Elliott C. Back: <3 Wendy Bug

I’m not a very big fan of Gizmodo, but I found their RSS feed interesting today. Check out the attached photo, which highlights four ad units nicely clustered at the bottom of every post. They’ve got two text ads (one from Pheedo, one from Google) and two Google Image/Video blocks:

I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, that’s a lot of ads. On the other hand, they’re tasteful and all clustered together so that you’re clear they are ads. They are compact, and don’t interrupt readers who are reading the feed. So in some sense, they’re an excellent example of how to do RSS feed advertising.

TechCrunch points out that even ex-Bloglines-founder Mark Fletcher twittered that Bloglines sucks:

Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.

According to Michael Arrington, the major problem with Bloglines is that it doesn’t update feeds with any frequency. But that’s not the only thing; the site itself is slow, hard to navigate, and hasn’t been updated in literally years. Here’s the UI that’s been in use since at least 2006:

Ask, please update me to something modern!

The beta design that Bloglines has been cooking up is nearly entirely worthless; it takes a bad design, and essentially reduces the amount of on-screen contrast. It’s also still pretty slow:

Here’s an interesting, funny blooper from their homepage refresh (it looks like Ask, when they bought them, finally figured out the homepage was extremely ugly):

That’s right, the “screenshot” for their mobile bloglines interface is actually of an iPhone checking voicemail? What?? How is that possibly related to an RSS reader’s mobile interface…

I just received an interesting email, which “offers” to help me secure my .com domain name in the Chinese varieties .cn and .hk. It’s more of a threatening piece of spam, because it carries the fear that if I do not avail myself of their services, them or another company will steal my brand!

Subject: YOUR DOMAIN NAME (elliottback)’S CURRENT SITUATION

Dear ELLIOTT C.Back

We are the domain name registration organization in Hong Kong, ,which mainly deal with the domain names’ conflicts of the company in China and Asia regions.We have received an formal application online from one company named “TianHaiYuanTong (China) Investment Co.Ltd” who is trying to apply for the domain names(www. elliottback.cn www. elliottback.hk etc.) and the Internet keyword(elliottback) as their domain name and internet brand on Oct 6,2008.After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names being applied are the same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you don’t know this company, we doubt that they buy these domain names with other aims. We have not started the registration for TianHaiYuanTong company until now. In order to deal with this issue better, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Boyce Meng

Tel: +852-31757931 (ext8048)
Fax: +852- 31757932
Email: boyce.meng@hk-nsc.org.cn

Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited
website: www.hknsc.hk

However, as far as I can tell, there is no such “Tian Hai Yuan Tong” company, and I am not replying. I advise you to do the same, and post any more samples of this spam in the comments!