Feeds — Page 2

Well that was quick.

June 22, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Well that was quick.

I got my invite to Odeo earlier this evening, and from my cursory look-see, the service looks pretty good. The site is easy to navigate and use, and is presented in a very straightforward manner. I downloaded the Odeo Syncr app and gave it a try, but I also was very happy to note later that you don’t have to use it – you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your subscriptions and use your normal feedreader to download the podcasts, which is probably what I’ll do.

There is an important feature that will likely be the next tempest in the blog-teapot – but that I think is totally cool and web-like. The site is to a great extent simply organizing links to podcasts that already exist elsewhere, so the original show stays only on the site it came from. At least that is the case for content that has not been expressly put into Odeo by its creator. You can be sure that there’s going to be some sort of outcry over this, but that will be misplaced to say the least.

Beyond that, the little inline Flash player is pretty good, and for some reason your subscription list is hidden and only accessible via the Sync section. It really should be a site-wide sidebar item or something.

Anyhow… I can’t wait to see the content creation tools, and maybe soon I’m going to have to motivate myself to do something in this medium. Or maybe I’ll just convince Nadia to give it a try – after all, she’s the all-pro radio host in the family. I’m sure her skills would translate very well to podcasting!

More on Tiger:

May 4, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Last week Scoble wrote

February 23, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Last week Scoble wrote

that building a marketing site without including RSS feeds should be a firing offense, and today he updated his post with links to comments from a couple of Jupiter analysts: Eric Peterson and Michael Gartenberg.

I mostly agree with Scoble, but I think he’s expressing it backwards. The point isn’t to have RSS, period, the point is to quit building boring, static sites – sites that frankly aren’t a good fit for RSS. After all, a static site with RSS but no updates doesn’t really make a blip in any newsreader until it updates. Static site = nothing new to come down the RSS pipe = site that few will notice or care about.

So rather than insisting that sites need RSS, I think it’s more useful to suggest that marketing sites should include at least a small dynamic, regularly updating component and hopefully quite a bit more. In that context, to leave out an RSS feed is ridiculous. But it’s not about the feed, primarily, but about the content on the site in the first place.

[Note: I posted virtually the same thing already in the comments at Dave Winer’s RSS site]

Syndication and me.

March 18, 2004 by Michael Boyle

Syndication and me.

I’ve been following all the hoo-haw about RSS and Atom and such for a long time now. I have used NetNewsWire at home and Bloglines (here’s my list there: mikel’s blogs). I love that more and more services are offering syndicated content in whatever format. But I also know this: I hate reading weblogs through their feeds.

For me, the words on a website aren’t really distinct from the overall effort that has been put into the site – the design, the additional content, the links, the stupid little buttons – I love all of that stuff. Extracting the words from that is, to me, to denude the weblog owner’s work far too much, it is to remove more context than I like. I have found that I much prefer a service like Blo.gs or something that lets me know when my favourite sites have been updated so I can go and read them myself, and in the format that the writer intended.

I don’t mind if you, dear reader, prefers to read this in either RSS or Atom formats (I provide both). But me? I prefer to get the full effort a person has made, not the minimalist version that RSS provides.

Plastic launches

January 16, 2001 by Michael Boyle

Plastic launches and Steven Johnson writes eloquently about it. I’ve signed up, and though I’ve never really warmed the slash structure (I get it, it’s never done much for me is all) I think it might be interesting in this context. I particularly like that Plastic is going to aggregate the contributions of partner sites. It’s like there was an original idea (basic linear content aggregated on a site) that was then turned inside out (resulting in the crossover of syndication feeds and weblogs, among other things). Then Plastic is turning it inside out again – but what comes out isn’t the original, it’s a new mutation. Mutation is good.