Siegried Hirsch recently created a small questionaire concerning the topic of site syndication with RSS. As I wish to contribute to this questionaire, I suggest you will answer the questions on your own – either within his article (in german) or in my blog – where I translated the questions into english. The information provided might help Blogspirit to develop, too.
1. Which sources do you currently use to search for RSS-Feeds?
(Welche Quellen nutzen Sie im Augenblick um nach RSS-Feeds zu suchen?)
2. Which must be offered by a Search-Engine/Directory-Service for RSS-Feeds?
(Was muss eine Suchmaschine/Verzeichnis für RSS-Feeds bieten?)
3. How is the expectance to categorizing?
(Wie sind die Erwartungen an die Kategorisierung?)
4. How important is the completeness of recorded feeds?
(Wie wichtig ist die Vollständigkeit der verzeichneten Feeds?)
5. Should inactive feeds be listed?
(Sollen inaktive Feeds aufgeführt werden?)
6. How important is the possibility to subscribe to a Feed directly?
(Wie wichtig ist die Möglichkeit direkt einen Feed zu abonnieren?)
7. How important is a German feed-directory at all?
(Wie wichtig ist ein deutsches Verzeichnis von RSS-Feeds überhaupt?)
8. What else has to be considered?
(Was wäre sonst noch zu beachten?)
My answers:
1. As sources, I prefer the direct method to accquire feeds by news websites, blogs (of course) and other portals such as Technorati or search engines. I hardly browse Feed-Directories since most of these services are filled with (subjectively) useless feeds. These directories are often unmoderated as they grow in time. A centralized feed directory and not an endless sum of competitors aids the process of keeping up to date with education and information.
2. Search-Engines must offer a clear distinction between commercial (company/corporate) and private feeds. An up to date sample of each feed found by the search engine must be visible before choosing to subscribe to it.
3. The categorization process for a feed may not be limited to a handful of categories since many feeds contain multiple topics and areas to cover. As much as search-engines restrict users, the important entries of a feed may never become visible to a greater audience. For feeds themselves, the idea to categorize the content is highly advisable and should not be forgotten by its author or service provider.
4. Feeds may be distributed completely, but while the number of subscribed-to feeds increases, the download traffic increases, too. To offer teasers or the first paragraph of an entry is as much marketing as newspapers cover with their printed version: The reader is drawn towards the content, and will either decide between reading it or skipping the article while filtering the information by your most personal interest. I offer a limited feed for this blog as not every reader may not be interested in everything.
5. Clearly, an inactive feed should be marked as „inactive for xyz days“, but not completely be removed. This problem occurrs mostly for private feeds created by authors who are indeed able to contribute with world-changing ideas, but might be persecuted by their government in return for their written work.
6. It is very important, and I am not sure how you can not subscribe directly to a feed except if the subscription is moderated by the author(s). But certain people have experienced difficulties with the cut-copy-paste process of URLs. The feed reader software should link to the feeds and automatically catch them. Perhaps a special W3C guideline will aid this process.
7. A German feed is interesting, but not important at all as most German authors who write 7C-content usually distribute their content on a global scape.
8. Free accessability for at least a teaser article of 50 words or more instead of listing only headlines. A central archive for feeds will limit the chance of data loss for the smaller and greater authors, by which even articles of limited or restricted feeds are archived completely. Distribution of RSS Feeds by newspapers. To include Tagging contributes to the connectivity of feeds in order to create a network.
Mark Jen’s Resume on Google
MedienBeing introduced to your new job at Google on January 17th, 2005 and being fired just nearly two weeks later on January 28th, 2005 brought Google’s policies concerning bloggers to the medial focus. Publishing corporate information on his personal blog and utilizing this blog to openly criticize the company – Mark Jen commented on Google’s financial performance and future products. As he summarized, he expects the idea and concept of blogging to become the future’s new method of interacting, communicating and providing information for a connective community. Within this network, corporations must embrace this technology, allow employees to use them and always keep in mind – blogging is one of the fastest and most cost-effective methods of marketing. It will either create an amazing sympathy for you or destroy your carefully created corporate image in society.
Tags: Blogging, Community, Google, Image, Policy, Technology
Your Personal MSN Search
MedienHow to fight out a small battle with Microsoft? All you need is basically an invitation from MSN to participate in a promotion event for your own company. MSN offered to provide a personal search assistant accompanied by a laptop, mobile internet card and extra battery packages in order to advertise for its new search service. This person is meant to spend the day in your editorial office and research whatever you want by using MSN Search. But the key is to channelize the input for their search into four simple questions:
1) Which agencies work for Microsoft in the individual EU-countries and in Bruxelles in public affairs?
2) Which former politicians of EU-countries are by now employed at Microsoft’s public affairs / lobbying / public administration?
3) Do numbers exists on how much money is being spent by Microsoft in Europe each year in public affairs?
4) How many people does Microsoft employ in lobbying / public affairs in Bruxelles and Germany and how are the names for them?
What happened in the end – Microsoft opted out and got their promotion students back home. You can read the details at Netzpolitik.org in german.
Yahoo’s Slurp-Bot: Official Tips
BlogkulturThe search-engine company Yahoo released some useful tips and tricks on how to limit the sometimes aggressive behavior of their spider robot „Slurp“. In the previous months, this particular robot became one of the most annoying and invading robots of my Blogspirit account. I already used the suggested method of including the „crawl delay“ option in meta tags, tough the robot penetrates this small line of defense still. Dave Simpson suggests to enable Gzipped Files and Smart Caching to aid the process of restricting the robot’s aggressiveness. As I tested my subdomain with Netcraft, I was informed it’s Apache was using the mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a already. Since most image files for the HTML layout and formatting reside on my own server, the smart caching is little to worry about. Overall, Slurp is already restricted in it’s behavior but still very aggressive. I will try to analyse the whole situation in a near future once I’m done with the final tests.
Unlawful DVD Ripping
MedienThe idea to shoplift a DVD is hardly the usual among lawful citizens in any country. But instead of shoplifting, many people consider it is as legal as it seems to download the same movie for free on the internet. In the end it is nothing else but the same. Since I’m going to write a test on Managers and the Law in about 50 minutes, I feel a certain urge to publish this info concerning the daily habit of almost every manager – downloading illegal music or video files from the internet. Karl Wagenfuehr researched the penalties for a) shoplifting a DVD in comparison to b) downloading one.
Tags: DVD, Manager, Law, Penalty, Shoplifting
Two things I forgot to mention…
Medien… are meant to be summarized by this article in wholeness. Let’s see what I can make of it.
Bloglines
Well yes, rumors hold a significant piece of truth. The search-engine company Ask Jeeves made a deal to take over Bloglines. I honestly don’t understand why half of the blogs I’ve been reading were onto this trip, but it must have been something special for them. History became legend. Legend became myth. Where will Bloglines and Ask Jeeves end?
About.com
The major information portal About.com is apparently on its way to be auctioned off. I suppose the larger companies like AOL or MSN, probably the search-engine portals like Google or Yahoo are sticking their heads together to bull it out who’s going to take About.com over…
Google goes Local
Social MediaAfter GPS, GPRS, UMTS and whichever other network services have proven to be able to find your nearest gasstation or hotel and transmit this data to your mobile phone, Google introduced their own „Google Local“ search tool to browse the web for local information
s. And being the Sichelputzer who I am, I immediately wondered where to find my local dealer? After rushing to their site and searching for a Pizza in Flensburg, I was prompted an error as result. I am not listed? Of course, because the new service is limited to the United States only. Disappointing.Tags: Google, Local, Flensburg, Sichelputzer
Google as Domain Registrar
Social MediaWe’ve been made for suffering – Google’s power increases since the company announced its own role in the registration process for Domainnames. Google became a proud member of the ICANN’s registrars who may offer the registration for com, .net, .org, .biz., info, .name and .pro domains. Another episode of the continued reign of Google terror made by the Googleopus.
Tags: Google, Googleopus, ICANN
IT Magazine under DOS
MedienThe website of the largest German magazine for Information-Technology and Computer Science has suffered an intensive Denial of Service Attack. Since monday evening, the website has been temporarily unavailable, and especially today Heise.de is unreachable. The publishing house has offered a reward of 10.000 Euros for useful clues about the attackers.
Tags: Heise, DOS
Reaction
BlogkulturPositively, the support staff of Blogspirit reacted to my previous support tickets and suggestions, and I expect a new version of this service to appear very soon. I wonder how the new version will merge with the current version as it might compromise any self made HTML modifications – like in my own blog. As far as I can tell, the Trackback-Ping, Robots and Bandwidth modifications, and Comment-Spam filters will definately boost the engine.
Tags: Blogspirit, Robots, Bandwidth, Comment-Spam
RSS Questionaire
BlogkulturSiegried Hirsch recently created a small questionaire concerning the topic of site syndication with RSS. As I wish to contribute to this questionaire, I suggest you will answer the questions on your own – either within his article (in german) or in my blog – where I translated the questions into english. The information provided might help Blogspirit to develop, too.
My answers:
1. As sources, I prefer the direct method to accquire feeds by news websites, blogs (of course) and other portals such as Technorati or search engines. I hardly browse Feed-Directories since most of these services are filled with (subjectively) useless feeds. These directories are often unmoderated as they grow in time. A centralized feed directory and not an endless sum of competitors aids the process of keeping up to date with education and information.
2. Search-Engines must offer a clear distinction between commercial (company/corporate) and private feeds. An up to date sample of each feed found by the search engine must be visible before choosing to subscribe to it.
3. The categorization process for a feed may not be limited to a handful of categories since many feeds contain multiple topics and areas to cover. As much as search-engines restrict users, the important entries of a feed may never become visible to a greater audience. For feeds themselves, the idea to categorize the content is highly advisable and should not be forgotten by its author or service provider.
4. Feeds may be distributed completely, but while the number of subscribed-to feeds increases, the download traffic increases, too. To offer teasers or the first paragraph of an entry is as much marketing as newspapers cover with their printed version: The reader is drawn towards the content, and will either decide between reading it or skipping the article while filtering the information by your most personal interest. I offer a limited feed for this blog as not every reader may not be interested in everything.
5. Clearly, an inactive feed should be marked as „inactive for xyz days“, but not completely be removed. This problem occurrs mostly for private feeds created by authors who are indeed able to contribute with world-changing ideas, but might be persecuted by their government in return for their written work.
6. It is very important, and I am not sure how you can not subscribe directly to a feed except if the subscription is moderated by the author(s). But certain people have experienced difficulties with the cut-copy-paste process of URLs. The feed reader software should link to the feeds and automatically catch them. Perhaps a special W3C guideline will aid this process.
7. A German feed is interesting, but not important at all as most German authors who write 7C-content usually distribute their content on a global scape.
8. Free accessability for at least a teaser article of 50 words or more instead of listing only headlines. A central archive for feeds will limit the chance of data loss for the smaller and greater authors, by which even articles of limited or restricted feeds are archived completely. Distribution of RSS Feeds by newspapers. To include Tagging contributes to the connectivity of feeds in order to create a network.