1. Good points Judith, with RSS reader usage continuing to climb you'd even need to start questioning whether or not to both with design for your site to start with, a page of plain text may suffice :-)

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Duncan Riley

2. Tribe Cast is the beginning of turning Tribe into a web service.

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Marc Canter

3. alwayson lists 'friendster' as a 'web service' and in fact a winning web service. what do you think?

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by judith

4. I certainly wouldn't call Friendster a web service - now.

As soon as some service or app allows you to bring it to them, versus force you to go to them - that's when they become a web service.

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Marc Canter

5. "How many folks still ‘read’ weblogs by visiting them? How many ‘read’ via RSS sans all of the cool thingies in the left and right hand columns of nicely laid out weblogs such as Ross Mayfield’s?"

Most times, I prefer for my newsfeeds to have a full feed. But if they have good headlines AND excerpts, that's great too. "How to save the World" has a FULL feed, and I still load his site to comment if the post makes me want to comment. "Terrorism Watch" and "Jihad Watch" also have full posts; I click on them a lot, even if I don't comment, because I want to read others' comments.

I UNsubbed from T** because of BAD HEADLINES, and the excerpts were too short (the headline was part of the first few words of the opening paragraph, which was repeated in the very short excerpt, SIGH). I'll tolerate no excerpts if the headlines are good though (The Terrorist Research Center).

So you don't have to give me a full post to get my click, good headlines and excerpts along with a post that motivates me to comment will do it. And even full posts have got my clicks because I wanted to comment, and read others' comments.

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Sherri

6. i will leave the RSS reader quite easily for a well-designed blog. RSS is great for digesting a ton of information in a hurry, when i need to - but i find that i miss the richness of the web medium. Sometimes the eye candy is easily as mentally stimulating as the content itself. RSS is fast food; a good blog is a meal. (had enough of the food metaphors yet? :))

i am using the Tribecast on my 2 more 'personal' blogs - less because i want to promote Tribe.net and more because a) it adds a nice collection of juicy icons to the sidebar and b) it is a convenient 'meme list' of a decent subset of my interests.

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by barb