Wednesday, March 19, 2003

The Heritage Foundation reaches out to bloggers Rebecca Blood received an interesting email from the Heritage Foundation... subject: Is 2003 "The Year of the Blogger"? date: 19 March 2003 received from: Laura O'Dea Rebecca, You've been discovered! Tim Rutten's Media column in today's edition of The Los Angeles Times is the latest example of the traditional media's newfound appreciation of the growing influence of bloggers on America's public policy debates. Our job at The Heritage Foundation is to provide useful resources - objective data and conservative analysis and commentary - to journalists, analysts and commentators of all stripes. But we aren't quite sure how to do this with the blogger community. That's a start, but it will probably be difficult to keep a pulse on the blog community manually. This is what computers are good at! Referring to my recent post on polling, how can we measure the blog community in terms of mindshare, positions, beliefs, and values? 10:12:40 PM

Towards Structured Blogging Lately I've been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily. Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on. Now, say I've written a review of the latest Radiohead album into my blog. I'd like others who are interested in Radiohead, or in music reviews in general, and who may not know me, to be able to pick out my review from the common pool in a simple way. Interesting people may come my way because of this. What we're talking about is getting people to put more metadata on their content. Now allowing it is one thing, and fostering it is another. And I'd say the latter is the bigger challenge. Here are some ideas. ...continued in Towards Structured Blogging [Seb's Open Research] Yes, yes, yes! Bring it on. Personally, I'd like to have an extensible weblog editor, such that I could create new weblog entries of different types: website reference, weblog reference, music review, book review, movie review, photo album announcement, etc. Perhaps these are just template weblog items, but I could see having XML tags in there beyond just text. Also, perhaps these templates would have implicit categories, as well as default pingback targets, so that all music blog entries would be pinged in one place, all politic blog items would be pinged at another place, and so on...? 9:54:13 PM

Jonas promises Pundyt Jonas reports that the first version of "pundyt" should be available shortly: I believe it's about time to lift the veil of secrecy and let you all in on the big project plan: I give you: pundyt , a full fledged microcontent management and news delivery system. Pundyt is somewhere between Radio Userland, Movable Type, Drupal, and Ampheta Desk. Blawgy goodness built in, that means, for example, a citations database, case crossreferences, auto-linking of whatever you'd like to autolink, but especially bluebook-style citations, etc. But that's not all. Pundyt comes with desktop frontends for Mac OS X, Windows (not finished, yet), Unix (it's Open Source), and Palm OS, and has a fully integrated workflow management backend. Woah, sounds super! [Bag and Baggage] I'll believe it when I see it. 9:49:29 PM

"Lose The Browser, Keep The Blog" So says Leo Laporte in recommending RSS to Screen Savers viewers, and in particular aggregator applications NetNewsWire (Mac) and NewsDesk (Windows). Among other things, Leo explains why RSS is not PointCast, and links to UserLand's and Web Reference's definitions of RSS. (I say put the aggregator in the browser, but that's a segment for another day.) [Bag and Baggage] No no, put the browser in the aggregator! NewsDesk does this, and it looks good. (Now if it just had all the other cool features of NNW!). I don't want to browse anymore, I want to aggregate. When I do need to browse, that's just one button away in an aggregator interface. 9:47:56 PM

Temporary RSS filters, oh lazyweb Oh mighty Lazyweb, thee of great loins, grant me this: a filter for NetNewsWire that allows me to mark-as-read all posts containing keywords I set. Today, for example, I wish to be undisturbed by posts containing words such as "Iraq", XML, "Fish Fingers" and "Harlot" - all of which are sat in that little guilty red-starred unread posts number. I want to opt out of these conversations. I don't even want them to impinge on my conciousness enough for me to just skim them. I want them away. But I don't want to loose everything, or unsubscribe from people who, when they're not talking about said words, are quite entertaining. Help me unconsume! Filters, I cry! Filllllttteeers. [Ben Hammersley.com] Amen, brotha. Routing and filtering would be very strong features for NetNewsWire and other desktop news aggregators. I'd want to add feeds in numerous folders, some I would puruse, others I'd let filters act on independently. 9:46:09 PM