In part 1, we learned that users want very little changed – they want a simple, fast, feature-light RSS reader. This time around, Digg found that a majority of users aren’t really into social features inside readers. They also uncovered that 40% would pay for a good reader. And that led Digg to all but announce that Digg Reader will be a paid service.

Although they don’t come right out and say it, Digg says that they were “pleased” to see that 40% of their survey respondents said that they would pay for a Google Reader replacement.

Also, Digg says that they would like their users “to be customers, not our product.” Sounds like Digg is pretty much set on charging for their RSS reader:

Free products on the Internet don’t have a great track record. They tend to disappear, leaving users in a lurch. We need to build a product that people can rely on and trust will always be there for them. We’re not sure how pricing might work, but we do know that we’d like our users to be our customers, not our product. So when we asked survey participants whether or not they would be willing to pay, we were pleased to see that over 40% said yes.

Although Google Reader was a free product, and yes, it is being shuttered, I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that free products on the internet don’t have a great track record. Plenty of free products have thrived and continue to thrive, with the help of advertising.

Either way, Digg probably needs to go ahead and get their reader on the market – sooner rather than later. It’s already been over a month and a half since Google announced the end of Google Reader. Users have already had plenty of time to find alternatives like Feedly, NewsBlur, Netvibes, FlipBoard, and many, many more. Digg has targeted June for the beta release – but will that be too late? And how amazing would it have to be to get people to pay for it?

And there was a lot of feedback. According to Digg, their blog post announcing the Google Reader replacement received over 800 comments – more than when Digg announced the big Digg redesign back in July.

Here’s what Digg says were the four overarching trends they found in the user feedback, meaning these are the things that former Google Reader users want to see in a Digg Reader:

1. Keep it simple, stupid
2. Make it fast (like, really fast)
3. Synchronize across devices
4. Make it easy to import from existing Google Reader accounts

As we know, simplicity is one of the things about Google Reader that users seem to be the most fond of.

“Google did a lot of things right with its Reader, but based on what we’re hearing from users, there is room for meaningful improvement. We want to build a product that’s clean and flexible, that bends easily and intuitively to the needs of different users,” says Digg.

And they are also planning on building a reader that better incorporates content from Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, reddit, LinkedIn and other, more social places.

Digg says that they have been planning on building their own Reader for some time, but were forced to expedite their plans after Google dropped the hammer on Reader.

“We’re confident we can ship a product that meets the principles above, but if a feature is missing on Day 1 that you were really looking forward to, we ask that you 1) tell us and 2) be patient.”

Those petitions included a few on Change.org, a single-serving site called keepgooglereader.com, and even a White House petition on the We The People site. That latter was quickly removed by the administrators before it could garner more than a few hundred signatures. Clearly, telling Google to maintain Google Reader is outside the purview of the Obama administration.

Out of all the petitions, one has risen above the rest. That particular petition, hosted on Change.org, simply asks Google to Keep Google Reader Running. And in less than two days, that petition has already crossed the 100,000 signature mark. Its next goal is to hit 150,000, which is most definitely achievable considering it’s gaining a hundred or so signatures every few minutes.

Here’s the full petition:

Dear Google:

A few years ago — years, wow — Google Reader was one of my go-to social networks. It was an accidental one. I was using it for its intended purpose — aggregating and reading a lot of web content in one place — but it turns out, a lot of other people were doing the same thing. A lot. Many of which shared interests and when you added the amazing (amazing!) share and comment features, Google Reader blossomed into a wonderful experience for many of us, core to our day-to-day consumption of content online.

Unfortunately, you decided to kill those “extra” functions. I’m not here to ask you to reverse that (you should, though). In doing so, Google Reader’s day-to-day value declined, and I, like many, ended up using it less often. Instead of hitting the bookmarklet I have on my Chrome install three, four times a day, it’s now a once a day (okay, once every other day more often, recently) experience.

But it’s still a core part of my Internet use. And of the many, many others who are signed below.

Our confidence in Google’s other products — Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus — requires that we trust you in respecting how and why we use your other products. This isn’t just about our data in Reader. This is about us using your product because we love it, because it makes our lives better, and because we trust you not to nuke it.

Oh.

So, please don’t destroy that trust. You’re a huge corporation, with a market cap which rivals the GDP of nations. You’re able to dedicate 20% of your time to products which may never seen the light of day. You experiment in self-driving cars and really cool eyewear which we trust (trust!) you’ll use in a manner respectful to our needs, interests, etc.

Show us you care.

Don’t kill Google Reader.

So it’s obvious that plenty of people are upset about Google’s decision. Although Google cited a decline in usage as the motivation behind canning Reader, the product clearly has a loyal and substantial following.

But will this incredible show of support for Google Reader make any difference? I wouldn’t hold my breath. Google has killed 70 products or features since instituting “spring cleaning” back in 2011, and Google Reader is simply one of those layers of fat that needs to be trimmed, in Google’s eyes. Google admitted that the decision was a tough one, but in the end they need to do this in order to focus on other, newer and more innovative products as not the “spread themselves too thin.”

And that very well mean sending resources to work on Google+.

If Google decides to go through with the kill, which it probably will, where does that leave RSS readers? Alternatives already exists, such as Feedly or Newsblur. You can bet that there will be a race to fill the massive void left by Google Reader’s departure. Take for instance Digg, who announced yesterday that they were prioritizing plans to build their own reader that will serve as a replacement for Google’s – API and all.

So, a hundred thousand signatures in less-than 48 hours is a big deal. Hell, it’s a landslide of support for Google Reader. Unfortunately for the signers, Change.org is not the We The People site and Google isn’t the White House. 100,000 signatures does not force Google to respond. But I wouldn’t use that as a reason to stop spreading the word.

Stranger things have happened.

It’s Digg. The answer is Digg.

On their blog, Digg has just announced plans to build a reader to replace Google Reader both in function, and in our hearts.

The news aggregation site says that RSS isn’t dead yet , and it’s worth saving. Apparently, Digg has had plans to build its own reader for some time, planning to start the project in the second half of 2013. But Google’s announcement that they were canning their own Reader has forced Digg to “move the project to the top of their priority list.” Work on the new reader begins today.

According to Digg, the reader will be comparable to, if not mimic Google Reader – even down to the API.

“We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the Internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what’s interesting. Don’t get us wrong: we don’t expect this to be a trivial undertaking. But we’re confident we can cook up a worthy successor,” says Digg.

Digg? Why not Digg? Someone has to step up. There are plenty of Google Reader alternatives out there right now, such as Newsblur, Feedly, FeedReader, and Bloglines. Plus, there are those magazine-style readers that kind of work like an RSS reader – we’re talking things like Flipboard or Pulse. But Digg, even having seen some troubled times over the past few years, has that name recognition. We’ll be anxious to see what they come up with.

So, I thought I’d post my referer log to show you who is sending the most hits. FSJ is still 7x more clicky. Too bad Nick Denton!

Comments

I want to be able to segment RSS readers, to be able to see the different browsing behavior of new visitors versus my loyal visitors.

Getting to the point where I actually can acquire that data has been a pretty long ride. I first had to create a way to change the URL’s used in RSS feeds, so I could detect this different URL, 301 redirect it to the right URL, and set a cookie while doing that. To do that I filed a bug in WordPress’ Trac, which I wrote a fix for as well, someone else improved on it, and it was committed into the WordPress core. As of WordPress 2.3, you can apply a filter to the_permalink_rss, which allows me to add ?source=rss to any URL (or &source=rss when the blog uses the default ?p= permalinks).

The next step is detecting that parameter in the URL, and 301 redirecting to the original post URL. Before doing that 301 redirect however, I drop a cookie, which lasts for 30 days, identifying the user as an RSS reader. This allows me to, in the last step, add the following code to the Google Analytics script tag when the user has that cookie:

__utmSetVar("RSS");

I will know if this works tomorrow, and if it does, I’ll release a new version of my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin with this possibility in it. Since I can imagine other people want to identify RSS readers for other purposes, I’ll release that small bit of code as a single plugin as well.

Comments

Finking On Paid Linking?

The reason that speculation has arisen is that though there was a seeming spate of directories hit, the number of them – up to 60 or so that we know of – is relatively small compared to the number of directories out there, hundreds or thousands passing on PageRank.

One theory suggests that people are using Google’s controversial paid links report form, implemented last spring to a furious response. However, shortly after Matt Cutts’ invitation to report instances of paid links, Cutts clarified that he and Google’s webspam team weren’t interested in reports on directories, only instances similar to what he cited on his blog.

Nevertheless, Cutts followed up that question with some rules of thumb for evaluating a directory’s value:

- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.

- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.

- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Webmaster Takeaways

Paid link reports are not     automatic Mind your link neighborhoods Don’t sell links that pass     PageRank Google doesn’t like being     gamed Penalized directories may be     a message » Give our readers your take

That may or may not be a lot to consider, and given that a select few directories have been affected, it may be a cue that Google is considering it more than before. It may be just a strong message being sent, a warning to clean things up.

Rand Fishkin ups the considerations with a lengthy post at SEOMoz entitled "What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones." The most interesting suggestion is that Google is manually taking down directories that violate its guidelines, and not necessarily with a strategy that involves spam reports, but rather by taking what might be obvious cues:

Banner Ads [for paid links] from Your Directory on SEO Sites – It’s like waving a flag with a voice-activated, wind powered speaker that yells "ban me! ban me!" Sure, you might get clicks and money and submissions, but you’ve gotta know that search quality team members read SEO blogs, too – so if you do this, make sure your directory is ready to be manually reviewed by search engineers.

Marketing to Webmasters – If your forum signature at Digitalpoint (sorry to stereotype, but it’s just so true) contains links to three directories you own, you’re probably in possession of three obviously manipulative directories. I’m sure there’s a couple exceptions, but if I were Matt Cutts, I’d just tell one of my quality control guys to go spend a few days trawling DP for directory domains.

Speaking of DigitalPoint, some there seem to agree that they’re being targeted, and are smelling "rats." One such forum member says:

I have been in touch with a lot of directory owners, free and paid.

Also blog network owners and many have lost PR and SERPs ranking.

I think it is simply from Googles new ‘Report Paid Listings’

For those who report paid listings, DP is a gold mine for these rats.

It’s important to note also that Cutts says the reports, if used, are not fed automatically into the webspam algorithm, but are only starting points for review, suggesting a report is not automatic guilt.

Until Google speaks up though, we may not know whether people are finking on paid linking, or if Google just sent the directory world a message via some notorious suspects, but webmasters will be free to speculate until they do. 

Necessity is the mother of invention, the old saying goes. But boredom and the desire to experiment are powerful forces too, says Canadian author Michael Winter. That’s how he came up with the idea to “serialize” his latest novel on Facebook, the hot social-networking site.

“I look at the whole book-publishing and promotion-of-books process as pretty boring,” the British-born author says with a laugh from his home in Newfoundland. “And I’m always game to do anything different to promote the book.”

Over drinks one night, Winter and Penguin Canada publicist Stephen Myers came up with the idea of using Facebook to create an online community around Winter’s new novel, The Architects Are Here. For the past several weeks, the author has been posting a short synopsis of each chapter every few days on his Facebook page and will continue doing so until the book is officially published later this week.

In addition to the synopsis, Winter has also been posting his thoughts and commentary about how the chapter developed, including debates he had with himself over how to handle a particular situation, or the local landmarks and people that became part of the novel.

“At first it was just going to be an excerpt from each chapter, but I thought that was just as boring as doing a reading,” says Winter. “So I thought what I could do was talk about where I was when I wrote a certain passage … and kind of annotate the book in a way.”

Winter is just one of a growing number of authors who are trying to drag the book into the 21st century by using the Internet to supplement the traditional process of writing, publishing and distribution, and by using blogs and other Web tools to build relationships with readers.

While Winter’s group isn’t likely to set any world records for Facebook membership, he has about 230 “friends,” many of whom return for each chapter and post their own comments about the events in the book, or the process of writing it. Some are clearly would-be authors.

This two-way connection isn’t something that novelists often get, Winter says, and it is nice to have. “There are so few readers in the end for a Canadian literary novel,” he says, that the chance to connect with some of them online is a treat.

Myers and Penguin Canada have also been involved in other publicity stunts involving young Canadian authors, including a boxing match last year with Craig Davidson, author of The Fighter, and a drinking game to help promote Noel Boivin’s and Christopher Lombardo’s The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery.

But Myers says the Facebook idea is more than just a stunt. Looking at the readers who have come together around Winter’s book, he says, “I see community there. I see 200 or however many have signed up for it, and I see them on there discussing each of his posts as they come out.”

Winter is not the only author using Facebook to promote or serialize a novel. Halifax author Dr. Brad Kelln – a forensic psychologist who has published two thrillers – has been posting chapters of a new book as he writes them, and has even been using the names of group members from Facebook in the novel.

Another recent experiment with online interactive fiction – something authors have been experimenting with since the early days of the computer – comes from Canadian author Josh Martin, whose latest project is called Plot Party. Readers suggest different outcomes for each chapter and then vote on which they prefer. Martin is also planning something called Pocket-Change Parade to coincide with World Literacy Day this Saturday.

One recent attempt at online interactive fiction didn’t come to a happy end, however. In February, Penguin USA launched a fiction-writing project called A Million Penguins, loosely based on the concept of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia written and edited by users. But the project shut down a month later and was widely viewed as a failure.

According to Penguin, about 1,500 people contributed to the writing and editing of A Million Penguins, making it what Penguin’s CEO reportedly called “not the most-read, but possibly the most-written novel in history.”

On the Penguin blog, one executive at the publishing house summed it up in this way: “So what of the experiment – can a collective really write a novel? I guess the answer has to be a qualified maybe.”

Meanwhile, some authors have even taken to publishing their entire works online, although that is still relatively rare.

The most recent high-profile example is Austrian writer and 2004 Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek, who is posting chapters of her new novel as she writes them, on her website, for free.

Jelinek isn’t interested in publicity. Described in a recent Associated Press news story as a recluse who rarely ventures outside her house, she has apparently chosen to publish her book online because she wants to avoid the usual book-launch interviews and readings.

The new novel will not be protected by any digital-rights management or copy protection. Jelinek says “anyone who wants to can download it,” and calls publishing on the Internet “wonderfully democratic.”

Other authors have experimented with online sales of books in various forms. Technology publisher O’Reilly sells “e-books” as PDF files, and so have marketing guru Seth Godin, Toronto-born science-fiction author Cory Doctorow, and digital-rights advocate Lawrence Lessig.

Fittingly enough, an early employee at Facebook — engineer Karel Baloun — has written an e-book called Inside Facebook that can be downloaded from his website as a PDF file. Readers can choose to pay $9, $12 or $18, and the author says he has sold more than 700 copies.

Stephen King wrote and published parts of a book called The Plant online in 2000, allowing readers to download each chapter and pay $1 for it using the honour system. Although a majority of people paid, by the sixth instalment interest had waned and King shelved the idea.

Another recent trend is the blog that becomes a book. There is even a prize for the best “blook,” called the Lulu Blooker Prize. The winner this year was Colby Buzzell, whose blog about his time fighting in Iraq became the book My War: Killing Time in Iraq, published by Berkeley/Penguin.

One of the most famous blog-book deals came in 2004, when the author of the pseudonymous Washington sex blog Washingtonienne, Jessica Cutler, got a reported $300,000 book offer from Hyperion.

Blogger Zoe Margolis recently became a sensation in Britain writing the pseudonymous blog Girl With a One-Track Mind, and won a lucrative book deal, and so did Salaam Pax, the pseudonym of a Baghdad resident who became famous for blogging during the invasion of Iraq.

Other recent blog book deals include one for the website Hot Chicks With Douchebags, and one for the creator of Petite Anglaise, who was fired from her job in France when her employer found out she was writing a blog. And Anya Peters, a homeless woman who wrote a blog about living in her car, was signed to a book deal last year by HarperCollins.

Bloggers who want to become published authors don’t have to wait for a book deal, however: software from a San Francisco-based company called Blurb will download the contents of your blog and format it for publication, and then print glossy hardcover copies for you for prices ranging from $30 to $80 (U.S.) each, depending on the number of pages.

Comments

But one important distinction: readers hate them. They want the full Monty.

So we have a rather classic debate between publishers ensuring their business model and content consumers who neither care nor appreciate the cost of the content they are consuming. The consumer, knowing they have a certain amount of power over the providers, are naturally, unabashedly, justifiably selfish,

And why not? So’s the other side, right? You sell it, I buy it, that’s the way it works.

It’s not an indictment, then, of how the model works, or of media-consumer relationships, that we need to examine. Instead, web content producers, as usual, have to consider the consumer and their business model with a rather precarious sense of balance – after all, the consumer is not responsible for it, nor should she be. The consumer is only responsible for judging and responding, and she is a temperamental mistress.

This relationship was most recently explored when the New York Times acquired the popular Freakonomics blog, an extension of the popular book of the same title. The Freakonomics reader has been a loyal one and has enjoyed, up until the big sale, full RSS feeds.

The NYT promptly switched to partial feeds in an effort to increase page views. Assumedly, unlike traditional print, subscriber numbers just weren’t cutting it (or perhaps are more difficult to manipulate, but that’s a whole other topic).

And now, as might be expected, Freakonomics subscribers are upset and are threatening to unsubscribe if the NYT is going to destroy what made RSS feeds beneficial to the end-user in the first place.

Globe and Mail tech writer Matthew Ingram, writes, "The bottom line is this: if I wanted to click through to the website, then I would just go to the damn website in the first place. Partial feeds defeat almost the entire purpose of reading RSS feeds in the first place."

He points to a commentator on the Freakonomics blog that argues the defeats-the-purpose point, while noting that partial feeds come off as "rude" and "greedy." In addition, it means fewer readers in the long run, as subscribers judge two lines of text and decide on whether it is worth their time to gamble with the "click-and-wait" game.

TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick takes the argument to the next level at the TechDirt blog, saying that though it sounds counterintuitive, full feeds actually increase page views:

It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.

As you would imagine, once that’s determined, it opens up the recipient to a flood of new spam.

Martin Thorburg, cofounder of SPAMfighter, says the practice of piggybacking on popular culture is standard among spammers.

"It is common that spammers will use large events, such as film premiers, wide scale media stories, or holidays to coerce e-mail users into a scam. We are hoping to avoid having our users fall victim to these scams by filtering away these e-mails," he said.

SPAMfighter is a third-party downloadable spam filter and certified Microsoft partner. The company says there is also a prize promised in the Simpsons spam to entice recipients into taking the survey.

“Major spamming events such as The Simpsons Movie provide us with an opportunity to educate  all computer users for the need to protect their data and privacy from spammers," said Alix Aranza, Managing Director, SPAMfighter, North America.  

And of course, the information comes with a pitch. Aranza informs us, "SPAMfighter offers all computer users the opportunity to download SPAMfighter Standard for a free 30-day trial.”