Category: Internet

Well, that was interesting

I didn’t mean to stir up the shit today, but it looks like that’s what I managed to do. Among other things, I got some very rational observations in my comments on the piece about the Echo project that made me think twice about the whole issue, namely that this could be a way to avoid the whole RSS 0.9x vs. 1.0 vs. 2.0 battle for good (which would be great) and that Echo is aimed at building a full blown, honest to God standard, which would make RSS an easier sell in more conservative vertical markets like banks (see Tim Bray for a remarkably well written scenario that illustrates the problem). Thanks to Matt Haughey for the pointer, and for the reference to Evan’s post about the Blogger API vs. the MetaWeblog API which (in between some fingerpointing), Evan illustrates a serious technical concern about MetaWeblog, namely the lack of support for appkeys.

Then Dave rewrote his original pointer to my piece to quote a long snippet of it and posted a qualified endorsement of the Echo project, saying that if and when the format reaches closure, he will recommend that UserLand support it and RSS 2.0.

Today felt like a therapy session for me. I posted something that went against the groupthink that was starting to form around Echo, Dave linked to it and got the concerns out in the air, and then there was some forward movement. Amazing. This actually, despite some of the peripheral mudslinging that’s been happening, speaks quite well about how everyone in the community is going through this process.

Is the air cleared? Good, then here’s the takeaway from what I wrote today:

  1. There are sufficient technical and business concerns with the way RSS and the MetaWeblog API work today that Echo isn’t just about rebuilding things for the sake of doing it.
  2. Users and institutions who have already embraced the existing paradigms will continue, like me, to freak out about this. There better be a pretty good marketing guy associated with Echo to work will the existing adopters.

Fair enough?

A hamhock in your blog

Ah, it’s too nice a day to be pissed off. I will note, however, as long as I’m stepping in things, that I think the word “funky” is being misapplied to RSS 2.0 feeds with extra items; but for different reasons than Don Park does.

Fundamentally, funk is about booty, not XML. (Yes, I said booty. Loose booty! More Loose Booty!) What is funk? Funk is, like soul, a hamhock in your cornflakes. Funk is not domestically produced! Would you trade your funk for what’s behind the third door???

I think everyone needs to adopt this motto from Funkadelic:

For nothing is good unless you play with it. And all that is good, is nasty!

And remember, heads I win, tails you lose.

A civilian in the format wars

Brent yesterday declared his neutrality in the brewing revolution called the Echo Project which is working to displace RSS and the Meta-Weblog API (among others) as the blogging wire formats of choice. Good call, Brent. As a civilian observer and consumer of these formats, I’m going to have to go a little further. This is one of the stupider things I’ve ever seen, from a technology AND business strategy perspective.

Is there anything wrong with the technology that we have right now? No. Meta-Weblog works, though it needs wider implementation, as an API to allow multiple tools to work with multiple different kinds of blogs. RSS works, and if it doesn’t do what you need it to do you can expand it with namespaces. I understand the frustration of underspecified formats, but let’s get it straight: every groundbreaking 1.0 project is underspecified. And adoption happens anyway.

Furthermore, this couldn’t come at a worse time. Blogs are finally getting respect. RSS is gaining widespread adoption by BigCo publishers like the New York Times, the BBC, and Microsoft (I can’t imagine that MSDN’s RSS feeds will be the last, and more importantly both programmers and execs are blogging). The market has converged on a standard, and now it’s not about tech any more. It’s about implementation.

But all this is happening because RSS is essentially baked. If you re-open the debate with a project like Echo, you’re sending a strong signal that RSS isn’t ready for prime time—either the technology, or the community around it. And, more importantly, you’re also granting license to other people to do the same thing. One of the beautiful things about RSS is that it can be adopted without question, largely because it just works. What’s to stop some smart guy in a large software company from saying, “there’s no consensus out there, so I’m just going to build my own format.” And if the software company is large enough, lock in happens around that format instead and we’re right back where we started.

Update: Adam Curry and Don Park on the topic.

Update #2: Dave accuses me of eloquence and sums it up in a phrase: “anyone who uses weblogs and aggregators should be angry as hell when developers try to rip up the pavement, break everything and start over.”

Safari 1.0

I still have a few problems with Safari, including the fact that it doesn’t appear to support font-variant: small-caps; as a result my date headers appear in lowercase. But I bit the bullet and redid my CSS so I wouldn’t fall prey to the problem that was hitting me with a div nested inside my H3 tags, so most of my page now displays correctly.

For the record, I just appended the border effect I was using in my “grabber” div to the H3 style definition. It means I have to update multiple places in my style sheet if I decide to get rid of the blue bar effect, but it seems a small evil to put up with.

The best I ever did was freeze a banana

Found on Blogdex: In this month’s Popular Science, Theodore Gray (of Mathematica fame) gives the recipe for liquid nitrogen ice cream. Damn. Wish I had thought of that when I was freezing bananas in the lab after hours to amuse and impress friends. (Disclaimer: I only did that once, and it was a bitch to clean up. Fellow smart-ass physics undergrads, you’ll try it once and then curse me out.)

Measuring blogs, part IV: Pageviews and RSS

A follow up to my thoughts about the acceptability of inserting arbitrary markup into RSS feeds to measure usage. Some RSS “readers” just display headlines (such as the Radio and Manila RSS Box), meaning that the tracking code would have to be in the title element of the RSS to measure exposure successfully.

But Mark Pilgrim’s experiment last week has awakened the authoring community to the danger of arbitrary markup in RSS, and it appears the community has quickly decided that titles aren’t for markup.

Why did we go down this thought road in the first place? So we could track page views of RSS content. Why? To get clickthroughs (total clicks divided by total pageviews, for each RSS exposure). But we can’t get clickthroughs that way.

How about this: the most effective way to measure RSS usage is to put a tracking URL in your RSS feed, one that’s distinct from the one you expose through your navigation. This should be trivial with a good content management system (which all blogging engines are), and you needn’t even make the tracking URL hop through a redirect. On the landing page you can count unique users and all that fun stuff, and if the RSS link has been posted to other pages for discussion and people click through there you’ll be able to track the spread by watching referrers.

It can’t be that bad a system—after all CNet uses it. All links in their feeds include the parameters “part=rss&tag=feed,” and some even are directed to a special host, rss.com.com (oddly, the home page for this redirects to download.com).

In short, we don’t get reach and we don’t get clickthrough rates. But we get something that can empirically measure the effectiveness of RSS against other content promotion technologies.

Keiretsu update, with news on the side

A quick sweep of the blogosphere and a ton of interesting stuff this morning:

  • Matt Kirschenbaum (a fellow Hooblogger) writes about the convergence of anti-spam technologies and the humanities in a pointer to an email list discussion article by the editor of the venerable Humanist Discussion Group.
  • Jenny the Shifted Librarian points to the approval of the CD antitrust deal, indicating that I’ll be getting my check soon for $12.63 (not the $20 max). Which will pay for a month of eMusic, with enough left over for an Americano…
  • Esta writes about the family reunion picnic this past weekend. Best line: “…my DNA realigns to become ‘Dutch Hillbilly’ rather than the usual ‘Hillbilly Dutch.’” Um, shouldn’t that be Hillbilly Deutsch? Second best line: “A dinner party on Saturday with my parents, aunt, two first-cousins-once-removed, a first-cousin-once-removed-in-law, and most of the over-40 gay population of Lancaster County. And no air conditioning. We were stuck together like highly conversant and well-fed things that stick together.”
  • Greg did a rib feast for Father’s Day that sounds like it was even more lip-smackin’ than our grilled chicken. And in another post comes up with one of the great one-liners of the Bush presidency: “Bush gives more lip service than a cosmetician.”
  • In local news, in a story about Medicaid the King County Journal points out that the clinic that has my current primary care physician decided not to accept any more new Medicaid or Medicare patients. Actually, I should say had my current PCP. That little revelation is the last straw and I’m officially changing as of today.
  • My mother in law is moving her mail out of Netscape 6. The Mac Classic versions of Outlook Express and Entourage don’t appear to support importing mail from Netscape 6. Suggestions?
  • Rand Beers, former National Security Committee member and presidential antiterrorism advisor to George W., resigned his post over concerns that the Bush Administration’s antiterrorism policies were making America less secure. And now he’s working for John Kerry’s
    campaign    . Why? “The way he wants to make a difference in the world is to get his former boss out of office.” The article is amazing, quoting a series of interviews with Beers in a list of critiques of the administrations fumbles on terror—the administration is “not into teamwork” in a war on terror that requires it; the Iraq war shortchanged domestic priorities including security, ran the risk of breaking our alliances, and could breed more al-Qaeda recruits; Afghanistan was begun, then abandoned leaving it an unstable mess—that sound like they could have come straight from the Green[e]house.

  • People continue to speculate about new product announcements at next week’s MacWorld. Since Steve Jobs isn’t giving the keynote, I’d rate any significant product announcements about as likely as the Justice Department embracing FOIA.

Measuring blogs, part 3: Tracking RSS the old fashioned way?

A reader emailed after my post last week about measuring RSS to ask “Why not slip a 1 pixel ‘webbug’ into the RSS feed?” Good question.

Advantages of web bug graphics:

  • Unobtrusive in the RSS reader’s pane.
  • A direct hit to your server, allows you to play games like feed views and unique users. Note I didn’t say page views or content views; more on that in a second.

That’s about it, really.

Disadvantages? Plentiful:

  • No referrer, no specific content tracking. RSS readers generally send “no referrer” per the HTTP standard rather than try to make up a referring URL (though some, like Radio Userland, refer back to a host page for their services). So you can’t track which content piece the reader was coming from.
  • Doesn’t always get forwarded. RSS items generally contain minimal markup, so an extra image tag inserted is sure to be noticed and removed by most bloggers. Why is this important? We care about the total reach that our content gets, on other peoples’ sites as well as our own. At minimum you won’t be able to count any references that your content gets on tech-savvy bloggers’ sites.

Plus, of course, any tracking system that relies on client side code can be exposed—and risks your readers’ alienation. And, as we’ve discussed before, alienating your blogging readers can be a sure way to invite shunning—and shrink your reach, but good. Kind of the opposite of what you’re trying to do in the first place.

And, by the way, this goes double for any more complicated embedded Javascripts or other solutions.

But what about embedding meaningful images, each with a unique name (perhaps associated with your article’s GUID), in each article? Kinda suggests that the photobloggers are the people most likely to get real tracking of how their content is read.

Of course, they’re also the most likely to get it stolen, renamed, and rehosted on someone else’s site.

This is starting to feel like the three laws of thermodynamics, which I propose we recast as the three laws of measuring RSS:

  1. You can’t win.
  2. You can’t break even.
  3. But you don’t want to get out of the game. Not if weblogs are worth one one-hundredth of the hype that they’ve received. (And I think they’re underhyped. Weblogs at Harvard? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.)

Technorati doubleheader

First: The creator of Technorati, Dave Sifry, commented on my note about bloggers and journalism last week. He notes:

…if people stop linking to you, your Technorati ranking will drop – and if a blog is removed from a blogroll, the ranking will drop faster. I’ve also been talking with folks like Kevin Marks about his Vote Links initiative, which would place an extra attribute in a link tag to show whether you are approving of the link, neutral, or negative, which can then be used to make further judgements about things like notoriety.

Which puts a little more muscle behind “shunning.” And makes the subtle social dynamics of the blog world replicate middle school just a little more. I’m almost kidding—I think “vote links” is a fricking brilliant idea and long overdue. Just… wow.

Anyway, onto the second point: Doc points to the newest feature at Technorati: blog keyword search. Beating Google to the punch, over 360,000 blogs indexed and ready—plus an API.

The search is pretty cool, though I wonder if indexing by the Technorati ranking of the parent site alone is the right thing to do. After all, someone may only have three inbound links but be the total authority on some obscure search term.

Phone update

So a little quick update on my phone drama: I splurged a little over the weekend and got a Nokia 3650. This is the phone that’s been in a few carriers’ commercials—the one with the built in camera on the back. So I wanted to figure out how to get some of the more advanced features enabled, and I tried to sync the phone up to my PC via infrared.

Nothing. I never got the phone to connect—every time I tried, the software on the PC reported a failure in the sync layer. And now I can’t send emails from the phone, which worked fine before.

I think there’s a law of increasing complexity in cell phone technology, and I think I just crossed over the line between usable and crazy with this new phone. Of course, I can always try putting a Bluetooth adapter on my computer and seeing whether that works any better’adding another layer of complexity.

Realistically it will be a while before I can blog or send photos from this thing…

Measuring blogs, part 1

I was doing some thinking about measuring blog usage today—not how many blogs there are, but how far blog content reaches. Such measurement isn’t a priority for most blog publishers, but what about traditional media companies that have to decide whether to make the RSS plunge as a business investment? So I came up with a few observations:

  1. Reach is a traditional media measurement that calculates how much of the potential viewership (I would use the word “audience,” but we all know that’s a screwed up metaphor for online activity) can see a particular piece of content. This is a hard measure to get, since the content is exposed not only on one’s website but in an XML file that can be exposed in lots of different readers, and when the headline can be posted on lots of different sites. Other traditional media metrics based on exposure, including unique users and cost per impression, also go right out the window.
  2. Likewise, coming to a decent clickthrough measurement is difficult, since clickthrough is defined as clicks per people that viewed the link (see above).

So what does that leave us with? What about treating RSS like newsletters? Subscriber count is hard to gather since there’s no “formal” subscriber process to get an RSS file. Likewise download count for the RSS file: while the latter is feasible, platforms like Manila don’t render a static XML file that can be tracked in a traditional web hit log, and counters like SiteMeter only track files that can embed their counting code (which leaves out RSS). And it’s hardly a meaningful or reliable measure of exposure without unique users, or knowing whether the downloaded file actually contains new content.

So what’s a media company to do? Other than take it on faith, I mean. Maybe starting with Technorati? Or Google’s PageRank?

Too many questions, not enough good answers.

Are bloggers reporters?

A funny confluence of news stories this morning:

On first glance, these two items don’t seem to have a lot to do with each other. But as Dave points out, there’s a thin line between the two stories: “an intelligent person with a weblog is a reporter.” Salam Pax proves that, at least.

But do we really want to be “treated” like reporters?

This is the critical thing. The fuss at the Times led to the resignation of its senior editors for one reason—reputation. The Times had earned a reputation for integrity and thoughtful, substantive reporting that it couldn’t afford to lose. There were consequences for their actions. In general, there is a higher standard of behavior expected from the media and a higher level of formality when dealing with the media, not just because they report things, but because people believe what they say and act on that belief, sometimes with serious consequences.

So if weblog authors want to be taken seriously as journalists, they have to be prepared to live up to a higher standard of behavior—and admit when they screw up. The only problem is, the tools we have for weblog “reputation”—PageRank and Technorati—don’t take those screwups into account. Or do they? If you stop getting pointed to by people, pretty soon that will be apparent through Technorati. Google seems to have a longer decay time, on the other hand. My old weblog site (same content as the new one, different home) has fallen one point of PageRank from its high water mark of 6, although the blog hasn’t been updated since November 21, 2002. But maybe not getting pointed to by other bloggers is bad enough—like a “shunning,” only online.

More on this later…