Monday, January 16, 2006

Now that I have a scanner I can share the diagram I've been drawing for people to explain the HyperCamp concept.  

In the fall of 1999, when RSS was still brand-new, I started a site called SalonHerringWiredFool.Com. It was an aggregate of the flow of the four sites: 1. Salon, 2. Red Herring, 3. Wired News and 4. Motley Fool. Four of the early adopters, aggregated into one flow, it helped to evangelize RSS. Today, this idea would be considered controversial, although back then hardly anyone noticed.  

New doc: How to edit a reading list with the OPML Editor. 

I've added a top-level section to the OPML Docs directory for Reading Lists.  

Hey I have a new scanner. It's pretty cooooool.  

I missed the four year anniversary of Radio 8 on the 11th. When the software shipped, the home page of scripting.com was briefly replaced by a big number 8. Some people thought it was too commercial. I liked it then, and I still do. 

Reading lists may solve an old but vexing problem in the RSS world. Consider this great feed from NPR. It's special coverage for the Alito hearings. Highly relevant today, but next week it will be history. Maybe it will turn out to be a pivotal moment in US history, maybe not. We don't know. They did a good thing by making a feed out of it. But here's the rub, next week and the week after, when it's history, all those aggregators will still be checking it, even though it will never again be updated. What a waste of resources. Now, in the future, you'll just subscribe to the NPR current topics reading list (caveat: it doesn't yet exist) and they'll automatically subscribe for you when the hearings are current, and then unsub when the hearings are over.  

I used the Alito feed as an example in the docs.  

I heard they gave Martin Luther King grief when he came out against the Vietnam War. He explained that he had equal rights, and was entitled to express an opinion about a matter of national interest. People told him to stick to civil rights. I know how he feels. People tell me to stick to technology. To which I say pfui. You think I worked so hard to create this stuff just so other people could tell me what to think about politics? NFW. 

Aside from that, the Vietnam War was a civil rights issue, because it sucked resources away from the War on Poverty, much the same way Iraq is a race issue in the US because it sucks resources from the recovery of New Orleans.  

I began the morning writing docs, and told iTunes to play me random music. It found an oldie but goodie that makes me sing and smile. It's Jerry Garcia singing The U.S. Blues. Red and white. Blue suede shoes. I'm Uncle Sam! How do you do? 

Screen shot of the new Subscriptions page in NewsRiver, with the Reading Lists feature completed.  

Here's a page listing the RSS feeds for UK newspapers. He also has an OPML version of the page, an excellent reading list. Reading lists are not a new format, any list of exported subscriptions will work (you might want to validate them to be sure). The key is what the list contains. Suppose you were going to move to the UK in a few months and wanted to get in the flow of news of your new country. Then it would make total sense to subscribe to this reading list. And if any new UK news sources show up, hopefully Dave over in the UK will add them, and if URLs should change, we hope he updates them. A reading-list-aware aggregator, such as NewsRiver, will automatically adjust to any changes in the list.  

Reading lists are simple yet very very powerful. We have a phrase for such things, we call them Mind Bombs. Defined on 8/26/00: "What's a Mind Bomb? An idea that's so strange or powerful that it explodes in your mind. And that's a good thing!" We've gotten out of the habit of talking about mind bombs, but that's going to change. Enough "user generated content" -- let's blow up some minds. I'm tired of all the sanity. And you can quote me on that.