Babble gogle dindle tok BOUGHT TIVO LAST NIGHT! Tiggle dag drool sphit FREAKIN’ AMAZING! Jagle sneh bahble beh NOW A FREAKIN’ CULT MEMBER! Zapf newt spittle BABBLING IDIOT!
Ah, Tivo. Friend, confidant… secret lover.
RSS feeds are still gaining traction. They’re still primarily the domain of geeks and other technical wonks. But, as more services like Bloglines come to the fore and make accessing these feeds easier and more user friendly, I genuinely believe that RSS will catch on.
What makes RSS so appealing is that it’s a fairly intuitive way for folks to cut through the info-clutter in a way that mimics how most of us read the morning paper, but without all the page-flipping. Most feeds display just the headlines of stories and, if you’re lucky, a little blurb that is the equivalent of what folks in the journalism industry refer to as the “lead”. So it’s easy to skim through the days stories from several publications in just a matter of minutes. My subscription list is now up to about 75 sites and growing daily. It takes me about 30 minutes each morning to scan through the articles and read the ones that look interesting.
My subscription list, for obvious reasons, is rather tech-heavy. But that’s also due to the fact that a majority of the RSS feeds out there are generated by tech sites. What is noticeably missing from my subscription list is something that I am a strong advocate for: local news. In fact, the only mainstream general news source that I’ve been able to find an RSS feed for is the New York Times, which covers – surprise surprise – news focused on that metropolis in the East. Here we are in the heart of Silicon Valley with newspapers that, while not necessarily as nationally loved as the NYT, serve their local communities well and not a one of them have figured out the growing popularity of RSS. The San Francisco Chronicle’s SF Gate, at one time hailed as a bellwether for traditional media moving into the Internet Age, is sorely lacking any form of digital syndication, as is the San Jose Mercury, whose award-winning web site has expanded their printed coverage immensely. These are both great local papers with exceptional online presences, but neither have switched to RSS. And, considering that both use a content management system to publish online, I can’t imagine it would take that much effort to supply one.
There’s a business opportunity in RSS, and I think some folks are missing it. RSS feeds remind me a little of the headlines I used to get through my text pager. Whenever I was waiting for a meeting to start, I’d surf the headlines on my pager to get a 10,000 foot view of everything that was happening in the world. If I wanted more details, I could always visit CNN when I got back to my desk. With the convergence of hand-held electronics and the Internet, I can instantly move from the headline straight to the text of the story right there on my portable device. That’s just one small example of the power of RSS.
If it’s a matter of revenue, do what many of the RSS feeds have done: include text-based ads in the feed. I’d prefer they had some sort of marker on them to indicate that they were ads rather than normal content (when you’re working with straight text, it’s sometimes hard to tell) but I tend to think they’d be even more effective than the graphical banners that are the web’s de facto standard.
As for the argument that media doesn’t want to give its content away for free, I say try different revenue models (in-feed advertising, charge some micro fee for reading the full article, subscription-based feeds) but, in the mean time, get on it. The true value of the feeds is further brand-awareness. If I know which feeds are the best and most trustworthy, I’ll be more likely to pass them on (again, have you seen my subscription list?) which expands the reader base, opening a wider audience for you content, a larger market for whatever revenue model you go with and, perhaps most importantly, greater mindshare when the online subscribers see your offerings in “real space”.
Of course, the media giants can sit idly by and let their competition and smaller, faster, less-established agencies take advantage of this technology. RSS may not take traction before some other, similar technology does, but its usefulness and popularity has already been proven. The next killer app, I believe, will be something that takes the RSS concept and makes it palatable to the masses. I tend to think it’s better to be up, running and have all the kinks worked out before then, while the audience is small enough to not make too much noise over the inevitable glitches, than to do it in view of the whole world. Right now is a good opportunity to get started with RSS. Let’s hope the media folks are paying attention.
Oh, and lest you think I’m a hypocrite, the use of MoveableType makes providing my own feed a snap.
This buffets my belief in a divine hand driving nature. A process that a) cleans up environmental toxins harmful to all life b) using common, easy to grow natural resources c) that completely pays for itself d) with enough profit left over to educate people on how to further help the environment. Wow. I’m not a particularly religious man, but it’s hard to accept this as a coincidence. Or, in the very least, perhaps this is evolution driven by economics. Very cool.
There’s been all kinds of bad press about the iPod – it’s expensive, it’s battery life is shockingly short, the headphones suck – but Apple just announced a 900% increase in iPod sales from last year. With all of the nasty reports, why is it so darn popular?
Well, have you visited your Mac Store lately? I have. While waiting to purchase the new Mac G5 Dual Processor machine for one of our designers, I wandered around and played in the stuff in the gorgeous showroom. There were iPods on every table. I picked one up and gave it a listen and that’s when it happened – instant gear lust. Yeah, I could probably buy an MP3 player with the same features for half the price, but it would be nowhere near as cool as the iPod. The interface, with it’s faux-wheel and directional buttons, is undeniably cool. Surfing to find songs is a snap. And damn if it don’t look good on my hip.
But I don’t have an iPod… yet. In the long Mac v. Windows battle, I’ve always come out on Bill’s side. As cool as the Macs have always been, they’ve never offered the same amount of software and flexibility of a Windows box. And, seriously, a one-button mouse? I use the right-click feature on Windows non-stop. But this new G5 has me drooling. I mean, OK, the thing is powerful and it’s somewhat noticeable on the chunky apps like Photoshop and Illustrator and what have you, but it’s certainly not mind-blowingly fast like I had imagined. But DAMN is that thing pretty! It’s like a work of functional art. I love sitting in front of it. I love the colors on the cinema display. I love the fact that the CD-ROM pops out of a little door on the front that blends in completely to make it almost look like there are no slots at all. We got the G5 about the same time as I got my new Dell workstation. The Dell was a total letdown after the G5.
Back to Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside, Apple’s design is its free prize. Yes, their stuff is expensive. Yes, it’s not always the most technologically sturdy stuff around. But you just don’t look as cool toting around an Archos player or working on a Dell as you do grooving to an iPod or pounding on the keyboard of a G5. And the other smart thing Apple did with the G5 (well, the OS, I guess) is use BSD as the basis for OS X. This is a *brilliant* move on their part. Not only is BSD a stable, proven OS, but the move to an open source platform has enticed many open source developers to switch to the Mac. This actually serves both the Linux/BSD communities and the Apple community by creating more useful, usable software for both platforms. Someone in Apple’s OS department was really using their head on that one.
As a result of this, OS X-based systems are being used as servers more and more. And don’t be surprised if you start seeing more MAc systems on the desktop as more useful programs become available. The argument is that this is the year that Linux will finally conquer the desktop. Thanks to Apple’s work, BSD has already succeeded in that space.
OK, let me first admit my whoredom before I go out of control here: I recently signed up at bzzAgent.com to become a “bzzAgent”, i.e. someone who gets to review cool stuff in exchange for attempting to create buzz around it. I’m instructed to be totally honest with my opinions, good or bad, but still try to at least spread the word.
So I just got my first piece of, I guess, bzzMail: A free copy of Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside. And this is one of the first release copies which actually comes in a cereal box. And a nifty little parody of the Wall Street Journal. Two, actually. Check it out:
Now, that’s pretty eye-catching. I work for a marketing firm now and the folks here were mildly impressed by it. The next question is: does the content live up to the presentation? Well, I’ll definitely be reading it (I’m actually excited to read it in large part because of the packaging) so I’ll keep ya posted.
I just read a rather fascinating bit about Google’s massively distributed operating system. One of the most telling quotes in there is:
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
In that little paragraph, I suddenly got a flash on what Tim O’Reilly has been saying for years – The Internet is the operating system.
So, it’s like this: you drop your server running whatever service you’re offering into this massive mangle of networks known as “The Internet” (which, if you don’t know, is really just a network of networks). It ultimately doesn’t matter what operating system you use – open protocols such as HTTP and FTP work just as well on Windows as they are on Linux. You have your desktop, which is like the dumb terminal connected to the mainframe of the 70s but is more “intelligent”, having its own hard drive, motherboard, etc. In this case, the mainframe, which holds a bulk of the applications and data you need, is the Internet.
As it stands, we’re sort of in a middle ground. We’re still wildly reliant upon desktop applications installed locally and dependant on the operating systems we run in order to get things done. For example, to create a new word processor document you open, let’s say, Microsoft Word rather than visit www.microsoftword.com or, for that matter, word.microsoft.com. The pros to this approach is that you don’t need to sweat the lag of busy network and your data is, theoretically, safe and secure on a machine you control rather than out there in the wild on one you don’t control. But the cons are also pretty big: every time Microsoft adds a feature to Word, you either need to download the update or purchase a new version. Were it hosted online, the update would just be there the next time you used it.
The so-called Application Service Provider (ASP – not to be confused with MS’s Active Server Page technology) model is intended to hasten this move from a desktop-centric to distributed model. Salesforce.com‘s Customer Resource Management (CRM) ASP has been pretty successful in convincing small businesses lacking the resources to maintain their own in-house CRM to move to the distributed model.
Massive ERP systems like PeopleSoft and Oracle attempt to compensate for the security issues while still providing the update benefits by selling what you may think of as “internal ASPs” – i.e. rather than run around installing updates to commonly used systems such as HR and customer management on each employee’s desktop, they simply update the software on the servers. This puts a heavier load on an IT department, which is usually only feasible for large corporations that can afford such support.
Thinking in this direction really does open a lot of avenues for business and makes me finally – FINALLY! – understand what all the hoopla is about. Kinda pathetic that it took this long to figure this out, but I have a head for technology, not business.
This is why Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking – where every client is also a server to other clients on the system – is so important. The future of the internet is not millions of semi-dumb terminals connecting to thousands of servers, but millions of server-clients connecting to millions of other server-clients and a few thousand dedicated servers. Web surfers will no longer be passive participants surfing the web: their computer will serve a little bit of the web as well. And P2P, which currently gets a pretty bad rap for being the primary distribution method of illegally copied copyrighted software and media, will finally get the recognition it deserves as a method of efficiently distributing the network load.
Wow. And I just thought the Internet was just good for porn!