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Subject: User submitted book reviews and package required PHP versions Author: Manuel Lemos Age in days: 120 Summary: In this post it is announced a new feature that allows any site user to submit reviews of books and products of the interest of the PHP users. The package pages are also showing now the information about which PHP version each package requires to run, as well the package version number, if the respective authors have submitted that information.

Download the MP3 (10.8 MB)

Topics we cover in the interview

1. How is FeedBurner impacting on the way we understand media?
2. What kind of information about their readers do media and advertisers want?
3. RSS and television, what’s the relationship?
4. How can RSS be developed?

Full transcription of the interview

SD: I’m speaking with Steve Olechowski, one of FeedBurner’s co-founders. It seems to me that the impact that FeedBurner could have on how we understand media and how media is going in a bilateral way is quite profound. Would you care to speak on that a bit?

SO: We totally agree: I think that’s part of the value that we offer to all of our publishers and part of the reason that we find most of the major media companies around the world using Feedburner. What really attracts them is that we help them understand their audiences in this changing world of media - where their audience is going as far as blogs and RSS feeds and everything else.

SD: So, would you see yourself as a presenter of aggregated information or data?

SO: It’s something we certainly have in our network, lots of great data, but that’s not really what our mission is. Our mission is to help publishers understand their data. Something that they ask us a lot is “Where do we fit in the entire landscape here?” but we’ve been a little careful about privacy - it’s something that you really want to make very important on a network like this. In order for publishers to use us, privacy is very, very important, so we try to uphold our privacy policy for our publishers. That’s number one, but in the aggregate there certainly is interesting data we can provide that we think helps the community at large as far as understanding that this is a totally separate medium from what we’ve seen in the Web in the past and that it is something that needs to be paid attention to, as the numbers continue to grow. We can provide aggregate data that can prove that to people - that hey, this is something that’s really growing, it’s something you need to pay attention to - but we’ll do that carefully.

SD: Talking about that changing landscape, from what you’ve been seeing, what’s the weight of a story that runs in USA Today as opposed to - and I know there’s all different tiers of bloggers, but how do you weight those, or how are they being weighted, by the numbers that you see?

SO: Well, I think it’s changed quite a bit over the last couple of years. USA Today is one example that was using feeds very early on so they were one of the early entrants into using RSS and I think in general those early entrants are doing very, very well. It’s all over the map, certainly when we look at the long tail that exists of feed subscribers the head is made up of some of the very large blogs, so a lot of the largest blogs in the world are leading the pack as far as RSS subscribers and because they were early entrants and they’ve been doing this a couple of years they’ve had a head start to really grow their audience, but I would say that major media is catching up at an alarming pace if not eclipsing it right about now, so we’re starting to see those lines cross, where commercial media companies like USA Today, Reuters and some of the other major media companies that we represent, have very large subscriber numbers and we think that’s a good thing, it’ll continue to grow.

SD: I think you answered some of this in the Q&A after your session at the Future of Web Apps, but how about advertising agencies, how are they approaching the data that you’re providing?

SO: Well, the agencies are really interested in figuring out how to reach the audience that’s consuming blogs, I mean that’s extremely interesting to them right now. So, we go to them with data that shows the reach that RSS and blogs have and they want to know how they can reach and tailor their message. The large brand advertisers are always concerned about making sure it’s being presented with content that upholds their brand so that’s always a concern, but more often than not they’re now more interested in reaching this audience.

SD: So, RSS. Television. What’s the relationship at this point in time and where will it be in the future?

SO: Right now I’m not sure there’s a huge relationship beyond a lot of the media companies are starting to use RSS as a way to make awareness of their television programmes known, new episodes and things like that. I think certainly what we’ve seen with the iTunes store and Yahoo and some of the other large podcasting engines are that they’re starting to do deals with some of these large media companies to actually distribute television shows via RSS and I certainly see that as something that’ll happen very soon, that there will be feeds of TV shows that people can subscribe to instead of having to go sit in front of their TV at 9PM on Tuesday night, they’d rather “give me the feed, I expect at Tuesday night 9PM there’s going to be another thing here, I know I can either watch it then or I can watch it later.”

SD: Is Tivo obsolete?

SO: No, Tivo’s not obsolete. Tivo is fed by a feed, it may not be RSS format, but in the future I wouldn’t be surprised if it is fed by RSS feeds and that’s how content providers are distributing their content to people instead of over a cable network, over the lines. Certainly there’s IPTV as well, that’s starting to become popular in mainland Europe, and something that I think the networks there are looking at very, very closely, in terms of how that’ll change how things are measured, and certainly RSS will play a big part of that I think over the next few years.

SD: What are you offering right now that no other company is offering?

SO: Well, we’re offering, we think, top notch statistics of who’s consuming, presenting publishers with who their feed audience is, so we’re helping them analyse their data and provide analytics. We’re helping them really promote and distribute their syndicated content in ways that we don’t think they could do by themselves, and then we’re helping them monetise that in ways that we don’t think they can do by themselves, so those three things are what makes Feedburner unique. Part of what we bring to the table is a) the scale of our network, it’s huge. It’s so much larger than anything else out there and that allows us to do a lot of things that maybe other companies couldn’t do by themselves.

SD: Where do you see the development of RSS? where do you see that evolving, because you’ve been helping to really shape how it’s used?

SO: Again, I think it’s going to develop more and more to deal with things like rich media. I think it’s already done a pretty good job of dealing with that but it’s going to continue to grow in that facet. One of the things I think will have to be solved by someone, if not us, is how authenticated feeds can work. Right now it’s very difficult to have private data propelled via feed because it’s just shareable and things like that, so I think that’s something that’s going to have to be solved and hopefully we can play a part in working with all the major parties to make sure it’s done the right way and can be presented to people.

SD: In the larger context, what is the focus for you over the next couple of years?

SO: We want to continue to grow what we’re doing today. We think we’re doing a great job today of dealing with serving the needs of publishers and advertisers but we don’t think we’re doing a good enough job. We think we still have a list about a mile long of things we think we could do better. So we’re going to prove out what we’re doing and help optimise it as much as we can, but on top of that we really deal today with media publishers and advertisers that follow along those suites, but feeds are going to be coming out of all other sorts of other places so we need to make sure we can cater for those publishers as well. As an example there are all sorts of retail companies like Target, very large retailer that’s here, which is starting to have feeds of daily offers, so the circulars that they normally would put in the paper every week are available over RSS feeds. That’s not a publisher that we cater to very easily. We don’t do a lot for them today but I think that’s something that we’re working very, very hard on, in making sure that we can deal with RSS feeds no matter where they come from.

SD: Do you have any advice for individuals who are going through the start-up entrepreneurial process for the first time?

SO: This is the third company I’ve started and I’ve learned something every time. The most important thing is to understand who your customers are, and make sure you’re listening to and serving to them in a very controlled, but almost rabid manner, and build your business around that. You may have some great technical ideas that are the foundation of what you’re building but you really have to look at your customers and your audience and make sure you’re serving them. That’s been the biggest key to our success over the companies that we’ve developed. So that’s number one. From a development side of things, don’t over-engineer up front. Basically, do what you need to do to get your product to market quickly and iterate very quickly, spend a lot of time optimising and be able to deal with that scale that’s going to come on the next level, but if you spend all of your time up front thinking about that, you’re just going to spin your wheels and somebody will pass you up, so get to market quickly, always be very, very conscious about optimizing what you’re building, but don’t spend too much time on it up front. Those are my biggest pointers.

SD: Thank you so much, wonderful.

Transcribed by Scott Morris

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Download the MP3 (10.8 MB)

Topics we cover in the interview

1. How is FeedBurner impacting on the way we understand media?
2. What kind of information about their readers do media and advertisers want?
3. RSS and television, what's the relationship?
4. How can RSS be developed?

Full transcription of the interview

SD: I'm speaking with Steve Olechowski, one of FeedBurner's co-founders. It seems to me that the impact that FeedBurner could have on how we understand media and how media is going in a bilateral way is quite profound. Would you care to speak on that a bit?

SO: We totally agree: I think that's part of the value that we offer to all of our publishers and part of the reason that we find most of the major media companies around the world using Feedburner. What really attracts them is that we help them understand their audiences in this changing world of media - where their audience is going as far as blogs and RSS feeds and everything else.

SD: So, would you see yourself as a presenter of aggregated information or data?

SO: It's something we certainly have in our network, lots of great data, but that's not really what our mission is. Our mission is to help publishers understand their data. Something that they ask us a lot is "Where do we fit in the entire landscape here?" but we've been a little careful about privacy - it's something that you really want to make very important on a network like this. In order for publishers to use us, privacy is very, very important, so we try to uphold our privacy policy for our publishers. That's number one, but in the aggregate there certainly is interesting data we can provide that we think helps the community at large as far as understanding that this is a totally separate medium from what we've seen in the Web in the past and that it is something that needs to be paid attention to, as the numbers continue to grow. We can provide aggregate data that can prove that to people - that hey, this is something that's really growing, it's something you need to pay attention to - but we'll do that carefully.

SD: Talking about that changing landscape, from what you've been seeing, what's the weight of a story that runs in USA Today as opposed to - and I know there's all different tiers of bloggers, but how do you weight those, or how are they being weighted, by the numbers that you see?

SO: Well, I think it's changed quite a bit over the last couple of years. USA Today is one example that was using feeds very early on so they were one of the early entrants into using RSS and I think in general those early entrants are doing very, very well. It's all over the map, certainly when we look at the long tail that exists of feed subscribers the head is made up of some of the very large blogs, so a lot of the largest blogs in the world are leading the pack as far as RSS subscribers and because they were early entrants and they've been doing this a couple of years they've had a head start to really grow their audience, but I would say that major media is catching up at an alarming pace if not eclipsing it right about now, so we're starting to see those lines cross, where commercial media companies like USA Today, Reuters and some of the other major media companies that we represent, have very large subscriber numbers and we think that's a good thing, it'll continue to grow.

SD: I think you answered some of this in the Q&A after your session at the Future of Web Apps, but how about advertising agencies, how are they approaching the data that you're providing?

SO: Well, the agencies are really interested in figuring out how to reach the audience that's consuming blogs, I mean that's extremely interesting to them right now. So, we go to them with data that shows the reach that RSS and blogs have and they want to know how they can reach and tailor their message. The large brand advertisers are always concerned about making sure it's being presented with content that upholds their brand so that's always a concern, but more often than not they're now more interested in reaching this audience.

SD: So, RSS. Television. What's the relationship at this point in time and where will it be in the future?

SO: Right now I'm not sure there's a huge relationship beyond a lot of the media companies are starting to use RSS as a way to make awareness of their television programmes known, new episodes and things like that. I think certainly what we've seen with the iTunes store and Yahoo and some of the other large podcasting engines are that they're starting to do deals with some of these large media companies to actually distribute television shows via RSS and I certainly see that as something that'll happen very soon, that there will be feeds of TV shows that people can subscribe to instead of having to go sit in front of their TV at 9PM on Tuesday night, they'd rather "give me the feed, I expect at Tuesday night 9PM there's going to be another thing here, I know I can either watch it then or I can watch it later."

SD: Is Tivo obsolete?

SO: No, Tivo's not obsolete. Tivo is fed by a feed, it may not be RSS format, but in the future I wouldn't be surprised if it is fed by RSS feeds and that's how content providers are distributing their content to people instead of over a cable network, over the lines. Certainly there's IPTV as well, that's starting to become popular in mainland Europe, and something that I think the networks there are looking at very, very closely, in terms of how that'll change how things are measured, and certainly RSS will play a big part of that I think over the next few years.

SD: What are you offering right now that no other company is offering?

SO: Well, we're offering, we think, top notch statistics of who's consuming, presenting publishers with who their feed audience is, so we're helping them analyse their data and provide analytics. We're helping them really promote and distribute their syndicated content in ways that we don't think they could do by themselves, and then we're helping them monetise that in ways that we don't think they can do by themselves, so those three things are what makes Feedburner unique. Part of what we bring to the table is a) the scale of our network, it's huge. It's so much larger than anything else out there and that allows us to do a lot of things that maybe other companies couldn't do by themselves.

SD: Where do you see the development of RSS? where do you see that evolving, because you've been helping to really shape how it's used?

SO: Again, I think it's going to develop more and more to deal with things like rich media. I think it's already done a pretty good job of dealing with that but it's going to continue to grow in that facet. One of the things I think will have to be solved by someone, if not us, is how authenticated feeds can work. Right now it's very difficult to have private data propelled via feed because it's just shareable and things like that, so I think that's something that's going to have to be solved and hopefully we can play a part in working with all the major parties to make sure it's done the right way and can be presented to people.

SD: In the larger context, what is the focus for you over the next couple of years?

SO: We want to continue to grow what we're doing today. We think we're doing a great job today of dealing with serving the needs of publishers and advertisers but we don't think we're doing a good enough job. We think we still have a list about a mile long of things we think we could do better. So we're going to prove out what we're doing and help optimise it as much as we can, but on top of that we really deal today with media publishers and advertisers that follow along those suites, but feeds are going to be coming out of all other sorts of other places so we need to make sure we can cater for those publishers as well. As an example there are all sorts of retail companies like Target, very large retailer that's here, which is starting to have feeds of daily offers, so the circulars that they normally would put in the paper every week are available over RSS feeds. That's not a publisher that we cater to very easily. We don't do a lot for them today but I think that's something that we're working very, very hard on, in making sure that we can deal with RSS feeds no matter where they come from.

SD: Do you have any advice for individuals who are going through the start-up entrepreneurial process for the first time?

SO: This is the third company I've started and I've learned something every time. The most important thing is to understand who your customers are, and make sure you're listening to and serving to them in a very controlled, but almost rabid manner, and build your business around that. You may have some great technical ideas that are the foundation of what you're building but you really have to look at your customers and your audience and make sure you're serving them. That's been the biggest key to our success over the companies that we've developed. So that's number one. From a development side of things, don't over-engineer up front. Basically, do what you need to do to get your product to market quickly and iterate very quickly, spend a lot of time optimising and be able to deal with that scale that's going to come on the next level, but if you spend all of your time up front thinking about that, you're just going to spin your wheels and somebody will pass you up, so get to market quickly, always be very, very conscious about optimizing what you're building, but don't spend too much time on it up front. Those are my biggest pointers.

SD: Thank you so much, wonderful.

Transcribed by Scott Morris

Like this article? Digg it!

Advertisers are no longer limited to textual ads on traditional search and content networks. Google offers advertisers a choice of various media formats and platforms to promote their products and services.

Microsoft Live Search is following in Google's footsteps by banning websites that attempt to artificially boost search rankings via link exchanges. This is one more reason for webmasters to be careful when building links.

Documentation. Makes you want to call it a day and start with some real work tomorrow. Or at least that’s the reaction that you often come across in web design, even with seasoned developers and designers. Yet the biggest problems we often come across in our work are ones related to communication; problems with people from marketing; clients with bad ideas; management with worse ideas. What if you could make them understand your vision? Documentation is the answer.

Communicating Design, by Dan Brown is one of very few books that address the subject of documenting a modern web design project. With chapters ranging from personas and usability testing to content inventory, sitemaps and wireframes, the book covers a lot of ground, with something for everyone; from project managers to interface designers.

The chapters each follow the same general format, and can be read in pretty much any order - making the book an ideal reference to have lying around. Each chapter breaks the chosen deliverable into three layers; essential, enhancements and contextual information, which makes getting started easier and further adding to the book’s reference potential. The chapters also include tips on presenting the various documents, and useful information which places them in the wider context of a project.

Dan Brown does a very good job of describing a potentially dull subject in useful ways. As a long time contributer to Boxes and Arrows and an active member of the Information Architecture community his experience comes through in the examples, and in particular the real world problems you may encounter when using the proposed deliverables. These sections on when, how and what to deliver to clients really raise the book into must-read territory.

The most impressive aspect of the book though is the up-to-date discussion. Not content with describing what makes a good site map and how to present it we get the author’s well-thought out ideas on whether sitemaps are indeed up to the task in a world of user-generated content, search and non-hierarchical site structures (probably not apparently). In another chapter a disussion of the problems involved in carrying out a large content inventory are accompanied by details of why the perfect tool for the job is difficult to come by.

A minor issue is that the book focuses on the documentation of the interface design aspects of a web design project at the expense of including chapters or comment on documenting the more technical, functional, aspects of development. In fairness it doesn’t set out to plug this gap in the market, although personaly I’d love to see a follow up in the same style. Communicating Development anyone? With all the diagrams throughout the book full colour would have been nice, but these really are minor points.

Overall Communicating Design is a good read, covering techniques that you can jump right in with, and providing hard earned, real world knowledge in digestable chunks. For anyone interested in improving their design documentation this will be a solid purchase, for anyone not interested in creating better documentation this should be required reading.

• Book Name: Communicating Design
• Author: Dan Brown
• URL: http://www.communicatingdesign.com/
• Price: $39.99 USD
• Rating out of 5: 4

So we all know that WWW stands for the World Wide Web, but the World Wide Web and the trends coming around have to not necessarily do with marketing to the world, but more about marketing on a localized level.  Keep your eyes open and begin practicing localized marketing as soon as you can.  Using keywords like city names and different phrases that will very easily bring your marketing down to a localized level.  If you start on the front end of the localized craze you will find yourself and your business with much more longevity.

I think this is a godsend for local physical businesses also.  In such a large corporate world, it seems like there’s only a few companies that own everything and that we all seem to work for the same company anymore.  Well the internet has definately given us an edge on cost effective business, but now it can help local businesses when things are done right to stay afloat and potentially expand and  progress.  There is a very good opportunity for local marketing and local businesses to survive.

One of the major things that seems to be coming into the realm of Web Standards is Language.  It’s not a have to, but it’s a thing that can increase your business profits and business opportunity times a very high percentage.  At PubCon they showed some charts about internet usage growth and the biggest country and the one on top was actually not necessarily a country but a continent you wouldn’t think of, Africa.  Sounds strange but it is true.  Of course international business does come with complication, but it can be a simple option for a site that doesn’t involve any shipment of a product.

If you are running a service website or a downloadable product or even have nothing more than a sponor site, listen to some tips and recommendations I have for you.

Getting set up for international business of course will require the following:

1. A merchant account that supports multiple currencies.
2. Setting up your site with seperate divisions for different languages.
3. International support and communication.
4. Price adjustments to be competitive.
5. International marketing, (PPC advertising in different languages).

The investment into these things may help your business take off.  There are many different solutions that can help you accomplish all of these things.  International marketing sounds like it may be tricky, but with exchange rates and the lack of competition you may find yourself able to afford a tremendous amount of advertising.

I think what I learned the most about CSS Design when going to the PubCon conference wasn’t necessarily technical, at least in my mind, as it was logical.  It wasn’t what they said but what was triggered in my mind about what they said.  CSS just seemed to make much more sense.

First of all, most of the things I heard I knew.  I found out a few different tricks to make life easier, but for the most part the puzzle just seemed to come together.

The search engines read the HTML and that is pretty much all that they care about.  CSS is more of an element for the browsers to use in interpretting the decoration and layout of the content.  HTML was not created for design.  In all actuality the search engine could probably care less on how the text is decorated.  If you are familiar with keyword prominence, then this can be confusing because we always talk about making things stand out.  Well just changing the color and bolding and italicizing is something that should be done in the CSS.  Even size change.  There are some default elements however that the search engines pay a little more attention to.  Those are things like the heading tags, strong tags, link tags, and the basic tags that are set to specify different types of text.  Understanding that, those are the elements that are creating the true prominence on search engines.

Heading Tags are things like h1, h2, h3, h4, etc.  When the search engines see those tags they expect the text to get bigger and bolder and they expect important information to be in there.  So it is very important to use heading tags.  Strong tags are the true bold tag.  Bold isn’t really the b tag, it should be the strong tag.  A lot of the font weight can be determined through CSS, but the strong tag is a default CSS element so it should be used.  Of course last and possibly most important would be the link tags, specified by using an ‘a’ in the beginning.  This definately creates some notice in the coding.

By limiting your use of decoration and sticking to the CSS defined styles your HTML code will become more streamlined.  The more code the search engine has to sort thru the harder it becomes to determine what the real content is.  Also lets just say that if you were rated on density not necessarily thru just your content but within your code, when you use CSS it will get rid of a lot of unnecessary code that will make you more able to get your density within the code a lot higher.

When using CSS alway opt to refer to your style sheet externally rather than mucking up the top of your HTML code.

Remember also that Search Engines cannot read Javascript, Frames, and Flash very easily.  Often times it is well worth the option to completely rid your design of any of the mentioned to help your content become more streamlined for the search engines.

Worst thing ever to do with your site, create a Flash landing page.  Do not in any circumstance create a Flash landing page unless you are willing and able to spend a lot of money to market your website.