BBC: "The number of users taking advantage of illegal file-sharing on the net is on the rise, according to new figures from analyst firm Jupiter Media." Illegal? [Scripting News]

» Maybe because the Hollywood pigopolists have stripped or squashed any chance of legal P2P file-sharing???   When you look at effect it is often useful to analyze cause.  Not that you'd expect that from a news organisation.

Now, the idea is this. When I come across a post on an interesting theme that seems like it might have lasting value, I want to be able to

1. Create a topic, with a title of its own and a definition or description in plain English (which may contain arbitrary hyperlinks). Just "where" the topic is stored is unimportant. The important thing is that it is a public entity.
2. Subscribe to that topic. Subscribing has two effects: it adds the topic to a personal topic list of mine, and it means I'll get posts by other people on that topic in my RSS aggregator because each topic is associated to a shared RSS feed.
3. Post to that topic whenever I talk about it in my weblog. This has to be *easy*, like checking a box or selecting from a drop-down menu displayed under the box where I write my posts.
4. Access an archive of posts on that topic somewhere on the Web.
5. Let anyone edit the description of the topic when important things are added to the "state of the art" on the topic, or when other related topics spring out of the discussion, to let people know where the conversation has branched off.

Basically, from where I stand, this sounds a little like a witch's brew of liveTopics, standalone TrackBack, and this peculiar brand of editable web sites known as wikis.

[Seb's Open Research]

» What you are describing sounds very like the idea behind the BlogPlex Server, for forming ad hoc communities, I put forward a little while back and is the start and endpoint for liveTopics.

In order to form BlogPlexes you need enough good metadata in someones weblog to being to make connections between them.  When I looked around I realised categories weren't going to cut it, AI wasn't ready and hence I began working on liveTopics.

Obviously since those initial thoughts (which I don't claim are particularly original) I have come across lots of other new ideas like RSS, XFML and so on.  These will all feed in to the design and I think improve it.  For example in considering item (5) one of the powerful features of XFML is to allow us to connect topics together.

In greed we trusted. Robert Bryce's Enron book entertainingly chronicles fraudulent excesses and office sex. But was Enron a fluke -- or capitalism taken to its logical extreme? [Salon.com]

» Don't worry.  When Bush is proclaimed Emperor by the Senate he'll be able to root out all the people talking about these kind of abuses and excesses.  Now back to your regular programming...

To restore it just add <%radio.macros.staticSiteStatsImage ()%> anywhere in your templates!

Then you have to wait until the next day. It (unfortunately!) won't restore your referer report for the time you did not have the bug in your template. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

» Well spotted Roland.  I thought my referrer log had been looking pretty boring lately.