Category: Internet

Reliable data about RSS usage?

Dave and a bunch of folks have been fighting out the question of how to take the next step forward for RSS. This is an important fight, but I have a different question: how big is the RSS market?

Dave has a good idea about the market for producers and consumers of RSS feeds from a tools perspective. But how many websites are out there actually producing RSS feeds? How do they break down by number of unique users–how many 1000 pound sites like the BBC produce RSS to increase their reach? Same questions apply for other syndication formats, too–like the New York Times’ custom headlines format.

Another question: Are websites that have to make a choice to adopt the technology (i.e. RSS syndication doesn’t come from their backend software for free, as it does in Manila, Radio, or Movable Type) doing so to extend the number of people who read their content–simply to grow traffic? Or do they find value in the contributions of people who consume their RSS feeds and comment on them?

Days like this, I wish I were totally self directed and could spin the cycles on figuring this out. But I’m hoping someone out there whose business is in RSS has actually done this. What does the market for RSS generation look like? I’ll be blogging a bit about this for a few days.
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Meetup

Looks like I might actually stir out of my house and make it to the monthly Weblogger Meetup in Seattle. (OK, the fact that Lisa is out of town has a little to do with it; I always feel guilty not spending evenings with her given that she has to be up before 5 every morning.)

I’m trying to talk Brent into going. He says maybe (if he can get his VCR working). Let’s make this a tech blog meeting. If we can get Flangy to show up tomorrow I’ll know we’ve succeeded.
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“The dinosaurs didn’t believe in you either”

Okay, the series of billboards signed “God” aren’t as bad as most of the explicitly religious signs you see on the back roads of America (digression: in my home town of Newport News, Virginia, there was a realtor, Paul Lotz, who had a big neon sign with his name on it; below it he had a sign that regularly said things like “I believe Rapture in early 80s.” Driving by it I used to ask my parents, “What does that mean?” When I was old enough to understand it, and it was the late ’80s, I would say snarky things like “I see Paul Lotz is now saying ‘Rapture will come soon.’ Guess he figured out God isn’t on his calendar.”). But things like “Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game. -God” don’t go quite far enough for some people.

Check out saysGod.com for such insights as “I’m flattered you liked my book so much. Now why don’t you read something new?”, “Just look at this planet! Do you expect me to clean this up?”, “If you seek to know my ways, read a damn science book,” and my favorite, “I never said, “Thou shalt not think.” I hope to see these on billboards soon too.
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A shot across my bow

Brent Simmons, author of the very good NetNewsWire news aggregator software, showed a screenshot of a weblog posting tool today that he’s playing with. It’s Cocoa, it is compatible with the Metaweblog and Blogger APIs, and it remembers your past posts. Plus it will be supported by NetNewsWire…

I have a funny feeling that this as yet unnamed tool will quickly smoke Manila Envelope, and for good reason: ME is my hobby, and software development is Brent’s day job.
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Sample code for Google search from VB

MSDN: Using Visual Basic .NET to Access Google’s Web Service. Article in MSDN giving instructions and a sample executable for using the Google web service from VB. Looks like the support for XML web services is pretty strong in VB.NET. Another development environment to learn.

Nits: There are no active hyperlinks in the document to Google, including the one that should point to the location for downloading the web toolkit. Not sure what’s up there.
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The sound of a thousand ISPs wiping their brows

Slashdot: BT Loses Case Over Hyperlink Patent. Thankfully the judge saw that what had been patented and what was being claimed as a violation were apples and oranges. I love the statement in the opinion:

“I find that as a matter of law, no jury could find that Prodigy infringes the Sargent patent, nor that Prodigy contributes to infringement of the Sargent patent, nor actively induces others to infringe that patent,” McMahon wrote in Thursday’s opinion. “I therefore grant Prodigy’s motion for summary judgment.”

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Random weblog of the day: Brilliant Corners

I’ve started clicking my own Blogtree link–not to be vain, but to browse Blogtree for other blogs that might be interesting reading. A lot of them are familiar, but every now and then I run into a cool weblog that engages my attention.

Accordingly, the first “random weblog of the day” here at JHN is Brilliant Corners. And not just because he’s namechecking Monk. Bill Turner discusses Barthelme and postmodern fiction intelligently one post away from linking to two contrasting articles about making movie trailers. Plus he wrote his own blogging system using Perl and MySQL. Check him out.
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Don Box: “Tolerance is great, but…”

“…vocal tolerance is even better. Keeping your tolerance to yourself only exacerbates the problem.”

Marriage counseling? Nope, he’s talking about the longstanding practice on the web that emphasizes generation of correct outgoing code but acceptance of incorrect incoming code. He points out, rightly I think, that unless you find a way to tell the source that generates the broken code that it’s broken, that no progress will ever be made.

Don’s story is in the context of the new RSS feed on his site at GotDotNet, which I highly recommend subscribing to if you’re a developer or interested in XML web services.
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Holy smokes! IM in my favorite weblog tools

Userland announced that Frontier (which runs this site through the Manila weblog suite) and Radio Userland now have beta support for IM. Flexible architecture: Jabber and AIM are included, other drivers can be written. You can IM outbound or you can use an IM client to write to your blog. (I haven’t tried it yet but once we get done with our morning activities I’ll be back to give it a whirl.)
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Hit and Run

A couple of quick reading notes, a la the old “Hit and Run” columns that the Suck editors used to do when they couldn’t get a full piece out of any of their websurfing fun:

Phew! Looking over this, I see it’s high time I blogrolled Boing Boing. (Is that sentence English?)

BlogCritics of the world unite

Eric Olsen and company have launched BlogCritics, an online communal blog about music, books, and popular culture with a traditional critics’ bent. This is the sort of site that Greg and I used to idly dream of starting one day, before we went on, him to get 1200 hits from InstaPundit and me to get continuous hits from Google wanting to know about Wil Wheaton naked.

Anyway, BlogCritics is still looking for authors, so sign up…
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