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Microsoft Download Center has an RSS feed. It's very not funky. Bravo!  Steve Gillmor's latest piece is on the "Allchin tax." Jason Wellnitz is blogging the campaign from Iowa. The Florida Dept of Law Enforcement supports RSS. Their intentions are good, but the feed is pretty funky. Janet Kolodzy: "Why have journalistic values when no one believes the media anyway?" SJ Merc: "The latest version of ReplayTV's digital video recorder is notable for the features it lacks." MusicDonkey has an RSS feed. What's the story on MoreStuff4Less.Com?  Steve Gillmor thinks RSS should be all over Steve Ballmer's radar. BTW, I absolutely don't agree that the most powerful application of RSS is to flow it through mail readers. Then it's just email (why not send the bits around by email if that's how you're going to read it). The first aggregator did it right, every hour it scans the feeds, and presents the new bits in reverse chronologic order, kind of like a weblog. Demo. Steve's brother Dan is on an island in Helsinki harbor. Thanks: "We use the same format as that used by weblogs.com." Two years ago today: "A bit of philosophy. What happens when someone dies. People are kind to memory of the person. What a waste. The person you're being kind to is dead. Be kind to people who are alive. Blow their minds. See what comes back." Funky  5/24/98: "It's even better if it has a funky beat, because that puts the smile on your face right away. The funkiness is the smile. Get it?" I want funky in the music I dance to. I don't want funky from a cop, tax collector or doctor. Funky isn't necessarily good or bad. Imho, the content of a feed is the place to be funky. The structure of the feed is a place to be boring. Predictable. Innovate in what you say, be uninnovative in how you deliver it. Most of the time people only hear half of Postel's exhort, be liberal in what you accept (btw XML's philosophy departs from this, rightly). I'm talking about the other half. Be conservative in what you generate. I go one step further. Be conservative in what we generate. It works better if we all generate the same thing. If we have only one way of saying something. That differences reflect true differences, not taste differences, not religious differences. When a techy gets excited because of the expressive power of a format, when there's more than one way to say it, I run the other way, because that's the opposite of what I want -- a format so simple that it's impossible to get it wrong. Don Quixote Guys and gals -- think about it this way -- wouldn't it be great if every blogging tool did Trackback the same way? Wouldn't it be great if every blogging tool supported the same API? Sure it would. And if they don't, who does that help? The big guys. And who loses? The little guys, and the users.  The bad news for today's big guys is that they often become next year's little guys. And if you think it can't happen to Google, just ask Netscape. I came out of retirement and got involved in software again, in 1994, because it seemed we could avoid this kind of michegas, with "flavors" of specs, and bookshelf-size specs (heh, they aren't really specs). When Blogger and MT reinvented RSS, and had the audacity to call it RSS (man that is nasty), you gotta wonder why they did it. I don't know. The only reason that makes sense to me is that they want to keep data interchange a dark art, understood only by a few, and widely considered impossible. That's probably not the reason. As some wise man once said, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Either way, it's bad. Not that I expect software people to ever work together, I've had that idea hammered out of me. I know better now. We're too selfish as individuals to acknowledge that the others exist. I have been Don Quixote about this. Won't happen again. Windmills "Silence, friend Sancho," replied Don Quixote. "The fortunes of war more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations. Moreover I think, and it is the truth, that the same sage Freston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me. But in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword." |
 
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