Radio UserLand Notes

Scoble does somthing that many people would be shocked about: he regularly gives out his cell phone number in weblog posts. I do something similar at the top of my about Steve page (I know I need to update it) and have had no calls from "random people" from the web.

That kind of raw trust takes a certain amount of guts. Scoble was my inspiration to disclose my cell number (417-894-4460) and besides, I'm in the phone book anyway.

UserLand Radio Community Server Scheduled Maintenance. The UserLand Radio Community services are being moved to a new server.

Your content is already being upstreamed to the new server and existing content has already been moved. The server changes will not require you to re-publish your site or make any changes to your Radio configuration.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact us directly at webmaster@userland.com.

Date: Sunday November 14, the Radio UserLand Community Server [UserLand Product News]

Kevin talks about his year long love affair with his Treo.

The True Story of Audion.

Ordinarily, this is the sort of thing I’d post to the Linked List, but it’s simply too good — extraordinarily, wonderfully good — and thus deserves your full attention.

Get yourself a lovely beverage, disconnect the phone, quit your IM client, and enjoy The True Story of Audion, by Cabel Sasser of Panic Software. One of the greatest Mac stories I’ve ever read. Joyous, exciting, heartbreaking. Note: most of the links are pop-up footnotes; don’t skip them.

Seriously, read this. You’ll thank me. Plus, there will be a quiz next week.

Dann also thinks out loud about what a good blogging tool could do. One of the things UserLand has been thinking about is the personal distribution issues of podcast-laden RSS feeds. You'll see more about that in the first part of next year.

Dann Sheridan: "This feature list is all wrong. Four out of six of the items are what I would consider real features."

Dann and I traded comments and I explained that the features listed are the most frequently requested. My list as a developer would be different--we'll run a developer survey next.

Messaging Architectures.

Tim Bray talks about "store and forward" and "post and poll" messaging architectures. "People who are designing message interchange frameworks that might need to become Internet-scale should consider this, and be careful of architectures that don't fall into one of these two baskets, because nothing else has yet been shown to work."

Terry Frazier points out that your airline reservation system might have a bias.

Don Park's original post about Atom and RSS last week spawned a second post. That motivated me to head to the original, read the comments and think. A great discussion ensued in the comments and I'd like to mention something that Dave said regarding two party systems. What's wrong with a two party system for syndication? RSS (and all of it's sub/super flavors) and Atom are two parties, right?

Still catching up with BloggerCon stuff. Here's a nugget via Ed Cone that Stowe Boyd wrote about the downside of BloggerCon. The format is great for discussion but bad for solving problems because it's too freeform. For me, that's great because I got to hear so much and draw my own conclusions.

As far a Stowe's mention of vendor issues, at first I would have been inclined to agree. In the end, Dave's heavy handed handling of the vendors was right in principle, wrong in execution. Dave's weakness has always been his directness and those who don't know him are easily offended. Dave was right to shut the vendors out because they have a much greater opportunity when they listen.

Vendors are still users of blogging tools with valid opinions and ideas about how to effectively blog and do it with zeal. Fine, BloggerCon is the wrong place for vendors to talk. Let's start a vendor's conference where it's only vendors and we talk about common opportunities and true interop with products.

Paolo's recent post on comments got me thinking about removing comments from my templates and leaving trackback only. It's a hard decision to work through, but when Paolo mentioned Matt Mower's metaphor I became hooked. The problem, I don't write much to which people feel the to respond. I need to write more and write better content, right?

Bruce Zimmer put up a tutorial on how to change the date of a postin Radio. It's a bit detailed and geeky and also points out a flaw in the product's permalink format, something that Rogers Cadenhead noticed in his move from Radio to a homebrew setup. It's something we are looking to address as we move Radio forward--trust me.