Puffbox

I’m genuinely shocked by the apparently small numbers of people in the UK using RSS. Every global study I’ve seen recently has shown Bloglines to be the most popular tool for RSS consumption. Helpfully, Bloglines tells you how many members are signed up to (almost) every feed. I’d say that makes the Bloglines community as representative a sample as you’ll get (without really trying). When you dig around the numbers, it’s quite startling.

The most popular single feed on Bloglines, after Bloglines’s own (for which data isn’t published), is Slashdot – with just short of 60,000 subscribers. The BBC’s main international news feed is #6, with over 35,000 subscribers. How many does the main UK news feed have? As I type this… just 844. The international sports feed has 3,237 subscribers, the UK feed only 149.

Either Brits don’t like Bloglines, although I can’t think of any reason why not, or any alternative mopping up the UK marketplace… or Brits don’t do RSS. Weird.

Doing some unexpected research on international use of character sets (thanks again, IE7!)… and I came across something called AlertInfo, which I hadn’t heard of before. Basically, it’s an open-source RSS reader for the French market, produced by an organisation called Geste – ‘groupement des editeurs de services en ligne’. You don’t exactly need an A-level to translate that, do you? 🙂

Nothing spectacular about the software, at first glance. What’s remarkable is that it’s an initiative supported by a large number of competing French media players – such as newspapers Le Monde, Le Figaro and Liberation – with the apparent aim of extending RSS takeup, in the interests of the industry as a whole. Can you see that happening in the UK?

The novelty factor of having a new beta of Internet Explorer v7 has worn off rather quickly. Suddenly I’m looking at sites I’ve set up in the past, some with very high profiles – and we have some serious layout issues to resolve, like key homepage content just disappearing.

As the Microsoft IE team explains in this MSDN article:

‘Internet Explorer 7 contains a number of improvements to cascading style sheet (CSS) parsing and rendering over IE6. These improvements are aimed at improving the consistency of how Internet Explorer interprets cascading style sheets as recommended by the W3C.’

Improvements, improvements, improving… OK, OK, we get the message. Yes, in the long run, this is great: I’m sure we’ve all spent ages crafting pages in Firefox, only to see some horrendous results in IE6 (or vice versa). Hooray for standards, etc etc. And in the immediate term, there’s no need for panic, as IE7 is currently only in beta, and hence limited in its circulation.

But somewhere in between, there’s the reality that IE7 is now ‘out there’, and judging by comments emanating from Redmond, is more-or-less feature-complete. When they write on their blog:

It’s a difficult challenge to keep compatibility with sites and apps but break compatibility for standards compliance, and we would appreciate you checking your sites and making necessary changes where you’ve hacked in non-standard stuff for IE in the past.

you don’t have to read too far between the lines. The message is ‘hey, you wanted standards compliance, you got it.’ And guess what: now we have to deal with it.

This is your head-start: use it, before IE7 goes final, and Vista hits the shops.

I don’t know what to make of the first episode of Channel 4’s new sitcom, The IT Crowd. Granted, all sitcoms are meant to be a bit predictable. But if you made a list of all the stereotypical jokes about geeks or technology, you could have sat through the opening 20 minutes and ticked them off, one by one. Geeks smell – check. Geeks do pointlessly pedantic things – check. Geeks dress stupidly or scruffily – check, both. Geeks can’t handle talking to women – check.

There were a few positive signs, if you’re an optimist. The opening visual gag. The central character stretching the truth on her CV, and getting found out. The support call becoming a little confrontational. Plus a little mindless violence never does any harm. But we don’t need a running joke of ‘have you turned it off and on again?’. And Chris Morris – is he auditioning for the role of CJ in a remake of Reggie Perrin? Come on Chris, you didn’t get where you are today by shamelessly imitating classic sitcom characters.

Will I watch it? Yeah, probably. Maybe your first episode needs to play to the stereotypes, to win an audience. Maybe it’s not meant for those of us on the inside; we’ve already had Nathan Barley. But let’s put it this way, The IT Crowd will need to develop some serious depth if it’s to last a full series. Judge for yourself: episode two is online from tonight.

• Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview
  Are we any closer to full CSS compliance? What are they doing with RSS? The 11MB download will reveal all.
  (tags: ephemeral.work)

I’ve been preaching the gospel of RSS for some time now, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting the first public release of Internet Explorer v7. Well, the beta has landed… and I think I can see where Microsoft is heading with this. Bloglines and del.icio.us, look out.

True enough, the Firefox RSS icon has made its appearance. Subscribing to feeds is kept very simple; the icon lights up, you click on it, you see the feed in XSLT-styled form with a big link at the top – ‘subscribe to this feed’. Adding a feed is as simple as adding a bookmark, selecting a folder or creating a new one. And therein lies the key.

Microsoft is treating RSS feeds as part of the bookmark concept, but as a parallel track. When you call up the ‘favorites’ sidebar, you effectively have tabbed options at the top for what you might call ‘static’ favorites and ‘live’ feeds. So let’s click on ‘feeds’… and open a feed in the main content panel. Hold on… a left panel of folders and links? The feeds appearing in the web content window? No question, this is the Bloglines way of working. I suppose it makes sense to copy the market leader.

If you subscribe to any feeds using categories, such as any of BBC News’s offerings, you’ll be pleased to hear these are parsed properly, and displayed in a floating box on the right, indicating the number of items for each category. Yes, that’s right, very reminiscent of del.icio.us. Throw in a bit of social functionality, and we’re there.

And then the penny drops. The key to this is Windows Live Favorites. So far, this service only offers an online place to store your static bookmarks. If they were to include live backup of your feeds as well, you suddenly unite the functionality of two leading players in the whole Web 2.0 world: one which happens to belong to Ask Jeeves, the other to Yahoo. And with feed consumption being (very) similar to reading a web page, it’s easy to see a seamless experience between client and online. The best of both worlds?

This clearly isn’t being aimed at power users. Even terms like ‘podcast’, which have entered the public consciousness, have been dodged, in favour of ‘attachment’. But Microsoft looks poised to do it again – let others innovate, then bundle the best bits together and call it an integrated solution. And we all know what happens next.

The Arctic Monkeys may or may not be 2006’s answer to The Strokes. But you can’t knock the fact that their ‘disruptive’ approach to promoting themselves and their music has worked.

Actually, that’s not strong enough. This doesn’t just prove that the ‘disruption’ model can be successful. Arguably, it proves that it works better than any other strategy has worked since the 1960s. According to an HMV spokesperson:

‘In terms of sheer impact, where a band has come from virtual obscurity to achieve huge, overnight success, we haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Beatles.’

Or rather, technically, since Hear’Say… and suddenly it doesn’t sound quite as sexy, does it. Time will tell if it merits its place as one of the five best British albums ever, ever, ever, as listed in this week’s NME.

I recently visited the new Shoreditch offices of a consultancy I’m currently working with. The more ‘presentable’ staff – account management, creative, editorial – were on the ground and first floors. The dev teams were kept safely away from actual clients, in the upper levels.

As we climbed the stairs, my host apologised in advance in case we caught them playing games. It comes with the territory, she explained; guys with a passion for that sort of thing were precisely the sort of people they wanted working for them. A certain amount of game-playing was tolerated, and almost encouraged.

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I’m aware of the mild irony that, just as I’m noting a story on the rise of the ‘me too’ figure… non-celebrity Chantelle wins Celebrity Big Brother. This is taking the peer-to-peer thing one step too far.

I genuinely don’t know how to read this. Perhaps it’s the voting audience being deliberately perverse. Or maybe it’s the backlash against the cult of the celeb. The fact that a blonde PR bunny, the archetypal Essex girl is leading that charge? Now that, dear readers, really is irony.

We’ve had plenty of celebs who have been labelled as ‘famous for being famous’, and little else. With millions of viewers having cast their votes, we now have someone who is nationally famous for not being famous. Getting my head around that will take some time.

PR agency chief Richard Edelman preaches the gospel of the blogosphere in his company’s influential annual Trust Barometer survey. In a posting on his often challenging blog, he writes:

The employee is the new credible source for information about a company, giving insight from the front lines. Smart companies must reinvent their communications thinking, moving from a sole reliance on top-down messages delivered through mass advertising. This is the Me2 revolution.

His company’s study has tracked the recent growth of the ‘someone like me’ figure as a company’s most influential spokesperson. His data charts the corresponding decline of ‘establishment’ figures in people’s estimations. This is all properly researched, and can be traced back. He can’t be accused of jumping on the ‘whatever 2.0’ bandwagon here.

His conclusions range from recognising the importance of internal communications, to embracing new channels like blogs and podcasts. It’s nothing new to those of us already engaged in this space. But when it comes from the mouth of Richard Edelman, you can expect the mainstream to take notice. This is an important endorsement.