Switching to FeedBurner Without Handing Over Subscribers

I recently began using FeedBurner to publish the RSS feeds for five web sites, relying on it to provide usage stats, check regularly for errors, and make the feeds more useful. Since the service was acquired by Google, there's been some concern among bloggers about whether it's a good idea to trust a third party to publish your feeds. Though FeedBurner exec Eric Lunt is one of my homies on the RSS Advisory Board and I've had good experiences with the company, I think the caution is well-placed when relying on any outside service for web publishing.

In this instance FeedBurner provides a free feature that removes the risk of using it. If you have your own domain, you can use MyBrand to create a new subdomain that hosts your feed. I created one for each of my feeds:

• http://feeds.cruel.com/cruel
• http://feeds.drudge.com/retort
• http://feeds.rssboard.org/rssboard
• http://feeds.sportsfilter.com/sportsfilter
• http://feeds.cadenhead.org/workbench

These domains redirect feed requests to FeedBurner's servers, but if Google ever shuts down the service or I decide to quit, I can host them myself or redirect them to a FeedBurner competitor. There's no lock-in at all.

The fear that FeedBurner might throw its weight around and try to knock off RSS 2.0 in favor of Atom seems far-fetched to me. One reason FeedBurner grew to 866,000 feeds was because of the confusion caused by multiple feed formats. Publishers and readers don't want to mess with that stuff or figure out which format to choose. Any site that makes potential subscribers choose between an Atom and RSS feed, as I did for the last year on the Drudge Retort, is going to scare people off.

FeedBurner makes a publisher's choice of format irrelevant because it works with all of them. There's even a SmartFeed service that converts feeds on-the-fly based on the formats supported by a subscriber's software, making it possible for an RSS-only client like Amphetadesk to get an RSS feed while an Atom-only client gets an Atom feed. All of this happens behind the scenes.

Considering how much FeedBurner has gained by shielding users from the technical aspects of syndication, it would be crazy for the service to pick sides.

Rss · Atom · 2007/08/08 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Notre Dame Coach Loses Malpractice Suit

Notre Dame football Coach Charlie Weis nearly died after gastric bypass surgery a few years ago due to internal bleeding, so he sued surgeons Charles Ferguson and Richard Hodin for negligence. I love this detail from the first time they faced off in court:

The first trial ended in a mistrial in February after Ferguson and Hodin rushed to the aid of a juror who collapsed in the courtroom.

It can't be good for your malpractice suit when the defendants save a juror.

Law · 2007/07/25 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Blogger Files FEC Complaint Calling Daily Kos a PAC

I wrote a story for Watching the Watchers this afternoon about an FEC complaint that's been filed against Daily Kos -- a conservative blogger alleges that the liberal site functions as a political action committee and therefore should disclose its sources of income and expenditures.

Conservative blogger John Bambenek's complaint doesn't seem like it will get far, given a 2005 FEC advisory opinion that supports the "media exemption" for political activist blogs. Daily Kos functions like a media site and is neither created nor controlled by political entities. Declaring that you want Democrats to win and working toward that goal doesn't make you a PAC.

But there's one aspect of Daily Kos that makes a lot different than the media -- the site directly raises funds for specific Democratic candidates and PACs. During the current and preceding two campaigns, Daily Kos has raised nearly $2 million for Democratic candidates and BlogPAC, a Democratic PAC founded by site founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.

For the 2008 election, a Blue Majority fundraising campaign run by Daily Kos and three other liberal sites has raised $72,232 from 1,456 donors for two candidates and BlogPAC, a political action committee cofounded by Moulitsas in 2004. ...

In 2006, Daily Kos and two other sites raised $1,544,089 from 14,443 donors for 17 candidates, including Senate victors James Webb and Jon Tester, and BlogPAC.

In 2004, Daily Kos raised $366,947 from 2,235 donors for the "Kos Dozen," 12 Democratic Congressional challengers including Jeff Seeman in Ohio.

That's a lot of political action.

Politics · 2007/07/24 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Journalist Defends Misquoting Her Sources

I'm running this quote from syndicated newspaper columnist Penelope Trunk to make my wife -- and every other journalist I know -- cringe:

As a journalist I hear all the time from people in business that they are misquoted. And you know what? People need to get over that, and I'm going to tell you why. ...

If you do an interview with a journalist, don't expect the journalist to be there to tell your story. The journalist gets paid to tell her own stories which you might or might not be a part of. And journalists, don't be so arrogant to think you are not "one of those" who misquotes everyone. Because that is to say that your story is the right story. But it's not. We each have a story. And whether or not someone actually said what you said they said, they will probably still feel misquoted.

Trunk doesn't appear to have a formal journalism background -- her bio and a puff-piece Wikipedia entry reveal that she's a former dot-com exec and pro beach volleyball player who became a successful pundit on career-related subjects.

I'm not clear on how the existence of subjective truth makes it OK to put quote marks around something an interview subject did not say. The best way a reporter can win someone's confidence is to take the time to quote the person accurately, even if it means a follow-up call just to recheck the quotes. I developed a much stronger appreciation for this fact when I switched from being an interviewer to an interviewee.

Journalism · 2007/07/23 · 20 COMMENTS · Link

Robert Scoble and the RSS Advisory Board

On Sunday, Robert Scoble accused the RSS Advisory Board of being a plot by large companies to steal RSS 2.0:

But, what really is cooking here is that RSS has been given (and if you listen to Dave Winer, stolen) to big companies to control. How so? Well, the RSS Advisory board, which includes members from Cisco, Yahoo, Netscape, FeedBurner (er, Google), Microsoft, and Bloglines and this new unofficial board +is+ changing the RSS spec all the time (they are now up to version 2.0.9). Dave Winer, who founded that spec says that's in direct contradiction with the original charter of the RSS Advisory Board that he founded when he moved RSS from UserLand over to Harvard University.

The board hasn't changed the spec "all the time." The change notes for the document show that it only has been revised twice since January 2005, and one of those was an administrative edit that didn't affect the format itself. The other added four words to clarify how namespaces are supported.

Our work's a lot less controversial than Scoble and others make it sound. Most of the board's efforts have been to support publishers and developers on the RSS-Public mailing list, promote things like RSS autodiscovery and the common feed icon, and draft an RSS best-practices profile.

In airing his concerns about FeedBurner, Scoble made this comment about moving a site's feed to a new URL:

Switching feed URLs at this point is audience suicide. If you don't care about your audience you'll do it.

This is a weird point for him to make. When Scoble switched blogging software in 2005, moving his blog from Radio UserLand to WordPress, he left behind thousands of subscribers. His old feed still has 7,520 subscribers in Bloglines.

Recently, he moved his feed from Scobleizer.Wordpress.Com to Scobleizer.Com using an HTTP 302 redirect, which tells RSS readers the move is temporary. His WordPress feed has 3,635 subscribers in Bloglines and his current feed has 747.

If Scoble had been using FeedBurner to publish his feed, he could have switched blogging tools and feed URLs without losing as much as 70 percent of his RSS readership. (Even today, he could fix this by using HTTP 301 redirects to point all those old URLs to the current feed.)

Rss · 2007/07/23 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Picture Day in Kenya

Schoolchildren at a rural school near Kakamega, Kenya (photo by Ryan Secrest).

Photography · 2007/07/21 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Harry Potter and the Instant Gratification

In honor of tonight's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows midnight release parties at Barnes & Noble stores across the U.S., I'm reissuing some advice I made on my blog in 2003.

There will be hundreds of people lined up to get the book at 12:00 a.m., so it may take until 1:30 a.m. or longer to get yours, even if you preordered a copy.

If you didn't preorder, leave the bookstore shortly before midnight and go to the nearest 24-hour Wal-Mart. (By law, no American is ever more than 30 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart.) You're likely to find what we discovered four years ago -- a large pallet of books and no line of people to get them. You can get the book in minutes.

I suspect this principle also applied to the launch of videogames like EA Sports NCAA Football 2008, which EB Games sold at midnight Tuesday. My sons and I stuck around until 12:45 a.m. to get ours, leading the North Texas Mean Green to several heartbreaking losses until 3 in the morning. You'd be surprised at how many people exhibit this kind of insanity -- lines are already forming for the release of Halo 3 at 12:00:01 a.m. on September 25.

After you buy your Potter book, please resist the urge to drive back to Barnes & Noble and taunt the people in line.

Books · 2007/07/20 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

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