Tuesday, May 18, 2004

RSS Feed For Time.com Time Magazine has RSS. [Scripting News] 6:40:10 PM

Wireless Montreal Montreal's Westmount Square gets Hot Zone. Vivato gear enabled a hot zone in Montreal that otherwise would have been much more difficult to build: Tadaa Wireless, a wireless ISP, hired Summit Technologies, a solutions provider, to build a network covering three 22-storey skyscrapers in Montreal. Summit figured that it would take 160 traditional APs to do the job. Using Vivato gear instead, Summit built the network with three Vivato base stations and six Vivato APs. The network covers a 1.5 mile radius and is available to 1,500 users. Vivato has had some troubles recently with an overhaul of its management team but if it can focus on this niche of unusual deployments it may do well. There's probably not a shortage of historic buildings or other sites that may be difficult to wire.... [Wi-Fi Networking News] 6:35:22 PM

The Acoustic Storm with Jeff Parets Adds Two Radio Affiliates The Acoustic Storm Radio Program with Jeff Parets is now on the air in Portland, OR via KRVO 105.9 The River. Beginning May 30th, the Acoustic Storm will also broadcast in Cortez-Durango, CO via KKDC 93.3 The Crow. As a bonus, The River streams live on the internet, so you can listen to The Acoustic Storm on the web! 6:28:39 PM

Recording Artists in the Digital Age Radical plan for compensating recording artists in the digital age. A Harvard professor outlines a radical plan for compensating recording artists in the digital age. He wants to pay for music with taxes on Internet access and MP3 players. [Wired: Digi-wood] Editor's note. "Recording Artist" is a music-business euphemism for "musician". However, in this digital age, most movie makers are — literally — recording artists. Although it addresses the peculiar desiderata of the music business, the plan adumbrates the kind of new approach to the problems of digital-distribution which face the movie business, as portable media players create a demand for Cinema Minima–style movies. [Cinema Minima] 6:14:23 PM

w2p6+p4-2 w2p6+p4-2. [Abstract Dynamics] 6:10:10 PM

RSS In New Zealand E-Government RSS in New Zealand E-Government. This is an article I've submitted to Computerworld NZ. I interviewed Ferry Hendrikx of the NZ E-Government Unit for this. Note that the target audience is mainstream IT people, so as well as writing about Ferry's experiences in E-Government I decided to also explain what RSS is and put it in the context of everyday IT. So here it is: <start of article> RSS is an XML-based standard for syndication of news and other regularly-updated content. It is being widely adopted as a form of online publishing - The New York Times and Reuters are just two big-name publishers who now offer RSS "feeds". The New Zealand Government began using RSS feeds in 2003 to publish government news to the public. In July 2003 the New Zealand E-Government Unit released a document entitled "A standard for the publication of government news summaries", which outlined their vision for RSS in the New Zealand public sector. I interviewed the document's author Ferry Hendrikx, from the New Zealand E-Government Unit. Publish/Subscribe Component The document by Hendrikx proposed a 3-part RSS "component" for e-government, made up of: - RSS news feeds - News Aggregation - A Syndication/Subscribe service This is known as 'publish/subscribe' on the Web and it is one component of the New Zealand E-Government strategy.  The E-Government Strategy document published in 2001 declared that the Internet should be "the dominant means of enabling ready access to government information, services and processes" by June 2004. Hendrikx views the publish/subscribe model as "one of a number of ways of making information available" and confirms it is "one of our key goals". As to whether RSS is being used by the Government to distribute information both to the public and internally, Hendrikx asserts that "this model is equally useful for making information available for both public and internal consumption." A Short History of RSS The history of RSS comprises a number of competing and at times conflicting versions. It's also a matter of contention as to who invented RSS. Netscape were the first to release something called RSS - which at that time stood for "RDF Site Summary" and was designed for use in portals. It was labelled RSS 0.9 and came to light in March 1999. Netscape went on to release RSS 0.91 in July that same year, re-christening it "Rich Site Summary". This version included features from Dave Winer's <scriptingNews> format. In December 2000, RSS 1.0 was released by an independent group of developers - it used RDF (Resource Description Framework) syntax and focused on modularity and extensibility. It had more in common with RSS 0.90 than RSS 0.91, which was one of the reasons the RSS world forked off into two different directions. Soon after Dave Winer released RSS 0.92, which was a simpler version of RSS that built on RSS 0.91. The most popular version of RSS today is RSS 2.0, which was released by Dave Winer's company Userland in September 2002. E-Government selects RSS 1.0 When the New Zealand E-Government Unit came around to selecting which RSS format they would use at the end of 2002, they opted for RSS 1.0. Hendrikx explains how they came to that decision: "We started researching news syndication in late 2002. It was clear to us that we needed an extensible way to add new information to our RSS feeds. The early RSS standards (0.9x) were not extensible. RSS 1.0 was chosen mostly because of its standards based approach and the use of XML namespaces. The fit of RSS 1.0 with DC (Dublin Core) also helped our decision." In their implementation, the New Zealand E-Government Unit added the Dublin Core-based New Zealand Government Locator Service (NZGLS) metadata component, for government specific information. The NZGLS metadata standard is the official New Zealand Government standard for metadata. For example one of the NZGLS tags, <nzgls:type.agency>, specifies the Government agency for each item in the RSS feed. Currently the New Zealand E-Government has about 20 agencies generating RSS feeds. These are collected and aggregated into two public RSS feeds, which can be found at http://news.portal.govt.nz/. Hendrikx says that "these two feeds differ only by the geographic cover of the content: one contains only country wide news, the other contains all news including regional." Aggregation and Syndication The document published in July 2003 focused on the first part of the e-government RSS component, RSS feeds. The next parts, aggregation and syndication, are actually in deployment already says Hendrikx. "An aggregator was successfully prototyped last year. A production version is now running and produces the two RSS feeds mentioned previously. The output from the aggregator also drives the news content on the Govt.NZ portal (http://www.govt.nz/)." Hendrikx says that details of the aggregation and syndication features will be published on the E-government site "at an appropriate time to link with upgrades to the portal". Bringing RSS to The People In the commercial world, RSS and syndication technologies are familiar to only a small percentage of people. Mainstream IT people have yet to buy into the Publish/Subscribe vision, so there is a need to educate people and evangalise the benefits of publishing in RSS. Hendrikx says that this is true of government agencies too. "The concept and its benefits are not always immediately obvious and so we've spent time talking to agencies. Some agencies with the in-house technical capability were quick to adopt the system. Other agencies have joined up on a gradual basis as they developed an understanding of the benefits. One agency produced a forms-based client for us to help the smaller agencies generate their RSS content. In the longer term we may roll out a push based technology that allows interested agencies to push their RSS content to our server rather than having to publish RSS on their websites." The E-Government is one of the early adopters of RSS in New Zealand. Non-government organisations are now starting to consider implementing RSS and syndication technologies too. Hendrikx advises "the advantage of RSS is that it makes content widely available. RSS is fairly easy to implement, as there are plenty of tools available to help you." Commercial companies might not need the metadata rich feeds that RSS 1.0 enables. It's even easier to use RSS 2.0 to publish news and other regularly updated information. Companies may even want to consider engaging their customers in conversations, by publishing weblogs with RSS feeds. But whichever form of RSS you use, one thing's for sure - the world of RSS and syndication is re-defining how information is published and read on the Web. [Read/Write Web] 7:28:11 AM

Jerry Garcia Audio Jerry Garcia audio A Deadhead archivist who calls himself Slipnut found my post about a backstage interview with Jerry Garcia and emailed to ask if he could make a copy of the tape. I sent the precious cassette to this stranger in California on faith -- and he quickly sent it back, along with a CD copy. So now I had a digital copy of the brief conversation between Forbes editor Allan Dodds Frank and Garcia, with interjections from other bandmembers and Bill Graham. The question I remember asking ("Why don't you ever play St. Stephen or Cosmic Charlie?) is sadly not on tape. I found hearing Garcia speak to be more powerful than reading his transcribed words. There are ten tracks of audio (MP3), ranging from about 20 seconds to over 2 minutes in length. Here are links to those tracks (my transcription and annotation here); Tracks 6-10 are the meat of the interview: Track 1 ADF, Bill Graham, members of Grateful Dead chatter Track 2 Garcia banter Track 3 Garcia jokes and talks about money Track 4 Garcia on possessions, money and happiness Track 5 Short take on travel Track 6 Garcia on current projects, what's worth doing Track 7 Garcia on cycles of creativity Track 8 Short track of Garcia on illness and renewal Track 9 Garcia relates Borges story of the death he'd choose Track 10 Time for the second set. [EdCone.com] 7:23:25 AM

w2p3 w2p3. [Abstract Dynamics] 7:14:37 AM

'Expressionist Fab' Blogger To Change Publishing Software I've won! A free copy of Expression Engine, that is. Expect a complete move of this weblog in the not too distant future... [The Cartoonist] 7:12:23 AM

PR Notes / PR Opinions Corporate Blogging Guidelines.... Blog Relations concerns using blogs to communicate with an audience.  There's two elements to that lofty objective.  Firstly how you can reach out to bloggers who are of interest to your audience and secondly how your organization can communicate using your own blogs. Corporate blogging, has to date, been primarily taking place in the technology industry, however the growing number of weblogs means that other industries will undoubtedly follow suit.  It's common sense for the employer and the employee to have some agreed guidelines to ensure that everyone is clear on what's acceptable, in the same way that companies have formal e-mail and web usage policies. (Aside: I am always surprised at the number of organizations who don't have formal e-mail and web usage policies, if you don't already have one you should consider it.) The objective of these blog guidelines isn't to stifle creativity or create a Big Brother environment, but rather to help staff and employers make use of blogging without any negative repercussions. With Microsoft now boasting over 400 staff bloggers, it's no surprise to hear that Sun Microsystems is planning to enter the world of corporate blogging. Tim Bray at Sun has published some common sense guidelines for Sun employees interested in kicking off a blog. There are also a host of other guidelines and essays on the Web regarding Corporate blogging and if your colleagues are beginning to blog, it's useful to try and agree some groundrules. Here are some examples: Ray Ozzie - Guidelines for Weblogs at Groove (The original) George Dafermos - Corporate Policy on Employee Blogs Rebecca Blood - Weblog Ethics (General) Jorgen Thelin - My Personal Weblog Policy Here's some additional reading: BtoB Magazine - Corporate Blogs Make Personal Connection Nick Wreden - Ten Rules for Corporate Blogs The UK Guardian - Why Blogs Could  be Bad for Business The NY Times - The Corporate Blog is Catching On  (Free Subscription Required) Robert Scoble - The Corporate Weblog Manifesto Deborah Branscum - Blogging PR and All That Footnote: Thanks to Constantin Basturea for the link to Tim Bray's guidelines. [PR Opinions] 7:10:04 AM

On Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' "Exterminate all the brutes". With our highly idealistic war in Iraq turning monstrous, Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is frighteningly relevant -- again. [Salon.com] 7:06:23 AM

Yahoo Boosting E-mail Storage "Yahoo has announced it will provide 100 Mb of free space for its e-mail users." [Daypop Top 40] 6:56:13 AM