Wednesday, December 11, 2002

When you miss an important email because your mailbox is full of spam, you can send a letter to Alan Ralsky, 6747 Minnow Pond Drive, West Bloomfield, MI 48322. He's one of the leading suppliers of spam services, and runs a very profitable business according to the Detroit Free Press. Thanks to Jason Levine for collating the info. I plan to send Ralsky a hand-written letter tonight, and any other time I have something to say about spam. Finally, there's someone to complain to about this. [Scripting News] 8:06:31 PM    comment []

Snow Day. Another School Using Manila and RSS "Here we go...very cool concept using, guess what...Manila (check out the yearbook link). Note the high school site and the news site: 'Who maintains this site? Volunteer editors. Each dynamic site is constructed and maintained by one or more editors. Look in the about area of each site to find the names of the editors.' AND 'Why are we using a content management system? It requires far less technical knowledge to publish a good looking site. The value of our network will grow as more and more people use it. Publishing is a simple way to start the ball rolling.' Definitely an addition to the rolls!" [weblogged News] I followed the link to the news site and came upon the following entry for December 5: "WSAZ is reporting that Eastern (along with most other local schools) is closed today. Yea Baby, it[base ']s the first snow day of 2002. This is a friendly reminder to drive safely and watch this page for the posting of snowdance lessons to be offered in the elementary cafetorium. Dates and costs to be posted at a later date. [^] Chad Griffith - goto" This is exactly what I want from the kids' school - a current news page that I can go to in the morning to see if school has been cancelled. I shouldn't have to wade through the scrolling ticker on TV, and while there are web sites out there that are aggregating closings, it would be far easier for the principal or the secretary to post a quick message to the school's site. Even better if it appears in my morning aggregator read. [The Shifted Librarian] 8:05:15 PM    comment []

Another Catalog of the Blogosphere. Steven Cohen has come across yet another blogosphere aggregator - Janes' Blogosphere. The "Janes" in the title is David Janes, a Canadian blogger (eh). Naturally, David is maintaining a blog to highlight changes, endorsements, and improvements, but here's a description straight from the site: "Welcome to Janes' Blogosphere, a web-based microcontent aggregator for blogs (and soon newspapers). If you want to dive right in, go to BlogTrack -- and read your favorite blogs in a fraction of the time it would usually take. If your blog is not listed here, please use our Template Rewriter to mark up your blog's template and then send me a note! You can also register by creating a login. This is a beta test of this software -- I've been testing it for the last two months, but obviously there still may be bugs. Please mail me if you have problems and I'll try to fix them as soon as possible. This website has only been tested against Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla/Phonenix running on Windows. It should be moderately well behaved on other Version 4 and higher browsers, though if you have a problem, I'd appreciate hearing about it." Offhand, I don't see a count of how many blogs are being indexed at the moment. It's an interesting twist on an online aggregator (reloading external content in a frame), plus a mix of the various ecosystems and Technorati. My favorite feature so far, though, has to be the geographical breakdown of those blogs indexed in the database (although it looks to be a subset of those currently indexed). Could dovetail nicely with political initiatives, meet ups, and business/social networks in the big "B" Blogosphere, although the obvious barrier here is the onus on bloggers to sign up and add code to their templates. Another great find, Steven! [The Shifted Librarian] 7:54:31 PM    comment []

Shop hard. Andrew Goodman in Traffick: Brand Bullies' Scorched-Web Policy: A Dissent. Good piece. Sources Cluetrain & its authors extensively, too. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 6:42:42 PM    comment []