The Full Text RSS Feed Campaign

Posted by David Whitehouse

If you are like me you will have a number of RSS feeds that you have added to an RSS reader, so that you can read all those articles in one place.  I find this really useful as I use Google Reader and have it synchronised on my phone, so when I go number 2 I can read about SEO and Seth Godin’s latest thoughts (bet you like that thought, don’t ya?)

But I have one major gripe, something which I think is a BIG mistake on the part of the blog owners – partial RSS feeds prevent me from reading and require me to click through on my phone, and to be honest – that just spoils the whole point of an RSS reader and an RSS feed.  So I just don’t subscribe.  I’ve recently started making comments on other blogs who I wish to follow, asking them to change their feed to a full one.  My latest one was after I found what looked like an excellent blog on public relations, you can see my comment here.

Does this piss you off too?  Please, if you run a blog, please please please enable full text RSS feeds and ask others to do the same! :)

David Whitehouse finally has a Wordpress spell checker!

Posted by David Whitehouse

Lets face it, I’m basically writing this post to check my spelling and it seems to work, as long as I use the visual section to writ write my posts, which I don’t normally do.

The plugin I am using is called After the Deadline and its pretty neat if you ask me – lets hope this reduces the hordes of people correcting my spelling all the time, eh? ;)

(The main problem is it is correcting my passive voice, so I shouted at it a bit to prove I wasn’t passive, but it is still highlighting ”is called“)

Update: Notice it didn’t realise I meant write instead of writ, guess I can’t totally rely on it then.

Think Visibility September 2009

Posted by David Whitehouse

I attended Think Visibility this September on behalf of Bronco, it was my first conference I’d attended and I must say I found the experience very interesting. The conference was held in Leeds at a casino (I forget the name, but it was a pretty cool venue).

First up was Joost de Valk, who I met just before he kicked off Think Visibility, he’s a friendly guy and he really knows his stuff, you can check out his presentation here. It was a very useful, and a highly technical presentation on speeding up Wordpress and various other things :) It’s given me the kick up the ass I needed to sort out caching on my site and start using smush it.

Next up was Judith Lewis who gave a very useful presentation on universal search results, this made me realise how much I was missing out on by not doing a YouTube video for every blog post I do – perhaps I should start doing this! I met her afterwards, she seemed like a nice lady (hey anyone that gives out free chocolate has to be kind, right?)

After that there was Julian Sambles from the Telegraph and following on from that we got to choose which presentations we watched. You can view all the slides from ThinkVisibility here. Zoe Piper also did a useful presentation on the content network, which I’m sure will come in handy sometime :)

On the whole it was a great event organise by Dom Hodgson – who was really friendly and helpful, helping me decide which presentation was best for me :)

Using Flickr for Wordpress Images

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’ve just downloaded the Wordpress Flickr Manager plugin and I’m debating over whether to use that, or to keep them within in my Wordpress install.

The advantage is the photos will load from another domain, so in theory they will load faster, plus also the flickr images may bring me more traffic. On the downside it isn’t incorporated straight into Wordpress, but I suppose it doesn’t need to, also I can’t “smush it” before I upload to Flickr.

So which should I go for? Anyone use Flickr much?

Is this the beginning of the end for Twitter?

Posted by David Whitehouse

Do you think Twitter will be around in 5 years time? I don’t. It’s growth is starting to wane as you see less and less people are searching for Twitter, if you look at the graph below it shows the number of searches for Twitter on Google – it isn’t increasing, which means that its user base perhaps isn’t increasing the way it should.
twitter-growth-plateau

If you compare this graph to the typical problem faced by growing technology companies, if you ask me Twitter seems to be stuck, it doesn’t look like its growing at an exponential rate – according to the graph above, the same number of people will be joining the network each month.

New users aren’t tweeting and aren’t inviting people

Ok so perhaps you think that because people are joining each month still, it therefore must still be growing, well unfortunately these people aren’t getting their friends to join, in fact a lot of people are only tweeting once and then never returning to the site (I’ve got a number of non “tech” friends who have done this). There has even been a study proving this.  Lets face it, what is the point?  Really…

Can’t invite people within a tweet

Once you sign up with Twitter, there isn’t really that many reasons for you to invite someone again, and there isn’t a “smooth” way to do so. If they were to introduce functionality to automatically email non-twitter users when you tweet about them, then perhaps I could see them growing.

Twitter is rapidly becoming obsolete

Now lets compare Twitter for Facebook. Twitter largely came about because it took what Facebook did and made it simple to do on the mobile phone, but with mobile broadband rapidly becoming the norm, this functionality isn’t going to be necessary as people will be able to browse their already existing friend network on Facebook. Twitter doesn’t offer any (or hardly any) advantages for the user over Facebook, and Facebook can quite easily release a few new features that would finish off any competitive advantage Twitter may have.

They aren’t making money and they never will

Finally they aren’t monetizing the site, and with other sponsored tweet services already started up the only way I can see them monetizing it is with interruption marketing. They just aren’t gonna get the money they need to keep this thing going.

In summary Twitter is screwed

So to summarise:

  1. New users aren’t spreading the word
  2. There isn’t a way to invite new users in a tweet
  3. New users aren’t tweeting
  4. Mobile broadband will make Twitter’s only competitive advantage obsolete
  5. Facebook has a pre-existing network of “practical” users
  6. They don’t look like they are gonna get much money

So all you people out there best watch out, cos there is going to be a real vacuum when the bottom falls out of this one.