Saturday, August 26, 2006

Heads-up: NYTimesRiver now includes podcasts. The new feeds were added at about 9PM this evening, so most of the items in the river now are podcasts. This should even out over the next few hours. If you want to listen to the podcast, click on the sound icon. Note that some mobile devices can't play MP3s; this unfortunately includes the Blackberry.  

Something to ponder. How close the various PDA-makers are to something that would kick the iPod in the behind. We just need a quick way to get an MP3 over HTTP. These cell phones, with built-in speakers even, are good at audio.  

NewsRiver feature: Eliminate duplicate stories? 

NewsRiver feature: Goodbye annoying "web bugs!" 

Andrew Baron: "Google Video is set up so that you can actually link to any second in the video." 

I learned something today on my walk that I did not know. Writely, the Google-acquired web-based word processor, can generate RSS. This I have to check out. If it works well, that means that Writely is actually a blogging tool. Could it possibly be that cool? I'll report back. BTW, it came from the NY Times Tech Talk podcast.  

Postscript: Hold on to your hats, Writely supports the Metaweblog API. That's awesome! 

Library Camp East, Darien CT, Sept 25. 

Phil Windley: Which Mobile Device Should I Buy? 

Earlier this week, while trying to sip from a firehose of feedback, Ed Vielmetti pointed out that the BBC river derived from their UK Edition, and that there was more in the World Edition. So it went on my to-do list, and this morning I was able to find them and now they're tributaries.  

Why carry the water, David? 

David Weinberger: "If FOO doesn't make an effort to be diverse, the old boys will just naturally become better friends because they spent 2.25 days camping, eating and peeing together."

As long as you keep carrying their water you'll be peeing with them. The minute you say something honest and honorable, you're out. This is why the tech industry is so rotten.

Tatoo this on your forehead: It only works when it's open to all comers. No matter how much of an "effort" O'Reilly makes, a closed community is still closed.

BTW, keeping it closed is a perfect way to be sure you've got a bubble. If you want sustainable growth, you have to keep investing in strange new ideas. That's what I told John Doerr just after the last bubble burst, but he didn't listen. You guys aren't listening now.

By keeping it nice and closed, and keeping everyone you invite too scared to say what's obvious, you make sure that this little euphoria you think you're having will pop at the first sign of trouble. There's nothing sustainable about what you all are doing.

You need to invest as you're spending, but there's none of that going on. If you have any guts insist that Tim ask me to keynote his Web 2.0 conference and I'll lay out a roadmap for investment. That'll be a good first step toward insurance against this being a bubble.

Why the title works 

In a perfect world every item would have a unique guid.

In a better than perfect world, not only would they all have unique guids, but they'd all be permalinks.

In an even better world, if an item appeared in two or more feeds it would have the same guid (and it would also be a permalink).

But it's not a perfect world, and even if you put it in the spec that it must work the best possible way (as the Atom 1.0 spec did) there's no guarantee that it will actually work that way. But it sure would be nice if it did!

We have to live in a less than perfect world. I know many people think I'm omniscient and all-powerful and it's my fault that the world isn't perfect, so go ahead and blame me, if it makes you feel better, but that's not the point of this piece (although my detractors will surely stop right there).

You can do a decent job of figuring out if you've seen an item before and not show it to the user if you look at the title of the story. Like the situation I describe above, it ain't perfect, but then neither is anything else in the world.

Why the title works...

I noticed that headline writers tend to be creative, they don't come up with different headlines when a story appears in more than one feed, so I tried using that as the guid, it worked! Poof there go the dupes.

Now I'm sure you'll miss some articles as headlines get re-used, but I've found that it's much more likely to go the other way. As a day goes by the editors play with the titles, making slight, subtle editorial changes. I have a table that tracks this, and it can get really humorous. An inside peek into the mind of an editor.

Anyway I thought I should share this bit. Have a great Saturday!