FeedBurner Users: Playing With Fire

I read this morning that Andrew Sullivan has added syndicated feeds to his weblog using FeedBurner.

No offense to the FeedBurner developers, but every time I see this, I marvel that another weblogger has handed over their most loyal readers to a third party.

FeedBurner offers several features for feed providers, but only one seems genuinely useful: better feed-reading statistics.

The others -- multiple feed format support, podcasting enclosures, Creative Commons licensing -- are easy to get elsewhere. If you aren't using a weblog publishing tool that supports them, you're on the wrong software.

The most highly touted feature of FeedBurner, support for all of the syndication formats, has become a trivial issue. Every popular aggregator can read Atom, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 today, so there's little disadvantage to publishing in only one of these formats.

Perhaps I'm underselling FeedBurner (Stewart Butterfield of Flickr digs them), but people relying on a free web hosting service are taking a huge risk. What position will FeedBurner users be left in if it goes offline, goes pay, or cancels the account?

There's only one place on the FeedBurner site where I could find anything addressing this risk -- the terms of service, which sensibly protects the company from liability:

[Burning Door Syndication Services] may also in its sole discretion, for any reason or no reason and at any time discontinue providing the Service, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of your access to the Service under any provision of this Agreement may be effected without prior notice, and acknowledge and agree that BDSS may immediately deactivate or delete your account and all related information and files in your account and/or bar any further access to such files or the Service. Further, you agree that BDSS shall not be liable to you or any third-party for any termination of your access to the Service.

Andrew Sullivan will draw thousands of feed subscribers, considering the popularity of his weblog. Wil Wheaton has 12,000 reading him through the service.

If FeedBurner goes out of business, which is the most likely outcome for any Internet startup, they'll instantly lose that entire audience.

Can someone using this service explain how its benefits are worth taking that kind of chance?

Rss · Publishing · 2005/03/26 · 49 COMMENTS · Link

Robert Scoble tries out the new JVC GZ-MC200u camcorder in a bathroom at Microsoft after business hours. This video is much more innocent than it sounds.

2005/03/26 · Comment · Link

Crossing Over the Line

On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart presented clips from the ongoing, 24-7 obscenity that is cable news coverage of the Terri Schiavo case.

The Crooks & Liars weblog offers the five-minute segment in QuickTime and Windows Media formats.

To give you an idea of how bad the infotainment cesspool has become, a Fox News morning show invited Crossing Over TV psychic John Edward in studio to talk about it.

John Edward: I do believe that the soul, the consciousness, can communicate when they're in a state, whether it be a mental incapacitated person, someone who's in a coma. It's a consciousness, and the soul has a living consciousness.

Host: So she may not be able to talk with her brain, but she's ...

Edward: But she's clear on what's going on. And I can tell you she's definitely clear on what's happening now around her.

As if that weren't unbalanced enough, Fox News presented the charlatan split-panel with looping video footage of Schiavo.

Television · Politics · 2005/03/25 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

If you think the religious passions enflamed by the Terri Schiavo case are over the top, imagine where we could be if a slightly more famous Roman Catholic takes a similar turn.

The Pope lacks a living will.

The Rev. John J. Paris, a bioethics professor at Boston College:

This is the open invitation to chaos. There are no rules in the Vatican on this sort of thing because, up through 1950, really, it wouldn't happen. Doctors tended to kill people more than save them. Unless there’s some secret document that the pope has written, he becomes a pawn in the hands of bureaucrats. This organization is no different than any others.

Politics · 2005/03/24 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Permission to Speak Freely on RSS

After a few webloggers objected to his practice of reproducing their entries in full on his link site, Robert Scoble tied himself into an interesting knot, claiming that RSS is a format that only exists for software to reuse and remix, thus justifying his actions:

RSS is a community syndication system. If you don't like your content being reused in weird, dangerous, wacky ways DO NOT PUT YOUR CONTENT INTO RSS!!! Hint: RSS isn't for humans. It's for syndication and resyndication systems to use.

It's an opt-in system. If you don't want it reused, don't put it in! Easy. End of discussion.

Scoble's right to describe syndication as opt-in, and the availability of content in an XML format makes it easier to work with than HTML. But as we've seen with Google Toolbar and Greasemonkey, HTML's not exactly difficult for user agent software to parse. The markup's out there in plain text, making it a lot closer to RSS than to a reuse-inhibiting format like PDF.

One of the looming controversies for syndication is the legality of feed reuse and republication in the absence of an explicit license tag such as those offered by Creative Commons.

Before he shuttered his linkblog, Scoble seemed to be acting from the presumption that if a feed is online, he can do anything he wants with it, because the format's intended for reuse.

I don't mind that personally, because I want to encourage republication of my syndicated feeds, even on commercial sites. I just added the Creative Commons Attribution license to my feeds to make this policy official.

But in a general sense, it seems inarguable that the availability of a feed grants no legal rights to reuse its items, beyond fair use.

A feed is a copyrighted work. If a feed provider wants to forbid commercial reuse or public redistribution of the full text of items, that's something we ought to respect.

If high-profile reusers like Scoble make this a big deal, we'll take the informal situation today -- where feeds are republished in the absence of explicit permission -- and turn it into one where toolmakers have to examine license tags before allowing the functionality.

Perhaps this is a good thing, but it goes against an important principle I learned as a teen: It's always easier to ask forgiveness than to seek permission.

Rss · Publishing · 2005/03/24 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Sorry, I Broke the News

An e-mail to the Drudge Retort this afternoon revealed that Jeff Weise, the teen who allegedly shot up his Minnesota high school and killed himself Monday, was an active participant on a UFO, conspiracy, and cover-up site called AboveTopSecret.Com.

The posts appear legitimate and are corroborated by several other members who participated in the discussions with Weise, so I posted a news story about the messages.

Because this appears to be the first media report on these messages, I needed something that trumpeted the exclusive, but I didn't want to borrow Matt Drudge's famous siren.

By combining a few images from another alert graphic, I have created the News Alert Banana:

Journalism · 2005/03/23 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Politics 1, Medical Science 0

One of my favorite local bloggers, Attaboy, shares the sentiments of people who believe there's a possibility that Terri Schiavo is aware of her surroundings.

This isn't a situation where medical experts disagree: There's no realistic hope of recovery from brain damage as severe as Schiavo's, as a recent Newsday article makes clear:

Dr. Dana Lustbader, director of palliative care at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, said, "In this case, there is basically no hope of recovery."

Patients have awoken from comas with little or no lasting effects, but Lustbader said patients in Schiavo's condition, with normal wake-sleep cycles, are neither comatose nor brain dead. While awake, they cannot track objects or faces with their eyes. "The eyes are roving randomly, and they happen to follow, at times, people moving in the room," she said.

A behavioral researcher in neuroscience, posting on the ALAS weblog, writes that the the damage is so irreversibly severe that there's nothing left to make thought and reasoning possible:

There is no way any qualified brain doctor or scientist could look at this image and suggest that significant recovery of function is possible. The fact that we could have all this discussion on the subject is a triumph of politics over science. Tragic for Terri Schiavo, and really for us all.

Politics · 2005/03/22 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

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