Teach42

Rick Klau is the presenter and he’ll be talking about RSS and feeds. He’s the VP of business development for Feedburner, so I’d imagine that he knows what he’s talking about!

Bah. Must. Stop. ADD. Urges. Hearing that he works for Feedburner made me wonder about my own stats. So I logged into Feedburner for the first time in months and discovered that they’ve made quite a few changes. So of course, I had to explore a bit, which took me to a link, which led me to something else, and so on and so on. Back to topic.

We’re getting a little history lesson about how he came to be involved. One interesting thing that he’s talking about is that Microsoft is making RSS a major part of Vista. They’re saying that RSS and subscriable content is going to be built right into the operating system and will be prominent throughout it. Actually, thinking back on it now, Windows has dabbled in this idea before. Anyone he remembers that part of Windows that allowed you to make your background picture a web page and populate it with live content will know what I’m talking about. Just looked it up, it was called Active Desktop. It was a great idea, but didn’t work too well. Total resource hog. Slowed your computer to a crawl. Be interesting to see if they use RSS to try to create a better version of it.

Interesting idea. The first generation of the web was basically getting content up there. The second generation of the web was making it all searchable. The third generation is making it subscribable. I’m not sure I got that down right, I was too busy paying attention to write down the details!

The biggest problem with RSS is that people can still see the feeds. The feed should be invisible for the end user, or at least transparent. Someone once told Mark that 80% of the people who click on his feed, leave his page altogether. Think about it, they get a massive page of code that’s terrifying to the common person, they have no idea what to do with it, so they close the window. Of course, that also closes their link back to the web site. Mental note: Gotta change that “Click here to subscribe to our blog” link on the DEN blogs! That is definitely one thing I like about Feedburner, you have the option of getting a semi-normal looking web page that doesn’t look like it’s full of code.

Oh good, someone is bringing up that Typepad creates three different styles of feeds. Our current blogs at DEN do this right now. One of the things that I need to do is combine them into a single feed. My gut reaction is go with Feedburner, simply because that’s what I have experience with. I also like the stats you get with it. They aren’t perfect but provide the best data about your subscribers that I’ve seen yet. Having three different feeds for a single blog really doesn’t accomplish anything more than confuse the end user. There may be a few people who care about distinguishing one feed from another, but I haven’t met any of them yet. If you’re one of them, email me.

We’re in the middle of a discussion about creating secure feeds right now, which he admits there just isn’t a good way to do just yet. He says it is possible, but there are many applications/aggregators that expose big ol’ security holes. Since Bloglines adds every feed that users subscribe to a database and makes it searchable. If you pass a name and password to a feed through such an aggregator, you’re probably passing it along as clear text. In other words, just about anyone will be able to see your name and password. Not cool. A solution needs to be come up with, but it’s slow in coming.

After a detour through the world of advertising and revenue generation through feeds, we’re now on the subject of pings. Depending on how a blog is set up, whenever a new post goes up, the blog engine will ping different sites like Technorati and Google to let them know that there’s something new there. His example is, if you publish something to My Yahoo, it will be updated in the search engine within four hours. If you send a ping, it’ll happen instantly. Let’s be honest here though, pings are pretty flaky at times. The idea is great, but the follow through is sometimes a bit lacking.

Out of time, but this was definitely interesting. Good stuff. Matt just broke in saying that this session was the appetizer, the conversations that will come of it tomorrow will be the main course. I like that. At most conferences, the actual sessions are the meat and potatoes. Here they just whet the appetite. More later.

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Enable CommentLuv?
If you have supplied a blog in the URL above, it will include a link to your most recent blog post.