Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Roogle me this, blogman OK, so Roogle RSS Search Thingy® (I don't know the new name yet) is all the rage this week. I said it before, and I'll say it again: what I really want is an RSS feedback loop. I go to Roogle and sign up. It asks me for my RSS feed, as well as my OPLM feed. Then daily, it performs a bayesian filter on my weblog, then searches all the other weblogs, filters out all the feeds already in my blogroll, and returns the results in an RSS feed unique to me. As I write in my blog, I get continuous updates on new bloggers that may be writing about the same things as me. As new topics arise and old ones fade, the bayesian filter will change, as will the search results. 10:41:22 PM

The SJ Merc interview with Marc Andreessen The SJ Merc interview with Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape) asks if he has a blog. "No," he said. "I have a day job. I don't have the time or ego need." People used to say stuff like that about email, believe it or not. [Scripting News] It sounds like Marc hasn't taken a good look at weblogs. Heck, his own company created RSS! 9:45:34 PM

Werblog: Why blogging isn't a fad Why blogging isn't a fad Arnold Kling offers one of the best explanations I've seen of the value of blogging as a distributed information filtering mechanism. "This filtering process makes all of us more efficient. Information with low value does not travel far. Information with high general value tends to travel the farthest. Information with low general value but high local value tends to reach interested people but then die out because as it gets passed along its value decays below the threshold. Everyone tends to receive information with a high value to them, and they avoid having to read information that has low value to them."[via Werblog] I guess this item itself has high general value within the local domain of bloggers who blog about blogging. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio] So, the question is, how many people need efficient information filters on a daily basis? Lawyers, journalists, marketers... who else? 9:43:48 PM

Blogging Goes Mainstream When It Hits CNN Blogging Goes Mainstream "'Just like the Internet was 10 years ago, blogging is popular with an underground culture that is doing it for the love and passion,' said Tony Perkins, who edited the recently folded Red Herring technology magazine and last month launched a business blog called Always On Network. 'Now there are people like me coming along and trying to figure out how to package it,' Perkins said. 'It's time to take it to the next level.'" [http://www.cnn.com/ ] This is a reprint of an Associated Press article from last week, but what's interesting is the poll on CNN's site asking if readers have ever used a blog. Assuming that bloggers aren't deliberately skewing the results in an attempt to get BigCos to stay away from blogs (like that could happen now), 55% of the more than 1300 people that answered the poll picked "No and I probably won't." That's probably accurate because if "using" means "working with," by the time they use a blog, it will be integrated into whatever software they are using. If "using" means reading a blog, they still won't know because to most folks it will just be a web site with short entries arranged chronologically. [The Shifted Librarian] 9:37:48 PM

SCOTUS Makes Millions Of Lawyers Very, Very Happy Plastic::Work::Health: The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that stress over asbestos-related illness is cause for damages. Cry havoc, and let loose the lawyers of personal injury... [Plastic] ...and the insurance companies writhed in pain. 10:55:11 AM