twopointouch

Great post from fellow Good-blogger Kate on the bête noire that is partial feeds. I share her thoughts entirely on this issue. She’s unsubscribing from anyone or anything that only offers partial feeds. Unfortunately for me, since some of my most important news sources (every (?) UK newspaper and the BBC) only offers partial feeds that really isn’t an option.

Kate sums up the arguments:

(a) readers hate it

(b) full feeds actually increase traffic

The second point is, as she says, counter-intuitive, but basically it means that you can hang on to readers who aren’t committed enough to come to your site every day, draw in more occasional readers, and please your regular readers by giving them the choice.

Forgive me, but it’s time for me to indulge in a ‘how cool is this!?’ post. Grazr is a very nifty solution to RSS and Blogrolls in a widget. It can work from either a single RSS feed or an OPML file. Pity you can’t add or remove subscriptions on the fly, but you can’t have everything. If it behaves itself, I’ll stick it on its own page in a few days.

Update: Even cooler - it will even work through an RSS feed, launching a new window from the button that is presented.

Just a thought. Does any aggregator generate a live OPML file that I could use to feed Grazr?

Went to a networking event last night: Beers and Innovations in Soho. The pretext for the event was to discuss the future of RSS, with presentations from Richard Edwards of MyZebra, Peter Nixey of Webkitchen and Ivan Pope from Snipperoo.

Thanks to the ‘beers’ aspect, my notes get a little sketchy after the first speaker. Richard said that the way to approach the problem of evangelising RSS is to think about the benefits for the user, not the technology. Talk about ‘never missing a feature or an offer’, not ‘feeds’.We need to lose the little orange button and the name RSS because they mean nothing to anyone but geeks. They serve to keep the technology niche.

Peter talked about his DeepTag project as a way to simplify getting the news from the people we care about and doing real social networking in a way that sites like del.icio.us don’t allow. It appears to be a combination of various different Web 2.0 services wrapped with RSS and concentrated around friends and family.

Lanjut →

Good to hear from Craig Williams from audabble.net who has just set up a new personalised radio service. The downloadable Flash application plays your own MP3 files interspersed with news highlights from your favourite sources which are fed through a text-to-speech engine.

At this point, the service still needs a little work. It functions, but not quite as smoothly as I’d like. The pace of development has been pretty hectic so far, though, so it should be straightened out soon. Also, I think they have a USP and offer a clever and original service, which I much prefer to hear about than another me-too video sharing/social network/news voting site.

I don’t really do product news. It’s an area that’s very well-served already. So I took the opportunity to ask rude questions about the background to the service.

Lanjut →