Making Money with Full RSS Feeds

I recently wrote about the struggle to get paid for free content and software, including the situation with full RSS feeds, it's going to be difficult to make money.

When Freakonomics recently moved to the New York Times web site, they switched the RSS feeds to partial feeds. When this happened, the small, but very loyal full-feed reading fans of the content shrieked like little girls who’d just dropped their ice cream cone on the pavement.

They’ll make their official decision on Monday. They need to get paid, and I don’t blame the NYT or the crew at Freakonomics if they say, “Sorry, you’ll have to live with it.” The situation with Freakonomics got me thinking about solutions.

I really enjoy full RSS feeds and someday I believe a significantly larger portion of the world will as well though this might still be a ways out. In the meanwhile we will see less and less full feeds. Unless someone designs (and this could be done in-house as well) a product to work with blogging software and other content management/web publishing services where when new content is “posted” it’s done in such a way that the following happens:

1. On your site, things work exactly as they always did
2. Somehow there is a mirrored version of the content that is automatically served up with advertisements in the body of the actual posted content. This would become the feeder for the full feed RSS content.

I don’t think this is a huge challenge, but it’s also not a teeny tiny one either. It has to work with various content publishing systems and with various ad serving technologies and not add anything to the administrative overhead.

I hope it gets built. I really love full RSS feeds on the iPhone. If it doesn’t get built, ultimately everyone will go partial feed.

Hopefully Google and others are already working on something like this.

A Brief History of Facebook

Kind of. NYT Slipstream column by Jason Pontin.

That lawsuit has no chance and is just more free press for Facebook.

Update: Newsweek hops on the Facebook train with full coverage with this cover story plus the 3 other articles which are linked off of it. Flip-flops didn't make the cover. Sad.

Update 7:59PM 8/11: This just in via TechCrunch: Facebook Source Code Leaked. Scary if true, especially if it gives hackers a way to gain personal information.

Seth Godin May be Over His 'Stats' Problem, but...

update 8/10: please see the following: Seth Godin is a Good Guy, I Am a Dope
(i didn't simply delete this post because I am OK with the historical record reflecting some of my dopiness, Seth is a good guy, as I'm sure is Imal who originally forwarded the link to Seth).

...does not seem to be over inexplicably failing to source the New York Times' story that inspired the blurb. Eww. Here's Seth's post:

I'm totally over my stats problem...
But I worry that if you're an author, you might not be. You might be spending hours a day checking your sales ranking on Amazon. If that's you, I hope you'll forgive me sharing this site that Imal sent in today. Type in an author's name and watch the rankings all day long. If I were in charge, I'd reformat the page, but like I said, I don't check anymore.

Here is his un-sourced creative inspiration. I bring this up only because the guy yammers on constantly about things like "building trust", and one good way to build trust is to give credit where credit is due. Especially when the original inspiration is much more interesting than what you have to write...