Decentralized Interoperability
Edd Dumbill: If you don't care about decentralized interoperability, it's hard to see how you can ever agree with web technology. [Sam Ruby] 
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Otto von Bismarck

"Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made."

[Quotes of the Day] 
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Science revisits Kevin Bacon
"An experiment in which Internet users were asked to find any one of 18 strangers by using their online connections, showed that it took, on average, only five to seven steps by using friends and acquaintances. The results, published this week in the journal Science, illustrate how social networks operate and how they have become truly global, the team at Columbia University said. See Reuters. [onlineblog.com] 
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RSS Resource - Readme
For a while now, you've probably been hearing all sorts of things about RSS; we are just beginning to see its power and potential. Information on this "new" syndication format has (to this point) been scattered and somewhat tricky to understand. We're aiming to change that trend with this particular Lockergnome resource.

This was designed to be driven by several contributors, but only fellow evangelists and technologists need apply. Experts and novices should be able to turn here for the latest updates, and we'll keep expanding and fine-tuning the "About" page until our fingers bleed.

Ultimately, the desktop news aggregator (read: software) will decide which syndication standard comes out on top. RSS or ATOM, the focus for this effort will always be to illustrate the use of syndication technology to make personal and professional lives easier. [Lockergnome's RSS Resource] 
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Technorati Tutorial, Part 1
Lilia Efimova at Mathemagenic asked an interesting question about Technorati on her weblog today, and I popped by (thanks to my watchlist) and answered her questions. Given the interest, I thought I'd republish my response here, along with a few elaborations. Lilia asked, Does anyone knows how Technorati works? Do they process blog homepages only? Or only items in RSS feeds? Or only things "not older than ..."? I wonder because I usually observe some fluctuations in numbers of inbound blogs and inbould links. E.g. yesterday I had 100+ inbound blogs and today it's 80+. It would be interesting to know why these things change. I tried Technorati site and weblog of David Sifry with no luck. I guess this is a quite typical question that user has about systems that digest information: what are the criteria that are used? Some basics about Technorati 1) We spider weblogs, and correlate each weblog's outbound links to any page on your blog/site 2) Technorati works on any URL - not just URLs for weblogs. For example, you can see what people are saying about an interesting article or favorite company, and get an instant read on the conversations going on around that article or site. 3) The simplest way get your weblog included in the Technorati index is to ping us whenever you update your weblog. That puts you in the high-priority queue for indexing. You can save the page as a bookmark, or you can program your weblog software to do... [Sifry's Alerts] 
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John Kenneth Galbraith

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."

[Quotes of the Day] 
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RSS resource
If you want to learn how RSS can help you or keep track of new RSS tools and services head over to Lockergnome's RSS Resource.
[Kalsey Consulting Group :: Measure Twice] 
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Microsoft's Blogging Intentions
Just got a note from a Microsoft PR person, answering some questions I had about how the company plans to... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 
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An RSS/RDF epiphany
Some fascinating conversations have been weaving their way through blogspace and email in the last few days. As a result, I think I've reached a new understanding of the seemingly endless debate about whether and how to use RDF (Resource Description Framework) and RSS together. I mentioned Dan Brickley's comments the other day. He expands on his remarks over on Shelley Powers' blog: [Jon's Radio] 
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Two types of aggregators
Ziv talks about two types of weblogs - "take that" and "phone home". I think the distinction is more subtle than that, and deserves further exploration. ... [Sam Ruby] 
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Iran Translated
"things you always wished your english speaking friend could read ..."
[Blogalization Community] 
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Martian Soil...
Now this is truly cool... a blog on the news involving Mars and our explorations of that planet....
[Teal Sunglasses] 
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How Technorati works? (2)
David Sifry answers my question about Technorati:

Here's the basics:

1) We spider blogs, and match up their links to your blog - to anywhere on your blog 2) In the inbound blog list, we use the outbound links from the blog homepage, not from the archives 3) We do process RSS feeds an other metadata, but that doesn't affect your inbound blog stats 4) Nightly, we go through the database and re-calculate the number of inbound blogs and links, which helps us double-check our work and also allows us to create the interesting newcomers list, the interesting recent blogs list, etc.

We strice to be accurate all the time. Sometimes things slip through. For example, one of the reasons why your inbound blog count may be down today is because we were doing maintenance of the database last night to remove duplicate blogs - for example, Radio Userland has an obnoxious habit of sending pings to www.weblogs.com for each weblog "category" if you use multiple categories on your blog. Same information, same author, just link spam, basically. So, last night we cleaned out a bunch of that stuff. If you were linked from a bunch of people's blog categories, then you lost those inbound blogs. Then again, so did everyone else. :-)

The last thing to remember is that while we strive for accuracy and completeness, we still do have bugs and have to fix things. If you notice something strange, please don't hesitate to send us feedback (feedback@technorati.com) and let us know.

Thanks for fast reply! And for fixing the category problem (I had it in my stats). I suggest that you add this explanation somewhere, so people know that inbound blog/link statistics are calculated based on links from homepages of other weblogs. (I guess I'm getting spoiled as a researcher: I want to know the method to trust results :) [Mathemagenic] 
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