281–290 of 358 posts
I loved the 'RSS feed' ecosystem but it did have its problems. Plain old 'everything you can eat' RSS suffered from lack of a decent curation system. You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When the number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much, you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and still might do. Most never got round to this an…
Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.
Don't forget Google. In fact, it's not just RSS; it's other open standards (e.g. XMPP) that they embraced initially, then dropped.
I loved the 'RSS feed' ecosystem but it did have its problems. Plain old 'everything you can eat' RSS suffered from lack of a decent curation system. You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When the number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much, you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and still might do. Most never got round to this an…
This describes my social media feed / process, and I would imagine most others as well.
Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.
Twitter used to have RSS versions of every profile, accessible through api.twitter.com without credentials. It was awesome. They retired it years ago... I took the time to make a proxy (Twitter API to RSS), and though I did write a few more, a lot more services still provide feeds (such as YouTube, Reddit, Steam, GitHub) than I thought they would. RSS is still going strong.
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If they use ad networks I can block it, but inline and serve from their own servers and I cannot. Maybe it'll work, maybe it will not, but I'm inclined to believe it will to the same extend advertising works in newspapers and magazines.
Well, it is a fact that it doesn't work. I'm not making this up. The whole industry knows it doesn't work. This type of advertising has a name of its own: "native advertising". Companies like Buzzfeed, etc. made a lot of money in the beginning by taking advantage of this new format, essentially tricking readers into thinking that these are actual real content. However it doesn't work as well as it used to because peo…
I'm not saying it should be a flashing banner on top, but it be somewhat incorporated in a format and length such that people aren't too annoyed - probably in corporation with the "sponsor". We know this works from the web because advertisers keep paying money for the ad space through articles.
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What is the "economic model" you speak of? It's surely not banner ads, and it's surely not search ads. Also it can't do behavioral targeting. Please educate me
They're "sponsored by", just like some YouTubers do. So if your target audience is significant, you can choose to include something from a sponsor in return for a payment.
However, the "sponsorship" model (a very few advertisers paying content creators to--usually manually--include mention of them in their content) is much more concerning to me than the "black box ad auction" model (content creators get money from an advertising aggregator like Google for putting a box on their page).
There's a spectrum there, to be sure, but with sponsorship it's much easier for advertisers to explicitly or implicitly influence the content creators outside of the "this podcast funded by FooBarCorp!" segments. Even without strong-arming creators, the knowledge of sponsorship can have a chilling effect on some content (i.e. it's just tawdry to start a segment about military drones being bad and then have to state that Lockheed Martin is your sponsor).
This can have two outcomes, neither of them good. Option one is that content creators can spend a lot of time trying to select/vet/court sponsors that align with their interests. This is the NPR model, and even they have trouble getting it right. Smaller creators may not have the time or ability to emulate it.
Option two is content that drifts into the realm of affiliate marketing as sponsors exert more influence over creators.
Neither of those have happened yet because the market is not yet saturated, I suspect.
I'd prefer black-box auctioned ads over that any day, even with the drawbacks of that system (ad aggregator influence, pervasive tracking, content delivery engineered for metrics collection, potential for sketchy ads to run on your site).
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RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug. I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for contro…
How come it doesn't? I'm a paying subscriber of Ars Technica so I have unique personified URLs to access various of their feeds. You also can include images from the web into the feed and most of the clients will gladly render it. There are myriads of tricks you can use to collect data.
Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.
RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug. I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for contro…
> No suspicious javascript. My only problem with this is the very positive trend towards design-heavy journalism... just like the NYTimes Wind Turbine article currently on the homepage: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/ener... I love the Instapaper/RSS style consumption as much as anyone but that doesn't mean that multi-MB pages with plenty of JS/CSS/Images are always a bad thing. Maybe the sol…