New Flavour Model for Blosxom
Rael Dornfest, (who I assume is the creator of Blosxom) incorporated a few suggestion I had for improving Blosxom 'Flavours' (themes). Instead of 4-5 text files spread around in the root folder, he has boiled a template down to 1 file stored in its own folder, inside a themes folder. This is going to be a much cleaner system, and now Blosxom has a standard model for themes with component parts, like images and css files. Simply store your images in the same folder as the theme file, and they will be automatically detected and used. In addition to this innovation, Rael will incorporate a standard way to designate different themes/flavours for subfolders in your directory.
[BryanBell.com] 
7:32:37 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Semantic Blogging
Phil Wolff has a great post about sematic blogging. There was a ton of talk and hype about the sematic web a couple of years ago. The combination of simple formats, such as RSS and XML-RPC, make sematic blogging attainable and remove a lot of barriers that confronted the sematic web.
[Dann Sheridan's Weblog] 
7:19:37 PM      comment []   trackback []  



People Out Post Commerical Feeds
A keen observation which I can confirm:

I noticed for the first time this morning that the majority of my news aggregator content was from individuals rather than media organizations like the New York Times, CNET, or InfoWorld.
[Dann Sheridan's Weblog]

What are the implications? 
7:17:31 PM      comment []   trackback []  



RSSlets Are Just the Beginning
Phil had a nice post tonight about RSSlets from Eightlinks. I remember the Amazon RSS feeds hitting the ether about a month ago. RSSlets by themselves provide point functionality. I disagree with the location of the intelligence -- on a server. RSSlets in a MoveableType world can only be server based. In a Radio world, RSSlets are desktop based. Once you move this type of functionality to the desktop, a whole new world opens up. What is needed is a supervisory engine in Radio that provides a plug-in architecture for RSSlets. The rough structure is there with Tools, but this structure needs to be extended to provide management for RSSlets, a simple interface for creating RSSlets, interfaces that feed the news aggregator, and an engine capable of learning your preferences based on RSS subscriptions, RSSlet return data, and specific user input.
[Dann Sheridan's Weblog] 
7:14:14 PM      comment []   trackback []  



MetaWeblog API
"It is now safe to deploy applications based on this spec."
[Scripting News] 
7:09:24 PM      comment []   trackback []  



AOL launches blogging service (News.Com) [Scripting News] 
2:34:10 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Dan Gillmor on RSS.

"One problem with the current crop of newsreaders is a sign of their youth. They assign equal weight to everything they display. So the headlines and text from Joe's Weblog get roughly the same display treatment as material from, say, the New York Times."

This is exactly what we are working on at the moment within K-collector. What we are trying to achieve is ranking based on topics. Most of the times is not only about who is writing something but about who's writing on some specific topic. I might find very interesting what somebody writes about technology but not, for example, about politics.

Thanks to topics embedded into RSS feeds via ENT, we have the basic necessary pieces. Now the challange is to make it useful and easy: a lot of people are not using filters to organize their email, so we can't expect them to have to set up complex filters to organize their feeds, it must be easy.

Btw: if you haven't visited our w4 beta site recently, you will find some interesting news. I especially like the new floating window in the topic view and the classifications pages organization. It definetly helps understanding where we are going.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 
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