Thursday, April 28, 2005

Today's big news is that we have full support for RSS in weblogs.com. Popular services like Technorati and Feedster build on its output. 

A Morning Coffee Notes podcast done on the Archos on the beach, while tanning. Only ten minutes, but packed with stuff about weblogs.com, ipodder.root, KYOU and podcasting for love.  

More news. I'm going to BlogNashville at the end of next week, where I'll lead a discussion on a topic near to my heart. How can we work together in the USA even when we disagree. Nashville's a good place for that, and I'm a southern boy these days, but still have my blue state values.  

Om Malik: "One of the main reasons people started turning away from network/broadcast television to niche cable networks is because of the homogenous, brain dead presentation and uniformity of content. I see exactly the same thing happen today." 

On Sunday as I was preparing to leave Seattle, Lake Washington was quiet, like glass, and no was stirring but some birds. So I got out the camera and made a movie.  

This evening, as the sun was setting behind the beach, the light was just perfect, the colors so vivid, the sounds so tropical. So I got out the camera and made a movie.  

David Pogue: "I have to admit that it's Safari's RSS feature that has changed my daily routine the most. It's turned me into a fan of RSS--something that, because of the hassle and overhead, I never stuck with before." 

Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could. 

Niek Hockx unsubs from feeds with ads.  

Here's what Engadget's feed looks like in my aggregator today. The good news is that now the ads aren't garbled and incomprehensible as they were before. The bad news is that Engadget is kind of like a feed of ads for me, already. I know the products they write about aren't paying them for placement (right?) but as a scanner, which is how I read in my aggregator, with my finger on the scrollbar, moving up and down quickly, the ads are disrupting my flow. I'm pretty sure that's the idea, but as Niek points out, these feeds are optional for me, if one starts becoming a bother, I can quickly get rid of it. These days there's no shortage of feeds vying for my attention. I don't know how this is going to shake out, but I'd like to get a message through to advertisers who are paying for placements in RSS feeds, try coming up with your own feeds, and route around Google and Jason, what the heck, it's worth a try? The cost of serving your own feeds is infinitesmal. What's the barrier? 

The KYOU website goes up, which raises an interesting question -- what happens if a submitted podcast has a commercial in it? Another thought, I was trying to work something like this out for bloggers with a very big flow website last fall, but it didn't work out. Instead of looking for submissions, we'd go trawling for the good stuff and surprise people. Nothing like having 10 million fresh newbies show up at a blog that had 10,000 readers the day before, eh? Maybe we were just teeny bit ahead of the times. It was going to revolutionize news. It still could happen. Probably will. 

Ed Cone has become a regular on MSNBC. 

John Martin outlines the issues of outlining software.