Monday, August 02, 2004

Rick Klau: "All politics is RSS." Amen. 

Radio UserLand has a product manager. Hey how about that. And he's already on the job. I use Radio, using it right now to write this post. I was planning on fixing some bugs. Steve Kirks is a good guy. A true believer.  

Dan Bricklin's response to Charles Cooper re blogging in Boston.  

BTW, now that Dan has an RSS feed, I never miss one of his posts.  

Two interesting letters to the editor of News.Com about bloggers. 

Happiness is more feeds from NPR.  

About the Republicans, lying and the latest terrorist threats. The Republicans are protesting Howard Dean's comments on Sunday suggesting that there's probably at least a little politics in the latest warning from the Homeland Security folks. Dean's conjecture, even if it turns out to be wrong, is reasonable. The President lied about the connection between al Qaeda and Iraq in order to get us to go along with his war, there was no connection, it was obvious then, and totally obvious now. So if he lied to get us to pay billions to fight a war we didn't need to (if our goal was to fight terrorism, which we are told it is) well, why wouldn't he lie now? This is something the President should address, if he wants people to vote for him. At some point I hope even smart Republicans would want some kind of explanation about that. And Bush should also explain why al Qaeda is still in business, almost three years after the 9-11 disaster. How effectively has he used our military, our money, our time, our lives, to make the country safer. And skip the hype, give us some facts, and don't try to change the subject.  

Marc Canter switched from Radio to Movable Type, and finds that some features he depends on are missing.  

Starting to look for bloggers who will cover the RNC. 

Last year on this day: How to name a product. 

And on this day in 2001, a couple of jokes you could tell your niece or nephew.  

New summer-like header graphic. 

These are the what they call the dog days of summer. In NYC at a little after 8AM it's already 80 degrees, 100 percent humidity. That's one reason I'm heading west on Wednesday, to get a taste of Pacific dry warmth and cool nights before heading south on the east coast by car.  

I'm in Seattle Wednesday through Saturday, then down to San Francisco Sunday through Tuesday, then back to NY. Robert Scoble is generously hosting a dinner and a BBQ. I am available for dinner on Sunday in San Francisco, if people are interested. I'd love to get together to talk about convention blogging, as it's still very fresh on my mind. A good time to do a brain dump.  

CBS: "South Korean Web site operator Daum Communications said it's buying Lycos from Terra Lycos for $95 million, according to published reports." 

Question for Yahoo, Google, Bloglines, anyone else who wants to run a centralized aggregation service. I can't speak for anyone else, but the user interface I want is the one in the Convention Bloggers site. It's derived from Radio's aggregator, which was derived from My.UserLand. It's designed to let the reader skim over hundreds of articles in just a few minutes. It works. Why mess around emulating three-paned email interfaces. In my humble opinion, if you just emulated this interface you'd clean up.  

Forbes has 42 new RSS feeds. A great way to start a new week. (Thanks to Steve Rubel for the link.) 

Jonathan Schwartz: "Whoever owns Novell controls the OS on which IBM's future depends."