I’ve always thought that Radio Userland was mispriced. So I’m very pleased to have Steve Kirks ask a pricing question in the comments to Domain Name Fixation. I just don’t know whether that’s quite the direction I would go.

The underlying issue is that Radio Userland is different things to different people. But it has only one price. So depending upon what you’re using; it can be underpriced, overpriced, or just right.

If you’re using Userland hosting, then [domain names aside] Radio is a great deal. It’s hard to find hosting for less than $5/month. And while the base Radio only includes 40MB of storage, you can buy more. On the other hand; if you host your own weblog, then that Radio renewal doesn’t feel like much of a bargain. Especially with the seeming lack of progress in Radio capability and robustness over the past 20 months.

The problem is that if you make the pricing too complex, then people will walk away rather than sort out the pricing. What I would recommend is:

• 1-3 entry packages similar to the current offering. Unless there is a lot of demand for a non-hosted package, then I’d avoid offering one.
• 2 renewal prices: one with hosting and one without.
• Domain pointing either included in the package, or as a one time setup fee.

Thanks to Tivo and Netflix, I’m enjoying a repeat viewing of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5. In the beginning, I thought Deep Space Nine was the better show. And as Babylon 5 picked up steam, it became my favorite. Now, I’d split hairs and say that Babylon 5 is the better series and Deep Space Nine is the better TV show.

The entirety of Babylon 5 fits together like a puzzle. Each show provided several new puzzle pieces and each season swept out a new swath in the story arc. But it’s a series in which it is important to view the shows in sequence as the stories build upon themes that were laid down before. Deep Space Nine is more show than series. It had the season spanning war with the Dominion, but most episodes require no particular place in the time line.

I recommend both. But try to watch Babylon 5 in sequence, it’s meant to be viewed that way.

One difference between Baseball and Football is that Billy Beane can become a target for disdain while Bill Belichick can become the benchmark for a well run franchise. The Patriots are praised for trading Bledsoe, cutting Malloy and being tough with Law. And the A’s are derided for letting Giambi and Tejada go. You can’t compare 0 for 9 in playoff elimination games and being 2 for 2 in Super Bowls. But you can compare the approach towards building a cost-effective team.

Of course, the NFL has a cap and the cap is king. While the Yankees have a $180M payroll and still rake it in. But I just don’t understand why baseball people expect the A’s to spend like the big market teams while earning money like a small market team.

I have a fixation about domain names, perhaps the result of spending the better part of a year as radio.weblogs.com/0118153 before becoming Ideoplex. A good domain name is the foundation of your internet brand. And a bargain to boot (.com registration at GoDaddy is only $8.95/year).

Consider Steve Kirks’ mantra of upstreaming, commenting and application stability. These are hard problems. Solving them takes some thought, hard work and a lot of testing. Now consider domain names for Userland hosted weblogs. How hard is that?

I have no issue with Steve’s current focus. I think Radio has attained a reputation for feature richness over feature quality and upstreaming, commenting and application stability will go a long ways to correcting that.

But there is also the issue of competitive feature set. Domain names are a big bang for the buck. To my way of thinking; part of the core, competitive feature set.

Right now, Steve’s mantra is upstreaming, comments, application stability. I can’t argue about keeping your eye on the ball. But it never hurts to think about what comes next. My wish list includes:

Domain Names for Userland hosted weblogs: ‘Nuff said already.

Secure Upstreaming: Perhaps not a problem with Userland hosted weblogs, but for those of us with hosted space compromising the FTP login can open the doors to everything. Right now, I render files to my hard drive and rsync them up to my space. It would be a lot easier with a secure upstream driver.

Reappearing news: I have a problem with old posts reappearing in my news aggregator. It seems to primarily happen with high volume MT blogs. I’ve kept copies of the underlying feed files, and it happens with feeds that have not changed. I speculate that there are so many items that Radio gets confused about what’s old and what’s new - feed has 30 items, radio has 15 cached, radio thinks other 15 are new and caches those, next go around the reverse happens and the originally cached 15 now look new. Rinse and Repeat.

Fragile news presentation: Ditto to Cristian Vidmar’s post on a single badly sized post making an entire page of news unreadable.

News grouping: I’d like to be able to group news feeds together in my aggregator. I’m using folders in Bloglines, and it makes a difference.

Trackback excerpts: Radio uses the post’s first sentence for it’s trackback excerpt. I’d like to have the option of supplying the excerpt text. Or how about taking the sentence with the link?

The 2004 Radio Roadmap is up. And it’s good to see the plan. But, the Roadmap is missing what I consider the Number One priority: hosted domain names.

Radio Userland is a great product for the beginner: Integrated news aggregator with easy post quoting; hosted space included with the annual subscription; easy switching between the included themes; 30 day free trial. But it doesn’t allow hosted users to have their own domain name.

And because it doesn’t support hosted domain names, I’m reluctant to recommend Radio to anyone with the potential to establish serious googlejuice. Because there is no good way to move from the hosted Userland site to your own domain.

5 Aug: I must not have been clear. The annual Radio subscription includes hosting. But you cannot use your own domain name for a Userland hosted weblog. You must provide your own host - too much for most beginners.

Now that I’m paying attention, I see that Steve Kirks is looking at Radio Comments. I’ve got a bit of experience with Radio Comments and here are some of my thoughts:

• Maintain static count files. I suspect that the web server would do a bang up job if you just made it easy.
• By month. So sites with prolific comments don’t pull the lifetime comment count for each page view.

4 Aug: Pat Ritchey points out that there can be multiple months on a page. Since Radio knows what months are present on any page, it can simply include more than one month when appropriate. The extra get is simply the price of conserving bandwidth.

Hey, Radio has a Product Manager. Good timing for me, my renewal comes due in December. That gives me a chance to see how things shake out before laying my money down. [via Scripting News]

Of course, I’m also just a wee bit jealous. Getting paid to guide the development path of Radio Userland. That’s a job that you can really sink your teeth into.

With about a month of Tivo Plus under my belt, here are my current pet peeves.

1. Time: Time, especially late night TV time, is not absolute. So if I try to extend the recording time on a season pass by a minute, then please give me the option of delaying the start time on another season pass by that corresponding minute.
2. Half a loaf is better than none: If a hour long show conflicts with a half hour show, then maybe I’d be okay with a season pass to the second half of the show. Especially if you record the full hour when appropriate.
3. Wishlists: Pay more attention to ratings. We like Mysteries, but we don’t like Matlock or Murder She Wrote. So stop taping them already. Three thumbs down be enough to get rid of them.
4. Space Remaining: It would be very nice to know when I’m running out of space. And to have a projection of when I would run out of space if I did not delete any recordings.

One of the things that I look for in a hosting service is access to raw access logs. There is no substitute for raw data when you really want to know what is going on. But the good folks at TextDrive provide Urchin, and Urchin just might be enough to change my mind.

Urchin would definitely be enough, if it just understood the nature of RSS. I recently added a filter to exclude my RSS feed from the statistics to get a better view of sessions. Unfortunately, that also removed my RSS feed from the hit count and bandwidth computation.

What I really need is for Urchin to understand RSS. To understand that 20 news aggregators pulling my RSS feed every hour represent 20 sessions, not 480. I’d settle for being able to exclude my RSS feed from the session report while retaining it for hit count and bandwidth.