Thursday, January 23, 2003

Perseus killed Chimera Here's an interesting tidbit from a MacSlash thread: Apple had dubbed early builds of Safari, v12-36, if I remember correctly, as Perseus. Anyone that knows their Greek mythology will recall that Perseus was the hero who killed the Chimera. The state of affairs for third party developers is getting even more precarious. Sure, Microsoft has a developer program, but any markets that it wants to own, it does, open APIs be damned. Apple is now following a similar track, recognizing that it's only path to increased market share and profitability is to offer complete solutions, not open just open platforms. There is a long history of Apple subsuming product categories, like personal file sharing, personal web sharing, music players, et al. The latest is web browsers, re Chimera v Safari. If Apple decides to get into weblogs, whould NetNewsWire and iBlog be concerned for their futures? I think so. 9:45:49 PM

RSS ~ credibility networks I found this description of credibility networks interesting. The whole FOAF thing seems to tie in here as well. Why isn't FOAF so simple that its just built-in to my weblog server? NetNewsWire gives me a terribly sexy data consumption rate by giving me great tools to manage my credibility networks. Wondering what a credibility network is? You can probably guess, but I'll explain in my next column. NetNewsWire does two things amazing well, first, it reads RSS feeds. I'm not going to explain RSS here, but I will point you at this. The good news is that most weblogs I care about sport an RSS feed. When I asked Emma why her site didn't, she claimed, "I think weblogs are about the content and the presentation" and she's right... they are. They're also published with the intent that it's reasonably easy to discover and read them. While I appreciate the huge amount of work that goes into sites, I'd argue that without an RSS feed, the individual weblog has less of a chance of being discovered, let alone read because more people can read RSS-based sites than crawl their bookmark files (keep reading re: scalability). Besides, it's just a matter of time before NetNewsWire embeds a browser to gracefully display weblog content in it's fully HTML rendered glory thus making this concern irrelevant to both Emma as well big media types who avoid RSS because of a few of lowering click-thru rates. The other rock star feature of NetNewsWire is its scalability. I discovered this in two distinct phases. Phase #1 we'll call, "What's the RSS-thing all about anyway?" This was when I downloaded the application and subscribed to ten of my favorite weblogs. Now, whenever I schedule it, NetNewsWire pings all the weblogs, finds new articles, and flags them, Depending on the RSS feed, additional sortable data shows up in the table at the top as well as an excerpt or the article in the detail view. The side effect of a successful Phase #1 is Phase #2, "Scale, Scale, Scale". As soon I got in the zone with 20+ feeds, I find more weblogs I want to read and I start adding them to my list because my credibility network is growing. The list grows longer and suddenly fills the entire list. Wait, I don't want to start scrolling, so what do I do? Groups. Using the collapsible tree control, NetNewsWire allows you to group sites and then does a spectacular job of rolling all the new content contained in ALL the sites to the top level. This means that for every group, I only see the content that is hot and juicy. Are you drooling, yet? You should be. NetNewsWire has painlessly scaled to handle hundreds of weblogs for me. This means I'm scanning the fact/fiction/opinion of hundreds of people every minute of every day. I challenged anyone who is currently bookmarked or tabbed based to efficiently read hundreds of weblogs in the time it takes to drink your coffee. If your answer is, "I don't care about hundreds of weblogs", I would suggest you are a state of technical denial where your tool (i.e.: a browser) has limited your vision. Think about it like this, if you were lucky enough to find ten weblogs that you like isn't it possible there are, at least, another ten and wouldn't it great if there were a whole lot more? [Rands in Repose] 9:44:33 PM

The RSS Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades My brotha Steve just started using NetNewsWire, and now he's totally hooked. "Time sink" was what he said. Yeah, but he also added an RSS feed to his PHP-based weblog. Now if I can get him to add the MetaWeblog XML-RPC API, he can be editing his weblog from NNW as well as read all is RSS feeds! Where Next for RSS? "People who hang around with bloggers all know what RSS is (if you don't, I'll introduce it.) RSS is headed for some interesting times as regards client software, traffic management, and business model, and it would be reasonable to expect some breakage along the way. RSS FOR THE UNINITIATED: The history of RSS is fraught and complicated and I'm not going there. To summarize, RSS is a little XML language that you use to describe changes in a web site. Usually this is called an 'RSS feed'. Then all kinds of different programs can read the RSS feed and give you clickable news summaries that mean you don't actually have to visit all those websites unless you know there's something there you want to read. Most people, once they start using RSS to check the news, just don't go back, the amount of time and irritation saved is totally, completely addictive.... When I turn on my laptop in the morning, NetNewsWire goes out and scans 21 RSS feeds. Then it checks up on them at 30-minute intervals after that (this is configurable). I don't know how typical that is, but I know there are people who track way more than I do. There's a problem here - if RSS becomes as wildly popular as a lot of prognosticators (including me) predict, there is going to be an ungodly traffic bulge every morning, and then at half-hour intervals all day. People who read RSS through web-based products like the Userland offering are going to present a much smaller load to the sites providing the RSS. But I think that RSS-reading is going to get wired into Mozilla and IE and Safari and people will just do it from their desktop. Fortunately, I think the Web's caching mechanisms will hold up under the load assuming everyone plays by the rules. Unfortunately, at the moment we're not... I hate to be a wet blanket but I just don't see RSS readers persisting for too long as a standalone application class, this stuff just belongs in the browser. It will take a couple of years for it to get cooked into mainstream browsers in a mature enough form to be usable, so the guys with the RSS-reader software should make hay while the sun shines and start figuring out their Next Big Thing. RSS was driven by the Weblog-technology companies and I suspect they'll continue to do just fine, Weblogging ain't going away any time soon. Also, anyone who does any kind of publishing software had better start offering a real-easy-to-use RSS interface and sooner rather than later or they're just not going to be in the game." [Textuality, via WebReference] Emphasis above is totally mine. I'm up to something like 175 feeds in my aggregator, and it scans once an hour. I can't say "me, too" loudly or often enough. I'm a big believer in RSS (in fact, I've based our entire grant project on it), and I agree that RSS readers will go mainstream and become background like browsers. In fact at this rate, I think RSS will make great headway with PDA and cell phone browsers first. I think there's a huge future for multimedia enclosures in RSS. My plan is to revolutionize communication between Illinois Library Systems using RSS. Resistance is futile! Bwahahahahahahaha [The Shifted Librarian] Well, I'm not sure I agree entirely with the original poster's points. News aggregators *could* be integrated into other apps, but I would suspect it more in email clients rather than web browsers. Even then, there are few well integrated email cients (e.g. Entourage!). But there is so much more that I want from a news aggregator that I think a standalone product could do very well. 9:38:44 PM

b-Blogs: The Next Level of Collaboration Clickz; Meet the B-Blog Kathleen Goodwin discusses the implications of weblogs as business tools. From a marketing perspective she points out the business benefits such as customer dialog forums, positioning those within your company as niche industry experts, and providing open communication with business partners. The beauty of the weblog is that it is extremely cheap compared to any other form of collaboration. But, does it have enough features to do the job? Posted by Steve Hall at 11:58 AM [marketingfix] It's good to see more mainstream press cover the weblog phenom, but this article was a bit skimpy, in my opinion. Perhaps it felt that way because it feels like such old news. Thenagain, her examples were kinda interesting. 9:31:47 PM

In escrow We got back the signed offer last night, with only a slight change request from the sellers. They didn't even counter offer, just wanted to extend escrow to 45 days from 29. Fine with us. We're excited and anxious all at once! I thought we'd sleep better last night than the night before, but alas, that was not the case. There's a lot to do: secure a loan, finalize our down payment, organize the move, set up utilities (inc ISP and DSL!), move servers, give notice... it's the coordination of all these activities that seems the most challenging. Overall, though, we feel really blessed. We got our apartment much the same way we found this house. One week, Paulette saw it in the paper, and we spent days just talking about the significance of moving in together. By the time we had decided to pursue it, we figured the apartment was already taken. But lo and behold, it showed up in my RentTech daily mailing the following Friday. We went by on Saturday, and were surprised to be the only ones there. The landlady explained that the unit had been rented, but had fallen thru, and the print ad just missed the deadline. We were literally the only ones to see it, and a week later we got the place. Well, this house is almost the exact same story. Paulette saw it in the paper one week, but it was the holidays and we were too busy. Now that the new year is finally started, I think we both knew we had to start taking house-hunting seriously. Lo and behold, the unit popped up again in our automated inbox searches. When we went to look at it, the broker explained that he hadn't given proper notice to the tenant, so no one could see the place. We went back the next day, where only one other person came by to casually glance at the place. Four days later and we've secured the winning and only bid, and we're now in escrow. 9:28:50 PM

News.Com : "The market for XML-based content-lifecycle... News.Com: "The market for XML-based content-lifecycle products -- software and services that allow content to be easily reused in a number of formats -- will grow tenfold to $11.6 billion in annual revenue by 2008, according to a report released Thursday." [Scripting News] More reasons to find a business opportunity in this space. I need to go find this report! 9:10:31 PM

Everest base camp wireless This one is for RichardB. You really should be weblogging your adventures, dude! Everest base camp wireless: The grandson of the last living Sherpa who accompanied Hilary on his jaunt up Everest is bringing wireless relayed satellite network access to Everest's base camp, among other projects. This fine article, written by my friend and colleague Nancy Gohring, conveys the critical importance of communication. I love the sense of community also by Gordon Cook, Dave Hughes, et al., where their long association and their deep generosity provides this kind of outcome. (Just a sub-reference here: Tenzing Communications in Seattle, an airplane Intenet access system provider, named themselves after Tenzing Norge, another Hilary Sherpa, and the one who possibly stepped on the summit before Hilary. [802.11b Networking News] 8:58:36 PM

weblogs stats question If you watned to gather some statistics about the usage and growth of blogging and aggregators, where would you get 'em? I'm talking about the kind of numbers that make a slightly pointy haired boss think twice about ignoring the blog world. [jeremy.zawodny] Let us know what you find? Thanks! 2:12:29 PM