Tuesday, February 24, 2004

A vision for the next generation of blogging tools? 

The hot story today is the President's call to amend the US Constitution to prevent gay marriage. You heard it here first: It won't pass. It can't. Homosexuality is becoming fairly accepted in the US. This amendment won't pass anywhere outside the Deep South. This is a political tactic. It's funny that the press won't let the Nader candidacy exist for one second before they question its viability. This idea is impossible. 

BTW, I would endorse a constitutional ban on Donald Trump.  

Elizabeth Drew: "This is no way to pick a possible president." 

Steve Gillmor: "Maybe I should accept one of those Orkut invitations before I run completely out of friends." 

Wired News interviews the author of the USA PATRIOT Act. 

It's time to dump Sprint for Verizon. What phone should I get? 

Rebecca MacKinnon: North Koreans cite John Kerry in positive light. 

The opening act for Ralph Nader on Sunday's Meet the Press was California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was his first appearance on Sunday morning political TV. He was unusually frank for a politician, for example he favored a constitutional amendment that would allow him to be President (he wasn't born in the US, which disqualifies him). He was there to promote two California propositions related to the state's finanical crisis. He said over and over that the two propositions must pass. But he never said what they would do, and the interviewer never asked. So much talk about two propositions, and what they were about never came up. They did show a clip of Sylvester Stallone reacting to a hypothetical Schwarzenegger presidency. Life imitating movies. Reminds of the bit in Sleeper where Woody Allen asks how civilization was destroyed. 

The Tubes have a feed. White punks on RSS.  

A Russian article called RSS For Dummies.  

Olav Junker Kjaer is building a table of Unicode support in XML-RPC libraries. Thanks for doing this. It's good that someone is bothering to get the data instead of just making speeches.  

A new feature on the Share Your OPML site, an Andrew-Dave collaboration, it lists people whose subscription lists are most like yours. Think of it as your personal echo chamber. It's an interesting way to discover new feeds you aren't subscribed to.