RSS feedLooks like the SMH (Sydney Morning Herald) has caught a bout of New York Times disease, in that they’re about to start requiring registrations. So long as it doesn’t turn into Macquarie dictionary disease, requiring payment.
A registration model will cripple techniques such as screen scraping and synthetic feeds, and after turning the SMH into a great global newspaper, who seem to understand the internet and related business models, it would be a shame to see them throw all that away without a good reason. In our time, there will always be a competitor either cheaper, easier or both, so until they explain why, it doesn’t really make any sense. We’ll wait and see.
Earlier this year I spoke about how much personal information people give out on their blogs, in most cases without realising it, or understanding the consequences.
Here’s a BBC News story about David Huffaker’s thesis study of 70 bloggers showing the amount of personal information being provided through blogs (via Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion). The story fails to mention that with archive.org and blog quoting, once the information’s posted, there’s no way to retract it.
Sounds like a nice web posting analysis tool to me, providing warnings and metrics on privacy at publication time. David’s already fleshed out part of the process in his paper.
With respect to personal blogging of the live journal kind, as the blogging populace start to realise the privacy issues with blogging, will we start to see a move away from personal factual blogging, and a sharp increase in fictional content, like John Howard’s blog, Beagle Diary and Ripley the Cat, and writing about other non-personal subject matter.
Update: Helps if you include the URLs behind the hyperlinks. Should work better now.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
If you put aside the apparently significant work of our (Australian) special forces troops in Iraq, we’re still this fairly insignificant sparsely populated island at the edge of the Pacific ocean, dying to look like we’re of significant importance to the U.S. Perhaps the fact that we’re English speaking, we have our own Australian Idol (where we, like everywhere else, manufacture talent so they can regurgitate other songs written by talented song writers), and John Howard wants to make us a staunchly conservative Christian nation, makes us more than a slight blip on U.S. Inc’s RADAR. It’s all about trade of course, but I’m happy to continue the facade that we actually care about democracy in Iraq, for the sake of argument.
Anyway, you have to smile when G.W. spends time with John Howard, moaning about Mark Latham, which is a bit of a change from John Howard moaning for G.W. The SMH calls Bush’s words a “strong condemnation” of Latham, but more significantly, in a time when the U.S. should be spending more time trying to solve the Iraq problem (some would say it has a simple solution), it is amusing to think that Mark Latham, new Labor leader and yet to stake a real claim on anything locally, can get so much up G.W.’s goit.
Personally, anyone who can do that successfully, gets my vote at the next election.
British police arrest a musician in a Clash cover band who SMSed the words to The Clash’s song Tommy Gun, thinking it was a message from a terrorist, raising privacy concerns; Monty Python’s Terry Jones slams critiques G.W. in The Guardian (via lenn®, a Microsoft manager who seems to be my alter ego, or at least thinks, acts and grew up the same as me, just on opposites sides of the Pacific; Changing technologies, bags that stain near mobiles, hats that change according to mood, and jackets for the mobile phone set (via purse lip square jaw); Broadcatching, the RSS-ification of television news (via John Udell); John Kay slams corrects EMI’s David Munns that file sharing is not theft (via Lessig); a drip feed of Leonardo’s notebooks, one entry per day, the first new use of RSS since blog feeds.
peterme talks about Audience Segmentation, which is pretty much what we’re doing with information spaces in Sytadel.
A holy grail in Web site information architecture is the ability to cleanly segment content by audience type. Much of the content on a website is not applicable to every single person, but without good segmenting methods, we have to expose all that content to everyone.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
Today I stumbled across one of Dave Winer’s RSS posts titled Would a big media company lose traffic if they supported RSS?. As regular readers know, I’m not a big fan of the idea that big media RSS is “little almost useful teaser bits of random stuff which have been selected by the publisher from their bigger stash of actually useful stuff”, so while I can see Dave’s point as a stop gap measure, and appreciate his post is all about evangelising RSS, the real problem still isn’t being solved, the availability of and access to content (which I promise I won’t reiterate yet again 🙂 ). From Dave’s post:
I assume you’d publish links to your articles with brief descriptions, in your RSS feeds. So when the reader clicks on a link, they go to your site to read the full article [ ] and your traffic stays even. Of course those pages have ads, so your revenue doesn’t decrease.
Even uber-Microsoft blogger Scoble isn’t a fan of crippled feeds, and to say that traffic stays even is a bit of a misnomer, as typically you’d see two or even three pages of content with several ads per page for each news item you read on a web site (which is ~200-900% more ads than coming in from a feed). Replacing this with a feed will definitely reduce traffic, that’s sort of the point isn’t it? Remove the web site embellishments, show the raw content (or an almost useful part of it) in a feed, reduce traffic yet increase content discovery and value. If this wasn’t the case, then people wouldn’t be starting to talk about putting ads in feeds to protect their revenue.
Another argument goes that increased (or viral) traffic from weblog referrals could offset the reduction in traffic, but that’s a weblog effect, which people often forget is independent of RSS or Atom.
This all seems a bit defeatist to me, to invent this great syndication technology (RSS, Atom etc.), then have much of it’s value crushed by media companies perhaps too scared or ingrained to question their own outdated business models. It’s the same problem with p2p file sharing and the big record companies, the only real bipartisan step forward is to change the business model to embrace and take advantage of the technology.
People want music (and big media content), and they don’t mind paying for it to arrive in a way that suits them. Seems pretty simple to me.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
A few days ago, the SMH showed a picture of Nick Riley, supposed secret lover of Joanne Lees. The interesting thing wasn’t the story or the photo itself, but the fact that the SMH put the following quote under the photo (I’ve highlighted the interesting bit).
Nick Riley pictured in Sydney in 2001. WARNING: this photograph is protected by copyright. Republish it and you’re in big trouble.
They’ve subsequently removed the warning, but I kind of like the cut of their jib, to quote Blackadder.
The questions are, was this a mistake and they’ve now fixed it? Was it to cover them while they had exclusivity of the photo, and now it’s not so much of a problem? Is my posting of a copy of the photo (which I’ve blurred out to cover my arse) against the law, even though I’ve covered my arse with the aforementioned blur? Does my linking everything back to the SMH site validate my use of the photo, or the blurred copy of it anyway? Or, is our expected formal language changing, and are the SMH embracing this to speak to us in conversational language we’d expect down the pub?
I got a spam today with a slightly amusing title. Not that I get one a day or anything, I get around 70 per day, but most of them disappear down the ol’ junk filter. Anyway this one made me stop and ponder for several minutes. The subject was:
if only you had fusion gerbil
Indeed. If only.
I was talking the other day about filtering or lensing content, in order to view content according to a particular combination of context, depth and field of view.
- Context is the orientation and position of the content, with respect to related content.
- Depth is the amount of focussed detail contained within the content. We’d liken this to depth in the standard model of 3D space, and typically use the zoom in and out analogy in user interfaces like Adobe PhotoShop or Microsoft Visio.
- Field of view is the scope of the content, and using our 3D model, is effectively the width and height, or area covered by the content.
Within Sytadel, our CMS product, we’ve tried to address the context problem in several ways, but the most interesting is through information spaces. A Sytadel information space is like a category, and each item of content must belong to one. However, information spaces also have security control, which is used passively during web page construction for personalisation. Information spaces are like filters/lenses, and help weave the content into the final constructed web page.
All web pages in Sytadel are constructed at request time, and can contain up to several hundred items of microcontent on some of the more complex pages. Depending on the security for the content and information spaces, we end up with a page which has been constructed specifically for this particular user and their location within the site, by combining content from various information spaces and several layers of information architecture. We say location, like with a typical web site, but because every page is completely dynamic, there’s no real notion of a page or location within the site. It is left to the information architecture to allow the user to perceive the structure of the site in their own particular way. This is real personalisation, and without bragging too much, Sytadel does this exceptionally well.
Getting back to filtering/lensing, because the technology is not currently available to make the contextual, depth and field of view decisions required for this type of personalisation, information spaces allow us to annotate the content to give the system hints. You could liken this to web search engines, where AltaVista tried to use page metadata for hints, and Google dismissed the metadata once the technology became available to act purely on the content. (I don’t like to use too many search engine examples, because Peter, our in-house pedantic search uberguru usually spends an hour explaining to we why my example is slightly incorrect and a better example would be )
We have a standard diagram we use to try to explain information spaces to our customers, which likens them to an 2D onion skin, where there are successive layers of information spaces containing content, such as Intranet, Extranet, Internet, and our page construction is like polygons of various sizes and shapes which lay over the onion as a representation of the page. An external observer looking at the site may see content from all three layers, as if peering into the onion.
In hindsight, this is a flawed analogy, because it gives information spaces a distinct layer ordering, whereas while technically possible within Sytadel, we instead use a flat separated information space model for sites which have a typical team (Intranet), organisation (Extranet), public (Internet) content split. Also, this weaving of content into the final page means that the typical end user is unaware which parts of the page come from the Intranet, Internet, Extranet, or any other information space or section of the site. With an onion, you have a pretty good idea about what each layer looks like.
Sytadel is great example of annotating content to solve the problem of personalised filters/lenses on content, and it is encouraging to see that for this and a fair number of other inherent problems with assembly and visualisation of microcontent, we’ve either solved or at least recognised the problems which weblog CMS developers are only now started to bump their heads against.
While our Sauce project has a different user base to Sytadel, the technical challenges are the same if not similar, which gives both Sauce and Sytadel a nice developmental reinforcement effect, as they gain from each other’s future development. Bring it on I say, bring it on!
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
In October 2007, smoking will be banned in Sydney pubs. And there was much rejoicing…