That John Martin

I’ve been using the FeedDemon 2 beta for a while now and overall I’m really happy with it. The new templates are excellent, as are the improvements to feed management, like hierarchical feed preferences and persistent per feed styles. I do have a couple of gripes though.

The new tree control is a little annoying - only a single branch can be opened at a time, so jumping around looking for something is a hassle. I’m also not quite sure how to manage the news bins. It seems difficult to access and manage individual items.

The other thing that just doesn’t work for me is the attention report. The basic algorithm that Nick uses looks pretty good, and I can see some “worthy” feeds bubbling up, but there is far too much noise from the high traffic feeds.

Shouldn’t the calculated attention value be divided by the number of items in the feed? That way a feed wouldn’t be able to improve it’s attention ranking by sheer brute force. I guess that’s just giving you a different number, and a different type of ranking, but it feels like it would be more valuable.

I’m talking, of course, about the Earthlink ad that gets played across the Gillmor pod properties. I have no real problem with it - actually, that’s not entirely true. I agree wholeheartedly with Dave Slusher, and that condescending tone of voice used by the actors goes down about as smoothly as a bowl of lego. But, it’s a new medium, and they’re giving it a shot, and it’s start, etc etc. I just think that it’s a wasted opportunity. Surely there is enough meat in those podcasts to put together something like The Deck.

The Deck is a micro advertising network featuring just four sites, including A List Apart, 37signals, Daring Fireball and Coudal Partners. They say that they won’t run an ad for a product that they haven’t paid for and/or used themselves. So the ads are highly targeted. And not just in a keywords point-and-shoot kind of way, but in an attention kind of way.

PodShow aside, I could imagine a network consisting the Gillmor podcasts, plus Venture Voice, VentureWeek, and maybe even Om and Niall. Surely the value derived from such a construct on both sides of the transaction is worth the extra effort.