adoption curve dot net

I’ve noticed a number of interesting blogs over the past couple of weeks that are hosted on Blogger – mostly because there are comments or trackbacks to postings here. As a rule, I’ll go and read a few posts on the blog that’s linking, and more often than not I’ll subscribe to it – but that’s almost impossible to do if it’s a Blogger blog.

Why? They don’t have RSS feeds.

Apparently (after digging through the Blogger FAQs) RSS feeds are a Blogger Pro feature. The standard service doesn’t provide any kind of syndication – instead they recommend you go to Feedburner

Which strikes me as quite frankly daft. What’s the point of offering any kind of blog service – free or paid for – that doesn’t provide syndication? Surely that’s an integral part of what blogs are about – it’s a bit like a rental company offering their cars without steering wheels unless you upgrade to their premium rates. I can understand wanting to hold back some features as an incentive to upgrade to a higher revenue service – but surely syndication is a fundamental?

UPDATE: Commenters have commented, and I stand corrected: standard Blogger does have syndication – Atom 0.3 to be precise – but it’s not necessarily obvious if the blogger (this could get complicated – “I’m a Blogger blogger”) uses custom templates and doesn’t push their feed.

Which is just as bizarre as a blogging service not having feeds in the first place if you think about it – why would you want to have a blog without a feed? It’s a bit like hiring a rental car, but then declining the rear offside wheel along with the collision damage waiver…

Filed under ‘reactionary old farts’:

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.

That’s the president-elect of the American Library Association, reacting to some criticism of his article in the Los Angeles Times which suggested that Google digitizing texts and making them available for search might not be such a good idea.

Which actually illustrates rather neatly the intersection of two rather 20th century viewpoints – on the one hand, you’ve got Mr Gorman who seems to view bloggers in much the same light as he no doubt views people who chew gum in his library. Information, it seems, isn’t for everyone – instead it’s to be handed down piece by carefully-selected piece to the great unwashed masses by those who have made it their lives’ work to mediate, filter and carefully shelve it.

And on the other, you’ve got the Los Angeles Times, who have locked the original article away behind their paywall, neatly removing it – and them – from any relevance as far as the web is concerned. I could have linked to them, sending a few visitors their way perhaps, or used my fair use rights and quoted a line or two.

The irony given the subject of Mr Gorman’s rant is that rather than hand over $5 or so to the LA Times, his article was available for free after a few minute’s Googling…

If you’re not in the mood to read a rant, now might be the time to hit the ‘back’ button. If you are, bear with me while I get something off my chest.

If you follow the news in the UK and you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of days, then you’ll have found it difficult to miss the announcement of the UK Government’s new initiative to make the net safe for us all – IT Safe. I quote:

ITsafe is designed to provide both home users and small businesses with proven, plain English advice to help protect computers, mobile phones and other devices from malicious attack.    It consists of both the Advice on this website, and a low-volume Alerting Service.

All laudable enough, you’d think, so why the rant?

THERE’S NO *&$£@*& RSS FEED!!!

I’m not going to foam at the mouth about how the front page is less to do with securing you against electronic attack than it is a pre-election publicity stunt for headline-grabbing lobby-fodder responsible for the biggest assault on civil rights since the ink dried on the Magna Carta.. Or that they’ve launched the site to provide ‘alerts’ without actually providing any. Or that they specifically disclaim “responsibility for the accuracy, availability, completeness or usefulness of any of the information which is available on, or via, the website or our e-mails.” Or that the site itself looks like it’s been knocked up in a 12-year old’s lunch hour using Frontpage.

But launching a site where the only means of communicating with the target audience is email is cluelessness writ large. Fantastically useful that will be, as the emails pile up in Outlook Express inboxes surrounded by viruses, spam and phishing attempts.

And I don’t care about the argument that says ‘RSS is for geeks, and no-one will know what an RSS feed is’. This is a site (allegedly) put together by people who know enough about IT and technology to at least have heard of RSS. The effort of creating an RSS feed would have been trivial in the scale of the no-doubt six-figure sum that has been spent on creating this. It was an opportunity to show that there IS an alternative to email as a means of distributing this kind of information, and it’s been wasted.

I predict that this site will be updated spasmodically until after May 5th, and will then decay quietly as it collects digital tumbleweed like the pre-election stunt it is.

There, I feel better now. Rant over.