Friday, July 10, 2009

Gary, Indiana Jackson's boyhood home pays tribute. Michael Jackson was the pride of Gary, Indiana, growing up and on Tuesday his hometown paid tribute to the late entertainer with a memorial and celebration in his honor. [CNN.com - Entertainment] 10:08:11 PM

Notes on RSS and PubSubHubbub Google's Pubsubhubbub. It's got a weird name, and I found the spec somewhat hard to understand. But thanks to Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin from the team at Google that implemented it, I now understand what Pubsubhubbub does. It allows you to receive updates of RSS feeds without polling. It makes it possible to build a distributed Twitter-like system with components that are not made by a single company, and with servers not run by a single company. It makes instant updates possible for RSS. It makes it possible to build a Twitter without the limitations of Twitter. (For example, no 140-character limit, the ability to handle enclosures, categories without #hashtags.) The protocol it defines seems reasonable (I'll have to implement one side of it to be sure) and because it has the backing of Google, one of a very small number of companies with the resources to make something like this work, it has a chance of gaining traction and when it does, scaling. In fact, it's part of one of the components I asked Google to implement in a blog post here on May 28, as Brett pointed out in our phone conversation earlier today. It's nice to see that at least a few people at Google see the possibility of assembling a Twitter-like notification system with the Small Pieces, Loosely Joined approach. Drilling in one more level, here's how it flows. 1. Any feed that wants to participate in this network must add a bit to the feed that indicates which ping server is handling notifications on its behalf. There can be more than one. 2. When a subscribing application initially parses the feed and notices this bit, it sends a notification to each server saying "I want to be notified when this feed updates." 3. When the feed updates, it pings each of the servers it has registered with saying "I have updated." 4. The server then pings each of the subscribers saying "He updated." The subscriber must have a known address, therefore must not be behind a firewall or NAT. For client apps, they need some kind of proxy that has a known address. This limit is signficant, but certainly not insurmountable. I would like to see them understand RSS syntax in addition to Atom syntax, and I understand from the spec that that is forthcoming. Update: http://superfeedr.com/ has also implemented this protocol. [Scripting News] 10:04:31 PM

'Smile' Michael Jackson memorial: Jermaine Jackson sings 'Smile'. Pop & Hiss brings you quick thoughts on some of the main performances at Tuesday's Michael Jackson memorial. What: Jermaine Jackson's "Smile." A song that was nicely set up by actress Brooke Shields. Her speech will likely stand as one of the day's best, offering personal, humorous looks at the pop singer, as well as some touching insights. She would hold his hand, Shields noted, as long as it wasn't covered with Jackson's famed white sequined glove. And his favorite song, Shields noted, was "Smile," a tune originally used in Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." Michael covered the song on his 1995 double-disc set "HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I." Michael's brother Jermaine performed the song here immediately after Shields' speech. Ann Powers is inside the Staples Center. "The older brother keeps his composure for the most part, the wobble in his voice echoing Michael's own, but during an a capella moment near the end, he almost loses it," Powers writes. "It's possible in this overwrought moment to see the lineage that extends from Louis Armstrong -- who also employed a very tricky smile -- to the man being celebrated here, as above all an African American icon. To feel the sorrow, compromise and determination behind every entertaining smile." -- Ann Powers and Todd Martens Photo credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times [Pop & Hiss] 9:27:58 PM