With .NET 2.0, Microsoft introduced the new System.Transactions namespace. This will give us the power to create transactions that span across multiple data sources as well as our own code. Here’s a great video about the new Transaction capabilities in .NET 2.0.
RSS is becoming significant because main stream web sites allow users to subscribe to yours and others’ RSS feeds. Neither you nor the user base need to understand RSS for this to be easy and work.
What technology your grandmother understands is irrelevant to your web content strategy. In particular, you should ignore grandma’s opinion about RSS. What you should pay attention to is this:
Yahoo News, gmail, My Yahoo, and MSN allow users to subscribe to (RSS) news sources on their home pages. Users can subscribe to any source including yours, if you produce RSS. Don’t you want your customers to at least have the opportunity to subscribe directly to your content on their home/news page? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Worried that, like grandma, you don’t understand how to produce or publish RSS? You don’t have to, just start a blog. They all produce RSS automatically, are quick to set up, and can be very low cost. Don’t want to invest the time to blog? Use a free service like feedburner or Sally Falkow’s $89/month PRESSfeed.
So, in a nutshell, the argument for RSS is this: (1) There’s an expanding user base that is becoming significant because of main stream media involvement; (2) Neither you nor this user base need to understand any of RSS’s technical niceties to subscribe to or provide relevant content. Rok Hrastnik and Chris Pirillo take heart.
Susie Gardner has given great, detailed, and constructive feedback to the High Octane teams. She focuses on effective communication strategies, the key to succeeding in an essentially textual enterprise.
Susie Gardner has provided some impressive feedback to the High Octane Blogging teams. She really emphasizes getting all the small points right that when summed together lead to effective communication. You can see in both her criticisms and her praise that she sat down and took the time to read the posts and let them speak to her. Here are her remarks as she applied them to each group:
One thing I really like in Susie’s approach is that she finds specific posts to hold up as exemplars rather than falling back on general impressions. I think this approach gives people specifics they can either try to improve or do more of. It is the same approach I have tried to use in my individual feedback with them.
We should be getting Sarah Goldman over the weekend.
Jeremy Wright is providing some excellent feedback to The High Octane Blogging Bootcamp leading me to feel the coaching model we are testing here will work. Next up is Susie Gardner of Buzz Marketing with Blogs fame.
Blogmarks has provided excellent support for xFolk in their Blog Sync functionality.
I meant to post about this earlier but have been very busy with client work. Blogmarks has really stepped up to the plate with xFolk support in their newly renovated blog sync functionality. Blog sync allows you to republish in your blog the links you bookmarked that day.
The neat thing about Blogmarks’ approach is that they allow you to specify the markup that will be used in the post to your blog. Their wiki gives a good overview, and their first example shows how to do the markup so that it complies with xFolk.
Napster does it. So does Yahoo. And Microsoft is considering it, according to many reports. Music by subscription, that is. Instead of “purchasing” a song, you rent the right to play anything from a huge online library, for as long as you maintain the subscription.
Why does this make sense? For a start, we have never really purchased our music. Even with a CD, what we buy is a license, sometimes accompanied by physical media. Once the physical disk is replaced by purely electronic media, that fact becomes more obvious. So the difference between an iTunes purchase and a Napster subscription is merely the length of the license (leaving aside the horrible DRM for a moment).
Now think about it. You can only listen to one piece of music at a time. Why pay for lifetime rights to a small subset of what is available, when instead you can subscribe and play whatever you want whenever you want?
Perhaps it depends on the cost. So how much is Napster? Currently, $9.95 per month, or £9.95 in the UK. That’s around the price of a typical discounted CD. At that rate, most music fans would both save money and get to hear far more music from a subscription service than from buying CDs. In fact, I wonder if the music industry has thought through the potential loss of revenue?
Even disregarding the money aspect, subscription makes more sense than a lifetime purchase. If you have broadband, that’s especially true. If you have fast internet access on a mobile device the thing really comes alive. Ever wondered what to pack onto your MP3 player or iPod? With an always-connected or mostly-connected model, you don’t have to worry. Think cache, not download.
Here’s another good thought. Subscription mitigates DRM lock-in. You could move between Napster and iTunes (if Apple go that way) with less pain, because you can still play all the music you want. You will likely need a new device, until Apple gives up or opens up its iPod-iTunes lock-in DRM (when hell freezes over?), but that is more acceptable than abandoning gigabytes of expensively-purchased DRM-protected files. After all, what’s the lifetime of the average mobile device with its proprietary and expensive battery, and gradually fading display? Just two or three years, sadly.
I can still see some sense in purchasing a CD. Nice cover, no DRM, best quality sound. But buying a DRM-protected song download looks poor value compared to subscription. Subscription is the future.
All of this reminds me of a problem with security on Mac OS X. Just like web sites, dialog boxes can be spoofed. This includes the dialog box that prompts for an administrator’s password when you install new software. While no one has, to the best of my knowledge, exploited this weakness, it’s possible for someone to implement an installer that looks exactly like the standard installer yet squirrel’s away your administrator credentials. One way or another, convenience always compromises security.
Thought I’d mention this nifty little application, My MSN Clock moves. Does yours ? written by William Tay. It is an add-in for MSN Messenger that stores a personal message as your location and date/time in your current location.
