Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Hacking Netflix: What is RSS & Why is it Important? 

I'm now an off-road vehicle, moved-in to my new 1-bedroom apartment on the Seattle waterfront. I'm a city boy now, totally off the road. My car is parked in the garage downstairs, I can walk to almost everything, or so it seems. No more hunting for a net connection, I've got my own. Just a few more touches and I'll be fully civilized.  

Scott Rosenberg: "Russia's brief trajectory from glasnost to perestroika to democracy has now boomeranged straight back to dictatorship." 

Kos is puzzled by my view of weblog comments. Mark accurately quoted me in his article, but didn't (understandably) quote everything I said. I'll write more about this, today is move-in day, the day that I give up my migrant status and become a resident of the great state of Washington. 

A perennial problem with RSS is how does the publisher force an unsubscribe? Shouldn't the publisher have the right to opt-out? Right now there is no mechanism that's broadly supported by aggregators. This has come up many times but always gets mired in the usual hand-wringing and second-guessing of the XML mail lists. If you were looking for a use-case, consider the NY Times Olympics feed. Here's a screen shot of their latest entry. Now the Times presumably can configure their server in a couple of weeks to tell aggregators that the resource is gone. Even so, many aggregators won't notice and will keep polling indefinitely. And many content people can't change their server in this way. I'm no longer on the RSS advisory board, so I won't be playing a role in solving the problem, but it needs to be solved.  

Scott Rosenberg uses MusicMatch, and wants Yahoo to fix it (now that they own it). 

Scoble reports on the Friends Of O'Reilly Camp, which was held this weekend in Sebastapol. Of course, I'm not a member of the club, so I wasn't invited. Boo-hoo, I'm so sad, because it's exactly the kind of environment I thrive in. Anyway I won't do the obvious thing and start the inverse of FOO, where everyone but Friends Of O'Reilly are welcome, although I do have a great name for it -- BOO-FOO, which you have to say out loud, and if you still don't get it, listen to the Zappa's Valley Girl. It would be great if O'Reilly gave it up. I invited Tim to BloggerCon. Esther used to welcome Stewart and vice versa. After the election I bet Kerry and Bush shake hands. It's a big world, there's plenty of room for a book publisher and a random gadfly. Next time, make it inclusive. You'll square the result.  

Wired: "Radical librarians are standing up against the government to protect free speech and fight censorship. 

Just when you thought SUVs couldn't get any larger. 

Yesterday I had time to rewrite the ping handler for weblogs.com, and it seems to be responding better now, knock wood, Praise Murphy. I have another rewrite planned, after we get the open source release of Frontier out. I want to recode the whole thing in C.