Sull

I had no idea you struggled, you mask it well, and I’m glad you don’t let “the shit” keep you down.

Hearing that you’re worried about your job ending unexpectedly, I’d encourage you to apply for Kaltura’s open html5/javascript position (I’ve applied for it myself, but you’re a better coder, and I can switch my app over to the community management position (you might be a good fit there too)). Also, there’s some rad stuff going on at http://exchange.kaltura.com/ where you can apply some of your ideas to video hosting stack apps and sell them.

the jobs @kaltura: http://corp.kaltura.com/about/careers
–Drew

BTW… to access this great feature, you have to use the mobile site. And I haven’t figured out how to access that from a standard browser without some user agent fu.

also worth noting is brevity. i like your blog because you are not wordy yet get the point across.

Another reason is that blogging is less structured. You have more power over the form, especially the markup.

Also, I think of it as something like hosting a party. Sometimes I go to other people’s houses, sometimes they come to mine.

the tweet:
http://twitter.com/vocally/status/3729004310
or rather….
http://go.vocal.ly/y

RSS is crucially important to the web. This does not mean that a viable business can be based off of being the primary controller of it, as Feedburner had tried to do.

Feedburner was never necessary. But a few things made it appealing. People love stats. People are lazy.

Instead of learning how to manage and own your RSS feed(s), publisher’s instead chose to use the hip service that would take care of the voodoo. In return, the publishers got to use a poorly designed interface loaded with stupid feature names and cluttered with gimmicky gadgets for stats that was more of a novelty fix than i in depth analysis of reader and traffic patterns.

Google may have thought it wise to swallow Feedburner. And let’s face it, $100million is nothing to Google. Even the nearly $2billion for youtube was an easy transaction for Google. So they can kill an acquisition and not feel like a failure about it. Often, that is why they acquired a company in the first place. Kill momentum. Control momentum. Re-invent and re-ignite momentum under the Google brand.

Google may even want to kill RSS. They may want to forge ahead with Atom + PubSubHubBub and the Wave Protocol and see RSS as a distraction. I don’t know.
but Google has a calculated strategy for everything and what seems like a mistake is not necessarily one. I’m sure that in some cases, disorganization is a factor as well. But we should not assume.

Look on the bright side of the Feedburner debacle. For all I care, FeedBurner could burn down. And in place of that is what should have happened to begin with…. RSS controled, owned and managed by the publishers themselves. It’s not difficult, folks. And it’s good to learn about RSS.

Also of interest is some fun experiments going on with http://rssCloud.org to make RSS move a little faster (like PubSubHubBub).

Namespaces are your friend!!

i replied:

They are my friend so i’ve learned. I use them often, sometimes reluctantly. A project for an employer was a perfect case for using the SMIL standard. But my argument failed and we started with an RSS namespace instead which devolved into a hybrid DTD based off of XSPF. Our stuff works, but I have this drive to leverage existing specs especially when functionality can neatly fit. I am all for using namespaces. But I cant help myself and enjoy the debate for what can be considered, oddly, the underdog (the standard spec). Here is a thread of interest from 2003 that I just found – http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2003/Jun/14/CommentsRSS

I hope to see more discussion on this. Might be a good topic for your next blog post. Great work on MyStatusCloud.com!