02 June 2002

RSS Auto-Discovery SIGHTING: RSS Auto-discovery During the June Bank Holiday Weekend, the worldwide weblogging community coalesced around a good idea (originally proposed by Matt Griffith) and a good implementation (by Mark Pilgrim). The next release of MovableType, Radio, Manila, Drupal, and Blosxom will all include the LINK tag in the default templates. (Manila already generates it automatically and doesn't require any further action by existing Manila users.) Syndication and wire services like Syndic8, NewsIsFree, and Meerkat support it on all their news pages. On 31 May 02, Mark Pilgrim's article, More on RSS auto-discovery, hit #1 on Daypop and #1 on Blogdex overnight. Thousands of weblogs now support the LINK tag, and even a few non-weblogs are jumping into the action. Sent over eircomm ISDN from Garringreen. ref: 125

Discoverable RSS is in my HEAD I like Discoverable RSS, so I'm putting Radio into my HEAD elements. This will link my Weblog to lots of other blogs. It's easy for Radio users, and automatic for (most) Manila users. Newbies will have discoverable RSS out of the box. I'm also looking forward to this same functionality with news aggregators. Radio has the largest installed base of aggregators. You can see the trail of aggregators on the Weblogs page, by viewing the top 100 most-subscribed-to feeds. If you cross-reference the Weblogs feed with the UserLand List you can quickly see the number of people who are getting news from which sources. This is a v.nice way of seeing what's being talked about. Sent over eircom ISDN from Garringreen. ref: 125

Radio's Applications Make the Difference There are several reasons I use Radio as my main web tool now. First, it's easy. Yet it's a complex software system. Second, it puts most of the things I need to read and edit into one lightweight space. That means other like-minded people have looked at how to get people to actually use Radio tools. Brent Sleeper also notes that apps make a difference, and web services that are not app-driven are meaningless. Dave Winer appreciates UserLand being cited, pointing out it would be just as fair to cite Blogger.  Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. ref: 143

Lockergnome: Internet and telecommunications companies have seen a surge in law enforcement requests to snoop on subscribers. That's no surprise in Ireland, as last week most counties featured Gardai (police) raids for child porn downloads. The tip-offs came as a result of following up on credit card billings.Sent from Garringreen over eircom ISDN. ref: 26121.

FLICK - Piracy is up. Viant Corp. (VIAN.O), a research company tracking Internet piracy, on Wednesday estimated between 400,000 and 600,000 film copies are illegally downloaded daily on the Internet. [Lockergnome Bytes]