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Dienstag, 11. Januar 2005 |
NASA Spitzer Space Telescope Sees Dusty Aftermath...
NASA Spitzer Space Telescope Sees Dusty Aftermath of Pluto-Sized Collision
7:16:25 PM
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The solution to the Yahoo problem
Okay, let's be clear about the problem.
Yahoo sends emails to bloggers with RSS feeds saying, hey if you put this icon on your weblog you'll get more subscribers. It's true you will. Then Feedster says the same thing, and Bloglines, etc etc. Hey I did it too, back when Radio was pretty much the only show in town, you can see the icon to the right, if you click on it, it tries to open a page on your machine so you can subscribe to it. I could probably take the icon down by now, most Radio users probably are subscribed to Scripting News, since it is one of the defaults. But it's there for old time sake, for now.
Anyway, all those logos, when will it end? I can't imagine that Microsoft is far behind, and then someday soon CNN is going to figure out that they can have their own branded aggregator for their own users (call me if you want my help, I have some ideas about this) and then MSNBC will follow, and Fox, etc. Sheez even Best Buy and Circuit City will probably have a "Click here to subscribe to this in our aggregator" button before too long.
That's the problem.
Now there is a solution, but it would require a bit of cooperation, something the so-called RSS "market" is famous for not doing. (Hehe.) Since I'm widely hailed as the Father of RSS (bear with me please) I would volunteer to coordinate this, raise the money, write the software and run the server, and make all the data public.
1. Ask the leading vendors, for example, Bloglines, Yahoo, FeedDemon, Google, Microsoft, and publishers, AP, CNN, Reuters, NY Times, Boing Boing, etc to contribute financially to the project, and to agree to participate once it's up and running.
2. Hire Bryan Bell to design a really cool icon that says "Click here to subscribe to this site" without any brand names. The icon is linked to a server that has a confirmation dialog, adds a link to the user's OPML file, which is then available to the aggregator he or she uses. No trick here, the technology is tried and true. We did it in 2003 with feeds.scripting.com.
3. Develop the software and release it as open source, with a license that permits anyone to operate a competitive service. This guarantees that the result of the contributions in #1 are shared widely, that there is no proprietary technology involved, and should the system we set up falter, it would be easy to set up another.
4. All the data maintained by the server would also be available in XML, publicly, allowing a myriad of applications to be developed by anyone who wants to. Steve Gillmor would hail it as the first step towards attention.xml, and it would be, and it would be cool. Imagine the Friendster-like service you could develop from a large database of people's subscriptions.
Anyway that's it. It's possible to solve the problem. Eventually I'm sure we will try to do so once our sites are sporting 35 different "subcribe here" buttons. Maybe that's sooner than you think.
PS: With all the talk about commercializing RSS, isn't it surprising that the pundits haven't been talking about an OEM market for aggregators. They'll claim to have invented the idea, shortly. Stay tuned. 
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isbn.nu feeds, um günstige Buchpreise zu vergleichen
Glenn Fleishman told me about something clever—at his site isbn.nu, you can get feeds for individual books. The feeds show prices, so you can see how much a book is at Amazon, how much at Powell’s, and so on.
Say you want to buy Tom Negrino’s latest book about managing your personal finances with Quicken. Since you’re smart about money (or at least hope to be), you’re looking for a good deal.
Here’s what you could do:
1. Get the ISBN number of Tom’s book. (You could search for it at isbn.nu, look it up on Amazon, etc.)
2. Add a new feed with a URL that looks like this: http://isbn.nu/0321293657.xml
(The number part is the ISBN, which is different for each book.)
When a price changes, the feed is updated.
In completely other news...
daveXtreme says: “Here’s how I’d describe podcasting: it’s like TiVo for radio.”
See? Can’t get away from TiVo comparisons.
My love is like a red, red TiVo. Shall I compare thee to a TiVo’s day? Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous TiVos, or to take arms against a sea of programming, and by opposing TiVo them?
I got TiVo on a cloudy day—when it’s cold outside, I got the month of TiVo. [gefunden bei inessential.com ...]
10:15:17 AM trackback []
25-foot rock falls on road
Mark Frauenfelder:
The rain here in Los Angeles is really bad. Our lawn is flooded, and my neighbor just told me we live in a flood area. A couple of years ago he took his kayak out and paddled it down our street. I'm a little nervous. But things are even worse a few miles away from our house, in Topanga Canyon. Take a gander at this boulder that rolled onto the road. Link (Thanks, John!)
[mehr bei Boing Boing ...]
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Blogging disaster relief in Phuket
Xeni Jardin:
One of the bloggers on the Bangkok edition of metblogs.com is documenting disaster relief efforts in Phuket, day to day, with snapshots and a detailed first-person account.
Link (note: includes some very graphic images which some might find disturbing). (Thanks, Sean)
(Boing Boing.)
10:00:12 AM trackback []
Companies that have fired people for blogging
Cory Doctorow:
This page contains a list of companies that are purported to have fired employees for blogging "fired, threatened, disciplined, fined or not hired people because of their blog."
1.) Delta Air Lines
2.) Wells Fargo
3.) Ragen MacKenzie
4.) Starbucks
5.) Microsoft (some say yay, some say nay)
6.) Friendster
7.) the Houston Chronicle
8.) the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
9.) Nunavut Tourism (Canada)
10.) the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, Harvard University
11.) Maricopa County Superior Court of Arizona Self Help Center and Library
12.) Mike DeWine, US Senator (R-Ohio)
13.) the Durham Herald-Sun
14.) Kerr-McGee
15.) ESPN
16.) Apple (according to this blog entry AND this article)
17.) Statistical Assessment Service (DC nonprofit)
18.) Minnesota Public Radio
19.) The Hartford Courant
20.) the International Olympic Committee (barred athletes from blogging during the Olympics last summer)
21.) Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (?)
22.) the National Basketball Association (NBA)
(via Apophenia)
(Boing Boing.)
9:58:03 AM trackback []
Skype for Interviews? Read This!
If you’re trying to use Skype for Podcast interviews – or for anything else, for that matter – you must read this post by security guru Mark O’Neill. I learned about Skype’s super nodes during Niklas Zennstrom’s phoned in presentation at Supernova, but I forgot all about it. It will be interesting to see if accepting inbound TCP and/or UDP ports makes Skype less susceptible to dropouts and therefore more suitable for recorded interviews and discussions.
(Blogarithms.)
9:53:02 AM trackback []
Was podcasting actually invented by NPR...
Was podcasting actually invented by NPR in the early 80s?
9:50:29 AM
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Sightseeing in Paradise?
Eindrücke eines freiwilligen Helfers beim Einsatz auf der thailändischen Inselgruppe Phi Phi
(Telepolis News (26.11.2004).)
9:46:13 AM trackback []
Musikindustrie:Und wer nicht aufpasst, den frisst das Krokodil
Ein Kinderlied stürmt die Charts - und widerlegt so ganz nebenbei die Argumente der großen Plattenfirmen für ihre Misere durch Raubkopierer Von Stefan Steck für ZEIT.de
9:42:56 AM
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NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth
9:39:50 AM trackback []
Last update: 26.02.2005; 0:27:34 Uhr .
