Archive | 2005

Back in June, Dave Winer blogged about the obnoxiously large picture ads in the InfoWorld RSS feed: “Today I unsubbed from a feed because its ads were too big in relation to the value of the content.”

I agreed with Dave’s sentiment. The ads are large and distracting. I regularly read the InfoWorld articles online (I also subscribe to the print magazine), so I get plenty of “impressions” from the ads. I much prefer the RSS feed to be a plain-text lead that tells me what the story is about so I can decide to go to their web site and read the story. My click on their link is my consent to subject myself to their profit-making ads, in exchange for an interesting and relevant article. My subscription to their RSS feed should not be. Adding insult to injury, they include a couple lines of text ad at the bottom of each article, doubling their hit rate at subscriber expense. That said, it is small, text-based, and clearly set off with “ADVERTISEMENT.” I’ll take those over the gaudy bandwidth-wasting graphics any time.

A quick Google of “InfoWorld site:scripting.com” shows that Dave cites them as a source over seven hundred times, a pretty valuable set of links from a highly-ranked source.

I hope InfoWorld reconsiders the over-commercialization of their feed, and goes back to enticing us to their web site instead.

The Doc Searls Weblog posts Better late than later. “I’ve finally put up the slides from my closing keynote at the Syndicate conference in New York. Here’s the audio (a podcast on its own). Here’s one version of the original, with all the builds. For my friends who have problems with my resistance to characterizing the Net as a “medium” for the transport of “content,” I begin making my case here, and expand on it here.”

It’s a great presentation and worth the time to listen if only to enjoy the delivery. If you’re in a rush, here’s one of several points and another. Well worth a bit of study.

Garrett Fitzgerald’s Blog notes Rhode Island government on the net. The Rhode Island state government has an API!

It is simply unacceptable at this point in history that a citizen can use web services to track the movies he is renting, the weather around his house, and the books he’s recently purchased but cannot as easily monitor data regarding the quality of his drinking water, legislation or regulations that will directly impact his work or personal life, what contracts are currently available to bid on for his state, or what crimes have recently occurred on his street.

Cool!