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?

Wouldn’t it be interesting if every certified A-lister, by convention, didn’t blog during the third week of every month. What if that idea caught on?

Yes Dave, that would be interesting…in an amusing but disastrous type of way.

1. Memeorandum wouldn’t update for a week (and sites like them).
2. Many non-bloggers would have nothing to read. Imagine no Boing Boing (they are all A-list bloggers), Scripting, Tech Crunch, Robert Scoble, Om Malik…;the list goes on.
3. Bloggers wouldn’t have anything to write about and would *gasp* have to create some original content. Not that many don’t but the vast majority point to…;you guessed it, A-listers. Hell, if Dave hadn’t written his entry, I wouldn’t be writing this one.

That’s the way it works.

The above scenario doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be quality content to read. Good luck finding it though. Technorati’s top searches would be filled with “how the internet went dead”. Think about it…;if they “really” stopped blogging for a week – there goes a big chunk of content for sites like ZDNET, CNET, Slashdot. And it would only get worse with services like BlogBurst, taking blog content and pushing it to traditional publishers.

This caused me to look at my entries a bit to see how this would affect me. I have a good balance of linking to A-listers, small blogs and creating original content. Keeping it real, that was not always the case. Looking back there are many entries where I looked in FeedDemon, something an A-lister wrote sparked my interest and I wrote about it…;like the A-List Shuffle entry. Almost a year to the day people were complaining that Dave is stingy with links.

Hello! Black woman, non-A-Lister was linked to by Dave. Again. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

I’d like to see the A-listers stop blogging just to see the impact it would have on the net, but it’s highly unlikely that would happen. Too much money would be lost that week.

This version is very different from the previous verions, changes I feel are for the better. I can see all my folders now. I can drag and drop feeds between folders. But it gets better…I now know the feeds I pay the most attention to, the ones I pay the least attention to. I love it!

FD2 now allows me to get an instant look at what I need to read, how many items are unread and the ability to mark them all read without clicking on folders.

There are so many little changes that makes it easier to read my feeds. I can easily change from subscription view to news items. Change from full feeds to excerpts – right there in the window I’m looking at. Nick, you did a great job!

If you are comfortable playing with betas, I recommend trying it out. I haven’t experienced any problems at all and I have a lot of feeds. That’s the only thing off the top of my head I wish FD had…how many feeds am I subscribed to?

I won one of the free licenses and I logged in today and my license is gone. If I get my legitimate free license back, I’m back with Expression Engine. I don’t remember there being a limitation on it and I did not receive a reminder notice if there was one.

Why? Because I want a blog software I can recommend to people and receive professional support. WordPress doesn’t give that. Matter of fact if you ask a question on their forums odds are you’ll receive a response with lots of negativity in it.

Nothing beats the customization in EE as well. I wanted to be fair, I used MT for over a year, EE for almost just as long and I admit I haven’t given WP as long but I know what I know. There is no word on when the next version will come out so why wait, ya know?

So it all depends on the license – time will tell. It is also important to me that a company keeps their word. I might have already been screwed with FeedDemon – a couple of months after I got my paid licensed copy they were bought out by Newsgator who has a subscription model. FeedDemon users receive two years of the Business Standard subscription so I have two years to test the waters. No point in getting upset about it but initially I wasn’t please. Time will tell on that too.

Update: pMachine responded to my request in less than 30 minutes informing me there was a $19.95 renewal fee to access the download area. Gotta love it. So yes, I’ll be moving back to Expression Engine.

1. Blogs foster conversation.
2. If your blog doesn’t have comments, it’s not a blog.
3. If a blogger makes a mistake the blogger needs to correct it (not only the source).

That said, look at the graphic below (click to enlarge it).

It’s a screenshot of RSS Bandit, my RSS aggregator of choice at the moment. I still use FeedDemon to download podcasts but that’s about all. If RSS Bandit had better enclosure support (like FeedDemon) I’d be a happy camper.

My post is first, with the link I referenced second. Robert Scoble’s post is third where he linked to me. Then it goes crazy – look at all the links under him! 12 levels deep and it goes on – I just can’t capture it all on one screenshot and the screenshot be easy to read.

Points 1 & 2: Comments are what create the conversation. RSS Bandit does an excellent job of tracking the conversation. A static website can’t do this. A static website can spark a conversation but it can’t engage in the conversation. That’s what makes a blog special – engaging in the conversation while the conversation is taking place. A blog has to have comments enabled to be a blog.

Point 3: Referring back to the screenshot let’s say Robert made a mistake in his post and corrects it. Unless the people who linked to him corrects it, the readers of the site 10 levels down will never know there was a mistake. Look closely, Robert’s post “I love Maryam” somehow entered the conversation because a blogger related the two posts. Bloggers start stating an opinion and the deeper a reader goes in the chain the more the original theme of the thread can be lost. That is why it’s extremely important that all bloggers correct their mistakes.

Get it? If you don’t and you still believe that a blog is a blog if it doesn’t have comments then explain to me the difference between a static web site and a blog.

More aggregators need to track the conversation. Aggregators have such a long way to go and that is why I think many people don’t understand the true power of a blog. How can they? The technology hasn’t caught up yet.

Update 5:30pm: I forgot to mention my main point – to integrate non-bloggers into the conversation, blog have to have comments. If comments were tracked as well (and on some blogs comments do show up – depends on how the RSS feed is made) the thread would be much more detailed than the screenshot above.

Dave Winer sparks conversation on a daily basis on his site but the only way I can interact with him on what he said is to send him an email. Robert on the other hand gives me the tools to interact with him whenever I want and have other readers interact with each other because he allows comments on his blog.

Yes, it’s true: NewsGator has acquired FeedDemon and TopStyle, and brought me on board in the process.

Perhaps my age is showing (I’m not 40 yet) but to me, that is so unprofessional. Clients should have been told first, period. Not everyone uses RSS. Not everyone would think to look in the places the news was announced. What happened to professionalism? When money is exchanged it is a business transaction and there should be some professionalism in how things are handled. It’s great to integrate blogs into the business environment but it shouldn’t be at the expense of professionalism and catering to client needs. There has to be balance so business owners can properly conduct business.

Let’s take a broader example…if your mortgage was sold to another company, would you want to find out about directly from your bank or on the web? If your employer changed hands, would you like to find out about it from your employer, the new company or on the web? If you have a Bank of America or Wachovia account would you like to find out about the recent security breach on the web or from the bank directly? See the pattern?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Nick and I do believe that he thinks he’s doing the right thing but that doesn’t excuse not formally notifying clients about this change. Especially since this is the second time some users are going through this.

I also want to say that I feel that Newsgator handled this in a professional manner. They have a press release on their site, they have FeedDemon added to their current offerings (as coming soon). For Newsgator clients, they did exactly what they were supposed to do and I commend them on that. Other sites reported it because Newsgator has a formal press release on their site. This missing piece is that Nick should have had one on his site, the day before not the day after, since FeedDemon/TopStyle users are the ones that are facing the biggest change.

I’m hoping that business owners remember their clients and put their needs first. Clients deserve to be informed first and their questions answered. Happy customers will spread the word and give all the publicity a business needs.

While dealing with a nuisance computer issue I’ve been thinking about how I want to develop this site – the direction I want to take. The computer issues caused me to re-think some things about how I manage the information that is given to me each day. To keep myself organized I have filters set up so the email goes where it needs to, and I address it. Some I only need to glance at, some goes directly in the trash (junk). Some must be addressed immediately. You get my point right?

With RSS feeds I’m bumping into the same problem but I can’t battle it as efficiently. While dealing with my nuisance computer issue I didn’t open my RSS reader for a couple of days. But I wisely had a backup of my feeds. I wasn’t thrilled when I noticed I had 12,564 items to read.

Yeah…with no management. So I decided to cheat a little bit. I glanced at some of the conversations going on it’s been a busy time. A lot of people are talking about Robert Scoble (for various reasons) and Adam Curry (podcasting in general). So I created a watch in FeedDemon for Adam Curry, Robert Scoble and podcasting. All the posts regarding them where placed in their watch folder. Yippee! The problem is they were still unread in their main folder. My number of unread items didn’t decrease.

Going through the feeds I noticed a lot of people saying the same thing, pointing to the same thing. Hence, once I get caught up all link blogs are going in their own category. I have nothing against link blogs but if that’s all they do I think for my purposes I want them separated from original content. See, when you’ve read the same thing more than 3 times it becomes the equivalent to junk mail. Unfortunately there is no way to get rid of the “junk”.

Since I’m talking about “junk”, there is another type of junk – posts you aren’t interested in. When bloggers have one blog for everything it can create a problem – the reader getting bombarded with information they don’t really care about. For example, if a reader has an interest in photography and they subscribe to a blog of a photographer who writes about photography, that’s great. If the blogger starts talking about interior design or their personal life, the reader might not have an interest in that. In truth there might only be one post a week about photography the reader is interested in. That one post per week is worth subscribing to the blog. The problem is that 90% of the content is not being read – yet it’s costing the blogger money if they are not using a free hosting service. The RSS feed is being downloaded, and not read. What a waste.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to filter out the stuff we really don’t have an interest in? That is why I have category RSS feeds on Tyme Said – the reader can pick what interests them. I made the categories to ensure I stayed on topic. Right now you might not be experiencing this problem because you’re not subscribed to many RSS feeds. Wait until you do, then you will see there is definitely a problem. I’m not sure if there is an easy solution to this issue because RSS feeds aren’t individual pieces of email.

But something needs change. It would be a dream if I could manipulate feeds like I can email.

Your system config file is missing.

Your drive is not formatted.

Your hard drive is going to fail.

Your computer is going to blow up.

So I ended up having to reformat the hard drive. I didn’t think this was a big deal because the important stuff is on a separate drive. For example, I have PocoMail on one drive but it backs up to a secondary drive. World of Warcraft – on the secondary drive. Yahoo? Secondary drive. Java? Primary drive. See what I mean?

So I wiped the drive, reinstalled everything and I thought I could continue on with life like normal. I forgot something though. Software authors got the bright idea to store configuration information in the Documents & Settings folder, which is on the primary drive. So there’s no point in placing an application that does that on a secondardy drive if all the configuration stuff is on the primary drive.

If programmers must do this, then they need to have a backup feature. Thankfully I have a recent backup of my blogroll but it’s not current. All the editing I did wasn’t saved, and I thought it was because it was on a secondary drive.

Sigh….it gets worse….

FeedDemon won’t let me just add all the feeds…I have to do it by category. And there’s a 999 limit on how many feeds you can add to a category…and guess who has more than 999 in one category?

PocoMail has really spoiled me. With PocoMail I was up and running again in less than a minute even though it was stored on a primary drive (but backed up to the secondary). Yahoo? A snap. As sophisticated as World of Warcraft is, that worked without me having to do anything because it’s on a secondary drive. FeedDemon? I’m starting from scratch.

Don’t get me wrong, I like FeedDemon. Why can’t all programs make it simple?

What I fail to understand is why people feel compelled to post something daily? With RSS your readers will be notified when something new is posted. Technorati and PubSub will help guide new visitors to your site. In my opinion three good posts per week is better than seven days of little posts here and there. Of course this is up to the blogger but it still amazes me how many bloggers feel like they must blog everyday.

And apologize if they don-t.

When you feel that obligation that is when blogging becomes a burden. I can understand this better if you are a news resource then yes, people are expecting you to post material everyday. If one person is behind a site like this burnout will come quickly.

If you are using blogging software that allows future posting, use it. For blogs that post original content (ie: not date sensitive) write up a couple of posts and spread them out for a couple of days. They take a break and enjoy life. Enjoy your family. You-ve knocked out two birds with one stone and lessen the chance suffering from burnout.

That being said I wish there was a tool that would aid in maintaining a link blog. For example, I use FeedDemon as my aggregator. FeedDemon has a newsbin section where I can drop articles that interest me then come back to them later. What would be nice is to have another area that has a section for a linkblog that allows me to drop posts in that area then upload all the posts to the blog with the following information:

1. The name of the blog
2. The title of the post
3. The link to the post
4. Optional: an excerpt of the post

That would make maintaining a link blog much easier.

Scoble asked me to write this post, so here goes. I don’t mean that RSS aggregators are the kind of killer app that sells a billion computers and creates new markets (there is that possibility, though). I mean the app that does so much that it consumes all available CPU, memory, network, and disk. Perhaps I really mean that they’re the “killing my computer” app.

I posted about my problems with RSS Readers and I have to admit, sometimes I feel like I am at their mercy. I have yet to find one application that does everything I want it to do. Perhaps I should write these thoughts down, post them and pray it makes it into an application.

I decided to use FeedDemon because it is feature rich, but I have to admit that there is one feature that put it over the top – and it is not one that is advertised. FeedDemon gave me the most accurate results for feed retrieval. I subscribe to over 1000 feeds. When I decide to read my blogroll I expect the program to retrieve the feed if it’s available. I noticed when the number of feeds increase the accuracy in feed retrieval (and the performance of the software) decreases. I was bumping into the problem of going through my feeds and the next day there were a ton from prior days, which is inefficient.

RSS readers have room for improvement and I think this is the time to really speak out on what you would like in your favorite RSS reader…because programmers are listening, but they aren’t mind readers.