Linkage

Oh my goodness. Chocolate Industries finally launched their website! There’s not going to be much more than that to this post — it’s been Coming Soon well over a year now, if not two… just the fact it’s up is news enough. Go check it out!

As a footnote to my comments on RSS ads, I’d like to point out how Dave Winer points out the obvious about feeds:

Okay, now consider the other case, your feed only has summaries of your article (Example: NY Times). To read the full article you have to click on a link and (listen very carefully now) see an ad as you read the article. In other words, the RSS feed is itself an ad, pulling you in to read a page with a big ad on it. You want to put an ad on the ad? Okay, but it’s getting pretty thick. I might start feeling used and not like it, and unsub. In other words, think carefully about how much advertising you think your readers can endure.

“I think this is a dark day for TiVo, and this new feature is aimed at pleasing TV Networks and advertisers. I doubt a single customer would ever ask for this kind of feature, and that it happens while you skip commercials just drives the point home. TiVo is no longer TV your way, it’s TV their way.”—Matt Haughey

Dave Winer just offered his mini-review on FeedBurner. He’s right—that vendors are providing a “solution” to the format wars isn’t an actual solution, it’s more like a market-hack. It’s a good product to an unfortunate reality of this culture that thinks the platform should be owned instead of shared. Just compare the rollout of the original black and white TVs to the new digital and HDTV formats, with broadcast flags and vchips galore. Collaborating on standards and building off them responsibly is the real solution. You are, after all, talking about the ground on which you’re building what really matters—your products.

Gothamist alerts us to the winners of the City Lights Design Competition. These look great, although I believe the city should stick to classic styles when executing such broad-reaching public projects. It’ll be interesting to see the first batch go up, anyway.

An good example of “speaking your target’s language”, which oddly enough is the focus of an HSBC campaign which I enjoy very much: I had been looking for a city map system that had NYC subway stations plotted in it for some time now. Turns out, Yahoo! Maps has this, but was under the label “Public Transportation.”

Now this certainly appropriate and all, but it’s clearly not what a New Yorker is browsing for: we’re looking for “subway,” maybe even “transit system” as a label, especially if that’s all the data you’re providing.