Friday, February 11, 2005

NY Times: "Eason Jordan, a senior executive at CNN, resigned on Friday night, citing a tempest he touched off during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos." 

10 points for CNET: "Newsburst allows OPML import and export. If the service doesn't earn your time, your subscriptions go with you." 

People: If your aggregator doesn't make this offer, switch aggregators, immediately, unceremoniously and never look back.  

Update: Now that I've been able to log on to Newsburst, the "stream" tab seems to be a River of News aggregator. If so, they should just nuke everything else, and not require a log-in to see a nice river. Don't make me wait or hunt for the pleasure button. I might not find it.  

Interesting data in the logs. Over 14,000 hits came from one machine at Apple today, and the next two top clients were also from apple.com, leading me to wonder if they're working on some kind of search engine. This has been going on all week, so it's not just one day. 

The Economist has RSS. 

The Economist has Scoble. "...seems to be worth his salary." 

They say he started blogging when he was at NEC. They need better fact checkers. He started blogging when he worked at UserLand. The rest of the bit about his blogging at NEC is pure fiction. I don't think he actually ever blogged about NEC until he was at Microsoft. He certainly didn't engage with legions of gadget lovers. Geez Louise. How do they make this stuff up? Do they have a program that generates it? Okay, Scoble just called. They were wrong about him starting his blog at NEC, he had one when he worked at Fawcette, before he worked at UserLand. So we were both wrong. Mea culpa. He also says his blog when he was at NEC did get quite a following among Tablet PC lovers, esp those at Microsoft, which helped get him his current job.  

12:30PM Eastern: Arrived safely in Chapel Hill. 

Greensboro is cool. The first time I was here, last summer, I missed that. 

I've got a smile on my face. 

Today's an important day in the history of Scripting News, and as it turns out, the history of the web. On this day in 1999, Netscape went public with its RSS reader, the first-ever. It was called My.Netscape.Com, and it was something like a page layout program in a browser. You arranged boxes containing news from a publication or a weblog. They got their service to work with Scripting News (I knew because they were sending me questions about my XMLization). Anyway, the news of their rollout is in the archive for the day, six years ago, and in a DaveNet piece that explained the news to the industry.  

Political Wire surveys news about Dean as the DNC chair. 

Scoble's been pretty busy. Last night he had dinner with the blogger that Google fired (he's also an ex-Microsoft guy). Earlier in the day he spoke to San Jose State journalism students about weblogs. "I was struck by how many students thought they would be working at newspapers in the future. I think I got a few of them to think differently," said Scoble. I also used him as an example in the discussion in Greensboro on Tuesday night.  

Steve Gillmor wrote last night to ask why the Greensboro meetup podcast wasn't in my RSS feed yesterday. It's a long and not a very interesting story. As a make-up, it's in today's feed. Sorry for the omission, thanks for keeping me on my toes Steve!