My conversation with Mr. Safe. Mr. Safe: Hey, I've been reading about that RSS thing you were telling me about. It was mentioned recently in the New York Times, and also the Wall Street Journal. I'm thinking maybe it's a safe choice after all. ... [Jon's Radio]

If you ask me (as an outside observer), this piece says it all. Right on the button, John.

 
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Gates and Security. An anonymous reader writes "Orwell was wrong about Big Brother! Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates told a homeland-security conference on Wednesday ... ...[Slashdot] 
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IBM creates self-assembling metamaterial [Ars Technica] 
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Hacker How-To Good Summer Reading. Stealing the Network is an entertaining hacking manual that purports to get inside the minds of hackers, explaining how they think. It's a good read, but it may infuriate some security types. A review by Michelle Delio. [Wired News] 
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"Google Weblog": Try Before You Sell: Want to see what ads AdSense thinks are relevant to your page? Just enter its URL: [Daypop Top 40] 
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SpaceshipOne:.

"Slung below its equally innovative mothership dubbed White Knight, SpaceShipOne rides above planet Earth, photographed during a recent flight test. SpaceShipOne was designed and built by cutting-edge aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites to compete for the X Prize. The 10 million dollar X prize is open to private companies and requires the successful launch of a spaceship which carries three people on short sub-orbital flights to an altitude of 100 kilometers -- a scenario similar to the early manned spaceflights of NASA's Mercury Program. Unlike more conventional rocket flights to space, SpaceShipOne will first be carried to an altitude of 50,000 feet by the twin turbojet White Knight and then released before igniting its own hybrid solid fuel rocket engine. After the climb to space, the craft will convert to a stable high drag configuration for re-entry, ultimately landing like a conventional glider at light plane speeds." Astronomy Picture of the Day [Follow Me Here...] 
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Blog Post Analysis [BlogStreet] 
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Artima Creates Buzz
People are using RSS more and more to guide them to interesting HTML pages. Because readers are changing the way they relate to websites, website owners need to change they way they relate to their readers. Find out how one website, Artima.com, has attempted to catch and ride the RSS wave. And if you have a weblog, find out how you can "Join the Buzz." [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] 
12:32:46 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blog voices settling the wilderness of politics.

Lance Knobel has posted a very interesting piece at the BloggerCon 2003 Weblog about Tom Watson, blogging MP. A sample:

Why did Tom start his weblog? "I wanted to develop new forms of political participation, particularly with communities that weren't really that involved in politics," he says. Tom says that when he started he had a "vanity website: a big photo of me, with details of my surgery [constituency office] hours". He quickly recognised that he needed something different.

He'd never even heard of weblogs, but Tom did some searching on the Web for something that would satisfy his needs. "I wanted to convey information very quickly and do it myself. I wanted to be relevant." He found weblogs.

"For me, it was a huge risk," he says. "I've taken a few hits in diary columns and most of the people in Parliament just don't get it. But the community I was talking to knew what I was on about and understand." Tom spends an average of one hour a day on his weblog, which he admits is "a big commitment for an MP".

Although he didn't start his weblog for either his constituents or the media, both are beginning to take an interest. A few of Tom's postings have developed into news stories in the national press, and he says some of his constituents now read the site.

However, it isn't about electoral advantage. "If I get half a dozen additional votes at the next election because of my blog, I'll be surprised," he says. "It's not a campaign tool. It's a political ideas tool."

For the first time I'm starting to believe we are reaching the implementation stage of Cluetrain in politics: The point where voice and authenticity matter more than any campaign strategy. When serving finally means more than campaigning. When sharing ideas in a place where they grow and change matters more than calculated, and usually intransigent, positions.

I like it.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
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Searching for Commentary on Cluetrain Manifesto.
InfoSeeker News
Yesterday I watched an expert complete a search in Google for commentary of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Analyzing behaviors of experts can be both instructive and provide interesting avenues to explore personally when participating in similar activities. The expert I worked with in this example spends eight hours a day searching for information for other people, usually creating reports based on what she finds online, and which the reports are usually heavily annotated with plenty of good quality links for the client to follow-up interesting leads her/himself. Explore with me this expert's activity to see what you can gain and implement in your searching. [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] 
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Blogstreet Takes Content Management to a New Level.
Blogger News
The basic unit on which Google and most every search engine is based is the "webpage". Commonly this is a single HTML unit that is deemed to be similar to every other webpage. Weblogs on the other hand are different; the basic unit of a weblog is a microdocument normally called a "post". Microdoc News adds to the blogosphere story which is already taking shape on the web that started with the Blogstreet "Blog Post Analysis". Blogstreet have taken content management to a new level. [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] 
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Blog Counting and Bloggership.
Blogger News
Phil Wolff at Blogcount tells us there are 3 million blogs worldwide. So far, BlogCensus has found only 480k of them while Technorati has now crawled 402k of them. What does this mean? Have BlogCount, BlogCensus and Technorati found the same ones and if so, are they really blogs? [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] 
12:28:17 AM      comment []   trackback []