July 3, 2003

This is another test post to my weblog. This time I've set the format to Plain Text, and I've removed my vCard signature. 11:33:08 AM    comment []

Wow.  That's what mail-to-weblog did with a simple post from Outlook.  Let me try that again. 11:29:14 AM    comment []

This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------_=_NextPart_001_01C34173.250BB020 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----_=_NextPart_002_01C34173.250BB020" ------_=_NextPart_002_01C34173.250BB020 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable This is a test posting made using the mail-to-weblog feature in Radio. ------_=_NextPart_002_01C34173.250BB020 Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable This is a test posting made using the mail-to-weblog feature in Radio.       ------_=_NextPart_002_01C34173.250BB020-- ------_=_NextPart_001_01C34173.250BB020 Content-Type: text/x-vcard; name="Steve Tibbett.vcf" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Description: Steve Tibbett.vcf Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Steve Tibbett.vcf" QkVHSU46VkNBUkQNClZFUlNJT046Mi4xDQpOOlRpYmJldHQ7U3RldmUNCkZOOlN0ZXZlIFRpYmJl dHQNCk9SRzpaSU0gVGVjaG5vbG9naWUgSW50J2wgSW5jLjtFbmdpbmVlcmluZw0KVElUTEU6RW5n aW5lZXINClRFTDtXT1JLO1ZPSUNFOisxICg2MTMpIDcyNy0xMzk3DQpBRFI7V09SSztFTkNPRElO Rz1RVU9URUQtUFJJTlRBQkxFOjtPdHRhd2E7MjAgQ29sb25uYWRlIFJkPTBEPTBBU3VpdGUgMjAw O05lcGVhbjtPTjtLMkUgN002O0NBTkFEQQ0KTEFCRUw7V09SSztFTkNPRElORz1RVU9URUQtUFJJ TlRBQkxFOk90dGF3YT0wRD0wQTIwIENvbG9ubmFkZSBSZD0wRD0wQVN1aXRlIDIwMD0wRD0wQU5l cGVhbiwgT04gSzJFIDdNNj0wRD0wQUNBTkE9DQpEQQ0KRU1BSUw7UFJFRjtJTlRFUk5FVDpzdGli YmV0dEB6aW0uYml6DQpSRVY6MjAwMjEwMTVUMTgwNDI2Wg0KRU5EOlZDQVJEDQo ------_=_NextPart_001_01C34173.250BB020-- 11:26:11 AM    comment []

Something to keep in mind is that nobody makes ad revenue from Usenet.  If Echo and RSS and aggregators make it unnecessary to actually visit a site to read it's content, then even though you may have a million readers reading what you write, you're not going to have any revenue potential. Before the web, syndication meant people liked your stuff enough to buy it and publish it more broadly.  It would be cool to think that writing in a weblog could be the same way - that if I regularly wrote stuff that enough people found interesting, that I could be "picked up" by someone who would pay me to do it.  (well maybe not me personally since nobody reads this anyway.. but you get the point) 10:40:10 AM    comment []

Web Advertising Now that Google ads are on my Restaurant Thing site, here's a perspective on web ads. 10:34:59 AM    comment []

My two cents on Echo and RSS I'm not an "A-List Weblogger", or really anyone special in the weblogging world, but I'm going to offer my two cents on this issue anyway. RSS is based on XML, and generally, it works well for what it was designed for.  I don't think we need Echo to replace RSS for what RSS is doing today. However. The way people are reading weblogs is changing, thanks to the features in the current crop of aggregators and features coming in future ones. Instead of simply using RSS to see what the current stories are on a site (which is what RDF was originally created for right?) people are using RSS to subscribe to a site's content.  The trend seems to be towards doing all your reading in the aggregator, which is fine with me. There are some problems with this, though.  And here's the interesting thing:  Most of these problems existed already and are solved, by NNTP. Weblogs won't scale.  If you write something incredibly interesting and it gets posted to Slashdot or CNN, your little site is going to get destroyed.  NNTP handles this by automatically mirroring content.  RSS is going to need something like this when it goes mainstream - sure it will survive without it, but a standard mechanism of distributing RSS content would make for better bandwidth usage and help feeds scale.  This is going to become especially important as more weblogs start incorporating "payloads" - pictures, video, music, etc. There are also some standard operations that you expect to be able to do with a collection of items posted to a site:  See if there are new ones, request specific old ones, and have some way of identifying which ones the user has read. Usenet handles all these things.  When you talk to an NNTP news server, even though each article has a unique Message-ID, it also has a number local to that server.  Your news reader knows you've read articles 1-2301145, and doesn't need to store 2301145 strings to know which ones you've read.  This is important.  Your news reader also knows when you've read 1-2301140,2301142-2301145, so simply storing the date of the last read item isn't enough.  You need to know which ones you haven't read. What I would like to see is a client/server weblog/news protocol.  A next generation NNTP.  NNTP already handles most (if not all) of what the weblogging community needs, and we know it scales.  We could build on top of NNTP, the way SOAP is built on top of XML. Anyway, that's my two cents. 10:27:39 AM    comment []