house of warwick

John writes:

The BloggerCon model, and a little substance

Thanks to many who commented, we've made some changes to the BloggerCon model.  The highlights, as you may have noted, are that 1) we'll give away at least 25 spots randomly on September 1 to those who have signed up to be on the list of possible "scholarship" recipients and 2) we're making the BoF sessions on October 5 free of charge to all bloggers. [John Palfrey News]

With the added mission of writing features for a newspaper, I've applied for a press pass. I've got my fingers crossed.

D'Arcy links to an aggregator list. I've spent most of the day trying to find a NNW replacement. (I'm selling my laptop to by a desktop dual 1GHz G4.)

Looking for an RSS reader?
Well, you're probably not, but if you know someone who is, they might be thankful for this page, containing what appears to be a pretty comprehensive list of RSS readers for a whole lotta platforms.... [D'Arcy Norman's Learning Commons Weblog]

Good News and Bad News:

Bad News: My first choice sponsor fell through. Sadness and despair loomed. Where am I going to find $2000? On the bright but zany side, I feel like Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams". I just know I have to get in a car, drive to Boston and take Dave Winer to a Red Sox game...

Good News: They will accept stories as feature articles. I'll be submitting a pre-conference article about the big picture: content syndication, business use, technology. I'll submit a second when I get back: day by day, stories of meetings and dinners and people.

Bill French points to this post in a comment about my post about leaving RSS to the business of information delivery.  Here  a snip of his comment:

...the trouble that the [RSS] industry is expriencing is the rush by marketing folks into the RSS fray without a complete understanding of what RSS syncation (sic) is good for or its historical roots.

Bill is making a great point here.  The market is ready for content syndication, but they don't know what the underlying technology is called and don't care.  See my two posts on the right sidebar for extra details.

The average customer cares about RSS vs. Nechoatom in the same way they care about Intel vs. Mac.  They want the most compatible best deal for the money.  Most average consumers don't care what chip drives an X-Box or Sony Playstation, just that the games are cool and easy to afford.

So is RSS the Playstation and Nechoatom the X-Box?  Discuss!

I've subscribed to his site now.  Thanks Bill!

Joe is at it again.  I had a blast with Phase 5 and am looking forward to all of the fun with ShareBlogs.  It's really made me take a different approach to BlogShares in general.  I've made a couple of new blog friends and learned that you really do get more out of an endevour when your focus is giving rather than receiving.

I've received share gifts over the weekend from blog owners, increasing my BlogShare worth.  Now it's time to give some back.  Watch your emails.  If you are a subscriber to the RSS feed of this site, you'll get a gift (send me some inventive proof, too :> ) and if you've given me a gift before, you'll find something in your stocking...

 

I've been evaluating two ways of reading aggregated syndication feeds: Radio Userland's built-in aggregator and NetNewsWire. To skip the suspense, NNW won. I used Radio extensively for the last three days, posting and reading content. With Radio running on my downstairs server (see this), response time was fast and reading news was a little easier, since I use the traditional view in NNW and Radio's layout puts all of the news on one page.

This brings me to the reason I shut of Radio's aggregator this morning. I read news by scanning the content, then reviewing interesting stories, then posting the content afterwards. With Radio's aggregator, that just wasn't possible. I subscribe to 92 sources and that makes managing headlines in Radio unwieldy.

I'm hoping that when I learn a bit more about Radio/Frontier/Manila, I can create a read-only aggregator page that's tailored to my needs.

Update: Brent Simmons (creator of NNW writes):

[snip]

The thing to remember is that the distinction between aggregator types isn[base ']t between mail-reader style and weblog-style, it[base ']s between GUI apps and browser-based apps. Dave writes: [base "]People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something.[per thou]

Actually, no, they[base ']re not. [inessential.com]

Here's a list of questions Dave is asking his candidates. I like that they aren't condusive to sound bites. I don't think many of them will answer the mary-jane question.