I handed my trusty iBook over to UPS today, the first step in its journey to a new home. The iBook was my primary computer for over two years and did yeoman work during that time. The only time it really fell short was during an adventure with some NCAA tournament video and iMovie - I wasn’t sure that we would be able to make it, but it came through in the clutch. I hope that it serves Steve as well as it served me.

Now that Dave has noticed the issue of feed recovery, it may be a good time to bring up URL Escrow again. I still think that there is an opportunity for a service that took temporary control of a domain name to provide http redirects. It wouldn’t fix Henning’s printed perpetual URL to nowhere, but it would give the internet a chance to route around the disruption.

It’s no secret that I believe RSS is a broadcast solution. So I was in a bit of a tough spot when ZDNet posed a compelling application for personalized RSS: tracking packages. But then I realized that I missed a key point. Package delivery status is not a personalized topic; rather it is a topic with a very limited audience. There is no presumption of privacy and subscription is open to anyone with access to the tracking number.

The argument for private RSS is that the message source is intrinsically verified (authentic unless site or DNS are hacked). But it does nothing to insure that the messages are actually private. And many news aggregators do not provide adequate support for authentication (at a minimum, keeping authentication separate from the feed url to prevent accidental sharing).

Tim Bray is interested in truly private syndication, with bank account and stock portfolio information available by RSS. I’m not quite ready to trust my news aggregator with the username and password to either my bank or my broker accounts. I’m not enthusiastic about having to enter them every time I launch my aggregator. And I’m not sure that I can trust developers to properly protect my username and password once I’ve entered them (not in an accessable memory location while running and not dumped in a program crash).

Me, I’d like to see more use of digitally signed email to prevent phishing. I’d like to leave RSS for broadcast. And I’d like to keep my financial information both private and secure.

I like to stretch out on the floor. So we moseyed over to Target and purchased a fine floor pillow for my stretching comfort. However, Sam seems to think that it’s much better suited for a tab.

With Mark claiming my bed pillow, there is little doubt that I’m the low man on the totem pole around here.

PS: Flannel sheets purchased at the Company Store. They don’t appear to be currently available, but it never hurts to ask.

I really wish that Jason Calacanis hadn’t mentioned ethics in the ethical chickens are coming home to roost. I happen to agree with his basic premise that accepting money to blog on a topic will cost the blogger credibility on that topic. But I see it as losing a couple of credibility points in a vocation where there will be opportunities to earn those points back.

Which isn’t to say that earning those points back will be easy. It’s going to require taking a hard stand against your own personal interests. And that you reveal enough about your personal interests for us to see that you’re going against them. So how ever much money you made, I hope that it was worth it.

Returning to the question of ethics, I think that more often than not whoever brings up ethics is trying to take the moral high ground. And that labeling someone’s actions as unethical is guaranteed to draw a response. Which may have been Calacanis’ objective. I just think that the conversation would have been more productive without the added heat.

via BlogKits: Blogging Ethics & Advertising, The Fading Grey Line

At its core, RSS is a broadcast technology. You make the feed available, and it is open for anyone to access. By doing so, you provide a much better broadcast user experience than email. No problems with spam filters, no problems confirming email addresses, and no problems with email list administration.

With email, you choose your audience for each missive. But with RSS, your audience chooses you. Because your audience chooses you, there are no natural waypoints where you can ask for information. And without information, no ready way to target your message for an individual.

Of course, it is possible to provide personalized feeds. But the current infrastructure is going to fight you. How will you support reader referrals when the easiest method is sharing the feed url? And how will you support passwords without wide-spread support from aggregators? And most importantly, how will the personalized RSS user experience be better than email?

PS There is a special exemption for entities using RSS as their primary broadcast communication mechanism - a common vehicle to a common location may provide a better user experience than splitting messages across RSS and email.

Part of a series inspired by my contribution to Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS.

RSS was developed to support the syndication of existing content. Unlike email, its relationship to permanent content allows us to:

• Throw it away: because you’re just deleting your local pointer to permanent content elsewhere. I keep years of email archived - because the discussions in those archives no longer exist anywhere else. When I finally delete those email archives, those discussions will be gone forever.
• Find it when you need it: because the search engines have indexed it at the original location. If it’s important, then the search engines will find it. And if the search engines can’t find it, then it probably wasn’t really that important.
• Share it: because it’s disseminated content. You may be able to find information in your email archives. But will you open your email archives up to your colleagues?

Of course, RSS doesn’t have to point to permanent content. But are you willing to give all that up?

Part of a series inspired by my contribution to Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS.

After a good night’s sleep, it occurs to me that the really big news from yesterday’s announcement on rel=”nofollow” was that 10 content producers and 3 search engines all joined in a common initiative. While I remain sceptical about the end of comment spam, I think that we can be a bit more optimistic about cooperation and interoperability in our community moving forward.

Today’s big story is preventing comment spam with rel=”nofollow”. Color me sceptical. As I noted in fighting comment spam, I found that link moderation was an ineffective counter-measure - the spam-master just continued to bludgeon me with linkless comments. To the best of my knowledge, my comment link blacklist has been the most effective weapon in my anti-spam arsenal.

I suspect that the cost of spam is so low that the spam-masters will continue to cast a wide net - spamming promiscuously in search of unprotected targets. And that it will take years of punishing and closing down those unprotected targets before rel=”nofollow” finally ends comment spam.

20 Jan: The nofollow Silver Lining.

It is just coincidence that RSS has risen to prominence just as email has started to buckle under the weight of spam. But that coincidence has lead many to advocate RSS as a replacement for email. I think that shows a lack of understanding about what RSS is and isn’t.

1. RSS is a transient representation of permanent content
2. RSS is broadcast not narrowcast
3. RSS is read differently than email

Part of a series inspired by my contribution to Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS.