Home-Based Entrepreneur

Friday, January 09, 2004

Wikipedia is back.

I am not a big fan of Wikis, but Wikipedia is the one application of the idea that seems to work. -- BB

Wikipedia timelines. Whoa. Wikipedia -- the free, user-edited, almost-3-years-old, 191466-article-strong, encyclopedia that's just raised more than 30,000 dollars from surfers like you -- features a truckload of hyperlinked timelines, many of them quite detailed. Astronomy, biology, chemistry...
[Seb's Open Research]

9:57:38 AM

Verisign changing DNS updates.

VeriSign planning more changes to .com, .net. BOSTON - VeriSign Inc. is planning changes to a DNS (Domain Name System) component responsible for coordinating updates to the .com and .net domains throughout the DNS system, according to a company spokesman.[InfoWorld: Top News]

9:55:55 AM

What is OPML?

If you aren't using feeds.scripting.com, maybe you should be. -- BB

OPML is "a file format that can be used to exchange subscription lists between programs that read RSS files, such as feed readers and aggregators." There's an RFC for developers at the end of the doc. [Scripting News]

9:51:50 AM

What is a weblog?

Shift happens.

Clay points out how the meaning of the term "weblogging" has changed over the last few years as people have repurposed weblog tools in multidinous ways:

Weblogging used to mean, roughly, “daily personal publishing, with an emphasis on conversational annotation of links”, and the software was originally designed to match that pattern. Now weblogging means “stuff people do with weblog software”, and those uses are far more various than the pattern Jorn Barger named and Rebecca Blood described.

So do we need a new term for the activity formerly known as "weblogging"?

[Seb's Open Research]
9:44:49 AM

Weblog strategy.

This could be important if your weblog is an important part of your marketing communication or your personal branding. -- BB

Should you split your blog?. Last month Lisa Williams answered no, and proceeded to eloquently articulate a key part of the philosophy that motivated the design of the Internet Topic Exchange (which incidentally turns one year old next week!).

Basically, unless there are good reasons to do otherwise, all of an individual's public writing ought to be coherently tied together (that includes comments too, by the way). Some of it could additionally go to other spaces, if the author feels like sharing it with a community. To reuse Don Park's metaphor, bloggers are mountains, topics are lakes, and posts flow like water from one to the other. Topics help generate new connections and they provide good starting points for new bloggers.

Here's part of Lisa's post:

As syndication becomes more robust, I think we will see more and more site/feeds that contain vast quantities of news and commentary on a specific subject as people map their own categories to a kind of "pidgin taxonomy." The categories in that taxonomy could then be themselves a feed displayed in an aggregator or on a webpage or both. (While I was hanging out on IRC someone -- I wish I remembered so that I could attribute this idea -- made the comment that we could use the categories of the Wikipedia as this kind of lingua-franca. Just think how it would enrich an online reference work to be able to get a definition of a term and then hit a button and see a live, continually changing feed of related news stories and blog posts on that idea!! I need to fan myself...is it warm in here?).

It so happens that Michael Fagan took it upon himself to create directories of topics in the Exchange early on. One of them uses the Open Directory's category scheme.

(link via Kaye)
[Seb's Open Research]
9:43:10 AM