Sunday, June 13, 2004

Maybe the IETF has found the answer for itself and for the W3C. Perhaps both should start processes to create a format for syndication and protocal for content management. Maybe then we can see the strengths of each process. Standards organizations compete. Maybe if each had to work to get developer and content support, a better format will emerge. It's been proven that competition makes for better listening.  

Time: Meet Joe Blog. 

Gotta try the Findory Blogory. Love the name.  

Terry Heaton: "The Federal Communications Commission yesterday took the first step towards reassigning frequencies to enable high-speed, wireless broadband in the US." 

I can now convert audio cassettes to MP3 format. The first things I'm going to convert are exercises and lectures from Jeru, my meditation teacher. This is really important because he died a few years ago, and the tapes are not easily available, if they are available at all. I'm converting one of two Quantum Light Breath tapes first. Amazing stuff. I have more Jeru tapes. I also have a recording of a keynote with Bill Gates, Larry Tesler, Dave Liddle, Esther Dyson and myself from 1991. This is so cooool. 

Turns out I only have a tape for half of the 1991 keynote. It ends at the moment I ask Bill Gates and Larry Tesler to work with each other on a common interapplication communication layer. Tesler was an exec at Apple and they had the Apple Event Manager. Later in the session, Gates said he'd bake it into Windows if Apple would give it to them. In the end, Apple wouldn't answer the question, and it never happened. How different the world might be today if they had gotten together on this in 1991. Desktop networking could have been much more powerful much sooner. I'll have the recording available for download tomorrow morning. It's 35MB. 

Adam took Freecache for a ride. 

Daniel Abrams wonders about SOAP interop. 

Scoble is cleaning out feeds. I'm seeing the opposite problem. I am now hosting the weblogs.com sites started in Y2K, most of which are inactive (or so it seems, I've yet to quantify this). All of a sudden I'm hosting hundreds of inactive RSS feeds, and since this base of sites was where RSS was bootstrapped, there are a fair number of subscribers. I need a way to tell the aggregators, forget it, these sites are in mothballs, stop asking for the feed. A couple of years ago I proposed a way to do this, but as far as I know only Radio and NetNewsWire support it. If you know of other aggregators that do, please let me know. It's important to support both HTTP and XML level redirects because some authors don't have control over HTTP. 

James Robertson reports that BottomFeeder supports redirects per the 2002 proposal. 

Rogers Cadenhead and Sam Ruby comment. 

Ben Hammersley, a reporter for The Guardian, objects to the idea of XML-based redirects. I've heard this before of course, but the fact is, a lot of people can't change how their HTTP server works. Still it's important that they be able to tell aggregators that their feed has moved, or that their feed is finished. It's so disheartening to see this constantly reduced to religious terms, when it's a user issue. Further, Hammersley is not an independent observer, as this post clearly shows, he has a strong partisan opinion. Even so, the Guardian, a respected UK publication, has assigned him to report on developments in the RSS community as if he were independent. Puzzling.