It brings value to your product. Newspaper industry, where’s your wake?
[Poynter](http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=79424) has yet another tidbit, about yet another media outlet creating a branded RSS reader.
This is a horrible idea. H o r r i b l e.
Why?
1. **Trust** — Whether you’re developing your own, or licensing a reader from someone else, you’re presenting it as coming from the site.
We live in a day and age where the line between a [healthy machine](http://www.apple.com) and one that gets [“pwnded”](http://www.microsoft.com) comes down to trust. Can you trust the software running on your machine.
Simply put, why should I trust **software** written by a **newspaper**? Shouldn’t they stick to writing headlines and stories?
2. **Confusion** — An explosion of branded RSS readers is likely to bring with it a variety of new terms, UI paradigms, and [“marketing-speak”](/blog/2005/01/11/thought-of-the-day-enterprise/).
This will all be done in attempt to “make RSS easier” for “our users” to “understand.”
In fact, what it will do, is fracture the mindshare of the general news consuming audience.
Imagine two friends, Bob, who reads a national paper, and Mary, who reads her local paper. Bob uses his paper’s branded RSS reader. Bob runs into Mary at the park and tells his friend about this cool thing on his newspaper’s site, called *Syndi-news*. Mary thinks that “having the news *e-filed* directly to her *Syndi-news* site”, as Bob described it, would be cool.
Mary goes home and starts looking for a *Syndi-news* link on her local paper’s site. But her local paper, doesn’t have *Syndi-news* that’s *e-filed*, it has *Accuquick Headlines*. So Mary is left out of the goodness that is RSS/Atom.
3. **Control freaks** — I think what ultimately drives the move to create branded RSS readers is a misguided attempt to maintain control over the ‘reading experience.’
I have news for the news industry, you lost it the minute you posted content in a digital format. While analog material _can_ be altered, digital content is even easier, and thus, more likely to be reformated, changed, etc. to suit what the readers want/need.
I know it’s a difficult transition to go from having control over the content, its presentation and its promotion to having control over only the content, but that’s the way the Internet is. I’m sorry, I didn’t [invent it](http://www.jsonline.com/election2000/image/110700/1gore110700.jpg), that’s just the way it is.
The double-edged sword of the Internet is that content is king, yet it is also a commodity.
So, my advice is, embrace your role on the Internet. Be a content provider. Be a great content provider. Do good journalism, let your users read it, search it, index it, share it, slice it, dice it, and make julienne fries out of it.
Your readers will thank you for it.
[Acts of Volition](http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2005/march/theinternet) has some great commentary, by way of [Peter Rukavina](http://ruk.ca/article/2646) about how the decentralized nature of the Web affects our thinking and culture.
What struck me is that newspapers have traditionally been a force for centralization.
Newspapers go out into the community — be it literal, like [Atlanta](http://www.ajc.com), or figurative, like pop music — and gather news and information from disperate sources.
Then they bring it back, in the old days to one central building — though now it may be a bureau, write it up and push it back out to readers.
So, in the future, as our culture adapts to one where media consumers are also media producers, what’s the future of newspapers — or any information collecting/dissemenating institution for that matter.
I don’t have the answer, it’s a question that’s always a background process running in my head.
One thing I do know: power in the hands of consumers has almost always proven to be a good thing in just about any industry.
But the product we peddle one that’s so vital and important to the health of a democracy, information.
I may not know the answer, but I’m optimistic that I’ll like the outcome.
Several folks have reported getting errors when [WordPre.cio.us](/projects/) makes a call to parse_w3cdtf().
That function should be a part of [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org) 1.5’s install, located in wp-includes/rss-functions.php.
It should get pulled into the namespace when your wp-config.php is pulled in, but folks with proper paths to their wp-config are still getting errors.
So I’ve updated the release to include that parse_w3cdtf() function in del2wp.lib.php. You can get this updated version at my [projects page](/projects/)
**Update:** I changed the name of the function to cmh_parse_w3cdtf() and changed all references to it in the latest build, so that folks without the problem won’t have name conflicts.
**Update again:** Per [John’s](http://johnhesch.com/) suggestion, you can now set the ping and comment status to either ‘open’ or ‘closed’ when configuring del2wp.php. It’s lines 13 and 14 in the file. You can get the updated release at [my projects page](/projects/).
**Why not again:** [I’m looking for some help from folks experiencing the time-shift problem with their blogmarks…](http://heisel.org/blog/2005/03/14/fixing-wordprecious/)
**Last time:** If you’d like to keep up with work on WordPre.cio.us then subscribe to it’s [RSS feed](http://heisel.org/blog/category/projects/del2wp/feed/)
I was working from home today because my back decided it wanted a trial seperation from me!
It was a generally crummy day, made crummier by the 30 minute wait to get my hair cut at Great Clips. Yeah, I’m cheap, wanna fight about it?
Anyway, I arrive home from the aforementioned proprietor of famed trimmings, and [Erica](http://www.ericaendicott.com) surprises me with an iPod shuffle!
While, she loves me dearly, don’t think I’m such hot stuff that I warrant random gifts throughout the year.
Erica and I have finally started going to a gym, and Erica thought it would be perfect for me to have as a music-at-the-gym gadget. Also there may be some latent guilt involved, since the regular iPod that *she* got *me* for graduation a few years ago, somehow always ends up with *her*.
In fact, when plugged in to a computer, the iPod used to say “Chris’s iPod” and now — I guess reflecting her “ownernship is 9/10ths of the law” view of things — it says “Erica’s iPod.”
And speaking of names, I’ve named my iPod shuffle Myron. Props *and* a [G-mail](http://www.gmail.com) invite to the first person to correctly guess who it’s named after….
By day, I'm a product manager serving a group of fantastic engineers at Square.
By night, I fight crime and solve mysteries with a robot pal of my own creation.
By midday, I like a snack, generally a cookie.
Part of this biography isn't true (hint, I like cookies and engineering, I don't own a robot)
