Friday, March 7, 2003

Roogle an RSS search engine! A RSS search engine, Roogle. What a great idea! [Joi Ito's Web] No No No! You got it wrong! an RSS search engine should read my RSS feed, then compare it to all the other RSS feeds, and return interesting results in an RSS feed that I sibscribe to! 8:40:15 PM

A visual HTML editor for Blogger.com Marty Ford, president of OneSeek.com, passes along info about BlogWeaver, the company's new software utility that integrates directly with the Blogger.com website to provide a visual HTML editor for creating and editing blogs. Says he: "Until now, most blogs have... [JD's New Media Musings] There's no denying the appeal of desktop editing over web-based editing, but the market is still piecemeal in its offerings. There is definitely an opportunity to offer consumption, production, and distribution of syndicated content in a tiered product line. 11:08:49 AM

Blog early, blog often Mike Sanders has been exploring habits of highly effective blogging. The series starts here. [Doc Searls] Basically, Mike applies The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to blogging, for some interesting results. The first three habits suggest that we should take control of our lives (to the extent possible), define our direction, and then make sure that we are doing the things that head us in that direction. If blogging is a part of your life, why should it be any different. I need to better define why I blog. Part of it is to document my life, but personal diaries aren't very interesting to anyone except really close family and friends. Another part of it is to figure out my next business venture. I'm fascinated with the potential for weblogs and RSS-style feeds, and I think we'll see the promise of PointCast reborn in the distributed grassroots efforts now taking place. Lately, I've become acutely aware of you, my audience, when I consider what items to blog... is it interesting, is it informative, is it persuasive enough? Mike emphasises that last point when he focuses on Habit # 3 - Put first things first: In Blogging, this habit presents many challenges. So much of blogging is focused on reacting to the latest news stories, blogosphere post or email. We constantly get distracted from what we wanted to blog about. So we must try to keep our I on the ball. Make sure that the majority of our blogging is fulfilling the "Why Blog?" question we thought about in Habit 2. Mike's series is continuing, and I highly recommend it. BTW, i found this series a bit late, and he doesn't appear to have an RSS feed, so I'd like to see a single article version of his posts.. an interesting observation about how serialized content can sometimes be packages up into longer presenatations with as much or more potential impact and value. 11:06:27 AM

Leslie Walker reviews news aggregators... Leslie Walker reviews news aggregators and RSS. [Scripting News] Here's the intro to Leslie's article: News junkies like me are constantly on the prowl for an electronic Einstein to sniff out the nuggets we crave online, sparing us the daily hassle of clicking to so many Web sites. I wish I could report I've found my electronic Einstein. As near as I can tell, such a digital prodigy is still just a glimmer in the brains of inventors. But I have been testing a promising new breed of software that is helping me on the daily news hunt. Called "news readers," these programs fetch headlines and site summaries from hundreds of Web sites I preselect and present all the information in one spot on my computer desktop. So desktop news aggregators are the first step towards Leslie's dream information tool: bringing all the interesting information to you, in one place. The next generation of news aggregators will do even more interesting processing of that information: filtering, summarizing, categorizing, prioritizing, storing, and aging. 10:50:35 AM

Blogging Wish List - Huge Honkin Console An interesting wish list here... A real-time ticker application that will be updated using RSS. (Not the current "refresh to update" silliness in aggregators of today) Intelligent Agents (ooh, blast from the past ;-) to be constantly indexing and searching the internet for other things that I might be interested in. Fully functional annotation engines to work in conjunction with my window-on-the-web environment so I can mark-up both cached and remote versions of web pages for future reference. The ability to publish these annotations (the way a few applications used to be able to do... uTok, etc.) so that other people can view them as well. Notifications when people read, comment on, or annotate anything I've published out in publicly-accessable land. (and all the other psycho TrackBack, Pingback features that have shown up in the blogosphere in the last year or so.) Published playlists from iTunes, WinAmp and any other damn thing.  Note I don't mean publishing the mp3s, just the playlists so I can compare with other people and see what music I might be missing in the world. (Hilary sit the hell back down and shut up.) Published blog entries (like this one) to auto-annotate with links to the right places (i.e. Jabber, uTok (no longer available.) , Zope, CMF, RSS, etc should all be auto-linked without me having to "create shortcuts" in Radio (which just took about 20 minutes).) And I want it ALL in a unified source-accessable platform (I'll pay.  Doesn't have to be open source.  But I will need the source) A massively flexible api for developing plug ins for the 50,000,000 things I haven't thought of and the 150 or so I'm gonna make money on and therefore am not mentioning here. 10:43:56 AM

FM Radio Station - desktop editor for Radio A Windows-only app that puts a desktop interface on top pf Radio Userland. Sure looks pretty. 10:34:54 AM

Cute Puzzle Funny, this puzzle was circulated around the office yesterday. I saw this puzzle linked to here. Go play with it and then you can see how it works. Basically what it asks you to do always produces a number that is a multiple of 9, which can be proven easily. z = (10*x + y) - (x + y) z = (10*x - x) + (y - y) z = 9*x So the puzzle functions by just placing the same symbol at each multiple of 9. Still, it's a cute trick, since the puzzle actually changes the symbol when you reload it. :) [Surfin' Safari] 9:52:28 AM