Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Mashup Camp this weekend in Santa Clara. 

Wired: "Lycos is selling its Wired News unit to Condé Nast Publications for $25 million." 

Rafat Ali posted three screen shots of My Times Beta which appears to be yet another me-too clone of My.Netscape, 1999. It was a low leverage approach to news back then, and it hasn't gotten any better in the last seven years. Here's what My.UserLand looked like in the same period. You can see it was River of News, and it worked. It's a lost practice. I found it hard to explain to Joe Hewitt, a super-bright Firefox guy. He should know all about this approach. Maybe it's time to have a one-day seminar for UI designers on how to do RSS readers.  

Staci Kramer reviews My Times Beta.  

A podcast of the reading of the proclamation of RSS Days, by yours truly. 

Angus McDonald: "The ephemeral nature of Wikipedia edits is one of the main problems that I have with trusting it for anything other than fun research on hobby topics." 

Jeff Jarvis got an outrageous comment from someone who says he works for Dell.  

Rex Hammock: "The old baseball catcher wheeling across the screen with car crash sound effects gag is always good for a laugh." 

Four years ago: "Tomorrow it will be four weeks of no smoking." 

Zimbio has an interesting OPML feature.  

While you're waiting for the new Rocketboom, get the Best of Rocketboom, via BitTorrent. 

pubDates in the future 

About pubDates, the RSS 2.0 spec says: "Its value is a date, indicating when the item was published. If it's a date in the future, aggregators may choose to not display the item until that date."

A couple of real-world use-cases might help you understand why a pubDate in the future makes sense.

My parents receive the NY Times via home delivery. The Sunday magazine sometimes arrives with the Friday paper. Its publication date is Sunday.

Visit a news stand and look at the publication dates of the magazines. Most of them are in the future, some way in the future.