Monday, February 16, 2004

The Rave Award nominees for 2004 are up. I'm nominated in the Software Designer category, for RSS, along with the designers of Friendster, Skype, BitTorrent and iTunes. 

Observations about RSS. It's doing the job. It's right up there with social networks, VOIP, the latest in file sharing, and the Internet music revolution. It's the only XML format on the list. HTTP was good enough, as was HTML, and there's certainly nothing wrong with RSS, clearly, because it works, demonstrably. It's a great format, and of course some people don't like it, and that's their right. But it's a great day for us, the community of people who use and build on RSS. I love RSS, with pride.  

Law Tech Guru follows up on yesterday's post on Atom vs RSS. 

The concept of friendship is much-discussed these days in the blogosphere. For a refresher, I turned to a couple of essays I wrote last September when my uncle died suddenly. We don't have many friends, true friends, people who will listen to anything we want to talk about. I was confused then, but not now. My uncle was a friend, and I still miss him, terribly.  

BBC: "According to a new survey, UK women are now spending more money online than men for the first ever time." 

AP: "Howard Dean revealed Monday that national campaign chairman Steve Grossman has departed." 

Roy Neel: "There have been a lot of rumors around today about Gov Dean's intentions after the Wisconsin primary." 

Several people sent a pointer to this page on the Feedster site, which is pretty clearly the source for the page on the Kerry site, below. They have similar pages for other candidates. What's interesting (and if true wrong) is that they've chosen weblogs that support the candidates to include in the synthetic feed for each candidate. What's the logic behind that? They might as well call the project The Echo Chamber. Aside from that, they have me down as a Kerry supporter? I don't recall making such a declaration. Would you say the NY Times is a Kerry supporter? We're getting confused here. At the same time Taegan Goddard is starting a political aggregator, but he's not including blogs, only pros. Oy. We need some philosophy here. 

Something interesting is going on at the Kerry site? Hmmm. Some kind of aggregator. Crawling Scripting News among others. A Feedster app? Here's my guess on how it works -- any blog posts on any of the sites they subscribe to that contains the word "Kerry" is included on their page. If so, we can probably do better. For example, I have a category for Kerry, with its own RSS feed. That way I can deliberately route something to their site. (That's why I did it that way, anticipating this application.) 

I bought a new microphone for our Thursday evening meetings. The webcasts should be much better, Murphy-willing. 

Mike Walsh: "I decided to get a copy of my credit report." 

Adam has arrived in Iraq. Pictures from the trip. 

Washington Post: "Will Google get steamrolled like Netscape?" 

It's a bank holiday in the US. Happy birthday to Presidents Washington and Lincoln. It's an efficiency. We used to have two holidays, one for each. I think they collapsed them into one so we could have a January holiday for Martin Luther King. Good deal. George could not tell a lie, Abe freed the slaves, and MLK had a dream.  

Postscript: It's not true that President's Day is the result of merging the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington. Nixon said it is the "holiday set aside to honor all presidents, even myself." Heh. I don't think anyone's celebrating Tricky Dick. I'd love to see a picture of Dubya with Nixon. Now that would be cool, even if it were a fake.  

Caucuses and jury duty make you smarter. So do weblogs, if you use them the same way, to share ideas.  

Snopes exposes the fake Republican picture of Kerry and Jane Fonda. 

A rare unretouched photo of a young George W Bush visiting the Nixon White House around the same time John Kerry was appearing with Jane Fonda.