Feedburner offers a feed-splicing service, and a lot of people use this to splice their del.icio.us links into their blog feed.
But I have decided this is annoying, and I find myself unsubscribing from feeds that have far more del.icio.us links than real posts. It is perfectly possible to subscribe to a person's del.icio.us links separately, if anyone wants.
I'd rather have just one interesting post every month. Surely the whole point of feeds is that you don't have to keep the channel busy in order to keep the channel open.
(The guilty parties include several industry analysts, as well as employees of certain very large software companies.)
At least Feedburner doesn't offer a Twitter splicer yet. I hope they never do.
Showing posts with label freedbacking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedbacking. Show all posts
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Freedbacking
Is anyone Freedbacking?
Freedbacking means putting free feedback (for example suggested improvements to your favourite or not-so-favourite products and services) into your blog or webpage, in the hope that this will be picked up and acted upon by the companies responsible.
This term was coined by Chris Pirillo, and described in a Wired article in June 2006. [Are You Freedbacking?] At that time, there were 400 hits for this word on Google. There are currently around 10,000 hits.
In the scheme of things, that's really not much. Even Wikipedia doesn't have an entry.
At the time, some companies declared that they would be tracking posts that combine the word "freedbacking" with their own company or product name. For example Bloglines. (Hello Bloglines, are you there? Sorry to wake you up, but maybe there's something for you in the next paragraph.)
What I'm missing is any sense of a closed feedback loop. If there are product improvements that were actually triggered by freedbacking, it would be useful if the companies responsible acknowledged this and thanked their supporters for their input. Or is freedbacking a complete waste of time, like sending emails to blackhole@somevendor.com?
Freedbacking means putting free feedback (for example suggested improvements to your favourite or not-so-favourite products and services) into your blog or webpage, in the hope that this will be picked up and acted upon by the companies responsible.
This term was coined by Chris Pirillo, and described in a Wired article in June 2006. [Are You Freedbacking?] At that time, there were 400 hits for this word on Google. There are currently around 10,000 hits.
In the scheme of things, that's really not much. Even Wikipedia doesn't have an entry.
At the time, some companies declared that they would be tracking posts that combine the word "freedbacking" with their own company or product name. For example Bloglines. (Hello Bloglines, are you there? Sorry to wake you up, but maybe there's something for you in the next paragraph.)
What I'm missing is any sense of a closed feedback loop. If there are product improvements that were actually triggered by freedbacking, it would be useful if the companies responsible acknowledged this and thanked their supporters for their input. Or is freedbacking a complete waste of time, like sending emails to blackhole@somevendor.com?
Feature Interaction at Google
Google owns Blogger and Feedburner. So when I added a Blogger-related Feedflare to a Feedburner Feed of a Blogger blog (why did I think this was a good idea? don't ask!), I hoped this would be pretty painless.
Unfortunately not.
Feedburner gave me an error:
And when I went to look at my feed to check the problem, I got an error from Google
Sigh. It looks as if this combination of features is triggering some auto-immune response. Is my blog going to come out in spots, or be laid up for a few days? I hope not, but you never know.
Of course this kind of thing is depressingly common. We can never assume that two lumps of software or service will interoperate cleanly, just because they are owned and operated by the same software company. At least some software companies (including Google) do make an effort to integrate and rationalize after acquisition; some don't even try.
Unfortunately not.
Feedburner gave me an error:
The URL you entered does not appear to be a valid feed ...
And when I went to look at my feed to check the problem, I got an error from Google
We're sorry ... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
Sigh. It looks as if this combination of features is triggering some auto-immune response. Is my blog going to come out in spots, or be laid up for a few days? I hope not, but you never know.
Of course this kind of thing is depressingly common. We can never assume that two lumps of software or service will interoperate cleanly, just because they are owned and operated by the same software company. At least some software companies (including Google) do make an effort to integrate and rationalize after acquisition; some don't even try.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Forthcoming Meetings
Lots of the emails I receive include notices or invitations for forthcoming events. I am on the mailing lists of various groups that meet regularly, but I don't get to all the meetings.
So what to do with these emails? I could copy them into my diary straight away. I could put them into a "forthcoming meeting" folder and forget about them until it's too late.
What I really want is some way of aggregating these forthcoming events into a calendar. Each of these groups maintains a webpage, with details of its forthcoming events. If I can subscribe to this webpage, and others like it, all I would need is for my news reader (I use Bloglines) to show me (in calendar view) all the forthcoming events from all the eventpages I have subscribed to, perhaps filtered by city. (So I can see all the London events, but not the Washington events, unless of course I am going to be on a business trip to Washington next week.)
The word "freedbacking" has recently been coined as an identifier for a consumer providing free feedback to providers. Bloglines has announced that it will be picking up all blogs containing the words Bloglines and freedbacking, so let's see if this works.
So what to do with these emails? I could copy them into my diary straight away. I could put them into a "forthcoming meeting" folder and forget about them until it's too late.
What I really want is some way of aggregating these forthcoming events into a calendar. Each of these groups maintains a webpage, with details of its forthcoming events. If I can subscribe to this webpage, and others like it, all I would need is for my news reader (I use Bloglines) to show me (in calendar view) all the forthcoming events from all the eventpages I have subscribed to, perhaps filtered by city. (So I can see all the London events, but not the Washington events, unless of course I am going to be on a business trip to Washington next week.)
The word "freedbacking" has recently been coined as an identifier for a consumer providing free feedback to providers. Bloglines has announced that it will be picking up all blogs containing the words Bloglines and freedbacking, so let's see if this works.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)