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Monday, April 14, 2003
 

"It's the Classifieds, stupid."
No kidding. I came up with this concept on my own today.. RSS feeds of newspaper classified ads.  Then I saw this tagline above on a web page. Wouldn't this potentially be something that challenges the mighty eBay?  eBay took the classified model and added community, trust, power of the web.  A classifieds aggregator could bring some of these value-adds back to the newspaper.

I did a Google search for RSS Classfied Ad and got back many hits.  Looks like I'm not the first to think of it by a long shot.  Here are a couple:

"Most of the RSS community is focused on content. That's great; so was the early Web. But feeding classified ads to aggregators is the next obvious step, and will prove to be hugely profitable for newspapers — or whoever decides to do it first. "

"And he sees revenue possibilities here. "RSS could be a great way of distributing and reading classified ad information, customized to the user's preferences. If news media don't do this soon, eBay and Monster will."

The question is, why would a newspaper do this?  How would they explain the value to their customers (the advertisers).  Seems there would need to be a solid, well known Aggregator out there that the advertisers would trust and count on to bring more eyeballs to their product.  Then the newspaper could upsell this feature. Seems some papers like the NY Times are already visionary in presenting bits of content via RSS.  I wonder if they've approached the advertising dept with the idea.  Anyone know of any newspapers doing this?

Looks like this PostAClassified company had the good vision to let folks post a classified ad on their site, then PostAClassified would offer that posting as an RSS feed for anyone that wanted it.


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O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara CA next week.  Howard Rheingold, author of one of my current night stand books Smart Mobs, is one of the Featured Speakers.  Exhibits are free, else $400 to $1100 passes available.  There is also an all day Amazon platform class on the 22nd.  It says free, but I'm not sure if you need to pay to get into the conference for that.
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Spent an hour or so reading thru a copy of the new Content Syndication with RSS book by Ben Hammersley at Tower Records in Palo Alto (hard book to find around here, and they had 2 on the shelf!).  Wonderful job Ben.  Lots of great example Perl code, even a 1 pager Perl example that uses the Google Search Soap API to run a search then converts the search result into an RSS feed.  This and many other great examples that just get one's mind flowing with the possibilities.  I'm hooked.  Thanks for mentioning the book Joi.

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Kiki's Delivery Service
Mizuko Ito has a post regarding the new English version of the wonderful story of Kiki the Witch from Japan.  The film version of the story was the first Miyazaki film I saw a few years ago.  The Japanese DVD is excellent.  His new movie, Sen-to-Chihiro, or Spirited Away in the US is even better.  Won the Oscar for best full feature animation this year.  It got my vote.


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We're in the human communications business...
".. the widely held conviction among people who deal with any aspect of new technology is that they are in the 'high tech' business.. they usually aren't.. The researcher who made fundamental breakthroughs in those areas are in a high-tech business.  The rest of us are appliers of their work.  We're in the human communications business.  Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions." .. most important quote from a good book I read I while back Peopleware by Tom DeMarco.  Here's a review by Megnut.  If you like Mythical Man Month, you'll like Peopleware.
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"Newspaper .. precisely tailored to our tasts"
Well done piece on the power of RSS and aggregation today by Charles Arther of the Independant News.


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