adoption curve dot net

Courtesy of Steve Rubel, here’s an ingenious way of turning non-RSS enabled news sources into RSS feeds, using GoogleNews and Gnews2RSS. Exceedingly useful for keeping up with those sites that haven’t got around to smelling the coffee and turning on their RSS feeds.

A similar way of achieving the same ends is through NewsIsFree, who have taken a portal approach – they claim to monitor 13,166 sources (currently) and offer a range of premium services. Interestingly they’re also including advertisements interleaved with the actual news items, something which I’m finding suprisingly unobtrusive. Effectively I just scan over the ads in much the same way as I would an article that doesn’t interest me – so it’s not entirely clear what kind of CPM metrics could be used to work out the ad’s payback.

But this type of ultra-personalised news is most definitely the future – now if only electronic paper would hurry itself up and arrive…

This is a test post to check the webfeeds…

the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy on Radio 4.

Geek heaven…

I’ve just been hit by a tsunami of comment spam from someone on a network in Sweden (assuming that they’re not spoofing their IP address, of course.) I’ve set Wordpress to automatically moderate all comments so they don’t get posted unless I specifically allow each one, but it’s still a pain having to delete a hundred-odd rogue ones. So as they were all coming from a specific IP address, I’ve banned it using a .htaccess file.

For my future reference, this is the format – in the .htaccess file, add the following lines:

order allow,deny

deny from 122.222.333.444

deny from 999.888.777.

allow from all

The first line sets the default action – allow first, then deny.

The second line denies access from a specific IP address

The third line denies access from a specific subnet – i.e. anything with an address of 999.888.777.1 to 999.888.777.254

The fourth line allows access to all other addresses.

The best part is looking at the server logs, and seeing them battering their heads against the block…

I might find his “bloggers are sad wankers who do nothing but post articles online expressing their often fatuous opinions” opinion a little – erm – ironic given that’s pretty much what he does for a living, but Andrew Orlowski does spout some sense every now and again:

Both the technology people and the music people are sharing the collective hallucination that technology will save them but it won’t

Somehow, you’d expect David Trimble – a lawyer-turned-politician who always seems to have an uptight holding-my-breath-until-I-turn-blue expression that makes me wonder if he went into politics because he found law lecturing too exciting – to have a wife called Daphne, wouldn’t you?

(She’s a solicitor, too…)

Forgive the rant for a moment, if you will, but this posting at Master New Media is a symptom of something that seems to have become rather worryingly prevalent at the moment – namely that we’re all getting just a little bit up ourselves about blogging and RSS and the ‘death of mainstream media’ and so on’:

This is a clear sign of how incompetent the major news media outlets are gradually becoming when it comes to good reporting. A pro blogger offers much greater value without swamping my field of vision with ads everywhere.

‘Why?’ you might be asking yourself. Are we talking about missing the next Watergate, or definitive proof that there was someone else on the grassy knoll? Actually, no. The clear sign of incompetence was, and I quote:

In all cases Anne Chen should have written “Really Simple Syndication” and not “Real Simple Syndication”. And someone else after her, approving this for online publishing should have known better too.

It’s exactly this kind of precious, holier-than-thou, I-know-my-acronyms-better-that-you attitude to a new technology that slows down its adoption by mainstream technology users. Presenting what is – after all, in the grand scheme of things – a fairly marginally useful technology as some kind of precisely-worded religion is not going to make your average PHB sit up and take notice. They’re going to stick with what they know, thank you, because it’s safe and familiar and they don’t have to worry about being made to look a fool in front of their peer group because the R in RSS stands for Really and not Real.

Of course, this post might be a tongue-in-cheek spoof, in which case count me in as suckered – but if not, get over it! Given the holy wars and flying vitriol raging over syndication, a technical journalist venturing into the fray should be congratulated rather than criticised, let along picked up on a point of pedantry.