Author: Nick Bradbury

Creator of HomeSite, TopStyle & FeedDemon for Windows, and Glassboard for Android. I'm a mobile developer at Automattic.

Google Web Accelerator

Published on by Nick Bradbury14 Comments

Given that not too long ago I posted about the auto-link feature in Google’s toolbar, it seems like I should at least speak up about the new Google Web Accelerator as well.

Before I do, though, I want to make it clear that right now I trust Google. I haven’t seen them do anything that would cause me to not trust them, and I can see from their excellent work on things like Google Maps that they really do wish to make the internet useful for everyone. Some people don’t trust them simply because Google makes a lot of money, but I don’t subscribe to that belief system at all. I prefer living in a world where people can earn money from what they’re good at, so I have no qualms about Google getting rich from their innovations.

But the question isn’t, “Do we trust Google enough to allow something like Google Web Accelerator?” The question is really, “Fifty years from now, can we still trust them?” After fifty years of change, upheaval, etc., will they still be the “do no evil” company? Hard to say.

Which is why something like Google Web Accelerator is a little, well, unnerving. Serving as a proxy for everyone’s web activity in order to figure out what people are clicking is certainly a brilliant (and unexpected) move on their part, and in the short term I’ll enjoy seeing what they do with this information. I expect them to do much more with this data than simply use it to prioritize their search results. After all, this is attention data that they’re getting, and that’s incredibly valuable to an awful lot of people, especially advertisers and marketers.

Part of me wants to say, “Go, Google, go!” After all, they’re making the Internet OS happen, and they’re doing a hell of a job on it. But I get nervous whenever one entity gets access to so much private data, especially when I consider that no matter how trustworthy they are, they still have to submit to government requests for information access.

So, do you trust Google enough to feel comfortable about this? And how will you feel in fifty years?

RSS Ads Revisited

Published on by Nick Bradbury9 Comments

Yesterday, Dave Winer had an excellent post about RSS ads. Rather than include an excerpt here, I’ll ask that you read it and then come back here (I’ll wait).

Like Dave, I also do a lot of skimming when reading RSS. I’ll quickly scan the headlines, then read the first sentence or two when I find something of interest. If it keeps my interest longer than that, I figure it’s worth a click, so I don’t mind clicking through to the site to read the rest of the story. Anything that gets in the way of that – even visually – could easily make me choose not to click. In this situation, RSS ads could get in the way – which means they’d lower the revenue earned by these sites.

But there is at least one big caveat here: offline reading. I’ve heard many, many reports from customers who really like FeedDemon’s offline reading mode, and I use this feature myself whenever I travel. Before getting on a plane, I’ll often tell FeedDemon to download all the latest items in my subsriptions, then when I’m on the plane I’ll put FeedDemon into offline mode and read everything that was retrieved. Others use FeedDemon for offline reading on subways and long commutes – basically, in any situation where there’s no internet connection available.

This is where summary feeds fail for a lot of people. If you post only excerpts and expect readers to click through to your site, you’re not serving those in your audience who wish to read your articles offline. RSS readers could pre-fetch links so that your web site is available to them offline, but when you consider the number of feeds many people read, that would involve an awful lot of unnecessary bandwidth consumption (not to mention space on your hard drive).

Perhaps one solution is to offer two feeds: one with excerpts but no ads, and one with the full articles and also ads. I’m not usually one to recommend having multiple feeds (quite frankly, I don’t understand why so many bloggers have separate links for RSS, Atom and RDF feeds), but in this situation it might make sense.

Tablet PC, MD

Published on by Nick Bradbury18 Comments

I just returned from an appointment with a doctor whose office had upgraded to Tablet PCs since my last visit, and it was pretty cool to see non-techies benefit from these gadgets. The office had several docking stations which held the tablets, and my doctor undocked one as he walked in to see me. Geek that I am, we talked more about his office tech than we did about my reason for visiting (a simple clogged ear, btw), and he obviously loved his tablet. During the visit he took notes on the tablet, and he even used the stylus to draw a picture of my inner ear to show me what the problem was. When he was done, he handed his tablet to a nurse, who jotted a few notes down before re-docking it. This was a real-world display of tech “in the wild,” helping someone do their job.

I also own a Tablet PC, and it comes with me to every conference I attend. I’m often surprised by how few tablets I see in the crowd, since I love mine and everyone I’ve met who owns one feels the same way. Keyboard-centric apps like word processors aren’t that great on a tablet, but something like FeedDemon is pretty slick.

BTW, does anyone else run FeedDemon on a tablet? If so, feel free to post a comment here if there’s anything I can do to make FeedDemon even better for tablet use.

Link Dump: May 4, 2005

Published on by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

RSS Ads: Now it Gets Tricky

Published on by Nick Bradbury4 Comments

There have been many discussions about RSS ads lately (including my own), but so far most of these debates haven’t addressed ads in aggregated feeds.

Here’s the deal: I believe that as more people rely on RSS for information, we’ll see the problem of feed overload come to the forefront. The way this usually works is that you start using RSS like email, subscribing to a few feeds and reading everything that comes into your RSS reader. As time goes on and you continue subscribing to more feeds, you eventually reach the point where there’s too much information coming in (and too little of it that really interests you).

While there’s a lot that RSS readers can – and will – do to address this problem, I believe we’ll also rely on human “editors” to find stuff for us. These are people like Scoble, who live in their aggregators and use their blogs to share the links that interest them. Rather than subscribe to a dozen feeds about a particular topic, we might subscribe to a single feed offered by someone who is an editor for that particular topic – for example, rather than subscribe to several PR feeds, we might just subscribe to Steve Rubel’s feed and let him point out the interesting links. These editors are the ones poised to benefit the most from RSS ad revenue.

Combined with that, we’ll also rely on RSS search engines like Feedster, BlogDigger, Technorati and PubSub to find items that interest us. Forget subscribing to a hundred feeds that might have an item of interest every now and then – just subscribe to an aggregated search feed which looks for your keywords.

Few of us would be willing to pay for RSS search results, so the RSS search engines will most likely rely heavily on ad revenue. This to me is where RSS ads get tricky, and it’s something we should think about. If you use Google AdSense in your feed, what happens when items from your feed end up in the search results of an aggregate feed? Should your ads stay in place? Is it okay for the search engine to strip your ads and insert their own? How about if they insert their ads in addition to yours?

What if a search engine offers ad-free feeds for a nominal fee – is it ethical for them to make money by stripping out your source of revenue?

And if the search engines leave everyone’s ads in place, how will the aggregated search feed look in your RSS reader if each item uses a different type of ad service? Will the hodgepodge of ad styles be so distracting that we’ll find some other way to locate items of interest?

I’m sure others have thought about these issues far more than I have, so it will be interesting to see where this discussion leads us.

RSS Advertising and FeedDemon

Published on by Nick Bradbury25 Comments

Dave Winer writes:

“Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads. Make it default to on. Then, that would force the advertisers, if they want to speak to us, to do so respectfully, by our choice. Create feeds of commercial information that we might be interested in, and if we are, we’ll subscribe. If not, we won’t.”

Like many of us, I hate seeing advertisements everywhere I go. The problem isn’t just that ads can be annoying: it’s also that advertisers affect the content we see, and I don’t wish to give them that power yet again.

So, the question is, should FeedDemon strip ads? I’ve wrestled with this quite a bit, and I’ve seriously considered making it possible to apply your own filters to what you see in FeedDemon, so that you could filter out ads by choice. These filters could be shared with other FeedDemon users, much like newspaper styles are – and hey, wouldn’t it be nice if these filters could be used by any RSS aggregator, and not just FeedDemon?

But despite my personal dislike for some forms of advertising, in the end I’ve decided that FeedDemon should not strip ads, at least not by default. I don’t wish to deprive income from those who rely on ad revenue – that in itself would shut out voices we might wish to hear. Plus, ads may give some people enough incentive to offer full-text feeds instead of excerpts, since a big reason people use excerpts is to drive traffic to their site where readers can view their ads. I’d prefer full-text feeds with ads over excerpts without them (and so would Richard MacManus).

I do understand what Dave Winer is saying – he wants advertisers to come to us with separate feeds that we choose to subscribe to because they offer useful, relevant information, and that’s a nice idea (and I expect it will happen, too). But this doesn’t necessarily translate into revenue for those who write blogs, which is why Google ads in feeds are so attractive. And there’s nothing wrong with advertising in and of itself – it’s simply that too many advertisers rely on being annoying and intrusive, and really, that’s where we need to be vigilant.

The RSS ads I’ve seen so far are fairly tame and non-intrusive, but advertising is all about getting your attention, so we know where this is headed. Luckily, RSS readers like FeedDemon already strip much of the stuff that could be used for intrusive ads (popups, ActiveX, scripting, etc.), so really annoying ads aren’t as likely to appear in your RSS reader as they are in your browser. And I guarantee you that every developer working on an RSS reader will be on the lookout for advertisers that discover exploits that enable them to intrude, and we will keep working to prevent that.