Author: paolovalde

Dilbert feed broken

Too many years ago to count, the company I worked with developed a Radio UserLand plug-in to scrape web sites and generate RSS feed. One of the first filters that we developed was the one for Dilbert.com, which back then was not offering RSS feeds yet.

Some time later they started publishing the official feed, and I have been a happy subscriber ever since. Until last week, when they broke it. Instead of my daily strip, now every day this is what I get in my aggregator:

Dilbert readers – Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

Now, I’m not a “full content in your feed” fundamentalist, but if all your content is a comics strip, you can’t get away just linking it.

My guess is that this is another effect of Google Reader closing: the number of feed subscribers must have dropped significantly, and they decided that whoever was left was not relevant enough. They must have thought: “At least let’s get their lazy eyeballs back on our site so they can be exposed to our fantastic banners and we increase our page views”

It looks like it’s time to go back to scrapers.

PS: I’m sure that this move also broke hundreds of intranet home pages that were adding some color to otherwise boring sites using that feed.

People don’t read (but they watch TV)

Yes, it’s what everybody is talking about: people don’t read long articles, long email, books. In this era of easy to generate content, we have all had enough.

Even one liners seem too long to read sometimes. In the short registration form of State of the Net conference there was one simple question: “Is this the first time you will come to Trieste?”. Well, 21 people from Trieste checked “yes”.

At the same time I’m quite impressed with the analytics of the conference’s keynotes videos that we have posted last week: an average of 20% of users get to the end of them, with peaks of 40% for some.

While I do understand that watching a video requires much less engagement, I still find these number significant (and somehow depressing).

Addictions

For the last seven days I have been fighting an unusually aggressive chest cold. No smoking. No drinking. No taste.

I hardly noticed not smoking my pipe or the occasional cigar. I have not missed a bit the usual glass of wine, or our Friday martini. It’s flavours I can’t live without! For the last week I have eaten all these fantastic and tasty dishes, but no matter how hard I tried, I could only perceive some very basic “salted-acidic-sweet-bitter”. Nothing more.

Can’t wait to go back to all mi vices, but it looks like I’m only addicted to one.