Devil's Dictionary on Copyright. The new edition of The Devil's Dictionary has many swell corkers, but I'm quite partial to this one:

copyright, noun

The notion that you can protect from the future what you stole from the past.

Link (Thanks, Jason!) [Boing Boing Blog]

7:00:08 PM 

Do Webfeeds Help or Hurt Site Traffic?. On June 3, Dave Winer (a key creator of the RSS technical standard wrote an article answering this question: Would a big media company lose traffic if they supported RSS?

This piece a good, timely complement to my June 4 article, How Many People Read Your Webfeed?

Winer's main point, with which I heartily agree, is this: "I don't think that providing [webeeds], if you do it right, lowers traffic, in fact I think you can gain traffic."

I both agree and disagree with Winer's other points...

(Full story, with links to Winer's article and other resources...)

[Contentious Weblog]

7:00:07 PM

categories: Radio Fun, Web Analytics

 

How Many People Read Your Webfeed?. From the perspective of many online publishers, webfeeds (whether RSS or Atom format) have one big shortcoming: In most cases, it's difficult or impossible to know how many people subscribe to your webfeed.

Circulation numbers have always been the cornerstone of the publishing world, and that hasn't changed in the online age. This is especially true if a site's business model hinges at all on advertising, or on leveraging relationships with readers to sell other products or services, or to promote a particular organization or issue. For those sites, offering a webfeed feels a bit dangerous – they don't necessarily fear losing readers, but rather losing track of how many readers they have.

Webfeed metrics is a complex issue that mainly boils down to technology. Most content and publishing people aren't technical specialists. However, this is one technical area that online publishers probably should understand (on at least a basic level) and follow major developments.

Here are a few good resources to get you started...

[Contentious Weblog]

7:00:06 PM

categories: Radio Fun, Web Analytics

 

Export Posts to Text.

I've been tinkering with blosxom lately and I needed a way to extract all my posts from the weblogData.root. What I came up with was the exportWeblog tool.

I tried to make it a bit more universal. It should make a great alternate backup strategy as well. Everything's pretty straight forward. If there are any questions let me know. I'll be unavailable for the next several weeks starting 8/13. I'll try to answer any questions I can before then, and I'll certainly get to the rest when I return.

[Surgical Diversions]

7:00:03 PM

categories: Radio Fun

 

Re: Radio crashes after start-up. Hi Lillia,

My script will fix blank archives:

http://www.cybersaps.org/gems/weblogData.root.fixingBlankArchives.ftsc

I would have thought merely deleting said categories from the www local folder, be they folders and/or files, would delete them from the server? That's what's supposed to happen.

Steve Hooker
http://www.cybersaps.org/ [Radio UserLand Messages]

7:00:02 PM

categories: Radio Fun

 

Wanted: Gluttonous RSS Feeders. Using MySQL and PHP, I'm cobbling together a server-based RSS aggregator/publisher that makes it insanely fast to skim feeds, choosing items for publication without much descriptive text or editing. The code makes use of two terrific open source PHP projects: the Magpie RSS and Atom parser and Edd Dumbill's XML-RPC for PHP.

Erik Thauvin uses this approach on Linkblog, checking a mind-boggling 1,600 feeds for technology and programming links and choosing the best 15-20 items each day. His site has quickly become a favorite.

Although I'm not going to adopt this format on Workbench -- I write like someone who gets paid by the word -- when you read Thauvin's description of his editing process, it becomes clear that he's practicing a specialized form of weblogging that could benefit from its own tools.

As I explain this concept to people, I've dubbed this kind of site a passalong, because the point is to scan lots of syndicated feeds and pass along the best links quickly.

For the most part, existing weblogging software is designed under the assumption that users write about everything they link. Radio UserLand can route individual items from the aggregator to an editor, but this wasn't simple enough for the process I have in mind:

1. Scan a headlines page, selecting items that sound interesting. Click Submit to put them all on a queue.
2. Skim the queue, which adds item descriptions, and visit links. Select items that should be dropped from the queue, then click Submit to dump them.
3. Publish the queue once an hour (in my case, using the MetaWeblog and Movable Type APIs to send items over XML-RPC to a Movable Type weblog).

The software needs a lot of work -- there's no editor yet, and I want a Bayesian filter that can guess which new headlines I'm most likely to read -- but I'm jazzed about the potential.

With thousands of information sources producing RSS and Atom feeds, we need people like Thauvin who have integrated weblogging into their daily news-gathering routine. Weblog links are like ant trails -- a lot of people have to link to something good in order to get noticed.

Though my original plan was to design this for personal use, if there's interest, I'll add user account support and make the code available for beta testing. Pass it along. [Workbench]