Entries Tagged 'Commentary' ↓

So, one of my very favorite daily reads is moving to its new home at the New York Times. This should be a Good Thing. Unfortunately, responses to the announcement consist almost entirely of loyal readers congratulating the authors on the move, while at the same time indicating that they no longer wish to subscribe, on account of the Times’s lame syndication implementation.

Will someone at the Times please stop the bleeding and deliver a simple full-text feed? If your concern is that full-text feeds are going to affect your ad revenue, fear not. Most of us don’t see them now.

UPDATE1: Progress?

In protest of Flickr’s on-going, poorly communicated and arbitrarily-enforced censorship campaign: I just removed the photo that I had on Flickr. That’ll show ‘em.

More worthwhile commentary on the problem:

• Update on the Censorship Problem on Flickr
• Non-nonsense about Flickr, Germany & restricted photos
• A German’s view on the Flickr censorship issue

1) Spotting one of the “Google vans” (Is this it?) becomes the new Where’s Waldo.

2) Locating Street View imagery of one’s self intentionally doing stupid things for the camera on said van becomes a new measure of geek stardom.

3) [I'm half-way serious about this one] Google (or a partner) finds a way to produce a cost-effective collection platform that can be distributed to private individuals–who’ll be given some amount of compensation for periodically sending imagery back to Google–for the purpose of expanding Street View to those areas that might otherwise be cost-prohibitive to capture.

Google has a wildly popular feed reader. And they presumably know a thing or two about ranking algorithms. Why not rank blog search results based on subscribership? Or, since they’ve surely already thought of something as groundbreaking as my previous idea, maybe up that weight a tad? Would this not do away with the vast majority of spam in blog search results? Or, are the sploggers in control of massive numbers of Reader accounts that they use to subscribe to all of their junk blogs? And, if they do dutifully subscribe to their junk blogs, would that not make auto-termination of said Reader/Google accounts pretty simple.

Wouldn’t Google have to try pretty hard to screw up something like this?