Richard Giles

There’s a blogosphere skirmish brewing online. Duncan Riley, of The Blog Herald, another Western Australian weblog, got on the wrong side of Robert Scoble today. He doesn’t agree with the idea of full text RSS feeds; it reduces his revenue from his weblog advertising.

I’m with Scoble on this, I unsubscribe from RSS feeds that are partial. I use an aggregator to save time, skimming through content quickly until I find something compelling. In some cases I use the headline and the body to determine if it’s something I’d like to read in detail. If that’s the case I’ll often visit the weblog in a browser, that way I can get a little more context (other posts, comments, etc.).

Providing a partial feed doesn’t give me all the information I need, so I unsubscribe. I realise some people rely on hits to generate advertising revenue, but like any business in an evolving industry, they adapt. After all, it’s not about the business, it’s about the customers! Lets not forget that.

Clay Cook at TechUncut is starting a regular meeting in Perth for people interested in Web 2.0. It’s a fine idea, and I wish I’d thought of it, but his wife Rachel is a tad too quick. She beat us all to the punch.

So, Clay’s plan is to call the event a Web 2.0 TechUncut Mashup (great marketing for his weblog), and hold the first one in Cottesloe (Western Australia) on March 6 at 8pm.

Unfortunately, I’ll be at O’Reilly’s ETech while the first meeting is on. However, I plan to attend the subsequent ones when ever time permits.

I’ve always thought that Perth is a hotbed for innovation. I figure it’s something to do with being isolated. So we should encourage as many people to be involved in the latest wave of Internetdom as possible. We all benefit from a rising tide as they say.

If you’re interested, check the post and contact Clay.

I’m starting to get frustrated with Guy Kawasaki. He is posting insightful stuff thick and fast, and this weblog is becoming a shrine to his entries. However, I had to mention his latest post, How to Suck Up to a Blogger, and suggest another bullet point.

He has some valid points, and I laughed at his list of email messages a marketer should send a blogger.

If you want to supplement citing and linking, you can send the blogger emails with these kinds of messages:

* “I love how your style sheets cascade.”
* “I set my RSS reader to refresh your blog every five minutes.” (contributed by Alex Krupp)
* “Not a day goes by that I don’t read your blog.”
* “Why don’t you publish your blog in a book?”
* “You could easily break up your daily entries into several parts because they have so much content.”
* “I’ve forwarded your blog to many of my friends.”
* “I ‘digg’ your blog almost every day.”
* “I don’t care how often my RSS reader gets your edited versions because your blog is so insightful.”

Adding to Guy’s process, I’d recommend a company get involved in the blogosphere’s conversation by starting their own blogs. It’d make it’s conversations more genuine, and bloggers appreciate that.