Thursday, September 29, 2005

See the TechCrunch Directory in the right margin? It's new! 

Mike Arrington: "We’ve created a directory, in OPML format, of every TechCrunch company profile." 

Scoble: "I will switch to the blogging tool that outputs OPML automatically like what Michael Arrington did by hand." 

Niall Kennedy created a template that teaches Movable Type how to produce categorized OPML per Scoble's request. And it works. Here's a screen shot of Niall's OPML in my outliner. And here's the same outline viewed through my directory browser. Ahhhhh. That's the sound of developers and users partying together. "You can get anything you want..." 

Next up, I got an email from Matt Mullenweg saying that he's got every blog on wordpress.com supporting categorized OPML. It works. I was able to browse his OPML. "Walk right in, it's around the back...." 

Today's song: "You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant. You can get anything you want. At Alice's Restaurant. Walk right in it's around the back, just a half a mile from the railroad track. And you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant." 

Glad to see Harvard support RSS 2.0.  

A year ago yesterday, Doc Searls predicted there would be hundreds of thousands, "maybe even millions" of hits on Google for podcast. Doc was actually thinking small, it turns out. According to Cameron Relly, there are over 61 million hits. How's that for a meme. Yo Adam, we actually created something. Feels good. 

In February of this year, Rex Hammock explained how things like podcasting happen.  

Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder about the propriety of a US government agency doing a deal with Google? Maybe there's nothing wrong with it, after all software companies sell stuff to the government all the time. But who's the customer here. Hard to tell.  

Jeff Jarvis may need meeting space in SF next week.  

Went over to see Mike Arrington, we talked about the new directory and came to an interesting place. It all would have been easier if WordPress, the blogging software he uses, produced an OPML file listing all the articles in his blog, according to the category they appear in. Then Mike took it to the next place. Once in OPML, he could do a more robust categorization. Two-way. Exactly! 

From Scott Young comes news that a public beta of Manila 9.6 is now available. 

With the new version of Flash out, it's time to renew the request for a weblog-viewer in Flash, with an integrated Edit This Page style editor.  

Roberts was confirmed as Chief Justice. To be sworn in today. 

Roberts is the name of a fancy supermarket in Woodside, CA. 

Jacob Reider's history of medical weblogs going back to 1998. 

I had "guilty until proven innocent" below. A bunch of readers caught that. Hey it's good to know people are reading.  

Had a doctor's appt today with my GP -- I've been seeing her for 18 years. It was good to get back in the loop. Her 12-year-old daughter has a blog. I apologized.  

DeLay and guilt 

On TV last night the Republicans were either swinging at the Texas prosecutor who indicted Tom DeLay, or calling Democrats names, or saying that Kay Bailey Hutchinson had similar charges leveled at her and they were dropped. I wondered if it occurred to them to shut up. Or maybe to talk about how important it is to have clean elections. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a rule juries must abide by, as long as I'm not on the jury, I can decide he's guilty whenever I want. That they yell, so loudly, saying nothing but dirt, responding only by trying to change the subject, says one thing to me. The trail leads to them. They talk about liberals as if they had a philosophy other than robbing us blind. We're fools for putting up with this, and the Republicans are the worst fools. It's long past time when a person with honor or integrity could support these people.

Where's Alda? 

I just noticed something weird about the picture of the cast on The West Wing on their website. The Democrat candidate played by Jimmy Smits is included in the picture, but the Republican candidate played by Alan Alda is not. What the hell does that mean?