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Russ Lipton's RadioDocs, on-line, ready for UserLand.  Milestone: My Weblog Outliner posts to Blogger.  Mickey Kaus and Glenn Reynolds (mostly) endorse my plan for newspapers embracing weblogs. Kaus wonders why businesses should pay to associate with newspaper websites. Fair point. I really wanted to say that businesses that have nothing to say (advertising) that interests anyone should perhaps find another business. This is just a paraphrase of part of Doc's philosophy that says that there is no demand for messages, which is why advertising is such a 20th Century concept. BTW, this is the third time around this loop. The first was just after the Davos Y2K meeting, in response to questions about how pubs can make money on the Internet. The second rendition came after the dotcom bust. Note to Kaus, UserLand, a software business, communicates through Scripting News, a weblog. (I'm the CEO.) Where are the permalinks on Kaus's weblog? This evening we released glue scripts for the MetaWeblog API for Frontier and Radio. Is it just me, or do other people think that XML feeds like RSS can help make information more accessible to people with disabilities? What about outliners? Today, an application for Radio's outliner that will be new for many. We've brought a feature from Manila into Radio Community Server, making it possible for people to create Yahoo-like directories that appear in their Radio weblogs. These directories can include other directories. They're built on an open format, OPML; which can be created in any compatible outliner, including Radio's outliner. Viewed another way, directories are hiearchic blogrolls. When you start getting hundreds of links in your blogroll, and start categorizing them, it's time to look for something richer, and that's where directories come in. Several real-world examples of OPML directories. Rick Klau has a directory of law weblogs. Yes! Screen shot of the XML-RPC directory edited in my outliner. It's interesting that they're discussing directories on Blogroots. The first thing I thought of when I saw their list of weblog management tools was "I want that as a directory." About the politics of directories. DMOZ scores points for "open" in comparison to Yahoo, but it is not decentralized. There's still a single owner of each category, and if that person wants to exclude something they can. This, emphatically, is not weblike. The directory I'm envisioning is one that's as open and chaotic as the Web itself. No one owns a category anymore than there is a single place to go for information on a single topic on the Web. We thrive on triangulation, multiple ways to view each subject. Earlier this month I wrote a piece about directories and Google. Perhaps it makes more sense in light of the technology we released today. Now it gets more interesting. I asked Mark Pilgrim to create a list of weblog neighborhood implementations so I could include it in one of our directories to show that you don't have to use our outliner to participate in the decentralized directory of directories. Here's the demo. I included Mark's directory in mine. Then he sent two more lists and I included those too. Note that Mark's lists could have been hierarchies, nested as many levels deep as makes sense. Mark can edit his directories, and within one hour his changes will be reflected in mine. Suggested links go to Mark, not me -- because the directory environment knows that he's the author of his branches, not me. That's why OPML has information about the author. Paolo explains how Radio can be viewed as decentralized Intranet portal software. InfoWorld's readers choice awards form. It's surprising that no weblog software or news aggregators are on the list. Next year, imho, they will dominate. Remember, InfoWorld hired Jon Udell. And it wasn't just for his good looks. Jon Udell: "I'm sure it's true, though no-one can come out and say so, that the FBI are among Google's most intense users. I hope a private network of weblogs will be the next step." Brian Buck is fighting bone cancer, on his weblog. "My first reaction was that of taking on a war." Brian is on the Credits page for Frontier 4. Bravo to Ed Cone for pushing back against one of the great listmakers of our time, Eric Raymond, who did more to divide the software world than just about anyone. An essay about academia and XML. |
 
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