Changing address? Redirect your RSS

So many ways to choose. Except if your RSS is dead, then you have zero.

The Economist, this means you!

If you move home, you can get the post office to redirect your letters so they come to your new address. If you change your internet address, it makes sense to tell your users where you’ve gone too.

So why do websites make it difficult for themselves by not doing this on their RSS feeds?

I almost never visit homepages, they are generally a waste of my time to flick through and find out what the new stuff is. I’ve even set my browser to come up with a blank page. Like most webusers, I begin with a search, or if I’m using some type of internet news reader software, then I’m using RSS.

If you change the address of your feed and don’t tell me, you’ve just lost me and everyone else who used to read you from that source.

Better still if you’ve decided to retire the blog, tell me and suggest alternatives. Don’t just stop updating. Best practice here from the Financial Times.

And the bad practice award also goes to the FT, as that’s exactly what they did almost a year ago when they moved their Tech Blog from

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ft/techblog

to

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ft/fttechhub

This means my feed just hangs on the last entry, 30 Dec 2010, and my tablet/phone/desktop newsreader stops working.

No more news for you

It’s not just news articles. Media downloads or podcasts depend on RSS. I haven’t had a new piece of Economist audio or video on my MP3 player since the end of October! No reason as to why in the feed. It still works, it’s just got nothing new in it.

So I pop over to their multimedia page.  Lots of new stuff on there, so at least they’re still making it. The RSS indicator on the page takes me to http://www.economist.com/rss which oddly mostly contains links back to the main websites, rather than to RSS links and certainly not a working multimedia RSS.

Their (possibly out of date) video portal at http://video.economist.com does have a front and centre RSS link. But that takes me to yet another (possibly even older) list of feeds, none of which is the one I’ve requested.

So, the Economist was making interesting stuff that used to turn up on my MP3 player/tablet/phone.

It’s still making useful stuff, except that now I can only watch/listen when I’m at my computer (which is increasingly irregular).  Or maybe I can get it on a more useful device, except they’re making it really hard to find out how.

If you’ve got a working feed for the Economist’s multimedia output, do let me know in the comments!

Farewell the original UK Tivo

One bit of kit I probably won’t be able to keep going much longer

In the midst of my zeal to get more value out of some of my older electronics I’ve just had a setback.

This morning I turned on my Tivo and got this screen:

No more predictions for me

To be honest, I’ve been expecting this news. There were always going to be two options. Either the hardware was going to expire (something I’d tried to mitigate already 3 years ago by upgrading the hard disc, the only mechanical component), or Tivo itself would turn the system off.

Option two happened first. Yes, I am an early adopter. Tivo launched in Britain in October 2000. But in having my Tivo for something like 8 years, I’m surprised that they waited quite this long.

The thing about Tivo which makes it different from other hard disc recorders is that it depends on a regular download of TV and radio programme data provided by Tivo itself. No EPG data, and the box becomes a dumb VHS device you have to laboriously set for each recording.

Tivo was something that Sky brought in to help navigate their hundreds of satellite channels. But a year later Sky realised it was something they could do themselves and launched the Sky+ box in 2001.

Tivo lingered for a little while but decided to stop selling their device at the start of 2003.

All that time it was actually Sky which maintained the Tivo platform. You never needed a Sky subscription however, Tivo worked perfectly well with Freeview, which is what I used it with. If you had a problem with your subscription it’s  Sky’s call centre you get put through to.

I actually bought a Topfield Freeview Plus recorder a year ago and I have been running the two side by side. I’d been trying to wean myself off Tivo because I knew my hardware didn’t have a future although I still use it on a daily basis. The reason why is significant and it’s something that today’s manufacturers still need to pay attention to.

1) Tivo is really simple to use.

2) The box predicts what I want to watch and if I forget to record something, it normally does it anyway.

And that’s it. That’s what’s kept me using it for 8 years. Many’s the time I’ve been on the train in the morning and while flicking through the free paper realised there was something on TV that night I wanted to watch. Dammit, I’d think. I wish I’d set the recorder.

Imagine my delight when I got home and discovered that this gorgeous box had done it for me! There was always something on TV I wanted to watch. I stopped watching linear TV (and advertisements) the same week, and I’ve never gone back. That knack of prediction is something Freeview and Sky never managed to replicate.

Compared with the Topfield device I have now, even 8 years on, the original Tivo interface is a *lot* easier to use.

I shall miss it.

But Tivo is about to  re-launch on a new platform and want rid of legacies like my old box. Although I imagine that with Tivo now being associated with Virgin Media , Sky don’t want to keep it going any longer. Maybe there are contractual issues. Who knows.

It would be interesting to know how many of the original Thomson Scenium devices are still out there, and what proportion of them are still paying £10 a month for the EPG download (there was also an option to buy a ‘lifetime’ EPG subscription for £300).

I will now have to try and make the best of the last few months of my Tivo’s life. It’s an analogue device so keeping it going beyond digital switchover was another issue on my mind. Getting out of the habit of tagging programmes I like or dislike will be a struggle.

But viewing has moved on. My next TV will be HD, as will the recording box I buy with it. It will have at least 5x the recording space, although the number of TV channels coming into it will stay about the same (I intend staying on Freeview)

My entertainment choice will still change though. My next TV will be able to download directly from the web and playback media from any device within a WiFi radius.

What won’t change is the amount of time I have to be able to watch the damn thing!

CNET Loaded doubles up – time to unsubscribe?

Signal-to-noise ratio drops a little

I have a lot of video/audio downloads I carry with me. If I’m waiting for a bus, a train or a meeting, I tend to be watching or listening to something.

A regular view was CNET’s Loaded, a quick summary of tech news every weekday. I don’t get a lot of time, so I tend to watch a week’s worth at once.

They delivered a bombshell last week – they’re going bi-daily. This might be the trigger that makes me unsubscribe.

I just don’t have time to watch 10 editions a week! I can’t cope with 5, and as I also watch Geekbrief, I’ve been thinking that one of them has to go.

I’d almost decided it was going to be Geekbrief (a bit too squeaky and happy), but now I’m reconsidering.  Cali Lewis might just get a reprieve.

CNET’s reasoning is that Loaded can be 24 hours old by the time you watch it. Big deal. They’re sometimes a week old by the time I watch them, but I still value the content. Old does not equate to out-of-date.

Content providers are obsessed with ‘newness’. New is important, but so is being able to pick stories that interest me and that have meaning beyond the next 24 hours.

They also need to understand how unlikely it is that they’re my only content supplier, so they don’t need to give me everything. They can’t possibly do everything well, and become less relevant to me as they try to do so. As their filters get broader, they invariably stray into areas I’m not interested in.

I can’t help but feel that this concept becomes more important in an increasingly non-linear world. Tell me stuff that matters, not just stuff that happens, because I don’t have time for noise.