Thursday, February 27, 2003

TECH TALK: RSS, Blogs and Beyond: Blogs. Weblogs have been growing in popularity and importance over the past year. The recent decision by Google to buy Pyra Labs is a manifestation of this, along with Tripod’s decision to offer blogging. Tools like Radio’s Userland and MovableType have made it easy to publish weblogs. Also, the increasing variety of content on the web and the desire for fresh insights has created a large group of people (in the tens of thousands) who link and analyse what’s out there. Weblogs are diaries, or personal journals. They are organized chronologically, and are typically written by a single individual. They are... [E M E R G I C . o r g] 8:04:54 PM    Trackback []

Andy Rhinehart is experimenting with an RSS feed of help wanted ads from the Spartanburg Herald.  Very cool.  It would be even better if there was an e-mail address attached to each job posting so people could respond.  He is also using the multi-author tool in Radio to publish a weblog for the paper's news stories. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 7:31:10 PM    Trackback []

Zoe Indexes RSS Feeds. The latest release of Zoe now scans, and indexes, RSS feeds. I pointed it at my subscriptions file from Radio and Zoe consumed the whole thing without any problem. I would like to see a couple of minor issues cleared up with Zoe's implementation of aggregator features. First, I would really like to be able to adjust the frequency of scanning. For indexing purposes I would probably be fine with a scan that runs once every 12 hours (rather than the three minute default). That would also please the owners of heavily subscribed sites that are footing big bandwidth bills. I know Mark Pilgrim (and others) has been pretty vocal about this in the past. I would also like to exert more control over what sites Zoe indexes. I am sure Raphael has already thought of this and it will be supported in the near future. I just do not want to index every feed that I subscribe to. In fact, there are only a small number of feeds I would even want to bother indexing. Some have too low a SN ration for me. Others have a fine signal, but it is not content I am going to want to look for later. [On The Mark] 7:28:46 PM    Trackback []