We’ve thrown this around in our head for some time now, and we finally decided to pull the trigger and disable site comments. There was no particular event that forced us to do this, and we weren’t encumbered by moderation problems like much larger sites are. So why bother nixing comments?

Over the past several weeks, we read various opinions across the blogosphere on commenting, and we decided that we agreed with the camp that many single-author sites fall into, which sounds something like this: “This is our blog, and if you want your own voice, comment on your blog.” It’s not a matter of control, or humbleness, but rather a philosophical stance that we believe harbors more useful commentary and discussion.

For one, mendax.org doesn’t get a lot of commentary to begin with. Of the commentary it does get, a good percentage is from people we’re already familiar with, who we already follow on Twitter, or Google Plus, or simply know in real life. Those people can just as easily comment using any of these networks, and we can easily comment back. The rest of the individuals who want to comment probably use one of these social networks also, so it’s easy for them to utilize these networks to comment here if they so choose.

Of the remaining individuals who choose not to have a social networking account, and still want to comment, there’s always e-mail. This should cut down on the number of non-productive comments we get, as feedback that’s direct (either via an @WyldKard at Twitter, else a direct e-mail) tends to be more constructive.

Two, we believe that a lot of useful information sometimes gets lost in a site’s comments. We’ve felt this when leaving commentary elsewhere, and we took a stance some time back that, if we have a real position worth leaving a comment for, we’d sooner write about it at mendax.org and give a link back to the post we’re commenting on. Not only does this help drive traffic to the person we’re commenting to, but it tends to make our response more thought out.

In a way, we liken this to the back-and-forth that philosophers and scientists had yesteryear, which was by way of letter. This slow, almost tedious approach provided both detailed thoughts, as well as a more three-dimensional banter between parties. The same can be done across blogs thanks to trackbacks and tweets, as a more detailed picture of the involved parties can be drawn in the context of their own blogs. As a bonus, this fosters a more personal exchange, and therefore, one less prone to personal attacks.

Three, our own comments to our posts often get lost over time, when a detailed response to a reader could just as easily become its own post. We believe it makes more sense to flush such responses out as a new entry, than to minimize its importance to our position in a sub-comment.

Four, the decision follows a more minimalist approach.The site is simpler, and in our opinion, cleaner because of it. No longer do we need to worry about whether our anti-spam plugins are working, and no longer do we need to worry about catching a comment alert via e-mail, or in WordPress’ admin section. Rather, we can rely on notifications we check for other purposes daily, and be better engaged with our audience. From a plugin perspective, it also means there’s less WordPress needs to handle, and less load the server needs to provide.¹

We’re not necessarily attached to this change long-term, but would like to try it out to see how well it fosters discussion and cross-linking over the near future. If it doesn’t seem to be working out, we can always go back, but this change seems right for what we envision the site to be.

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The last several years have shown us the demise of retail giants like Circuit City and CompUSA. In a way, the birth of these big-box retailers was out of necessity: electronics and computers were typically too complicated for the average consumer to research without help from knowledgeable salespeople. On Monday, Larry Downes at Forbes wrote a piece on Best Buy’s recent disappointing earnings announcement, and how Best Buy may soon go the way of the dodo as well.¹

With the flop of 3D televisions and the expansion of Apple’s own retail locations, there was no killer product on the horizon that would lift it from the doldrums.

The problem isn’t with a lack of compelling hardware, or even Apple’s rise.² Rather, it’s entirely about a lack of customer service. Forbes addresses this by discussing the annoying up-selling and cross-selling that salespeople are required to try, but that’s not the main problem. It’s the education.

It doesn’t take much to become a retail employee at one of these stores. Your average Best Buy is staffed by teenagers and college kids trying to earn a bit of pocket change. Occasionally you’ll find someone who’s been selling TVs for the last ten years and knows the brands and tech and usability of each option quite well, but how often does that happen? How often is the basis of hiring an employee to truly understand the products they’re selling, and educate them about the products over the course of their employment?

On our last trip to Best Buy, we eyed the integrated Bose surround sound systems offered. There were three. Between two salesmen, neither could tell us the extent of the differences between systems, and the prices were no better than what we could get from Bose directly. Neither salesman could offer suggestions on comparable equipment, both agreeing that “Bose is the best”.³ When we asked a question they couldn’t answer, they looked on Best Buy’s web site.

Here’s the thing: we can go online, too, and we do.⁴ As a kid, when our father wanted to shop for a piece of electronics, we’d drive down to the local electronics store where we were greeted by grown men who knew the products they sold inside and out. They didn’t have to consult a big book to determine what options a given company had, or what a particular device could or could not do. They knew these answers because it was their job, and in order to do their job well, they had to stay educated about their trade. That quality is lost these days, and it’s easier and quicker for us to do some online research and make a purchase on the web than it is to get shoddy information from a kid who only knows to get on Best Buy’s web page for more information about what they sell.

Don’t think we’re singling out Best Buy, here. The same is true wherever we go these days. Pride in knowing your product is left to very niche, small outlets.[^4] A local Starbucks barista didn’t know the definition of “fair trade coffee”. A Target employee in the cell phone area didn’t know what Jawbone was, or what the display of the Jawbone Up was for. If your employees don’t know their product, then they’re failures. And you are too.

We’re reminded of the magical Macy’s from Miracle on 34th Street, which ended up formalizing a policy to direct buyers to exactly what they were looking for even if Macy’s itself didn’t have it. Nowadays, retail employees can’t do this, because they barely even know their own, in-house products. But maybe the decline of big retailers will increase the gaps that smaller, niche retailers can fit. Looking to put a home theater system together remains a confusing endeavor, and there’s still opportunity for small retailers in this space. Growing that expertise into something profitable, however, will be a challenge, especially given the low salaries most salespeople are forced to cope with.

As for Best Buy, we won’t miss ‘em.

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RSS is poisonous?

On the internet, you can find someone to complain about anything, including the internet and people on the internet who complain about people on the internet. And to be fair, many of those complaints hold water, and while we’re not saying that RSS is a perfect technology, Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng pronounced this marvel of information simplification a flat-out poison. But is it the technology that’s bad, or the way she’s simply using it?

As for me, I use RSS regularly at five minute intervals for pretty much the entire time I’m awake.

We could just end this post here, because that quote perfectly illustrates Jacqui’s problem, which isn’t RSS, but some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder in which she can’t keep her eyes off her RSS feed. Sounds more like the problem is simple willpower, ability to organize her information stream, or prioritization strategies.

When Jacqui had no access to her RSS feeds, she realized just how much information she had to comb through when the stream was turned back on.

And when I ended up sifting through them all, I realized that I hadn’t missed a single story doing things the “old fashioned” way—rather, by following all these feeds, I was instead seeing hundreds of iterations on the same handful of stories.

Here’s her other problem: she has too many feeds. However careful she thinks she’s curated her feeds, it obviously wasn’t enough. We all see duplicates from time-to-time, but if there’s that much redundancy in your RSS feed, then you need to filter out the sources that are just rehashing the major stories. Also, Jacqui’s “old-fashioned” way is e-mail and Twitter, which seems just as prone to article duplication as RSS, and arguably less effective without some major filtering options for e-mail. If your solution to replace RSS is to just drink the poison that is the Twitter stream, you’re not really making a healthy choice there either, especially since Twitter likely has way more noise than your RSS feed does.

In a last-ditch effort, Jacqui attempts an argument ad populum:

The fact is, RSS just hasn’t caught on much among the general population, and for good reason. Even some of those who run with the geek crowd have either shunned it from the beginning or are now getting disillusioned.

They get disillusioned with bathing too, but that’s not a reason to stop cleaning yourself. There are many reasons RSS hasn’t caught on with the general populace, and it has nothing to do with it being a time sink or hard-to-organize, and almost entirely to do with it not being as accessible a technology as, say, the web itself.

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Instapaper’s developer, Marco Arment, seems sure that Instapaper has a future despite Apple’s sherlocking of the idea. At WWDS, Apple announced that all future versions of Safari would support a Reading List function in which people could “save” articles to read later, by grabbing the article’s text and presenting it in a streamlined fashion outside of the web site it was originally found on. Yeah, basically what Instapaper’s been doing for a while now. And an Apple offering means one less login and app to worry about, with the spit-and-polish Apple is known for. But maybe Arment is right in thinking that Instapaper still has a future. We don’t totally buy the argument that Instapaper will live on simply because a lot of people are already using Instapaper. Rather, Instapaper will live on because it offers features that Apple’s Reading List doesn’t offer for several revisions.

1. Offline Reading: One of Instapaper’s biggest selling points, even if it’s not advertised as such, is the fact that everything on your read-it-later list can be cached for offline access. That means people on-the-go who aren’t always connected to the internet can still catch up on the articles they’ve saved, and then synchronize the article’s read status once they’re next online. No word on whether Reading List will offer this feature.

2. Web Access: Reading List’s thus far been advertised as a way to keep cached articles available to all of Apple’s devices, so even if you mark an article to save on your iPhone, you can pick it up on your iPad or MacBook. That’s all well and good, but just as Mobile Me offers access to Apple services on computers that aren’t Apple devices, the strength of a service like Reading List is in it being always-accessible. Instapaper does this, thanks to a web site that users can login to in order to see what articles they’ve saved. Again, there’s no word yet on whether Reading List will offer a similar feature, though we seriously hope it does.

We like Instapaper, and use it fairly often for tagging blog posts and articles for later review. Despite this, we’d be lying if we said that we wouldn’t strongly consider replacing our Instapaper workflow with Apple’s Reading List. It all depends on how much functionality Apple decides to build into it early on.

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Shawn Blanc wrote a nice piece about RSS and Twitter, and whether the latter is replacing the former. In short, it’s not. Blanc’s end-note is insightful:

As you can see, on average, there are about 6 RSS subscribers for every 1 Twitter follower of the site’s dedicated Twitter feed. Moreover, for most of the websites, the author’s personal twitter account has more followers than the site’s dedicated account. Meaning, people are subscribe to websites in RSS and following the author on Twitter.

RSS hasn’t been killed by Twitter because it does things that Twitter can’t. Namely, marking items as read and unread, and including the full text of a post. Arguably, RSS feeds that only post excerpts could be replaced by Twitter because you need to click through to the original post anyway, but it’s hard to track what you’ve read and haven’t read unless you’re constantly checking Twitter. That’s fine for people whose job it is to read the latest news on a subject, but doesn’t make sense for the rest of us.

Twitter could add a read/unread tag to posts, and that might make the service more useful for replacing RSS, but right now, the service isn’t ideal for people keeping apprised of new web content without requiring them to constantly watch their Twitter stream. When we look at our own Twitter timeline, we may very well open links to friends’ blog posts, but we typically don’t follow accounts whose express purpose is linking to new blog entries. In our mind, that’s still what RSS is for, because it’s where RSS excels. We do link our own new entries, but not exclusively.¹ As Blanc’s assessment notes, people are more likely to follow personal author accounts than they are accounts just advertising new web content.

The end of RSS is a popular story lately, but it’s just not true. The convenience of RSS readers is still unsurpassed by social media, and as useful as it is to see what crowd-sourced stories are brought to your attention, you’re still missing a lot if you’re just relying on the hive-mind for stories.

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With Apple’s iCloud on the horizon, TUAW’s Steven Sande is speculating a death-knell for Mobile Me’s offerings, even though Mobile Me is supposed to transition over to the new iCloud. One of the features Sande thinks will disappear with iCloud is web-based apps:

I’d speculate that the web-based versions of Mail, Contacts, and Calendar will get less attention going forward, and might even disappear on June 30, 2012. Seriously — who needs them? If you have a Mac or three, you’ll sync Mail, Address Book, and iCal through the free iCloud service.

The people who will still need these services are the people who don’t have access to an Apple device all the time. Most major corporations, for example, haven’t jumped on the Apple bandwagon, and so their desktops are still Windows-based PCs. Employees who use Macs at home require Mobile Me web apps to access mail, calendars, and contacts while in Mac-restricted environments. To remove this ability is to spit in the face of many of your customers, who will then just jump ship and move over to a service that can be accessed from a Windows computer, like Google’s suite.

For Windows users, you’ll be using Outlook 2010 or 2007 to sync to the iCloud. The only scenario in which you might not be able to get to your “stuff” is when you’re using a public computer of some sort at a hotel, on a cruise ship, or at a cybercafé in Spain. Of course, you don’t want that to happen, so you’ll have your iOS device with you. Hook up to Wi-Fi or use your 3G data service, and the problem is solved. That’s why they call them mobile devices.

Sande, perhaps, doesn’t know how things work in many large corporations, where one can’t simply add accounts to Outlook (it’s restricted), nor install third-party software. Nor does everyone have the capability of toting their iOS device into their workspace, and even if they did, not letting them access their mail from a local desktop isn’t in the spirit of the cloud.

In reality, what we would hope to see with iCloud is an even more robust and featured web suite, to include accessing of bookmarks and saved online articles from the web. iCloud shouldn’t just be about consistency of access across Apple devices, but from all devices, until such a time that Apple devices are more ubiquitous across industries.

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Apple is being asked by the U.S. Senate why they haven’t removed iOS apps from the AppStore that report on the location of sobriety checkpoints. That may be a reasonable question to ask if safety is on your mind, but the issue quickly gets muddled when you consider that what many of these apps are doing is re-reporting published information. Further, apps like Fuzz Alert, which TiPb specifically calls out do not limit reporting to DUI checkpoints, but on the location of speed traps, speed cameras, et al.

The obvious question is whether it is illegal to report the location of a DUI checkpoint. Apple can ultimately make a decision based on ethical grounds¹, but it appears that they’re relying on their lawyers for this one. So far as we can tell, an individual can freely publish information about a DUI checkpoint via other means², so reporting such information via an app is no different. Has the U.S. Senate asked similar questions to those operating web sites, or manufacturing GPS units, that offer similar information?

While you can argue that drunk drivers may use such information to avoid getting caught, thereby potentially injuring or killing someone, isn’t there a similar issue with other published information? Having access to information on how to build a bomb isn’t illegal, but actually building one with the intent to use it illegally is. Police officers organizing in public locations is not a secret³, so simply making this information easier to access shouldn’t be an issue. Should we next ban apps that report on where local playgrounds are, because child molesters could use them to more quickly identify where young children hang out?

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Twenty-one months ago, we expressed skepticism over OnLive, the gaming service offering streaming video games over the internet. In that time, OnLive has left beta, and recently offered it’s “microconsole” for $100. Still, OnLive’s growth has been slow, to say the least.

After our article went live, it didn’t take long for someone (Darq) at onlivefans.com to respond.

On the topic of OnLive struggling to have an attractive library, they already have some of the leading names in the gaming industry partnered up with them… I think right now is a poor time to judge the game library. I imagine that there are many skeptics out there that will decide to partner with OnLive and offer their games after the beta this summer.

Twenty-one months later and OnLive has 38 games available (we’re not counting expansions). And if we discount sports titles with “2010″ subtitles that now have 2011 releases, the already-abysmal library is even smaller. That’s today. Is now the right time to judge OnLive’s game library? The sad thing is, how many games were available 21 months ago? Is OnLive even meeting the goal of one new release per month?

Maybe it’s a testament to the service that OnLive was able to bring games like Borderlands and Batman: Arkham Asylum to the table, but these titles do not make up for the many other big-name games that are available for the XBox 360 and the PS3, which are simply missing from OnLive’s library. And, even these former big-name titles are yesterday’s news in the console world, where pre-used prices are less than OnLive’s pricing.

Yes, OnLive is cheaper than a console because there’s no necessary hardware cost if you already own a computer and a controller, but the lack of titles is a serious matter; even the Wii has a more enticing library for hardcore gamers than OnLive does. Maybe with OnLive, you have a few more dollars to spend on games, but since there’s a real limit on how many games you can feasibly buy (never mind how many games you’d actually want to buy from that limited selection), the price savings for OnLive may very well be irrelevant.

One of OnLive’s more promising offerings is the idea of streaming MMOs, since this is a gaming niche that many console gamers simply can’t participate in. Yet, OnLive has nothing to show in this area, either.

I believe you’re exagerating OnLive’s inability to cater to the add-on/modding or customization community. OnLive already has started promoting their SDK, and with their push on a community driven player experience I see them have a large focus on being able to mod for games that wish to support it.

Why still no MMOs On OnLive (a gaming niche that PC gaming is known for)? Not only has OnLive not addressed whether they can realistically support client addons for MMOs, but they don’t even have a single MMO announcement yet. There’s no point in us even addressing addons/mods for other games, since these are clearly a pipedream at this stage in the game.

Does OnLive have potential? Certainly. But given its performance on our home FiOS connection, and the absolute lack of games, the service doesn’t seem to be doing well for itself. If subscription numbers are going up at all, it’s certainly not because of the gaming library, and we can’t imagine people sticking around for more than a couple months if things don’t change for the better soon.

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Despite the number of initial downloads, it appears that magazine “subscriptions” on the iPad aren’t drawing nearly the number of people that publishers thought they would. But a lot of this has to do with how magazines on the iPad are implemented, which only a handful of publishers are doing well.

First, a lot of people don’t want to download each new issue individually. And, when they buy a subscription in advance, they expect a discount, to the point where the digital magazine is cheaper than the print magazine. Two, they want to be notified when a new issue is available, instead of having to remember to check manually.

Second, several iPad-based magazines are little more than PDF versions of the print magazines. It’s fine that these magazines don’t have additional content, but manually zooming in on sections just to get readable text is a pain; minimal reformatting should be done on these magazines such that the smaller form factor of the iPad isn’t an obstacle.

Beyond the implementation, there are still many magazines (particularly those targeting niche audiences) that may do very well on the iPad but that simply aren’t available digitally yet. Larger publications also need to realize that they’re competing with free; the iPad is more than a magazine browser, so why load up a celebrity-gossip magazine when you can just load up Perez Hilton on the web instead? Look at where magazines are still typical fare: in waiting rooms, at the grocery store, and in bookstores. Usually, customers in these locations don’t have computers readily available; who brings their iPad to the grocery-store checkout line? Point is, the audience may be similar, but the setting for reading the magazine isn’t.

What it comes down to is doing more than just porting an analog publication to a digital format. The reality is that many magazines simply won’t survive the transition to the iPad, or any mobile electronics device, because the audience for that magazine is negligible in a world where the internet is becomes more ubiquitous. Other magazines will fare fine, even if it means tweaking how the magazine is formatted and priced, because the content of the magazine is more unique, and of a greater quality, than what you’d find on the web. In some ways, the future of digital magazines is much the same as the future of print magazines, only with the former, the web is an even larger competitor.

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God forbid Apple enforce its app store rules and pull the controversial WikiLeaks application. It’s not like the site isn’t available on the web. But let’s address the app store rules for a moment, and dismiss the silly notion that Apple is necessarily taking sides in this silly WikiLeaks debate.

The app store rules state that any app providing charitable donations must be free. Further, that any charitable donations be done via a web site or SMS. The WikiLeaks app, however, was not free, though the author explicitly stated that half of the app proceeds would be given to WikiLeaks. The author presumably split the proceeds on his own end and sent them in to WikiLeaks. So, no donations were done via the web, or SMS, by the app customer.

This alone is grounds for removal, but there’s another breach to the app store rules.

8.5 Use of protected 3rd party material (trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, otherwise proprietary content) requires a documented rights check which must be provided upon request.

It’s a simple argument to make that WikiLeaks is hosting proprietary content, and issues of over-classification aside, the fact remains that there is classified information accessible via the WikiLeaks that is not meant for release in the public domain. Even if you’re a WikiLeaks supported, you have to realize that this is no different than an eBook app being pulled which republishes a leaked, yet copyrighted manuscript. Simple because a leak occurred does not render the contents of that leak public domain.

Amazon pulled the plug on a WikiLeaks server under similar grounds, and though there was backlash against it, it’s not as though Amazon didn’t respond to a policy it already had in place. People can get as angry as they want about companies not supporting WikiLeaks, but in these cases, it’s not an issue of endorsement or support, it’s a matter of enforcing existing policies. Why should Amazon and Apple make an exception for WikiLeaks but enforce their policies for everyone else? By Apple enforcing it’s app review policy, it’s not taking a side, and isn’t being neutral in this matter an appropriate position for Apple to take?

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