Quite often, the authors intent was too look smart. This is a form of intellectual violence and an indication that the blogger doesn't know how to communicate.

On Twitter, this problem is inevitable, as we try to communicate in 140 characters. When blogging, it's simply a knock on the author.

I'm amazed how many large offline publications (like newspapers) don't allow user feedback, in the style of blog user comments, on every article of their website. Now, I'm sure they have blog-like sections to their websites that allow user comments. But why not everywhere? Here's some examples I came across while reading about the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes.

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/8560402
• http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-newswire16-2009jun16,0,6238518.story
• http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/06/16/20090616coyotes0616.html

Now, here's pretty much the same article topic on CBC.

• http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2009/06/15/sp-coyotes-balsillie.html?ref=rss

300+ user comments. I'm not sure what their average is, but it's pretty apparent that readers want to engage in the conversation. From there, it's easy for a website to create a small user community for their readers. Acquire email addresses. Increase pageviews. Increase email subscriptions. Increase ad impressions. Increase profits.

It's no wonder that many of these newspapers are going bankrupt. They're so fixated on their print, that they can't see the goldmine of the Internet. You can't just put your offline article on a website. You have to go the entire nine yards. You need to make the Internet your focus, not just a side business. Print is in decline. Any newspaper that can't make the move will disappear and new online-focused media companies will emerge to take their place. And they'll print newspapers to compliment their offerings and make lots of money doing it.

Update: My dad just left two comments on my blogs today. My own little community.

I'm so tired of Facebook restrictions. Today, I sent too many messages to my friends (about 20-30 at most). They issued me a warning, so I stopped. Then later, I found out they blocked me from sending further messages. Wait, I stopped when they warned me. And now they say I'm banned from the feature for continued misuse. WTF!? I stopped when I was warned and I wasn't doing anything wrong in the first place. I highly doubt anybody reported me. The restrictions are stupidly in the ballpark of normal usage now. This isn't even the first time this has happened. This is the 2nd time this happens to me. It's also happened to quite a few of my Facebook friends. Wake up Facebook! 

Update: WOW! I've even been blocked from writing comments on my own wall posts. Facebook is going right down the suck road.

Listening to people like CNN's Rick Sanchez, is like listening to Bible thumpers. He's a populist for the Twitterers. When you spend your entire show BOGUSisming (bending over and greasing up) for the Twitteres, you sound so fake it's ridiculous. How does CNN put up with such public a_s li_kers?  This guys is the most fake reporter I've listened to in years. I love CNN and watch it all the time, but when this guy is on, I know he's just greasing up for the Internet geeks and I turn it off. It's so fake. Get a real opinion Rick instead of pandering to the Internet crowd.

http://twitter.com/ricksanchezcnn

As per Google Blog Search Sucks, I just did a search for links to talk-sports.net just now and the results were empty. Yesterday, there were hundreds. I'm sure later today, there'll be dozens. It's totally unreliable. Worse, it picks up sidebar links, so I mostly get results that are not even in the RSS feed. Ridiculous!

Watching the Pocono 500, I loaded up NASCAR.com and TNT RaceBuddy. You can attached your MySpace, Twitter and Facebook accounts and update your status in-race. I like what they did. Unfortunately, there's so many status updates (too many fans) that it looks like a bunch of noice and zero conversation.

http://www.tnt.tv/sports/nascar/racebuddy09_live/?o_cid=rbc18

Update: RaceBuddy hung up on my on my 2nd update :(

I'm very happy that Bing.com, like it's predecessor Live.com, supports RSS. Any Web search (rss) has a very predictable RSS feed (rss). Simply add the format=rss parameter to any URI. This appears to be exactly what live.com did, but I can't remember off hand.

I was surprised that all the Live.com RSS feeds got redirected to the equivalent Bing.com HTML webpages. An extremely smart RSS client might be able to rediscover the RSS feed, but it would have been better had they permanently redirected the old Live.com RSS feeds to the equivalent Bing.com RSS feeds. I'm sure they lost thousand, possibly millions of subscriptions because of this small failure. Something to remember, if you are into designing RSS search feeds.

http://www.bing.com/

Scott Kingery: RSS is not dead. It is the glue that holds the web together.

http://www.techlifeweb.com/2009/05/30/how-to-filter-your-twitter-feed/

This is a great article on filtering the RSS in Twitter using Yahoo! Pipes.

I just upgraded Reblinks to Beta. Still tones of work, but it's ready for people to start using and reporting bugs (to me randy@kbcafe.com). It needs some major ease-of-use work still. The email engine is working and sent 70 emails yesterday. This is the start of great things.

http://www.reblinks.com/

Steve Gilmour says RSS is dead. That's a prediction more than a thousand times proven false. What Steve doesn't realize is that all his arguments for RSS dying are actually arguments for why it has won the day. Why? Steve thinks RSS is a user application. What he doesn't realize is that the very site he claims is putting RSS to death relies on RSS itself. How many have created bots that use the Twitter API to automatically post content from RSS to their Twitter page? Go to your Twitter updates page and guess what? Your Twitter updates page has an RSS feed as well. RSS is not an application, it's a platform. It's here to stay. Even if those that don't understand the technology think otherwise.

Thanks Candem!

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2009/05/06/rss-is-dead-long-live-rss/

Two years ago yesterday, I made the worst mistake of my life.  I'm rewriting the Rmail engine for Reblinks and I'm getting closer and closer to an Alpha release. In the first version, I intend to support polling of RSS 2.0 or compatible feeds. I'm going to add SMTP support to begin, then MetaWeblogAPI and finally Twitter. Ya, I don't really like Twitter, but you geeks sure do. Polling can be set for either daily or hourly. The engine will be stateless, unlike Rmail. That is, I won't have to cache feeds. We'll see how this goes. I'm going to rely on pubDate to determine whether an item should be sent. I was hoping to have this ready at the end of March, but I've been really lazy this last month plus. 

http://www.reblinks.com/

Yesterday, I moved the blog and domain for The RSS Blog to a new server. Within an hour, a user reported a problem. I investigated and realized that FeedBurner was now picking up the wrong feed. It appears that it was not resolving the IP address with every pull, but rather using a cached IP address. I figured this was a temporary situation, but now it's 20 hours later and FeedBurner was still picking up the wrong feed. Worse, I noted that the feed itself had not been updated in those 20 hours. I pinged the FeedBurner server and that didn't resolve the problem. I ReSynced my feed and that did fix the problem. I have to ask myself how many people are RSS/FeedBurner savvy enough to have fixed this problem. FeedBurner really isn't for RSS savvy people like myself, but rather for the Joe-Blogger who doesn't want to manage his own RSS feed. More and more, I'm reading about user problems on FeedBurner. Just search for FeedBurner on Google Blog Search and most all you find is users struggling with the service. Somebody at Google should be doing this search daily and helping these guys. Is this service dying?

• http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-can-you-please-fix-feedburner/
• http://thenextweb.com/2009/04/06/feedburner-infuriatingly-inaccurate/
• http://icycucky.blogspot.com/2009/04/most-of-us-bloggers-sign-up-with.html
• http://blog.jacobburke.com/2009/04/09/calling-it-quits-with-feedburner/

I think it's time for us all to call it quits with FeedBurner.

Lot's of noise about FriendFeed these days. IMHO, FriendFeed+Twitter is like a really bad implementation of Facebook's implementation of Twitter. The ability to respond to status updates is built right into Facebook, whereas FriendFeed+Twitter are too separate applications. I use Twitter, but when people give me links to FriendFeed, I simply don't know what to do. I'm sure FriendFeed has its own advantages, unfortunately I don't know what they are and I'm pretty certain most of your readers don't either.

Jeff Nolan wrote an interesting article title "Is Twitter Killing RSS?" I want to respond and decided to respond here on The RSS Weblog, rather than in Jeff's comments, as I'd like everybody to read this follow-up.

http://jeffnolan.com/wp/2009/04/01/is-twitter-killing-rss/

RSS is a protocol and Twitter is an application. Many publishers are using RSS-to-Twitter gateways to update their Twitter account when new items are publiched on their blog. The protocol and application are not competitive at all. In fact, they are complimentary. Twitter is not an RSS-killer, but rather a use-case for RSS.

Further, Twitter not only can import RSS, but it exposes an RSS feed so that you can inject your Twitter data into other applications. Many social websites are trying to import your Twitter updates. That RSS feed is likely the easiest way to do exactly that. Hmmm! Must play.

Last, could Twitter replace RSS for audience acquisition (as Jeff suggests)? Of course it could for some publishers, but it'd be a bad idea. Remember that Twitter is mostly used by us geeks. Most people are not trying to target geeks, but rather are targeting people like my wife, kids, parents, brothers and sisters. Not one of them have any clue what Twitter is and obviously don't use it. On the other hand, many of them are using RSS even though they really don't know what RSS is. That's because RSS is a protocol (under the hood). Twitter is just an application. Someday, the geeks will get bored with Twitter and move on. RSS is a protocol of the Web and it's not going anywhere.

Yesterday, I had a brief Twitter discussion with Rober Scoble. It started when Scoble and a few of the Web 2.0 bloggers re-twitted an article that suggest Google is gonna buy Twitter. I added the following to the conversation.

Twitter is a lot like del.icio.us, Digg and MyBlogLog. Where are they now? They were geek fads. Twitter will fade.

Scoble responded twice.

I'm willing to bet $1,000 you are wrong. Wanna put up?
if Digg is a "fad" then I want a "fad" too: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/Digg.com/?metric=uv

I wasn't willing to bet $1,000, but I did respond that I'd take the bet for $100. I never heard back on the bet. Hopefully he takes me up on it.

Further, you look at the stats Scoble provided reguarding Digg. I wouldn't put any stock in web stats, but if you look at Alexa web stats for Digg, then you get another story. Brandon Wirtz suggested that Digg traffic has been dropping 7% monthly for 6 months. I'm not gonna argue the stats, but what I see is that uber-geeks like Scoble have moved on from Digg after evangelizing it for a year or two. All that you have to do is look at Scoble's Digg profile and note that it hasn't been active for several months now. The same is true of Steve Rubel and most all of the other Web 2.0 evangelists.

If you look at the other Web 2.0 fads, like del.icio.us. You can see that some geeks continue to use it (Steve Rubel), while others have long stopped (Scoble). If you look at the web stats for these Web 2.0 fad websites, then you can see that most are fading (delicious).

Basically, the Web 2.0 websites of the last decade begin with a small group of uber-geeks. The site is picked up by Steve and Scoble from the uber-geeks and blasted to their mostly geeky audience. The geeks in turn blog about it and tell their friends. The audience jumps on the bandwagon and the websites receive tremendous growth for a year or two. This is classic WOM (Word of Mouth) viral growth seeded thru the top geek bloggers.

Unfortunately, Steve and Scoble get bored and move onto newer things. They neglect to blog about Digg and even stop using it entirely. The WOM funnel breaks down and the website's traffic begins to fade.

I'm gonna call this the Scoble factor.

This doesn't apply to non-geek websites like MySpace or Facebook, but even MySpace has experienced a decline as users move over to Facebook.

You ever get the feeling that Twitter is just a bunch of auto-follow bots hoping to trick other bots into following them?