Sunday, March 14, 2004

A.Word.A.Day is an RSS feed now.  

I've arrived in SF a little worse for the wear and tear. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon with Tori, a very good friend from my massage days. She lives in Millbrae. On the ten minute drive from SFO to her house I was reminded why the Bay Area is so blessed. Such vivid colors, such pleasant surroundings. Everything is so clean and sparkly. I realized in an instant that I miss living here (even though I really like Cambridge). I've got a nice car, and a fairly open schedule. Staying in Fisherman's Wharf at a beautiful boutique hotel. Life is good. Looking forward to the Wired awards tomorrow and talking-up the new connection between BitTorrent and RSS that Andrew is cooking up. Adam says it works as advertised. Excellent! 

An excellent Steve Gillmor rant about Scoble, RSS, Allchin, Microsoft and every other thing that's on Steve's mind. 

Observation: Librarians often talk about search engines the way graphic programmers (used to) talk about the Web. Even though the browser has severe limits for users, and the dominant browser is owned by Microsoft, users still want software to run in the browser. Even though search engines point to Web sites, which can contain "illiterate chatter, propaganda and blasts of unintelligible material," users still seem to prefer them to using reference sources at a library. 

Tom Regan blogs at the Christian Science Monitor. I found out about his weblog through the registrants page for BloggerCon II. 

I often find news of RSS through the Referrers page on the site that's home for the RSS 2.0 spec. The news I find is often routed to my RSS category, which of course has an RSS feed, which is mirrored in a box on the right of the site that's home for the RSS 2.0 spec. We've developed and continue to develop new ways to refine information using the tools of the Web. That's why (I think) librarians are so excited about weblogs, RSS and the Web in general. But we should listen carefully when they caution that the Web has not yet caught up with the pre-Web practice.