I previously indicated I intend to shut off the feed from this blog. That will happen at the end of this month – that timing is because I’m curious to see what happens to traffic. I’ve given my reasons, but there’s another good reason: the coming glut of advertising to your RSS feed. Here’s an excerpt (Link) from one excited member of the marketing community looking to use syndication technology to advertise:

New techniques are being unveiled that allow marketers to leverage the appeal and growing adoption of RSS without sacrificing their hard work of the last decade to achieve measurability, targetability and flexibility.
…
With these next-generation solutions, each recipient gets his or her own unique feed, enabling marketers to understand exactly how many and which recipients are picking up their messages. And because each feed is unique to the individual recipient, marketers can track and measure subscriber actions all the way down to an individual, facilitating the same behavioral targeting and testing possible in other personalized media. Moreover, marketers can actually create a unique message for each user based upon demographic or behavioral data.

Now I know what the argument is going to be: you don’t have to subscribe to the feed if it’s full of ads. That’s right. Only I’ve been watching as some of my favorite blogs slowly morph into advertising whores. Some barely even load anymore they’re so full of code delivering dynamic, trackable, analyzable content. All that AdSense crap is becoming nonsense. I barely visit the MIT Advertising blog anymore, it loads so slowly. And the BusinessWeek blogs have been running some horrendous Land Rover ad that drops the site loading to a crawl (you’ll notice I’ve dumped BusinessWeek and Nussbaum from my blogroll). And if you’ve visited Bruce Sterling’s blog in the past few days, you’ve noticed a change over there as well. It’s off the blogroll too.

Of course, people will make their own choices. Some sites will doubtlessly strike a balance that makes RSS subscribers happy. In the meantime, on someone’s reader, my content is going to be (and likely already is) sandwiched between two RSS ads. By virtue of that aggregation, my content has, by default, become part of someone else’s advertising campaign. This juxtaposition won’t happen all the time, I know. And again, with all the feed reading options out there, for some people it won’t happen at all. But I don’t want it happening, period.

There’s been some buzz around Phillip Torrone’s Make: blog entry (Link) pointing out that virtual worlds and MMORPG’s should be developing their own credit cards and reward systems. I’m not sure why there’s any buzz, to be honest. While it’s a nice idea, anyone involved in virtual worlds should be at the point where anything crossing over from the real world shouldn’t be a surprise.

Besides, Second Life, which he uses as an example, already depends on users to have a credit card; you need one to sign up – even for the free service (it prevents people from signing up numerous accounts, among other things). And as noted earlier (reLink), the trade in virtual goods is sufficient to have Sony considering giving up their subscription models and replacing that (substantial) revenue with fees from player-to-player transactions. Let me quote the important part of SOE Smedley’s comment:

Smedley said Thursday that Station Exchange is paying off. “It’s a real business,” he said. “It has a very meaningful revenue stream, and it’s growing.”

This all does have me wondering though: at what point will people finally grok that immaterial boundaries have simply fallen, and the material boundaries are crumbling fast? Where are we on the technology adoption curve?

Virtual world economic theorist Edward Castronova has a one-page piece over on Wired called “Geekonomics” (Link). While he’s focused on contrasting the scarcity in the real world with the abundance in a virtual world, I found a comparison between the two more interesting. After all, there are some things in the real world that share important qualities with virtual goods. Most of you know where I’m going with this, so I won’t turn on the rant machine.

I really like this post over on I SHUSH (Link) discussing the “kirkyan” concept I presented earlier (reLink):

Kirkyans sound like spimes that sort of blossom forward in time. These are the spimes that are conscious of their own timesuits. … {snip} … you can have a hybrid book that changes itself over time based on the experiences of all the other copies of itself out there, and all the responses to those other copies. It’s information that blossoms forward in time to become better, more accurate perhaps, more current perhaps, and always growing in scope (but not necessarily authority).

A kirkyan book becomes a community of responses to the information that drives the book toward always new (even if not better) content. This means that books become aware of the changes in their own material manifestations (or timesuits).

How eloquently stated is that?

Joystiq has an entry showing the Novint Falcon haptic interface in use at this year’s GDC (I mentioned the device last year if you recall – reLink). The comments might be worth watching.

The Falcon reminds me of Sensable’s devices (Link) so it’s interesting to see a convergence between a sculpting tool like what Sensable makes and a gaming/interface device like the Falcon. All I can think now is, at under a $100, how ripe the Falcon will be for hacking. Combine that with an open source app like SharpConstruct and Sensable might have some competition.

The tools continue their downward migration.

via Blue’s News

{Image Copyright© 2006 Novint Technologies, Inc.}