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All My RSS Are Belong To Me

Bah, grr and buggeration. In a momentary brain fade I’ve managed to delete the Google account associated with my Feedburner feed and can no longer access it.

However every cloud has a silver lining, and this error presents me with an opportunity to move more of my data back into my control; something I’ve been doing of late. I love “the cloud” don’t get me wrong, but I have had a few occasions recently when the cloud has been unavailable, and so therefore has my data.

Anyway the upshot of all this is that my RSS feed is now: http://www.davidhughes.org/feed.

I assume the Feedburner feed will continue to work but, in case it doesn’t those of you consuming this site via the wonder of RSS should probably update your feed reader of choice.

URL ABC

From the Friday afternoon mind of Tim Van Damme comes the URL ABC. Tim says: “Go to the address bar in your favorite browser, and type one letter. Start with “a”, end with “z”.”

I’ve just rebuilt my system so my alphabet is perhaps not as representative of my surfing as it could be, some of these sites I’ve visited just once, but for what it’s worth here’s mine:

A http://www.autosport.com/

B http://bitingthebigapple.blogspot.com/

C http://www.cameronmoll.com/

D http://www.davidhughes.org/

E http://elliotjaystocks.com/

F http://www.flickr.com/

G http://www.google.co.uk/

H http://www.homebase.co.uk/

I http://www.imdb.com/

J http://jasonsantamaria.com/

K http://konigi.com/

L http://www.last.fm/home

M http://my.ebay.co.uk

N http://news.bbc.co.uk/

O http://www.obsidion.net/

P http://www.panic.com/

Q http://www2.quidco.com/

R http://www.rohdesign.com/

S http://simpledesktops.com/

T http://twitter.com/

U http://usedcars.audi.co.uk/

V http://www.videolan.org/

W http://wireframes.linowski.ca/

X http://www.xmarks.com/

Y http://www.youtube.com/

Z http://www.zeldman.com/

A autosport.com
B bitingthebigapple.blogspot.com
C cameronmoll.com
D davidhughes.org
E elliotjaystocks.com
F flickr.com
G google.co.uk
H homebase.co.uk
I imdb.com
J jasonsantamaria.com
K konigi.com
L last.fm
M my.ebay.co.uk
N news.bbc.co.uk
O obsidion.net
P panic.com
Q quidco.com
R rohdesign.com
S simpledesktops.com
T twitter.com
U usedcars.audi.co.uk
V videolan.org
W wireframes.linowski.ca
X xmarks.com
Y youtube.com
Z zeldman.com

Andy Clarke and Sam Brown have published theirs also; I suspect we will see a lot of Z for Zeldman.com.

Perfect Pitch

Jeremy Keith has a rather alarming post about Perfect Pitch and the abuse of DMCA legislation for SEO purposes over at Adactio.com today.

Guardian Gagged From Reporting Parliament

Yes really…

From the Guardian:

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Reading The Spectator and The Third Estate it seems this is the question that The Guardian is being prevented from reporting:

61 N: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

This would seem to be the report that Carter-Ruck are trying to supress.

It’s hard to belive that we, in the UK, still live in a democracy and not some kind of Orwellian state controlled not by Big Brother, but by Big Business.

But it’s also pleasing to see how quickly and widely this story has spread through the ‘blogosphere’, and that as of writing the top trends on Twitter currently include: Guardian, Cart-Ruck, Trafigura and #carterruck.

trendsmap

Maybe Carter-Ruck will think twice before slinging injunctions around next time…

Monetising Twitter Trending Topics

I don’t like or normally use the term “monetise”, but it is the big question hanging over Twitter; how are they gonna make money from this thing?

We saw last week that Twitter have secured another found of funding described as “significant”, and so we assume that at some point these investors are going to want to see a return.

Many ideas for how Twitter might monetise the service have been put forward: paid accounts, premium accounts for brands and companies, advertising on the page, advertising in Tweets etc. But I have another thought about how Twitter might be planning to integrate advertising or paid content.

In the sidebar of the of a Twitter user’s homepage is a trending topics panel which shows the topics, keywords or hashtags being tweeted about most at that point in time. Clicking on one of these takes you to a search for that term or keywords which can be updated as new tweets appear.

Clicking on the trending topic ‘iPhone’ this morning I went to the usual list of tweets but then noticed this new, at least to me, content at the top explaining why ‘iPhone’ was a trending topic:

I’d not really got why Twitter had added trending topics to the site as it just seemed to be a tool for spammers to piggy back upon, but once you see this explanatory content it starts to make a little more sense. I can see this easily becoming advertising (Google keywords anybody?) or paid for content: each use of the word iPhone could be a link to Apple.com for example. This would allow Twitter to start to generate revenue from the service and without a negative impact on the user experience. Interesting…

Of course this would make trending topics even more of a spam magnet and doesn’t address the large number of users accessing Twitter via other clients and applications, but it does point to a potential approach for Twitter to start making money.

What do you think?