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Back in March 2011 I wrote a piece about how feeds would model Twitter posts. This came up yesterday, after writing a post about app.net, one of the things it uncovered is that there is a service that brings content into app.net through RSS. That's an automatic thing to support for me, because my linkblog is built on RSS. It's easy for me to plug in.
I did. But there's a problem. The software is not prepared to deal with feeds don't have titles on the items. And imho, Twitter posts don't have titles. I wrote about this in 2011, when I implemented the feature in Radio2. That's the software I use today to manage my linkblog.
It's important, if there's any hope of bootstrapping an open network to model what Twitter does, with RSS. To get interop, we need more conventions, beyond what RSS does to model blog posts. Twitter posts != blog posts.
So, here's my linkblog feed, and here's the document I wrote about how it works.
Suggested solution: Just remove the string "No Title" from the rendering. Everything else is fine the way it is.
The Boing Boing recap on my piece on the way the NYT does tech reviews was pretty awful (superficial, sexist, racist, ageist, and pretty much wrong about who I am, and he misread an important part of the post thinking I was criticizing the writing in the Times, rather than the subject of the writing), but it delivered a lot of readers, and the graphic was excellent. I loved the way they put me in a cowboy hat, in the context of one of the best movies ever made, No Country for Old Men.
But even better was this highly Photoshopped graphic, with just me in a cowboy hat. I'm not that skinny, and my face isn't quite that weathered, but man it makes me look and feel good. It's in the right margin of this piece. Click the picture for the full image.
A couple of comments in rebuttal of the BB piece.
Just because your form of racism and sexism is considered acceptable by some doesn't mean it's not racism and sexism, and even more reprehensible than the kind that people (correctly) object to. Dehumanizing people by turning them into labels is very dangerous stuff. It leads to all kinds of brutality, and should never under circumstances be tolerated.
It's not easy for me to say that because I'm in the targeted group. Which is something my grandparents warned me about when I was young, because both sides of my family had to run for their lives during World War II. The memory is pretty fresh in our culture, and the wounds will probably take a few more generations before they completely heal.
Further, how obnoxious it is to drag race, gender and age into a piece about the way the NYT reviews technology. So utterly off-topic. Are there any values at all to the discussion about gender? How this is tolerated is beyond me.
Imho you don't understand gender if you haven't learned about male depression. We are half the species, and frequently talked about, but rarely listened to on this subject. The assumption that we have been given all the advantages is incorrect. There are very important aspects to maleness that are not incorporated into the discussion, and until they are, the problems will persist.
Remember: Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.
I was very pleased to see that the New Yorker has a piece about tech reviews, that agrees with my post. The more I think about it, the more important I think it is to broaden the discussion of technology. We need a Krugman-like columnist in the Times to cover tech the way they discuss economics. It's no more complicated, and no less important.
Your comments are welcome as long as you accept the constraints of the comments guidelines on this blog. If you can't then post your thoughts in your own space, and feel free to send me a link. I'll read it, and might even respond if I have something to say.
