Archive for the ‘Feeds’ Category
Feeds that go bump in the night March 30th, 2007
RSS feeds are a great way of staying in touch with conversations on one’s favourite blogs. I have been subscribing to many different feeds in Feedreader lately simply because I don’t have time to browse immediately, but often read a post or two whenever I get the chance. There is just one (slight) problem I have encountered… There seem to be an increasing number of sites with RSS url’s that look something like this:
This is a problem because Firefox does not recognise the url as a feed url at all (neither does Feedreader) and gives me an error message, as can be seen below, instead of automatically inserting the feed into my Feedreader.
The work around is to simply edit the url, deleting the “feed://” part, and inserting a semi-colon between the http’s p and the first forward slash (/) like so:
http:/
and then copy the new url into Feedreader. Note: You can also do the editing within Feedreader.
My question is however, why are some feeds represented like this in the first place?
At the WebPR+ conference Sally Falkow expounded on a variety of means one can draw on to make it easier for blog visitors to syndicate and access one’s content. This is certainly not one of them.
Case in point: even though I am comfortably net-savvy, when faced with this error the first few times I actually thought the feed was broken and immediately browsed away without the syndicated content. What will a first-time RSS user do?
I hope that there is a really simple solution and explanation for this phenomenon! Until then, some of the RSS feeds I want to subscribe to will continue to go *bump* in the night…
Posted in Feeds | Comments (1)
More RSS activity on del.icio.us March 22nd, 2007
Interesting tidbit the other day. According to the del.icio.us blog, there are more people accessing del.icio.us content through feeds than are visiting the site itself:
Did you know that well over half of the requests seen by del.icio.us are for RSS feeds? That means that people cruising around our site in browsers are actually in the minority, when it comes down to raw traffic. Instead, our heaviest hitters include personalized home pages, desktop news aggregators, and even stranger things.
I don’t think this is an isolated thing either. Imagine what this could mean for the local market in a couple years? What value will page views have then?
Tags: del.icio.us, rss, page views, feeds, aggregators
Posted in Feeds, Sharing | Comments (0)
Media Centre RSS Reader March 16th, 2007
Lifehacker has a post about a very cool service for Windows Media Centre users. The Media Centre RSS Reader is a plugin for Windows Media Centre which brings RSS to your TV screen. Wow! Now if that doesn’t do a lot to make feeds more accessible to Joe and Thembi at home then I don’t know what does.
The software will run on Windows Media Centre edition and Vista. There are some issues with the plugin though. It apparently strips out images so you are going to be left with text feeds. I am also not sure if it supports audio/video enclosures so podcasts may be out too.
If you are in the market for podcasts on your TV then perhaps you should consider the Apple TV?
Tags: windows centre rss reader, rss, feeds, windows, vista, apple tv
Posted in Devices, Feeds, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
RSS feeds in marketing March 14th, 2007
This is a repost from BizTips.co.za. I really found the report by Pheedo interesting. It indicates relative parity between summary and full feeds.
Interesting post on Read/Write Web about using RSS for Marketing. RSS feeds can be fantastic for getting the message out there. RSS feeds are not hit by spam filters, unlike email marketing efforts, so all of your content is going to be delivered to the recipient’s feed reader. Another important point is that people receiving your feed have chosen to receive it so you have a captive audience. If they don’t like what they are reading, well, they’ll simply unsubscribe from your feed. Either way, you can tell how many people are reading your content via your feed using freely available metrics sites like Feedburner. The challenge with feeds is user adoption. More and more sites offer feeds (everything from news sites to blogs to cooking sites, for example) and user adoption is growing but we are not quite at the point where feeds could replace email newsletters are the default distribution mechanism.
Feeds are fairly flexible and dynamic. You can add all sorts of content to them and publish a podcast through the same feed you may be using for normal text content. It is possible to create multiple feeds from one main feed using categories so you could publish a single site feed and then publish individual category feeds to enable users who want them to only subscribe to the specific content they want. For those people who prefer to receive emails, you could easily provide your feed by email using Feedburner or Feedblitz, for example. If you use a blog or other content management system (like Drupal or Joomla) you have a few options for the distribution of your content. You are already publishing your content on the site itself. The blogging software or CMS is publishing a feed based on your content (probablly a variety of feed options) and you can easily add feed-to-email distribution as well.
An interesting point was made on the Read/Write Web post about summary/truncated feeds and full feeds. A report by Pheedo published last year seems to indicate that in some instances summary feeds are more effective than full feeds and in others it works the other way around. One argument in favour of a summary feed is that an abridged feed forces readers to visit the source site and this protects the readership of the site itself (this is a bit like a trailer for a movie). An argument in favour of full feeds is that people should be able to access the content in their chosen medium and if users want to read your content in a feed then they should be entitled to do that. I am more in the full feed camp myself. If anything, reading a summary feed tends to put me off the site itself and I often visit the source post even with a full feed because I may want to blog about that post and would need link details for the post.
All in all, there is considerable merit in using feeds in your marketing initiatives. I do see feeds as being part of the overall picture and an increasingly important part of that picture.
Tags: rss, feeds, marketing, feedburner, feedblitz, pheedo, read/write web
Posted in Feeds, Tools | Comments (0)
Before you jump in March 1st, 2007
In some ways Web 2.0 is just like Web 1.0 in the late 1990s. There is plenty hype about what social media in particular, and new media generally, can help achieve and how everyone is using these new tools on their new sites. The problem with this is that this sort of hype led to a monumental bubble burst that led to a fairly dramatic downturn of the global IT industry. The reason much of the hype turned to vapour is because it was all about the technology and had very little in the way of a sound rationale for implementation of those emerging technologies. In other words, all the promises made about the newfangled Web thing were a load of bull.
Almost a decade after that crazy time we find ourselves with a far more developed version of the Web with improved infrastructure and capability. Ironically we now have the bandwidth to realise some of the dreams of the dotcom era and yet we have our own hype and range of promises about the current Big Thing. The question is whether we can back up those promises with something real and tangible for people and companies that want to get stuff done better and not get caught up in fancy pictures and promises of 1% of 1% of a gazillion visitors to their website. Is there is a good reason to set up a blog or a podcast or a wiki for a company? Answering these questions involves asking a couple of pretty sensible questions, namely why, what, when and how/who? There is really no point installing a blog because it is the dine thing, especially if you are not going to maintain it.
On this note, Christopher Carfi has a great post on The Social Customer titled "Prerequisites For Setting Up A Business-Driven Web 2.0 Effort" which asks these questions and suggests ways to constructively answer these questions to ensure that when you do set up a "business-driven Web 2.0 effort", that it makes sense and is more likely to be sustained by that business.
Tags: business-driven, web 2.0, social media, new media, rationale, adoption, case for adoption
Posted in Feeds, Podcasting, Sharing | Comments (0)
YouTube on your Nokia with the Nokia Video Center February 16th, 2007
Nokia recently announced its new Video Center application which enables Nokia Nseries mobile device users to view and subscribe to YouTube videos:
The new Nokia Video Center offers a comprehensive and user friendly mobile video RSS feed and video on demand consumption experience with an easy-to-use interface for discovering, viewing and storing one’s favorite content on the Nokia Nseries multimedia computer. It combines branded video RSS feed services, internet videos and sideloaded videos from the PC into one single place such as the Nokia N95 and the recently announced Nokia N93i.
"Our cooperation with YouTube paves the way for continued growth for internet based content distribution. Enabling people to have access to a wide range of videos on their connected multimedia computers offers great potential for this area," said Torsti Tenhunen, Director, Multimedia, Nokia. "Also, Nokia Video Center offers content producers and distributors a unique way to lead consumers directly to dynamic video services which can easily be produced and tailored for various interests."
Nokia Video Center will be available globally in the markets where Nokia Nseries devices are sold. It will first be preinstalled in the Nokia N95 device and thereafter in most of the new Nokia Nseries devices. Nokia Video Center will also be available as download version for selected compatible S60 devices.
The Nokia Video Center supports H.264 videos which is a format supported by your video iPod and this means there will be even more content formatted for the smaller screen. Add feed capability (apparently the Nokia Video Center will support the Media RSS format which Yahoo! is promoting) and you have a whole new audience that wasn’t there before in the mobile space.
Nokia is really making serious headway in this space with their deals with Six Apart and now with Google/YouTube. The Nseries devices are high end devices with cameras with up to 5 megapixels and almost DVD quality video. Combine that with high speed data access and you have not just the ability to stream video over mobile networks (something that analysts have been predicting year after year since 3G networks started rolling out a few years ago) but also to further develop the citizen media movement by adding high quality video and image content.
(Source: Niall Kennedy)
Tags: nokia video center, nseries, n95, n93i, mobile device, youtube, media rss
Posted in Devices, Feeds | Comments (0)
Why I publish full feeds? January 11th, 2007
I was asked why I publish full feeds whereas some people only publish truncated feeds. It is a good question and one which has been debated for quite some time. I originally dealt with a related question on one of my other blogs, Wired Gecko, almost two years ago. At the time I published truncated posts on the front page of my blog and a few readers expressed their dissatisfaction with the truncated posts. I took a brief poll and my readers indicated they wanted the full posts and that is what I started publishing.
Since then I have also come across a few arguments for and against publishing full feeds. I have published full feeds for as long as I can remember and one of the main reasons is that if you are going to subscribe to my feed it is because you probably prefer to get your content fix in your feedreader rather than having to visit each blog on your list to catch up. Publishing partial feeds would force you to visit my blog to read the rest of the post and that probably isn’t what you want to so. So while I may benefit from increased traffic to my blog if the partial feed forces you to visit the blog, I also run the risk that you will unsubscribe rather than be forced to consume my content in a way that doesn’t suit you.
Robert Scoble took issue with advocates of partial feeds about a year ago. One of the reasons to publish partial feeds is to push people to visit the blog and expose them to the ads you may have on your blog and make that much more money. Scoble disagreed with this line of reasoning, pretty much on the basis that it is a very limited take on partial feeds. His argument is to publish full feeds, not so much for the benefit of subscribers who prefer them but rather because other bloggers who may have access to far greater audiences who respect their opinions may prefer to subscribe to full feeds and who may just point their readers to your blog if they find something of interest in your posts. What they won’t do is go and visit every post on your blog, there is far too much content out there to do that for every blog. I find that I work in pretty much the same way now. I subscribe to more feeds than I can consume in a day so I wind up skimming through posts looking for posts with something of interest to you, my readers. When I find those nuggets I will visit the blog post itself and either publish a post of my own about that post or at least add the post to del.icio.us (a daily link roll consisting of my del.icio.us bookmarks is published to one of my most popular blogs each day).
Darren Rowse, the ProBlogger, took a look at this issue in February last year (around the time of Scoble’s post) and came up with arguments for and against both partial and full feeds. One of the distinctions between Rowse’s approach and Scoble’s is that Rowse preferred to subscribe to partial posts himself and Scoble preferred to subscribe to full feeds. One of the benefits of partial feeds is that they force readers to your site if they want to read the full post and that exposes them to your ads and other means of generating some form of revenue from your blog. Notwithstanding what I said above about this rationale, you may find that your readers are happy to visit your blog to read the full post and to support you by supporting your sponsors.
Interestingly, Rowse posted an announcement in April 2006 that he was going to start publishing full feeds, largely in response to a poll he conducted to determine what his readers’ preference was. He has continued publishing a full feed for his ProBlogger blog pretty much since then.
For me, it comes down to how I would like to consume that content. I prefer full feeds and full posts so I can read the posts in one go and have the option of clicking on the links to get to the original post. That being said, I subscribe to a few partial feeds and the only issue I have with those partial feeds is that they are not as informative as full feeds and I sometimes skip over partial feeds a little quicker than full feeds and potentially miss some really good content in the process. That is not a desirable result at all.
Here, at least, are a few ideas. I’d love to know what you think so leave a comment or two. You are welcome to contact me as well to discuss the whole thing further.
Tags: full feeds, partial feeds, problogger, scoble, darren rowse, pros and cons
Posted in Feeds | Comments (2)
Google Reader adds statistics January 5th, 2007
I have been using Google Reader pretty much since it was upgraded and love it. This morning I noticed that the Google Reader team had added a new feature which enables you to track your reading habits with cool tables and graphs with pretty pictures.
The new statistics tell you how much of each feed you read how often you read them. It is a pretty useful tool for determining which feeds to spend more time on or perhaps which feeds to remove from your list if you find you are not getting to everything. In a way, this new service integrates elements of Google Trends into Google Reader to give you a lot more information about the content you digest every day.
(Source: Micro Persuasion)
Posted in Applications, Feeds | Comments (0)
More about RSS January 1st, 2007
Reuters has published a pretty useful introduction to feeds. The information isn’t really groundbreaking but the fact that it is in mainstream media (this article was published on Yahoo! News) means that we should start seeing feeds more widely used in the coming months and more non-techie people becoming aware of them and even using them.
There is a debate on the Micro Persuasion blog about the statistic quoted in the Reuters article that only about 2% of online users use feeds and half of those users are 40 years of age and younger. One commentator on Micro Persuasion made the following point:
Those stats are false. You can say that only 2% of users know they are using RSS. But anybody with a MySpace blog (or any blog) or that uses Google Blog Search (or similar), is in fact using RSS, but they just don’t know it.
This may be true. How many people use services like My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google’s Personalised Home Page and simply add modules without giving much thought to the fact that those modules involve the use of feeds to provide that content. The Reuters article suggests that the survey was conducted on people who actually use the feed buttons on blogs. I’d love to know whether the survey incorporated services that I mentioned above. Charlene Li of Forrester Research conducted the research. I’ll see if I can find out more about the survey.
(Source: Micro Persuasion)
Tags: feeds, user adoption, micro persuasion, charlene li, forrester research
Posted in Feeds | Comments (1)
Import your posts into Vox December 20th, 2006
I came across a post by the Vox Team announcing a series of new releases on the Vox platform. One of these releases is a facility to import content from other blogging platforms into Vox. I took a look at the help file on importing posts and found that while Vox supports the Blogger and TypePad Atom APIs, other blog posts will be imported using that blog’s Atom feed:
You can import from any blog that has an Atom feed. The number of posts and the amount of content shown in each post will depend on what the Atom feed provides, so if the Atom feed contains excerpts of the 10 most recent posts, then that’s the information that can be imported. We have additional Atom API support for TypePad and Blogger blogs, which is why you need to provide the sign-in information when you’re importing from those services. When importing from TypePad and Blogger, you can choose from your 25 most recent posts.
We are looking into providing Atom API support for other blogging services in the future. Also, we anticipate the ability to import more posts and older posts from your other blogs.
This is great news for people who would like to migrate their blogs to Vox (which I maintain is one of the best personal blogging platforms around).
Tags: vox, import posts, blogger, typepad, atom, feeds
Posted in Blogging, Feeds | Comments (0)