Thursday, June 12, 2003

FrontPage to have blogging features FrontPage 2003 to include blogging tools. According to the article, Microsoft plans to include blog publishing tools in its newest version of FrontPage. It is interesting that they include this feature along with more advanced web edting tools in a bid for more "professional" users. [Blogroots] ...maybe then it will be a worthy product? probably not... 8:52:27 PM

RSS Aggregators Gaining Ground! Should the big pubs be paying attention to RSS? Just ask Andy Rhinehart at GoUpstate.com, home of the Spartanburg Herald-Journal newspaper. Last year Andy led the pack by offering an RSS feed for their top news stories. This year he enhanced the SHJ's status by creating a feed for their classified ads, and he topped himself with a third feed for stories about the war in Iraq. So GoUpstate.com is a good model for other newspapers to emulate, but we all know you need numbers to help sell the benefits of RSS at that level. Once again, here comes Andy to the rescue. He provides us with some hard facts from the Spartanburg Herald-Journal's experience (emphasis is mine): "From March 1-May 31, users accessing our RSS feeds accounted for 7.97 percent of our total traffic. This doesn't include people coming to the site from the various blogs who used the RSS items, but just the number of times our feeds were accessed. The one disclaimer that probably should be noted - some folks may have their aggregators hitting us often throughout the day, especially back during the war. Looking at my top 25 referers from yesterday [Monday], I see NetNewsWire, Radio's aggregator, Frontier's aggregator, and Amphetadesk. I'd say the aggregator movement is gaining ground." If you figure that we're still in the "early adopters" stage for RSS, 8% is a pretty staggering number for a major newspaper's traffic. Even with Andy's disclaimer, this is far more than just a handful of people reading the paper via an aggregator. This is going to be big, and the Spartanburg Herald-Journal is going to ride the crest of the wave! [The Shifted Librarian] 8% for a local/regional newspaper, 25% for a technology journalist,... the numbers are getting bigger, as we'd all imagine. What's the "magic" number to call this critical mass? 8:51:18 PM

Blog Tipping Points Dave Pollard has written a nice piece on blogs and tipping points. [thought horizon] An interesting read. I've been meaning to read the book, and it certainly seems appropriate to blogs. 8:49:10 PM

InfoWorld Trials RSS-Based Advertising Jonathan Angel: IDG's InfoWorld yesterday became the first publisher to incorporate advertising into its RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed, an important step in the medium's commercial viability. And so it begins... 8:43:40 PM

Advertising in RSS The NewsGator team are soliciting advice about Advertising in RSS. Web pages have developed pop-ups, email has spam and now it seems RSS is to have advertisements. Pop-ups and spam are not opt-in services. In many cases they aren't even opt-out. RSS at the moment has no mechanism to identify which posts are advertisments and which are not. It is opt-in, all-in. If NewsGator leads the way in putting advertisements into RSS feeds then they are also beautifully positioned to make them an opt-in service from day 1. An extension to RSS that marks a post as advertisement means they can be easily filtered out. The other, more insidious, alternative is the change in policy. "By agreeing to take this feed you...". Many of the feeds I subscribe to are personal and so are unlikely to carry advertisements yet I'm still uncomfortable with the idea unless I am given a choice up front. [thought horizon] That choice is your decision to subscribe or not. A weblogger will do well to balance his content with advertising, lest the signal-to-noise ratio fall too low. Get over it, it's gonna happen... 8:36:33 PM

BusinessWeek on Blogs BusinessWeek Online has just produced a special report on The Social Web, and the best article of the bunch is Jane Black's piece on weblogs, titled, The Wild World of Open Source Media. Jane succinctly describes the thrall of blogging as well as its impact on the wider media world, using Salam Pax and the resignations at the NYT as examples. She did her research as well - discussing diverse viewpoints: from David Weinberger and Glenn Reynolds, Nick Denton to Clay Shirky. She also writes kindly about Technorati: It hasn't taken long, however, for the impact of Sifry's software to exceed his harmless narcissism. In the eight months since Technorati appeared, it has become a tool not just for bloggers but for anyone who wants to discover what's on the global agenda. Well, shucks. ... [Sifry's Alerts] Is ti me, or is the hype machine not working the same way this time around? Everyone seems burned by the bubble-burst, and so no one is rushing into weblogs like they rushed into the web. That's a good thing, maybe we'll get real value out of our investments this time around. 8:32:39 PM

Blog Relations... a state of the nation An interesting take-away from the ClickZ conference... It seems that some of the pioneers of the blog world, to whom we are indebted for facilitating the medium, believe they have the sole rights to what is or is not a blog. In response I thought I'd post some key thoughts on blogging that are my most humble opinions - well maybe not. Users not innovators define a technology The enginneers who created GSM cellular phones never foresaw that the number one application of their invention would be short text messages - rather they saw it as simply a better means of providing voice services. Similarly, how weblogs develop from here will be based on how Internet users want them to develop. It's out of the pioneers hands. Blogging is not mainstream It's widely popular and growing fast, but it is not at this point in time mainstream. Web browsers are mainstream, blogs are not. Commercial interests are key to it's success The small population of Internet pioneers were irked when 'newbies' started appearing in newsgroups and were appalled when people started trying to make money from the new medium. But guess what, it was commercial pressure that helped the Internet go global. Blogs will follow the self-same model. (ref: the growth of the PC and hobbyists) Blogging isn't owned by anybody I also say to the purists (who have done us a great favour by pioneering this application) that you do not have a divine right to tell everyone else what is or is not a blog. We don't care, we'll decide. Respect, understand and adapt When anything includes participation by large numbers of people, there will always be different opinions. Just because someone's opinion is different does not mean it's wrong. Get over it. Blogs are still immature, but are already very useful. I just think we get ahead of ourselves sometimes. 8:30:58 PM

Portal Aggregators vs Desktop Aggregators This entry was in regards to Tony Perkins and his AlwaysOn site. ...On the reader side of the card, being a portal, an aggregator gets tougher every day, whether you're AOL or Yahoo. Most of the newbie readers which they have relied on have now figured out search engines, and those heavily into blogs may have discovered that useful tool, an RSS [desktop] aggregator. Though they have the same name, the RSS [desktop] flavor of aggregator is as corrosive as battery acid to the portal flavor of aggregator. What use is a single site to the reader if it's all brought to the desktop automagically already? [Due Diligence] Bingo. Sites like java.blogs or Macromedia's MX-themed aggregator are nice, but most serious readers are going to pull straight from the source into their desktop. Portals have their purpose, but we should be focusing on improving the information delivery experience in the desktop aggregator, too. 8:17:05 PM