General

Users Tell Us What’s Wrong

~ Doug ~ 1 Comment

You can always count on loyal website visitors to tell you what you really need to hear. I emailed a survey to the registered members of SpokenWord.org this morning and already have some great responses. Here’s a sample of the answers to “What do you NOT like about SpokenWord.org?”

  • collections
  • No Comment
  • Not sure I totally understand how it works.
  • I do not understand how I am supposed to use SW, and the web pages don’t make it manifest. What is “collect” and what does “subscribe” imply? Unclear. Yes, I can spend a lot of time clicking “help” to “FAQ” to “Advanced: Collection” but I still feel that I’m using a Swiss Army Knife as a club. Awkward and unfamiliar.
  • – the search is annoying; I wish it would search both feeds and episodes, without having to go to a separate page. – the look is quite cluttered and visually messy – it’s not good for discovery; I don’t find the homepage content useful — it’s rarely something that I want to listen to, and doesn’t change frequently enough. I haven’t looked at other’s collections much, maybe that would be helpful.
  • Jason Ponten
  • Too early to tell
  • Too much data entry required to add a single program. The feed reader should be more forgiving. I’ve tried to add several feeds that failed, but I assume they work find with iTunes or other feed readers.
  • Removing individual programs from collection (that was added trough feed) was not working, but now that seems to be fixed.
  • Removing individual programs from collection (that was added trough feed) was not working, but now that seems to be fixed.
  • Nothing
  • I’m not so sure about the Stack Overflow-type badges and such, though I’m always a late adopter in the social media thing.
  • I used to get these emails from ITC, and I just manually downloaded each one and put it in a directory. Now, I don’t know where to find that stuff. there seems so much, it’s confusing to a simpleton like myself.
  • Same as above
  • not friendly for new users. not clear what should you do there..
  • I am not sure how to use it.
  • – No audio podcasts of video talks available – The time lag in updating my feed after making changes to my collection. – The strictness in parsing RSS feeds has not allowed me to move all of my podcasts over to Spoken Word.
  • to much mumbo jumbo and does not seem smooth
  • It was difficult to figure out at first.
  • Wasn’t obvious how to subscribe to a feed, although I just went back and found it.
  • Not live. New feeds sometimes take days to add programs to my collections. When a new feed is added you should give the ability to add a small number of older programs immediately to test the feed.
  • I just didn’t find a lot of podcasts that I hadn’t already found. It’s been a while since I checked. I’ll look again and maybe this opinion will change.
  • Cluttered UI.
  • Some of the feed parsing is pickier than I thought was necessary. If I make a collection on SpokenWord and subscribe to its feed on my PC its not always easy to differentiate which original feed an episode is from. So I don’t use this feature. it’s not really your fault but there isn’t an easy way to contribute to SpokenWord other than adding feeds. I download podcasts with gpodder on my PC and I don’t tag or rate podcasts because it’s a lot of extra effort.
  • can’t get to it ALL!
  • Off the top of my head? Nothing.
  • Too hard to find things. I am pretty new at this. I also visited TED. I felt it was easier to find interesting stuff there.
  • Can’t think of anything… Tue, 5/12/09 9:14 AM
  • Well, for one thing, the feedback link to tell you what didn’t work didn’t work. And here’s an obvious but unappreciated idea: I signed up to hear a progran that wasn’t there. Can you build some kind of machine that’ll delete busted or cancelled links? Also, I had a little too much difficulty finding the actual link to the program. In fact, more than a little too much.
  • Search is so broken! I search for my own podcast and it doesn’t show up in search results – even though I’ve submitted it. I have to type the exact url. Related keywords are useless. Also, I would really, really encourage you to create multiple lists of podcasts broken down by various categories, topics, niches, sub-sub niches, brand-new podcasts, etc. Even if these lists are in a separate section of the site (not taking up valuable home page real estate) these would be invaluable to finding/discovering podcasts I haven’t heard about previously.
  • there is an empty yellow popup area on the home page that just says “close window”
  • The layout and searching for new podcasts. Not much Canadian Content.

What do you think? Maybe we have a UI problem?

Kindle Needs Profiles

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Here’s a feature I’d like to see in future versions of Amazon’s Kindle’s software: user profiles. My wife and I would like to share the same Kindle, she with her books, me with mine and both of us sharing the NY Times, the New Yorker, etc. The best way to do that would be for us each to have separate bookmarks, so that I could just pick up the Kindle, switch to my book marks and pick up in the document and on the page I was last reading.

Bug- and Feature-Tracking Report Online

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By popular demand, I’ve posted a report from Jira, our issue-tracking system, for all to download. Many (most?) of the items won’t make sense to anyone who’s not actually writing code for SpokenWord.org, but you may find it interesting. By all means, feel free to peruse it and if you find a feature request that you think should be escalated (or one that should be added), let us know. The best place to discuss bugs and new features is on our Spoken Word Strategy discussion list.

What Would it Take?

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Now that SpokenWord.org out of the alpha/beta phase…

  • What would it take for you to:
    • recommend SpokenWord.org to your friends?
    • send a link to your collections to your friends?
  • How should we spread the word?
    • a JavaScript or Flash widget for displaying your collections on other web sites?
    • a better email-to-a-friend feature?
    • better links to social networking sites?
    • direct interfaces to Facebook, FriendFeed, etc?

Give us your ideas on our Discussion List.

SpokenWord.org UI Improvements

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I’ve just enabled some much-requested UI improvements to SpokenWord.org. Over time we’ve been displaying more and more metadata on the detail pages for members, programs, feeds and collections and you’ve told us they’re just too cluttered and hard to navigate. As of early this morning we’ve moved most of the metadata and actionable links on those pages to the right column. I hope the data are easier to find and the pages are now eaier to read.

Swine Flu: Why All the Hype?

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As I wrote on Twitter earlier today: “35,000-50,000 die each year from influenza [and subsequent bacterial pneumonia] in the U.S. The panic over this swine flu is whacko. Is it just a slow news week?”

Okay, so I can understand the media frenzy — we’re all used to it — but what about the Obama administration? Janet Napolitano (Homeland Security) and CDC officials aren’t just accepting interviews, they’re pushing this. When’s the last time a U.S. president opened a major press conference suggesting we wash our hands and stay home from school or work? It’s really quite extraordinary. And puzzling.

And then it hit me. Of course! The Obama administration is scared to death that this could be their Katrina. They know the chances of the H1N1 flu becoming a true national tragedy are quite slim, but they’d rather risk the consequences of overreacting than take the chance they’d be blamed for an inadequate response. For them it’s not about the likelihood the swine flu will become something we should worry about. Instead, it’s about *their* risk of being associated with the previous administration’s national-response failures. Once I figured that out, it all made sense.

I don’t want to give the impression that this isn’t a potentially serious situation. I believe it is, particularly because the virus has essentially spread worldwide and development of a vaccine has just begun. I hear it could take 9-12 months before large quantities can be available and by then 25%-30% of the population could have already been infected. And we also don’t know how virulent this microbe really is. Only one fatality yet in the U.S., and that was a young child who came here from Mexico. 160+ deaths in Mexico, but we don’t yet have a clue of the actual death rate. How many were infected and recovered? If the virus is already widespread, 160 deaths could actually suggest a milder-than-usual outbreak.

Bottom line: It’s early. Let’s all hope the pandemic (already declared by the WHO) turns out to blow over quickly. But in the meantime, there’s certainly no shortage of attention being given to it, from the White House on down.

Abandoned-Feed Hijacking (FeedBurner)

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I was researching a new feature for SpokenWord.org when I came across a site that lists an old URL to the primary IT Conversations RSS feed. Curious, I clicked on it and discovered someone else’s content there. I just assumed that when we abandoned that URL years ago it would simply disappear, but that appears not to be the case. (http://feeds.feedburner.com/ITConversations-EverythingMP3)

I’m not sure how this happened. Are some site looking for abandoned FeedBurner URLs? How do they learn that a URL has become dead? If you’re thining of changing or abandoing an RSS feed URL hosted at FeedBurner — okay, I admit you should never do that — just remember that someone else may come along and grab that URL for themselves once the FeedBurner free-redirection period has ended. You’re probably better to keep that URL forever even if it means you need to run permanent redirection at the target.