12.29.09
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Newsflash! RSS still not dead: Story at 11.

I’ve lost count of the number of times over the years various people have declared RSS to be dead, dying, moribund, comatose or laid low with a dose of swine flu. The latest is a piece by Read Write Web’s Richard MacManus who says, RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline.

RSS is a bit of a weird duck, really. It is infrastructure more than it is a service and there’s a distinct lack of clarity outside the tech community about what it is and what it does. That’s not helped by the fact that there are competing standards, not to mention competing terms: RSS (and all its version numbers), RDF, Atom, web feeds, news feeds, syndication, syndication feeds, even just plain ‘feeds’.

In short, RSS confuses people. It’s not until I explain how easily RSS can save time that people start to become interested. In a business context, RSS is invaluable. So many information publishers now produce RSS feeds of one stripe or another that it has become possible to draw together huge numbers of sources in one place very easily indeed. Anyone in market or competitive intelligence, marketing, PR, research, and any other department that relies on aggregating information should be all over RSS like a rash. But they aren’t. Why?

This is where RWW’s piece becomes relevant. At best there is stagnation in the RSS reader market, at worst there is a genuine decline. RWW reports:

[…] Feedburner no longer publishes any useful data about RSS Readers. The product has been infrequently updated since Google acquired it in June 2007 and it no longer even has a proper blog (a Google blog called Adsense For Feeds was the closest I could find).

Pheedo also has gone quiet from a blogging perspective – its last blog post was January 2009.

[…] There’s little sign of life on Bloglines’ blog either and its Compete.com traffic numbers show a decline since June 2009.

Netvibes, FriendFeed, Newsgator and PostRank are the only other english language competitors showing in our Feedburner numbers. The others are either browser (Firefox) or operating system readers.

Also note that Newsgator shut down its online RSS Reader at the end of July this year.

We are not seeing the kind of innovation that we need in the RSS market. I suspect that part of this has been because businesses have been very slow to realise the usefulness of RSS and so hoped-for licensing income hasn’t been forthcoming for aggregation vendors. Partly this is down to the fact that getting new software assessed, accepted and rolled out through business is a long, tedious process in most companies – long enough to kill off relationships with cashflow sensitive start-ups.

A friend of mine once told me that it took his company 18 months to code-check new software. Doing that with social tools is IT suicide – most tools have iterated half a dozen times in that period. At least. It’s no wonder that most of the companies I talk to have not implemented any RSS readers internally. By the time they’ve got the software approved, it’s out of date.

This means that people are stuck using web-based applications. Whilst Netvibes and Google Reader are very good at what they do, they are also a little limited. Google Reader is a very introspective tool – you can share stuff with other people within Google Reader, but there are no tools for sharing on Twitter, Delicious, Instapaper etc. Netvibes does a bit more, in that you can share on Twitter or Facebook, but again it doesn’t embed itself in the wider content-reading ecosystem.

RSS still has huge potential, but the landscape it sits within is complicated, comprising of RSS sources, RSS readers, IT department policy makers, and those social media community members who are actually still communicating to business that this is a really useful tool.

That’s a lot of ducks to get in a row, but I am pretty sure (or rather, I hope!) that at some point, it’s going to happen. I wouldn’t call time of death on RSS just yet.

12.28.09
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links for 2009-12-28

12.27.09
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links for 2009-12-27

12.25.09
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links for 2009-12-25

  • NPR Hires Key Staff For Local News Effort; Finalizes Station List
    Kevin: National Public Radio in the US is launching an ambitious local news effort known as Project Argo. They have $3m in foundation support from the Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This hire definitely caught my eye. "Knight Foundation’s Matt Thompson, co-producer of viral hit Epic 2004, joins as editorial product manager Feb. 1." NPR head of digital Kinsey Wilson says the project is aimed at replacing what newspapers have traditionally done as newspapers continue to struggle. The project partners with a dozen stations across the country, although most are big city stations and most are in coastal states. Each station will have a blogger-journalist to contribute to the project.
    (tags: local npr radio)
12.24.09
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links for 2009-12-24

  • Is A Tablet At The Heart Of Apple's Upcoming TV Subscription?
    Kevin: Apple is reportedly in talks with US TV networks for subscription TV services. Apple TV hasn't seemed to get a lot of love from Steve Jobs, but it sounds like iTunes TV subscriptions will be part of a broader hardware strategy from Apple which includes the mythical Apple tablet. Publishers like Conde Nast are already preparing to deliver content to Apple's tablet and other media slates.
    (tags: apple TV VoD tablet mediaslate)
12.24.09
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Metrics, Part 4: Subjective measurements

(If you haven’t already read them, you might like to take a look at Part 1: The webstats legacy, Metrics, Part 2: Are we measuring the right things?) and Metrics, Part 3: What are your success criteria?)

In the last instalment of this series I mentioned that sometimes there just aren’t objective metrics that we can use to help us understand the repercussions of our actions. Yet much of what we try to achieve with social media projects is exactly this sort of unmeasurable thing.

No amount of understanding of page views, for example, is going to tell us how the people who have viewed that page feel about it. Did they come because they were interested? Or because they were outraged? Is your comment community a healthy one or a pit of raging hatred? Are your staff better able to collaborate now you have a wiki or are they finding it difficult to keep another datastore up to date?

There are two ways round this:

  • Surveys
  • Subjective measurement scales

Surveys are sometimes the only way you can get a sense for how well a social media project is going. All the metrics in the world won’t tell you if your staff are finding their internal blogs useful or burdensome. Random anecdotes are liable to mislead as you’ll end up relying on either the vocal evangelists who will give you an overly rosy picture, or the vocal naysayers who will give you an overly pessimistic picture. The truth is likely to be in the middle somewhere, and the only way that you can find out where is to ask people.

Survey questions need to be very carefully constructed, however, to ensure that they are not leading people to answer a certain way. At the very least, make sure that questions are worded in a neutral way and that you cover all bases for the answer options you give. Test and retest surveys as it’s so easy to get something crucial wrong!

The second way to try and measure subjective metrics is to create a scale and regularly assess activity against that scale. If you were assessing the comments in your customer-facing community, for example, you might consider a scale like this:

?????…..Lively discussion, readers are replying to each other, tone is polite, constructive information is shared

????………Moderate amount of discussion, readers replying to each other, tone is polite, some useful information shared

???………….Little discussion, readers reply only to author, tone is mainly polite, not much information shared

??……………..Discussion is moribund OR Tone of discussion negative, tone is impolite, no information shared

?…………………Abusive discussion OR Discussion is just a torrent of “me too” comments

?…………………No discussion

The idea here isn’t to create an enormous cognitive load but to try and have a consistent understanding of what we mean when we rate something 3 out of 5. This means keeping scales clear and simple, and avoiding any ambiguity such as language which could be misunderstood or which has an inherent value judgement that could sway an assessment.

I would also suggest that valuable data would be compiled by having a varied group of people rating on a regular basis and then averaging scores. That would hopefully smooth out any variation in interpretation of the scale or personal opinion.

Again, I’m going to stress that both these methods need to be put in place and measurement started before a project begins. Thinking ahead is just so worth the effort.

In all honesty, I’ve never had a client do either surveys or subjective scales. Mainly because none of them have ever really given enough thought to metrics before they start a project. It’s a shame because with services like Survey Monkey, it’s really not hard to do.

12.23.09
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links for 2009-12-23

12.23.09
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Developing etiquette

Technological change is outpacing our ability as a society to negotiate and agree upon acceptable behaviour sets for each new tool type. The mobile is a great example of this: Some of us think that it’s rude to sit in a cinema yapping away on your mobile, whilst others feel that it’s not only acceptable but also their right.

Where social media steals a march on mobile phones is that we can use the very tools we are discussing to negotiate what acceptable behaviour means. What is rude on a social network? What is expected on a wiki? And what is good etiquette for comments?

Justine Larbalestier has a great post outlining what people engaging in comment threads should do before plunging in, including:

  • Read the entire post before commenting. Nothing is more annoying to a blogger than to have someone say “But why did you not mention French beanbags?” when you have just spent six paragraphs doing exactly that.

And:

  • Do not explode on to a comment thread in a whirl of fire and outrage. Particularly don’t do this if all the discourse up to that point has been calm and measured.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been online for so long, but it does seem to me that most of these are no-brainers, yet they still appear to be news to some! Will the day ever come where online etiquette is pervasive or are manners a thing of the past?