12 October 2002

"I am better than your kids" Maddox Rules -- While searching Google for the best page in the universe, I stumbled upon reasons why "I am better than your kids."

Transclusion in Action Marc Barrot -- Check this out, especially the Endless Web Page demo. Clicking on an icon causes the linked outline to be inserted directly in the current page, as a child of the node that carried the link. While the linked outline renders, a small globe replace the icon. Once the linked content is inserted, the iconn reverts to a normal twisty outline wedge. This is the in-browser version of what Dave Winer and UserLand created for Radio's outliner. This is instant rendering, happening on the fly as you browse through the current page.

In Praise of Evolvable Formats Mark Pilgrim -- My Radio says I've written something like this already, but I'm doing it again because of feedback I've received following my piece published in The Irish Examiner. And because James Robertson makes a better point: "Mark Pilgrim calls into question how XML standards are developed and used. See Mark's comments on RDF, for example."

Dealing with the RIAA SLASHDOT.org -- Cliff explains in Slashdot why this hasn't been a good year for music lovers since the RIAA has removed the kid gloves. In the past 3 months they have declared war on their own customers, silenced Internet Radio, and are targeting 3 other P2P networks for shutdown. At about this time last year, they wanted unprecedented access to your personal property. [...] The RIAA has waged war on the Internet rather than try and use the technology for the benefit of their artists. Now there are people willing to play by the rules, but the RIAA is unresponsive, and their web site seems to provide more questions than clear answers. Who do you need to contact? What forms need to be filled? What agreements need to be signed? By whom? What do you have to pay? How is this value determined? If you are planning on offering the RIAA's music, what do you really have to do to play their music legally?

Mr. Swartz Visits the Internet Bookmobile Aaron Swartz -- Have you ever seen Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive Bookmobile? Aaron Swartz stepped aboard and wrote about it in "Mr Swartz Goes to Washington." Unlike most Bookmobiles, this one didn't contain any physical books. Instead, it connects to the Internet Archive's servers in the Presidio to download them. Then the high-speed printer prints out the pages. The chopper cuts them in half so you can fold them together to make a normal-sized book, and the binding machine heats up the glue-smeared cover to hold it all together. The whole process takes about fifteen minutes. [...] People have a hard time understanding the public domain," Brewster says. "It's an abstract concept; it's hard to grasp. The bookmobile changes that." He picks up one of the books he's made. "This is the public domain! The public domain means giving books to children. You want to extend copyright? You want to steal books from children? No one wants to steal books from children."

Can Public Web Services Work? NEW ARCHITECT MAG.com -- In small Irish communities, you have to have a business model to sustain public information providers. The most generous of government handouts push you towards a money-making business model. If you can identify, then scrape, government information, you might be sustainable. That means setting up an aggregator, like we're using in the blogosphere. When implementing the public information model, you have to consider the protocol in use. There's no way any kind of walled garden approach is tenable.

Further Reading Upgrades Mark Pilgrim -- How cool is this? I'm on Virgin Rail in England posting to my Weblog in London using no wires to my IBM TransNote. (Mobile data services over Vodafone at 43k wirelessly are good to me but damaging to my wallet.) And because of Mark Pilgrim's innovative RSS 2.0 feed, my laptop comments will appear on Mark's blog. (On the second day, it said that 28 people have followed this link and arrived on top of Mark's post. But the Swedish post that points to diveintomark.org lost a bunch of character enhancements, so the behind-the-scenes parsing is probably limited to an English language character set.) Imagine wrapping Mark Pilgrim's code onto separate laptops -- let's say Tim Kirby's and Bernie Goldbach's -- as they both work in separate countries on the same project. If Mark's "further reading RSS feed" works as I think, the further readings on my blog will keep me updated on Tim's project work. That's v.cool laptop web services. I think it would be easy to spam this kind of referrer log system, so to keep its integrity intact, some form of look-back would have to be figured into the script.