Sunday, May 23, 2004

Another former US general, Anthony Zinni, has spoken out about the war in Iraq, on this evening's 60 Minutes. He calls for the resignation of the civilians in the Pentagon, all the way up to Rumsfeld. I wonder why he stops there. The President is the one who led us to this disastrous war. At this point I wonder how any American can feel this war was worth it. Every justification we've heard was a lie.  

Scoble: Why can't you all use the XML icon? 

I went to three meetings last week in NYC with publishers, two of whom are currently publishing RSS feeds. The ones who are public have heard from advocates of different formats, saying that they were taking sides in a religious war. Considering that they probably all hear that, it's pretty remarkable how broadly RSS is being supported. As far as I know RSS advocates don't use religious arguments. If you do, please stop. 

Something I didn't know. According to op-ed columnist Jim Kennedy, former Clinton communications director, Colin Powell's "wild" press agent, Emily Miller, tried to terminate Tim Russert's interview with Powell because the interview's ground rules were broken. Raises a question -- why doesn't NBC disclose the ground rules to viewers? 

I'm getting a sense that some of the newer aggregators have a funny way of handling time. Not sure exactly what's going on. I've gotten one complaint about the NY Times feeds which include the items in the order the NY Times provides them. It's never been a problem in Radio's aggregator, it knows if it has seen an item before and if it has, it doesn't present it to the user. I gather some reading software isn't keeping track of what they've already shown the user. This is not a bug in the feeds as some people believe, rather a missing feature in the aggregator. However, I haven't got enough data to be sure, I'm just guessing. We've talked about starting to track features in aggregators and blogging tools at the Berkman Thursday meetings. This is an affirmation of the need of an independent view of the various categories of software in the blogosphere. 

I went to the ballet yesterday, and saw a great movie.