Re-design without community buy-in will kill you

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by glatt

How many were you expecting?

None, actually. The whole reason I kept adding words to the string was I was trying to get a result of zero, but it kept not happening.

[SteveDallas]

I find it ironic that there's such outrage over the design of an RSS aggregator.

One of the points of RSS is to present you with raw information, information that you (or your software) will then slice, dice, and use as you prefer. By deciding to use RSS, you have already sidestepped a great many of the page design decisions made by the sites you subscribe to.

But in presenting you this information, your RSS reader has to do... something. And so Google Reader imposes a set of decisions about design and layout on its users (decisions that most people agree are poor in its latest iteration).

In the great Platonic Ideal Hypertextual Internet, this would be about as newsworthy as coverage of the fact that I've chosen to change the desktop wallpaper on my computer. But here in the gristly real-world Internet, web sites want to give us stuff in a particular format that they chose. Even a web site that owes its very existence to the concept of pulling the content of other web sites out with no particular formatting information. So, you don't like Google Reader? Use a different RSS aggregator. The very lack of alternatives, or perceived alternatives, is in itself telling.

The problem for the tech industry corporations is that RSS disempowers them. It makes them commodities. And if that's what they are, they can't command a premium in the stock market.
--Dave Winer

[classicman]

Observant users of Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool have noticed something odd in recent days — when you do an exact match search on certain terms, the volume reported is zero. Surely someone has been searching on terms like wine, iPod, and dogs. Indeed, a Google spokesperson confirms that it’s a bug.

“We’re aware of a potential issue that is affecting the keyword tool in AdWords, and are working hard to fix it,” said the spokesperson in a statement.

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