Open mouth, insert money. Dare Obasanjo has taken over development of the BlogX weblog editing software, a popular choice for webloggers in the .NET community:

Combining this with RSS Bandit means that I know have both an RSS aggregator and a weblog engine as projects that I manage in my free time. Now instead of just complaining about problems with existing weblog technologies I can just put my money where my mouth is and code. This should be fun.

[Workbench] 
3:43:42 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Google, Search Tools and Difficulties of Studying Blogosphere Stories.
News on Google
Microdoc News has been studying and following the way blogosphere stories develop. Now, in review of the stories run on Microdoc News, we began studying what bloggers are saying about blogosphere stories. The problem we faced was how we could collect and organize more than 13,000 different blogger posts on this issue. Through this activity we highlight some of the difficulties of searching with Google. Essentially Google Inc's strategy of delivering relevant webpages for a particular search works when seeking a few webpages as a result, but when seeking thousands of web pages, our search queries look like contorted and abstract hieroglyphics and then we are unsure that we have actually located those we are seeking. [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] 
3:30:58 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Keeping Up With New Web Stuff.
InfoSeeker News
Everyday there is new stuff being added to the web. Often, you cannot telll what is new when you do a Google Search. However, with some guidance of people who are constantly gleaning new stuff, you can find interesting sites easily. Most bloggers add their own posts each day. As bloggers we do not often lift our eyes to see what other sites are being added each day. Here is a list of sites I have found that are really good to keep abreast of what new sites are being added. [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] 
3:27:29 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Daniel Berlinger nails it twenty-five different ways. [Scripting News] 
6:18:43 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Bill Kearney: "You could use my personal list functions on Syndic8. The lists can be downloaded in OCS, RSS and OPML formats. You can upload/edit the lists via XMLRPC calls. Lists can be public or private." [Scripting News] 
6:14:05 AM      comment []   trackback []  



SmartyPants 1.4 is out. No new features, but lots of small improvements, including much better support for parsing HTML comments and PHP code blocks. See the project page for full details of what's new.

Update: If you downloaded version 1.4 within the first hour or two after it was announced, please download it again. Botched zip archive; sorry about that.

[Daring Fireball] 
6:10:25 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogalia.com : Blogalia [Daypop Top 40] 
6:06:10 AM      comment []   trackback []  



"Leave RSS alone" [Daypop Top 40] 
6:05:17 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Use XML-RPC.

It was disheartening to learn (via Brent, via Dave) that Blogger is planning on moving away from XML-RPC in favor of SOAP:

We are moving away from XML-RPC. If you choose to take advantage of the capabilities of the new API, you will need to use SOAP instead of XML-RPC. This was a difficult decision (made collectively by the designers of Echo), because there is a lot of investment in XML-RPC in the blogging tool space, and it is great for getting things done quickly. But we felt the technical advantages offered by SOAP were worth the effort. [their emphasis]

Here's my take on what this means for Blogger developers:

1. Everyone who wants to talk to the new API will have to find or write a SOAP implementation that works in the development environment they're using for their application.
2. Applications will have to be adapted to call through the new interfaces using SOAP rather than XML-RPC
3. Lots of interop testing will have to be done. This takes lots of time, which is expensive. I know from personal experience.
4. The capabilities (and usability) of available SOAP toolkits may vary widely. Whether the limitations of various SOAP toolkits will become apparent in the (N)Echo API remains to be seen, but my past experience tells me that there's often a lot more work involved in calling APIs using SOAP than might be apparent on the surface.
5. For the unfortuante developers who'll have to come up with their own SOAP implementation, there's an enormous barrier to entry, which will be especially difficult if not impossible for independent developers -- who if I understand correctly were supposed to be the very developers that the (N)Echo effort is trying to help the most.
6. Users will have to upgrade their applications to the new versions. In all likelihood, there will be bugs and some users will lose data. Who will take the blame for this? The developers.

Will it be worth it? Will what we have at the end of this process be better than what we already have? I don't have a crystal ball, but my fear is that we developers will have a large amount of work to do if we want to support this decision, and that the benefit to our users will be negligable.

A few other comments...

There are four reasons cited in the (N)Echo Wiki for not using XML-RPC. I'll go through them one-by-one:

1. "Serious historical confusion about whether string types supported encodings other than just ASCII."
   
   As noted in the Wiki, this has been resolved. As best I can tell, it was a non-issue from the beginning, and as on 6/30/03 Dave updated the XML-RPC spec to clarify that XML-RPC supports any string encoding that's valid XML.
   
   
2. "Doesn't support SSL. (HTTPS is not identified as a valid transport mechanism in the spec)."
   
   Dave says in the Wiki, "if you asked me if you can use HTTPS to transport XML-RPC I would say yes. HTTPS is HTTP." See also this message on the XML-RPC discussion group.
   
   
3. "Doesn't support timezones."
   
   As I noted in my comment in the Wiki, there's no reason that this problem isn't really easy to solve. Just express dates in GMT.
   
   
4. The fourth reason has been deleted from the Wiki since I started writing this. Basically it said that if the (N)Echo API were to send posts back and forth as XML, then they would have to be entity-enocded if it were to use XML-RPC, and that this isn't an issue with SOAP.
   
   I don't think the reasoning here is totally sound, which is probably why it was removed from the page. If SOAP is used for passing posts back and forth as XML, then they'd still have to be encoded. As I recall, SOAP does have a provision for transporting XML documents, but I'd venture to guess that support for this feature is not available in many of the current implementations, and even then, there are probably huge interop issues looming, since it's one of the more advanced features of the SOAP specification.

Evan cites Ben Trott's "Why we need Echo" reasoning for not using XML-RPC. Ben has updated the page since it was originally posted, with a note that the internationalization issue has been resolved -- basically the same resolution now listed in the Wiki's first reason for not using XML-RPC. As far as I can tell, this is Evan's only reason for using SOAP over XML-RPC, and it's a red herring.

Lastly, Evan notes parenthetically that the decision to use SOAP over XML-RPC was "made collectively by the designers of Echo". As far as I can tell, no such consensus has yet been reached, and SOAP isn't even the only alternative to XML-RPC. To say now that Blogger will favor SOAP over XML-RPC is at least jumping the gun.

I wonder what other motivations are behind this statement. We know that Google has SOAP server-side tools, since the GoogleAPI uses SOAP. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Google's engineers have done a lot of fine-tuning on their SOAP implementation. Could this have had any influence on Blogger's decision to move to SOAP?

[Jake's Radio 'Blog] 
6:01:13 AM      comment []   trackback []  



On Social Software. A must read by Clay on how blogs and wikis differ as tools for getting things done, using the Echo wiki as an ex... [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
5:59:12 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Intellectual Blindness.

How we interpret what we read is subject to our biases.  At the extreme, total blindness occurs, fabricating something entirely different.  I am no exception and had many embarrasing moments when such blindness strikes.

Yesterday, it happened to Sam Ruby.  Upon reading Rogers Cadenhead's description of SSF activities in which he wrote that his goal was to develop a new specification from scratch, Sam concluded that Roger was developing a new protocol from scratch even after going back and checking to make sure.

Human mind continues to amaze me in how it works and I am left to wonder what evolutionary purpose these type of blindness serves.  Other than suffering from occasional intellectual blindness like Sam, I suffer from inability to see things right in front of me.  It usually happens when I open the refrigerator looking for something to eat.

Another weird thing is that I seem to organize things far differently than my wife.  She likes to store things in pre-assigned locations.  I tend to just remember the location where I see things last.  This train of thought begs me to ask this question:

Will there be Men and Women versions of Longhorn?

Update: This is my theory on the differences in the way men and women organize things: women change location, men remembers location.  When luxurious caves were popular, women usually stayed near the cave and stored food in the cave.  Since caves are finite in space, they had to organize storage efficiently.

Meanwhile, men had to travel long distances to catch animals which means travelling lightly and having to memorize locations and distinguish directions reliably.  So, women move things to organize while men just notes where things are and move on.  Is this too simple?

[Don Park's Blog] 
5:58:20 AM      comment []   trackback []  



AdSense Trial Update #1.

After twenty hours of AdSense trial, the ads have gotten over 1000 impressions and almost 20 clicks.  Hmm.  Isn't 1.6% clickthrough rate just a little on the high side?  I thought it was around 1%.

My AdSelect idea will probably result in much higher-clickthrough than AdSense, particularly if greater flexibility in layout and personal comment via tooltip is allowed.  I am now thinking about making it happen, maybe co-op style or through a partnership with Google or DoubleClick.

AdSelect can become more of an endorsement network and product quality filter.  Another crazy angle is that it has the potential to turn into an identity/reputation network.  How about this weird piece: You Are What You Recommend?  Reputation network is, in essence, distribution of reputation.  But reputation must radiate from somewhere, meaning you need a starting point.  Interesting thoughts.  Need more thoughts though.

Another thought.  AdSense ads don't appear in RSS feeds because it is just plain irritating when ads follow you around.  If AdSelect thing works out, it might make AdSelect RSS feeds (a channel of just ads for products I endorse) worth subscribing to so people can learn about what new products I like.

These kind of ideas are what I was after when I started my AdSense trial.  Good ideas are linked by dumb ideas.

[Don Park's Blog] 
5:51:02 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Japanese company trademarks "Blog". A Japanese company filed for a trademark on the word "Blog" on March 6 and received it from the Japanese trademark office on June 28. This trademark would be utterly bogus in the US, but I don't know enough about Japanese trademark law to figure out if it's enforceable there.

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
5:47:45 AM      comment []   trackback []  



RESTLog. Joe Gregorio's RESTLog is a fascinating piece of technology and a great example of the RESTian model of web service in action. Everything is built on XML and HTTP - new blog entries are POSTed to the index page as RSS 2.0 item elements, edits are done with the little-used HTTP PUT method and the DELETE method can be used to delete items. Content... [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
5:36:18 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Pingback redux. I think I've worked out a way of implementing Pingback (or a Pingback-like system) without any need for XML-RPC, elements or custom HTTP headers. There are three principle reasons for using Pingback to "detect" a link to a page rather than relying on referrals: A referral from a blog is likely to come from that blog's front page,... [Artima Web Services Buzz] 
5:33:28 AM      comment []   trackback []  



obscure, unKnown & little-shown Movie Database. unknown movies ~ database of the obscure, unknown & little-shown movies. [MetaFilter] 
5:21:27 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Welcome back, Jorn. Welcome back, Jorn -- The host of RobotWisdom and coiner of "weblog" has been on an unexplained break since mid-May, leaving some to wonder if it was for good. But he's back. Now if he would drop the Iraq-protest-black background so we could actually read it . . . [MetaFilter] 
5:11:33 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Reboot videos online. Videos of each speaker's presentation at Reboot are available online for your enjoyment. I haven't watched mine -- too painful -- so I'm not sure what you'll see if you do. I suspect lots of fast talking, excitement about weblogs, and flailing of arms. I do recommend checking out the other speakers though, there's some good stuff in there, especially if you haven't heard any of them present before. [megnut] 
5:07:43 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Howard Sherman: "About.com, a network of more than 400 sites and one of the largest producers of original content on the Web, just relaunched those sites as Weblogs... There will be some, undoubtedly, who will look upon it as another attempt by big media to co-opt the best form of individual expression on the Web..."

[Corante: aa Corante on Blogging] 
5:06:56 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Is the weblog world about to derail?. People need to realize that making drastic changes to weblogging tools for what appear to be minimal gains will have an effect on end users as well as those who build the technology that makes all of this work. [Mac Net Journal] 
4:53:44 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Testing AdSense. I have subscribed to Google AdSense and now you should be able to see some advertising on this page (scroll down, right side). I'm not sure how long these ads will be there, I'm just experimenting.

A couple of notes so far:

• Google seems to think that on this weblog is relevant as far as collaboration software and in some cases weblogging applications are concerned.

• From the control panel I can decide which ads I don't want on my site (for example competitors). I can't decide which ads I do want on my site.

• I have an high clicktrough rate because *I* am clicking on those ads: no, I'm not cheating, I do find some of those ads interesting... In fact it makes sense: considering that google "reads" my weblog, it should be able to guess what kind of ads appeal not only my readers but also myself. Weblogs are the ultimate profiling system.

[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 
4:49:46 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Case Study: Triple Point Technology, Inc.. via Column Two: News Gator has published a case study of the implementation of RSS at Triple Point, a commodity trading company. To quote: Triple Point started with a simple goal: "The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via [Channel 'blog_network'] 
4:29:32 AM      comment []   trackback []