A quick rant to the boys at SiliconBeat
There are so many things in life that can frustrate you if you allow them to, hence the common (and appropriate) advice to 'let go of the little things'.
Then, there are the things that irk you so much for some subconcious reason that they just want to make you throw up your hands, scream and shake the bejesus out of your monitor.
This is one of them for me.
Over on the About page of SiliconBeat.com, in the description of Matt Marhsall's background, is a link to his news stories over at the SJ Merc. In parens after the link are the words (my emphasis) "subscription probably required to view them".
Subscription, as I've written before, is generally understood to imply that a periodic payment is required to access/receive goods or services on a periodic basis (though admittedly, this is changing somewhat as the term has been co-opted w.r.t. Feeds and Aggregators). This is not the case with KRD properties, even for content that is greater than 7 days old (which are sold individually or on a tiered/bulk buy scheme). The right word here is "registration".
If you guys don't get it right, you can't expect others (like Google News) to, which only hurts you in the end in the minds of end-users.
Update: My monitor, though still cowering on the corner of my desk, let out a big sigh of relief when MichaelB's comment flashed on... its... umm... face. Yes, I've taken this as far as it's going to go (and far further than it needed to go).
5 Comments:
Well, we certainly wouldn't want you to smash your monitor to pieces over a little ol' mistake at SB. Consider it fixed. Thanks.
Michael Bazeley
www.siliconbeat.com
Hey Michael, thanks for being a good sport! ;)
Now, how do we get Google to do the right thing and make a similar distinction over at Google News??
And perhaps an even bigger battle... how do we get KRD (et al) to tear down the registration *requirement* and 7-day curtain (I've got ideas there)?
And how do we get Blogger to support trackback (my pet peeve)?
Doh. That last comment was from me. - Michael B.
You said it. What keeps me with Blogger is the promise of Blogger... not its current state.
The good news on that front is that now that they've birthed the first set of international sites, they can get back to the infrastructure port... and then on to new features... or so I've been promised by one of their engineering leads.
We'll see...
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