7 years ago today: I was gung-ho on the naplesplus website. This
is before Google had business listings, before Facebook had
business listings, and the field was wide open for people like
me to do what I did. It was really exciting as newspapers freely
shared their full articles via RSS feeds and such. Well, in the
intervening 7 years, RSS feeds went ka-pooey, as newer versions
of the concept with fancier names and a more "programmy" look
and sound to it, killed it.
The people distributing the RSS feeds couldn't monetize it, but
they CAN monetize keeping a tighter squeeze on their data. Also,
when Google changed their algorithms, and Yahoo left the search
engine race, it pretty much killed my project as financially
viable. It's still there; but it's mostly a relic of a by-gone
web. It's not that they were the "good old days" or anything
like that; today's web is better than before. It's just that
things are getting more and more corporate, a trend that began
way back in 1993 when the doors were opened and we all cried
out, "IMMINENT DEATH OF THE INTERNET!" as commercial interests
were now ok and DARPA said, "Here you go world - here's our
project - you have it".
