Long RSS Items

"Are long RSS items rude? More and more people are reading inside of news readers and not bothering to go to the blogs themselves. (My logs show this.) Should we put full text of the blog entry in the RSS feed, even if it's long? It will surely slow your refresh rate. Has anyone written a style guide for RSS feeds? It's a moving target, but I would be interested to hear about how readers and writers are designing their RSS feeds. Obviously, the people who are reading this in their RSS readers are going to have to get up off their butts and click on my blog to comment... ;-)" [Joi Ito's Web]

Joi Ito is asking about RSS ettiquette, just as I was last year. Luckily, Brent Ashley rode in on a horse and saved the day. I agree with the folks commenting on Joi's site - offer both!

[The Shifted Librarian]

Google + Blogger = Stimergy. Matt Webb: Imagine, searching at Google, and then:

• this trail is highly followed
• do you only want to see what people suggest, or where people went?
• here's a worn track in the interweb. Follow the Google Pixie!
• this trail is uncommon, but made by someone we see (by your weblog) that you value

Or, more succinctly, stimergy. [Sam Ruby]

Lots and lots of reaction to Google buying Pyra. This post plus another from Cory at Boing, Boing hit on the most provocative interpretation I've seen; that Google is building the Memex.  Here's Matt's key observation:

GOOGLE ARE BUILDING THE MEMEX.

They've got one-to-one connections. Links. Now they've realised - like Ted Nelson - that the fundamental unit of the web isn't the link, but the trail. And the only place that's online is... weblogs.

There are two levels to the trail:

1 - what you see
2 - what you do
("And what you feel on another track" -- what song is that?)

And the trail is, in its simplest form, organised chronologically. Later it gets more complex. Look to see Google introduce categories based on DMOZ as a next step.

What Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, weblogs, and now Google are all demonstrating is that the boundaries between organizations and disciplines are arbitrary. It's the connections and the trails that matter. It's just taken a lot longer to build it than we would have liked. With a bit of luck we'll find out that we've managed to build it in time.

[McGee's Musings]

Weblogs could soon be updated from mobile phones, creating a new generation of bloggers. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

[Scripting News]

Yesterday I mentioned talking with Noah Glass, but I didn't mention that Noah is the owner and developer of the audio blogging tool I linked to yesterday. He said he was doing something called OddBlog. Hadn't heard of it. He said "you wrote about it on Scripting News." Oh shit Alzheimer's again. "I write about lots of things," I said, "my memory ain't what it used to be." He said "you wrote about it today." Gulp. It's really getting bad. I asked for the name again. He said OddBlog. I looked at the site. "Ohhhh AudBlog," I said.

There's problem number one, the name. It's descriptive, not memorable, and impossible to pronounce.

Problem number two, which I reported yesterday, is that it only works with Blogger. After talking with Noah, I understand why. Blogger is centralized, making configuration easy. Radio is not centralized, and further the user might be behind a firewall or NAT and unable to receive an XML-RPC call, which is how Noah's software works. One solution, and it's not a very pretty one, is to do a mail-to-weblog, or use instant messaging (AIM or Jabber), but then the user might not have that features enabled, or want them enabled. I suggested that we work this out with Brent Simmons, who has had to traverse many of these issues in his work on NetNewsWire. Probably for Radio users the only option that will work is some kind of polling in the opposite direction, or just send me an email and I'll do the copy-paste.

Of course, some wankers out there have given me shit for criticizing Noah's product. Comes with the territory. Alan Kay said that Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. I love Noah and he knows that. I've always admired his spirit, and AudBlog (change the name please!) reflects that. I want it to be a success so I tell him how I think it can be better, or in this case, made to work at all. To those who think they're better software designers, I quote Scoop Nisker. "If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own."

[Scripting News]