Monday, May 05, 2008

No Sitefeed

Welcome to the official website of Ilan Pappe. Dr Pappe doesnt have a sitefeed. Neither does Dr. Finkelstein, Dr Hudson or Dr Gaffney. Or even John Pilger.

This suggest the good doctors dont have or use a feed reader either. Once you start subscribing to sitefeeds with a feedreader like Google Reader there's no going back. Talk about killer app. And you wouldn't start or have a blog or website which didnt offer a feed, that's for sure.

NB. The great Dr Richard Stallman does have a sitefeed, but doesnt have comments. Also, as I'm a loyal subscriber, I have found that Dr. Stallman tends to blog what are commonplaces in the radical blogosphere. It might be better if he had a focussed blog on the basic concepts of freedom and free software, but then again, what would I know?

Dr Chomsky doesn't even have his own website. But he's an old-fashioned guy. What's the big deal with the "Internet" when you've got a university library and know how to use it? I hear Dr Chomsky say. And Dr Chomsky has got a secret weapon at his disposal that not even today's Internet can match: the online Lexis-Nexis database. Have to traipse down to the University library in person to load up on that particular WMD.

Instead Dr Chomsky allows his Internet presence to be subsumed under ZNet, who recently had their abortion of a website completely redesigned to make it even more of a mess than it already is. And no, it doesnt seem to include a sitefeed. Well I couldnt find one after a bit of looking. Couldnt find the Chomsky blog either. Instead his content seems to be spread over at least half a dozen different areas.

Its so bad I've noticed that I've effectively stopped reading the Znet space. Which means I've probably been missing a lot of good stuff, not only Chomsky but other good writers they have carried over there.

No, I've found Chomsky's blog on Znet! Shows what you can do if you try hard enough. But still cant find the sitefeed. Hard to believe they dont have one.... Even worse, you have to register (or even pay) to read some if not all of the blog posts. That makes the site literally unreadable such as you do not visit again. A model that died sometime ago.

The other Chomsky site, chomsky.info, has the right idea, and have obviously been trying to make up for the longstanding deficiencies of Znet. Simple, clean homepage - except that the "what's new" or blogsite section is cleverly disguised under "News and Reports". Why do that? Reverse chronological order (of posting). A sitefeed. But it has weaknesses - not everything he writes or says is included (I guess that would be a massive task). No comments. No presence from Chomsky himself. Not everything is fed through the blogsite.

Antiwar.com is perhaps the best example of good webdesign among the antiwar and radical websites. But no comments, as well of course as the harmful impact of right-libertarian philosophy everywhere on the site. And too much reliance on the corporate press.

Commondreams.org is very good. Includes comments, which have been of exceptional quality lately. But not radical enough. Includes a sitefeed, but there are too many articles to take for a sitefeed to be much use. One wants to be more selective (which is why every writer should have their own website where all their articles are posted in addition to being posted elsewhere.)

Counterpunch.org is good. Its biggest fault is the huge waste of screenspace at the top of the homepage. Look at antiwar.com by contrast to see how it can be better used. No comments. No sitefeed, but again one would not want to subscribe to it all, only to selected authors.

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