JR posts a nice rant about who marketers should really be looking to please. My personal favorite part:
Influencers use weird crap. They use Macs and Linux, Mozilla, and other eminently hackable systems.They, and I like to consider myself part of 'they', use things that are cool.
And to segue, it's seems that everyone's noticing that RSS may not be quite perfect, which has been a been crunch on the horizon for awhile. I guess RSS has made it past JR's 7% (which I think is a drastically high number for the alpha-geeks, but at least it's prime). Adam Curry gets the award for the first dork to stand up and scream BITTORRENT! As soon as I saw Scoble's post, I knew this was a matter of time, like waiting for the 'imagine a Beauwolf Cluster of gameboy advances running Linux!' comment. Does Bittorrent really scale to files that are a few kilobytes?
What about last-modified headers? What about blindly denying based on poorly-behaved user-agent strings? Am I the only person that's ever heard of Akamai? We're talking about static files here, updated a few times per day. If you're a small website, the hits to your feeds are probably the only thing stroking your hit-counting ego, and if you're big time buck up and do some work to fix it. Slashdot recently implemented some crazy RSS throttling magic. If you're getting more RSS hits than Slashdot, then spend a few measly grand and add a dozen blind-stupid HTTP caching appliances to your rack, set the content timeout to something ridiculously long like 10 minutes, and watch your webservers load drop back to nothing. Or wait for RssFeedSuperSite.com(my guess), which will just be a bank of a hundred blind-stupid HTTP caching appliances and a few guys laughing all the way to the bank.
Post a comment