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Sunday, June 23, 2002

Today's Useful Weblog

Go see the latest useful weblog I've run across -- Dan Rosenbaum's Over the Edge. I gather from Dan's "About" page that he is a former technology columnist for UPI, now using Radio Userland to reach out to his former (and hopefully future) audience.

Dan appears to know his stuff. He's the first person I've seen to really put some meat into the idea of more collaborative weblogs. Definitely worth a read.

RSS Authentication Makes the Blogosphere More Useful

Excellent thoughts here on how to authenticate RSS feeds to promote the collaborative nature of weblogs. While both of these posts are thinking more along altruistic lines and general newsgathering, the principles espoused here fit quite nicely into the business arena.

This holds potential to vastly improve the nature of intra-company communication if a user-friendly, transparent control mechanism can be built that will keep everything from going to everybody.

A Challenge to the 'Blog Plumbers: Making a Buck on 'Blogging
[...] as an excellent way for professional news gatherers to distribute information to paying clients. [...]

Here's what would be required to make that work:

• a multiuser weblog that
• allows for content categorization and
• which generates material for a news aggregator that
• can be kept out of the public eye.

An electronic commerce addition might be interesting too, so that sites could subscribe on a monthly or annual basis [...][Over the Edge]

and

Why Authentication In Aggregators Is Such A Good Idea
[...]Often, though, people just don't want to pay or the subscription fee is too high. That's where libraries could come in. Many libraries already provide remote access to their databases for their residents, and there's no reason that couldn't translate over into aggregators.[...][The Shifted Librarian]

Matthew Ernest goes a step further, suggesting that the existing nature of RSS feed access already supports HTML authentication and can easily be structured to support basic userid and password protection for controlled access.

This is good stuff. If Matthew's ideas prove to be even partially workable I may have found reason enough to stay on the Radio bandwagon.

Let's keep our fingers crossed...

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This Page was last updated: 2/9/2003; 11:01:06 AM