Scripting News

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 11:55:19 GMT

WSJ: "Is Google slipping?"

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 07:32:48 GMT

My questions for Presidential candidates.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 13:40:14 GMT

NHPR has a series on the Presidential primary.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 13:26:43 GMT

Gnome-Girl: "Doesn't anyone else think monthly 4 day weekends would boost our morale for work?"

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 10:46:27 GMT

Comments here on Wired's article on news aggregators.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 11:45:02 GMT

Text of email sent to BloggerCon subscribers.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 06:56:16 GMT

Good morning. Up early, excited about my first trip to see a presidential candidate in NH, Bob Graham. The talk is in Manchester, New Hampshire's largest city. Approx one hour drive from my front door.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 08:01:35 GMT

Dean Landsman says Yes to an Outlines and the Web BOF at BloggerCon.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 07:03:12 GMT

Michael Feldman, who's been to a couple of Thursdays at Berkman, has a great weblog. Hard to classify. I'm a regular reader. Keep going!

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 07:07:06 GMT

Two years ago: "If you ever get the blues, try getting your car washed."

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 07:09:29 GMT

Three years ago, nodetypes were rolled out. They explain how the type attribute on an OPML outline element works, triggering a callback mechanism in the outliner, which allows it to route to the proper code to process an expand operation. That allows an outliner to be used to browse resources that aren't in memory, that can be located anywhere on the Internet. We got it working for RSS, and it was beautiful. It still works today. Maybe soon it will be time for this innovation to be used by users.

Wired on Aggregators

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 10:34:23 GMT

Wired News: "At heart, RSS is simply a specification that a site uses to produce a page of XML code. The code breaks up each entry or story on a website by title, description and direct link. An aggregator then determines how to display that output in a reader."

Comments. I love how Wired side-stepped the issues around all the angst among techies about whether it's RDF or not. I suspect that the RDF people might not be very happy. But it really hurts forward motion to have the reporters try to cover the pie fight. So on that, thanks Wired, you said there was trouble, but kept going anyway. That's what I did too. That's the right way to go.

Now, I'm not happy that neither this article or Dan Gillmor's piece yesterday, mentioned Radio UserLand. It's a very fine aggregator, and if it wasn't the first, it certainly predated all the ones they did mention. It's in very wide use. I think it's still the best one out there. So I feel sad when an article appears about the category Radio pioneered, over a lot of naysayer's objections, and it isn't even mentioned.

There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you're done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio's aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something.

Reporters, here's a new category of software, scoop your competitors, get the real story, not the easy one.