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01/31/06
RSS is a great way to share information. By sharing information, you can make your information source more valuable, attract more readers, and reach more people. News organizations get it. Web publishers get it. Bloggers get it. But most big companies and organizations don’t get it.
Take sports scores or stock data. They should be ripe for being syndicated by RSS. But you can’t find either, legally, as an RSS feed. Sure you can “take” some of this information from sites like Yahoo. And to some extent, Yahoo lets you do this for personal use. But if you are a Web developer, you can’t just take this information and build your own service.
So why aren’t sports scores and stock data available as RSS feeds? My guess is that the people that own this information think it is too valuable to be given away for free. Boy, are they missing the boat. They should be paying more attention to their real goals, and not worrying about collecting a few dollars by selling raw data.
Take sports scores, for instance. I’m sure that organizations like Major League Baseball don’t want to have an RSS feed of baseball game scores because they think it would hurt the fees they collect from news sites that pay for the information. But what if they provided a “next day” RSS feed where you could get yesterday’s scores? Web developers could jump on it to build sports sites and fantasy league games and such. Small news sites could feature the scores. What would this do? It would build interest in the game, that’s what. Interest would lead to attendance and viewership. And the people paying them for up-to-the-minute scores would still do that because “next day” is not good enough.
How about stocks? Why doesn’t the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ provide a free “closing bell” RSS feed. This wouldn’t cut into their revenue since “closing bell” is not any good for a major news site. But I, for one, would love to build a “play the market” game. Small news sites could feature the data as well.
I know there are tons of ways to get stock info on your site. But they are either little applets that don’t give you real access to the information, or they are semi-legal rips of Yahoo feeds.
It isn’t just sports and stocks, either. RSS feeds of books, music, television schedules, or even movie showtimes could be beneficial to the original owners of that information. Web services developed around them would sell more books and CDs and raise awareness of shows and movies. Right now you need to pay for this information. But information is not their true product.
Hopefully these large companies will realize that they are hurting their main goal by trying to make a few dollars off of what should be free.
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The maker of “Dodge that Anvil!”, a finalist in the 2006 Independent Games Festival, had this to say about using Director to make the 3D physics-enhanced game: “Director provides a solid, cross-platform 3D engine, Havok physics, and a widely deployed web plugin… experimenting with this toolset provided the inspiration for the basic game design.” You can read the whole article at Gamasutra’.
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01/30/06
Yep. Check out the story at Bungie.net. They call Director “a quick and easy tool to get user interface “screens” up and running.”
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Like many people, I am somewhat addicted to the recently-hot Digg.com Web site. But perhaps not in the same way. I’m watching it like a driver passing a multi-car pile-up on the freeway. I’m appalled and fascinated.
Digg claims to be a “news” site. It says so right there on the page: “What’s Digg? Digg is a technology news website…” But their definition of “news” is so different than mine, that I can’t help but be outraged.
You see, I have a slight background in journalism. I have a master’s degree in the subject, and worked a bit for newspapers before becoming a Web game guru. I still dabble a bit in the area, by blogging, our new video podcast and by making news-related games.
I learned a thing or two about “news.” Some rules, if you will. Many news sites break some of these rules. Bloggers break most of them, but they are just trying to be bloggs, not news sites. Digg breaks almost all of them.
1. Lack of Balance
Almost all of the stories submitted to Digg just show one side of the story. I’m talking about when someone links to a blog post. A blog post can be one-sided, sure, but then the post shouldn’t be linked to as “news.”
2. Lack of Editorial Consistency
The tone, quality and even grammar of each story is very different. This is, of course, because different people are posting each story. But competitor SlashDot has this figured out, so why can’t Digg? With all the bucks I’m sure they are pulling in, why can’t they employ at least a part-time editor to clean up the entries that make it to the front page?
3. Promoting Illegal Activities Isn’t News
A large number of Digg stories simply spell out how to steal music, video and software. I have no problem with people reporting that this is being done, or interviewing pirates, or even debating the legality of it. But there are a lot of “how-to” articles. It’s all fine and good free speech, but it isn’t news.
4. Low Quality of Text
Digg has spelling and grammar errors everywhere. Usually right on the front page. Things like exclamation points have no place in headlines. One headline uses capitalized words, the next only capitalizes the first word. Some are two words, and some are sentences. This lowers trust in a news source and they really need to clean it up if they hope to be taken seriously.
5. Lots of Old News
If Digg had an editorial team, they could stop the problem of having old news repeated all the time. Some of the “I just discovered this!” posts are for pieces of information that are months or years old. It isn’t news just because one blogger happened to come across it one day.
6. Need Better Headlines and Summaries
Some stories get posted with summaried like “You have to see this picture!” If you expect me to click on it, tell me what the picture or article is about. How do these items even get that many Diggs?
7. Popular Vote Just Doesn’t Work
The top stories on Digg are determined by how many Diggs it gets and how fast. Basically a popular vote. But that often puts silly and juvenile stories above more important ones. I like the idea of letting the readers influence the meause of the “newsworthiness” of a story. But I don’t think it should be 100% of that measure. Digg would do better to mix popular vote with editorial control.
My conclusion is pretty obvious, I think. Digg really should have some “editors” that clean up top stories and provide some guidance for the importance of a story. I don’t think that this would hurt the prime mission of Digg, since popular vote would still be a major factor. But it would certainly increase the quality, and they may even get taken more seriously — as a real news source, not a threat to good journalism.
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01/18/06
At CleverMedia we’ve been working toward getting some video podcasts off the ground. We have the talent, we have the equipment and we have the ideas. Finally, we got the first one off the ground. It will be a regular video podcast about books called Book Stories. The first episode is about the grand opening of my wife’s Attic Bookstore. Future episodes will be able individual books and book-related topics.
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