Content Notifications

I’ve gotten a little obsessed with figuring out how to manage new content notifications over time. There’s no great way to do this. RSS works, but someone has to subscribe and – assuming they’re comfortable with RSS – that’s often more commitment that they want.

How do you notify people about new content that they have expressly stated that they want to know about?

On the Lack of a Content Update Protocol...

This was my first lamentation that there was no universally accepted update protocol for websites.

I’m still dealing with my annoyance at the lack of a “content update protocol.” Or maybe I’m just annoyed that RSS has lost support over the years. Someone mentioned Visualping when I posted before, which I’ve been playing around with (they were gracious enough to give me a free account). It’s very…

Narrative Content: Storytelling Over Time

at CMS Critic

I gave a talk in Montreal about narrative story telling, which I then followed up with this long blog post. The key part is toward the end where I explain that there’s no way to let people know about new installments in a narrative.

The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know

This was a technical-ish idea for a notification protocol involving software agents and event-specific endpoints. This generated a lengthy comment thread over at Hacker News.

I want a new protocol, tentatively called “Let Me Know” (LMK). The purpose is to provide someone an anonymous way to get notified when a singular, specific event occurs. Here’s a basic use case: Some random blog author has published Parts 1 and 2 of a series. You enjoyed it, and you want to know…

The Missing Service: Notify One Time

This is a proposal for a service that would email you one time to notify you that a content event has occured.

There are lots of things I see on the web that are “upcoming,” and I think, “How can I find out when this happens?” Of course, I just could keep checking back to the URL I’m looking at, but I’ll no-doubt eventually stop doing that. And let’s face facts: no one really wants to give their email to a…