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Wednesday, September 29, 2004Gnomedex Vacation and PODcasting Drive
Looking forward to a few days of vacation at Gnomedex. Not work-related, but I wanted to try something new. Tahoe is close enough, and pretty enough, that I could not resist.
Loading the laptop with PODcasting material for the drive. Some of Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, one or two of Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes, Adam & Dave's most recent Trade Secrets, a batch of Evil Genius Chronicles, and other tidbits. Maybe tonight I'll add some of The Gilmor Gang, and RasterWeb, and other audio blogs still to be determined. IT Conversations will stream the Gnomedex sessions for the benefit of those who can't attend.
Monday, September 13, 2004The RSS Bandwidth Discussion Continues
More on RSS and Bandwidth Woes.
The RSS bandwidth troubles that Robert Scoble reported last week have reverberated through the community and many, many voices have decided to weigh in. Here’s a sampling:
I don’t care if an aggregator checks my feed every 5 minutes, if they support HTTP properly (last-modified headers) the load is neglible for me and them. The bandwidth used each time is around 250 bytes....most mature aggregators (like NewsGator and NewsGator Online) use the HTTP caching mechanisms, so use them. And further, there are things you can do on the server side to manage the bandwidth load, depending on the goals you have for your feed.If you are running a popular web site, you will need to spend money to afford the traffic. AOL.com, Ebay.com and Microsoft.com are all serving terrabytes of content each month. If they were serving these with the same budget that I have for serving my website these sites would roll over and die. Does this mean we should replace using web browsers and HTTP for browsing the Web and resort to using BitTorrent for fetching HTML pages? It definitely would reduce the bandwidth costs of sites like AOL.com, Ebay.com and Microsoft.com.For those who are surprised by the bandwidth problems that the polling of RSS feeds is causing the MS folks, let me say it once more:UNCONTROLLED POLLING OF RESOURCES DOES NOT SCALE!!20 years of developing distributed systems have thought us this, but the RSS advocates appear deaf for these issues. The simple approach that works well with small feeds and limited number of subscribers does not work with large feeds and many subscribers.Another bandwidth reduction idea, compliments of FooCamp04.This idea doesn’t require coordination between vendors, and leverages the ETag support that is present in many existing aggregator clients. It is complicated to explain, and would be complicated to implement, but the end result would take the form of an Apache Module (and/or IIS filter) that sysadmins of major sites could just “drop in”.It’s so great to see that we’ve got a consensus. I think we can finally put the whole Atom vs. RSS controversy to rest. We’ve got something better…
[The RSS Weblog]
Keynote to Acquire Vividence
From ClickZ
Web monitoring and management services provider Keynote Systems on Friday announced its intent to acquire Web-based customer research firm Vividence for $20 million in cash, and another $6 million possible over the next year based on performance targets.
Keynote has already done two acquisitions in the customer experience management (CEM) space when it acquired Enviz in October 2002 and NetRaker in 2004. With the addition of Vividence, the company expects to own 80 percent of the CEM market.
[more]
Saturday, September 11, 2004
Friday, September 10, 2004RSS Bandwidth Consumption
Mark Fletcher comments on the recent RSS bandwidth discussions, pointing to recommendations from FeedDemon's Nick Bradbury and also to Sam Ruby's HTTP Best Practices.
More on the RSS vs. Email Debate
From Paul Chaney at RMG: More on the RSS vs. Email Debate. He points to (among other things) Alex Barnett's Email vs. RSS comparison. I've only followed Alex for about 2 weeks, so had not seen his table of positives and negatives for each delivery vehicle before. Subscribed to RMG this week. Two worthwhile sources added in as many weeks. Gotta love RSS.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004Amy Gahran's Contentious Webfeed Grab Bag
Amy's hits just keep on coming. Go read her posts. Lots of them. You'll learn something new. Guaranteed.
Special Grab Bag: Webfeeds, Webfeeds…. I was just looking over the contentious-to-do topic in my Furl archive, and noticed that several of the items there are about webfeeds in one way or another. So I decided to throw them together into a special grab bag. TOP OF THE LIST: RSS: Real advantage for marketing and PR, by Neville Hobson, Aug. 16. It seems I'm not the only person who's talking about how businesses are really missing the boat with regard to webfeeds. This article addresses how businesses could be leveraging both weblogs and webfeeds to their advantage right now. On webfeeds, Hobson writes, "The new reality is that blogs and RSS present a phenomenal opportunity to any organization to embrace these new communication channels and engage quickly, directly and effectively with customers, investors, partners and other audiences. If you can't start a blog yet, the one thing you should do is RSS-enable the corporate PR and marketing information on your website – and get your press releases out via webfeeds as well as by traditional means. (I've yet to find any large company who offers open RSS webfeeds of their press releases from their websites.)" Yeah. What he said. HERE'S THE REST OF THE LIST... [Contentious]
Radio UserLand RSS Generation - Temporary Insanity
Just after midnight this morning, the RSS feeds generated by Radio UserLand came unglued. Some items in the feed were duplicated. Others contained the correct "description" field data but had the "title" field data from the prior post. Entries in weblogdata.root file were fine. Items displayed correctly in the desktop website. Used the Radio application to re-publish both the home page and the category home pages, which generated new rss.xml files. Still screwed up. Off to bed.
Up this morning and re-published again. New rss.xml files generated. Still screwed up. Off to work.
Came home this evening and re-published again. New rss.xml files generated. Now they are correct.
This insanity is typical of Radio UserLand, and drives users totally apeshit. The poor newbies in the support forum pull their hair out, thinking they've done something wrong when Radio suddenly stops working correctly. It isn't their fault, it is Radio.
UserLand claims that addressing the many reliability and stability issues is top priority for the September update. Time will tell.
Moving RSS From Radio UserLand to Bloglines
Enough is enough.
I'm tired of all the problems with Radio's built-in news aggregator. I currently subscribe to over 160 RSS feeds. Most of them don't contain material that will be re-posted here. I've started moving the "non-post" feeds to Bloglines. The others I'll keep in Radio, for now.
An example problem? The aggregator chokes on simple things like FORM tags in Live Journal "survey and attitude" toys when they appear in feeds. Another example? UserLand only started beta testing Atom format support last month. Yes, I know the prior lack of Atom support was partially political and partially a resource issue. As a user, I don't care about the politics. UserLand is releasing a loooong overdue update later this month. The feeds I moved to Bloglines are staying there.
Enough is enough.
The Best RSS Advice I've Ever Heard
The Best RSS Advice I've Ever Heard.
...comes from Paul Boutin, in the form of this post:
How to lure more RSS readers
Robert Scoble: “Write better headlines and you’ll get more readers.”
So true. I’m guilty of not putting any effort into my own weblog headlines, but that’s because I don’t really care how many readers I get here, and I have professional headline writers working for me at Slate and Wired.
You, however, you who have 300 or 3000 daily weblog readers and wish you had ten times as many, should always think about what headline would make a reader click on an entry as opposed to passing it by. Usually it’s a matter of making clear what the entry is about, and what the relevant new info or commentary in the post is.
Of course, as you can see, the original source of the advice was Robert Scoble, but his original headline was:...so I never actually read that post.
I’m going to try to take this advice to heart.
[The RSS Weblog]
Tuesday, September 07, 2004Install XP Without A Product Key
Install XP without a product key.
Direct and Related Links for 'Install XP without a product key'
“Microsoft’s new Windows Product Activation presents support techs with all sorts of new challenges, including the need to have a valid product key to install, or reinstall, Windows XP on workstations. But what do you do if you can’t find the CD with the original key that matches the machine you’re working on? You can discover the key using ViewKeyXP…. If you try to reinstall Windows XP and don’t have your original product key or… By marc@lockergnome.com (Marc Erickson). [Lockergnome's IT Professionals]
Make My RSS Perfect, Please
RSS would be perfect if....RSS is pretty simple. In fact, RSS wears a big t-shirt that says, “Simple is my middle name.” Publishers are adopting RSS all over the place and advertisers are trying to figure out how to reach this elusive and finicky audience of early adopters, but RSS is a pretty unfriendly medium for advertising compared to the regular Web or even spam (formerly known as “email”).
Me? I love RSS. I couldn’t keep up with the embarrassingly small percentage of WIN sites I read if I didn’t have FeedDemon, but there are a few things I wish RSS and feed readers could do. Many solutions to RSS problems involve server-side scripting — like the HTTP Conditional GET, which spares Web servers some of the load of repeated requests for feeds that have not changed — but scripting can only do so much.
Authentication
Not just for subscribing to content, but some people want the ease-of-use of RSS for a private news feed. If someone knows the URL, they can read your feed.Dynamic content
Like email, you cannot change the content of a feed once it has gone out the door. But worse than email, if you do change content after it has made its way to feed readers, many of them will do redlining and show you exactly what changes were made. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that they are constantly pulling down new versions for comparison? Maybe it’s a good thing to know that someone removed a paragraph that changes the entire tone of their post, but if I fix a misspelling, add a missing word or change my punctuation, do you really want to see little red underlines and strikethrough everywhere?Advertising and personalization
Without cookies and JavaScript support, you cannot intelligently serve ads in your RSS feeds. If you put an ad in with every post and people look at the 10-at-a-time view in their feed readers, they see ten copies of the same ad all on one screen. This discourages bloggers from putting ads in their feeds which, in turn, discourages them from putting all of their content into their feeds.RSS doesn’t know what a post is
I mean, RSS is all about showing you posts, but when bloggers switch from excerpts to full posts in their feeds, most feed readers load all 20 stories again as if they were new. The feed reader only knows which post is which by the date, title and content. Those are all blogger-editable. If I edit a title, does that make it a new post?The Atom spec addresses unique identifiers for posts with its “atom:id” element. Atom also takes the syndication to the next level allowing you to move content in and out, not just out, but it doesn’t address the “dumb client” issues.
To be fair, HTML doesn’t do any of this either. HTTP — the communication between Web servers and browsers — handles all of these things. But feed readers use HTTP to get RSS files from Web servers. Why don’t feed readers support more HTTP features? When Internet Explorer and Safari have built-in feed readers, will RSS feeds suddenly become more dynamic and powerful?
What would you like to see RSS and feed readers do? [The RSS Weblog]
On This Day Macro From Steve Kirks
On This Day Macro. Dave Winer has been writing a weblog for quite some time and has built quite a history of posts. He sometimes uses that history to prove a point or remind us of how far we've come. I always enjoyed reading the comparisons between current events and events from the previous years on his weblog and I hoped one day to have it on mine. That day has come. onThisDay macro Installation: save the file and use the Radio application's "Open" command from the "File" menu. Radio will offer you a location to save it in the object database that's the same as the place it came from. In this case, I stored it in a table called workspace.srk.scripts, but you can store it anywhere in the workspace table in your Radio installation. This is a simple macro in appearance, but hearty in its execution. It runs through your database of Radio weblog posts and compares the date you wrote the post to the same date in years past. It will find posts for last year, two years ago and three years ago and display the results in one of two ways: full content or summaries. If there are no posts, it returns no content. I plan on modifying this into a tool in the next few weeks and will include:
I'm using it on my weblog in addition to the radio.macros.weblogRecentPosts macro. Now, when I want to write a weblog post, I open my desktop homepage and see my recent posts plus any posts I made on the same day in years past. Leave questions as comments on this post. It's not a destructive macro so I don't expect any problems, but be careful, OK? [Steve Kirks: house of warwick : Radio notes]
- Preferences for content amount
- Automatic posting of historic content to your weblog
- Templates to allow you to control the layout
Most Search Phrases Are Unique
"According to Amit Singhal, principal scientist at Google, over 50 percent of the 200 million searches performed a day have never been searched before.Good discussion at SEW"
From SearchEngneBlog
http://www.searchengineblog.com/archives/2004_09_01_archive.html
Study: Fortune 100 Lack SEO
Study: Fortune 100 Lack SEO. The number of Fortune 100 companies who deploy effective search engine optimization (SEO) techniques has tripled in the last two years, but only a scant few have well-optimized sites, according to analysis from Oneupweb.
The 2004 study of the first 100 companies in Fortune Magazine's Fortune 500 list revealed that only nine had definitive, ethical optimization campaigns — up from just three in 2002 — indicating that this powerful group may be missing out on valuable online market share. [ClickZ News]
RSS: In the Slow Lane on the Road to Ubiquity?
RSS: In the Slow Lane on the Road to Ubiquity?.Alex Barnett proposes that RSS is too new to be judged as a niche technology.
Don’t write off RSS because it was invented 5 years ago and ’still’ isn’t at ‘mass use’. If XML, IM and P2P (depending on how you define P2P) - are anything to go by (technologies that ride on the infrastructure that itself took decades to make prime time) RSS has another 3 years before it can be judged as ‘having made it’ or not.However, his commenters are not really buying his comparisions to other technologies, like email, web browsers, and instant messaging. Rick Bruner, whose original post prompted Barnett’s, replies:
As Olivier pointed out, IM was a lot farther along five years in than 1.4%, as was the Web browser. Also, you didn’t have the platform in place for mass distribution of email for many years (i.e., PCs and ISPs were not widespread till the early ‘90s), and with mobile telephony you had a cost factor that doesn’t exist with RSS. RSS has a lot more things going for it than some of your other examples: a mature distribution platform, loads of content, little or no cost.[The RSS Weblog]
RSS: Marketing's Next Big Thing Online (Part 1 of 2)
RSS: Marketing's Next Big Thing Online (Part 1 of 2). by Tom Barnes RSS is in its infancy. But the velocity of its adoption confirms that it is one of the most important media developments in recent years. Here's the bottom line: RSS is indeed marketing's Next Big Thing. *Please note: This article is available only to paid subscribers. Get more information or sign up here.* [Current Articles from MarketingProfs.com]
Secure RSS
A downside I mentioned during RSS pitch. However, everyone involved with RSS recognizes that secure RSS is necessary. One of the old articles regarding this need:
http://www.infoage.idg.com.au/index.php?id=490561186
I may need to review the current state of secure RSS for our first implementation.
RSS At Work, Part 2
Two positive RSS items:
- I gave a short version of last weeks's RSS pitch to the group who would own the implementation. Nobody laughed.
- My senior director put RSS on his "things to consider" list for review with peers.
Thursday, September 02, 2004RSS Presentation Quotes
During the RSS presentation I gave yesterday, as expected, the following generated smiles:
"Explaining RSS is like explaining sex. You just don't get it until you do it."
George Siemens elearnspace 7/11/2003
Also, as expected, this quote generated frowns:
"It's medieval to make your customers come to you."
Martha Rogers, Co-Author, "The One to One Future"
FastCompany "Listen Up" May 2000
Some people understand that I take a stand to make people think. Others don't. Are we having fun yet?
Wednesday, September 01, 2004Gmail Anyone?
As mentioned earlier, Dean in the heartland was kind enough to bootstrap me into Gmail. (I know, I know, I need a new email account like I need another hole in the head. Why do you think I've avoided Gmail so far?) I now have several invitations of my own to pass out. My son added one to his collection. My daughter never checks her existing email, so what would be the point? Hi Crystal! You want it, duck?
Anyone from my place of employment want one? I think everyone already has Gmail, but maybe someone missed out?
More Readers? Bah, Humbug!
I may get a few more folks from work reading this web log as a result of my RSS presentation today. Waste of their time, but... no accounting for taste. Anyone interested in this drivel has long since located the public material written under my own name.
- 10,000 monkeys?
- 10,000 typewriters?
- 10 pounds crap?
- 5 pound bag?
RSS at Work
Introduced my peers and senior director at work to web feed syndication using RSS today. Watching their faces, I saw a few lights go on. I acted as enthusiastic as possible, but this is all so old hat. (I may have overdone the enthusiasm a bit, but figured I'd only get one last shot at this.) In addition, we don't have the resources to address the business process side. Many times, the technology is easy, and the business side is hard. This is actually the third (and a half) time I've broached the subject. One senior manager from the meeting later asked me to trim the pitch to 15 minutes and present to his staff. Here we go again.
It is typically 18 to 24 months from the time I pitch a new concept to the time we use it. It has already been over 2 years since my first RSS pitch. Only so much space in a 5 pound bag. You have to walk before you can crawl. Insert random platitude here. Basic web site, improved navigation, email campaigns, support forums, online service requests, content management systems, search engine optimization, extranets, intranets, newsletters, net seminars, localization, personalization, analytics, web logs, syndication, surveys, user experience, customer relationship management, et al. These are just a few of the many tools allowing companies to crown the customer as king. Everyone (given the funding) eventually uses the same broad tool set, just implemented in a different order and at a different pace. Is anyone having fun yet?
For those who asked, the RSS pitch was an update to the old slides you've seen here before. I'd post them again, but, be honest... does Google really need another lame "introduction to web syndication using RSS" presentation? To paraphrase Chandler Bing - "Could there be any more RSS resources available?"