Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Kunekt - Business Cards as RSS Feeds Interesting concept. Instead of handing out numerous copies of your business card (data), now just point everyone to one copy stored as an XML file. Not sure what the benefit is in having it in RSS, though... 10:37:22 PM

Semantic Web Journal Very cool! Welcome to the website of the Journal on Web Semantics! When designing the journal, we didn't just want to set up just another print journal, since we felt that the Semantic Web deserves and enables more than just paper and papers. This website, besides publishing preprints of the accepted papers, as aiming at more. Pure technology is only one aspect of semantics and the Semantic Web - maybe not even the most important one. Social aspects: sharing of technology, to learn and to be able to built-upon each others experiences is crucial. However, the traditional scientific process is still focusing on papers, neglecting other means of knowledge sharing. Consequently, not only scientific papers should be submitted, but anything that helps to learn from each other: demos and code, ontologies and code, initiative descriptions and code. Did I mention code? The journal website (and the print journal for descriptions), after a review process, will publish accepted material. All of this is only possible when the community gets involved - by submitting and reading papers, code and anything else that you feel deserves publication (please submit papers to jsw@cs.man.ac.uk and anything else to me). But also by other means - providing or contributing software that helps to run the site. In the longer run, this website is following the "eat your own dogfood" philosophy - technologies described and software submitted will be used to drive the website. Let's create the future we want - together. Now when will they have an RSS feed?! :-) 12:18:55 PM

Why RSS? There's an interesting cross-blog discussion going on about RSS. Follow the links: "Maybe one day Corante will get RSSfeeds. I almost completely missed this Part II. Almost nobody reads blogs anymoe. Everything comes in through RSS." [Marc's Voice] "Actually, a tiny technical elite reads RSS. Everyone else reads on the web. Maybe that will change. I'm not sure." [EVHEAD] "If I grab an RSS feed of his site, half the pleasure of visiting is taken away from me. The issue of RSS is about more than just textuality. Websites are still to some extent billboards, as they were back in 1995. But the slogan is often, 'Come for the scenery; stay for the entertainment'." [three legged pi] Of course, all of you know where I come down in this debate. If you're a casual blog reader, then that last course of action is for you. But once you start reading 20+ blogs on a daily basis, an RSS news aggregator becomes a huge advantage. There's no way I could read 190 sites consistently and thoroughly without one. So at some point, you have to decide what's more important to you - the style or the substance. In my case, it's the substance. And Corante, my foot is tapping while I continue waiting to read your content.... [The Shifted Librarian] There will definitely be a category of people who read dozens and dozens of weblogs regularly, and desktop aggregators will be their reader of choice. Will there come a day when everyone has a desktop aggregator? I think so, although that day may be very far away indeed. 12:15:10 PM

XrML and DRM Something for Macromedia to consider? I'd like to think that, some day, I can have a blog channel that is subscription-based, but there are few ways to address this now. Microsoft details new rights management tech [via InfoWorld: Top News] Lately I've been looking into digital rights management and technologies that can help support paid content. I picked up this piece about forthcoming technology from Microsoft on this front, and was happy to learn about a new emerging standard, XrML, the extensible rights markup language. Microsoft is a investor in the founding company behind this specification (ContentGuard, a Xerox PARC spin-out). I really like the approach taken with XrML. It's flexible and extensible enough to work with a very wide variety of content types, access and distribution models, encryption schems, and vendors. If major content formats like Windows Media, Office, Macromedia Flash, Adobe Acrobat, XHTML, MPEG, and others support this we could finally have the basis for secure, paid content. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio] 11:56:32 AM

Full Post RSS 2.0 Feed Okay, I can take a hint. I've resisted for a long time, but some of my readers want a full post feed for my blog. Fine. Here you go. I originally resistsed because I didn't really see the point. Plus... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog] Yeah! Another convert to full content in RSS! 11:54:06 AM