danielfranz

Imho the power and customisability of Jira is great. The problem is just its UI and performance. There are solutions to that though. You can always JXL your Jira (https://jxl.app).

Agree. Then again if you use JXL in your Jira you have a more agnostic spreadsheet view of your issues as well. Pretty neat. https://jxl.app

This will change the way you feel about Jira. No lag, no limits. Check out the free trial and let us know what you think. All feedback much appreciated.

Hi there, I am the developer behind Good Noows and I'd like to respond to a few posts here. I currently work on Good Noows in my spare time and I earn my living as a Product Manager at a mobile network operator. I started Good Noows because I simply couldnt find a news reader out there that serves my needs. I assume thats because it's very hard to get funding for it. Google Reader is top when it comes to functionality but I dont agree with their UI. Good Noows tries to address two segments of users and I hope that both are served ok-ish (feedback is actually quite good): 1) RSS reader users sharing my customer pain for a better browsing experience, and 2) the average consumer who doesnt even know what RSS is and just wants to set up a personal news stream (the twitter-like terminology with "stream" and "follow" is intended). Simple and quick.

- No we dont get paid for listing feeds. I'd love that because it would be a great business model.

- Sorry if the predefined sources in the catalog are not what you are looking for. Since I am German I do not have a complete overview of i.e. US-American politics blogs. I definitely was not biased when choosing them. I just used Technorati's top lists and looked for properly formatted feeds.

- The layout is not yet optimized for touch devices at all. Apologies. I hope I'll find the time to work on it soon...

- I decided to use Meebo because their sharing function does a good job. If you dont like the bar at the bottom, feel free to hide it (arrow icon at the right).

- You have to sign on before using it because I (and my legal counsels) see copyright issues when they look at my product vision and feature roadmap. If you re logged in it's private consumption. I won't display third party content publicly.

- Logging in with your social network account just simplifies registration. We dont get any personal data or anything from these auth services, just an ID (which is in some cases an email address).

Feel free to post any suggestions for feeds or features, other ideas, or just criticism here http://support.goodnoows.com I really try to do this very agile and user-focused...

Cheers

I strongly disagree. Can you define "useful content" in the context of journalism? Is it content that makes advertisers pay in order to put their ads next to it? That's not journalism! Even if it was, the online ad revenue wouldn't be enough to pay real investigative journalism.

Also you wrote "if you're not producing things people want, or if you're spending too much money to do it, you lose and someone else will take your place". That's right. But it should be our task to prevent that. A radical consolidation on the news market until just a few papers are left is not an option. This market is different to the one for chocolate or cars. This is about a vital variety of opinions and views.

A consolidation of opinions is not what we want. Trust me, I am German, it happened here some 80 years ago...

Another general comment: I think it's quite simple: the content itself is not the issue here. There are a lot of big publishers out there offering really fast really high-quality news content following journalistic standards. The issue is the lack of a business model appropriate to the current technology. Therefore I think the key is distribution and presentation of the content and the development of services around it - not changing the content. Especially not in order to be more attractive to advertisers.

Sounds like a good plan! My experience tells me that you have to be very careful when mixing bloggers and journalists from publishing companies (if that's what you intend to do). A lot of journalists perceive bloggers as a threat. Although that seems naive I think it's a normal reaction.

In my view it's necessary to involve bloggers but I don't think of them as journalists. They have other principles of investigating and sourcing and a different style of writing. Don't get me wrong, they're important and the fact that free blog providers enable potentially anyone out there to speak their minds on the big stage is a small revolution. Although not on one level with Gutenberg or the invention of the Net itself, like some say. But bloggers certainly are not the key to saving traditional journalism :)

Hi onreact-com. I am aware of them and a dozen others offering similar services. I'd like to point out that tracking and micropayment solutions would indeed be part of my model in the long run. But they are just infrastructure - they're not the core of my concept. My idea is about user experience. About changing the way readers consume content. Why would someone use services like Contenture or Kachingle or..? Because they're willing to pay for a certain product or service. Therefore, in order to establish a broad base of users who'd actually do that we need to develop a product they like. Something with added value. Personalization. Mobility. Something better than a single publishing company is able to develop. Something that makes a lot of publishers pull the same string even though they're competitors in their respective markets.

Somebody just wrote that there is good old common-sense economics at work. I’d say the subprime crisis is also good old common-sense economics at work. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a healthy thing and it's good for the industry, for the economy or for society as a whole.

Quality journalism plays a critical role in our society. In every society - that includes the ones in "Western" states. The death of a newspaper in San Francisco or Boston is nothing less than a tragedy. Journalists do what they do - they write. They are obviously not exactly experts regarding the WWW and the "new" technology their distribution is based on now. They weren't capable of adjusting their business strategies and products to this disruption. Somebody needs to do that for them and the business model is not advertising alone anymore.

In the past they generated revenue from ads and from content bundling. In the print channel interesting and high-quality articles subsidized less interesting ones or even whole departments. On the web there are no bundles, content is atomized and shareable. Clicks and links are the currency and people only click on links to articles (and ads) they’re interested in. Therefore in my opinion the only possible solution is to stop relying on ads alone and start charging readers for the product itself, which is the content - INCLUDING the delivery and presentation of it.

Usually product development follows a business strategy of maximizing profit. Obviously that’s the profit of the company offering the product and not the profit of competitors and providers of supposed substitute products, like bloggers and evil news aggregators. But the technology makes the content shareable. It’s complicated and a somewhat "socialistic" approach to the problem would help. No worries, I don’t want to raise taxes or fees to finance the good, I certainly don’t think that’s the right way. All over the world press representatives ask the administrations to come up with ancillary copyright laws securing their interests. That’s ridiculous and shows that they didn’t even analyze the issue right.

Bottom line: I’d try the re-introduction of bundling through simple flat-rate payment - with a solution based on the economics of the web, not the print world. Readers don’t face any switching costs. If one publisher asks for payment they just go to another. But if we offer content of all sources in one place, combined with revolutionary features they don’t get anywhere else, there is something to charge for. Start focusing on the delivery and presentation of the content. Start listening to users’ needs instead of advertisers.

Journalists produce content. A third party platform is working as a personalized content hub based on simple XML-formatted or API-powered exchange of content and serving all kinds of reading devices. No, I am not talking about feed readers or Google News’ index but decent, well-planned apps and websites. The platform would have to offer really innovative features and top user experience and would be considered worth paying 2-3 USD/month. On a voluntary basis wealthy readers could even pay more and therefore get a higher "supporter status" they can communicate to the outside world (the same target segment already pays a lot for their LinkedIn accounts and other web-based services). It’s amazing what peer pressure can do.

That paid amount is being split and percentages are paid to the according publishers based on the user’s reading behavior. The meshing-up is contrary to the content strategy of most publishers today but could become interesting to them as soon as they face revenue in exchange. As a result publishers could focus on their core competency (investigating and writing) and earn from partly "outsourced" delivery, like they often did in times of paper delivery. They could also focus on niche topics to build up competency and reputation in order to be "followed" in those areas by readers through these hubs - a truly capitalistic mechanism.

Now the question is what are the killer features to make this happen? 1) The product would have to offer content from various sources. 2) It would have to improve the way readers can consume their daily or hourly news so drastically that they’re willing to pay a small amount. 3) Payment would have to be really simple. I do have thoughts on how to achieve this step by step with a freemium business model based on existing technologies and with existing shared content. I also have concrete thoughts on features as well as an almost finished product design. Personalization is the key.

I am looking for developers and front-end developers with state-of-the-art CSS and AJAX knowledge, who think what I just wrote is not just stupid utopia and would like to work on this sisyphean challenge. Who would like to build a team and apply at Y Combinator? I am an ex web developer and UI designer and recent MBA graduate and Xoogler from Germany.

Poll: approx. 34 % of users are willing to pay 2-5 USD/month

Mashable - The New York Times Asks Readers If They’d Pay For Online Version (http://mashable.com/2009/07/09/new-york-times-online-subscri...)

The New York Times - Let’s Invent an iTunes for News (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/business/media/12carr.html)

Nieman Journalism Lab - How an NYT developer built a new way to read the news online (http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/02/how-an-nyt-developer-built-...)

Google Code's PubSubHubbub publish/subscribe protocol as an extension to XML content exchange (http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub)

TechCrunch - The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/the-media-bundle-is-dea...)