To the editors of BusinessWeek Online's DealFlow

Matt Marshall and Steve Rubel, (and Brad Feld), mentioned the launch of a new blog (or "blog" - see below) focusing on the startup/VC world by BusinessWeek Online: DealFlow. It is interesting because mainstream press can add a different perspective in their reporting on our industry. However, as I checked it out (full of hope and interest), I found no RSS feed, no way to trackback a story or leave a comment on a particular post.

So it is a "blog" (something that looks almost like a blog, is referred to as a blog, but is not a blog).

It is actually surprising that they do not provide (at least) an RSS feed for their "blog" since they offer some for their news. And, hem, it is not as though BW was the first to use this channel, and therefore had to discover what it means to foster participation, as opposed to traditional "one-way" publishing. As Jeremy Wright points out, FC Now was there over 18 months ago.

And whilst they offer a comment box, it is so @#(*$# tiny that I had write my comment/suggestion to them in another window (just could not read what I was typing). So I thought that I might as well post it here also:

Hi,

Great initiative to launch a "blog" to focus on the VC/startup world (which happens to be the world I leave in). The reason why I am using "blog", and not blog, is that your "blog" is lacking three key features: RSS feed, trackbacks and comments.

There are just too many interesting blogs out there that I can read in my aggregator to go through the extra effort of checking out your web site. And if you publish something interesting, I want to be able to refer/trackback to it. And I want to see comments from your readers below your posts, to get a more complete view of the story.

Oh, and by the way, what's with the size of your comment (shoe) box ? Did your web designer realize that you can only put 12 characters per line ?

Hope this helps turning your "blog" into a great blog.

Best regards,

Jeff Clavier
Managing Partner, SoftTech VC

Update: I just spotted this morning (01/18/05) that an RSS feed had been added to this blog (here). You can see it is a bit of a hack: it is listed in the middle of the list of blogs BW Online offers, it does not contain the full archive yet, and it does not really pass the Feed Validator test at this point.

But hey, it is great that they listened to their readers. Keep up the good work, just comments and trackbacks to go.

And, hum, if you could make blogs@businessweek.com a real mailbox, that'd be cool as well.

Comments

[Brad Feld]

There actually is an RSS feed - you've just got to look for it. If you use NewsGator Online and Add Feed, it'll auto-discover it. Interestingly, NewsGator Outlook didn't (gotta get all the feed discovery synced across all products.)

That said, I totally agree with your note to Business Week. Blogs have some fun characteristics (comments / trackbacks) that are real differences from traditional media.

[Jeff Clavier]

Unfortunately, the feed that is autodiscovered is the TopNews one :-).