There were some great comments in Saturday’s post regarding the preference Firefox together with a Google Reader has for Atom over RSS feeds. I’ll highlight a few below with comments.
MKR pointed out that I would be presented with an RSS option if I commented out the Atom feed. Very true. Any RSS reader SHOULD be able to read any popular RSS format. In fact, if it couldn’t, it wouldn’t be a very popular reader due to incompatibility issues. However, all of the popular syndications formats provide everything you need to deliver blog content, including title, pub date, and post body to name just three of the fields, so I don’t see why they need to play favorites at this point.
Brendan pointed out that Google may prefer Atom since it may work better with their system. He mentions that he personally prefers Atom feeds, so I’d be interested in hearing why that is from him. Personally, I haven’t noticed any difference as a feed consumer.
While it’s not a mandate to use Atom with Google, as Brendan mentions, if Google steers people toward Atom through Feedburner and Google Reader preferences, it could turn into a de facto standard which is pretty close to becoming a mandate.
Jason gave some great history on the standards debate within syndication.
bc anonymously comments that this is a known bug, which makes the screenshot to the right even more perplexing to me. In the case of Typepad powered blogs, I generally am presented with all three syndications options as I’d expect to be since that’s what the blog publisher presented in their header tag.
To me, this is a control issue. Control is being taken out of the hands of website publishers who provide multiple syndication options for their blog.
Later this week, I’ll be in San Francisco for
Real
Estate Connect. A huge conference for the real estate industry where the big
wigs come together to discuss where the industry is heading.
Each year, the conference has a theme used to tie together what’s happening in
the real estate industry. This year the theme is: Open Source, Open
Data, Open Debate
Which will be explained in the
welcoming
address:
out as data, social commentary and simple APIs overhaul the arcane process of
buying and selling real estate. Learn what is hot and what is not from the
leading real estate observer, Bradley Inman, Publisher of Inman News.
A year ago, Zillow was the
hot topic as their automatic home valuation tool had been on the web for a few
months and was drawing tons of attention and interest. How were real estate
agents who’ve traditionally generated leads through personal home valuations
going to adjust to the reality of publicly available home valuations? While it’s
still not clear, it does seem clear that the genie is out of the bottle on that
type of data.
A year later, the industry seems to understand that the web will continue to be
the a source of new forms of easily consumable data by agents and consumers. In
some cases, this will be data that’s always been available becoming presentable
in more palatable formats. In other cases, it will be the creating of new types
of data.
Blogging is one case where agents are starting to see the positive PR and
marketing benefits of presenting oneself as a neighborhood or city expert in the
field of real estate. However, this is still very immature. For example, I live
in a metropolitan area of 2,000,000 people and know of
four
real
estate
bloggers. I
wouldn’t exactly call that crowded. Perhaps
Hugh MacLeod
will connect with more than a few bloggers at Connect about the power of
blogging for business.
One issue I haven’t seen addressed at Real Estate Connect, but may see someone
mention this year is: “What happens if
Digg
gets into real estate?”
How would the real estate industry change if every home consumer could vote up
or down every listing in their market? If they could comment on every listing?
If they could easily blog every listing?
Would the quality of the average listing improve? Would home sellers freak out
to their agents if their homes received little or no Diggs while comparable
properties with more photos and better descriptions rose in popularity? How
would the industry respond to such an open marketplace like this? Is this good
or bad? Preventable? Inevitable?
Also, I’m considering sticking around SFO through the weekend. If you’re in the area, send me an email so we can meet up.
I was subscribing to a few new blogs this evening when I noticed something strange with the way FireFox together with Google handled the subscription options. Rather than giving me the option of subscribing to the RSS 2.0, RSS 0.92, or Atom 0.3 feed, the only option displayed was the Atom feed.
Here is an example site where I’m seeing this.
When I click the RSS icon in the address bar, here is what I see:
Only one option: Atom 0.3.
Clicking that option brings me to my Add to Google page where I can add the site to my Google Reader.
What’s strange about this to me is Gabe’s blog publishes three feed options with Atom 0.3 being the third choice.
Yet only the Atom feed was displayed as an option.
I do have Google selected as my default choice for RSS subscriptions within Firefox. Is that what causes this?
This reminded me of Dave Winer’s post from earlier this week about his dislike of Google owning FeedBurner. He sees this as a case of over-concentration of power:
Why Feedburner is trouble (Scripting News)
So now someone at Google “owns” Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone. Reader software might have trouble working with it. They would say “Oh but the new feeds work better with Google Reader, and that’s the one most people use.” And by the way, more and more that’s true these days. But what about other feed suppliers? Do they have to change to work with Google Reader? They will say no, but there may turn out to be practical reasons why they must.
Could this be a case where Google, together with FireFox, are subtly steering people toward Atom 0.3 feeds in order to create a de facto standard?
Do you have any other theories on why my FireFox browser is limiting my RSS options?
This finally dawned on me while discussing RSS readers with a guy I met at a bar earlier this week: RSS is most valuable for infrequently updated RSS feeds.
Why?
Do you really need an RSS feed to send you the latest content from TechCrunch, Engadget, or Slashdot? These are sites that update 10-20+ times per day, so you can confidently know that any time you revisit the site, there will be something new for you to read.
Given that, here are a couple stats on how I read feeds:
First, here is a high level of how many feeds and posts I’ve read in the past 30 days:
And here is a look at how many pieces of content I consume per day through Google Reader:
What this tells me is that I’m subscribed to 338 unique RSS feeds, yet only read something like 400 posts a day. The ONLY part is debatable, but the point is that it’s very close to a 1:1 ratio.
How can it possibly be so low? Because I subscribe to a TON of feeds that are hardly ever updated. However, when they are, I want to read them. They could be blogs written by friends of mine, feeds for obscure crap that I’m looking for on Ebay, Craigslist, or MinnesotaHomes.com.
This, in my mind, shows off the real power of RSS Readers. You’re given the power to passively track content that truly interests you, no matter how obscure.
VentureBeat has an interesting story explaining that some companies are seeing a spike in traffic to their sites due to their integration of their applications with the Facebook platform. For example, HotOrNot.com offers a Facebook interface for their site:
Surprise: Facebook apps may help grow home sites
The finding, reported by Quantcast, a service that tracks traffic trends for Web sites, suggests that sites failing to embrace Facebook may be missing out on potential growth.
For some, this is also encouraging evidence that Facebook’s platform, launched in May, isn’t necessarily weening users entirely off their own Web sites. While Facebook allows third-party sites to advertise on their applications on Facebook, many sites prefer to maintain control over their users’ experience, and are hesitant to trust Facebook’s promise that it will remain hands-off. Despite the pledge by Facebook’s executives that sites are free to make money on their apps within Facebook, its terms of service says Facebook can change its policy at any time.
To me, it seems like companies who can enable Facebook interfaces for their applications aren’t hurting themselves. They’re simply providing access to a larger audience who happens to prefer accessing applications through Facebook rather than on the open web.
In the ideal situation, data gathered through any interface such as Facebook will be treated the same by the application host, and improve the value of the application overall regardless of the interface used to get the data into the system.
This may not apply to all applications, but it seems like it should hold true for web applications that become more valuable as more people participate and contribute information such as HotOrNot, other dating sites, auction sites, wikis, etc.
I think we’ll see more businesses trying to decide whether they’ve better off launching as a Facebook application first, on on the web first with a quick follow-on Facebook interface.
Building online communities is no easy task. The first big challenge is actually
getting people to care enough to register and contribute to the community. This
then leads to a second problem: community moderation.
This has been a hot topic in the blogosphere this week as bloggers discuss their
community moderation policies. For example,
Joel
Spolsky and
Dave
Winer both think moderating comments isn’t worth the effort, so they’ve
gotten out of the game entire. It’s an extreme move, and potentially cuts down
on interesting discussions since some of their readers probably have some
interesting perspectives to share but may not have blogs of their own. Or, they
may have an opinion they would be willing to share anonymously, but no longer
have a good way to do so.
Personally, I think
Apartment
Therapy’s strategy is on solid ground. Their experience has shown that a
very small handful of community members have the power to destroy the goals of a
community site by picking fights and wrecking constructive conversations. Based
on experience I have moderating forums it is virtually impossible to turn around
the bad eggs, so simply blocking them is often a better choice.
It’s usually at this point where someone starts making a First Amendment
argument, claiming that community member’s free speech rights are being
violated. That’s when you know someone doesn’t realize they’re souring the
community or doesn’t care. Either way, they’re beyond help.
So, how to deal with them?
Apartment Therapy uses an
editor’s
consensus approach to decide who needs to be dealt with and blocks users who
are behaving badly. As they stated in a recent post, they’ve given up on
coaching bad eggs:
behavior that it has come to the attention of our editors and readers (via
concerned emails) we reserver the right to ban the commenters IP WITHOUT
NOTICE. In the past we used to do a good deal of emailing and communicating
with “challenging” commenters to see if we could get them back on track. It
did not prove to be very successful and, quite frankly, we don’t have the time
to do this anymore.
Moderating comments is a problem not just for large community sites, but for
personal bloggers as well. Luckily, there are quite a few tools in place that
help make the job tolerable. For example, Wordpress blogs have a variety of
moderation tools, including the ability to moderate comments from all first-time
commenters. While it may be frustrating for first-time commenters to see their
comment go into a queue rather than immediately live on the site, the overall
quality of the conversation is vastly improved by using this policy.
In the end, it’s up to the site owner to create a community that fits their
personality. Assuming they’re shooting for a civil discussion on a topic, using
strategies such as first comment moderation and blocking bad eggs based on
moderator voting gives communities a healthy and welcoming feel that avoids degrading into a cesspool of spam and hate.
Dear media sites:
I am so tired of truncated RSS feeds.
Why do you continue to work under the assumption that you’re better off forcing
people to click through to read blog posts or news stories rather than allowing
them to read content within their feed readers?
This is wrong.
Why?
Because you’re making life difficult for your most loyal and vocal readers.
People subscribing to your RSS feed are reading everything you publish.
Everything. That is, if you don’t truncate your feed.
They’re also the people who are most likely to have blogs, which means they’re
the most likely to link to or embed your content in their site after reading it.
Do you really want to make life difficult for them?
Below is an example of a truncated feed from the Minneapolis StarTribune
newspaper for their Dining + Nightlife coverage. This is exactly the type of
content that local food bloggers love, since they can riff on the reviews and
recommendations made by the Minneapolis daily.
Luckily for Minneapolis food junkies, there are plenty of other non-truncated
RSS sources covering the local food scene, so this content - as good as it is -
can be passed over.
As I understand it, the mindset leading to RSS feed truncation is, “we get more
hits if we force people to click through.” And this is absolutely true . . . in
the short term. If I truncated Technology Evangelist’s feed today, I’d surely
see a spike in traffic from our feed tomorrow.
This mindset needs to change. Focusing on short term hits over longer term
benefits that come from links and embeds is a foolish move. If your online
content isn’t easily consumable, sharable, and conversational, it’s something
close to dead.
Backing up for a second, this all assumes that the content being created is
WORTH consuming, sharing, and talking about. If not, you have bigger problems
that need to be addressed.
Longer term, easily consumable content will generate more links to your site,
which will each generate click through visitors to the ads you’re trying to
serve.
Which will lead to more people hopping on your RSS feeds.
Which will lead to more people reading and sharing your content.
Which will lead to more links to your site.
Which will lead to higher search engine rankings.
Which will lead to more unique visitors stumbling upon your site to see your
ads.
And we’ll all live happily ever after.
Jules at floobergeist raises an interesting question about whether Facebook could lead to the end of class reunions.
If you’re continually in touch with your old classmates and up to date on their lives, what’s to be gained from a formal reunion?
Facebook: The End of Class Reunions?
Could the advancement of Facebook also result in the demise of the high school reunion? Is there a need to see your high school facebook friends in one place after 20 years? Will high school reunions simply become a dreary coffee date for the people of your graduation class who *aren’t* on facebook?
I’ve addressed this before from the perspective of his this will effect Classmates.com’s business, which has largely been built on the concept of enabling reunions.
Personally, I don’t think Facebook or sites like it will kill reunions. In fact, it could do just the opposite since they’ll be easier to organize and people will have more to talk about since they know more about each other through Facebook profiles than they may have known about each other when they shared classrooms.
To me, this is similar to local blogger meet-ups. People who’ve been tracking each other’s lives through their blogs generally have a lot to talk about since they know what their fellow bloggers have in common with them before them get together.
*Photo by Velo Steve under CC.
Howard Owns has a great post on
Eight
historical mistakes the newspaper industry made where he goes over
newspaper’s slow adoption of blogging, online communities, leveraging local
blogger’s talents, winning the car and real estate market, and becoming better
community resources with online calendars.
His comments on the early attempts at forming online communities raises an
interesting point about why newspapers may be behind in this game today:
It was a mistake to view content as something we do and audiences
read, take it or leave it. Fear kept newsrooms from allowing comments on stories
for years — fear of the “graffiti on the bathroom wall” effect. Newspapers tried
forums, found they quickly devolved into ghettos of banality, spam and hate, so
they shut them down. But forum failure wasn’t the fault of the community or the
software. It was the fault of management for its lack of
management.
Tech companies created online community solutions
relatively early, which allowed for integration of online communities. However,
the problem wasn’t as much the technology as the management of the technology
which led to issues.
This isn’t to say that it’s an EASY thing to do, but moderation is absolutely
key to creating a community that flourishes (online or off). Take a look at most
professional blogs and you’ll find lively professional discussions in the
comments rather than nasty insults, spam, or over the top self-promotion. That’s
because professionals understand the importance of building a strong community.
If you don’t, you’ll lose the best contributors since they won’t put up with the
crap.
For those who don’t want to invest in proper moderation of things like
discussion boards or comments, a compromise solution that works very well is
trackbacks. Rather than allowing people to contribute to your site’s articles
directly, give them credit for the comments they make about your articles on
their own blogs. The quality of comments goes up tremendously in this situation
since people are more accountable for their writing. Rather than leaving
drive-by snarky comments, they’re writing for their regular audience and for the
audience interested in the story on your news site (or blog).
Two popular bloggers who’ve taken this approach are
Seth Godin and
Marc Andreessen.
Both writers receive more viewers per article than all but the top newspapers in
the country, so comment moderation could be a chore to maintain. By switching to
trackbacks, they and their readers can follow their reader’s opinions on their
reader’s own blogs.
Are any newspapers doing this today? Very few, as far as I can tell. One of the
first to do so was the
Washington
Post, who uses
Technorati to track
who’s linking to their articles. For example,
this
article on YouTube and politics has 36 (now 37) links to it as of this
writing. So after reading the article, a reader could click out to 37
independent editorials related to this story.
This afternoon is turning out to be a rough one for Google. First, they reported less than expected earnings that sent the stock price dropping $40 as of this writing.
Then NetApplication’s monthly newsletter shipped with news that Yahoo has nipped away at some of Google’s market share:
Aliso Viejo, CA based Net Applications announces June 2007 world wide Search Engine Market Share results. Yahoo, for the second consecutive month, has regained search engine market share at the direct expense of Google.
Yahoo climbed back to 12.16% market share, and the last time they had that much share was back in September of 2006. But, at that time Yahoo was on the decline in market share. Google’s US search market share has dropped to 51.53%. Net Applications has not recorded two consecutive months of search engine market share losses for Google until now.
NetApplications takes things a bit far by speculating that Jerry Yang’s recent return to CEO status has Steve Jobs-like rebound familiarity. I doubt any changes Yang’s made during his short time in his new roll can be responsible for Yahoo’s very recent success, but it’s certainly a trend worth watching.
