Reverberations

Full vs partial RSS feed is an old debate. I understand that a site needs to accumulate page views and ad impressions to pay for bandwidth. Now, Digg’s RSS feed and Slashdot’s RSS feed - both these sites don’t have much original content apart from the story comments. (Reading Slashdot comments is fun, even a few trolls. Digg comments OTOH are invariably retarded). These sites are not obliged to put all “their” content in RSS feeds, and may be that’s just me, but throwing an external link or two won’t hurt the click-through much and they can always put ads in feed.

“In Rainbows,” a new record album from an English band Radiohead, has challenged the traditional music sales model by allowing listeners to determine the price they are willing to pay for the album which is available for download on its website.

Figures coming out from comScore - an internet marketing research company - 38% paying an average of about $6 seem much more realistic than the numbers floated earlier - average price between $5 and $8 for 1.2 million downloads.

I’m one of those 62%. Radiohead’s music is decent but not my taste. But, had the album not been available for download, I wouldn’t even have heard of them or their music. Moreover, they probably made much more money from these downloads than they could ever make from regular album release.

After all, these days everything comes with a 2.0 tag :-).

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance.

It will begin life as a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia.

That means - to begin with it’ll have all the wikepedia articles, and then people start making changes to articles in the Citizendium.

Although intentions (without any comments on enmity between wikipedia co-founders Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger) and direction looks right for Citizendium; yet it’s very difficult for any new project to gain the critical mass, the success like Wikipedia. IMO, number of trolls you get is one quantifiable/definite meassure of popularity. And even though wikipedia model is arguably flawed, it has proven to be good enough so far.

Not that I was ever able to have bookmarking icons here, as this blog is hosted on wordpress.org with limited customization capabilities. I still want to present a case against having them. This one borrows generously from a comment that I recently encountered. With all due credit to ssp, here it goes after my editing/formatting-

[...]
wouldn’t you agree that having half a dozen ‘witty’ web 2 icons on your site

1. makes it uglier,
2. alienates people who don’t understand half of them,
3. suggests you’re a bit of a web sucker who can’t wait for his 15 seconds of web 2 fame,
4. insults the people viewing your pages by suggesting that
   • they are web 2 suckers as well who would put some ramble up on a bookmarking site and that
   • despite being web 2 suckers they’re too stupid to have a bookmarklet (or other technique) for the one service they actually use handy?

Just asking…

Or just show me the data which show a benefit of having those icons for a page being bookmarked. And, IMNSHO more relevantly, whether this benefit applies to good/helpful pages in the same extent as to meaningless/not-so-helpful pages.

I would never in my life could say it better. But exactly my thoughts. Perhaps there is a reason why Techcrunch doesn’t have them. I would be disappointed if it does.

Amazing coincidence. Within one week after I blogged how we need direct permalink to the particular part of the video content, Google Video has come up with the exact same feature.

Google Video now allows you to link straight to a specific part of a video by appending e.g. #1m35s to the video URL.

This is what I wrote last week-

I have to download/stream the entire piece just to get to the interesting part somebody mentioned/linked. How about the ability to generate a permalink to particular portion of the podcast/vlog content- just like quoting text from a blog?

Damn! I should have asked for something else that day

I just wanted to list some general observations from the perspective of a consumer (and not a creator).

• Size: Sample this - a 5 min rocketboom show (a new found thing for me, after all that brouhaha) the file size amounts to ~28mb. That’s just insane. Too much of a hassle. My bandwidth is precious. Why doesn’t everyone use divX/xVid compression along with all other formats just for sake of choice? Or flash maybe. Audio formats are little better placed, but still!
• Linking: I have to download/stream the entire piece just to get to the interesting part somebody mentioned/linked. How about the ability to generate a permalink to particular portion of the podcast/vlog content- just like quoting text from a blog?
• Transcripts/Summaries: Availability in alternate formats is usually non-existent. Though I understand that each format is unique and all the subtleties and nuances are impossible to incorporate. *rolls eyes* (Watch Jumanji with subtitles :-))
• Tagging/Commenting: I have been somewhat irregular/occasional subscriber to Geek News Central, TalkCrunch, Morning Coffee Notes and FuzzyBlog over the last year or so, and I use iTunes to manage my podcasts. I can’t tag or comment an episode for later reference and have to depend upon the provided description, which is again - not searchable.

Atom is technically superior, more comprehensive and has more possibilities. From an engineer’s (and a purist’s) point of view - agreed. But RSS

• has been widely adopted already,
• has become synonymous to content syndication, and
• is more evolutionary than anything else out there.

I’m too naive to take a stand, but RSS just works.

It seems spammers have found the new avenues. First it was digg, then del.icio.us, and now reddit. And this time they seem to use down-voting bots to suppress legitimate posts and up-vote spam to make it more visible. Innovative eh!

While it doesn’t make much sense to spam del.icio.us for Search Engine Optimization, as its pages don’t get indexed by Search Engine bots

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex" />

digg and reddit both don’t have any such measures AFAIK. As if mail and blog comment spam were not enough of trouble, spamming digg/del.icio.us/reddit is walk in the park - for all practical purposes.

Now, whether ‘Collective Intelligence’ is flawed is a matter of debate. Apparently, whatever is done to facilitate ease of use to the user, equally works for the spammer. There in lies the challenge of user generated content. How insightful!

From an article in NYTimes on a patent application filed by Philips in USPTO-

James Boyle, a law professor at Duke University, said that broadcasters offer a program knowing that only a fraction of the audience watches the commercials. Advertisers, he added, buy nothing more than "an option on a probability," and the viewer is no more obligated to watch every commercial than a driver is obligated to read every billboard.

I’m a bit under-informed* to put up an opinion of my own about this entire discussion over the term ‘user-generated-content’ being inappropriate etc. So, how about ‘People-powered’, ‘Authentic media‘, even ‘Unpaid Freelancers‘. Oh, The Name popping all over.

The other day, there was an article about headlines being written for search-engine bots and the decline of creativity. Not really!

*Busy?