Re: [syndication] Re: syndication for commerce

["Bill Kearney" <ml_yahoo@ideaspace.net>]

> Bill, thanks for the thoughts on this --- really helpful.

I try.

> > I'd have guessed, right off the bat, that this did more to turn  them off
than
> > ever would have retained their loyalties.
>
> Herein is the biggest problem dealing with droids --- it DOES work,
> IN THE SHORT TERM. It's like heroin for folks who live and die
> by "this weeks numbers", but every dose needs a little more juice and
> gets them a little less high.

Until they wake up in the crack house.

> Totally fair.... I would expect that as a start giving "advance
> notice" of deals would be a reasonable tit-for-tat, given the
> theoretically lower annoyance factor you get from a newsreader.

Yeah, but that's like getting the heroin before it's cut.  Eventually that too
wears off.  But if it's a low volume feed, you stand a much greater chance of
really being able to TELL if the feed worked.  Click-through tracking would give
you a pretty clear indicator of whether or not a feed's items were of interest.

> > Here's a list of other RSS feeds for "deals on stuff"
> > Like this article I posted a while back:
> > http://www.syndic8.com/~wkearney/blogs/syndic8/archives/000144.html
>
> Nothing in the world is new, dammit. :)

Heh.

> Interesting ... it's Overstock's HTML, not mine ... I'm just scraping
> it off of their site. But if that becomes a barrier for some readers
> it's clearly an issue. If only they had an XML interface to their
> catalog.

If you're gonna scrape you gotta do the diligence and clean it up.  That's only
fair.  This is why I usually discourage use of scrapers for any serious,
long-term stuff.  They do work, so don't get me wrong, but when a site makes
it's own RSS there's a number of extra things they can start adding that
increase it's utility.  Scrapers, in general, have a much harder time of it.

-Bill Kearney