Skip to main content

Et Tu, Google?

Google was recently granted a patent on personalized newspapers. Until now, I have been having the market all to my self with FeedJournal, but I welcome the competition. A player like Google can really help to boost the awareness for these kinds of solutions. Yes, I am one person, and Google is somewhat larger than that. But still, I think it is a good sign that FeedJournal-like sites start to pop up. It will increase multitude, and the competition will help to drive the projects forward and prevent stagnation. In the end, users will gain by having better products.

The granting of the patent seems somewhat dubious to me, considering that FeedJournal has been alive and kicking for a long time. The patent could have been a good requirements specification document for FeedJournal.

I am obviously very curious to see where Google is going with this, if they decide to use the patent to build a product. Will they offer both a reader and a publisher version of their product? How will they integrate advertising? They definitely have big potential to integrate many of their existing services into a new solution.

But don’t worry! I’ll continue to put late hours into FeedJournal. Small operations like this one depend heavily on word-of-mouth, since time and resources don’t allow much else in the way of marketing. So please, any mentions of FeedJournal is greatly appreciated. I am grateful and indebted to my small but dedicated group of enthusiastic evangelizers (Joel, Simon, Mike, and many others), who helps me to build a better newspaper.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Liberty NewspostNovember 20, 2007 at 9:37 PM

    Hey Jonas,

    Thanks for the Kudos.

    Keep up the good work!

    Check out your traffic stats:

    http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/feedjournal.com

    ~Joel

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousNovember 21, 2007 at 10:46 AM

    Asking for a patent on an idea that has been around since 1995 is pretty funny.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ShaudiusNovember 21, 2007 at 5:15 PM

    Jonas,

    I opined about the very same thing in my blog when I read the news about Google's patent on TechCrunch. I'd really be interested in your thoughts on what I wrote about the situation in general, and about your site in specific.

    My TechCrunch comment was one of two to mention your site. Other comments referenced ShelfMade. A similar product that has not released either of its versions(consumer or blogger), unlike you.

    No one mentioned the article that Boris mentioned, but I will be sure to add something about it to my blog.

    ReplyDelete
  4. MertNovember 21, 2007 at 11:05 PM

    I am following feedjournal for a long time and would be willing to be a gold user if only you could support UTF8 character encoding. I am the moderator of a turkish blog writers community and I pull all the RSS feeds of the blogs and then convert them to one opml file, after that I convert that into one single RSS file. As the last action I want to use feedjournal to display the most recent posts in the turkish blog community in a nice newspaper theme but Feedjournal doesn't support UTF8 encoding thus making some turkish characters missing in the pdf file. It would be great if you can support UTF8 encoding.

    Also displaying links and even embedded videos would be just great. (Not sure if you can do that in adobe pdf format)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Jonas MartinssonNovember 22, 2007 at 9:01 AM

    shaudius: That's a great post on your blog, thanks for notifying me about it. Please send me your e-mail address and I'll notify you when our private alpha/beta version of the reader will be available!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Jonas MartinssonNovember 22, 2007 at 9:10 AM

    Mert Ulaş: Please send me a link by e-mail to a sample feed where characters are not displayed properly and I'll fix it.

    I am working on an implementation for adding hyperlinks as footnotes to the end of the page or paper. Videos will be difficult to print, and I would be surprised if the PDF format supports that... :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HOWTO: Fix a Broken Laptop Lid for $1

A few months ago my laptop lid's hinges gave up and my lid kept falling over. I will show you how I fixed the problem in five minutes by using materials for $1. But first some background info. At first, I assumed there would be a quick and simple fix to this common laptop problem. My laptop is an Evo N800v. HP has bought Compaq since I purchased the computer so that's where I'm supposed to turn for help. I was kind of startled to hear that HP support wanted $500 for fixing the broken hinges - presumably they intended to replace the entire lid. Obviously, shelling out $500 for fixing a 6 year old laptop is not the way to go, so I started to look for alternative solutions. First, I disassembled the laptop numerous times, trying to make the hinges more sturdy (that's spelled S-U-P-E-R-G-L-U-E). Anyway, that didn't help. Option number two was to do something similar to what user xrobevansx did on instructables.com . Basically he bought a lid support in a hardware store...
19 comments
Read more

HOWTO: GTD with Google Docs & PocketMod

Take control of your unwieldy to do-list by combining Google Docs and PocketMod. With the system described here you will always be ready to take notes, and never run the risk of losing an idea! Update (July 30, 2009): Now using a Google Docs template. I use a subset of GTD (" Getting Things Done ") by having a digital copy of my next actions, sorted by context (@Home, @Office, @Shopping, @Computer, etc.). This lets me easily look up what I need to do, depending on where I am. However, a digital copy is not very useful by itself, since it is not accessible when I am offline. Putting it in my PDA is not ideal either, since the overhead of adding a new note is too big (turning on the device, opening the right application, having it recognize my handwriting). That's why I print out my to-do list on paper once a week and carry it in my pocket. It's the ideal way of accessing and editing tasks. Before I print out a new list I spend a minute or two copying the edits from my...
5 comments
Read more

Reading on Paper vs. on Screen

One of the basic premises behind FeedJournal is that it's better to read text on paper than on a screen. While it might not sound like a bold assumption, it still is an assumption and as such worth to examine deeper. Today, office workers and many other professionals are required to focus their eyes on a computer screen during most of their work day. Many of them continue to use the computer at home. FeedJournal was created with many goals in mind; one of them is to release you from the screen while enabling you to read the content you love. You shouldn't have to spend more time reading off a screen, just because you want to access fresh and relevant content. Recent research has found that reading a longer text on paper is 25% faster than reading the same text on a computer screen. At the same time, reading comprehension and article overview are improved. Although screen resolutions have increased and font rendering technologies such as ClearType make it much easier to rea...
11 comments
Read more