Day: February 10, 2005

I love bugmenot.com

One of the more frustrating things of my lunchtime reading ritual is opening up Romensko and following the links to one after another newspaper site that insists of asking for name, rank, and serial number before letting me view their precious content.

So, I use bugmenot and provide newspapers with fake log-ins.

Call me a criminal. The only reason newspaper pinheads inflict this conceited nonsense is so they can ostensibly target their ads, which my eye avoids anyway.

I just went to read a Howard Kurtz piece at the washingtonpost.com and took great satisfaction at providing the Post with bugmenot’s login:

registrationsux@effco.com
spumco

John Dvorak started the campaign.

Steve Yelvington demurs but maddeningly links to a white paper on the topic which costs $40 to read.

Web-based RSS aggregation models

The news that CNET is aggregating RSS feeds within its site with Newsburst came as a relief to me as I work with Mark Cahill to develop a way for a non-technical community to participate in a community of blogs held loosely together by a common niche. After installing several feed readers I pretty much gave up using them for various reasons and wondered by I couldn’t point my subscribed feeds to a single page.

Mark came up with this prototype as an example of how a publisher can serve its users by pointing them to affiliated blogs through a master index and sub-category indices.

We’re still debugging it, but it seems essential to our strategy of providing WordPress based blogs to our 8,000 registered users while retaining the ties that bind the community together.

I expect to see other publishers leap onto the Newsburst bandwagon over the next three months to keep their users on the reservation.

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