Checking in from Syndicate - Jarvis unkeynote

Jeff Jarvis is giving an un-keynote where he’s leading a group-wide discussion to kick off Syndicate. The audience “voted” by indicating that they want to talk about “Money and syndication” first (shocker! people want to make money on their content!). Some questions:

• First questioner asked about the repurposing of his feeds, and suggested that he derives a benefit from having other people resyndicate his content (in terms of page views, Google PageRank). Some people are worried about the unwanted resyndication, that’s what we built uncommon uses for.


• Eric Norlin (the guy who runs Syndicate) just said that marketers don’t like feeds because feed consumption can’t be measured… while he’s right that publishers/marketers don’t capture email addresses of feed subscribers, there’s plenty of other data that is measurable with feeds.


• David Weinberger threw out some ideas about measurement and networks, which led Jeff into a discussion of how Flickr calculates “interestingness“ of photos.


• Speaking of “interesting”: a guy in the front row just commented that he’ll not put his posts into RSS, but will put “little stuff” into feeds but wants to force people to come to his site so that he can monetize them on his site. That led Jeff to ask how many people are publishing feeds who are not publishing full-text feeds; USA Today said that while they’re doing mostly headlines today, they are testing various ideas with FeedBurner. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think forcing people to come to your site to read your content will work: people will just find content that delivers the content the way they want it.)


• Don and I just answered a question directed our way (Jeff didn’t know we were here) about what we can do vis a vis measurement (and I added that we’ve not seen evidence that partial feeds increase click-throughs over full-text feeds). That’s the fourth different context in which FeedBurner’s come up during this presentation. Cool.


• OK, the guy who just bit Dave Sifry’s head off? (“Tagging sucks! Technorati’s broken!”) Nuts.

Other people blogging this session: Everybuddy, Weblogs work, Josh Hallett.