Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

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Web Celebrations: The Return of Full RSS Feeds

Published by Taylor on July 29, 2008 in Blogging. View Comments

Last week I griped about Mental Floss (one of my very favorite blogs) truncating their RSS feed.  At the time I wrote:

Enter the most recent source of my web-frustration: Mental Floss.  I’ve read the Mental Floss blog (which is absolutely terrific) for about a year and a half.  While catching up on their prolific feed after a week of travel, I discovered that in early July they switched from a glorious and full feed to a sloppy partial feed.  I’m pissed.

Maybe I’m an atypical feed reader, but I suspect not.  The truth is, a partial feed decreases the likelihood that I’ll read something by approximately 100%.  [...] When content providers refuse to provide a full feed, they disrupt [my] information flow.  As a result, I read less of their material.  In other words, don’t be surprised if fewer Mental Floss items end up in my Monday Links or anywhere else on this site.  I still receive the (partial) feed, but I’m. Not. Reading. It.

Harsh I know, but hey: that’s why I have a blog.  Well folks, it brings me great joy to share this *breaking* news:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Birmingham, ALA. Today, at 4:15pm EST, the editorial board of mental_floss magazine kept their promise to  readers and turned their blog’s RSS feed back to full blast. The feed had been temporarily disabled due to hacking issues. The gushing stream of full RSS stories hitting inboxes around the nation was quickly followed by cheers heard across America, and the popping of champagne corks distribution of celebratory juice boxes around the magazine’s headquarters.
“This is a great day for mental_floss and this is a great day for our readers!” exclaimed a triumphant Will Pearson, President of the company. “But mostly this is a great day for mental_floss.” The comment was nearly drowned out by the thunderous sounds of high-fiving and back patting taking place.

Well done, Floss Nation.  In honor of their editors seeing the light, I hereby shamelessly plug the geektacular shirts available in the Mental Floss store.

It’s a web celebration (a webebration?).  Ball’s in your court now, Freakonomics.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user ~Twon~.

Web Frustration: Partial RSS Feeds

Published by Taylor on July 23, 2008 in Advertising, Blogging, Computing, Consumer Behavior and Web 2.0. View Comments

I’m sure if I thought about it for a moment, I could come up with other blog and web quirks that drive me bonkers (please share your own web-peeves in the comments).  But there’s one in particular that has me rankled this morning: RSS feeds that provide only partial content.

Those of us who use feed readers are well accustomed to major newspapers limiting their feeds to article titles and a sentence or two of summary.  A typical NY Times feed item, instead of a full article, looks like this:

Sticking Together, Up to a Point

from NYT > NYTimes.com Home

The Americans preparing for the Olympic sabre team have come to New York City, always a hotbed of fencing, to train for Beijing with Yury Gelman at the Manhattan Fencing Club.

It drives me nuts that I have to click through to read an article instead of reading without breaking stride on the Google Reader page.  But I accept that advertising pressures–despite the fact that some feeds, even partial ones (*cough*washington post*cough*), have ads embedded in them–will prevent the major news institutions from sharing their content in a more open way.

When the Freakonomics blog moved from an independent site to the NY Times, they experienced a huge amount of legitimate outrage from readers for switching from a full to a partial feed.  In a post to readers, co-author/blogger Stephen Dubner wrote (emphasis mine):

Way back when we first started talking to the Times, they said that they, like most content providers of their sort, favor partial feeds. Why? As much as people like to say that “information wants to be free,” content does not like to be created for free. In order to pay all the writers, editors, photographers, graphic artists, technologists, and the few dozen other kinds of folks who create and curate the Times’s content, most of which is free on the web [...] the Times sells ads on its site. But can’t they sell ads on a full feed, so that feed readers can still get all the content they want delivered to their computers for free without having to visit a single web site? The short answer is yes, they can, and our friends at FeedBurner, who have been distributing our feed, created a great business by doing so. But the Times and its advertisers aren’t crazy about this option. (Nor are they alone, apparently.) Why? This is the fundamental point: many advertisers do not value feed readers as much as they value site readers, since they believe that feed readers are far harder to measure and track.

Enter the most recent source of my web-frustration: Mental Floss.  I’ve read the Mental Floss blog (which is absolutely terrific) for about a year and a half.  While catching up on their prolific feed after a week of travel, I discovered that in early July they switched from a glorious and full feed to a sloppy partial feed.  I’m pissed.

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Is FriendFeed Doomed?: Jarred Guest Posts at SarahInTampa.com

Published by Jarred on May 20, 2008 in Blogging, Computing, Data Portability, Facebook, Google, Social Networks, Tropophilia and Web 2.0. View Comments

Jealous of Taylor’s recent gig as a guest poster, I decided to accept an open call for contributors made by Sarah Perez for her excellent blog sarahintampa.com. Sarah regularly blogs for ReadWriteWeb — one of the preeminent resources for technology news and analysis on the web . Thanks to Sarah for letting me jump in!

My guest post talks about how FriendFeed is going to encounter enormous, if not deadly, pressure from the recently launched Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect initiatives.

Facebook and Google realize that people are tired of filling out profile after profile, uploading user picture after user picture, connecting to friend after friend… on site after site after site. In “the real world”, we have one social graph of our friends and one identity. Both are centrally located in our brain. We block and expose different facets of our identity to different parts of our graph. This is how the web should, and will, work. Google and Facebook want to be our digital, social brains. [...] When you visit a website, you’ll no longer have to create your identity — Facebook or Google will load it for you. You’ll be able to concentrate on leveraging your identity in the context of the website you’re visiting and the services it provides.

What does that have to do with FriendFeed? Well you’ll have to head to Sarah’s blog to find out!

Attention Invesment

Published by Jarred on May 19, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Microfinance, Philanthropy Online, Social Networks and Web 2.0. View Comments

Your Attention, Pretty Please?

In March 2007, Alex Iskold wrote about the emergence of the “attention economy”, a marketplace “where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention.” The always-on nature of digital media has increased the scarcity of human attention, and in turn has increased its value. To put it concretely: the more time a company can get you to spend on their website, the more ad revenue they can potentially earn or the higher the likelihood that you’ll purchase one of their products.

I mention the attention economy not to wax theoretic about it, but to share my personal struggle with choosing how to invest my attention. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the purpose of all this technology reading and writing that I do. I enjoy thinking about the topics that I regularly cover. The evolution of web 2.0 and social network is fascinating to me, and it plays well to my geek tendencies. But my brain has been flirting recently with what bloggers have started to call “social media fatigue,” an exhaustion resulting from the overexposure to and overanalysis of those topics.

There’s Hope

However, my passion for social media was reinvigorated last week when I was directed to a web page where a friend was raising money to support her marathon run in honor of her college roommate’s struggle with cancer. I put the link up in my Gmail status and sent an email to some of my fellow classmates to let them know about it. Though I certainly can’t and wouldn’t claim to have made a huge impact, I think a few of the donors that day decided to act because of that simple message and link from a friend. By the end of the day, my friend had raised several hundred dollars, and as of today she has raised over $1,000 from over 25 donors.

Though the story is not unique or especially exciting, it brought home for me how much potential there is for social media. So much good can be done! And people create applications on Facebook that allow you to… throw sheep? Give each other cupcakes? Come on! Luckily, some people have caught on.

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Round-Up: What’s So Special About Blogging?

Published by Jarred on May 1, 2008 in Blogging, Culture, News and Web 2.0. View Comments

The conversation started by Steven Hodson about how bloggers can most usefully fulfill their roles and obligations to their audiences has grown to proportions rivaling some of our other popular posts. I learned of Steven’s initial post through Corvida at SheGeeks, who had added her own thoughts to his original theory. I responded with a critique, which prompted Corvida to rebut and clarify. Along the way, readers of all three blogs have chimed in through comments as well as on FriendFeed and Twitter.

Steven, Corvida, and I have since reached common ground in the fact that bloggers are indeed similar to news anchors in that they highlight issues for their readers. We’ve also essentially agreed that bloggers can be more aptly described as “layers” to raw information rather than filters for it. Finally, we’ve also found consensus in the fact that the term “blogger” is to broad a category to attribute specific characterisitics to it.

This last point has really had me thinking about blogs and digital media in general. What’s the big deal?

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