John Battelle's Searchblog

John,
On a more down to earth RSS topic, the Washington Post has soft launched RSS feeds, but has done a bad job of it. It is not a tech format issue, it is a content one. I wrote up the issue (see The Washington Post does RSS -- badly and emailed some of the people I have corresponded with in the past at the Post. I got nice responses from two reporters and Getler, the ombudsman, but nothing from the editors, and no change in the RSS feeds.

Maybe if some other people who straddle the tech / journalism world pointed out the problems, and how bad the feeds look compared to the NYT?

Dave is such a bastard. I think I speak for the collective blogosphere when I say "We hate you!"

No, you don't speak for me...Dave is controversial, but what's the point of spreading hate? Let's keep it civil here...

One by product (a good one) of the Wash Post launching RSS feeds is they have an ad campaign on Daypop.

What's good about it?

Dan Chan writes, "thanks to the sponsor, Daypop's bandwidth bills are taken care of for the next year."

More comments from DC here:
http://www.danchan.com/weblog/daypop/100785

John, please read this.

http://archive.scripting.com/2004/04/23#aboutGooglesResponse

It's not okay with me that you characterize this issue as a "conspiracy theory."

I am very careful with your rep, I'd appreciate it if you showed similar care with mine. As you can see in this thread (the bit about hate), the environment is pretty hostile to fact-gathering.

Ok, I read it. Thanks Dave. Still and all, Ev has a point, as do you. I think conclusions were jumped to. If Google actively excludes RSS in their engine, there will be many unhappy campers. But Google did not have an official "response", Ev posted on his personal blog, which to me is quite distinct. But...maybe Ev - or Google - will weigh in again.

John, I was told to look for a response from Google on a weblog, by an officer of the company, so that kind of makes it an official response.

And as I said in the post I pointed to, much of the time that's as much as we get. For example, in the issue of the Google Toolbar tilting toward Blogger shortly after Google promised not to do that, they responded on a blog saying it was just a beta (and implying then as now that it was a conspiracy theory) and that we should wait to see the final product. Okay, nothing changed between the two, and no further explanation was offered.

If this were a political candidate or a public company I don't think we'd be satisified with this way of communicating John. Just to split it in half and say both sides are wrong just means that you stand by and let them push developers and (now, something new) content providers around.

Be very clear, Evan and Google, whoever it is that's speaking, did not say they weren't doing it. It was a childishly rude response, and my post was emphatically not a conspiracy theory because they have, in other areas, tried to force developers to support Atom, when (according to Evan's logic) it would have been smarter to support formats that already existed.

This stuff isn't that hard to understand John, and it's in your area of expertise. If you want to be a search expert, you have to understand what's going on here, not just brush it aside as if it were an insignificant argument. There's substantial stuff at stake here.

And a personal note, I don't care whether anonymous people on your site call me names. I do care when respected a academic and journalist does. Please be more careful in the future, and consider retracting the statement. Thanks.

Dave! I wasn't calling you names. I'm not that dumb. I was characterizing Ev's post, which intonated that you (and in particular the person who emailed you) may have been seeing monsters under the bed. We'll all watch carefully to see if Google proves you right or wrong. I agree, how this plays out will be quite telling.