If the bread slicer was a recent invention, I imagine a conversation like this would take place somewhere in the world:
Guy #1: “Dude, you have to try sliced bread.”
Guy #2: “Why would I need that? I can slice my own bread, thanks.”
Guy #1: “Dude, you just have to try it. It’s so much easier and gets you to sandwich status so much quicker.”
Guy #2: “Man, how long does it really take to slice bread? You can’t be serious.”
Guy #1: “Forget that I ever brought this up.”
And so goes RSS evangelism in 2008 where, according to Forrester Research (via MicroPersuasion), of the 89% of people who don’t use RSS feeds already, on 17% are interested in using them.
Polling people on their interest in trying something they don’t understand will certainly generate some odd responses.
Of course, many of these people are already using similar technologies such as Tivo where they can subscribe to shows that interest them. Had the same respondents been asked, “would you like to have a ‘Tivo for the web’ that lets you easily subscribe to the latest content from your favorite sites?” I think you may have seen a more enthusiastic response.
Don’t try this at home.
I bumped up my Google Reader subscriptions last night from around 350 to 7570 for a work project. Fortunately, the blogs are very low volume so the increase in blog consumption wouldn’t be that significant.
However, it turns out that Google Reader had some problems with this:
Or, more specifically, Firefox or Safari would both time out before opening my subscriptions.
Luckily, Google offers a subscription management page under the Settings tab so I was able to filter for, and unsubscribe from, the newly added large batch.
Now I’m looking for other ideas on how to make this work. I tried using Yahoo Pipes to generate a single RSS feed from a 7000+ feed OPML file but ran into time-out issues with that as well.
Do you have any ideas worth trying? I’m sure Google Reader can handle the post volume - just not the individual feed volume - so how can I generate an aggregate feed of a large OPML file?
I’m no prude, but the idea of speaking at a seminar about RSS only to have a post about Silicon Valley escort services pop up in my Google Reader doesn’t turn me on.
For that reason, I whipped together a filter for Valleywag that filters out the posts from their new sex columnist, Melissa Gira Grant. No offense, but like escorts, there’s a time and a place for this sort of thing.
This filter will give you all of Valleywag’s full-post feeds with the exception of posts from Ms. Grant.
And I threw in a bonus filter for sponsored posts. You probably see as little value in those as I do, so you can knock those out by filtering for the word, “Sponsored.” If you DO like sponsored posts, just knock out the value in the first text field.
Resubscribe to the site using the feed generated at the above link and you’ll be all set.
As much as I HATE truncated RSS feeds, there are a few blogs with content that’s SO exceptional that I’m almost willing to put up with truncation.
For those of you who don’t know what the heck that first sentence means: when reading blogs and news sites through RSS readers like Google Reader, you’ll generally have access to full stories (title and story content) but sometimes you’ll only get the title (or a title with a short snippet from the story). Once you get used to reading full stories within an RSS reader, it becomes PAINFUL to have to click out to read stories from publishers who choose to restrict (truncate) their feeds.
In general, this is done to increase page views. As I’ve explained before, this is a risky proposition since you’re pissing off your most loyal readers.
Back to purgatory:
I’ve come to the realization that some sites are worth reading even if they’re truncated. Here’s a screenshot from my Google Reader account that shows how I’ve dealt with this situation:
Notice the folder called “Truncated.” That’s where I store feeds that publish less than a full feed. It’s the last folder I view in my reader. I grabbed this screenshot at the start of the day where I had 208 new items to read. In this case, I would read 189 stories before considering hitting the Truncated folder. But that’s assuming that no new stories come in throughout the day. In many cases, I just mark the Truncated folder as read without review, or quickly scan through the headlines without clicking out.
I’ve noticed a spike in hits to our RSS feed from a site called Cullect.com and decided to do some investigating.
Here’s a shot of the site’s “Welcome” page:
That raises a question for me: if the site is pulling our RSS feed without explanation, am I supposed to be there or not? What uses should be disclosed?
A check of the domain’s Whois shows that Garrick Van Buren is behind this project.
Cullect also has a Twitter profile with the following bio: “Minimizing Feed Aggrevation.” Links from Cullect’s Twitter Profile seem to discuss an RSS reading application Garrick’s building called FeedSeeder.
A little more digging - in this case, checking Google’s cache for pages from before they password protected the site - found this:
To me, this looks like a community based RSS reader where you’ll be able to read RSS feeds that are recommended to you by your friends. I could be wrong, but that’s what it looks like to me. The idea being that you’ll find better content to read by tapping into the shared knowledge of like minded colleagues.
Time will tell.
FeedBurner stats across the web took a nose dive today. For example, this site dropped from around 2700 to 1665 subscribers overnight.
Zoli Erdos did some digging and got to the bottom of it. For some reason, subscriber counts from Google powered RSS readers, including Google Reader and iGoogle, weren’t counted overnight. One would think that Google - who now owns FeedBurner - would count their own stats, right? Well, usually.
FeedBurner is Out of Flame Today
If your see your FeedBurner subscriber count cut in half today, don’t panic, it does not means your readers “fired” you. It simply means that Google’s Feedfetcher is not reported in the total count today.
What this does show is just how big Google Reader has become in two short years. Almost 40% of the subscribers to Technology Evangelist are now using Google Reader.
Reggie Nicolay at Technology for Real Estate has an interesting post title about how Yahoo Pipes could be used to refine real estate search. The post itself does more to explain Yahoo Pipes than how it could be applied to real estate, so I’ll try to build upon the concept here.
A quick refresher on Yahoo Pipes: This is a service from Yahoo that makes it relatively easy to filter content from RSS feeds, combine content from multiple feeds into a new feeds, and many other interesting things that allow you to process information in fresh new and exciting ways. Examples include filtering a group blog’s RSS feed for posts by a specific author, combining a Netflix Feed with an Amazon Affiliate program to create recommendations with affiliate sales, or filter out posts from an author on topics that don’t interest you.
How could this be applied to real estate?
First, few real estate sites have RSS feeds today, to this is an explanation of how to make a technology that doesn’t yet exist in real estate better. Strange as that may sound, the technology itself isn’t new any more. It’s just that real estate is a bit behind when it comes to syndicating content on the web.
Now, imagine you run a search on your favorite real estate site. You’ll probably drill down to an area that interests you using either a map or a zip code query. Perhaps a neighborhood search if you know the names of neighborhoods in the area you’re searching. At that point, you may save that search and subscribe to an RSS feed so you can receive the most recent matching results in your favorite RSS reader.
The problem: You’ll probably receive some false positive results. While you can easily select appropriate specs for things like beds, bath, and price range, it’s tougher to nail down the geography on sites on the market today. For example, I’ve been searching for a home in a narrow North/South area of Minneapolis along the Mississippi River. No site makes it easy for me to select a narrow strip 3-4 blocks wide so I end up with receiving false positive results from properties East or West of my self-defined target area.
Yahoo Pipes to the Rescue
Yahoo Pipes could help clean things up by allowing me to filter out terms that are generating false positives. For example, I could filter out the street names outside of my area. And in my case, I’m interested in living on the Minneapolis side of the river, so I could filter out listings where the city equals “St. Paul.”
Now, I’ll receive new results less often, but when I do they’ll be more relevant to me. Signal to noise ratio improved. Higher satisfaction.
Over time, real estate sites will figure out how to provide more control over search criteria. But for now, Yahoo Pipes is a great way to fine tune your real estate RSS feeds.
While many bloggers, including Technology Evangelist, publish their RSS feed subscribers on their blog, not all do. So that made Sunday’s news about Google publishing subscriber counts within their network particularly interesting.
While this doesn’t represent the total subscribers to a feed by any means, a few spot checks I conducted showed Google’s subscriber count representing 1/5-1/3 of a site’s total subscribers. However, as Matt Cutts points out, it’s important to make sure you’re counting the subscribers to each feed when checking sites that have split feed distributions (RSS & Atom, for example).
How do you check subscriber counts on Google Reader?
Browse over to the directory page within Reader and search for a site that interests you. The resulting page will include the subscriber count.
I’m looking for some help understanding the benefits of both RSS and Atom from a blog publishing perspective.
From what I can tell, there is little difference between the two syndication formats when it comes to syndicating text or text with images. And most blogging platforms generate feeds in both popular formats, so any compatibility issues at the reader level can largely be overcome by picking the most compatible feed for the reader. This also is hardly an issue with popular RSS readers.
But what if you were in a position where you were forced to choose between the two formats? Or, if you had time to build one format with plans to come back and support the other format at a later date. Who would win out in that decision?
As far as I can tell, the answer would be RSS 2.0 today since it appears to offer more flexibility for publishers for things like podcasting.
While Atom appears to offer a lot of capabilities unrelated to publishing a feed for syndication, from a blog publisher’s perspective, I don’t see the benefits.
Educate me.
Should social networking sites make it easy to import updates from other social networking sites? Yes and no.
On the Yes side, it makes it easy to consolidate one’s social network updates from your blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, etc.
On the No side, it causes serious redundancy issues for online friends who happen to follow you on more than one service.
For example, I have a friend who’s a blogger, Facebook, and Twitter user.
He’s integrated the blog-to-Twitter plugin for Wordpress, so every time he posts a new post to his blog, I get a Twitter update about his latest blog entry. The tweet shows the post title, which is generally underdescriptive, along with a TinyURL I can click to see wha his 3-4 word Tweet is all about.
I’m already subscribed to his blog in Google Reader, so Twitters about new blog posts are redundant. Yet there is no way to turn off the blog-to-Twitter tweets without unfollowing him on Twitter.
In this case, I unfriended him on Twitter since he was putting out much better quality content on his blog and the majority of his tweets were reblogs.
I’m also friends with ths guy on Facebook, and guess what? He’s syndicating his Twitter posts into Facebook as well, so my Facebook news feed gets hit with his Twitters, which means it gets hit with links from his blog posts which hit his Twitter account, which end up in Facebook.
Worst case scenario:
1. He publishes a blog post
2. Causing my phone to vibe with a new Twitter message pointing to a URL.
3. I click that URL, sending me to his blog.
4. Within the hour, I get a new link in Google Reader telling me about the same blog post.
5. I then get another new new item in Google Reader from Twitter of recent Twitter posts that’s redundant to #2. I realize this one is redundant but I don’t want all of my Twitter friends coming to my phone but will take them in Google Reader.
6. I then log into Facebook to find the same Twitter message I saw back in #2 in yet another location.
7. He could also syndicate his blog into Facebook so I could see the same post yet again.
There are four solutions to this that I can think of:
1. Social networking sites and RSS reader applications could all get together and work out a solution where all but the site where an item is read first would pull the duplicate message.
2. People should stop publishing their content in a redundant manner.
3. Use Yahoo Pipes to filter out redundant content from friends.
4. Use a yet to be created Firefox Greasemonkey script to block redundant updates in Twitter or Facebook.
I’ve realized that I’ve been guilty of this too by using the Twitter application in Facebook. I removed it after coming to the realization that my Facebook friends are already following me on Twitter for the most part, so I’m creating redundant content for most of my friends.
Steve Rubel from Micropersuasion has been looking at this issue lately and described the aggregation as “lifecasting.” I think his definition of that term would be something along the lines of a aggregated look at all of the content a person generates online. If someone wants to hear every nugget from Rubel from a short Twitter through a well thought out blog post, you can follow him at www.steverubel.com. This may work well for many Rubel fans since his content tends to revolve around work with a little sports thrown in.
For people who publish to the web on a larger variety of topics, I think Rubel’s version of lifecasting will fall short. For example, I may write about technology here, things that interest me from politics to Britney Spears on my personal blog, about shoes hanging from powerlines on another blog, and about hamburgers with cheese on the inside on another blog. Consolidating all of this into a lifecast would please no one since the topics are too diverse to be of interest to anyone but me.
However, it’s possible Yahoo Pipes could come to the rescue by making it possible to filter web user’s lifecasts down to the content that interests them, or by filtering out the stuff that doesn’t.
Would this post have made any sense a year ago?
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