Thursday, October 16, 2003

No URLs need apply.  I am thinking that in BlogBridge the standard way to sign up to a feed should be to use a search. In other words, "find me a blog about ..." which would produce a list of blogs, perhaps in relevance order, so that the user can choose which blog or feed he'd like to follow. No URLs need to be typed by the user. (Of course there will be an advanced feature somewhere if you insist.) This idea comes from hearing rants over the years about how URLs and DNS names are too primitive and get broken over time, whereas Google has become the de-facto tool to navigate to a web site, at least in all but the most obvious cases. By analogy, this question of whether the user types in the URL of the feed or the URL of the blog may be looking at things the wrong way. The user really shouldn't have to locate any URLs. If you are looking for a blog about X, just ask for it. Does FeedSter, BlogStreet, Waypath, Technorati or any other site support that kind of search through an XML-RPC or other API?   8:52:07 AM  >  trackback []   comment []

Cool Software Alert. To my frequent detriment (because I am on Windows, but I wouldn't be surprised if this applies to Mac's too) I am always trying out new softtware, partially because of the gadget freak in me, partly to keep up with what's going on, and well, because often I find something useful. I discovered MY IE2 and have been using it for a few weeks and I really like it. It's "simply" a new UI built around Internet Explorer with lots of handy little features. Most useful are: the tabbed interface (yeah, I know, it was invented somewhere else) and the notion of groups of tabs which you can save and recall with a single command (yeah, I know, ...) In a way the most important is what's not there, which is a new browser engine. Since it is IE under the skin all your usual web sites, warts and all, work in the usual way. Recommended. (p.s. why to my detriment? Because more often than one would like, installing software on a windows computer hoses something subtle and leaves the machine just a little less stable than before.) 8:12:54 AM  >  trackback []   comment []