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Michael Fraase says RCS is a "a swing and a miss." Hmm. Well, I sure hope not. It's funny, Michael calls me a sneaky bastard, but the way he does it, I like the way it feels. Sure makes for an interesting discussion over a few days among friends.   I wanted to give it some thought before responding to Michael, but then I stumbled across this post on the Blogsisters site that makes an important point. Centralized services go down or get clogged and require a lot of supervision. The design of RCS is part of a bet I made in Y2K that desktop websites are the way of the future, because the users get full control of their data, and they don't have to share a CPU with lots of other users. CPUs are cheap. People cost a lot more. There's a lot of power on today's desktop machines that isn't well-utilized. Anyway, in a perfect world, we wouldn't even need RCS, but net bandwidth being what it is, and NATs and so forth, we need something lightweight that's centralized to glue groups of people together. That's the premise of Radio Community Server. As kind of a demo, here's what the Windows Performance Monitor looks like on a modern $2K machine running Radio 8. Look, it's actually doing some work. (Note: I have a huge www folder and upstreaming is turned on.) Adam Curry is bootstrapping euro.weblogs.com. Here's the public view of a virtually empty RCS. And here's the very helpful Help page.  Daniel Salber has an RSS feed for VersionTracker. A very good idea. Done with Mark Paschal's Stapler tool for Radio. Hey Glenn has an RSS feed too. I'm subscribing right away. Russ Lipton explains the diff betw posts and stories. Julian Bond nails it. "From what can be seen of RCS at the moment, it could have been coded on many different platforms. The functionality could have been written in PHP, Python, PERL, as an Apache MOD in C++, Java, .NET and probably many others." That's correct. All formats and protocols implemented by RCS could be implemented in any environment that has support for XML, SOAP and XML-RPC; commercial or open source. Specs for every format and protocol on our websites. The basis for competition is performance, price and ease of use. Ours community server runs in Frontier and Radio, with the advantages that come from that. But there are lots of ways to slice it. Simon Fell: "I wonder if Dave is expecting any competition in the RCS space." 10/24/96: "The future's not ours to see." Chris Pirillo: "Hey retard! Why didn't you make a better product?" Archive of the RCS-DEV mail list for March 2002. This is the list we're using to test the software; when we go live this will be the support list for Radio Community Server. Here's some good news. Erin Clerico of Weblogger, the commercial Manila hosting service, has his Radio Community Server running.  Evan Williams of Blogger states his professional goal for the next six months. "Make my company/Blogger not dependent on me." Amen to that. A friend shared an idea on this. You don't actually have a business until you can take a sustained break, and work (and revenue) continues. This is what every business owner wants, and it's elusive. It seems that the economics only work if you're constantly feeding the machine, personally. Sam Devore is taking notes on his Radio Community Server. "If there was a callback on the server when a new page came in I could call to the mainResponder search engine to index the page." There is such a callback. This is a docs-writing weekend here. Ernie the Attorney: "Who's to say what really happened?" Archive.Org has a copy of Jeff Bezo's open letter about patents, which I pointed to from Scripting News a couple of years ago. Ted Conway sent the original pointer, which now redirects to a page about Amazon's products. Moral of the story. The Web is fragile. Archive.Org is scotch tape that holds it together. Best wishes to all my friends who are at SXSW in Austin. I wish I could be there. Maybe next year. Send me pointers to stories from the show. I'm happy to be your remote blogger. 802.11b: Apple Base Station for Half Price. Adam: "Last night we premiered the BlogNewsNetwork radio show on dutch public broadcaster BNN."  Yesterday, as part of the mop-up on Radio Community Server, I did a rewrite of the notification code on the server-side. Some people had asked what the Please Notify entries on their Events pages are about. Here's the scoop. Some RSS feeds have an element in their header called "cloud" that tells a reader how to subscribe to the channel. When you're subscribed to such a feed, Radio automatically requests notification. That's what Please Notify is about. Then when it changes, if everything goes well, the cloud sends a short message to Radio saying "Hey this resource changed." Then again, Murphy-willing, your Radio reads the feed and if there really are new items, it adds them to your News Aggregator page. Until yesterday, this feature of the community server was turned off, now it's back on, and appears to be working. Yesterday I had a great phone talk with Seth Dillingham about search engines, Jabber, and the Frontier community. He's a nice guy and I appreciate that. I like working with him. That's all I wanted to say. |
 
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