Paul Jacobson

Every so often a story about how print media are dead surfaces and depending on your take on factors like declining newspaper circulations and who you work for, you either agree or you don’t. One thought about the future of print media is that it will become a niche luxury item (thus giving hope to big media and advertisers that they can still tap the wealthier readership).

What isn’t in dispute is that circulations are in decline. The problem with print media is that it is just so wasteful and very much out of touch with the current pace of technology. As the New York Times put it in 2006:

Newspaper circulation has been in a long, slow decline for decades. But the pace of loss seems accelerated now, as the industry tries to adjust to the steady migration of readers and advertisers to the Internet.

I can’t imagine things have improved much for print media since then. There has certainly been a fair amount of discussion about how to survive this shift to digital media and a number of industry pundits have boldly declared that one or another technology will become the dominant platform for the content presently printed and which all those people out there clearly still want. After all, there will always be a place for quality journalism and writing. I agree although I think it is important that mainstream media realise that they are content creators almost on a par with bloggers, podcasters and other not-so-mainstream content creators. I am starting to wonder if the distinction between the content I could get from, say, The Times or Mail & Guardian and the content I can get from the likes of Ivo Vegter, Robert Scoble and Read/Write Web is fading fast to the point where I place as much (and often more) value in what I read on a blog than what I read in a mainstream publication.

Another issue is that actual print media is so wasteful and cumbersome. All that paper being printed and distributed across long distances over periods of time that could render the news obsolete before the publication arrives. Why not save the cost of all that production and the trees that were sacrificed for the idle pleasure of rustling pages and explore digital alternatives which can be so much better for the rainforest?

(Image credit: 02.Newspaper.DupontCircle.WDC.30mar06 by ElvertBarnes published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)

Although the hot platform at the moment is your mobile phone (lots of mobile phone users translate into more advertising bucks if only mainstream media could figure out how to monetise all those little eyeballs), I see the future of media (mainstream, not so mainstream and downright on the bleeding edge) being on a variety of devices feed by RSS and its successors. Ok, this isn’t exactly breaking news but it does help if the big media people take a look at this issue from the perspective of an end user. Have they actually tried to read feeds on a mobile phone that doesn’t cost R7 000 and have a large screen? It isn’t a pleasant experience.

Instead media should be available on whichever connected device you prefer. My personal preference is a tablet device of some kind (the one I dream about and which no-one has manufactured yet) or some iteration of what the iPhone could be. I want a large enough screen to comfortably read the feeds I have subscribed to and remain mobile where I want to be and also continue my reading on my large LCD monitor when I return to home base. Still not exactly news to most people but the point is that the focus should rather be on making the content available in a relative platform agnostic manner using a standard technology that can distribute that content (again, RSS works well here).

This isn’t to say that big media has to give up its subscriptions and squeeze more out of their advertisers. I noticed that the local publications whose feeds I subscribe to publish truncated feeds which force me to visit their websites to read the full article. This drives me nuts. I use a feed reader to read my feeds, not to link to web pages. I would pay a subscription fee to have receive the full articles in my feeds and I would even tolerate a relative innocuous ad if it means I don’t have to open yet another tab in Firefox or NetNewsWire to read the article. This option would mean the ability to add a password protected feed (presumably) and given the demand for this those feed readers that don’t support this functionality soon will if they are worth their salt, so to speak. I subscribe to Fortune magazine and it would be fantastic to be able to subscribe to a digital edition and receive full articles in my feed reader. Of course the second part to this fantasy experience would be a device that makes my content portable enough that I can meaningfully consume that content just as easily when I am at a coffee shop as I can at my desk with my MacBook (it would also be great if my preferred feed reader – NetNewsWire at the moment – would allow customisable media download options for offline reading).

That content could be formatted in a variety of ways and a nice example of this is a new feed reader which has recently been released and which is called “Times“. This newsreader aims to change the way we read our news in a digital format:

Instead of treating news like email (as most RSS readers do), Times presents you with headlines and photos from a variety of sources all in one place, letting you more easily discover the news you want to read. Like your own personal newspaper, you can put feeds into separate areas, create pages for different subjects, and more.

Although I think Acrylic Apps is missing the point a little with Times, it is still a fantastic example of how news and feed fed content in general can be presented to users. It doesn’t all have to look like this:

Feed fed content could include news feeds, blog feeds, ebooks, podcasts, music … whatever. The range of devices could be just as diverse and could include existing devices such as the iPod Touch/iPhone, mobile phones, Internet tablets, laptops, large LCD screens and future derivatives of those devices. In fact, I think a worthwhile exercise for a major publication is to investigate distributing a decent RSS enabled panel device to its subscribers (perhaps subsidised by a 2 year subscription like the mobile phone networks) and updating those devices over the Internet with the latest issue or latest articles rather than delivering print editions.

Print media may not be dead just yet but it isn’t getting any younger. Digital platforms far surpass print media in terms of immediacy and freshness of content and the growing trend towards digital consumption means that it is becoming more and more expensive to produce print editions of these publications. Why would I buy a newspaper except to paper my floors in case my puppies need to pee? I certainly don’t need to read a newspaper to find out what is going on in the world. I can do that online and in many instances, I can get better information on the Web. What about you? When was the last time you read a newspaper to find out what is going on in your world?

Technorati Tags:
feed reader, feeds, netnewswire, rss, print media, newspapers, digital media

I read this post on the Jive Software blog titled “XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services”. A lot of the technical stuff goes a bit beyond me so this summary on Read/Write Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick was pretty handy. As I understand the whole idea, XMPP (also known as Jabber), the protocol that powers Google Talk and a couple other IM apps/services may be better suited to many new media services and applications than the protocol that is so dominant on the Web at the moment, HTTP. The important aspect of XMPP is that it enables a two way communication process rather than the one way flow that we see with HTTP (ok, I know that isn’t strictly correct but this is how I think about it) so instead of you initiating contact with a Web service using your browser by clicking a link or something like that (HTTP), a Web service can contact your machine first, let it know there are updates and initiate an update process (XMPP). Maybe a better way to explain it is like this:

• When you want to update a page in your browser you need to click “refresh”. You initiate the process of communicating with the web server the page is on and request the updated page data; and
• When you use an XMPP IM client like Google Talk, for example, the IM server will contact your Google Talk app and send it updates without you having to do anything. This process is more efficient than constant polling the server to check for updates.

XMPP opens up possibilities for people wanting to develop services and apps that spontaneously update as and when updates are available rather than constant polling a server for updates. The one application of this that appeals to me is my feedreader. Your feedreader polls the various feeds you subscribe to for updates on a schedule and downloads new feed items when they are available. Imagine what happens if your feedreader runs on XMPP:

Ask yourself what a decentralized, open source infrastructure for real time communication could offer. A lot. As an RSS-head, I’d love to see XMPP let my various RSS clients do more faster and get bogged down in fewer unnecessary activities. RSS is all about speed for me but clients can only do so much so often when they have to pester someone else’s server every time they want to check for new information. Those delays can be of real consequence.

Receiving your feeds as and when they are published may not be a priority for you but this is a pretty good illustration of some of the possibilities. It is also pretty interesting that Google’s Android Mobile OS incorporates XMPP, at the very least because I can certainly see how XMPP could be a great protocol for widespread mobile applications, particularly where those mobile devices are constantly using a cellular connection or wifi.

I doubt very much that this is the end of HTTP but rather it could be the expansion of a generation of apps and services running on this dynamic protocol. It is probably the sort of development that could once again fuel speculation that IM (or the likes of IM) could overtake email as our dominant means of communicating across the Internet. Not sure about that but it is an intriguing possibility although I am not sure that an email replacement that shortens the already pretty quick delivery times of our messages is a good thing. It is bad enough that email creates an expectation of much faster responses to messages we receive (so much so that productivity gurus recommend you only check your email every couple hours or so to maintain some semblance of meaningful productivity) but if we start exchanging data between people using XMPP-based solutions that expectation becomes more unmanageable.

Where XMPP will probably be a tremendous benefit will be for machine to machine communications, the kind of services that are not immediately apparent to us humans and perhaps even running behind the scenes. IM is in your face, you see the updates coming in and either have to respond to watch messages pile up to be dealt with later. The feedreader example may be a good application for XMPP not because of the immediacy of the updates but because it could mean that my less powerful device can pick up updates automatically and on the fly using a more efficient update process. I can imagine that waiting for a mobile device to scan through hundreds of feeds could take time to update whereas a feedreader running on XMPP is almost always up to date so I can grab my device and run instead of waiting a couple minutes for an up to date sync.

Of course there are probably dozens of more useful applications of XMPP that haven’t even occurred to me that we could see rolling out.

Technorati Tags:
xmpp, jabber, protocol, internet, web, http, android, im

There is some useful information about NetNewsWire 3.1 on inessential.com This item caught my eye because of a comment Stii made on Wired Gecko a little while ago about NNW not playing YouTube videos. It turns out that this feature is available, just turned off by default:

It plays video and Flash

The most common feature request in the feedback I read today is that NetNewsWire should play video, Flash, YouTube, etc.

It does. It’s turned off by default, but it’s easy to turn on.

Open Preferences, click Browsing. Click the News Items tab—to enable Flash and video, make sure the box next to Enable plug-ins is checked.

Click the Web Pages tab and repeat to do the same thing for web pages.

A couple things to know, though:

1. On some machines, you may have to enable plug-ins for both news items and web pages in order to make them work in web pages.

2. Plug-ins are off by default because they’re unstable and eat lots of memory. (Flash in particular.) So if you run into memory or crashing issues, the first thing to try is turning off plug-ins.

I have been using NNW every day and although it does seem to be a little unstable on Leopard (at least, my installation of Leopard), I am really happy I gave it another try. I have asked that a future version or update to 3.1 enable automatic downloads of images. That would really make this a true offline feed reader and make me happier than my puppy on my lap (he is only happy when he is on my lap … go figure).

I was thinking the other day that with a wide enough screen I could see myself using Safari less and less to browse web pages I connect to through NNW. I am not sure which engine NNW uses for web pages (I imagine something like Webkit?) but having everything integrated into one app is really handy.

Do you have any thoughts about NNW or its Windows sibling, FeedDemon? Let me know.

Technorati Tags:
feed reader, feeddemon, feedreader, netnewswire, youtube, flash, safari, web browser

Web Worker Daily has been covering Newsgator’s decision to release its consumer products for free:

As you may have heard, this afternoon NewsGator announced that all of their desktop/mobile client applications are now freeware. NetNewsWire (see our review) and FeedDemon are well regarded as the best-in-class for all things RSS in a desktop application..now without a price tag. Loyal fans are cheering that the company has abandoned their ‘buy the software and get a free subscription’ model in favor of different ways of raising revenue (including abandoning all but web forum support options).

These applications were always well worth their shareware/commercial license, and now that is a thing of the past. But is it disruptive?

I have been using Google Reader exclusively until the last week or two when I decided to give NetNewsWire another go. Google Reader is great for me for a few reasons including speedy keyboard navigation, easy feed sharing and I can access it pretty much anywhere.

A couple people have commented that the Newsgator products are too limiting because they are software installs and are therefore machine dependent. This isn’t the case. FeedDemon and NetNewsWire will sync with Newsgator Online for free and that gives you a Web-based feedreader which you can access via your browser or mobile device (m.newsgator.com – just like Google Reader’s mobile site). Unfortunately Newsgator Online is not as good as Google Reader so if that is really important to you, you may want to stick with Google Reader. The mobile interface is pretty good though for what it is. I haven’t been able to get the (now) free Newsgator Go! client installed and working on my Nokia N73 yet. I tried it out previously and it is a fantastic mobile feed app. If only I could get this working on my N73 …

I’ve been using NNW exclusively for the last few days as part of a trial of sorts and, as Stii commented, the interface in NNW (and the Windows equivalent, FeedDemon is pretty good looking too) is awesome. It is certainly a lot more readable than Google Reader and there seems to be more screen real estate in NNW. It is important to me that I be able to share feed items I find interesting. If you take a look at my sidebar you will see a Google Reader widget which took me a few minutes to customise and publish to the site. You will also see a Newsgator widget I just created using some default options. I was initially going to write that the Newsgator options are cumbersome and not nearly as user-friendly as the Google Reader widget options but then I actually tried the Newsgator widget framework out and, lo and behold, Newsgator has a pretty powerful widget framework. This Newsgator widget is highly customisable and there are some awesome options which include this one:

This widget uses an accordion style and took me a few minutes to create. If you are a little more savvy when it comes to design, you can create some pretty awesome looking widgets.

I suppose out of all of this so far, the one disappointment is the Newsgator Online service. The site can be unresponsive to mouse clicks and it is a little difficult to figure out how to perform certain functions like marking all feeds in a folder as read instead of just the current page and removing all subscriptions to make way for a new OPML upload. This issue aside, there are some pretty compelling reasons to go this route of a hybrid desktop-web feedreader solution. For those people who prefer to only use an offline feedreader, you can do that too. You just don’t synchronise your feeds. NNW or FeedDemon will work as a standalone feedreader. There is also integration into Outlook for those who spend all their time in Outlook.

There is one other thing I would like to see in NNW though. I would like to have more control over which types of enclosures I download automatically. At the moment the options are to automatically download audio and/or “other” enclosures. “Other” enclosures include videos which doesn’t help me if not wanting to automatically download enclosures is to preserve my precious bandwidth.

If you would like to read a couple more perspectives on the announcement, take a look at this post on the Newsgator blog which contains a number of links to external sites talking about this.

Technorati Tags:
netnewswire, newsgator, feeddemon, feedreader, rss, announcement, google reader

I hauled out NetNewsWire 3.0 this weekend, upgraded it to 3.1 beta, and tried it out again. I thought I would give it another go after reading a review on Shawn Blanc’s blog. I exported my subscriptions from Google Reader, imported them into NNW and fired it up.

NNW will sync with Newsgator and you can use it as a standalone feed reader (there are also options to sync via ftp and .Mac accounts). It is a really good looking application and has some great features I miss in Google Reader like the ability to subscribe to password protected feeds.

Compared to Google Reader the NNW interface is fantastic but what NNW lacks are the easy keyboard navigation options that you have in Google Reader (“j” for the next article, “k” for the previous one and so on). NNW can be a little clumsy in comparison and there is no easy way to share feeds and feed items like there is in Google Reader that I could figure out in NNW/Newsgator.

So, after a little experiment with NNW I am back to Google Reader. Ok, you can all take another breath and the world can continue turning …

Technorati Tags:
netnewswire, newsgator, google reader, feed reader

You may notice an addition to the sidebar on this blog. I have created a Jaiku channel for chilibean content.

The channel will update as new content is published to a number of sites including the chilibean blog and a new chilibean group on Flickr which I just set up for photos of anything to do with chilibean media. At the moment there are photos from the WebPR+ conference a while ago. The Flickr Group is open to any one to join so please feel free to submit photos of events which we attend or organise or anything that is relevant to chilibean and our quest to promote new media.

I’d like to add other content feeds that have to do with chilibean too so drop me a line and let me know if you have a chilibean related content feed I can add to the Jaiku channel.

In a way this is an experiment with a new communication channel. Jaiku has the benefit of being mobile as well as Web-based and its ability to aggregate a number of feeds and content streams makes it a great short form aggregator. It is a bit like a specialised feed aggregator and microblogging platform for a specific topic. As I write this I have added the chilibean blog feed (which should contain the podcasts we publish as well as the blog content), a feed from the Flickr group, a Technorati keyword search feed for the term “chilibean” as well as a feed for an Amatomu search on the term “chilibean”. In time I’d like to add del.icio.us feeds as well as other feeds which chilibean features in with a view to providing a single channel of chilibean related content which subscribers can scan at a glance and then click through to anything of interest.

If you would like to subscribe to the channels feed, click here. You can also subscribe to the channel on the Jaiku page by adding the channel to your list of contacts/channels.

Technorati Tags:
jaiku, channel, #chilibean, flickr group, content stream, feeds

TechCrunch has confirmed that Google is buying Feedburner for $100 million in cash. I heard about this rumour a couple days ago and thought I’d wait to see if there was some truth to the rumour before posting anything substantial. According to TechCrunch:

Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.

As with anything Google related I am really interested to see how Feedburner’s data and business will be incorporated into Google’s product line, especially Google’s universal search service. I wonder if we will be able to run searches and find results in feeds too in due course. In fact, that seems like a likely result of this purchase.

(Source: Tom Raftery’s Social Media)

Technorati Tags:
google, feedburner, purchase, $100 million, feeds, universal search