Traffic
Recently there’s been some buzz about Genecast News Service, which provides RSS-to-NNTP conversion. People are realizing that when a new message format or protocol comes into existance it doesn’t mean you need an entirely new application. All you need is a translation service for your current apps. As Russ Beattie says: "there’s this very usable application sitting your desktop right now meant to read news just waiting to be utilized."
What the Genecast people are doing is, as regular readers of this site will know, on my TODO list for Hep. The difference is in the approach we’re taking to deliver the functionality. Hep is a standalone application that you install and run yourself. Genecast is a service that other people run, and you use. Which means that Genecast should be easier to set up, but Hep will be more flexible.
Brian Elliot sent me an e-mail earlier today pointing out that it would, of course, be possible to set up a public Hep server, which people could use without having to install anything. I probably won’t be doing this anytime soon - I don’t like the idea of having a single point of failure, and I doubt that the current Hep code is scalable enough to handle hundreds of users. But someday it might be interesting.
At some point in this discussion Dave Winer noticed Hep, and linked to it on Scripting News. So I’ve been getting a lot more traffic, referrers, and Hep downloads than usual. Cool!
