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The Panic Status Board

John Gruber — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:47:56 PST

If I didn’t love these guys I would hate them.

U.S. to Allow Export of Web Services to Iran and Cuba

Samuel Axon — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:47:13 PST

According to The New York Times, the United States Treasury Department will tomorrow give Internet services license to export consumer-aimed services like instant messaging and photo-sharing to countries with which trade has previously been restricted, including Iran, Cuba and Sudan.

The United States defines these nations as “closed societies” because their governments sometimes try to restrict the free flow of information between citizens, however in many cases trade is restricted by the United States in response to those actions. This new license would allow U.S.-based Internet companies like Yahoo to export certain services that can be described as “free mass-market software,” despite trade sanctions.

The U.S. State Department and members of Congress previously recommended this move to aid efforts to open up the societies in question. The value of exporting these tools has already been established.

Last year, the State Department asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled downtime so Iranian protesters could continue to use the service. Digital communication technologies like Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and SMS text messaging were used by Iranians to organize protests and to get information to the American and European media.

After Google threatened to leave China if the country doesn’t ease up its regulation and restrictions on the Internet, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech declaring the administration’s commitment to the free flow of information on the Internet. This is one example of that commitment.

We’re curious to know how our readers in the United States and elsewhere feel about this move. If you’re willing, share your thoughts in the comments, and participate in our poll: “Is the Internet a fundamental right?”

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!

Tags: cuba, exports, iran, News, Political, sedan, trade, treasury department

dryan: ★ Attention Is the Real Resource http://j.mp/d7XCIO

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:09:56 PST

dryan: ★ Attention Is the Real Resource http://j.mp/d7XCIO

★ Attention Is the Real Resource

John Gruber — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:55:36 PST

Jason Snell — editorial director at Macworld — wrote an interesting piece on his personal site regarding full-text RSS feeds, prompted by Merlin Mann’s piece last week regarding The Atlantic.

Snell writes:

RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. There are ads in RSS, sure, but they’re cheap and lousy and don’t have remotely the return as ads on web pages. The question is, if you publish all your content in RSS, does the resulting drop in traffic get offset by the fringe benefits? In the mind of some — presumably including Merlin Mann and John Gruber — you may lose a small percentage of tech-savvy people, but those people tend to be the ones who pass links around to friends and on their blogs and on Twitter, and a lot of those people will come to your web site from there, so in the end it’s a net benefit. Plus, more people will care about you and your brand and that’s a good thing.

I agree, that’s good. I wish someone could cite some studies that prove that giving away your full-text RSS doesn’t hurt traffic, but helps it.

It should go without saying that what works for me here at Daring Fireball, as a one-man show, may well not work (or work nearly as well) for a large operation with a full editorial staff such as Macworld. But: DF’s RSS feed, which contains the full content of the site, not only generates money directly, but has grown to become the single largest source of revenue on the site.

The ads in most sponsored RSS feeds are indeed cheap and lousy. The ads in DF’s RSS feed are neither. They’re priced at a premium, and have attracted (if I do say so myself) premium sponsors.

What is “traffic”? I suspect Snell is talking about page views. When someone loads a web page in their browser, that’s a page view. Most advertising on the web (but not all) is sold using page views as the metric — advertisers pay an agreed-upon amount for every thousand page views on which their ad appears.

When I switched DF’s free public RSS feed to full-content in August 2007, DF’s web page views had been growing steadily month-to-month. After the switch, web page views were stagnant, with no growth, for about a year. (If anything, they went down in the first few months.) But readership clearly continued to grow: subscribers to the feed skyrocketed. And, about a year ago, even web page views started growing significantly once again — going from a little over one million per month to a little over two million per month.

If you’ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS feeds will hurt, at least in the short term. The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.

(I could go on, which is good, because my friend Jim Coudal and I are speaking together on this very topic — online advertising — at SXSW next week. Our session is at 3:30pm Sunday afternoon.)

Update: Jason Snell’s thoughtful response.

dryan: RT @FakeAPStylebook: When a public figure denounces homosexuality, prepare accordingly for said public figure's eventual outing.

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:35:19 PST

dryan: RT @FakeAPStylebook: When a public figure denounces homosexuality, prepare accordingly for said public figure's eventual outing.

dryan: All Six HTML WG Working Drafts Have Been Published http://j.mp/95V9N2

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:41:54 PST

dryan: All Six HTML WG Working Drafts Have Been Published http://j.mp/95V9N2

dryan: It's 4:30 in the morning. I'm getting over a headache and winding down by reading the new HTML5 draft spec. I need to learn how to turn off.

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:41:34 PST

dryan: It's 4:30 in the morning. I'm getting over a headache and winding down by reading the new HTML5 draft spec. I need to learn how to turn off.

dryan: @select_start have made a very nice Basecamp iPhone app at http://headquartersapp.com/. First one that's actually nice to use.

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:48:45 PST

dryan: @select_start have made a very nice Basecamp iPhone app at http://headquartersapp.com/. First one that's actually nice to use.

All Six HTML WG Working Drafts Have Been Published

John Gruber — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:53:22 PST

HTML5 moves ever forward.

★

dryan: @michael_kendall you could have said hi

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:06:52 PST

dryan: @michael_kendall you could have said hi