Trying Out Blogrolling.com

Hm... Lets see how the new blogroll looks.  I think I like this.  I think this actually works well.  Nice it is indeed.

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iMakeNews Does Blogs

I know these guys -- a friend used to work for them and I interviewed there once for some consulting work:

iMakeNews DirectBlog™ is a new service that enables businesses to harness the power of Weblogs, providing untapped channels for e-marketing, knowledge management, sales and collaborative communications.  Weblogs are self-publishing Web sites empowering individuals to share commentary with likeminded people on issues of their choice, and to establish interactive dialogues.  Through DirectBlog™, iMakeNews will provide all of the technical abilities of a Weblog along with the features and flexibility of our e-newsletter service.  More...

Too bad they called it "DirectBlog"; I would have thought "iMakeBlog" would be a great name.

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Easy News Topics

Very, very interesting.  Matt and Paolo who came up with this are both damn smart.  Hopefully it will catch on:

This specification defines the Easy News Topics (ENT) Module for the RSS2.0 syndication format. ENT is intended to be a very simple standard for describing how topic information can be introduced into an RSS2.0 news feed.  More...

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Features, Google and Perfection

Dave has an interesting essay about Google and specifically about their Safe Search feature:

We depend on them being very good, and fair. When we turn on a feature like SafeSearch we expect to have pornography and other content that's not appropriate for children, or sensitive adults, eliminated from search results. But how good are their filters? Does it also filter out sites that talk about pornography; or human sexuality in an educational, non-prurient context?

Ben says: "SafeSearch is intended by Google to block pornography and explicit sexual content, but my research indicates that it blocks far more. SafeSearch is easily confused by ambiguous words in web page titles -- like Hardcore Visual Basic Programming, a web page that describes intense programming for experts, without any sexually-explicit content whatsoever."

This is based on the Ben Edelman report. What I find really interesting is the title of Dave's piece:

Shaking Our Faith in Google

This is a hard one.  I certainly don't disregard Dave's calls for fairness in Google.  Nor do I deny his comments about telling us how the feature works but this raises two key points:

1. If you disclose just how you determine if something is pornographic then that tells pornographers how to subvert it.  That's bad in my opinion.  Internet pornographers are rapacious in their quest for good search results and why make it easy for them?  This is also my biggest objection to Spam Assassin -- it tells spammers how to subvert it.
   
2. When is a feature perfect enough to be turned on?  I'll admit that Google's Safe Search isn't perfect -- but is it good enough to merit being available?  God knows all of us in the software business have shipped products that aren't perfect and I'd suspect aren't as well implemented as Google's Safe Search.  How do you judge this?  Should an imperfect implementation of Safe Search cause us to "lose faith in Google"?  Not in my book.

So do we give Google points for trying or just slam them?  Looking at the semantic meaning of content and assessing something like "is it pornographic" is just plain hard.  That doesn't mean that companies shouldn't try it.  And it isn't like Google is blatantly censoring content -- its something that needs to be turned on.

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Gnomedex has an RSS Feed

Scoble asks if Gnomedex is the 1st conference with an RSS feed and while I think it is, I can't say so definitively.  I can say though that its the 1st RSS feed for a conference that Feedster has indexed!  Woo Hoo!

Disclaimer: In the interests of utter and complete "blogesty" (blog-honesty), I should admit that we 25,000 odd urls in the Feedster database, I could actually be wrong about that.

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Really Cool Movable Type Tool: Zempt

If I was using Movable Type then I'd be downloading Zempt and giving it a shot.  Kalsey Group does good work.

Oh and today is lots of short bits that's all I have time for -- onsite at a clients and frazzled.

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