Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Adam Kalsey: "Yahoo is beta testing an RSS Aggregator." 

We're looking into this on the RSS-User list. 

Zawodny, who works at Yahoo and ought to know, says it's a bug. That reminds me of a story someone told on stage at Esther Dyson's conference in the heyday of Lotus 1-2-3. He imagined -- what if, at random, Lotus version 5.0 magically appeared on his computer one day. It's just a pattern of bits, it's improbable, for sure, but it could happen. Think of all the millions of dollars that he would have made, and all the millions that Lotus would have lost. So fast-forward to 2004, Yahoo has a bug that somehow makes it appear as if they have a built-in RSS aggregator. Hmmm. I suppose stranger things have happened?  

Doc Searls quotes Jimmy Guterman in Business 2.0 on weblogs. "We won't enjoy some avalanche of great new independent presses tearing down the media monoliths or something similarly utopian," says Guterman. "The old-timers will whine about how the good old days were better." Glad to know that. Anyway, Clay Shirky isn't a blogger, he's more of an anti-blogger. Does Guterman read the people he writes about? That's the cool thing about weblogs, you don't have to guess what people think. Anyway, I've gotten used to getting pushed aside. It's happened over and over. That's life. I'm not doing this because I want to be popular, I'm doing it because I believe we need more people telling us what they see. Do I think it will revolutionize journalism? I think it is already doing that. Will it tear down the media monoliths? They're doing a pretty good job of that on their own. Would I like to see them torn down? Yes if they get in the way. Are they now in the way? No. Had Guterman called I could have explained this. Instead he wrote a stupid mindless piece, all stereotype and caricature and zero insight. Too bad because he's a smart guy. He wrote a great series about content management in The Industry Standard in the 90s. Back then I wrote him to explain how Vignette and Interwoven et al were doing it wrong, and how weblogs were the way of the future. I wonder if we could get an acknowledgement of that Jimmy? I don't think we're quite as dumb as you say we are.  

Three years ago: "Most of the technologists I know have very high integrity, as much as most doctors, lawyers and cops. However because we have no rules, we're vulnerable to cheap shots and pretenders. That's the other side, the presumption of lack of integrity, and the tech press takes advantage of this." 

The Top 100 feeds is being recalc'd every five minutes. Think of the set of feeds it defines, like you'd think of a stock index. Now imagine an aggregator that was automatically subscribed to all the feeds in the Top 100. I'm working on this, and it's nice. 

NewsGator: "Users who subscribe to NewsGator Online Services can now synchronize their subscriptions across multiple machines." 

Daniel Berlinger on the Atom process. "RSD was the clear winner, but Joe did not revise his spec to match the outcome."  

Chicago Sun-Times: "The technology guru behind the scenes is Jenny Levine, Internet development specialist for Chicago's Suburban Library System, based in west suburban Burr Ridge. Her efforts to take libraries into the digital age started seven years ago, when she offered free dial-up Internet access for patrons of the Grand Prairie Public Library District in south suburban Hazel Crest." 

The Nation: "Gillespie, who is supposedly trying to reelect President Bush, has been working overtime to publicize comparisons of of the Republican chief executive to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler." 

Notes from Andrew's first getting-started-with-weblogs class at MIT. 

Ed Cone is doing a weblogs class at UNC-Greensboro. 

How to participate in the new OPML aggregator, for people with weblogs at Harvard Law. The instructions work for anyone with a Manila site, and can be adapted to any other environment. Note the Creative Commons attribution/share-alike license at the bottom of the page. 

Isn't it amazing what's happening between India and Pakistan? 

Speaking of amazing things, according to The Daily Mirror, Diana predicted her own death, "in my car, brake failure and serious head injury," at the hand of her husband, Charles. 

Wes Felter: "I wonder how much money Apple wasted adding ECC to the U3 north bridge when they could have just done it right the first time?" 

USA Today: "Dean still tops the Democratic field in the national survey, at 24%, but the 21-point lead he held over Clark less than a month ago has narrowed to just 4 percentage points, within the poll's margin of error." 

NY Times: "The first color photography of the Spirit mission, made public on Tuesday, showed that the robotic rover was resting on a broad, ruddy plain of Mars among gray rocks of all sizes and shapes, streaks of windblown dust tracks, a patch of cohesive soil that looks like mud but cannot be and hills set against a pink sky on the distant horizon." 

A fantastic photo of my grandfather, Rudy Kiesler, posing with a bunch of pilots and redneck cops, wearing a cowboy hat, in front of a commercial airplane, taken in the 50s or 60s. It's reasonable to assume that this picture will be in the banner of Scripting News, in some fashion, someday.  

An excellent Bush in 30 Seconds ad, no Hitler. Via Heilman. 

Steven Cohen: "So, why did I change back to Blogger, a piece of software that I had written off about a year ago?" 

NY Times: "The Mini is available in five colors." 

Russell Beattie: "Total let down. No cool-ass products, and the miniPod is too expensive." 

Zawodny writes great headline.