30 October 2002

RSS Keeps You Updated SUN TIMES -- "Web sites are colorful and noisy and clicky, but when you get down to how content is organized, a Web site really isn't more sophisticated than an analog newspaper." Andy Ihnatko likes the Radio Aggregator. He recommends NewzCrawler for Windows and he recommends reading RSS feeds to stay up to date.

Sighting: PodNews 3 CLINCHESW -- PodNews 3 is an aggregator for Apple's iPod, spotted by Dave Winer. [Scripting News]

Ballet Dancer Blogs While Captive WIRED -- A Russian dancer, held captive in the recent standoff with Chechan rebels used his mobile phone to blog. A Russian online news site carried the feed, as well as LiveJournal.

Vodafone's Messaging Centre Targets Millions ELECTRIC NEWS -- Vodafone has shifted its emphasis on email support from companies towards individuals. ENN says the move anticipates a robust uptake of MMS, part of Vodafone Live! I got my promotional literature last week and all I need now is a Nokia 7650 to climb aboard. Well, I also need to budget for the higher costs of connectivity, because MMS use will cost nearly four times as much as my SMS and GSM use.

QOD: Will Durant Will Durant -- I need to follow this advice from Will Durant: "One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say." [Quotes of the Day]

What People E-mail Saddam Hussein THE REGISTER -- Want to know what people email to Saddam Hussein? Wired has some interesting extracts. And I'll probably end up staying on an NSA Watch List because I cross-posted this info.

Easy Connections to XML Sjoerd Visscher -- Everyone with an interest in easily connecting to XML needs to look at Xopus. Q42 doesn't have a marketing department, and their Xopus site looks daunting. All actions in Xopus are schema controlled. If the schema doesn't allow it, the user can't do it. This doesn't stop with structural actions, like 'can you add one or more Authors to a Book', but markup is also restricted by the schema. Can a user only add bold and italic, or also lists and tables? And if the user can add links, is he then allowed to add a target attribute? This is a big issue for CMSs, where the site designers want to give the site a consistent look and feel, but where the editors keep messing things up. Xopus provides the standard Word-like interface, like toolbars, context-menus, and some dialogs. But a user must do more than edit some XHTML. For example, the University of Groningen allows teachers to edit course descriptions and other course related data using Xopus. The two options they had before were either teach the teachers to use an XML editor, or build huge amounts of html forms more or less by hand. The teacher doesn't even have to know the storage structure of the CMS. If he wants to edit his course, he fires up his browser and he surfs to the webpage of the course. And because the system can recognise the teacher, an extra link appears to edit the course. When clicked, the Xopus toolbar slides in and the course data becomes editable.

Is Publicly Accessible Information Public? LAW MEME -- Excellent discussion on the heels of ENN Opinion, Economist writing and Reuters reporting concerning whether all web info is publicly accessible. We talked about this issue on the Open Mailing List several times during the past two years. Wired thinks security by obscurity could be threatened by this Swedish legal review.