Wednesday, July 2, 2003

RSS, Echo, Wikis, and Personality Wars This is an excellent article on the raging debate over RSS and a new syndication format. In trying to refine my own voice on this weblog, I won't post the entire article here, but I highly encourage you to read it. I will, however, summarize it, from my own perspective. First, the difference between weblogs and wikis. Weblogs are author-centric, whereas wikis are project-centric. Sam Ruby has started the (not)Echo project on a wiki so as to remove the personalities that invariably are tied to weblogs. Here's the choice quote: There are lots of good reasons for using a wiki, of course, instead of a trackbacked weblog conversation. Though both weblogs and wikis support conversational patterns, weblogs are "conversation as published comments" while wikis are "conversation as shared editing." Weblogs tend towards polarized or divergent views, while wikis tend towards convergent ones, which is just what you want for a conversation around standards. But there is a second reason, under the surface but possibly more important -- wikis denature personality. Echo exists not because there are things wrong with the RSS markup -- there are, but they could be easily fixed. Echo exists because there are things wrong with the RSS process. RSS is having not a technological crisis but a constitutional one, where who decides what concerning RSS is not clear, and will never be clear, because the people doing the deciding don't even see themselves as being part of a decision making body. [Corante: Social Software] Well said! I'm following the (not)Echo project closely. 12:12:32 PM

the freedom to tape? I wrote this piece for CIO Insight, arguing that companies ought to let customers spy on their customer service agents. But I wonder: When you get a recording while on hold that says, "Calls may be monitored to assure quality assurance," doesn't the passive voice already authorize you, the customer, to tape as well? [Lessig Blog] I was *just* thinking about this on the drive in to work this morning! Can you give consent to be recorded but be restricted from recording yourself? This thought started with a Jeep radio commercial that played excerpts from a phone interview with a happy Jeep commercial. At the end, the announcer dashed thru a statement saying that interviewees were told their comments might be used on air. The tone and volume of the statement seemed like the whole thing was a bit sneaky. 11:57:12 AM

Numbers Funny quote from almost 13 years ago. DOS Computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use wordwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form. -- New York Times, November 26, 1991 Just curious, how many weblogs have you seen this quote on? 11:44:58 AM

Japanese company trademarks "Blog" WTF? I wonder how that affects BloggerJack.com? A Japanese company filed for a trademark on the word "Blog" on March 6 and received it from the Japanese trademark office on June 28. This trademark would be utterly bogus in the US, but I don't know enough about Japanese trademark law to figure out if it's enforceable there. Link Discuss [Boing Boing] 11:36:59 AM

Web browsing innovation dead Marc Andreessen thinks innovation in web browsing is dead... ...he laments that innovation has all but ceased on this essential piece of software that makes surfing the Net possible. "There hasn't been any innovation on the browser in the last five years... Navigation is an embarrassment. Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons -- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser." via [elearnspace blog] He's right, of course. And the answer is to stop browser and start aggregating. The key is to recognize that browsing the web is just one level of information processing, and that it is time to move on to the next level. 11:25:37 AM

Casady & Greene Very sad. Casady & Greene, a publisher that has been selling Mac software since 1984, is shutting its doors. [Daring Fireball] An acquaintance had a utility published thru them a few years ago... I wonder what happens with that? 11:14:25 AM