Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Jackson is walking and listening For all intents and purposes, Jackson is officially walking. In the last week or so, he's gone from 1-2 steps to the length of the living room and beyond. For him, walking is a way for him to hold two things and still move around. Last night, we got some great video of him walking and babbling. He's also got a wide understanding of language as well. The other night he was playing with the drawers of his dresser, opening up a drawer, pulling out some clothes. Paulette started to freak (hi sweetie!) but I suggested we see what more he could do. I told Jackson to "put it back", and sure enough, he looked over his shoulder, reached down, picked up the piece of clothing, and started stuffing it back into the drawer. He then repeated the whole cycle over and over again. 9:43:19 PM

The Blog Explosion I need to find a chart of weblog growth... I was just over at Technorati and noticed the "weblogs watched" count went over 400,000 today (it's at exactly 400,091 right now). It was only March 5 when the 100,000 mark was passed. At this rate, there will be more than 6 million blogs by the end of the year. [VentureBlog] ...expect a hockey stick when AOL Journals rolls out. 9:35:52 PM

RSS Killed the Infoglut Star Here's the same meme again... RSS Killed the Infoglut Star Quote:"When I started using an RSS newsreader daily, some remarkable things happened that I didn't necessarily expect: I began to spend almost no time surfing to keep up with current technology information, and I was suddenly able to manage a large body of incoming information with incredible efficiency." Comment: I've had the same experience...more information, dealt with more quickly. Slowing the pace of information isn't a solution to our current information overload...finding new and innovative ways to deal with overload is....which is the basic point I made here. RSS is a great example. [elearnspace blog] 9:34:52 PM

CNN on RSS and news aggregators This meme, about weblogs reducing time and increasing reach, is quickly spreading... Christine Boese writes an overview of news aggregators as a new way to read weblogs and news sites. "Less wasted time and more efficient surfing might appeal to folks dealing with harassing pop-up windows and masses of spam. It helps to balance the signal-to-noise ratio back in our favor." [Ranchero] Now if we could just drop the term surfing... which do you prefer, aggregating or harvesting? 9:30:52 PM

Don't be a sharecropper Tim... The Corante: Open Source blog has an interesting comment regarding commercial software development: Tim Bray manages to put into very few words something I've tried to explain to a number of people in a very long-winded way. Bray points out that developers (and companies...) who work on proprietary platforms are basically sharecroppers. That is, they're basically working someone else's plot of land to scratch out a living in a very unsecure position. It's a lousy position to be in, because you're never going to make much, and if the land's owner finds something better to do with the land, you're history. A practical example of this is Watson, the product mentioned above, which did very nicely, thank you, on the Macintosh, until the owner of the land brought out Sherlock, a very nice program that did many of the same things. Another example of this would be Adobe -- which is finding itself squeezed by both Apple and Microsoft. While Apple is developing its own tools for A/V editing, Microsoft wants to capture some of the space that Adobe is trying to capture with its Acrobat tools.[Corante: Open Source] I've been thinking a lot about this of late, what with my dismal experience (not)working with Apple to integrate PuppetTime into QuickTime, and considering the numerous other developers who bet their farms on Apple technologies only to see Apple screw them over. I think there are still opportunities on the desktop, but you won't see me rely on Apple- or MS-specific technologies anymore. It does mean more work upfront, but the independent foundation will be well worth it. 9:28:50 PM

the aggregator protocol The Fuzzyblog makes an interesting suggestion: Now if I was making an aggregator, I'd want to make it easy for people to subscribe to RSS feeds.  Really I would.  Now take a look at the Feedster seach results page and you'll see that even we're trying.  The three aggregator specific links on the right allow you to click on a Feedster RSS feed and subscribe to it in any supported aggregator.  So what's a supported aggregator you ask?  Well its any aggregator that exposes a web interface for subscriptions.  There are two ways to do this -- ports and protocols.  The port mechanism means that the aggregator runs a tiny little http server on a port and uses that for subscriptions.  Radio and AmphetaDesk both do this.  Of course they both use different ports.  Sigh.  The other mechanism, protocols, is what Kevin Burton did with NewsMonster which uses NewsMonster:// links.  Now what I'd recommend to aggregator vendors is that they standardize on an aggregator:// protocol so that other tools which produce RSS can easily embed that into applications.  I'd gladly add a generic Aggregator button to Feedster in a heartbeat so that this could work with any tool that handles the aggregator:// protocol.  BloggerJack will gladly support it! Others have pointed out that many aggregators can auto-discover an RSS feed from a website URL. But not all websites support this, and many people still want to click on something specific to get a subscription. Couldn't hurt to have both a protocol and auto-discovery. 9:20:43 PM

The market for micro-content managers Anil Dash wants a good micro-content manager, and is willing to pay serious bucks for it! I'd pay $500 for a Google-branded microcontent management platform based on the Mozilla core if it were scriptable, stable, and integrated API-neutral blogging and aggregation tools. Or I'd pay $150 annually. So, Google, are you guys game for taking your position as a platform vendor seriously? [Anil Dash] 9:18:36 PM

Fools on "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" Matthew Emmert discusses the phenom of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" on Fool.com: The truth is that Kiyosaki, and those like him, can make far more money selling you their "proven methods" than they ever could employing those methods themselves. The only available evidence leads one to believe that Kiyosaki has amassed whatever wealth he has by selling his methods, as opposed to employing them. I read the first book years ago, and liked the message that real estate is a worthwhile investment vehicle. A friend of mine read the same book, and thought Kiyosaki was saying that buying your first home isn't a good investment. Phooey! Then again, I lost interest when I started receiving tons of marketing materials for "investment seminars" from Kiyosaki's Co. which pushed people into multi-level marketing schemes. Phooey on that, too! 9:12:58 PM