish for. I’m excited about the race, which I’ve never done, but I have to commit myself over the next four months to a level of training I haven’t put in for a few years. Though the land course is very hilly, and the sand steps are notorious, I’m most focused on the 1.5 mile swim in the Bay. I don’t fall to the level of Dana Carvey as a synchronized swimmer in the old SNL skit (“I’m not a very strong swimmer.”), but my progress through the water is slow. My goal is just to get through the swim as smoothly as I can and then trust my legs for the rest of the race.

I’m not a journalist. I work with lots of them, though, and I feel at home in an environment that pulses with the rhythms of news. So, when I spoke to Gavin O’Malley of MediaPost on Thursday to answer his questions about Newsburst, I felt fairly comfortable.

Instead, I feel mildly frustrated by use of my words. I know most every person ever interviewed feels this way. In my case, a conversation that spanned more than 20 minutes resulted in two quotes, neither of which express what I meant. Did I say the words I’m reported to say? I didn’t record my answers, so who knows?

The article is Online News Sites Struggle With RSS Challenge in MediaPost, published this morning. In it, O’Malley uses the coincidence of the Bloglines sale, the Newsburst preview release, and the Consenda trial for the LA Times and Guardian newspapers to make a point: moves by news sites in the RSS space are defensive. Speaking only for Newsburst… he’s wrong. RSS is an incredible opportunity for CNET as a whole and News.com in particular. I’m going to avoid stepping over a line I shouldn’t, so I’ll stop there and just say (again) that RSS is an opportunity, not a threat, and there are numbers to prove it.

From the article, here’s my first quote:

CNET’s Newsburst reader, now available as a preview release, is not a typical RSS reader because it adds an “editorial touch,” said John Roberts, vice president of product development at CNET. The service is essentially an edited version of the Internet’s entire daily news offerings. “I expect all or most publishers to do this in order to try and hang on to readers and control the environment,” Roberts added.

I do expect more aggregators, from all sorts of companies, especially publishers. I don’t remember saying “hang on to readers and control the environment.” My point was that aggregation is a reader service, so anyone that cares about readers has to think about how to serve them. No one is “hanging on to readers” — they are in control, and can let go anytime. To bastardize Sting’s romantic phrasing on Valentine’s Day, if you love your readers, set them free. Newsburst offers some programming if you want it (Today Online), but you’re free to ignore that and use the application for anything and everything you care about.

In the second quote, I obviously wasn’t clear enough between RSS and Newsburst, which are not the same thing, despite the fact that Newsburst uses RSS.

CNET’s John Roberts said Newsburst did not yet have a viable business model. “I’ve spoken with a number of firms that serve ads over RSS feeds, and I haven’t found a compelling model just yet, but we’ll continue to listen and respond as the market matures.”

The quote is accurate; the lead-in is not. So far, as noted above, the traffic RSS brings to the website has been reward enough. I’ll leave it there.

Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day.

Shadow Puppets, from Orson Scott Card, was the only Ender book I had left… and I’m finished. As much as I enjoyed the series, well, I don’t think there need to be eight books. But I guess I read them all, didn’t I? Everyone should read Ender’s Game… after that, maybe Ender’s Shadow and Speaker for the Dead. The rest are gravy.

Update: At the time I wrote this, only seven of the eight had been written. Whoops. Now I really have finished them all.

Long day. Good day.

Woke up this morning to realize that Newsburst, the free web-based reader from CNET News.com had been found. We developed the service out in the open to a large degree, and it’s surprising in some ways that it remained quiet this long. Still, we were not quite ready to start showing it to people… but that’s the way the web works, and after various folks dug in and cleaned up, the preview release is ready for readers. Mostly!

I look forward to all the feedback. I’ve been reading lots all day, and at this point I’ll just point to the Newsburst sources I’m using to keep up. You can click the Add Source link at the top of any of these pages to add them to your Newsburst.

• Technorati
• Feedster
• PubSub
• and Bloglines citations, which aren’t available as a feed (that I know of)

Note: Newsburst allows OPML import and export. If the service doesn’t earn your time, your subscriptions go with you. You can also share (or simply export) specific categories if you don’t want to share your entire source list. All that is on the Manage page. You need to be a logged-in member (free) to get to that page.

I’ll have more to say over the coming days and weeks. Thanks to all the folks at work who cranked on various aspects, especially Anu and Andy. This is just the beginning.

Shadow of the Hegemon is another in the Ender series, though Ender is nowhere in the book. Instead, this grouping of books focuses on Bean, who I find a more compelling character all around. Not much to say right now, but I flipped through this quickly, and I’m looking forward to the eighth and final (to date) book in the Ender series. Thanks, Vin, for the loan.

I saw Million Dollar Baby ten days ago. You should see it if you haven’t. I wasn’t prepared to enjoy it, but I did, and I appreciated the surprise. I’m not much of an Oscar fan, but I won’t be disappointed if this wins some of the awards for which it’s been nominated.

I do know that Jamie Foxx deserves the Oscar for Actor in a Supporting Role for Collateral.

So Ask Jeeves picks up Bloglines. (Enough people have commented on this since Mary Hodder posted it that I certainly hope it’s true… otherwise many blogs will have to do another round of corrections.)

Ask made almost as much money ($260MM) as CNET Networks ($291MM) in 2004. I didn’t know that. 2005 revenue is forecasted as higher than CNET Networks. With no offense intended to the folks at Ask, I really don’t come across many folks who use their brands, but search revenue (keyword advertising) is certainly one nice cash cow for folks these days, even if you are not Google. I wonder how much residual traffic comes in to Excite, iWon, and MyWay, which I recognize as portal/search wannabes from my days at Snap.com/NBCi. It takes a portal wanna-be to recognize one! In any event, I’ll be curious to see what this means for Bloglines, and when Mark Fletcher or Ask confirm the news.

I started my Super Bowl Sunday as I’ve done for the last several years, with a road race. Pamakid organizes a half-marathon and a 5K on the morning of the de-facto American holiday, and it gets a big crowd eager for fitness before denting the couch for 4+ hours. As I did last year, I ran the 5K. The three previous years, I put in the miles and ran the half-marathon, but I’m not kidding myself right now.

Thanks to racing with someone for the last 2.1 miles, I huffed in at 18:58…slightly behind the other runner. Course was slightly modified from last year due to the construction on the museums in Golden Gate Park, but it was similar and still definitely downhill overall. It’s a point-to-point course, meaning you finish at a different place than you start.

Last year, I surprised myself with an 18:34, and I do wonder (still) how well the 5K course is measured. Only the half-marathon is a certified race. In looking back at past years, I found that in 2000, when I last ran the 5K, I finished in 18:56, over a tougher course (if memory serves).

Two nice things this year: weather was perfect (sunny/clear, little wind, temps in the high 50s) and the T-shirts are long-sleeve once again, with a fresher design (new sponsor), after a one-year blip of short-sleeve shirts. Yes, runners do pay attention to which races have great shirts. You don’t get Gary Larsen without running the Run to the Far Side, after all. Today’s garment doesn’t match Larsen, but quite nice all the same.

Wouldn’t you think a “localpedia” (a Wiki tied to a community) is a good idea? The domain is taken, or I would have registered it, but I wonder if Wikipedia will extend to this domain of locale, with the model of building a better yellow pages. In all honestly, that makes more sense than the idea of WikiNews.

What sparked this thought?

The January 27th CNET News.com article “Amazon search pictures your destination” was brief. The captivating point? Amazon combined photos and GPS and ingenuity to provide a yellow pages with real photos, at least for the 10 United States cities they tackled to start. The folks at A9 explain how they did it, and end with

We are driving and at some point hope to cover the whole country.

Here’s the thing: I’ll bet A9/Amazon hopes to cover the whole country even if they never drive another mile. I think it might have been part of the idea all along. All they had to do was make a splash with this new service (really, this new idea) and after they prime the pump, Amazon can encourage its customers to improve the service without driving another mile. I think Amazon is trying to kickstart Dan Bricklin’s cornucopia of the commons for a web view of a locale that is better than anything previously offered or envisioned. Of course, “the commons” remains within the Amazon.com universe in this model.

I don’t mean to discount the innovation here, or just how nifty the idea is. It combines several developments (broadband, digital cameras, GPS, endless storage, online business directories, peer-review systems, enlightened self-interest, etc.) and profits from their ubiquity in a manner which appears obvious once unveiled, but hadn’t occurred to anyone else yet… or at least anyone else with the oomph to make it a reality at enough of a scale to attract attention. (Am I missing something? Did someone else presage this entire category? Let me know.)

An example: Cup-A-Joe Coffee House, a few blocks from my house, doesn’t have a picture yet. Fruitful Grounds, which I prefer, didn’t even make their listings for “coffee” in 94117 ZIP code, though the local Starbucks did.

As you can see at the Cup-A-Joe page, Amazon encourages its audience to share its own images of the establishment, or add images if one exists. Ergo, no reason for Amazon to send its drivers back to the place they missed. Also, readers are encouraged to add to or correct the information presented, which evokes a Wiki for me… though all this information will live on A9/Amazon. Even it becomes part of the information available to others via the justly-praised Amazon APIs, it is still under corporate control. That’s not necessarily a problem, but if I replace Amazon with Axciom (from whom Amazon licenses some of the business directory, it seems), you might be less sanguine. (Tangent: I wonder if Amazon needs a license from Axciom in a few years, if this idea works.) But Amazon has treated its customers right, and hasn’t screwed up IMDB.com, among others. We’ll see.

Of course, those with the incentive to make sure their listings are accurate, attractive, and complete — the business owners themselves — are encouraged to “update and promote your business for free.” Amusing to me: the link goes to the same place as the non-owner link, and you self-identify your relationship with the business, whether customer, employee, manager, owner, etc. I wonder how they validate this information, or whether they will? I’d turn on the Amazon.com customer reviews process (it’s there, but not as a peer-review on the data), and let customers validate the information, once the easy-to-check-automatically information has been vetted. Maybe that’s already in place… hard to test without spending even more time on this than I already have. Anyway, it may be free to businesses now, but the “click to call” feature probably won’t in the future. Or maybe there is a better/different way to find money from the businesses who want to be seen by potential customers: the original Yellow Pages model.

Of course, I could be wrong on all of this. A9 is hiring drivers. But I think I’m right, even if their intentions are not so far-reaching, and my musings read way, way too much into their long-term goals.

Sharpe’s Prey jumps Richard Sharpe forward a couple of years from Trafalgar, to 1807, with the British invasion of Copenhagan. I never knew about this event. The Brits didn’t think the Danes were an enemy. Yet the Danish naval fleet was the only one left in Europe, and England had to deny the fleet to the French, at whatever cost to the Danes. This Bernard Cornwell book didn’t grab me as the earlier ones did, but the pages turned all the same.