Puffbox

Does anyone have any experience with RSS reader software that:

• is freeware;
• is portable (ie. sits in its own directory only, for easy setup);
• is dead easy to use, for total novices;
• is OK with feeds published locally on an intranet; and
• doesn’t have the word ‘Blog’ in its name?

One of my current jobs is with a contact centre (telephone calls, email, letters). They’re having problems keeping track of developments in other parts of the same organisation, on other sites. When a new press release is issued by the press office, for example, they all need to know it’s there – and word doesn’t always get through. I’m seeing RSS feeds as a possible solution: quick and easy to implement, popup alerts on the desktop, etc etc.

But we’re talking about a user community who have zero experience with RSS as a technology. Giving them a full-strength three-panel tool (like Blog Navigator or RSS Bandit) will be too much for them. Web-based tools are out too, as we’ll be publishing a lot of the necessary feeds on their intranet only.

I’ll be trying a few candidates over the next few days. I like the look of Nutshell, which is a name I hadn’t come across before yesterday. Greatnews gets a very good write-up as a ‘portable app’. cRSSReader looks good, but the .NET thing could be a problem. Does anyone have any experience with these… or any better suggestions?

UPDATE: I plumped for Abilon in the end. Here’s why…

If anyone tells you that RSS is a cure for information overload, they’re lying. I spent all day yesterday at a client site, and didn’t get to clear out my daily Bloglines reading. Only 60-odd feeds… and yet when I log in this morning, I’m looking at 800 unread items. Hugh MacLeod, I’m looking at you here. Although Google didn’t help by doing this.

Incidentally, if you’re looking for UK driving directions on the web, there’s a clear winner. For the same journey from Newbury to Runcorn, MSN and Google gave me almost identical routes. MSN reckoned the 182 mile journey would take 2h 38, which basically requires you to go at 70mph the whole way. Google gave a more reasonable 3h 56.

The clear winner is – the AA. Its time estimate was the closest at 3h 37, and its results page was by far the most usable. Simple things like highlighting the road numbers in colour, and telling you where the service stations are, put it head-and-shoulders above the rest.

• PRWeb Pioneers TrackBacks Availability in Press Release Distribution
  A very interesting development: press releases beginning to adopt blogging technologies.
  (tags: ephemeral.work)

Steve Rubel has been talking about this for ages, and it looks like it’s coming together. He notes today that ‘Press releases became a bit more social yesterday as PRWeb added trackback functionality.’

What’s a trackback? Basically, it’s the flipside of a link. It tells you who is linking to a particular page, and in turn, lets you visit the linking page to see what’s being said about it. So in effect, trackbacks turn web pages into dialogue. (Meanwhile the inventors of the trackback, are trying to get it adopted as a web standard. This isn’t going away.)

At the moment, it’s a brave organisation which opens up its press releases like this. Imagine, letting anyone and everyone say whatever they want about your lovingly crafted press release – as a footnote on the same webpage? Not really – it’s just accepting the inevitable. The commenting will happen anyway. And you know what they say about urination and tents.

Inevitably, given its success, there is to be a second season of the Ricky Gervais Show podcasts. I confess, I have been known to stay up until midnight on a Sunday evening, to be able to listen to the show in bed, as soon as it was posted. The ‘goats as Christmas presents’ routine in episode 4 made me laugh out loud, and woke the rest of the family. If I’m honest, it was generally ‘amusing’ with the occasional ‘hysterical’ – and when there’s no money changing hands, that’s a good deal.

But charging for the product takes it into a whole new area. And you definitely sense that Ricky realises that. Look at the fascinating choice of words in that final free edition:

‘We may have to charge a small fee for it, ‘cos it’ll cost us money, and Karl is unemployed. But we mean a real, tiny little fee… I hope you continue to support us. Go on, continue to support us. I hope there’s no-one out there going ‘oh, look, they’re charging for it now.’ But you know, people forget, we gave 12 for free… We have got to charge a little bit for it, because it does cost money to host. Please, please keep listening. It is going to be very little, and you know, Karl needs your money.’

(I hope I’m not being too pedantic by pointing out that the 12 episodes weren’t ‘free’: don’t forget the advertising for Guardian Unlimited, Positive Internet and Channel Four’s Friday comedy strand. There’s surely some cash flowing around there somewhere.)

Will it work? Depends on your definition. The audience figure (261,670 downloads per episode in the first month) is going to drop dramatically, like a lead zeppelin. But if even a tiny, tiny fraction of those people are prepared to pay £3.75 for ‘at least four episodes – but it could be more’, they’ll be in profit, albeit not quite enough to retire on (or, indeed, to quit your job making promos for XFM). It’s not as if there are huge production costs, or a massive team of writers to pay. Most of the later episodes were just Karl’s stream-of-consciousness, sparking off listeners’ emails.

Someone with his profile trying to make podcasting into a business: yes, that’s certainly a story worth following, but it’s not a guarantee of success. Ricky Gervais has always been brave, prepared to give it a try. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The Office is already recognised as a classic alongside Fawlty Towers. The jury’s still out on Extras, which had flashes of brilliance, but buckets of mediocre. We don’t talk about Meet Ricky Gervais. Nobody knows about Seona Dancing, which is probably just as well (but do check out the pictures).

A list (apparently) detailing the different flavours of Windows Vista appears on the Microsoft website. The bloggers find it, and inevitably, it’s the hot topic of the day. Microsoft goes ‘whoops’ and publishes a pretty weak retraction – ‘prematurely… incomplete information… testing purposes only.’ Todd at the Seattle Post-Inquirer has the full story, from bolting horse to the closing of the stable door. It would be great to think this was an example of a deliberate ‘viral’ effort by Microsoft. But… 😉

A very nice piece on the Daily Telegraph web team’s blog, about the perils of maintaining old content. (And good on them for posting it, by the way.)

Our most recent case began at the beginning of this month when we noticed that a story from April 2005 was attracting an extraordinary number of hits online. The story, which reported that Queen Margrethe II of Denmark had called on her subjects to show their “opposition” to Islam, was clearly connected to the Danish cartoons row but it was not clear why so many of our readers had stumbled across it.

I’ve always hated the term ‘archive’: it implies a dusty old room in the basement where nobody ever goes… not a fair implication, as this tale proves. But with no better word springing to mind – anyone running a website with a large archive of content would do well to read this. You always know it’s a theoretical risk; and then suddenly, it happens for real.

• FAQ: Using msstyles for Windows XP – Neowin.net
  Would people love Windows more if it was more customisable? This looks like a neat little hack to let you apply different visual styles to XP. Although its main purpose seems to be to disguise XP as Vista. A little more imagination, guys, please!
  (tags: windows ephemeral.work)

I’m looking at my favourite freeware programs – Firefox, Winamp, Picajet, Desktop Sidebar – and I’m seeing a common thread. They all let you apply your own skins or themes. There’s no better way to show that, in designing your program, the user comes first. All are fabulous tools, with fabulous user focus.

It’s also a very easy way to generate some community around your product: sites like Wincustomize, ThemeXP and Deviantart are full of creative people eager to express themselves using someone else’s software as their canvas, and share the results. It also extends the life expectancy of your product. We all get bored of staring at the same old interface all day; this is a free way to delay that eventual boredom.

Which makes it all the more curious that Microsoft should force you to download a hacked version of the relevant DLL, before you can get creative with Windows XP themes. Would people love Microsoft more if they let the users take control, even in this small way?