Radio UserLand Notes

Ranchero Software: "NetNewsWire 2.0 Released!"

What a long but worthwhile trip it's been for Brent and Sheila. NNW is an outstanding example of a Macintosh application, well crafted and lovingly shipped almost like a custom built sports car. I use NNW in conjunction with MarsEdit and Radio's aggregator to handle a large number of feeds, scripting, and writing for my weblog. It's well worth the license fee. Please take a moment to consider Brent and Sheila's product if you own a Mac and read RSS feeds. It's fantastic.

The new Radio 9 developer's site is now live. Head over and look around when you have a chance although the cupboard is a bit bare right now. I mirrored the post I made below on the new site.

A question that has been often asked in the last year is "What is Radio UserLand?" In the past, Radio has been an MP3 player, an outliner, a weblog writing tool, an RSS aggregator, a HTML content manager, a lightweight database, a scripting environment and finally a UserTalk integrated development environment.

Wow.

The fact that it can do all of those things *at the same time* is a testament to the architecture. It's also a big reason why Radio hasn't been an enormous commericial success. When you try to explain it to somebody, the description fragements in several different directions.

UserLand was well known for innovation when it first developed products like Radio and Manila, plus championed concepts like Edit this Page, RSS and XML-RPC. We'll be returning to that playing field with this next generation product, likely born from the loins of Radio. This new product will act your personal aggregator, but for more than RSS or other flavors of XML. It will help you step back and see yourself as the web sees you by using information from services you currently use.

Huh?

Well, let's start with your weblog. You'll use it to write, read and manage your weblog. That will likely mean it will act as a bridge between your favorite text editor and your weblog serving platform. It will gather content from weblogs you like to read and present it in a format and layout that makes sense to you. It will aggregate other weblog content that relates to you using information from services like Technorati, Feedster and PubSub. It will help you manage the basics of your weblog settings and stats. It will help you create, place and track the success of revenue-generating weblog elements (ads or affiliates).

Read Marc Canter's background piece on a "digital lifestyle aggregator" and you'll get a great idea of where we are going.

Dave Winer and many others fostered an entire "generation" of web writers--I'm one for sure--and those writers are now maturing and wanting to see the bigger picture. I want to be able to write and use more than text to express myself. If I'm writing professionally, I want to track and control advertising revenue. If I'm a techie, I want to modify the presentation and function of the web pages that represent me.

That's our goal.