RSS Questionaire

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.

Tags: , ,

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Blogging with Tags

I suggest the programming department of Blogspirit might want to take a look at these scripts to implement some functionality for this service provider to implement the feature to create a connective network consisting of Technorati.com’s tags. The company offers this service as idea of a simple category name. Everybody from any kind of Blog can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any senseful descriptor (tag).

A few plugins have been released for WordPress, one of the open-source software packages to create your own Blog. You can find more material on the plugin at TechnoTag. The plugins feature an automatic addon to each entry by which you may manually enter tags in a textfield or by which the plugin detects key words and elements by filtering the entry for word-relevancy.

Tags: Blogspirit, Sichelputzer, ,

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12 Reasons against nofollow

As featured on NoNoFollow.net, a new discussion has centered on the recent matter events caused by Google’s plan to implement the method of filtering links for their pagerank and searchindex systems.

As the argument rel=“nofollow“ will only restrict the robots to continously follow links, any blog can contain further spam as the filtering for spam can only be implemented in the blog software manually, via a plugin or directly on the side of the blog service provider. Almost too easy, an automatically created link can be formatted with the nofollow argument. This can be done secretly in any message system or bullitin board software without noticing the users. It may be used to restrict the number of links within html pages and might affect the pagerank of your own website if you use generic tools like this blogsoftware. On top of this, a human being will not be interested in the differences of normal links and the nofollow links as human beings are usually able to determine whether the link leads towards relevant content or spam.
The whole argument causes the filtering of link, the discrimination of users, changing the idea of the web, the discrimination of weblogs, the dissemination of free speech – all of this is based on the development by only search engine companies and not the W3C (World-Wide-Web Consortium) who should be responsible and decidable in concern of these matters.

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Inter-Linking the Sichelputzer

After reading the comments on Mr. Anonymous’s blog, I figure its good to know that modern CEO’s like David Sivry are able to respond to even minor issues as expressed in The Shining Ones. Preferably, I like the services of Technorati.com, and over all I believe its time to tag myself. As Sichelputzer (this was the tag), I visited the blog of David Sivry and noticed a nice functionality add-on which might be useful for Blogspirit, too. The idea to display Technorati’s „Cosmos“ link serves as much as the Trackback-Ping plug-in: The entire idea of inter-linking various search engines (preferably those specialized for weblogs) will already add a higher global connectivity to other blogs and authors who might link back to your own blog or simply write about similar or identical topics.

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Functionality Additions

I decided it was time to add a higher usability to this blog and inserted this small snipplet into the templates for the permalinks (Design -> Advanced Settings -> Permalink Template). You can see the result below each post while displaying the comment or permalink page. It enables the search for further information of each individual post or topic on Technorati, Bloglines, Feedster and Google.

Search for this topic elsewhere:
Technorati |
Bloglines |
Feedster |
Google

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Update: Against Googles Methods

As previously mentioned in GoogleBlog: Preventing comment spam, the search engine built up a major cooperation with various blog hosting providers. Nevertheless, it appears to be a neat trick by Google to establish a new content-filter only to recognize websites as websites or in specific as weblogs. I cannot advise to integrate the rel=“nofollow“ attribute to any blog software as it clearly identifies the majority of weblogs. It would only grant Google the perrmission to recalculate the pagerank for paying customers – to raise their pagerank and lower the pagerank of any weblog.
I decided to implement a special CSS snippet by Phil Ringalda to lure everybody on any rel=“nofollow“ link:

a[rel~="nofollow"] {
  text-decoration:blink !important;
  color:lime ! important;
}
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Update: Creative Commons Deed

Last night I updated my Creative Commons Deed (CCD). I advise every blogger, especialy those here at Blogspirit, to include his or her personal Creative Common Deed. Everybody is advised to keep in mind the following (as excerpt from the original CCD):

You as a reader are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work; and to make derivative works. All of this work may only be used under the following conditions:
1. Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
2. Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
3. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
4. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
5. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license).

Remember the disclaimer of Creative Commons, as you are in no way receiving an attorney-client relationship.

The Commons Deed is not a license. It is simply a handy reference for understanding the Legal Code (the full license) — it is a human-readable expression of some of its key terms. Think of it as the user-friendly interface to the Legal Code beneath. This Deed itself has no legal value, and its contents do not appear in the actual license. Creative Commons is not a law firm and does not provide legal services. Distributing of, displaying of, or linking to this Commons Deed does not create an attorney-client relationship.

Further information on Creative Commons can be found at the CC’s weblog.

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Robot Trouble

I was quite amazed as I noticed a total of 84MB traffic for this blog. I was the prancing pony, not someone else, but just me. Seen through pink glasses, it definately appeared as if many people visited my blog in the past days. But then the kickback to reality threw me off the fence: More than half of the traffic was created by robots, especially „slurp“ hit the road with 42MB! I hope Blogspirit will raise the montly limit of 250MB, because I am afraid of unavailability of my content in a few weeks as people become more and more aware of it, especially as it is indexed in the search engines or directories. I modified the revisit-after tag to be set for 7 and 14 days on the permalink/comment and archive/categories pages. Hopefully, this setting will come into effect as soon as possible. I figured my blog’s start page creates roughly 40kb-70kb, but I do not wish to destroy the whole layout to save space…

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Weird Problems

I don’t know why, but apparently I have a few problems with the blog… its content won’t show up on the first page, a few categories and -even worse- … it affects the rss feed. I remember Thomas wrote an issue concerning the caching of the database and server, however by reloading or refreshing my posts, the problem won’t be solved. Nevertheless, I hope by posting a random entry like this one the problem shall be no more… I’m just going to start to keep track of it – I think!

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GoogleBlog: Preventing comment spam

,

To fight the increasing problem of comment spam has become a priority for blog hosting providers, software developpers and even search engines. Google itself has introduced a new method to disable advertisement links found in the comment pages. As these spammers attempt to multiply their website addresses to increase their google-pagerank, the company has set up a new filter for their spider robot.

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=“nofollow“) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. […] We hope the web software community will quickly adopt this attribute […]

Major service providers plan to cooperate with Google. Blogspirit itself probably does not need to worry about the rel=“nofollow“ attribute as the comments are permitted to use html or actively link to other sites. Nevertheless, you may edit the permalink page to implement strings.

Edit: I discontinued to publish how to effectively (?) modify Blogspirit’s code…

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