Rory Blyth generates Amazon RSS feeds..
with a great browser-based user interface, no SDK.
[Scripting News] 
3:57:12 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Collect Britain:
From the british library. OK - I've spent a few hours looking around. The British Library has what will ultimately amount to an uber-site that will make it into my bookmarks (I have 11 at the moment). Go there - it won't be finished... [tingilinde] 
3:42:33 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Amazon goes RSS: A mere 7 months after I wrote about last-minute business RSS here Amazon gets it. Nearly. Amazon now provides RSS feeds embedded inside the HTML pages. To actually subscribe to the RSS you will need to take a look at the source of the page and then find the link to manually add it to your RSS newsreader (at least my version of NetNewsWire can't "auto-discover" the RSS feed). Here is an example RSS feed. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] 
2:59:47 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Modulo 26..
A work of understated beauty.
[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 
2:34:23 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Zen and The Art of Nano Publishing.. Time is an illusion. You and I think we have a year, or a month, or a day in which to accomplish something. Yet, is it not a fact that you never have a day! All you have is a moment, this moment, and this moment. There is nothing more than a moment you have that we call now. The present moment is all you ever have. In a similar vein of thought, we must also see that software is an illusion. Microsoft create nice packages, and print books and print pretty shiny patterns on CD disks and we are told we are purchasing sofware - a thing. Really, software is an illusion. It does not really exist. [Microdoc News] 
9:00:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



A look at recent user level activity in the RSS world (real long post):

I've been an advocate of RSS and the less recognized value of the aggregator side of the blogging world for some time. There have been a whole series of recent examples of RSS applications worth noting. I thought I'd pull together a niumber of the items gracing my aggregator on the topic...

[McGee's Musings] 
8:10:24 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Organizing Your Digital Detritus:. From John Robb's Weblog, I'm learning a little — enough to scratch my head about whether this is interesting at all — about this new class of apps that promise, as Robb describes it, to "provide a PC-based organizational system for all the digital data a person accumulates during a lifetime... (to) make sense of the gobs of information we are going to store in our 1 Tb computers in 2006..." There's MyLifeBits, for PCs, which is from Microsoft and which Robb suggests will be seriously flawed by being inflexible and monolithic. DevonThink, so far only for OSX, is a "freeform database with a browser interface that organizes your local data by similarity" and looks pretty interesting to him. And then there's Dashboard, about which all the recent buzz is about.

I'll surely investigate this phenomenon further, but for now I'm dubious about their usefulness to me. Maybe I need to get the terabyte hard drive first or progress further along the continuum to benign senescent forgetfulness (in which case a terabyte-range handheld PC will be more useful to me than a desktop, of course). Robb suggests these will be great for webloggers but I suspect he doesn't mean my style of weblogging.

As Robb asks, "what do we call this category of software" anyway? And, other than the amount of their muscle, how is it different from the heavily-indexed freeform databases (like Ask Sam) or the index-based PC explorers (like Lotus Magellan) I've made use of in my remote past? Here are Dashboard's stabs at answers to both of those questions:

The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time.

While you read email, browse the web, write a document, or talk to your friends on IM, dashboard does its best to proactively find objects that are relevant to your current activity, and to display them in a friendly way.

We call the dashboard an "association engine."

Part of my hesitancy is about that "friendly way". I'd be relieved if I didn't find it intrusive and annoying, even if my machine's performance didn't take a hit. I sound like the computerist version of a luddite, I realize, but I'm reminded of that old Twilight Zone episode in which the aliens arrive promising all sorts of boons to humanity. At the end, just as the world's leaders are about to place their fate entirely in the hands of the aliens, our hero runs up breathlessly to announce that he has just finished translating the aliens' handbook, To Serve Man. "It's a cookbook!!" he stammers. [Follow Me Here...] 
7:34:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Savings
Here's the TLC (Technorati link cosmos) for Saving the Net. Impressive.
[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
7:27:33 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Evan deconstructs a "Google is being spammed by weblogs" example. [John Robb's Weblog] 
7:22:32 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Web Zen: Graffitti Zen. (1) banksy
(2) vandal squad
(3) wooster collective
(4) laussanne
(5) stencil revolution
(6) guerilla parenting
(plus, a bonus link from me to you: my favorite tag, above left).
web zen home, web zen store, Discuss (Thanks, Frank) [Boing Boing Blog] 
7:21:04 AM      comment []   trackback []  



PayHole On the one hand, I believe PayPal is one of the greatest inventions in the history of the Web.

On the other hand, I hate it.

I think I may have made one successful payment for something with PayPal, a long time ago. But since last Fall, I've been in PayPal hell, and I can't get out......

There has to be a better way.

[Later...] Says here Roland Tanglao and his partner Pete have one. Check it out.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
7:07:30 AM      comment []   trackback []  



GeoPing [Daypop Top 40] 
7:00:09 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Read On.

I was about to address this post to anyone visiting from today's ABA Journal eReport article on lawyer blogs, then remembered that eReport articles supply no hyperlinks...

No matter, if you went to the extra effort of finding Bag and Baggage through a search engine (or if you followed an inbound link from a Web page that by definition would have somewhat less on the eBall than a bona fide eReport), and are curious to read what people much smarter than I have to say about relationships between the Web, organizations, individuals, and society, then by all means please visit, buy, and/or sign up for:

• World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else
• Cluetrain, the Manifesto
• Cluetrain, the Book
• Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web
• Up2Speed
• Up2Speed's Business Weblogs—The Big List, and the weblogs there referenced
• BloggingWorks
• John Lawlor
• And just to wake you up and blow your mind, the first interview since May '02 with the "gentle person with a piercing vision" and Cluetrain co-author who started me down this rosy path, including the outline for his book-in-process, and more allusions and illusions—literary, psychosocial, philosophical and I'm leaving some out—than you can shake a Dali at.
• [Update] Bad on me for initially omitting Robert Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto too.

[Bag and Baggage] 
6:57:11 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Wash Cycle: Rory Perry: "There's been a wash of articles this month that appear to solidify weblogs as a solid online content platform for politics, business and public information. This continued level of acceptance will hopefully enable more conservative institutions (like courts) to embrace the platform more widely." Rory's roundup. [Bag and Baggage] 
6:50:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Chris Lydon Interview
Amazing what he can do with such a tight budget and in such a short amount of time. I've been a big fan of his work, so I jumped at the chance when he called me up and asked for an interview. We did it amazingly quickly - he called me up, we talked for 30 minutes, and 2 hours later, the interview was posted to the web. Chris is onto something...... [Sifry's Alerts] 
6:20:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Amazon is offering an RSS interface. Not sure how to find all the feeds. They have an example feed for top-selling DVDs. [Scripting News] 
4:51:32 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Crimson: Harvard to House Blog Standards. [Scripting News] 
4:48:52 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The coming wonderworld - Technorati: Christopher Lydon in introducing his interview with Dave Sifry: "Technorati is for me the simplest clearest sketch we have of the coming wonderworld..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
2:25:42 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Stacy Cowley on Blogathon: "This year, 545 participants have enlisted, with US$56,000 pledged so far. At 6 a.m. Pacific time Saturday, they'll embark upon 24 hours of blogging..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
12:46:38 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Clare Booth Luce. "Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there." [Quotes of the Day] 
12:37:16 AM      comment []   trackback []