Posts from RSS

My partner Albert wrote a great post yesterday that I'd like to highlight. His going in assertion is:

It would a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it is fundamentally decentralized with nobody controlling who can email whom about what, anyone can use email essentially for free, there are opensource and commercial implementations available and third parties are offering value added services.  All of that is made possible by the existence of standards such as SMTP and IMAP.

Albert goes on to suggest what some of the key open protocols might be; webfinger, pubsubhubbub, and salmon, and then asks for comments and suggestions, which he got on his own blog and also on Hacker News.

A comment on Hacker News says that App.net (which I backed along with many others) is using the Activitystream.es, Webfinger, RSS, pubSubHubbub protocols. So that's a good thing. Dave Winer, the father of RSS, also has been posting up a storm on this stuff.

I believe in open protocols and open APIs. That is what the web was built on and that is how we can best take it forward in the spirit it was given to us. All of this is geeky and only interesting to a tiny minority of web users. It is not a threat to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the other social platforms who serve a mass audience any time soon. But it is important stuff nonetheless and I am happy that folks are talking about it and building stuff.

I've got some great news to share with all of you. MBA Mondays is now available in audio form. The coolest part is how it happened.

A few months ago, I met Tyrone Rubin in a room on turntable.fm. He was DJing and chatting. Because that's what you do on turntable. We got to talking and now we are friends. We haven't met but I'm sure we will at some point.

A few weeks ago, Tyrone emailed me and told me he wanted to do voice recordings of all the MBA Mondays. He has a friend Raph who is an actor and does voice work and they wanted to do it as a "labor of love." I listened to the first few and dug the South African accent. Tyrone and Raph are both South African and live in Cape Town.

So we created a SoundCloud account and they are recording and uploading. The've done 20 so far. They will get all 87 done in a month or two. And then they'll add a new one each week.

So if you are in a car or at the gym and want to listen to MBA Mondays, you can do that now. You'll miss a bit without the images and the links. But I've listened to many of these episodes and I have to say they are a pretty good substitute for reading the blog.

Here's the SoundCloud account. Here's the RSS feed. Here's the podcast on iTunes. You can also get the SoundCloud app for Android or iPhone and listen with that.

I was really impressed with how good of a podcasting platform SoundCloud is. It's a breeze to setup the account and start uploading. Getting an RSS feed and submitting to iTunes is also easy. And since SoundCloud is building out apps for all the popular mobile devices, you can listen pretty much anywhere on anything. Yet another USV portfolio company kicking ass. Well done SoundCloud. And most of all, well done Tyrone and Raph. Thanks for doing this.

This is a followup post from yesterday's one on RSS. Two things I want to add.

There is now an RSS feed just for MBA Mondays. It is available in the AVC RSS page. But for all of you who want to separately subscribe to MBA Mondays, here is the MBA Mondays feed. There's your MBA Mondays book everyone 😉

There were a bunch of requests to see the full refer logs for AVC. People wanted to see if engagement differed measurably by source of traffic (with most of the interest in people who click thru from RSS readers). Here are the refer logs for the top 25 referring sites over the past 30 days. If you want to see it larger, click on the image.

There are clearly differences but I don't really see any evidence that RSS subscribers are more engaged. The most engaged readers seem to come from TechCrunch! Go figure.