The CBC’s new WordPress-powered official weblog. Neat. There are several articles cross-posted (actually, copied… annoying if you read both via their feeds, because the articles don’t share an ID and thus appear twice in aggregators) from honcho Tod Maffin’s iloveradio.org weblog so far, but a good selection of original stuff too.
There’s also a status blog. The blog is operating just fine now, though the editor is a bit under-caffeinated.
Cute… but not that cute. The system is down, yo. 🙂
Update, 23:21: Ooh, first real disappointment: the RSS feed is summary-only. Is that a deliberate choice, Tod, or just an oversight in the WP config?
Update, 01:40: Gotta love the web. I added the previous update to this post less than two hours ago and Tod’s already found it and responded. That’s Phil Ringnalda-esque speed. 🙂
Canada Day 2006 update: I posted this as a comment on Inside the CBC, but I think it’s worth repeating here:
More than just blog content for individual shows, it’d be great to see more bloggers from within CBC as a whole. My Planet CBC aggregator site has picked up the personal “outside†blogs written by and associated with CBC folk, many of which are linked in Tod’s sidebar, but I’d love to see something like the Google Blog (and its spawn) or, ideally, a wide-ranging, open set of employee blogs like blogs.sun.com, which is “accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.†(Heck, Sun even has their own Planet site, which links to internal and external employee feeds.)
Oops… thanks for catching that. I’ve fixed it. You should have full feeds now. 🙂
Thankyewverymuch. 🙂
Oh, and the cross-posting will stop too. I was only doing that when it was in closed-beta and I was, er, lazy. 🙂
So why can’t the news feeds be more than a summary too?
They’re better than they were—used to be there was no content at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was part of the new advertiser-driven cbc.ca philosophy: in order to see a story you have to visit a page with an ad. If that’s the case, I’m willing to live with summary feeds; it’d be so much worse to have ads embedded right in the feeds. (I don’t even like the FeedBurner logos; ads would be terrible.)
Also, CBC wants to keep control over its content; the terms of use can only go so far by saying that . The temptation to republish a full feed would be a lot greater, I’d imagine.
Hmm, reading the ToU a little more closely shows some additional items of interest. For example, you’re not allowed to use the RSS feeds unless .
Also: Seems to me, to be fair, that maybe the agreement should have a feed of its own, or that any changes to the terms of use should be noted in each feed.
I understand that they are advertiser driven, but I subscribe to a number of RSS feeds that have ads in them.
Lifehacker uses text ads and John Battelle’s Searchblog has pictures as well. I would say both are just as or even more effective as what is currently on CBC.ca (especially since the CBC ads were so annoying that I had them blocked within 30 seconds of first viewing them).
I subscribe to a few feeds that contain ads too, and I block ’em all.
To skew the topic even further, that’s the big problem I have with Google these days: they’re not about search any more, they’re about advertising. Maybe they always have been, I don’t know. In any case, “not being evil” isn’t necessarily equivalent to “being good”.