It's even worse than it appears..
Friday, April 7, 2023
Podcast: How RSS 2.0 happened from my POV. 15 minutes.#
It seems the most interesting so-far unexplored territory in chatbots is news. A place you can go to find out what happened recently and get reports in plain language that you can understand. Without any of the usual filler copy or adware. And if they leave out the bit of info that everyone reading it would want (why do news orgs always do that) you can ask a follow-up question. So I started by converting the NYT Most Recent Headlines feed to Markdown, created a new bot on chatthing.ai, and fed it a copy of the feed. I asked what's new, and while the reply was not formatted very nicely -- it answered the freaking question. A new kind of feed reader. It'll be interesting to see where this goes. #
My NYT newsbot now has NBA news. I still have to update it manually, I'm sure it'll be automated soon enough. 😄#
How typical of Google. They could easily have implemented podcasting as the open format it is, but no one is forcing them to, so Google chooses to lock us all in, a company that would not exist if not for the open web.#
NYT Newsbot, embedded#
  • There are three feeds in this bot's database -- NYT Recent Headlines, Personal Technology and NBA. I'll be adding more. But for right now you can ask questions about recent events in those areas. #
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Last update: Friday April 7, 2023; 4:56 PM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)