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?

Technoratie: [blog] [feed] [rss] [ads]

A week ago I started a series of post about a certain sort of blogging “etiquette”; a wish list that bloggers would be able to follow to enhance the experience of their readers. I talked of the importance of posts’ titles; today I’ll talk about the content we put in our feeds.

When we blog we have normally two mediums of publication. The first one is what appears on the web site of the blog with all his features. The other is the Atom or RSS feed that our subscribed readers download every morning. What is really interesting with RSS feeds is that you can, at one place, aggregate many source of information. You can scan the content of your feed and read what catch your attention. Another interesting thing that you can do, depending of the RSS reader you are using, is to search in your old feed posts as if you were searching for stuff on Google. Everybody knows the fact but where is the problem?

The problem is that some blogger put entire posts on their website and only excerpt of these posts in their feeds. My question is: Why? This is probably to increase the traffic on their website; it’s the only thing I can think of. The problem is that this practice cut the readers with a vital source of information. What is interesting with feed is to have a local copy of posts to have the ability to search in them. Without the full post, this feature is useless. More and more bloggers are doing this. More and more frustrated I become and less and less I subscribe to such feeds. What’s beautiful is the decentralization of the information in the system; not his centralization in a focal point.

Think about it as a reader and as a publisher. As a blogger, think what are your goals: is this to get the greater number of hits on your website or to be read and commented? If it’s to be read then your preoccupation would be to publish your entire posts in your feed.

Technoratie: [blog] [feed] [rss] [content]

This morning I was commenting on 2 different posts on Scobleizer. The first one was Making sure the right story gets out about corporate blogging at Microsoft, a correction to an article appear on Economist.com. The second is Microsoft is rotting, Malone says. I was subscribed to Robert’s feed since some months. I read some of his posts but I never commented on them before. I never really understand how he got his popularity. I thought that I knew it after I read the Economist’s article on Robert; but I was wrong. I fully understood the root of his success when I read the correction to the article. I say that I fully understand? I’m possibly wrong but I’m probably on the good path. Why is he so popular? The answer to this question can be somewhat simple: because he his authentic in his writing. He has an undeniable talent in writing and public relations and these talents help him pass his message, his ideas and his thoughts. He has the capacity to say things as they are, a sort of modesty, and give credit to others. When we read him, we know we’ll not be bullshitted.

Some ideas had surfaced when I read/post comments on these articles. The first one is the power of small ideas, and normal person; how they emerge; how they are promoted and why they changed the world. You just have to think about blogs, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Silicon Valley and Einstein. They are all examples of small ideas or normal folks that changed the world. Why? How? This is the more interesting part of the story because nobody knows the answer to this question. Personally I think that all of these ideas/persons have a focal point: the ability to communicate their ideas; the ability to make these ideas understandable to their community. They are probably the result of their creator’s writing and communication genius. Without these traits, they would not have changed the world.

The second interesting idea that emerges from the discussion was the capacity of enterprises to cope with the changing market. The next big change in today’s market will come from the East. Enterprises will need to change the way they work and the way they communicate if they don’t want to disappear. Microsoft is doing it. Some person didn’t seem to see it or understand it but it’s the case. I personally thing that they are now where HP was some decades ago when they were at war with Digital. They won it because they cope with the market’s changes. They started to communicate with smaller Silicon Valley companies. Like Microsoft or not, we are here now partly by the ingenuity of people working for it.

I suggest you to read the posts and comments to fully understand what I wrote there 😉

Technoratie: [scobleizer] [scoble] [writing] [communication]

Yesterday I talked about how del.icio.us was inventive and genial. I talked on how and why I use it. But I had a problem: it was to publish the content of it on my blog. Radio Userland didn’t permit such a thing; the system is not made to refresh content if the Radio software isn’t running. So I had a problem. I searched and tested many solutions but no one was what I needed. I needed a simple, ease and reliable way to post a RSS feed onto my blog with a layout that fit in it.

I finally found what I needed. Feed2JS is a project of the Maricopa Community Colleges. What’s Feed2JS? This is a way to publish a RSS feed on your blog using JavaScript. How it work? You need to generate your feed’s code on their website. After you have to cut and paste the generated code on your webpage and it’s done. After, at each hour, their servers will scan your feed and refresh it with his new content. It’s free, it takes 2 minutes to implement and it’s without ads. You can’t really find a better service.

You also can create your own style for the feed’s box. It use CSS and you can find style examples there. The only thing you have to do is to generate the CSS code and put it at the top of the page where the feed will be displayed.

If you have access to your own server that run a PHP Interpreter then you can download the source code of Feed2JS, modify it, and run it on you server.

It’s really a good publishing tool for you blog and it’s the best I found around. Try it, you have nothing to lose.

Good publishing.

Technoratie: [rss] [feed] [publish] [blog] [feed2js]

As you can see at the bottom right of this page, I added a ” My Del.icio.us ” section. I have been convinced by reading Todd and Slacker to add it. What’s del.icio.us? It’s a social bookmark. You create an account and you add your bookmark when you find interesting stuff on the Internet. It’s just this. All bookmark entries are joining with tags. Tags can be seeing as folders; it’s a word in relation with the bookmark’s content. What is interesting is the definition you write with your bookmark entries.

This is a social bookmark. Who says social, say community and also say sharing. No bookmarks are private in the system. Everybody can see your bookmarks and they are automatically added to each tags’ pages. Then, they are rapidly viewable by thousands of people. It’s why the definition you’ll write about your bookmarks entries is important: it’ll help other users to figure out what it talk about. By correctly entering it you’ll participate to increase the quality of the product, then, the quality community.

Another cool feature is the ability to subscribe to other users entries. It’s called an inbox. Each time one of your subscribed users posts a new entry, it’ll immediately appear in your inbox. It’s a kind of bookmark aggregator. It’s really efficient and interesting when you subscribe to users that post interesting stuffs.

How to use it? Todd and Slacker are suggesting using Splur on internet explorer. Splur is the same type of system but you have an add-in software available on IE, Mozilla and Firefox to help you to bookmark your pages. One of the system’s options is to synchronize your Splur and del.icio.us account together; it’s what make it interesting. But I found that the best tool for del.icio.us available is a small Firefox add-in called delicious. It’s easy to use, small, fast and full of features.

Why I had added this feed content on my blog? Because I found really useful stuff each days on the Internet. The problem is that I’ll not do a post for each of them. I don’t want to make this blog a link repository; I want to make this blog a repository of my written thoughts. So, the del.icio.us feed broadcast on my blog is the best tool to archive these two goals: write my thoughts and share my findings. So, I wish that you?ll enjoy this addition!

Technoratie: [delicious] [feed] [social] [bookmark] [splur]