Derek Scruggs

Dave: The number for a feed gets bumped by one every time the feed is read and it contains new content.

By “read,” do you mean “downloaded by the aggregator” or “viewed by the subscriber?”
In my tests with Radio, it kept hitting my feed over and over, regardless of whether content had changed. (It also totally barfed on HTTP 301 permanent redirect, but that’s another story…)
Maybe that’s because I wasn’t using Manila to publish. Will this technique work for non-Manila publishing tools and non-Radio aggregators?If so, I’m all for it.

And circling back to my original post – subscriber tracking is just gravy. The real issue is making it a no-brainer for subscribers. Below is something someone wrote on the Braintrust discussion list in which I’ve been promoting RSS. This is from Frank Fleishcher of Breeders.net. He makes a living selling things on the web and is interested in using RSS on his site:

I guess I *am* a technophobe, or just call me Joe Average. I don’t have *time* to spend the better part of a day trying to ‘get’ a fuzzy technology just to see how works just in case it might fit my future plans. After Chris’ Amazon post [make sure you read the comments on that], I spent a couple hours, downloaded and installed one of the recommended newsreaders (Freereader) and thought, “now, I’ll see some seamless magic!”. Not! Clicked on the XML link next to a subject of interest on Chris’ Amazon page, and guess what happened. Nothing! Only saw results when I pasted the URL into Freereader. Who needs that?

Point of the message? Like anything new, RSS needs to attain a critical mass in order to catch on. I would suggest that those who support it and want it to catch on should not take for it for granted that non-tech internet publishers like me will jump on the bandwagon without a much clearer picture of how it works

While the RSS crowd works itself into a frenzy about “Blog This,” they ignore the most critical part of the user experience: making it easier for consumers to subscribe. If and when Google comes out with “Subscribe to This,” consumption of RSS will go up by an order of magnitude. And where the subscribers are, so will go the publishers. The average publisher will do much more due diligence in selecting a tool than the average user will in selecting an aggregator, so Manila. MT et al can compete and succeed on their merits, not on whether they’re on a Google toolbar. (I mean, come on! If the client were so important, wouldn’t Apache be dead by now?)

The RSS crowd needs to make a commitment to defining this standard now, before Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft et al do it for them.

If you’re wondering why I don’t have an RSS feed, it’s because Blogger Pro still is not accepting upgrades. I’ve been begging them to take my money for over a month, but I guess it’s not green enough.

Just got back from speaking (along with Rageboy aka Chris Locke) at RMIUG. A copy of the PowerPoint is here.

Everyone was clearly worried about the direction standards might take and whether/when/how Microsoft/AOL would come to dominate the space. I told them don’t worry, the RSS community will solve that problem once we get done with the critical issue of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Is Google Evil? When it comes to blogging, some would have you think so. A raging debate about this misses the whole point. Even Google misses it, but I suspect they won’t for long.

Dave Winer is thinking out loud about developing a tool to harmonize subscriptions. Sounds awesome. While you’re developing a protocol to do this, why not include the actual RSS feeds in the equation? There currently is no way (short of password protection) for a feed publisher to know how many unique subscribers it has to a feed. So why not ping the publisher at the same time you ping the feed harmonizer?

I’ve experimented with a few HTTP hacks to do this, one of which works reasonably well with NewsGator and FeedDemon, but not other aggregators. It would be nice to see a standard method that involves the aggregator directly in the subscription process.

Here’s my vote for press release of the year. Funny, clever and good news to boot.