Friday, June 27, 2003
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
3:08:30 PM      comment []   trackback []  



"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:. [Image 'http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0306/ssone_scaled_c1topcarry.jpg' cannot be displayed]

"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
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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
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 Thursday, June 26, 2003
Andrew Odlyzko: The unsolvable privacy problem and its implications for security technologies. [Hack the Planet
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Pulling Up by Their Sandal Straps. Ecosandals.com, an online retailer of sandals made in Kenya, is managing to survive the dot-com shakeout -- and is bringing hope to Kenya's poor. The Internet may change the world yet. Jennifer Friedlin reports from Nairobi. [Wired News
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Affinity starts a new hosting service with integrated weblog capabilities. [Der Schockwellenreiter
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Link collection:.

Feed on feeds (server side RSS reader) [via Brain off]

Word cleaner (to make clean HTML from Word-generated HTML) [via Blogging from the Barrio]

Teams That Span Time Zones Face New Work Rules by Bill Snyder [via Many-to-many] - worth reading if you are interested how to improve communication in virtual teams

Social Software and Social Capital and summary of the report [via Many-to-many]

Getting up to speed on wikis and Getting up to speed on wikis, part 2 - collections of wiki links by Jim McGee

[Mathemagenic
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Etching Echo.

Well, the name for the initiative led by Sam Ruby to create a new syndication format from scratch is ... [drumrolll] ... Echo!  Looks like they are going to use it as a brand of sort: Echo API, Echo Enabled, etc.  I proposed Wide Open Syndication (WOS-Up!) last night, but most people wanted to go with Echo.  Yeah, people will have a lot of fun Googling with 'Echo' as keyword, but then it is a sign of child-like innocence that I like so much in engineers.

[Don Park's Blog
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Renderman for OS X. Here they come... [MacRumors
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PDF and HTML everywhere. Oh, I mean, on every Mac.
Apple's handling of PDF (Portable Document Format, an adaptation of the PostScript printer language for display and document exchange) in the upcoming release of OS X is just remarkable. It harkens back to NeXTSTEP, the OS that effectively used PDF for everything. Apple talked a lot about PDF in OS X, but no one understood how deeply ingrained it is in what the Mac does. [Tom Yager
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'Metallica rethinks the Internet': (MSNBC article) [CULT OF THE DEAD COW
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Cory Doctorow on BBC's radio 4 "Today Programme". BoingBoing co-editor Cory Doctorow, currently traveling in the UK, talked about blogs on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme yesterday morning. Listen (Real), Listen (un-Real, thanks Gerard), Discuss [Boing Boing Blog
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 Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Fixing RSS's public-relations problem. Yesterday I spoke with two acquaintances, both of whom have decades-long track records in the high-tech biz, and neither of whom has ever used an RSS newsreader. When I mentioned RSS as an alternative to mailing lists, both said the same thing: "But I don't have time to visit 30 different websites in order to find things out." Of course, that is exactly the problem that RSS solves. And has been solving, for me, since 1999. ... [Jon's Radio
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Ryan Pitts: "Why do each of us read our own list of bloggers? Because they point us in interesting directions and they filter information... We test our preconceptions against theirs, and come out better informed." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging]

I'll second that. Thank you all! 
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Rafat Ali breaks the story that there's been an acquisition in blog media: "Andy Bourland is back... he has scooped up two media properties: Adventive, the family of business-oriented discussion groups; and MarketingFix, Rick Bruner and the gang's group-blog on online marketing." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
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William Gibson: "In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner." [Scripting News
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Stallman on GNU/Linux. CNet has an amusing commentary from Richard Stallman about the confusion between the GNU operating system and the Linux kernel whose development was started much later by Linus Torvalds. The point is that the kernel is only a small part of the operating system and in Unix-like operating systems can generally be changed with relatively little difficulty. You could certainly have a "Linux" system that looked exactly the same as it does today but did not use the Linux kernel or any Linux code. "Linux itself is no longer essential: the GNU system became popular in conjunction with Linux, but today it also runs with two BSD kernels and the GNU kernel," says Stallman.

Background: see my 1998 interview with RMS, originally published in Online though I can't find it on the Guardian's site. [onlineblog.com
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What are we doing here?.

So we have Emerson, Franklin and Pepys among the ancestors of bloggers.

Now Kevin reminds me this morning that Marcus Aurelius contributed some early DNA. [The Doc Searls Weblog
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Berlin marks Kennedy rally. The German capital celebrates the 40th anniversary of John F Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition]

--

The general sentiment in Germany towards the US has changed a great deal since the days of JFK. In fact, I'm not too sure whether the present climate on the European continent it is sufficiantly understood in America today.

To gain a sense of the widespread bitter emnity felt here toward the erstwhile liberators, one only has to glance through the countless comments posted in German forums around the web....

Who knows where all this will lead? 
6:39:06 PM      comment []   trackback []  



AdSense previewer. Aaron Swartz has ginned up a Google AdSense previewer. Enter the URL of your page and it will give you a sample of the kinds of Google Ads you'd get if you put them on that page.

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog
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Vatican unveils virtual tour. The Vatican offers a virtual tour of the famous Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo as part of upgrades to its website. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition
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Design According to Ive. At the launch of Apple's new Power Mac G5, Wired News was granted an exclusive tour of the new machines by Jonathan Ive, Apple's lead industrial designer. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News
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Feed Money Fast.

Tim is on a roll today.  His "MakeMoneyFast" post (actually the title is "$$$$!"), he writes about his experiment with Google's new AdSense program.  He made almost $16 in two days.  Cool.  AdSense reveals what Google is thinking with its Blogger.com acquisition.

Only problem is that popularity of RSS feed usage is on the upswing and will eventually lead to majority of blog news being consumed via news aggregators.  This means Google will have to get into the news aggregator business (?) eventually.  Sure, they can do this with from the server side, but to cover all the bases, Google will need a client-side aggregator as well.

[Don Park's Blog
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Blogtracker. Interface zu weblogs.com. Alternative From des Blogrolling. [thomas n. burg | randgänge
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Homebrew TrackBack Tutorial. via HITORMISS.ORG: What is TrackBack? Basically, it's a way of recording who has linked to your posts and notifying others that you've linked to them (invented by the folks from Moveable Type). [Channel 'trackback'
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stop pinging me you bugger!. via Virulent Meme: How Trackback Really Works: I’ve been about as befuddled as anyone else about this crazy trackback thingy, and these explanations (one, two, three) haven’t really helped. Still, in my attempts to figure out exactly what the hell is going on, I finally thought of an analogy that sort of nearly gets there. [Channel 'trackback'
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Cool new Feautre on BlogDigger - LinkSearch www.blogdigger.com. via BlogDigger Development Blog: What can we do with this? I am providing a link for each search result returned to a linkSearch URL that will get all the posts that link to the current post. So basically, you are getting all the posts that refer to the post you are interested in. It is sort of like TrackBack, except it is over all of the blogs that BlogDigger indexes. Kind of like TrackBack on speed. [Channel 'trackback'
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radiolovers. radiolovers ~ listen to OLD TIME RADIO shows for free, online. [MetaFilter
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Jim McGee: "Sites that provide no RSS feed essentially don't exist for me." [Scripting News
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Newborn baby taken to rock concert. Police are called in after a couple took their nine-day-old baby to an AC/DC concert in Germany. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition
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DaveNet: BBC Archive, Weblogs and RSS. [Scripting News
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Blog Spambot?.

Recently, I have been getting spams with subject lines containing words I have used in my blog posts.  These spams arrive within hours of a blog posting.  If this is being done by a spambot, it seems to be using words I used to retrieve or build a short sentence.  For example, within an hour of posting "Just for Fun", I received a spam with "What are you doing for fun?" as subject.  Are other bloggers seeing this sort of spams also?

[Don Park's Blog
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 Tuesday, June 24, 2003
JavaBlogs.

Adina on the JavaBlogs and Java.net communities:

...The discussion on the Java.net and JavaBlogs shows some classic tensions between a commercial software vendor, which wants to support a community of developers, and developer community, who self-organize, and want support from the commercial vendors.

It will be interesting to see how the communities evolve. Will there be syndication and federation techniques that bridge communities in different locations, or will developers choose affiliations?

Meanwhile, this is a strong sign of commercial interest in the value of weblog and wiki tools in supporting developer communities.

As with the hybrids between independent blogging and traditional journalism, the interesting question isn't the "purity" of any model. It's the process of evolution at work creating new variants. The most compelling new variants will survive.

[via BookBlog]

Community bridging already occurs through RSS and Federation.  Java.net RSS feeds are easily added to JavaBlogs.  Sure, more can be done.  But that's the beauty of these simple blog protocols, they open communities.  You wouldn't have this level of discussion and interchange between communities on a Bulletin Board based community.

[Ross Mayfield: On Blogging
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The Live Web Lives.

Minding Mark's Words about GlobeAlive...

Roland Tanglao: GlobeAlive + Blogosphere + software = goodness.

Mark Carey at Web Dawn: GlobeAlive as a pillar of the Blog community.

Clay Shirky at Corante's Social Software blog: Mark Carey Explains GlobeAlive.

Something going on there.

[The Doc Searls Weblog
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Polibloggery.

Lance points to a fine poliblog, by an actual pol, in his own voice. In that same vein, Lance thinks Dennis Kucinich's blog, also authored by the man himself, reads "so much like processed oatmeal."

Didn't strike me that way, but maybe that's cuz Iike oatmeal. It's off the diet, but still.

[The Doc Searls Weblog
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Chris Lydon: "In the booming energy of blog world, we are glimpsing the fulfillment of an Emersonian vision: this democracy of outspoken individuals." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
11:45:03 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Esther Dyson, a few weeks ago: "As a new blogger, I am learning that the only way to do it is to do it regularly..." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
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Landing a Job Can Be Puzzling. Microsoft is legendary for running job applicants through grueling interviews full of brain teasers and bizarre questions. Now, other companies are following suit. By Amit Asaravala. [Wired News
1:12:24 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Road Map. Road map from here on out? I'm going to pick a topic at a time from the wiki and explore it in depth on my weblog. ... [Sam Ruby
1:10:49 PM      comment []   trackback []  



HTML With Just Five Tags and CSS.

Read about Don Ulrich's adventure into HTML and CSS jungle that resulted in a client-side XSL stylesheet able to render his XML documents into fast loading HTML pages using just five tags: <div>, <span>, <a>, <img>, and <hr>.  His XSL stylesheet is here (.XSL).  Neato.

"A while back you pointed to Adventcode and myself [Fireball as a Candle]. You spoke of CSS style coflicting with CSS design. The conversation was about CSS Zen Garden and the inability to read it. I took what you said as a challange to use CSS a tool for construct while maintaining style. AdventCode now uses just 5 HTML tags and CSS to control the XML/XSL output. It is very fast. Using a minimum of HTML tags also allowed me to tighten up the content. Thank You for the encourgement. Yes CSS can do more than look pretty. It can also control content." - Don Ulrich by e-mail.

[Don Park's Blog
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Hermann der User. OS 10.3 revealed! [Industrial Technology & Witchcraft
12:45:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Mac Essentials. Die "Nacht des Apfels" war nicht nur für Apple, sondern auch für :itw: ein voller Erfolg: viele hundert Gäste verfolgten den Live-Ticker, und die im Senfkeller "Anwesenden" (falls jemand einen Elefanten gesehen hat - er war wirklich da!) hatten beste Laune und ihren Spaß. Apple präsentierte Produkte und Ankündigungen, die man wohl getrost als "historisch" bezeichnen kann. Hier ein Run-Down mit Links zu weiteren Infos:... [Industrial Technology & Witchcraft
12:42:26 PM      comment []   trackback []  



We can blog it!. "we can blog it" Franz Schmidbauer: Die Zulässigkeit des Linkens aus urheberrechtlicher und wettbewerbsrechtlicher Sicht. »Der Hyperlink an sich tangiert als bloßer automatisierter URL-Aufruf weder das Wettbewerbs- noch das Urheberrecht.« [Der Schockwellenreiter
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I am John's brain.. I am John's brain. Amusingly written, yet astutely raising an important point. What exactly are we to do about consciousness? Although clearly different theories abound, one must still ponder whether or not the problem is even solvable in the first place. Where then can we turn to for our solution? Why, bicamerality, of course. [MetaFilter
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TIME on phonecam blogging. This week's Time Magazine features a brief feature on phonecam blogging, and mentions textamerica.com -- the free service I've been using for mine. Hey, if your blog is a moblog *and* a photoblog, and you don't want limit the scope to phonecam pics only, could you just call it a mo-pho blog? Link, Discuss, (via Jason DiFilippo's Journal, which is always filled with amazing photos that you really must see.) [Boing Boing Blog
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"MT clarifies license structure, announces developer/service provider network" [Daypop Top 40
11:52:23 AM      comment []   trackback []  



WatchBlog Statistics. Since launching WatchBlog a little over a week ago, I've been waching the referral logs and closely monitoring the statistics. When I built the site I knew that the idea would be well-received but I underestimated the amount of traffic... [CamWorld: Thinking Outside the Box
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First play with the new Blogger. We were "upgraded" to the new version of Blogger Pro this weekend and, to echo Jack's comments below, I'm not hugely impressed. The interface is a inelegant thing, and there are little changes to the usability which grate. You can't see previous posts from the create new post page, which means it's harder to get a sense of context as you create your new post, for instance. I can't post and publish - only preview first. And some of the RSS settings weren't copied over correctly. Still, at least it works in Apple's Safari browser, which is something, and it feels a lot faster than the old interface. What it needs - real soon - is some new features, to keep up with the Movable Type crowd. For all that system's complexity, it is starting to look very attractive to me... [onlineblog.com
5:49:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Innovative Uses for a Computer Classroom?. flard asks: "I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a medium sized public university, in a computer classroom for next semester. Every student has their own machine with an internet connection. I am thinking about using a weblog for them to post their work and critique each other. Do you guys have any other cool ideas on what to do and what NOT to do?" ... [Slashdot
2:17:24 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Best Offer: Amazon Software Tech. Jeff Bezos wants his company to offer mini-Amazons to companies needing a successful Web commerce tool. The technology that runs the popular shopping site may be its most valuable product offering. [Wired News
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Mark Carey: "If GlobeAlive could combine efforts with Blog community sites, it could gain the users, and broader scope required for it to take off." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
2:10:00 AM      comment []   trackback []  



My new phonecam blog, and syndicating moblogs with RSS. I've been fooling around with some new phonecams and a free phonecam blogging service called Textamerica lately. You can see the results at xenijardin.textamerica.com. Each of the phonecams I've demoed have been wildly frustrating in one way or another. Motorola's T722i add-on cam produces grainy thumbnails at best; image quality on Sanyo's 8100 (Sprint) is teh suck in all but bright light conditions. Until those megapixel phonecams hit America, mobile photobloggers might be better off combining a good, small digital camera like the Pentax Optio S with a wireless PDA for uploads and text captions. But despite limitations, the convenience, speed, and novelty of phonecam blogging has been fun so far -- even if the results are mediocre, stamp-sized snapshots.

Chris Pirillo -- whose terrific phonecam blog inspired me to finally get off my digital butt and publish one of my own -- has been corresponding with the textamerica.com folks for weeks with service improvement suggestions. His persistent e-badgering led to the company's introduction of RSS feeds last week. Free, instant phonecam blog syndication. How cool is that? I'm exploring other phonecam blog services, and plan to post more on that soon. Discuss [Boing Boing Blog
2:08:31 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Marc Canter: "Technorati is quickly becoming the Google of the blogosphere... If you ain't in Technorati, you ain't in the blogosphere." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
1:20:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Euro censorship (Washingtontimes.com) [STOP1984
1:17:20 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Dave Sifry says Technorati's now keeping tabs on more than 400,000 blogs: "We hit 100,000 back on March 5, and 200,000 on April 6."

Andrew Acker on that news: "At this rate, there will be more than 6 million blogs by the end of the year."

Phil Wolff: "I expect Technorati's growth to accelerate until the blogosphere is mostly mapped; then we'll see periodic bursts as new clusters are discovered or services come online."

[Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
1:13:45 AM      comment []   trackback []  



 Monday, June 23, 2003
Iraqi Moblogging. Salam moblogs. (More moblogging replacing/enhancing journalism) [MetaFilter
11:46:02 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Sketches at the Eyepiece. Sketches at the Eyepiece. Drawings of the Moon, the Sun, planets and other astronomical objects.
Also The Face of the Moon: Galileo to Apollo. A catalogue of rare books and maps, with images. [MetaFilter
11:44:15 PM      comment []   trackback []  



whichbook should I read?. Whichbook: a neat little flash app that permits you to select on a sliding scale up to four different features of a novel and then recommends a list of prospective reading to you. (Plain-text available here). (via sixdifferentways). [MetaFilter
11:43:36 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Log Format Roadmap 
11:40:45 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Jaguar is Over. Steve Jobs announced the end of Jaguar, and the newness of Panther, today at his WWDC keynote address. Panther is to be available as a preview release now, and ... [Slashdot
11:36:15 PM      comment []   trackback []  



New G5 Power Macs "Fastest Desktop In The World". In the hardware part of his keynote address at WWDC, Jobs officially introduced the G5-based computers previously leaked on the Apple store. [Slashdot
11:35:53 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Apple recodes OS X Finder [bradchoate.com Sideblog
11:32:10 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogging from Iran

With Big Media largely ignoring the ongoing unrest in Iran, the Internet is the place to track events. Fortunately, while Iraq only had one blogger when things hit the fan, Iran has hundreds both there and in exile, and many post in English. There's enough you want a site that's capable of filtering and interpreting the flow, as well as looks at the raw feed. Those tracking the closest include:

If you want to go straight to the sources, Hoder has an exhaustive list of active bloggers.

The good folks in Iran deserve at least our moral support. They also deserve the chance to take back their freedom their own way, with their own hands. A tough conundrum with a nuclear time bomb ticking in the background. [Due Diligence
11:35:30 AM      comment []   trackback []  



WWDC Event Coverage [MacRumors
11:25:04 AM      comment []   trackback []  



International iTunes Music Store - October?. Is Apple launching the iTMS in Oct? [MacRumors
11:24:10 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Bloggercon [Daypop Top 40
10:26:56 AM      comment []   trackback []  



"The Corporate Blog Is Catching On" [Daypop Top 40
10:25:46 AM      comment []   trackback []  



MacHack 18 Happenings [MacSlash
10:22:04 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Kevin McCullough: "While limousine liberals are trying to get a 24 hour news network funded... conservatives are on to the next cultural wave: weblogs." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
10:19:07 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Tiny Sites Aren't Small Potatoes. xtrucial writes "Jakob Nielsen of usability fame has a new article up about the perhaps-unexpected power of tiny websites: 'Considering that the Web as a whole ... [Slashdot
10:18:09 AM      comment []   trackback []  



 Sunday, June 22, 2003
Blogging in Brazil

BBC reporter Paulo Cabral is travelling along Brazil's São Francisco river, following in the footsteps of Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton.

Each week day, for two weeks, Paulo will be posting a diary entry on the web, and responding to a selection of your e-mails.

[BBC News World Edition
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In correction of an earlier post about advertising on weblogs:

Martin Röll confronts a comment spammer on his blog! [Das E-Business Weblog]

The irony of his post actually had me there for a while (until Martin himself enlightened me)

Alright! 
1:17:01 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Brad Choate: RSS 2 Dates and Such. [Scripting News
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BlogShares goes live [bradchoate.com Sideblog
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Anais Nin. "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." [Quotes of the Day
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Google: Not In My Blog [bradchoate.com Sideblog
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Douglas Adams. "Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast." [Quotes of the Day
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 Saturday, June 21, 2003
Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers. I've never given much credence to the "only use 10% of our brains" urban legend, but this article, Savant for a Day, is making me reconsider. I'd like to see ... [Slashdot
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Lose, you losing loser who loses!. The biggest losers in the Blogosphere. Metafilter does not do the discussion of weight very well. However, I'd like to introduce you to a group of online folk who have found a way to help each other in losing weight. Meet mtpolitics. He had a moment of body based angst. Da Goddess had an idea. And so a project was born. (Have a care for the pipe, 'cause it ain't real big.) The blogs of the people involved in this contest might offer a unique diversion as well. [MetaFilter
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The translucent veil.
As we shift to an economy based on access to networked services more than on ownership of goods, translucency will be harder to achieve. Identity, after all, is a condition of access to such services. Even so, when customer data need not necessarily be personalized, translucency is a powerful technique that can meet your requirements, satisfy your customers, and keep the feds happy too. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
When I challenged Peter to nail down the practical uses and limits of translucency, he responded with an analysis of how Amazon might apply it. He concludes that it would be practical for Amazon to avoid storing a lot of data, and notes that the problem is really more in our heads than in our databases: ... [Jon's Radio
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Blog Census 
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Gentoo, Fink and DarwinPorts Join Forces. Mr. Quick writes "From Metapkg, "In order to better provide freely-available software to users of Mac OS X & Darwin, we Fink, Gentoo, & DarwinPorts ... [Slashdot
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Tim Bray raves about the potential of RSS: "We're potentially sitting on a rocket ship. But there are obstacles..." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
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"Bloggers Rate the Most Influential Blogs" [Daypop Top 40
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Astronomers take 3-D images of solar surface. Astronomers have taken the first three-dimensional photos of the photosphere, or solar surface. At... [spacetoday.net
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Curiosity is bliss: Behind Google. [Der Schockwellenreiter
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Java and the Web Community. Sun is doing interesting things with its java.net site, including "community" functions such as weblogs and even Wikis. It's the... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal
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nesting instincts. Joe has an interesting post about nesting in RSS. I like the idea, although as Dare points out, something of a bandwidth issue. On the bandwidth front, it seem inevitable that eventually each RSS item will get its own file URI, and the channel will just contain a list of pointers (with timestamps) so that new entries can be pulled down without having to refetch the 14 before it that haven't changed. [Simon Fell
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Weblogs and Threaded Messaging. Discussion on the future of weblog comments, the migration to discussion forums, and the merger between the two. Issues to consider:
  • the competitive nature of public discussion forums
  • the need to promote active reflection
  • the usefulness of bridging private, semi-private, and public discourse

JournURL. JournURL: More BBS/Blog Fusion. Another entry in the fusion of the BBS and Blog patterns, JournURL, an attempt to create a CCMS (that'd be Community Content Management System to you and me.) The focus here is improving on the model of simple comments for supporting real discussions in weblogs: "Robust threaded and linear discussion that encourages extended conversations and debate. No simplistic comment system here, folks. No anonymous spam."

JournURL recently launched a way to use its comments system from 3rd party blogging tools: [b.cognosco]

 
1:03:49 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Weblog Post Index. Wow! This is super handy. Clean, simple, straightforward. There is now a complete index of all posts to this weblog since it's inception. I can stop manually updating my archives. Woo Hoo!

Creating an index of weblog posts in Radio

Creating an index of weblog posts in Radio. Inspired by Rob Henerey's suggestion, I've written a Radio script that displays an index of weblog posts for the main weblog or a category.

Looking at the output of the scripts, I wish I had started writing post titles earlier than February. [Rogers Cadenhead: Radio Userland Kick Start]

If you use Radio as your blogging tool of choice, run, don't walk to get Rogers' latest goodie here. It took me about 3 minutes to download, install, and test. I can already see how this will help me extract more value from the posts I've been making here over time.

This is also an excellent example of the extensibility built into Radio. Radio may have its warts, and its user interface leaves a bit to be desired, but that's often true for industrial strength power tools.

Thank you Rogers! [via McGee's Musings]

[b.cognosco
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 Friday, June 20, 2003
If the only tool you have is a hammer....

A Day In My Life, By Bill Gates. (SOURCE:Scobleizer Radio Weblog)-PREDICTION: Within 10 years, the centre of most knowledge workers (including Bill Gates) will be a blog type application. NOT email. <quote> I'd say that of my time sitting in my office, that is, time outside of meetings, which is a couple of hours, two-thirds of that is sitting in E-mail. E-mail is really my primary application, because that's where I'm getting notifications of new things, that's where I'm stirring up trouble by sending mail out to lots of different groups. So it's a fundamental application. And I think that's probably true for most knowledge workers, that the E-mail is the one they sit in the most. Inside those E-mails they get spreadsheets, they get Word documents, they get PowerPoints, so they navigate out to those things, but the center is E-mail. </quote> [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Roland catches the real point of this interview with Gates. The interview provides some interesting raw data on the day-to-day work practices of our economy's quintessential knowledge worker. Email is the tool he has for communications so it is the tool that he uses. It is worth seeing how Gates thinks through how to get leverage from the tools that he has available. We all need to exercise that kind of thought about how to use our knowledge tools -- blogs and aggregators included.

[McGee's Musings
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Google says 'no' to Googling [Ars Technica
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Group Voice.

Lots of good blog posts these days on the differences of wikis and weblogs.  Of course, since they are all blog posts a clear consensus is never reached.  A good way of explaining the differences between the two tools, as wikis drive current state consensus.

[Ross Mayfield: On Blogging
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Jim McGee, on the "subtle promise of blogs and RSS aggregation as a tool for knowledge sharing": "The simplicity of the tools allows them to be gently grafted on to existing processes and practices with minimal disruption. The challenge is to let this simplicity work its course..." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
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Halley Suitt on the history of blogs, the rebirth of story-telling, 9-11, corporate fraud, the empowerment of women through blogs, and much, much more: "Weblogs work the way women work, they invite conversation and interaction in order to solve problems. They are not designed with women in mind, but they are all about cooperation, conversation and transparency." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
6:59:51 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Mark Glaser: One-Man Blogs Prove There Is Money to Be Made by Online Journals 
6:47:06 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Information as Product. From a technical point of view, the idea that information is somehow a product (and therefore should be distributed and taxed like one) is completely ridiculous. Here's why. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs
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RSS Reading via Email. I have tried more RSS readers, than you have had hot dinners. I have finally settled to have something that integrates with my email. Each blog has a folder and posts are filtered into the correct folder. Bob Lee wrote fetchrss to help with this endeavour, and recently released it via the new java.net portal. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs
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Schranken der Informationsfreiheit im Internet [heise online news
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Exploring XML and RSS in Flash. In this article we will examine the XML processing capabilities of Macromedia Flash, and create an RSS "movie" along the lines of the wildly popular RSS applet. By Michael Classen. 0602 [WebReference News
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Martin Röll confronts a comment spammer on his blog!

[Das E-Business Weblog]

The irony of his post actually had me there for a while (until Martin himself enlightened me)

Way to go, Martin! 
2:56:40 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Rafat Ali, in an article on one-man blog ventures, on the demands of nanomedia and the 14-16 hour days he puts in pointing to articles from other sources: "Link, link, link, link... I can link everybody to death." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
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Anne Holland: "Wahoo! The average amount a Blogwriter makes by selling ads via BlogAds has gone up from $30 to $50 month, with the really red hot sites pulling $750 monthly." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging
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Web services visionary. [Sam Ruby
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RSS-Search Merges with Feedster. [Scripting News
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 Thursday, June 19, 2003
Greek Temple Architecture and Linkeriffica of Antiquity. Greek Temple Architecture: They were houses--houses for cult statues, storehouses of treasures given to the gods--they were not churches. Worship consisted, by and large, of animal sacrifice: killing animals and eating them, for the most part--and, hence, it was done out of doors. The Internet Ancient History Sourcebook's Accounts of Hellenic Religious Beliefs and Accounts of Personal Religion give additional flavor and context. Greek religious architecture evolved from wooden structures and was tradition bound--they built in stone as they had in wood according to variations on a traditional canon called the orders, first and foremost, the Doric Order , the Ionic Order and the Corinthian Order. Here are some restorations. I love restorations, on paper or models rather than at the actual sites. The first in a series. [MetaFilter
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Dynamically Creating PDFs in a Web Application. HTML isn't the be-all, end-all of web applications. Sometimes you need something a little more precise. Sean C. Sullivan recently found himself generating PDFs from his web application with iText. [Der Schockwellenreiter
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PlanetMath: Math for the people, by the people. [the inimitable Schockwellenreiter
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small gods. I'm a fan of a design pattern for software where in a very large, complex, rich data-type creates the meat of the application and then over that you pour a gravy of scripting.... [Ascription is an anathema to any enthusiasm
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Iran and its 10,000 Salam Paxes [BuzzMachine
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Kudos to Oliver Wrede for his Newsposter: a consistent source of compelling reading (some German required). Thank you. Danke schön. 
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RSS: News That Comes to You [Der Schockwellenreiter
3:11:11 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The Good, The Bad, and the Blogly 
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Creating an index of weblog posts in Radio. Inspired by Rob Henerey's suggestion, I've written a Radio script that displays an index of weblog posts for the main weblog or a category.

Looking at the output of the scripts, I wish I had started writing post titles earlier than February. [Workbench
2:45:54 AM      comment []   trackback []  



iTunes: Death of Record Companies.

Check out this short Business 2.0 piece showing how each dollar collected per song is divided up.  Artists get 12 cents out of a dollar.  The music download service (i.e. Apple) gets 40 cents.  That leaves 48 cents up for grab as music download industry emerges, expands, and consolidates while the real world music distribution business shrinks.  I expect record companies will start to dwindle during the expansion phase as they start losing artists to the music download industry.  There will still be middlemen, but record companies will be left with peddling only oldies.

[Don Park's Blog
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IPod Muzak Isn't Same Old Song. Apple's iPod is changing the market for canned music in business establishments. Entrepreneurs are using the device to play cutting-edge electronica where they once might have turned to bland elevator fare. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News
2:42:09 AM      comment []   trackback []  



"Blog your Music" online/offline event in France. BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in Paris writes:
We have launched a collaborative event for June 21st, "Music Day" in France and other countries. On that day, every blogger (wherever he lives) can do on his blog a post or more about music in general and must link to another blog that participates in "Blogue Ta Musique" (blogging your music). Every blogger can participate (it's free of course !) by sending me a message with the URL of his blog at mediatic@netcourrier.com . We include it in the blogroll of "blogue ta musique" blog here. And on June 31st, Blog Ta Musique and mediatic will mention hour per hour each new music message.

More than 30 french speaking bloggers will participate. Some examples will be interesting : Kill Me Again will create a song for this day and will post it on his blog, Philippe Allard will cover the Music Day in Brussels by moblogging, and on a Wiki page here Christophe Ducamp will create a collaborative page about Joe Strummer.

"Blogue Ta Musique" is an initiative from me and the french free solution for blogging.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog
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Tech Support. »The technical support team at B. F. Yancey Elementary keeps the school?s 43 iBooks in good order, tutors students, organizes websites and shows parents how to make presentations. The average age of the team is eight years old.« [Apple Hot News] [owrede_log
2:38:38 AM      comment []   trackback []  



AAPL Gets and Upgrade.

While not juicy technical news, it is nice to once again get the "analysts" to see that the iPod is a killer piece of hardware. It's sales are very important to Apple right now. Not only are the most likely contributing to increased system sales, people are still buying tracks from the iTunes Music Service at about a clip of 500k/week. Not bad.

The other main reason AAPL got a boost is that it was bringing iTunes to Windows. Truth be told, it's a freakin' huge market. "Apple is abandoning its long-standing strategy of confining its award-winning software to the Mac platform," said Charles R. Wolf.

Another reason they gave for a bump is the upcoming G5 or PPC 970. If you like down and dirty CPU reviews you need to read Jon "Hannibal" Stokes' articles at ArsTechnica: PPC 970 Part I, Part II.

[Forwarding Address: OS X
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Blogs like Electric Venom sure make me realize how much work lies ahead... sigh! ' need more time. 
1:42:11 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Top of the Blog, Ma!.

The headline is a semi-obscure reference to the movie White Heat, with James Cagney at his bad-guy best.

Anyway, it's what Panoramas.dk/ brings to mind with Blogging Mt. Everest:

How 2 links at Kottke and The Presurfer growed to 840 links and 200.000 visitors in 24 days.

[The Doc Searls Weblog
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 Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Get Envenomed!

...' promise to check it out after I get some much needed sleep... nighty night! ...er, at 6am it's more like nighty day!

 
5:58:43 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogs breed western corruption [Ars Techinca
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Hiawatha Bray: "There's plenty of juice left in the blogging boom." [Scripting News
5:32:33 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Patching Radio to support RSS filtering. Matt Mower offers one line of code that UserLand can add to Radio so that the storyArrived callback can be used for my incoming RSS cleaner and other RSS scripts. I've tried his suggested patch and it works. [Workbench
5:29:33 AM      comment []   trackback []  



clever flash experiments. a collection of clever flash experiments [MetaFilter
5:28:09 AM      comment []   trackback []  



More MoFotoblogging in the news.

Wired and The Guardian both have articles on the intersection between fotologs and camera-enabled mobile phones.  Wired looks at blogging activism with an eye on the G8 summit.

The Guardian uses 20six as a jumping off point on the history of moblogging and a quick review of many of the tools and sites that support mobile fotologging. They also look a bit at the economics:

Many-to-many has a bit about the uproad at fotolog now that they've been cursed with success and need to pass their growing bandwidth and storage costs back to their users.  Many of their users will be unable to do anything about the changes, but those with technical chops can install their own mobloging software, or move their stuff elsewhere.  Why would I use T-mobile's hiptop.com, which claims full intellectual property for anything users post, when they can use 20six.com,  blogger's mobloging product that is in development or something like eachday.net?

[Corante: Amateur Hour
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FCC Minister of Information.

The Evils of media consolidation will never get past our defenses. When the media fails to do its job at least there are humorists like Mark Fiore to help us laugh about it all.

[Corante: Amateur Hour
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The People's Mesh Manifesto.

Marc Canter has written a detail history of multimedia through his early developer/artist eyes, ending with a call to arms for what he calls the "People's Mesh"

Everything we need has been invented, now it's time to get it all to work together

One of the most exciting evolutions I see coming is how the technical and social standards established within the blogosphere will spread around the world.... [Corante: Amateur Hour]

 
5:15:49 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Gene Linked to Manic Depression. A newly discovered relationship between a flawed gene and bipolar disorder could lead to better treatments for the mental illness, scientists say. [Wired News
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Supply Snag Slows Down Mac Cloner. John Fraser's one-man Mac-cloning business has been temporarily shut down after Apple kneecapped a key supplier. Some say, however, he'll be back in business in no time. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News
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MacMerc: New Links, And RSS! 
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MacOS X Hint Temporarily disable net connection [MacOS X Hints
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Welcome to itopik.com...
So tonight we are under way with the itopik blog/rss topic/subject directory. We will add the subtopics as we go based on what user's suggest as well as what places like Google, Yahoo, etc. are using as topic categories.
Everybody has a slightly different take on organization and taxonomy of course.

Next we'll add the link over to itown.com from the add_me page so that you can add your URL & RSS (Newsfeed) by area if you like.

There remains the discussion of how many topiks should someone register...unlimited or limited? I've thought maybe three, but curious to feedback.

Granted it is humble, but it is a start. Circulate the word if you would, and we'll add the links to the writing that you're doing... by topik and by town... after all, it's about what you're writing! [Harvey Kirkpatrick: itopik.com News
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Europe proposes right-of-reply. A European policy group is proposing that those who are criticised on the Internet should have a right to reply in the same space where the criticism appeared -- IOW, bloggers would have to give time on their blogs to the people they flame. I've always presumed that there was no legal interest in ensuring that people don't feel sad -- but rather, preventing real harm (which can be addressed through courts, should such harm be proposed).

The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization...

* "The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours."

* Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. "It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it" from the spot of the original mention.

* "So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link."

* Long replies are fine. "There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media."

Link

Discuss

(via Lawmeme) [Boing Boing Blog
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Celebrate permalinks. Tom Coates has posted a very, very good essay on permalinks and what they mean.

It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else's site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And - as a result - friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs. It existed way before Trackback and I think it's been more fundamental to our development as a culture than comments... Not only that, it added history to weblogs as well - before you'd link to a site's front page if you wanted to reference something they were talking about - that link would become worthless within days, but that didn't matter because your own content was equally disposable. The creation of the permalink built-in memory - links that worked and remained consistent over time, conversations that could be archived and retraced later. The permalink stopped all weblog conversations being like that guy in Memento...

Link

Discuss

(via Dan Gillmor) [Boing Boing Blog
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Vipul Kashyap and emergent semantics.

Vipul Kashyap's home page says "I am a Fellow at the National Library of Medicine in the Medical Informatics Training Program. I am currently working on issues relating the Semantic Web and Medical Ontologies."

The part I found most interesting is at the end:

Some other areas which I am working on are Emergent Semantics which is based on the hypothesis, that semantics on the Semantic Web are more likely to "emerge" from various types of information available and interactions between participants as opposed to top down formal specifications. Towards this end I am taking a close look at statistical clustering and NLP techniques. Also of interest are techniques from cultural anthropology, such as consensus analysis and social networks.

Vipul is presenting a poster at WWW2003, so I might be able to meet him soon.

[Seb's Open Research
3:52:38 AM      comment []   trackback []  



BlogMatcher: A kick-ass automated blog matchmaking service.

While I don't think it renders my own handrolled matchmaking offer completely irrelevant, Ryo Chijiiwa's BlogMatcher (found via Langemarks Cafe) is by far the best link correlator I've seen yet. The three closest matches to my blog that it turns up are Seblogging, Ming the Mechanic, and Puzzlepieces, and I think it's actually a very fine selection for someone with my interests. The rest of the top suggestions are also pretty good.

The FAQ is quite informative, as well. Similar earlier "related blogs" services include the BlogStreet neighborhood (which offers a cool visualization app as well), and Mark Pilgrim's New Door application, which no longer seems to work.

[Seb's Open Research
3:41:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Is the MTTB (mean time to Blogdex) computable?.

Interestingly, BlogMatcher's link cosmos shows that the word about it has been out for two weeks already, but it didn't start seriously ripping through the blogosphere until just two days ago. Assuming one knows that a particular meme is bound to explode at some point, is the "fuse length" predictable, say, from social network connectivity data?

Note that a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle is at work here: if you reference a specific test case publicly, you're certain to influence its diffusion process.

[Update] Ryo writes that he set up a referer feedback loop a couple days ago, which might have triggered it all.

[Seb's Open Research
3:40:26 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Achtung Baby! Heads Up!

Blogmatcher.com
New Door
SimilarLists

 
3:34:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



PlaNetwork Conference: Networking a Sustainable Future.

I just got this in my inbox and thought it might interest readers of this blog.

Join Hazel Henderson, Douglas Engelbart, Joan Blades, Jeff Gates, Leif Utne and others at this exciting gathering of innovators from the world of IT,
environmental advocates, peace and social justice activists, independent media pioneers, and many others exploring how social networks, information technologies and the Internet can play a key role in accelerating positive global change. June 6-8 at the Presidio in San Francisco, CA. Special non-profit, activist and student rate: $95 for three days. Register now online at:
http://www.planetwork.net

[Seb's Open Research
3:25:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



More blogstats. Michael has just appended links to Weblogs.com: Seeing the Curve (on the blogosphere's growth rate across time) and to Hot Weblog Crawling Action (stats by tool and language) to the Weblogs by the Numbers page. Both worth a look. [Seb's Open Research
3:24:03 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Mary Harrsch: RSS -- The Next Killer App for Education. [Scripting News] [Not So Obvious
3:23:09 AM      comment []   trackback []  



P2P RSS Channels:

The Tornado client for the Open Content Network [open-content.net] has support for P2P download channels based on RSS.

Basically, you click on a link which will subscribe the peer to the channel, and the peer will automatically download/pre-cache any new items that are added to the RSS feed.

You simply have to create an RSS feed and create a link that converts that feed into a channel that is subscribable via the Open Content Network.

Here's an example of a movie trailer RSS feed here [onionnetworks.com] linked it into the Open Content Network here. [onionnetworks.com]

[gleaned from Slashdot] [Not So Obvious
3:20:47 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Implementing Trackback for Radio Userland in 3 easy steps.

Paolo was wondering whether we could setup the standalone Trackback server and use it to implement trackbacks for Radio Userland.  It turns out (as this post proves) that the answer is yes!  All that was required was to install the CGI and then write a macro for Radio Userland and embed it in the #itemTemplate.txt.

The macro is supplying the RDF metadata that Trackback depends upon.  In order to allow the standalone trackback server to serve multiple blogs I have added a unique prefix (in my case @matt.blogs.it) to the unique post ID's supplied to the trackback server.

[Curiouser and curiouser!] [Not So Obvious
3:16:14 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Using a Mac on a cross country bike trip. Columnist Mike Wendland has been trying to figure out how to blog a couple of upcoming bike trips from the road using his 12-inch PowerBook G4, and in his search for solutions he came up with the following: [Mac Net Journal] [Not So Obvious
3:12:54 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Ridiculously easy group-forming via k-collector.

Communal topics and super-blogs. Matt on k-collector and shared topics: "If you click a topic name on my weblog now you don't get a local page but, instead, the dynamic k-collector page for that topic.  At the moment this is an aggregation of all the posts about that topic from anyone subscribing to the cloud." [Curiouser and curiouser!]

I hope to find time soon to compare this to the Internet Topic Exchange and investigate interoperability in both directions. More than ever do I believe that there is promise in loose community formation among bloggers. Many ingredients are there that weren't around only six months ago: more developers, many more bloggers (meaning more diversity and overlap of interests at the same time), and new complementary technology, such as the shiny new Technorati API.

Now, this is nothing more than educated guesswork, but I have a feeling that, say, a year from now, many of my favorite sources will not be personal blogs, but rather topical feeds that have been duly post-processed in some way by the collective intelligence of my microblogosphere.

While it makes me kind of sad to entertain the thought of progressively abandoning per-person subscriptions, I'm afraid I won't be able to keep up with all of those tremendously interesting new voices without the help of more sophisticated personal relevance filters.

[Seb's Open Research
2:46:40 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Will social software encourage polarization?.

A good post and a fascinating discussion over on Don Park's blog on the potential adverse effects of social software, starting from his observation of how the Internet affected people in his home country:

Korea is emerging as one of the most advanced Internet nation in the world.  Young Koreans, in particular, live and breath Internet, each belonging to large number of online communities.  One would expect them to be well informed and objective, yet they are not.  Their views are warped and often radical.  While all the world's information is at their fingertip, they consume information subjectively and produce misinformation biased by their views.  Adding highly effective social software to this is frightening to me.

[...] In a sense, social clusters form gravity wells which has its own local physical laws and is difficult to escape from.  Social softwares make it easier to create and grow such clusters.

Bill Kearney offers a counter-argument that I find cogent:

The fact that groups can form more rapidly will do more to devalue the ability of any one group or cult of personality. Yes, for those ununsed to the process it will be a terrifyingly vast expanse of rapidly changing groupings. Hang on, it's going to be a fun ride.

I guess the question could be summarized as "Does social software help people turn inwards or outwards?". (Personally, I don't think it can be answered without taking the context of use into account.)

[Corante: Social Software] [Seb's Open Research
2:45:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Distributed collective tweaking. Headmap: Declaration of Interdependence. A view of the future of the Internet and how it will impact the way we'll go about our business. Far-reaching, yet plausible if you ask me. (via Ming) [Seb's Open Research
2:44:32 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Are you an isoblogger?.

Blogging thoughts and philosophies is a neat rant that proposes a taxonomy of bloggers according to their linking behaviors. (via Stuart)

 

[Seb's Open Research
2:42:50 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Wiki of all wikis.

WorldWideWiki: OneBigWiki. I didn't know there were that many public wikis. (And some are missing from the list - I should try to add them when I find time.)

[Seb's Open Research
2:42:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogs open new frontiers for self-expression [NYU Weblog Portal
2:36:36 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Marc Canter: The New Paradigm of Tools 
12:24:08 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Microsoft Bloggers Under the Corporate Microscope. On Tuesday, Microsoft corporate is sponsoring a panel on the topic of Microsoft corporate blogging. Could some kind of official Microsoft policy on blogging be in the offing? Stay tuned. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley
12:20:06 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Hellen Keller The Fraud?. Helen Keller: A Living Lie? A fascinating New Yorker piece by Cynthia Ozick that explores Helen Keller's writing career and all the questions of authenticity it raises. She was charged with being a "fraud, a puppet, a plagiarist" and she was defended by the likes of Mark Twain and Alexander Graham Bell. Ozick ultimately asks the question: "Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know?" [MetaFilter
12:18:08 AM      comment []   trackback []  



 Tuesday, June 17, 2003
Internet Explorer. The key to understanding why Microsoft has killed IE: follow the money. [Daring Fireball
1:47:06 AM      comment []   trackback []  



World's whitest legs. The winner of the 2004 World's Whitest Legs contest can be found here. This trip was the first time in... [Backup Brain
1:33:00 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Editing OPML link directories with JOE. At first glance, the Java Outline Editor (JOE) looks like a suitable choice for editing OPML link directories and other outlines.

The program supports the addition or deletion of any attributes to each outline item, enabling link directories to be created by adding type and url attributes (screenshot).

It isn't as easy as using Radio, where you can hit CTRL-K or CMD-K to add a link to any title, but there may be a way to extend the functionality that I haven't found yet.

Note: JOE has the same problem with undeclared entity references as my OPML Link Publisher application: They break the document's XML well-formedness. [Workbench
1:31:44 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Java.net Weblogs.

Weblogs are important part of Java.net although one needs to stroll around a bit to find them.  I usually go here to find new articles.  Here are two articles worthy of mention this week:

In Whats up with the JavaSound team?, Jonathan Simon discovers that entire JavaSound team split a while back and now there is just one hardworking guy wearing many hats.

This is ridiculous on a number of levels! How does Sun expect to put out a decent product with a single guy responsible for all of JavaSound? Also, the code was poorly designed to begin with, and Florian can't even really change it! So whats left is a really buggy, poorly designed library that is on every Java enabled PC!

Michael Champion, an old compadre from XML-DEV, answers the question "When does SOAP add value over simple HTTP+XML?" and concludes with:

It's just as "wrong" to blindly reject SOAP as to blindly accept. it.

Right on, Michael.

[Don Park's Blog
1:29:35 AM      comment []   trackback []  



News.Com: Why Europe still doesn't get the Internet. The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization. [Tomalak's Realm
1:25:24 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Java.net Weblogs.

Weblogs are important part of Java.net although one needs to stroll around a bit to find them.  I usually go here to find new articles.  Here are two articles worthy of mention this week:

In Whats up with the JavaSound team?, Jonathan Simon discovers that entire JavaSound team split a while back and now there is just one hardworking guy wearing many hats.

This is ridiculous on a number of levels! How does Sun expect to put out a decent product with a single guy responsible for all of JavaSound? Also, the code was poorly designed to begin with, and Florian can't even really change it! So whats left is a really buggy, poorly designed library that is on every Java enabled PC!

Michael Champion, an old compadre from XML-DEV, answers the question "When does SOAP add value over simple HTTP+XML?" and concludes with:

It's just as "wrong" to blindly reject SOAP as to blindly accept. it.

Right on, Michael.

[Don Park's Blog
1:24:55 AM      comment []   trackback []  



 Monday, June 16, 2003
UserLand: The next weblogging buyout?. Roland Tanglao writes in a comment to Workbench, "Too bad UserLand doesn't seem to have the money to hire one developer for each platform (Frontier, Manila and Radio) and the right number of support people, because if they did there's no way MovableType or anybody else could keep up with them."

After Google bought Pyra and Moveable Type's developers secured venture financing, UserLand Software is the last chance for an outside company to buy their way into overnight credibility in weblog publishing.

Lately, I've been expecting to fire up Scripting News and learn that Microsoft, Adobe, or Apple purchased the company as part of an aggressive push to get into the space. Microsoft certainly has at least one employee who knows what UserLand has to offer. [Workbench
10:25:01 PM      comment []   trackback []  



ALA 158: Accesskeys - unlocking hidden navigation. In Issue No. 158 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: All your favorite applications have shortcut keys. So can your site, thanks to the XHTML accesskey attribute. Accesskeys make sites more accessible for people who cannot use a mouse. Unfortunately, almost no designer uses accesskeys, because, unless they view source, most visitors can't tell that you've put these nifty navigational shortcuts to work on your site. Stuart Robertson unlocks the secret of providing visible accesskey shortcuts. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
10:23:48 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Brad DeLong's prodigious sidebar ... all I've got to say is check out dude's sidebar. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. Lots of stuff to click on. Makes me swoon. I gonna lie down now cause concussion has me sleepy ... [disconnected
9:35:17 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Europe To Force Right of Reply On Internet Communication. [Slashdot
9:28:33 PM      comment []   trackback []  



The Internet and Chinese Ravers [Ars Technica
9:26:45 PM      comment []   trackback []  



The folks at the MacGPG project have set up a MacGPG Store for all your crypto-wear needs (someone buy me the clock!) . Says Gordon Worley, the project's admin: You can buy logo t-shirts, hats, mugs, bags, and other goodies. We offer them to you `at cost'; we earn no profit on them, so you get the lowest price possible. Check it out and support them - the MacGPG project is pretty damned cool. [Forwarding Address: OS X
9:02:10 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Who What When 
8:32:41 PM      comment []   trackback []  



The Post-it Note Story Told by Art Fry 
7:50:40 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Conspiracy theory. Dave Winer puts the death of IE5/Mac into context, concluding it took Bill Gates ten years to erase the web as a threat. The timing of recent events bears out Dave's thesis, at least as far as Microsoft's INTENTIONS are concerned. A blow by blow analysis of who did and said what when. Were standards-oriented Microsoft developers dupes? Did the company tolerate their actions because implementing standards pacified the developer community? What happens next? Do consumers have a choice? [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
7:42:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Worth your time. Truly engaging websites. Beautiful redesigns. CSS mini-tabs. Great reads on the use of weblogs for marketing and PR; design basics, from fonts and color to white space and alignment; how fonts really work in Mac OS X. Desktop backgrounds. Swedish pop bands. And so much more. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
7:40:32 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Apple's Net-Sharing Smarts Overcome Apple's WiFi Woes. So a bunch of us sit down in a WiFi-equipped conference room to talk about software, community and other such... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal
7:39:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



DaveNet: NY Times Archive, Weblogs and RSS. [Scripting News
6:47:15 PM      comment []   trackback []  



JournURL: More BBS/Blog Fusion. »Another entry in the fusion of the BBS and Blog patterns, JournURL, an attempt to create a CCMS (that'd be Community Content Management System to you and me.) The focus here is improving on the model of simple comments for supporting real discussions in weblogs: "Robust threaded and linear discussion that encourages extended conversations and debate. No simplistic comment system here, folks. No anonymous spam."«

As I've said in the past, blog comment systems generally suck. They're fine for "me too" responses and the occasional one-liner, but they quickly show their limitations when put to the task of managing large, intense discussions. ... Meanwhile, here I am, sitting on what is probably the most robust, blog-friendly discussion app anywhere, and all of those people out there using Movable Type and similar apps can't take advantage of it. ... I've decided to see what I can do to make this thing more useful to people using "foreign" blogging apps. Enter ping2talk. ...
[Corante: Social Software] [owrede_log
6:46:34 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Students teaching with blogs. Jill Walker: »One thing I've really liked in the student weblogs I've been grading is that there are a lot of posts that are really useful. It's so different from exams where only the examiners are ever going to see all the work students have done. For instance, a colour blind student teaches other students and readers how to design sites that can be read by colour blind people (you'll have more colour blind readers than readers using Opera or Netscape or needing websafe colours or any of those other things we fret about), another student explains how to make skins for your blog, one explains how to use php to join up separate html files. There are lots of comments from other students on the blogs, and questions are asked and answered and there are links to and fro and they've just done a really impressive job.« [owrede_log
6:45:45 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Watchblog: Coming From All Sides. Proximity Politics. One kind of proximity politics refers to new-found adjacency resulting from globalization which forces new dilemmas before citizens. Another kind of proximity politics refers to the coat-tail riding of aspiring politicians who try to trade on the fame, glory or popularity of others. Still another kind of proximity politics are practiced in attack ads, in which politicans seek to attach their oppenents' names to negatives without explicit accusations, relying instead upon a series of words or short phrases without the grammatical glue which might permit proper parsing or analysis. And the final kind of proximity politicsâ??probably the most positiveâ??are those practiced by WatchBlog, which calls paid to the inward-looking, self-reinforcing echo chambers of one-view political forums. Instead, the two main American parties and their myriad third-party siblings are posting to the same arena. It's the answer to the question, "How can people's minds be changed if they only seek out what they already agree with?" If the opposite camp is in the text column next door, maybe you can't help but to take a dose of what's turning out to be strong commentary largely free of carbon-copy rhetoric, cardboard cut-outs, and cookie-cutter opinions. [MetaFilter
6:42:57 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Africaserver. Africaserver. Contemporary African art and culture - San art from Botswana, Arms into Art from Mozambique, Dar es Salaam in Delft Blue - a cross-cultural comparison of favourite objects, Marthe Nso Abomo from Cameroon, a Rwanda Genocide Monument, and more.
Related :- Meshu, an artist and political activist from Lesotho who may have been southern Africa's first streaker. [MetaFilter
6:41:03 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Ambient Devices.

Via Alison Lewis and Howard Rheingold comes news of an intriguing device called Ambient Orb.

It is a wireless device that "slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, the health of your stock portfolio, or if your boss or friend is on instant messenger." [Don Park's Blog]

 
5:48:32 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Ambient Security.

Writing about ambient devices and reading about Gartner Group's recommendation against investing in intrusion detection systems (IDS), I thought this might be a good time to talk about ambient security: protection that weaves into your daily life without being obtrusive. [Don Park's Blog]

 
5:45:56 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Hands-on Henna. The Reverend Bunny's Secret Henna Diary. Sssh! Don't tell anyone, but this is a fascinating site featuring tips and tricks, and a nice gallery of images annotated by background information, image sources, history, and interesting anecdotes.

You can also find free patterns here, both traditional and non-traditional. [MetaFilter
3:43:33 AM      comment []   trackback []  



RVW specs. Alf Eaton has announced the RVW Specs.

RVW is intended to allow machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from distributed sources.

He's also using "ENT" to describe the type of subject under review. Exellent! [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog
3:40:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Team Tasks Tool. Last year we spent some time working on a Radio UserLand tool which we were calling Team Tasks Tool. The basic idea was leveraging on the power of Radio's embedded object database, outliner and web server to create a p2p task management and tracking tool.

We went pretty far with the development, we were actually using the tool internally, until our company's downsizing forced us to freeze the project (we didn't have the necessary resource to finish it nor enough tasks and people to manage).

I had totally forgot about this tool until a few days ago I received an email from Robert Barksdale asking me about it.

We still have no time to work on it, but maybe somebody out there is willing to work a little on it or simply use it (it already works).

So, just as a test, we are releasing it under a Creative Commons License.

Feel free to contact me (Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.) if you have any idea about this cool tool. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog
3:39:44 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Trackback. Looks like we got trackback working on a couple or Radio weblogs. It still needs some work but it looks promising. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog
3:26:34 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Surgical Diversions offers a wide range of nifty Radio scripts and tools. Good value! 
3:20:25 AM      comment []   trackback []  



 Sunday, June 15, 2003
Check out Thistle 
4:34:50 PM      comment []   trackback []  



WatchBlog [Camworld
4:31:21 PM      comment []   trackback []  



MySQL Ascendant. Monty Widenius is the Helsinki-based chief technology officer and co-founder of MySQL, the open-source database software that is becoming one... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal
4:11:44 PM      comment []   trackback []  



TrackBack Addenda. Clarifications, corrections, and notes regarding yesterday's little blurb on TrackBack. [Daring Fireball
4:10:31 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Restoring a Radio weblog from HTML files. The worst-case scenario for new Radio webloggers is to delete the Radio UserLand installation folder or lose it in a crash without a backup.

Many new users believe that because their weblog is still on the Web, it can be easily restored from backup. Unfortunately, this is only true if the user has turned on nightly backups. Otherwise, there's no automated way to grab the entries from HTML Web pages and save the data in weblogData.root, the database in the Data Files folder where the entries and other weblog data are kept.

To help the publisher of the Patriotically Incorrect weblog, I'm working on a script that downloads all of a Radio weblog's Web pages and builds a new copy of weblogData.root. Though it's not ready for release yet, the script appeared to restore all 35 entries of that weblog correctly. If you know anyone trying to restore their Radio weblog with nothing but Web pages left for backup, tell them to contact me. [Workbench
4:09:25 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Radio UserLand: This way lies madness. For Chapter 21 of Radio UserLand Kick Start, I'm working on a gateway tool that posts weblog entries via HTTP POST to any Web CGI script, even if it requires cookie-based authentication.

As a demonstration, the tool is mirroring the last five Workbench posts to my Metafilter user page (login required to view).

Radio gets knocked for being maddeningly complicated when you venture beyond the "five minutes to first post" features, and in some ways working with the software promotes Apocalypse Now-style "oh, the horror" moments. However, the fact you can do stuff like this in a few hours' work with under 50 lines of code is really amazing. [Workbench
4:08:29 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Laszlo [Don Park's Blog
4:04:27 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Permalinks and Why They Matter. Tom Coates: On Permalinks and Paradigms... There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us - so... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal
4:02:35 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Adam Kalsey has unveiled Simpletracks, a web interface for those without Trackback but still want to ping a Trackback URL. [Der Schockwellenreiter
3:26:53 PM      comment []   trackback []  



LiveJournal Supports Blogger API. [Der Schockwellenreiter
3:25:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



 Saturday, June 14, 2003
Preventing RSS exploits with Radio. I'm working on a Radio script that addresses RSS exploits.

Mark Pilgrim's suggestion of weeding out the unsafe HTML seems futile. Instead, the script removes all HTML tags and attributes other than a small subset that can't be abused: P, B, I, BR, and BLOCKQUOTE (all without attributes), A (with HREF only), and IMG (with SRC, ALT, HEIGHT, and WIDTH only). I'm hoping the script also has the side benefit of making RSS entries easier to read.

The script works on the text of entries, but I can't find a way to make it work with the storyArrived callback. If anyone has tackled this problem before, I've begin a discussion on the radio-dev mailing list. [Workbench
12:50:38 AM      comment []   trackback []  



zBlogger.com A new free weblog service [Der Schockwellenreiter
12:41:58 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The Semantic Blog. (»That's the Semantic Web dilemma in a nutshell. Where's the sweet spot? How can we marry spontaneity and structure? Recent trends in blogspace, plus emerging XML-savvy databases suggest a way forward.«)

Structured Writing, Structured Search. [Der Schockwellenreiter]

 
12:38:06 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Camino nightly builds include fast text find feature. The most recent nightly builds for Camino include a very convenient text search feature: after your page loads, just begin typing your search string and Camino highlights the first occurrence of the string on the webpage. [Der Schockwellenreiter
12:35:50 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Mono 0.19 for Mac OS X. [Der Schockwellenreiter
12:32:07 AM      comment []   trackback []  



R.I.P.. The rumors flew all day, but we held off writing about this until we had it from an unimpeachable source. Jimmy Grewal is a key member of the Mac Internet Explorer team and a stand-up guy. He confirms that IE5/Mac is dead. There is much that could be said, and we say some of it. Join the wake. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
12:28:53 AM      comment []   trackback []  



RIP IE/Mac. Microsoft drops development of Internet Explorer for Mac. RIP, IE/Mac. You were an amazing browser for your time. I sincerely... [Backup Brain
12:28:09 AM      comment []   trackback []  



 Friday, June 13, 2003
Displaying category links on Radio weblogs. New Radio UserLand macro: viewCategories() displays a list of links to a weblog's categories. The script supports Cascading Style Sheets and the placement of HTML before and after each link. [Workbench
11:35:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Mark Pilgrim trained the attack platypus.

Well, it sure screwed my feed reading until I managed to kill it in the Radio ODB... FSCK that, it's enough for me to ditch his feed. [thx to Rogers Cadenhead for the info]

It's not that one doesn't appreciate attention being drawn to security issues but, let's face it, posting a detailed alert, possibly with a link to an example of the exploit where the curious could choose to see for themselves, would have been much more commendable. 
1:16:51 AM      comment []   trackback []  



 Thursday, June 12, 2003
Turn on, tune in, log on. Need proof that computers were once a part of the counterculture? Check out this Creative Computing ad from 1976 drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, part of an online reprint of Best of Creative Computing Volume 1. From the text:

Creative Computing is the last outspoken bastion of TRUTH in America today. Read it and you shall be free! Contained within these pages are glimpses of mind-blowing REALITY as it REALLY is!

Two examples of reality as it really is: Hunt the Wumpus by Gregory Yob and ASCII art of Mister Spock. [Workbench
5:37:30 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Transcripts of WBS 2003 conference. Heath Row is really fast with the keyboard. So there are almost complete transcripts of the panels available (there are also some alternative transcripts from Denise Howell). They haven't provided an overview of the transcripts, so I add that here:

Postlude

XVII: Live Blogging

XVI: Using Weblogs in Large IT Organizations

XV: The Open Source Media Movement

XIV: The Law of the Blog

XIII: Weblogs -- New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms?

XII: Where Weblogs Matter

XI: Digital Self-Fashioning

X: Blogging Technologies And Platforms -- Today And Tomorrow (alternative transcript)

IX: Blogs and/as Content Management (alternative transcript)

VIII: Strategies and Tips for Business Blogging Success (alternative transcript)

VII: Why Weblogs Matter (alternative transcript)

VI: Managing A Business Blog (alternative transcript)

V: Are Weblogs A Threat Or Opportunity For Enterprises? (alternative transcript)

IV: What Are Weblogs? (alternative transcript)

III: Business Weblogs -- Blogging For Fun And Profit

Kickoff [owrede_log
2:24:33 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Paul Boutin: Wi-Fi for Dummies. [Der Schockwellenreiter
1:42:34 PM      comment []   trackback []  



RSS buzzing at Yahoo. Yahoo has added several RSS feeds for its Buzz Index, a feature that tracks the most popular current search terms overall and for several entertainment categories. [Workbench
1:38:49 PM      comment []   trackback []  



BusinessWeek on Blogs: The Wild World of "Open-Source Media". [Der Schockwellenreiter
1:17:51 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Watch java.net. Sun is doing something big with java.net.  If Sun is a hornet's nest, they have peeled back much of the skin around the nest with java.net, exposing a wild variety of interesting activities that invite the Java developer community at large to join them through a mixture of weblogs, wiki, directories, repositories, and pseudo-magazines.

End result is, well, confusing.  But, it is an enjoyable kind of confusion, not unlike being dropped into a new city being built.  If it was a city, I would say the city center is the Java Today page.  Drop in and check it out.  Unless I misread between the lines, I think there is a new bold attitude at work here. [Don Park's Blog]

 
12:46:52 PM      comment []   trackback []