To illustrate, NZ On Screen has 1-2% of its audience using RSS. Due to the nature of our content we can’t exactly publish full context, but from what we publish we have maybe 1-2 click-throughs a day. This is in the context of 500-1500 UBs. I would say that’s not really worth paying too much attention to at this moment in time.

How many readers of PA know what an RSS reader is, let alone use one?

It is too easy for us in the tech industry to forget the lack of technical know-how of most of our customers/readers.

Rowan Simpson eludes to that with his recent post featuring the Google “What is a browser?” question. If your readers can’t even distinguish between a browser, the OS, and a search engine, how many of them will use RSS?

Russell, in my opinion you would be better off fixing the abysmal SEO on the site :) You only have limited time and resources, so focus on what will bring you the biggest return. Having said that, when you do have time, allowing users that do subscribe to your RSS feed to have the option of a full feed would be a “nice to have” feature.

You need to deal with a loss mitigation company who has access to the investors/guarantors. There are very few companies that truly have this capability, we are a front end shop to such a company. We DO NOT charge upfront fees and we are compliant with federal regs… If a company wants to charge up front fees, RUN! If they don’t use third party trust accounts like a typical real estate transaction, run… Ask WHO they negotiate with? If the say your servicing company? Run they have no clue about true loss mitigation practices.

If you want more info– this was pretty basic just respond to this post. There are alot of lies out there and misconceptions…Time to set the record straight and help folks. BTW this meltdown was constructed and we are paying the price.

Best of luck!

This is what we use at interest.co.nz. Took me less than 5 minutes to find, download & install.

this should have been in itals:

Couldn’t agree with you more, especially re points 9 and 3 (in that order). I subscribe to PA but rarely read it (currently 31 unread posts) because I never see anything of interest in the tiny snippets that come through. This isn’t a case of short attention span or wanting to read McBlogs. Its that I want to spend the time I have reading interesting content, rather than finding it (isn’t that the whole point of the RSS reader?).

If Matt gets me my edit button before you get one, do I have bragging rights?

I guess so. I could also integrate PA and PAS in a way that would answer some of Lance’s issues. But that would require time (mine and the developers) and money. Would it be justified when we already have a CMS?

As it is, we have our nice, simple wikicode — so people who wouldn’t know HTML if it bit them on the ass can do blockquotes and links. That’s a really good thing. And it’s (almost) impossible to break.

But guess what? I actually listen to my readers about what they want. The forums upgrade that’s coming (isn’t it, Matt?) adds features they want, and which make it easier for me to manage discussions.

I could spend money integrating PA and PAS — and I will at some point — but no one has asked for it. So it’s not a priority right now.

Some of Lance’s other criticisms were a bit hard to understand. There are four links back to PA from every PAS page. The link he thought was “weird” actually worked fine. And having been writing my blog long, long before there were blogs, I’m going to pay precisely zero attention to an “expectation” that I should never mention one topic at a time.

Couldn’t agree with you more, especially re points 9 and 3 (in that order). I subscribe to PA but rarely read it (currently 31 unread posts) because I never see anything of interest in the tiny snippets that come through. This isn’t a case of short attention span or wanting to read McBlogs. Its that I want to spend the time I have reading interesting content, rather than finding it (isn’t that the whole point of the RSS reader?).

And if you want to spend your whole day in your RSS reader rather than becoming part of a reader community, fine.

But I would point out that there’s more to it than the kind of technological determinism I’m seeing here. If all you want is 150-word drive-bys for your feed-reader, you’re probably not going to get that with us.

And there’s more to it than software. I spend hours every day in our forums, contributing, managing, moderating. I’ll occasionally sort out disputes by email. I try not to ban people. We give stuff away, I stage sponsored real-world events, we media-sponsor other people’s conferences — all in pursuit of community.

Anyway, I’ll look at full feeds in the next couple of days, as an option. Because if I simply switched to full articles, I would be deluged with people complaining that the feeds were unusable because some of the articles were too long …

At interest.co.nz we have just done a ten minute unedited interview with Bill English (Bill English talks to Bernard Hickey about tax reform, interest rates and the government guarantee http://bit.ly/EyXkE)published on our blog. We publish high quality analysis of issues affecting borrowers and investors on a daily basis and regularly take a stand for and against issues of importance.

We do all this and still employ a team of highly skilled staff funded out of advertising revenue. It can be done.