In addition to yesterday’s brouhaha over the New York Times’ decision to include its op-ed columnists in a premium service starting in September, there are other interesting things happening here at IDG’s Syndicate conference that are worth highlighting:
BlogPulse
A lot of talk in the hallways about BlogPulse, which joins Technorari and Feedster and PubSub as part of the blog tracking toolset.
Atom
I had breakfast with Tim Bray (erstwhile Sun Microsystems blogger) and Jon Udell (Infoworld blogger/journalist) this morning just before our panel about harnessing the voice of the individual. Tim finished the spec for Atom last night. We may see an Atom-RSS battle in a few months when Google is expected to embrace it and place it on all Blogger blogs.
I’m sitting now at a lunch session with Robert Scoble, Charlene Li of Forrester, Udell and others, and Mr. Scoble was asked if he’d begin using Atom. He answered:
“Is it demonstrably better? If so, we’ll embrace it. Will I switch? I need to hear the benefits my readers will get from a new feed format. My mother wants only one feed, not a choice of five formats.”
Media RSS (mRSS)
Bradley Horowitz, director of media search for Yahoo!, gave a fascinating presentation about the just-announced Media RSS format (not quite a standard). He began by contrasting mass media and micro media.
Mass media:
Appeals to large audiences
Controlled and manicured distribution
Expensive to produce
Studio model, high-stakes economics
Micro media:
May have limited audience
Uncontrolled, unmoderated distribution
Cheap to produce
Different, developing economic model
“At Yahoo, we think people will consume media from both the head and the [long] tail. It’s about My Media,” Horowitz said. Inside the company, they call it FUSE for enabling people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge. People usually stop at the first bullet point, but Yahoo takes the ability to use and share media seriously.
He showed off the Flickr flash widget, a piece of javascript code you can drop into your blog to home in on the feed you want, displaying a small boxed set of photos on your blog. I think it’s similar to the Daily Zeitgeist.
Media RSS — which Ourmedia.org announced support for yesterday (here’s the short post Marc and I crafted for the Yahoo search blog) — is a simple extension to RSS and podcasting. It dresses up enclosures and gives it a little bit of metadata so it can be found by the search engines. It’s designed to support grassroots publishing, enabling audiences to access content previously unavailable through traditional channels.
1,366
The number of blog feeds that Robert Scoble now checks daily. (This is one!)
Memeorandum
Memeorandum came up today. It takes feeds from the NY Times and Washington Post and adds comments right beneath them.
Del.icio.us
I was excited to meet Joshua Schachter, founder of the social media/tagging site Del.icio.us. They have something over 100,000 users, with 40,000 active users who tag an average of 4 to 5 items per day. I joined a few weeks ago. Revealing quote from Joshua: “I don’t use RSS readers all that much.”
About those RSS numbers
David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, warned, “People mistakenly think their RSS readership is huge. You need to divide that number by about 10 because the RSS companies poll your RSS feed about once an hour on average,” and there’s no guarantee the content is even being read — just delivered.
Legal issues
Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge chaired an interesting session on legal issues and fair use in the digital age, with Neeru Pahlia of Creative Commons and Rafat Ali of PaidContent as well. I made the point that as a publisher, it shouldn’t really be up to me to decide which media items ought to be kicked off Ourmedia.org for copyright infringement, but the panelists agreed that fair use in cyberspace is a grey zone right now and we’re stuck with the status quo of laws not designed to take Remix Culture into account.
Meeting Adam
I was happy last night to meet Adam Fields in person at the blogger dinner at Gallagher’s Steak House in mid-town NYC that 40 folks attended. Adam has been a star moderator/content creator/server specialist for Ourmedia.org.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
More on David Sifry’s RSS numbers comment…. Another issue I see is that people with laptops using wifi in a number of locations will inflate the numbers as well.
For example I recently created a FeedBurner account for a client. I then subscribed via NetNewsWire on my Mac. Checked later that day and FeedBurner said I had 5 subscribers via NetNewsWire. Well I had been in 5 different locations that day using a variety of wifi networks (each time with a different IP).
Syndicate conference: osservazioni
JD Lasica riporta dalla Syndicate Conference, conclusa ieri, alcune osservazioni utili: 1,366 The number of blog feeds that Robert Scoble now checks daily. (= Scoble si legge oltre 1.000 feed al giorno). Del.icio.us I was excited to meet Joshua Schachter,
That’s why you can’t use IP address to identify visitors. AOL proxying also mucks with that, because subsequent requests from the same user aren’t guaranteed to be from the same IP (and often aren’t).