The timing is ironic for me, because only yesterday, for the very first time, I purchased the following two CDs by clicking through to Amazon from the Pandora site:

Anyway, this drove me to think a little more about the types of advertising we’ve been seeing in this millenium. Particularly recent product placement in shows like Heroes (which made a point to mention the Nissan Versa several annoying times), 30 Rock (Snapple), Studio 60, and my current favorite TV show, The Office (one of the biggest “offenders” here, mentioning Staples, Hooters, Benihanas, Chili’s, iPods, and most recently, Sandals). This is a very insiduous form of advertising, since it’s worked right into the plot, there is no reasonable way to extract it like you can with PVR‘s ability to edit out commercials. And as a viewer, you’re stuck with it when it comes onto DVD. I wonder if anyone’s considering that last bit. Do these advertisers have to spend more to consider future syndication and DVD releases or are they getting a free ride? Then again, 10 years from now, how effective are those Nissan Versa ads going to be?

I was talking to Rob about this during the Christmas holidays and I actually don’t mind this form of advertising so far because a) I immediately recognize it for what it is, and b) it’s usually either an offhand reference or actually adds to the plot/characters (Michael Scott does not have good taste, and Hooters prides itself on being the epitome of “not good taste”). Of course the fact that I recognize it is actually irrelevant because the job of product placement is brand recognition, so they are doing their job, even if I think I’m being clever by pointing it out to my wife. Of course there are those that have less of a clue, like flutterly:

I personally don’t even notice product placement. Then again, I’m usually doing other things while watching TV, so maybe I’m just missing the little details. I didn’t even realize the Nissan Versa thing was product placement.. if I was buying a car, I would have though, “Oh, cool, that car was in Heroes,” but that wouldn’t have made me want to buy it. Maybe it’s just me.

“Oh cool”. Don’t worry flutterly, you’re not “missing the little details” at all…

I wonder when we’ll see pop artists actually releasing singles or albums openly sponsored by companies. Of course rap songs liberally mention Cristal, Courvasier, Hennessy, etc but an answer to the question of whether these are paid endorsements is apparently No.

Anyway, this very blog and website that you’re reading are supported by what I call the “Nickel Trickle” (Google’s AdSense or Amazon Associates), so it’s not like I’m casting stones, merely making observations. I wonder where it’s all leading…

The bug is that Firefox ignores any <?xml-stylesheet?> directive in RSS/Atom XML documents and formats the web feed representation using a default style chosen by Mozilla.

Phil Ringalda describes the workaround of padding the beginning of your XML document with a really really long comment, because Firefox’s sniffer gives up if it doesn’t find a <feed> or <rss> string within the first 512 characters. To be fair, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 also does the same thing, which is one argument that Mozilla folks are using to justify the behavior.

There is a long and heated discussion over at mozilla.dev.apps.firefox about this right now. Mark Pilgrim stormed out after strongly disagreeing with the decision of the benevolent dictator.

On the one hand, web authors are screaming that Firefox should try to style their documents as they (the author) intended and that the workaround (hack) smacks of Web 1.0 days during the First Browser War where browser makers assumed they knew better than web authors.

On the other hand, the usability gurus are arguing that it is very important for everyone to “get” web feeds as a technology, including your Grandma. This means that a consistent visual representation of feeds (including subscription options) is very important and that the bulk of the stylesheets out there render the feed in a less than useful fashion. Others within Mozilla are arguing that IE7 and Google Reader also hi-jack the visual representation of web feeds, so why is everyone picking on Firefox?

These are all very good arguments, in fact, I can see both sides of the story. But I think it was this comment that finally pushed my opinion that Mozilla (and Microsoft) are in the wrong here. Here are my justifications:

• It looks like if IE7 and Fx2 encounters an unknown XML stream that has a root node of <feed> or <rss>, then they assume the content type is Atom/RSS and proceed to style it as they do all web feed content. This is clearly wrong and should be considered a bug because other XML grammars may use <feed>/<rss> as their root node and will be forced to be displayed as if the content is a web feed, a clear error.
• A consistent visualization is important, but what if Firefox decided that all HTML links must be blue, underlined and in 12-pt Arial font while all other text must be black, 10-pt Arial? This certainly would help Grandma realize where the clickable links are, but on the other hand if the technology supports more flexibility and the application can already handle the flexibility then overriding this behavior is stifling creativity and frustrating web authors. And yes, I know there at least an order of magnitude between ‘those who understand what a link is’ and ‘those who understand what a feed is’, but the fact of the matter is that styling is here now – once Pandora’s box is opened, you can’t close it.
• From reading the comments in both the bug report and the newsgroup discussion, it sounds like this change in behavior from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 broke some web sites. In general, I’m not too worried about breaking web sites if it’s to clean up a standards compatibility issue or because of a well-used hack that no longer applies. But in this case, the behavior change is actually quite unexpected from a reasonable developer’s point of view (“Firefox can style content using stylesheets. Here is my stylesheet, display my content the way I want!”). From their point of view, the developer followed the rules and got the shaft.

Mozilla and Microsoft should be encouraging web authors to keep their feeds unstyled for the purposes of mainstream adoption, but they should not be forcing the web authors hands. I also think for author-styled web feeds, the browsers should keep the “subscribe” button in the chrome (I’d even agree with the proposal of a tiny floating div at the top of the page), while unstyled web feeds continue to get the default visual representation that Firefox 2 and IE7 do now. Most web authors should realize that there are inherent benefits of letting the next generation browsers consistently display web feeds now that Grandmas everywhere will be subscribing to feeds all willy-nilly-like.

And the browsers should most definitely NOT be styling content that they don’t know is RSS/Atom (as told by the web server). Please, no more magic strings…

Finally, this is a web service I would consider paying for – we’ll see how the ads crappify the experience first though before I go down the subscription route. I have yet to experience any stream interruptions while at work (we’ll see how my home broadband connection handles it). The interface is done in Flash. Very slick, very excellent!

A good axiom I follow as a service user is that “eventually everything gets crappy”:

• Network television is mostly crap nowadays overflowing with ads in unexpected places (“The Apprentice” is just an excuse to pimp big ticket items like cars, movies, by including them in the actual programming – each episode is one big ad), as a consequence, most quality shows have mostly migrated to cable stations (like HBO).
• Specialty cable stations like MTV, VH1, Cartoon Network have migrated from their initial vision of selective programming to play crappy shows in an effort to generate “new content”.
• Email was crappified by spam. Same with blogs.
• Google’s business model made it acceptable to sprinkle ads everywhere in my web experience.
• One could make the argument that the quality of Wikipedia‘s articles have gone down since it hit “mainstream” and people with strong agendas have become entrenched.
• Many popular web sites get swallowed by major corporations. Read about TheSpark.com here.
• The Netscape browser – - well, I’ll say no more.

Anyway, I’m not casting judgment here, I’m certainly guilty of at least the Google ads. The key is to find the newer experiences and ride their waves of greatness until the crappiness becomes too much to bear – then switch to something new. I think that’s where we’re at with services like iTunes and Pandora and technologies like RSS/Atom right now – they’re currently in that phase of greatness…