Re: syndication for commerce

["seanno" <seanno@yahoo.com>]

Bill, thanks for the thoughts on this --- really helpful.

> I'd have guessed, right off the bat, that this did more to turn 
them off than
> ever would have retained their loyalties.

Herein is the biggest problem dealing with droids --- it DOES work, 
IN THE SHORT TERM. It's like heroin for folks who live and die 
by "this weeks numbers", but every dose needs a little more juice and 
gets them a little less high. 

> Here's where you run risks of annoying the consumers.  Start 
looking like you're
> tracking them with them getting nothing in return (and no being 
your customer is
> not a privilege) and they'll abandon you. 

Totally fair.... I would expect that as a start giving "advance 
notice" of deals would be a reasonable tit-for-tat, given the 
theoretically lower annoyance factor you get from a newsreader.

> Here's a list of other RSS feeds for "deals on stuff"
> Like this article I posted a while back:
> http://www.syndic8.com/~wkearney/blogs/syndic8/archives/000144.html

Nothing in the world is new, dammit. :) 

> The HTML in the items is pretty heinous.  How about cleaning it up 
a bit?  All
> those tables, yeesh.  Some aggregators will upchuck if they 
get 'too fancy'.

Interesting ... it's Overstock's HTML, not mine ... I'm just scraping 
it off of their site. But if that becomes a barrier for some readers 
it's clearly an issue. If only they had an XML interface to their 
catalog.

Thanks again ...
---S