Then came Twitter and the 140 character limit. The clean URLs were much too long. A flurry of short URL services popped up. I never liked them and contacted Twitter about them auto-converting URLs when I was within my 140 character restriction. I never received a response but read in multiple places Twitter converts URLs if they are over 30 characters long.

I started thinking about the history of new things online. A bunch of them pop up, a bunch of them hail. Most of them do. What happens to my links when these services go out of business? They die. I rarely link to my own articles but others do and their link would die. I didn’t like that.

I’m using WordPress and I decided to create my own short URLs. Why not take control of the situation and make it so people don’t have to shorten my URLs? I’m blessed to have a pretty short domain and I can get my URLs under 30 characters. There was just one factor stopping me…I became used to my links being made from the title. Then I thought about how often I actually used a URL on my site (or anyone else’s for that matter) to find an article. Almost never, it is very rare. I search instead. Isn’t that what most people do?

I’m going to try using short URLs. The beautiful thing about WordPress is that it has an automatic redirecting solution in it. My URLs usually are like this:

http://tymesaid.com/2009/title

I condensed it to this:

http://tymesaid.com/2009/a28n

But if I type this in the browser it redirects automatically:

http://tymesaid.com/a28n

I strongly suggest if you have the ability to make your own short URLs, to do so. Take control of the situation and have people come straight to your site – instead of using a third party.

there’s no other love
there’s nobody else I’m thinking of
only a baby as special
how could I ever forget you
and let the moment slip away
we’ve been here for a while
and I just wanna take you away
you got me doing things I never do
I can’t stop feenin and dreaming about you
and about your love it feels so real to me
you know what to say
and you know just what to do
come get me
whatcha got for me
I wanna see
I’ve been waiting way too long
got me losing my cool
don’t know what I’m gonna do
you got me going

The song is about a man’s love for a woman but it can be applied to love in general. One person loves another person very much and wants to take it to another level. Further in the song they say “just let me be, be all that you need” because after waiting, the struggles, etc. it’s time to move forward – together. Passion, excitement, endurance, commitment, loyalty – the song has it all. Now that we have an understanding about love and passion, I’m about to apply this to writing online…because I’m smooth like that.

Passion shows…

It is somewhat easy to tell when someone is passionate about their writing and those that are doing it because it’s “the thing”. Those blogging because it’s the hot new thing are experiencing a crush with blogging. Bloggers that are expressing and sharing their passions are like the excerpted lyrics above.

When a person loves or is passionate about their blogging it shows. The person does not have to say, “I love to blog!” for it to show just like a person doesn’t have to say “I love you” for the person he or she loves to know it or know when someone loves you in return. Actions speak louder than words. Actions speak when there is silence.

The person that is passionate about their writing will embrace all aspects of it. The blogger will pick a decent host (to the best of their ability) and, if he or she encounters hosting problems, will rectify the situation. The person who is passionate about their content (meaning their content is important) will take steps to back it up in case something goes wrong. The person who is passionate about their blog will tweak it in an attempt to improve it. This does not mean the person will morph into a designer but the blog will look like a well-cared lawn – some look better than others but one can tell when a lawn is being maintained and when it is not.

When a person is passionate about their writing and cares about their users the blog will have the features a user would look for: about page, easy to subscribe to the blog, perhaps options to subscribe depending on the target audience, contact page, easy navigation, tags and or categories, interact with readers, etc. The content will be published when promised and the presentation of the content matters to ensure the user is able to easily read their content.

Round 6: May 7th, 2008

9rules has a new round coming up. When I look at blogs I look for the passion and love to show on the blog. When I load a blog in my browser and I’m puzzled about the direction of the blog, confused while reading an article what the author is trying to say or look at a site and my corneas are damaged because the site has colors that should be a sin to put together, I remember when I felt a lack of desire to blog and was blogging for reasons other than passion – and it showed. One of the reasons why we do not accept new blogs into 9rules is because so many people are excited about blogging and dive in, only to bow out a couple of months later.

It’s hard to think of original content and that is where passion gives an edge. The person that is passionate about their blog will come up with original content, will track down that interview, will confirm whether a lead is accurate, will take extra care creating a tutorial, writing a review, explaining design or programming elements, etc. The extra effort isn’t a chore, it can be a joy, something exciting and fun. It’s an essential part of the process.

If you don’t feel the passion or the love for blogging, why are you doing it?

When I first visited the site my eyes bounced around the page following all the orange links and images. As you can see from the screenshot there is a large sign up box at the top of the page. This screams to me that they really want people to sign up since the box is taking up quite a bit of prime real estate on their front page. Very soon I understood why and it is the reason why I decided to write the article. Once you sign up the sign up area turns into this:

After signing up, things started to make sense. As you can see from the screenshot there are variety of options for the user. Groups, Contacts, Multimedia, Bookmarks, Feeds, Newsletters, Blog, Events, Networks, Recommendations. When you sign up they ask for your title, making it very clear this is for business purposes. It even says so on the front page before you sign up. So I ask you…

Why would I put images, video, audio and documents on their social site? Don’t people go there for information? Why would I create a network there, put my events there, and heaven help me, why would I blog there? And they have a widget for their blogs…so I can place their blog entries on my own site? I looked around their groups. One of their featured groups, Technology, was created on in January, has 109 members…and 10 comments of which I could only view 2 for some reason. Fast Company is not Facebook.

Recommendations and Bookmarks are great ideas. They focus on the content, which should be their focus. Their niche person is the business person, who probably has social network accounts elsewhere. There isn’t a reason to join this network and do what the person is already doing elsewhere.

Then they do the thing I detest the most. When you subscribe to a feed it automatically adds it to their internal feed reader. I was unable to subscribe to the feeds I tested in FeedDemon, Google Reader or Bloglines. There are some pages that have RSS buttons right next to a Subscribe button. One link works in a browser; one requires a login (going into their internal feed reader). Excuse me but both options are subscribe methods, correct? When you subscribe to an entry, the user is shown a message that the RSS feed has been placed in their feed reader. I promise you it didn’t go in my feed reader (FeedDemon). I looked in My Feeds and guess what I found:

How did SPAM get in my feed reader? My Feeds has 683 things I didn’t subscribe to! And guess what? I don’t see a way to delete all 683 of these items I didn’t ask for. I can mark them read but I cannot delete them…that I can see.

And please don’t get me started on the half descriptions for articles on their front page. If you look at the image above you will see they use a cut-off method instead of a more professional summary method like ArsTechnica or cNet. You know so the reader has an idea what the article is about.

Miserable effort Fast Company. Miserable. I hope you put more thought into your video network. What do I know? I’m not the designer of The Triad. Maybe people enjoy being forced to read feeds on a site instead of their feed reader and, when they go to read the feed, are bombarded with 683 spam (new member, remember that) rendering it almost impossible to find the article I subscribed to. Yeah…what do I know?

Rick and I will be doing a podcast answering any remaining questions. Keep ‘em coming!

Why isn’t the blog used more to educate people? It seems like it’s mainly used for announcements.

It’s true that we use our blog mainly for announcements that are applicable across FeedBurner’s wide audience. But your point is well taken and there is a lot more we are doing on that front, and will continue to do. Check out recent posts from Dick, me, last fall’s look inside TechCrunch’s numbers, Brent’s bylined articles in Adotas, the hundreds of interviews we’ve done over the past few years with media publications as well as independent publishers, our Publishers Tips site, or last spring’s podcast market overview as a few examples of educational posts. In addition to our own blog, the publisher team (that’s my team) typically leaves 30-50 comments per week on _other_ blogs so that we’re answering questions people ask in near real time. That way, we don’t force people to come to us to get educated about how we work… if they ask, we’ll answer.

I want to know what happened with the Pageflakes thing. How was it resolved? What measures were put in place to stop it from happening again?

This question is referring to a bug where, in certain cases, they were over-reporting the number of Pageflakes subscribers to a given feed. In that case, we contacted Pageflakes, they acknowledged the bug, let us know when it was fixed, and we resumed reporting the Pageflakes data. While we obviously have no control over how web-based aggregators collect and/or report their data, our algorithms are often able to detect anomalies in the data we receive that allows us to proactively reach out to those services to verify the information we’re seeing. When we establish that things are out of whack, we disclose the issue (e.g. this example) and wait until things are resolved before resuming inclusion of their data in the overall reports.

Is it possible to export data and if not will it ever be?

Yes, click “export” from the “Analyze” tab. Data’s available in Excel or CSV format.

What are their privacy policies? The company I work for is starting a blog in Feb. The very first thing they would question is who has access to the stats and what precautions can be made to ensure privacy. I read on a blog that by not checking one thing stats could be pulled through the API.

Our privacy policy is here. By default, your data is private, and no one other than the account holder has access to the data. If you choose to make your data public (which you can do only by explicitly setting the Awareness API service to “public” – it is set to private by default), then anyone who follows the documented API guidelines can retrieve shared data (like circulation, hits, etc.). A good example of how this information can be used well is the podcast directory here. To reiterate, this information is *private* by default, and is only public if you choose to make it so.

I thought FeedBurner had a content network? Can’t find it from the front page.

Since different people mean different things by “content network”, I’m not sure how to answer this. We have FeedBurner networks available to publishers who want to aggregate their content – currently in beta, details are here.

As a blogger am I able to opt out of my site’s data being used for advertising purposes? Data collection?

By default, FeedBurner users are *not* in the ad network, so their data is not used for any advertising purposes. Since the primary reason bloggers use FeedBurner is to collect data about their feeds and sites, I’m not sure how to address a desire to opt out of data collection, so perhaps we need to do some follow-up on this.

How secure is the FeedBurner service for bloggers?

If by secure the questioner is asking about data security, see question/answer above about our privacy policy. We lock our doors at night, and all of our laptops have really secure passwords. If the question pertains to something specific or less sarcastic, let me know and I’ll be happy to address. Beyond that, I’m not sure what to say in terms of security, since the goal of this aspect of the service is to provide publicly available data in the form of RSS feeds.

For commercial use if we decide we do not want to use the service any longer what happens with the data collected from our visitors?

You may export your statistics (via the export feature described above) and delete your account. We do not keep any data once an account is removed from the service. Let me take a minute to address another aspect of leaving FeedBurner that wasn’t asked here but is often asked: specifically, what happens to your subscribers once you choose to leave FeedBurner. They’re your subscribers, we don’t want them after you leave. So we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that your subscribers will follow you after you decide to leave (visit the link for more details).

Will performance be an issue if my site receives a large spike in traffic like Digg?

One of the many reasons publishers choose to use FeedBurner is to offload all bandwidth relating to their feed traffic to us. We manage more than 500,000 feeds, including thousands of feeds for 7 of the 10 top newspapers in the country, 3/4 of the Technorati 100 most popular blogs, and many thousands of high-traffic feeds. With more than a quarter billion feed requests per day, we maintain a high availability server infrastructure, and MySQL has used us as a case study (see this to show how MySQL can be used to power high demand environments like ours). We consistently keep our server farms at fractions of their total capacity, and our connectivity is structured in a way that were we ever to need to spike well above the hundreds of megabits of sustained connectivity we currently use, we could do so without any impact on overall performance.

Which is a long way of saying, “No.”

Why does the FeedBurner count increase dramatically after I am Dugg, then goes down a couple of days later? Did I lose all those visitors?

This is primarily an artefact of prior versions of Firefox (1.5.x and prior), where requests to the feed are labeled the same whether coming from the browser or the feedreader (LiveBookmarks). As a result, we would have to infer from the traffic patterns (i.e., polling intervals, IP addresses, identical user agents) to determine whether the access to the feed was a one-off (i.e., browser) or a repetitive request (i.e., the feed reader). Because of the high concentration of traffic that a site receives when Dugg, those inferences are often impossible to get 100% correct – so some one-off accesses end up looking like repeated requests, and our algorithms count them as subscribers instead of browser views. Recently, the Mozilla team added a unique user agent for the feed reader in Firefox 2.0 (per FeedBurner’s request), which means that these anomalies should be far fewer from now on.

What do they think needs improvement? Can they talk about future plans? They also seem like they are all over the place. What do they DO? Is it feeds, advertising, what is it?

Wow. Let’s see: what needs improvement? Everything. We want the web audience at large to be more comfortable with the notion of subscribing to media feeds. We want publishers to get more value from their feed content by adding more functionality. We want to see creative developers build more cool stuff using our open APIs. We want to sell more ads, so our publishers can make more money. The radiators in our office are maddeningly spotty, so we never know when to dress warm, so that’d be good to fix while we’re improving things.

As far as futures, we’d like to see the Bears win the Super Bowl. A Cubs/Sox World Series would be totally cool, too. On a more serious note, we’ve recently stated that further integration between our feed and site stats is in the near future, as well as a platform for measuring all aspects of content consumption: in a feed, on a site, in a widget, or via some new thing that doesn’t have a buzzword attached to it. However content is consumed, we’ll measure (and monetize) it. Expect to see a lot from us on this in 2007.

Regarding the ‘all over the place’ comment, our goal is simply this: FeedBurner aims to be the world’s foremost provider of online media distribution and audience engagement services. We want to help content publishers, be they independent bloggers or podcasters, blog networks, or commercial publishers – to distribute their media further, engage and build their audience and ultimately, make money. We think we’re in the best position to understand, measure and enhance the distribution of content – via feeds, resyndication, widgets, and who knows what comes next – and then, for publishers who want to capitalize on that understanding, we offer a monetization platform with our advertising network.

Rick and I will be doing a podcast answering any remaining questions. Keep ‘em coming!

Why isn’t the blog used more to educate people? It seems like it’s mainly used for announcements.

It’s true that we use our blog mainly for announcements that are applicable across FeedBurner’s wide audience. But your point is well taken and there is a lot more we are doing on that front, and will continue to do. Check out recent posts from Dick, me, last fall’s look inside TechCrunch’s numbers, Brent’s bylined articles in Adotas, the hundreds of interviews we’ve done over the past few years with media publications as well as independent publishers, our Publishers Tips site, or last spring’s podcast market overview as a few examples of educational posts. In addition to our own blog, the publisher team (that’s my team) typically leaves 30-50 comments per week on _other_ blogs so that we’re answering questions people ask in near real time. That way, we don’t force people to come to us to get educated about how we work… if they ask, we’ll answer.

I want to know what happened with the Pageflakes thing. How was it resolved? What measures were put in place to stop it from happening again?

This question is referring to a bug where, in certain cases, they were over-reporting the number of Pageflakes subscribers to a given feed. In that case, we contacted Pageflakes, they acknowledged the bug, let us know when it was fixed, and we resumed reporting the Pageflakes data. While we obviously have no control over how web-based aggregators collect and/or report their data, our algorithms are often able to detect anomalies in the data we receive that allows us to proactively reach out to those services to verify the information we’re seeing. When we establish that things are out of whack, we disclose the issue (e.g. this example) and wait until things are resolved before resuming inclusion of their data in the overall reports.

Is it possible to export data and if not will it ever be?

Yes, click “export” from the “Analyze” tab. Data’s available in Excel or CSV format.

What are their privacy policies? The company I work for is starting a blog in Feb. The very first thing they would question is who has access to the stats and what precautions can be made to ensure privacy. I read on a blog that by not checking one thing stats could be pulled through the API.

Our privacy policy is here. By default, your data is private, and no one other than the account holder has access to the data. If you choose to make your data public (which you can do only by explicitly setting the Awareness API service to “public” – it is set to private by default), then anyone who follows the documented API guidelines can retrieve shared data (like circulation, hits, etc.). A good example of how this information can be used well is the podcast directory here. To reiterate, this information is *private* by default, and is only public if you choose to make it so.

I thought FeedBurner had a content network? Can’t find it from the front page.

Since different people mean different things by “content network”, I’m not sure how to answer this. We have FeedBurner networks available to publishers who want to aggregate their content – currently in beta, details are here.

As a blogger am I able to opt out of my site’s data being used for advertising purposes? Data collection?

By default, FeedBurner users are *not* in the ad network, so their data is not used for any advertising purposes. Since the primary reason bloggers use FeedBurner is to collect data about their feeds and sites, I’m not sure how to address a desire to opt out of data collection, so perhaps we need to do some follow-up on this.

How secure is the FeedBurner service for bloggers?

If by secure the questioner is asking about data security, see question/answer above about our privacy policy. We lock our doors at night, and all of our laptops have really secure passwords. If the question pertains to something specific or less sarcastic, let me know and I’ll be happy to address. Beyond that, I’m not sure what to say in terms of security, since the goal of this aspect of the service is to provide publicly available data in the form of RSS feeds.

For commercial use if we decide we do not want to use the service any longer what happens with the data collected from our visitors?

You may export your statistics (via the export feature described above) and delete your account. We do not keep any data once an account is removed from the service. Let me take a minute to address another aspect of leaving FeedBurner that wasn’t asked here but is often asked: specifically, what happens to your subscribers once you choose to leave FeedBurner. They’re your subscribers, we don’t want them after you leave. So we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that your subscribers will follow you after you decide to leave (visit the link for more details).

Will performance be an issue if my site receives a large spike in traffic like Digg?

One of the many reasons publishers choose to use FeedBurner is to offload all bandwidth relating to their feed traffic to us. We manage more than 500,000 feeds, including thousands of feeds for 7 of the 10 top newspapers in the country, 3/4 of the Technorati 100 most popular blogs, and many thousands of high-traffic feeds. With more than a quarter billion feed requests per day, we maintain a high availability server infrastructure, and MySQL has used us as a case study (see this to show how MySQL can be used to power high demand environments like ours). We consistently keep our server farms at fractions of their total capacity, and our connectivity is structured in a way that were we ever to need to spike well above the hundreds of megabits of sustained connectivity we currently use, we could do so without any impact on overall performance.

Which is a long way of saying, “No.”

Why does the FeedBurner count increase dramatically after I am Dugg, then goes down a couple of days later? Did I lose all those visitors?

This is primarily an artefact of prior versions of Firefox (1.5.x and prior), where requests to the feed are labeled the same whether coming from the browser or the feedreader (LiveBookmarks). As a result, we would have to infer from the traffic patterns (i.e., polling intervals, IP addresses, identical user agents) to determine whether the access to the feed was a one-off (i.e., browser) or a repetitive request (i.e., the feed reader). Because of the high concentration of traffic that a site receives when Dugg, those inferences are often impossible to get 100% correct – so some one-off accesses end up looking like repeated requests, and our algorithms count them as subscribers instead of browser views. Recently, the Mozilla team added a unique user agent for the feed reader in Firefox 2.0 (per FeedBurner’s request), which means that these anomalies should be far fewer from now on.

What do they think needs improvement? Can they talk about future plans? They also seem like they are all over the place. What do they DO? Is it feeds, advertising, what is it?

Wow. Let’s see: what needs improvement? Everything. We want the web audience at large to be more comfortable with the notion of subscribing to media feeds. We want publishers to get more value from their feed content by adding more functionality. We want to see creative developers build more cool stuff using our open APIs. We want to sell more ads, so our publishers can make more money. The radiators in our office are maddeningly spotty, so we never know when to dress warm, so that’d be good to fix while we’re improving things.

As far as futures, we’d like to see the Bears win the Super Bowl. A Cubs/Sox World Series would be totally cool, too. On a more serious note, we’ve recently stated that further integration between our feed and site stats is in the near future, as well as a platform for measuring all aspects of content consumption: in a feed, on a site, in a widget, or via some new thing that doesn’t have a buzzword attached to it. However content is consumed, we’ll measure (and monetize) it. Expect to see a lot from us on this in 2007.

Regarding the ‘all over the place’ comment, our goal is simply this: FeedBurner aims to be the world’s foremost provider of online media distribution and audience engagement services. We want to help content publishers, be they independent bloggers or podcasters, blog networks, or commercial publishers – to distribute their media further, engage and build their audience and ultimately, make money. We think we’re in the best position to understand, measure and enhance the distribution of content – via feeds, resyndication, widgets, and who knows what comes next – and then, for publishers who want to capitalize on that understanding, we offer a monetization platform with our advertising network.

Deceive: To accept as true or valid what is false or invalid

Hard to believe that bloggers do this all the time. Not intentionally; bloggers many times do not put themselves in the shoes of their readers. A loyal readership requires trust and trust can only be built minus deceit. Let me blunt: bloggers think they do not have to disclose certain things and I suppose to an extent they don’t expect anyone to trust you. If there is nothing to hide.

Feedburner is a service that provides various tools for blogger, like advertising possibilities and user statistics. Recently Feedburner announced that they will be offering advertising for web sites and blogs. The concept behind Feedburner is a good one but in my opinion, bloggers are putting themselves in a possibly bad position. For example, some bloggers are very stat happy people. They want to know how many readers they have, where they are located, what they are reading, etc. Stats, when considered accurately and gathered openly, are good to have. The problem is that many bloggers decide to use a third party to gather that information, like stat counters or Feedburner. That’s fine, but the third-party has to be collecting data if only to provide the blogger with the stats. Shouldn’t the blogger disclose to the reader that there is a third party tracking a reader’s movements? Especially since there isn’t a way to opt out?

Remember when Real Networks put a phone-home type feature in their Real Player so that user statistics could be gathered? That really upset people because it was on by default, originally the ability to opt out wasn’t there and most important, people didn’t like being tracked. The average user doesn’t like tracker cookies, which is why companies like Ad-Aware are in business.

If bloggers know people don’t like to be tracked without being told, why do they do it?

NOOOO! The blogger says. We are collecting the data to better serve the readers! Funny, Real thought the same thing.

WAIT! Real could uniquely identify a listener! In a short period of time, everyone will have a static IP and identification will be very simple even for the novice blogger.

How do you think a novice reader feels when they visit a site, get a tracking cookie, don’t realize they have it, run Ad-Aware, the tracking cookie comes up as critical and they wonder where they got it? The reader, now cautious, begins retracing their steps but more cautious now…if they didn’t use their browser to block the cookie. If the user blocks the tracking, the stats aren’t accurate. Either way, unless the reader understands what is going on (and most don’t), the reader comes away with the feeling of being deceived.

But those stats are so important right?

I don’t know if CoolTechZone made this up or was given false information but the point is false information was posted to the web. This is a growing trend and unfortunately bloggers are having a good time with it. Bloggers are purposely making up stuff and posting it as a joke. And we wonder why journalists don’t take bloggers seriously?

I noticed another trend…snarky blogs. I know, I have a lot of nerve talking because I can rip something or someone apart but I always try to do it respectfully. I try to be open-minded and fair. I admit when I am wrong. I’m not perfect but I do try hard to find a balance between having fun with blogging, keeping it real, no ass-kissing and attempting to be accurate. I am always mindful of the fact that people read what I write and I am fortunate that I have readers that trust me. That trust didn’t happen overnight, I had to work for it. I would never purposely do anything to jeopardize that. Like stupid meaningless posts that might suck people into believing it because they trust me.

Of course there are bloggers that don’t care about trust. They don’t think about the after affects of what they’ve written…until it’s too late.

Audible says their service provides audit ready reports accredited by a third-party service like ImS. I went to ImS ad services to see what their accreditation includes:

* Ad trafficking

* Targeting

* Delivery

* Measurement

These services provide assurance to all relevant parties that the correct ads have been trafficked to the correct content and are being targeted to the correct visitors. At the conclusion of the ImS review, a client receives an accreditation report attesting to the system’s compliance to industry standards.

Targeting – let’s see, if I am an advertiser and I am interested in a male audience age 22-32, can they make sure my ad is only listened to by my target audience? If they can, they are getting way more information than the average person would feel comfortable with.

We are back at measurement. PodTrac offers an ad service as well and they track the following items:

* The date and time of the request to start the download

* The date and time of the completion of the download, based on the server time

* The source of the podcast download

* The unique podcast ID, as assigned by Podtrac collection technology

* Whether the request came through a URL or an RSS feed

Now of course they are getting other information like the IP (meaning location) of the person downloading, the browser they are using. I have no problem with them gather this information. The advertiser and the podcaster do not have the right to know when I played it, how many times I played it, the IP I played it from (which might be different than the IP I downloaded it from), the player I played it from…getting my drift here? It’s none of their business.

You know what is going to happen, right? Ad campaigns usually run monthly, sometimes quarterly. What if the listener does not listen to your podcast in the month the download it in? I have a ton of podcasts on my hard drive I have not listened to, but I have every intention of doing so. The podcasts that are not time-sensitive (for example interviews) can be listened to anytime and I save them for travel. There can be logical explanations for why there is a discrepancy between when a podcast is downloaded and when it is listened to but I seriously doubt the advertiser will care. This is why they want the information – so they can screw you over and get out of paying for ads that have not been heard.

My questions about the service:

1. Will Audible publicly state that they are tracking their users prior to the user downloading the podcast?
2. Will they modify their Privacy Policy to acknowledge the information that is being collected, what is being done with it, how long it is kept and how to opt-out?
3. Will users be able to customize the phone home behavior (as in turn it off)?
4. Will podcasters be able to download and analyze their statistics?
5. What happens if a podcasters podcast downloads greatly differ from the amount of times the ad is listened to?
6. If the podcaster does not want to partner with Audible any longer will the files be removed from Audible’s servers?
7. Will there be any restrictions placed on the podcaster – for example getting their own advertisements for show distributed by Audible?

Update: In an effort to be fair, I emailed Mitch the questions. Perhaps the answers I receive will ease my mind.

I noticed that many bloggers really don’t do much with themes. I’ve seen more default WordPress installations that ever before. I realize changing the header makes it easy but there are a lot of other themes out there. The other day I was looking at a web site that was linked in an RSS feed. It was using the default WP theme. Looking at their front page I noticed something interesting they linked to, so I clicked…another default WP theme. Surfing around I did this about three more times with the same result. By the time I was done I had six or seven browser tabs open and since I had scrolled down the page, clicking through them I couldn’t tell which site was which. I had to view the header to see where I was. Yes, I could look at the title on the browser tag but I should be able to visually view the difference. Here’s an example:

I use ExpressionEngine. The theme on BlogTyme is one of the themes a user can pick by default. I didn’t change it because I don’t see a lot of people using it, although I most likely will change the color. On Not Too Geeky the changes I made might not be considered an improvement to some but I like it and I might switch it around some more. When BlogTyme was using WP I created a custom designs for it.

Although there is a large amount of people using RSS (not seeing the site design but once) there are more people viewing sites via browsers. For people to comment (for the moment) the user needs to go to the site (it can be done via RSS). People will come to visit the site…help make their experience more enjoyable. Give them some eye candy.

Odd, I don’t see the same thing happening much with Movable Type. It’s been a while since I used it…so long I hardly remember what the default template looks like.

The main problem is that Microsoft is good at competing but not good at caring for customers. The focus of the developer division at Microsoft is the .NET Framework and related technologies which is primarily a competitor to Java/JVM and related technologies. However when it comes to areas where there isn’t a strong, single competitor that can be focused on (e.g. RAD development, scripting languages, web application development) we tend to flounder and stagnate. Eventually I’m sure customer pressure will get us of our butts, it’s just unfortunate that we have to be forced to do these things instead of doing them right the first time around.

This is very true. I’ve written about Microsoft products in one form or another for seven years now. At one time Microsoft was a company I truly admired because they seemed to “get it”. Not any more. If there isn’t anyone to compete with, Microsoft drops the ball.

Let’s look at an example…there was a post on the Internet Explorer blog that IE7 will have tabs. It has to have tabs, this shouldn’t be news. The only reason why IE7 is going to be released prior to Longhorn is because of Firefox. Millions of people had to switch browsers before Microsoft woke up and released that we (as users) realized we could do better.

That is what saddens me about Microsoft. When I used to talk to Microsoft developers you could hear the enthusiasm in their voices. The product features showed their enthusiasm. Microsoft is only as good as their employees – that is true for any company. When I read the IE7 tab post, I realized that something is missing. Is it that the developers “get it” but are bottlenecked somehow and are unable to produce? Is it that there isn’t a true understanding of how bad IE6 is compared to Firefox? IE7 needs to be better than Firefox for me to switch back…get it? That’s how Firefox users feel. We’re happy using Firefox – Microsoft is going to have to give us a reason to come back.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-Microsoft and I think I am being fair. I was extremely excited when news on Xbox 360 was released. I was giddy with delight when I saw some of the games I will be playing on my Xbox 360. I wasn’t swayed by the fact that, spec wise, PS3 trumps Xbox 360. I realize one important thing – it should. It’s coming out six months after Xbox 360, it’s supposed to be better. It has to be better – Sony gets it.

Microsoft needs to get it.