News.Com: Blogs and German Content
This morning I’ve spend some time reviewing the new CNET News.com layout, and of course I set my main focus on their Blogs section and the German tech news area. I guess I was inspired by John Roberts from their own product development team – thanks for noticing me! Let’s see if you’ll catch this feedback.
CNET’s Blogs
Fortunately, their authors write alot. They really do and its an interesting news grabber site. So far I’ve observed hundreds of blogs, yet within their main Blog site are things beneath the content. First of all, reaching the blog section is easy by using the main navigation-bar. At that point, I’ve been directed to excerpts and summaries of their entire totality of blogs. These excerpts lead to the articles or you can click at a major category for further topical research within these themed blogs. So far so good, now comes the problem.
- Leading RSS Feed
I cannot aggregate the entire blog section via RSS (or any other feed). CNET is only offering to aggregate the categories as independent feeds or the other main non-blog-related categories at their site. And I’m not likely going to add every to my RSS aggregator! On top of this, the link to their XML led to a 404-not-found page. - Comment Requirements
I understand the legal issues that come along once you’re allowing your visitors to comment on the site, but I’m not interested in using a fully-featured CNET account for this. On the other hand, the Pingbacks/Trackbacks are available for everyone. Where’s the comment regulation on these? Seems like a puzzle of illogicalness… - Main Page
Yes I’ve been rambling about the main blog section page already above. But in comparison to the individual categories (blogs), the same layout would be applicable. Without information about how many comments already exist and who wrote the post, I’m less interested in clicking to expand the post.
The German Section
I’m not going to doubt the integrity and quality of ZDNET as a sister site for CNET. Please let your readers know the publishing date of the linked articles. They already do it on their own site, and if a sister site offers to integrate their feeds to you guys at CNET, I’m sure they or you can modify the final appearance on how their feed appears on your site, or not?
Yes, I’m still paying attention.
We do not yet have a „News.com blogs only“ RSS feed, though I agree it would be useful in some circumstances. Our main feed includes stories, blogs, and everything we publish. So, if you add only one feed, you’ll get everything.
Not sure why our comments are illogical to you. We welcome comments on site and off.
As to the appearance of other items, including the feed from our German sister site (we’re both part of CNET Networks)… the beta site is not complete. We’ll resolve many of the rough edges before moving to live.
I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. No, the comments are not illogical. I know that I am required to register at your site to comment on the blog’s post, but I’m most likely able to pingback or trackback without any of these registrations. That’s what puzzled me – won’t you have more problems with open pingback/trackbacks instead of having an open commenting system?
I remember this was a major problem of Google’s Blogger system: People were only allowed to comment on the posts if they were either official Blogger users – or they were marked as „anonymous“ users. Now they changed it and opened the system.
And now I’m curious and interested on how the „rough edges“ will be resolved – I guess I’ll have to wait a few more days or weeks to see the changes in action. ;)
TrackBack and Pingback have been supported at CNET News.com since November 2004 officially (and unofficially before that). There are some abuse filters in place, of course, to handle the spam attempts. http://trackback.news.com/ for more.