One more little rant
Posted on 14. Mar, 2008 by Guido in Uncategorized
While this may be getting tedious, sadly this is the stuff that motivates me to come over here and blog.
An open letter to ESRI:
Dear ESRI,
My name is Guido. I am a GIS analyst and a consumer of your web content. I was pleased to see that you have embraced the ideas of both rss feeds and podcasts. I like to use these for keeping up with the wide array of stuff that happens with your company and GIS at large.
But I am having some serious problems with the way you chose to implement these technologies. These feeds can prove to be a good way to build a conversation and to inform your clients what you are up to. But you really aren’t providing either of these things based on what I am seeing.
First, the podcasts. While it’s nice to have a place where you can tell your listeners what you are up to, would it be too much trouble to have a place where your listeners can add there own comments? Even if you don’t have comments, how about some show notes where I can find links to things you guys were talking about in the podcats or even a transcript (you guys are big enough to afford that right?) Both show notes and transcripts also make it possible to Google these podcasts making them more assessable to all of the audience who would be interested in the topics you talk about. Finally, just because you put out a podcast doesn’t mean you should only link to your mp3, try creating a show notes page which has the mp3 enclosed and then my feed reader, itunes, and web browsers can get there.
Secondly, your news feed. Today I read this from your feed
The March regional issues of the Wealth Management Business Magazines from France Publications reveal the 25 Wealthiest ZIP Codes in the state of California, New Jersey, and Virginia in an easy-to-read graphic format. ZIP Codes ranked by ESRIs wealth indicators such as income, home value, net worth, and Community Tapestry prove there is more to wealth than just your paycheck.
And I though to myself, cool I would like to know more, so I tried to click on the link to the original page. This brought me back to a page about feeds fro your site and had no more contextual information or links to the article you describe. And that is what set me off into writing this letter.
Is it too much to ask for a link to the original story or a link to the original feed? arghh…
These issue worry me. I hear that you guys are going to be working on resource centers and are really trying to get WEB 2.0 stuff down. But these simple feeds show a real lack of understanding on how and why feeds work in a WEB 2.0 world.
I hope that you are trying to fix these issues. I have met many web 2.0 and podcast consultants with which whom i can connect you with if you would like.
Please let me know if I can be of any help,
Guido
p.s. if you happen to come across this site and this letter I know it’s low on content at the moment, I really am trying to get back to that, but content is not something I am getting paid for at the moment so this pet project needs to wait until I have a little more time to blossom.
