Comments

Wow, what a great catch! And what an interesting observation... VMware never ceases to amaze me. They certainly don't sit around idle, do they?

By  David Marshall, at Wednesday, June 14, 2006 4:55:00 AM 

You have a great site.
It would be nice if you could find a comparison(s) between the various VMware/Microsoft server/workstation products, for example, 'ease of use,' features, hardware requirements, speed, etc. etc.
Thank you, Tom

By  Anonymous, at Wednesday, June 14, 2006 5:02:00 PM 

Also...

VM Integrity?????

By  Anonymous, at Wednesday, June 14, 2006 7:18:00 PM 

Tom,
thank you for reading virtualization.info and providing such a great feedback!

Stay tuned cause you'll see so much news here in the coming months...

By  alessandro, at Wednesday, June 14, 2006 7:47:00 PM 

Just wanted to let you know that I'm unsubscribing from your RSS feed today and taking this site off my bookmarks. The reason?

Your site is already mostly just copy and paste. And I mean *huge* amounts of copying and pasting. Can't you put some work into it? Write some original content? Share your opinion?

Then to top that off, you put ads in your RSS feed?? Aren't the ads on the site enough? You have to put it in your feed too? The RSS feed is there so I can click through to your site (where I can view ads if you want to put them there). It's not there for you to put lame ads in.

So anyway, just wanted to let you know that you're losing a long-time reader today so you'll be able to (hopefully) correct some of these problems before they drive more people away.

P.S.: What's with this broken 'word verification' crap in your comments? Can't you use Haloscan.com for your comments so we don't have to decipher this thing just to put a comment through?

By  Jon, at Thursday, June 15, 2006 12:58:00 AM 

Jon,
first of all thank you for being a long time virtualization.info reader.

I hope the following answer, which you possibly won't read cause already unsubscribed, will clarity some questions many other readers could have about virtualization.info:

1) virtualization.info started 3 years ago (initially called Blue Alliance Project on a totally different URL) to satisfy a very precise, personal need: collect the few, sparse informations available on the web about this emerging market.
At the same time, in 2003, I wanted to evangelize a technology which changed my way of working forever and the only way to do that was posting every single piece of news around.

Today, 3 years later, literally everybody, every day is writing about virtualization, often abusing the term (but this is another topic), and the virtualization.info role changed: from a simple aggregation point it became a filtering and aggregation point.

What you defined (and I absolutely understand it would appear that way from outside) as "mostly just copy and paste" is actually an overwhelming task: monitoring over 500 news sources (including popular tech portals, blogs, forums, newsgroups, etc.), filter out reduntant news, evalutating remaining ones and discard informations which are not adding any new informations to the scene.
This "mostly just copy and paste" take several hours per day of work and believe me: it cannot be automated, because news have to be evaluated, understood, investigated, and sometimes I have to contact PR folks or vendors itself to be sure the news is worth to be mentioned, before simply copy and paste.

While virtualization.info is offering its readers this filtering service, appearing as a mere quoting, other blogs takes 2 alternative approaches:

a) consolidate every single information available (which is a non-sense at today in my humble opinion for reasons I wrote above)
b) comment over a press release or another site news: the appearance is a value-added article but if you carefully read it you'll see the content is pretty indentical to the original.
So you have 20-30 news sources saying exactly the same thing, which is the content of a press release, just with different words.
I refuse to take the same approach and prefer, if nothing notable can be added to the topic, to simply copy and paste press release, which already has 99% of times all informations you need.


You asked for original contents: there are a lot of concurring factors contribuing here.
The main three are: the changing scene, the changing role of virtualization.info in the scene, resources available on virtualization.info.

As I said above the scene changed and virtualization passed from a geek toy to an industry primary need.
At the same time virtualization.info reached volumes of visitors like 100,000 / month.

In these conditions I understood from myself that original contents are a new, impellent need, but some time is necessary to reshape the mission and organize things accordingly.
virtualization.info counts just on 1 resource: myself. And I can assure you that I already commit all possible time for a human to the project.
In other words: original contents are coming, but will take time, and will always depend on availability.


You asked for personal opinions: readers who wrote me by email can testify I'm always available (within a very short amount of time) for giving my point of view on technologies or products.
If this didn't happen in the form of public blog posts it still depends on the lack of time. This will change in future as I already said.


2) Ads on top of this huge copy and paste permits me to allocate all the time I justified in my first point.
Without the small revenue which they grants I couldn't dedicate virtualization.info the time it deserves today, and surely I wouldn't be able, tomorrow, to offer more original contents.

I perfectly understand some readers find them annoying or even disturbing, and in many site restyiling I tried to balance invasivity with profit effectiveness.
But I never prevented users to have a second chance: both RSS (read my point 3) and new email subscription are ad-less.


3) there are no ads in the RSS feed and, differently from other sites, virtualization.info feeds are full so you are not obliged to receive it and click to go back at the site, completely avoiding any ad.
So I really have no idea of where you saw ad (please note that I've just double-checked immediately before writing this answer).


4) the Blogger word verification feature is there to protect readers from the huge amount of spam, not bother them.
You are reporting is "crap" but sincerely since almost 1 year I implemented it I never had a single problem, and I think you can imagine I work with it most of the time, answering back all readers comments.

By  alessandro, at Thursday, June 15, 2006 2:06:00 AM 

Alessandro--Thanks for taking the time to reply instead of just deleting the comment (which I figured would happen as soon as you read it). It's good to see that you take the time to reply even if it is a criticism.

I understand that there is a lot of virtualization information coming out recently and one of the things I like about your blog is that you try to cover a greater range of them than other virtualization oriented blogs. However it'd be nice to see less copying-and-pasting and more summarizing with a link off site to the article. It'd be nice to see posts like this:
http://www.virtualization.info/2006/05/microsoft-extends-virtualization.html with less copy-and-paste and more of a 1 paragraph summary summary instead with a link to the full article.

About RSS ads: they are pretty much 90% of the reason I ranted above. Every entry in your feed has the text "Bandwidth saved by RSScache.com (http://www.rsscache.com)" and every couple of posts there's a full blown ad formatted to look like a blog post. Here's a screenshot:
http://aycu33.webshots.com/image/312/1343815969138040050_rs.jpg

Your reply has increased my confidence in your blog and would certainly be willing to re-subscribe if you could address these issues (I'm subscribed to the comment feed through cocomment so I can see replies to comments without coming here).

By  Jon, at Thursday, June 15, 2006 2:22:00 AM 

Jon,
I'm glad you are still there to answer back.

The article you mentioned actually is an official press release I quoted as usual, but luckily already summarized informations in 1 paragraph.

More often, mostly in the last period (so I can imagine you had the worst impression recently), some press releases contains more and more informations I feel are important for readers, so my copy & paste are larger.
I don't want virtualization.info readers miss critical details.

In the future I'll try to squeeze as much as possible. Promised.


About the RSS ad: I'm not sure but the screenshot you provided seems from Bloglines (correct me if I'm wrong).
In any case I was totally unaware of ad-injection and have no possibilities to modify the situation (and BTW: I don't take a single penny from the operation).
(I think that sooner or later all online feed aggregators will use this trick to survive)

I just can assure that there are no ads in the feed and you'll not see them with other offline aggregators.

By  alessandro, at Thursday, June 15, 2006 12:43:00 PM 

"About the RSS ad: I'm not sure but the screenshot you provided seems from Bloglines (correct me if I'm wrong)"

I looked at where the ad link was going to and apparently the ad was inserted by the company that used to host your feed (RSScache). I noticed earlier today that you're now using Feedburner, added that feed instead and the ads in the feed went away.

I guess it was just RSScache inserting those ads (and that's quite annoying).

Thanks for the info.

By  Jon, at Friday, June 16, 2006 3:19:00 AM 

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