Tag Archives: TechCrunch

Winamp Is Saved! Radionomy Acquiring Winamp, Shoutcast

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winamp
Winamp

Last month, news broke of Winamp getting shut down by AOL. Many have spoke up, which led to rumors abound and AOL didn’t take down the service when they said. Now, word is Radionomy has picked up the ball and will be running Winamp at this point.

Radionomy is a free platform that hosts thousands of stations created by pros and amateurs alike. It is one of the largest online radio networks in the world with over 6,000 stations. The company also has a licensed library with up to 80,000 songs.

So Winamp and the conjoining Shoutcast software is a perfect addition to what they offer. It would also add 50,000 stations to their system overnight.

This deal has not been officially announced yet. TechCrunch has “observed” that Winamp’s nameservers have been officially transferred to Radionomy. TechCrunch has further found out the deal should wrap up on Friday.

Contest Post-Tweeting: How People Don’t Read Contest Info

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iPad
iPad

Next week I’ll be headed to San Francisco for TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. Naturally, I added the hashtag #tcdisrupt in my Tweet deck. I went through the posts, and one seems to keep coming up:

TechCrunch Giveaway: White iPad 2 and Nook Color #TCDisrupt {link removed} via @techcrunch

I went to the page in question and they gave away a White iPad2. Yes, I said GAVE AWAY. This was for TechCrunch Disrupt in New York that happened back in June.

This is not the first time I’ve seen this tweet reaction. Someone sees a post saying “Win this, retweet and your entered”. You do so, but you don’t see the link they post. Now you’ve just entered into a contest that has been over for months.

I have held contests from time-to-time. I remember one where I was trying to increase my followers and said to Twitter the link information and hashtag. Weeks after the contest, I was still getting tweets. I even remember one guy who tweeted me “Did you draw a winner yet?” I had to reply “Yes, but that was back in April.”

This seems to be an interesting way to build people, but also is a bit deceptive. Of course, if people don’t read the rules, it’s not your fault, right?

In this case, I would say “wrong”. Why? Because TechCrunch hasn’t updated the page to say in the first line “CONTEST OVER”. Even in the title, they should put that information.

In the meantime, people are thinking they’ve just entered a contest for a white iPad2.Too bad they didn’t win…

How can RSS be fixed?

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I am sure a lot of you have seen Steve Gillmor’s article on TechCrunch talking about how he has stopped using RSS because of the small amount of quality information he gets from it compared to the large amount of dross he must wade through to get it.  In his case he is looking to replace it with Twitter.  I personally think he will find the situation the same there over time.

Firstly the problem is not with RSS itself.  RSS is only a notification method for content that is on websites.  In a sense what he is getting from Twitter is a similar thing, with the added benefit of the content being edited by a person before it gets sent.  I can completely see how this would be better for the way Steve states he looks for content.  According to his article, he added people likely to write interesting things to his RSS.  This is an attempt at a personal(ish) connection that RSS just cannot give accurately.

RSS will give everything that gets posted to the site that meets the rules set for the feed.  For example, if you took the GNC feed to get more Todd, you also get myself and all the other authors (lucky you!).  If all you really wanted though was to hear more about what Todd was thinking you would be getting a lot you didn’t want.

A title and part to all of the article is also not a great way to get the synopsis of the article.  The brief summary may not give you a correct sense of the content.  Also the content posted to websites/blogs is often a crafted piece to some degree rather than a brief summary and pointer to interesting information.  This is a limit to how much of the personal you can expect.

Twitter on the other hand enforces brevity and clarity with its character limit.  It is also simple and quick enough to get a higher rate of posting.  There is also a level of self editing of the content that goes to Twitter.  While some people tweet everything they do, others will only tweet their best stuff, or post links to relevant commentary to an ongoing discussion.

In short, if your goal is to be more connected to the information produced by the people, I can see how Twitter could work better than how RSS currently does.  For myself I use RSS to get updated when specific sites I like have new content, and I am looking for specific topics so have many of the broad based sites limited through keyword filters.  RSS still works better for me.

My concern is that the level of quality that Steve is currently getting from Twitter may fade as more and more people get onto the system and as Twitter evolves itself into the yet-to-be-revealed money making version of itself.  RSS as an automated notification and information aggregation tool has a lot of power and  acceptance, is there something we can do to make it work better for us?