What’s the utility of a RSS feed? To create relationship between the web site and his readers

Frederick Giasson

I was enjoying reading Scobleizer this morning. I came across another of his interesting post that talks about a web site that didn’t publish a RSS feed because they say that their new web site is a non-geek one. So Robert raised an interesting point: why should you publish a RSS feed of the content you put on your website? The answer: to create a relationship between you and your readers. He is right. RSS feeds can be seen as a socializing tool. Why? Because you converse with your readers. At first, it is a one way relation. You didn’t get immediate feedbacks. But to strengthen the principle, your readers usually have access to a comment system. These two systems, together, help to create a social relationship between the blogger (or the webmaster) and his readers. It can also create relationships between readers. Then we probably can say that there is an emerging community around the blog, more precisely, around the content of it and his emerging ideas.

rss feed social relationship

Updates on: Quebec dams open to terrorists’ attacks

Frederick Giasson

A week later, a journalist of TVA enters LG2 without being intercepted.

There are some updates on yesterday news. Mr. Caillé knew that Radio Canada would broadcast this report for more than a week. Yesterday a journalist of TVA, another French Canadian news network, had entered in LG2, without being seen. They explored the site for about 2 hours; they entered a repair shop, found blue print plans and Hydro-Quebec trucks with keys on the starter. It’s unbelievable. What do they need to do the make them react? Do they need to put bombs at LG2? If I’m going there tomorrow, will I be able to go anywhere I want without seeing any security agents and enter every door I see (because they are virtually all unlocked)? It’s not a game; it’s serious: they need to do something. These people, these administrators, don’t seem to understand what is going on, what?s the treat. We don’t live in wonderlands. Is 9/11 already forgotten? Did we learn anything from this event? …I can’t believe it.

Video report of TVA (french)

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Quebec dams open to terrorists’ attacks – And the USA his one of our main client.

Frederick Giasson

First, read this piece of news about the security of Quebec’s dams: Quebec dams open to attack, probe suggests. Everybody is talking about this report done by a journalist of Radio Canada. I saw the report on the TV and it’s awesome. The authorities can’t say that the security is correct; it is not. The journalist had reached the core of two major dams in the north of Quebec without being seen. Was he hiding? No, he looked like a tourist with a huge camera on his shoulder and his big white truck. He was able to stop the electric production of about 500 000 homes; he reached the main controls of the power plants without anyone intercepting him? he was alone in the complex. He never meets any employee or security guards in about 1 hour of door opening and investigation on each site. There was no evident camera (the authorities say that they are hidden). The problem is that it seems that they are not monitored by permanent security guards. Sorry but tell you it, Mr. Caillé, but Hydro-Québec is not a chain of corner shops; the camera don’t have the same utility in a corner store and in power plant of billions of dollars. Cameras in the first one are there to know who the criminal was. In the second, they are there to prevent criminals to reach the dam.

Okay, you know what’s the problem? It’s probably easiest to enter in this critical infrastructure of Quebec than to enter in any home on the territory. This situation is definitely unacceptable after the 11 September 2001. Some ones will say that we have nothing to fear; that we don’t have any enemies and it would be an unnecessary spend of money. To them, I’ll say that: first, we get problems with French separatists for more than 40 years. Last years, an unknown group had put dynamite on a main transmission pole and they pull the trigger. What if they had reached the core of the Manic 5 central, or LG2? The result had would be catastrophic. What if they do this in a cold wave of 1 or 2 weeks with temperatures under 30 or 40 degree Celsius? We probably wouldn’t be able to buy electricity at the USA or Ontario because they just wouldn’t have enough. Then, we would be in great troubles.

After, think about it. Our greatest electric client is the USA. We sell megawatts of electricity on the east cost market. If two of our main dams are the target of international terrorism it’ll not just be a catastrophe for the village around the dams (who will probably be flooded) but also for the entire east cost of America. Think back, the major black out that occurs a year or two ago on the east cost. The electric switch in new New-York city was turned at off and they didn’t have electricity at all for some days; no air conditioning in the middle of a dog days. This total back out was the result of a problem in a switch complex somewhere in the north east of the USA. Think about what it would be like if 2 or 3 of the main dams of the north east of America would be shutdown or destroyed? I don’t want to think about it. If international terrorists need to hurt the USA, then one of their best bet would probably to destroy these dams. It’s easy, as demonstrated above, and effective.

Finally, if there is no security at all for these dams, what’s the security of our nuclear power plant? Is this the same situation? I hope no, otherwise it would be the problem of many more person than the millions habitants of the east coast of America. It’s my reaction to the situation. I hope the government of Quebec will get enough pressure to move and spent money to arrange the situation. The current situation is unacceptable; and for the stability of the Quebec, the Canada and the United-States, we need to act now.

What can we do? Talk about the situation. Are you Canadian or American? Talk about it, wrote about it in hope that these things put pressure on Hydro-Québec and the government of Quebec to obligated them to act and increase the security of these sites.

Update 17-02-2005: The video report(french)

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Track your blog readers habbits: How and Why – Using statcounter.com

Frederick Giasson

All bloggers need to know who are reading them and where are they come from. Personally I’m checking my logs between 4 to 6 times a day. It’s a sort of compulsion, it’s a reward. But it’s more than this. It can be a way to discover who is linking to you, who discuss of your blog or posts. These traffic logs are a really interesting and useful to analysis. It can help you to upgrade your blog; to know who your readers are and what they are reading on your blog. You can track their movement through your posts, over time. Now how can you archive this?

Personally I’m using statcounter.com. This is the best, free, web traffic logging service I found. How it work? It’s easy. You sing-up for an account and after you can add many projects to this account. Then, if you have 2 or 3 blogs, you can have one account with one entry for each of them. Statcounter is basically a free system. You have a permanent counter of you page views, unique and returning visitors, with a related graph graduated by days, months or years. With this graph you can see the evolution of your blog, see peaks when you published a popular article, etc. There is the graph of my traffic since the first days of this blog:



With the free service you also have a traffic log of the 100 last visits of your project. It’s the must useful part of the service. With this information, you know the time, the OS and the browser used by your readers. You also know the resolution of their screens, the country they came from and, the most important, the pages they visit and the pages they come from. If you wish, you can pay to upgrade the length of this detailed log. Personally I don’t have the funds to pay for this and, for the moment, the 100 entries free log is enough for me. But if I would get more hits, I would consider the possibility to upgrade my account. What I personally appreciate with this service that other don’t give is the returning visitor counter. With this one, you know how many people, each day, are returning to your blog. There is a snippet of what look like the detailed log:



Many statistics are computed by the system with the detailed log:



With these statistics you can know everything about your readers. The path they took through your blog, the things they read, the time they spend, your popular pages, etc, etc. It’s most then important to know these things. It will give you the knowledge of what your readers are interested in without them saying it to you. Then it gives you hints of what to change on your blog to enhance the experience of your visitors.

There are two other things that I really like with the service. The first one is the possibility to put your IP address on the ban list. Then your visits will not be logged in the system. Is that not beautiful? Yes it is! The second thing is that you can show or hide the counter on your blog. If you wish, it can be totally invisible to your readers. It’s the first free system I saw that give you this opportunity.

Finally this system was not created for blog; it was for general purpose websites. But all his features are perfect to track the traffic post by post. For all his features, his statistics and his price I make him the best blog traffic tracking system I found.

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Introduction of ads in feed content? – If it the price to pay to have complete feed post, why not?

Frederick Giasson

Yesterday I talked about snipped of post in feeds content. Max reacted to it today and brings a really good point into the discussion:

“[…] In these cases, I could understand they don’t want entirely syndicate their posts. A solution could be inserting ads even in feeds (like Yahoo! and others do)[…]”

The question is legitimate. As he says, many bloggers add Google AdSense and other ads systems to their web site to cover the cost of their blogs hosting. In this case, they want to have the bread and the cash of the bread. Then they create feed but only put snippet of post in them to bring readers to their web site in hope they click on their ads. This situation can reopen, or refresh, a debate on feeds: will we see ads in feeds in the futures?

Personally, in the light of this situation, if you put ads in your feeds AND you put entire posts with these ads, then, I can consider the pertinence to put ads in RSS or Atom feeds. I’m ready to pay the price.

Think about it: you are at the airport; you just connected to the ATT Wireless services for 10 minutes with your Tablet PC. You refresh your entire feed list with your favorite RSS reader, close the connection and get onboard. You are seated and ready to read all of your feeds, you have 10 hours above you. Then you start to read them, but more than the half are just snippets. Don’t you think that this situation can be a determinant factor for air rage?

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