Confused about the difference between Atom and RSS? Perplexed by why RSS feeds have XML buttons? Glynn Moody wades through the alphabet soup with this article on syndication…
Archive for May 2004
There’s a great example of what blogging means for the way in which you relate to your customers being played out on web right at the moment. Six Apart is the company that developed the Moveable Type blogging software application which powers this and a huge number of other blogs – and they’ve just (in the past 24 hours) brought out the latest version.
This wouldn’t be news unless you were particularly interested in weblog software, were it not for the fact that at the same time, Six Apart have revamped their pricing structure. Previously, the software was free for non-commercial use, with a flat-rate fee for use in for-profit situations. Now that’s all changed, and the changes are kicking up a storm.
As you’d expect from a company writing this type of software, the changes were announced on the blog of Mena Trott, one half of the original founders of Six Apart. Her article is upbeat and enthusiastic, as you’d expect, selling the benefits of the new package and justifying the charging structure. But scroll on down to the trackbacks – excerpts of comments about the article on other blogs – and a completely different picture emerges. The changes are being universally decried as counter-productive, unfair and generally bad news for the customers of Six Apart. So on the one hand, the company is pitching its new product and explaining why the pricing was right, and on exactly the same forum, the customers are weighing in with exactly the opposite view. The conversations aren’t being played out behind the scenes in support forums or “sucks” sites – they’re right there on the front page for everyone to see.
Which is a pretty courageous thing for Six Apart to do, in my opinion. It’s not something you could imagine a large corporate business doing – imagine if Shell gave over a significant proportion of it’s corporate website to opinions protesting its activities in Nigeria, for example.
And there’s two ways an organisation could look at this. One is to throw up their hands in horror at the potential for negative publicity, and pull the dissenting views off the page. It’s probably not being too cynical to wonder if that’s not what the vast majority of organisations would do – scarcely a day goes by without another story about a company seeking to shut down a site or a forum where customers are expressing negative views.
But the alternative would be to look at this as customer feedback of the most direct and valuable kind possible. Here’s one of the most important decisions a company can take, and the feedback is almost universally negative. At the very least, you’d want to revisit some of your assumptions in the light of the criticisms, if not start to wonder “have we got it completely wrong?” And you’re not getting this feedback in six months time as the sales graph starts to head south – it’s as soon as the product hits the market.
What Six Apart will do remains to be seen, but we can be fairly sure that they’ll be sitting up and taking notice of the comments.
This probably makes me some kind of a pervert in Mac circles, but I’ve just bought a Dell Axim Pocket PC. It’s now incongrously sitting in its chrome-effect cradle next to my aluminium PowerBook, the shame of it all.
There’s actually a good reason for getting an Axim rather than a Palm – which seems to be the ‘approved’ PDA of choice for the Apple cogniscenti – which is that one of the projects I’m working on at the moment involves RSS feeds to handheld devices, and the corporate standard is Pocket PC. But it was actually something of a suprise, and it’s made me realise just how far the PDA market has come since I last bought one (which was sometime in 1999, unless you count a P800 last year).
The device itself is reasonably-well screwed together – it hasn’t quite got the same degree of brick-shithouseness that the Palms have, but that’s offset by the fact that it’s a) small, and b) got an extremely bright screen. The killer app as far as I was concerned was the wifi capability – Bluetooth is pretty much standard on PDAs now, but there still seems to something of a premium as far as wifi is concerned. The high-end Palms don’t do onboard wifi, nor will they run Pocket Skype. Put that together with PocketFeed (how could you not use software written by The Furrygoat Experience?), and it’s pretty much exactly what I was looking for, development-platform-wise.
Learning points from today are:
1) when banging head against firm surface because said PDA’s wifi connection isn’t working, remembering that you’ve enabled MAC address filtering on your base station will save hours of fun and amusement;
2) The MAC address that the Dell wireless utility reports is bollocks, so vx-IPconfig is the utility du jour once you’ve remembered about the MAC address filtering;
3) Dell’s documentation hasn’t improved any since I last bought any Dell kit;
4) Missing Sync works a treat syncing between the Axim and iCal etc etc.
I’ve been waiting for the latest version of Moveable Type for a while, partly because I keep hearing stories about how wonderful the new features are going to me (and given that I’m banging my head against MT-XMLRPC and mt.setPostCategories at the moment, a slightly less crunchy way of setting categories would have been nice) The other
reason being that I’m an inveterate hair-trigger ‘upgrade at the first opportunity’ geek of the highest order)
But then I read the new licensing regime for MT3, and now I’m not too sure. I suppose they’re about to make the transition from a gang of hackers with a neat package, to a commercial enterprise with a full-blown product – but I can’t help but feel they’re risking their core market here. There’s not a lot of detail on what the freebie license will cover, and the commercial pricing seems pretty expensive given the competition that they’re up against. 6A are in a difficult position – they’ve got to pay the bills after all – but I can’t help but think that this is going to cause the user base to haemorrage.
Which is all the more annoying because I was all set to start plugging MT as the answer to a couple of the projects that I’ve got on the go at the moment – as a non-scary CMS platform it’s got a lot going for it, but $700 is a lot of money for the sixth user. Especially as Wordpress is a free-as-in-beer alternative, and it’s written in PHP.
And it doesn’t look like I’m the only one having doubts – checkout the linkage from here…
Here’s an intruiging look at what a converged future could hold, from Dave Pollard:
It’s 2015. Thirteen-year-old Kari Ross just got a PTV for her birthday, the much-anticipated PC/TV convergence product
It’s somewhat William Gibson-esque, but I like the sound of MC2:
MC2, which stands for Managing Content & Communications, is the only software package Kari ever learned to use. It has three ‘modes’, represented by a pencil cursor (for document/message writing and annotation), a hand cursor (for saving, sending, publishing and otherwise moving content from one place to another), and a telephone cursor (for connecting with other people and their content).
Here’s another example of how wikis can be used – this time for building and tracking a PR plan at Voce Communications:
With the wiki, it’s easier to start with an agreed upon plan and build out different projects via the wiki so that the client can see (real-time) where our account team is executing – and where it’s not.
(Via Ross Mayfield)
I completely missed the fact that this blog was a year old yesterday. ..
