RSS, OPML and the XML platform.
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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.
Now, here's pretty much the same article topic on CBC.
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!ÂÂ
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.
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.