Sunday, January 26, 2003

posted by jjg » January 26 9:47 PM the weblog meme is gaining momentum. I *think* this is the paper my in-laws receive. The Westchester, N.Y. Journal News does what some larger news organizations seem to have trouble with -- covering the blog phenomenon from multiple angles in a three-part package. [Blogroots] 11:55:51 PM

Network theory: "Connect, they say, only connect" This one is for OliverKS. ...Not that network theory is an entirely contemporary creation. Its roots stretch back nearly 300 years, to Leonhard Euler, a brilliant 18th-century Swiss mathematician who dabbled in nearly every branch of modern science, from algebra to astrophysics. In 1736, Euler took up a brain teaser that had preoccupied the residents of Königsberg, a Prussian town on the Pregel River not far from where he lived: how to cross all seven bridges in town without crossing the same bridge twice. No one had been able to pull off the feat, but Euler provided the mathematical proof that it could not be done. To do so, he turned the problem into a network, depicting the bridges as lines and the landmasses they connected as nodes. Link to NYT story (registration required), Discuss [Boing Boing] 11:32:53 PM

feed page My second comment is that RSS can be used for more than "regular" content. It can be used to keep customers informed of new products and services. We have done something like this with our new barter site, Trodo. We have set up feeds for our members so they don't have to visit Trodo to know when new items are posted. Here is the feed page. [JD's New Media Musings] Bingo! 11:25:17 PM

Rise of the Uber-Browser Dave Hyatt is a weblog convert now. I wonder what influence he will have at Apple in guiding their involvement in the blogosphere. If I were running the show, I'd make a pitch for NetNewsWire ASAP, and I'd innovate the hell out of it. Now that I've started using NetNewsWire to read blogs, I find it frustrating to be constantly switching back and forth between NetNewsWire and Safari. This led me to wonder: should RSS capabilities and browsing capabilities be merged into a single "uber-browser" application? Do news readers like NetNewsWire and Feedreader contain functionality that should be absorbed into browser applications like Safari, Chimera or OmniWeb? Or is the opposite true? Should some minimal browser functionality be incorporated into NetNewsWire? OmniWeb already contains a very nice bookmark scheduling/updating mechanism. Imagine if you could bookmark an RSS XML file and have a browser transparently present it as a folder in your bookmarks, complete with an unread count and child items that represent blog entries. This mechanism would mesh nicely with bookmark scheduling/updating schemes that exist already in browsers. Or consider the other direction. NetNewsWire could instead embed a rich HTML control and manage the display of blog entries for you. One idea I had about blog entries in NetNewsWire is the idea of applying user stylesheets to blog posts so that you could format the blog entries according to your own chosen templates. In effect you could pick the "blog theme" to apply to the HTML snippet pulled out of the RSS file. Another idea along those lines would be allowing authors to somehow specify links to author stylesheets that could be loaded and applied when a snippet is read from HTML embedded inside RSS. Then the author's look could be preserved without having to go back to the original blog Web page. Yet another irritation is how difficult it is to subscribe to feeds. I'd like to be able to click on an RSS file link in a browser and have it automatically pass that off to my news application. One click should be all it takes to get me subscribed, whether that click happens in a mail app, a Web page, or inside NetNewsWire itself. A protocol handler would work for this. I think of this as being somewhat similar to the "view-source:" protocol supported in many browsers, i.e., you could just say "rss:original-url" or "feed:original-url" and have the appropriate application configured to handle feed subscriptions. Tabbed browsing has a role here as well. The same person who voraciously devours news feeds is the same kind of person who loves being bombarded with lots of information, and tabs provide one with a means of efficiently handling a lot of information. This makes Chimera's ability to open URLs sent from other applications in tabs very cool, and might help obviate the need for an application like NetNewsWire to build tabs into its own display. I've heard a lot of people state that RSS and news aggregators are for "geeks" and "blogging enthusiasts," but I simply don't believe that to be true. It should be possible to make an application for managing a large amount of information flow that is accessible to mainstream users. Browsers are trying to make information easier to manage with smarter bookmarking systems and page management capabilities (tabs), and news readers are emerging that (in effect) push new information to you in as it's posted and allow you to switch rapidly between different information sets as well. There is also an eerie parallel one can draw on the editing side between conventional Web page editors and the need for specialized blog editor applications. Mozilla has MozBlog for this purpose. Should personal blog management become the domain of a specialized application, a sort of uber-editor that can handle HTML editing/publishing but also blog management/publishing, or should it remain as a Web application like Movable Type that you use a browser to access? [Surfin' Safari] 8:27:09 PM