WSJ: “Just a few years ago, as dot-com companies started to tank, many analysts had predicted that some free Web content and tools would disappear or dwindle. “Free is certainly making a huge comeback these last 12 to 18 months,” says Olivier Travers, a technology consultant in the U.K. who in March 2001 launched a blog, theendoffree.com, chronicling the move to fee-based services from free.”
Monthly Archive for December, 2004
Errata: In “Push media comes of age” last week the seminar for online publishers on RSS to which I referred was put on by the good people of the UK Association of Online Publishers. It should have appeared in that column, and the subsequent column but, unfortunately, didn’t.
TBBC is going to teach more UK hacks how to blog. Yay…. I think?
Well, that’s another year of E-business Briefing columns chalked up.
Went to the Neal St Restaurant for Google’s annual Christmas press lunch, graciously hosted by their UK ad sales MD Kate Burns. Antonio Carluccio, the owner, walks in before we start lunch and tells a joke he says he tells each Christmas to his customers:
“There’s a little boy, the son of a Mafia boss. His father tells him that to get any presents from Father Christmas he must write to Jesus first. The little boy starts off writing ‘Dear Jesus, if I get lots of presents, I’ll be a good boy for a whole month.’ But he thinks better of that and throws it away. He gets another piece of paper and writes ‘Dear Jesus, if I get lots of presents, I’ll be a good boy for a whole week.’ He decides that’s too long as well. ‘I’m a good boy already!’ he says to himself. He gets another piece of paper and looks at the statue of the Virgin Mary his mother keeps on the sideboard. ‘Dear Jesus’ he writes ‘you better bring me some presents or your mother gets it.’
I have a been a big advocate of RSS in the past. But this article (which I have come to late, alas) has an interesting take on how RSS might start to look like a DOS attack. I’m not sure what the answer is, but I’m afraid we are going to have to get used to these issues, or come up with more interesting ways of dealing with them, since RSS is here to stay, both for users and for publishers.
Why on earth is there still no RSS feed from the Media Guardian? Are they afraid of something? Do they think media people don’t ‘get it’ (they may be right actually, but that’s another debate).
Or are they worried it might adversely affect their impressions? In fact, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you have to register for their stories? Could it be that their new media “halo” (the big G constantly wins awards) is slipping? Everyone knows that it’s hard to produce a feed from a registration-only site. Not to mention, largely pointless.
Well, I thought I’d ask the question…
Sony is trying to sue long-time blogger, Jason Kottke, because he posted a tiny audio sample of a question from a US game show. Sony owns the show. That’s it. They really are that pathetic. So I suggest people consider boycotting Sony and mailing their CEO (howard_stringer@sonyusa.com) to tell him that this is rather heavy handed behaviour over a tiny one-man blog.
(Thanks to Calacanis).
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