The Butt Ugly Weblog

Today's stupid question is "Why does CNN do this?" They get advertisement revenue off of every page view. With the RSS feed, they have lost at least one view, maybe more.

On the other hand it would be nice to get a slightly larger feed, it would be nice to get the first paragraph of the story.

--Foster, 11-Jan-2005

I guess CNN is thinking smart: the more people see their headlines through RSS the more hits they get on their site if the news are interesting. It's expensive to keep people interested enough to get them visit your web site everyday. When you get to someone's RSS feed list, you hit a home run. That way your on their permanent "shopping list", even though nothing catastrophic happens in the world and the person can not "forget" to come to your web site. Great idea and it's too bad that finnish newspapers haven't woken up yet. They're too afraid of giving anything for free, even though their market share is dropping and people are loosing interest. I bet that the news are not that different in Keskisuomalainen...

--Haltia, 11-Jan-2005

"When you get to someone's RSS feed list, you hit a home run."

Well said! I may have to quote you on that... :)

Actually, smaller papers have already seen the light: For example, Kaleva also sports the RSS icon on their front page.

Big companies move slow, unfortunately.

--JanneJalkanen, 11-Jan-2005

Be my guest . It would be my first tech quote ever ;)

--Haltia, 12-Jan-2005

But what reader should one choose? Is there some nice add-on to Firefox?

--svedupelle, 12-Jan-2005

Firefox 1.0 already integrates RSS reading (they just call it "Live bookmarks"). However, it's not particularly good, then support in Thunderbird is far better.

Take a look at http://sage.mozdev.org/ for an RSS reader extension for Firefox. I don't know how good it is, as I use http://www.bloglines.com myself...

--JanneJalkanen, 13-Jan-2005