If you're reading this, then please update your links. The new home is http://www.ideoplex.com/blog/topic/software/ with a new rss feed.

PS I could use some google juice at the new site.

The lights are On

The lights are on at my new digs. Unfortunately, I don't know how to implement http redirects from the Userland Radio Community Server. Please update your links to the new location.

Going Dark

Take the First Step will be dormant for a few days. I'm in the process of moving to my own domain and will be posting infrequently until the process is complete.

I'd buy Radio Userland Again

Mark Beaty also asks whether Radio Userland is worth $39.95 – I think so. The primary contenders for hosted weblogs are Userland, TypePad and Blogger. The lowest cost TypePad option is $49.50 per year, the free Blogger weblog doesn't provide RSS, and Blogger Pro is no longer available. At $39.95 per year (for continued support and hosting), Radio Userland has an attractive feature/cost ratio.

The real question is whether you prefer smart client/dumb server or dumb client/smart server? I like having a lightweight desktop CMS, so I like Radio Userland – your mileage may vary. Both Userland and TypePad offer a free 30-day trial. My advice is to try them out before making a decision.

In fact, I'm willing to pay Userland more. I'd pay for my own domain name. And I'd also pay to be on a faster server – especially for referrer statistics. Since I don't have that option, I plan to move to my own hosted space in the near future.

Where the Rubber meets the Road

Long time readers may have noticed that I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing for a technical guy. If your company has a direct sales force, then they'll insist that they are where the rubber meets the road. If you have a installation/consulting arm, then they'll insist that it's them. And ditto for customer support. But for my money, marketing is where the action is.

Yes, they all spend more time working with customers then anyone in marketing. But where everyone else is focused on just a few customers at a time, marketing is wrestling with concepts that cut across the entire customer base. So I'd like to send out a belated welcome to the blog roll to Thomas Warfield, who's living the Shareware Life.

Tom may have the Greatest Job in the World, but he's also out there by himself. The decisions are his own, as are the consequences. So I'm glad that he's decided to blog about them.

Mea Culpa: I was taking another look at the Hibernate documentation in preparation for playing with persistent subclasses when I came across the mutable property. And I realized that I had said that Hibernate shouldn't be used for immutable classes when I meant to say that you need to be wary of comparing object references from different Hibernate sessions. I've corrected Hibernate Prototyping with the BeanShell.

IT Still a Great Career

Nothing is better than getting paid to do something that you would do anyway. There aren't many professions that you can say that about, but I think that's still true of IT. IT lives in a junction of logical thought and creative expression that stretches and challenges your mind like few other things can.

Yes, IT is under attack from outsourcing, foreign competition and a poor economy. But what isn't? And while outsourcing support looks good on the bottom line, it's often more of a cost shift than a savings – fine when shifting costs to your customers but not so good when shifting costs to your business units.

So I think that it would be a mistake for Tim Bray to guide his son away from this profession. He should make sure that he has exposure to other careers. But if the kid has the knack (he certainly has the genes), then I wouldn't fight it.

RSS, Email and 1-to-1 Marketing

To my way of thinking, RSS is most effective as a broadcast medium while email is most effective as a narrowcast medium. When we're broadcasting, we're trying to generate buzz – an awareness of who we are, what we do, and why we're good people. We're interested in the aggregate effect: how many readers, reader retention, and the like. But when we're narrowcasting, we're trying to elicit a specific reader action. Our focus is on the individual response.

In 1-to-1 Marketing, we want to take members of our broadcast audience and convert them to narrowcast and eventually customer. The evolution from broadcast to narrowcast to customer necessitates a loss of anonymity. We develop more information about individuals so that we can target information and proposals for them.

If RSS is to play a significant role in that evolution, then it needs to distinguish between readers and become part of the process of learning about individual readers. Returning to yesterday's request for a standard block of [anonymous] IDs, many people won't want to be a part of that process. It's best to recognize that and provide a mechanism that works within your overall marketing effort.

RSS User IDs

Well, I guess I wasn't paying close attention to the feedback on Tim Bray's counting RSS subscribers – Greg Reinacker describes a method for automatically assigning RSS user IDs (and Derek Scruggs' work on counting RSS subscribers). I have my misgivings, but it looks promising.

Derek has concerns about aggregator support for HTTP 301 redirects and ETag headers. I'd like to add aggregator support for user IDs to the list. It's the wild west in RSS and aggregators right now and people will be hopping around for a while. So we need to easily transfer user IDs from aggregator to aggregator. And we need to balance that against the ability to refer others to RSS feeds without piggy backing on existing user IDs.

Plus, I think that people will always want a safety net of anonymity. So it might be nice to reserve a standard block of IDs for that purpose – an aggregator could then be configured to randomly use an ID from that block for a given feed.

I still think that email marketing has a lot of life left in it. But maybe RSS is ready to take on more of the load than I had thought.

Marketing by RSS

I love RSS as much as anyone else, but we don't do anyone any favors when we refuse to take off the rose-colored sunglasses. Chris Pirillo throws some brickbats at an RSS doubter, but I happen to agree with the doubter on several points:

• You can't reliably measure exposure via RSS.
• You can't control how RSS is displayed.
• RSS doesn't build a user database.
• RSS is difficult to customize - as a response driver - the way email is.

Tim Bray brought up the issue of RSS Subscriber Counting before, but the nay-sayers shut down the conversation before we had a good answer. The most valuable subscribers are the most likely to be sitting behind a proxy server and the most likely to be lost in the shuffle. Just how is RSS going to address that?

Maybe I'm dense. But I don't see how anyone is going to build a RSS user database, segment the users and target the segments independently – remembering that a user may belong to multiple segments. I happen to believe in 1-to-1 marketing, how does RSS fit into that world?

And don't expect to control presentation in my RSS aggregator. I don't think one-page aggregators are going away and I don't think anyone is up to the job of blending dozen's of presentation formats on the same page.

Now, maybe spam spells the end of email marketing. But I think email is important enough that we'll fix it before it dies. And that we'll see RSS become one of the tools in marketing's toolchest – supplementing email, not replacing it.