Link parkin': The folks at BurningDoor have an unofficial FeedBurner dev/suport weblog going.
I've had a few pages lying around in saved tabs for a while and finally bothered to actually give a few their just due
One was a short piece, entitled 2020 Vision, by David Brin in the Online Journalism Review, which I thought was going to be an interview of the noted science fiction author. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a short fiction piece, only tangentially related to the "future of news".
To my ears, it read somewhat like an overstimulated piece of mid-90's cyberpunk. Lots of neato, gee whizzy stuff jumping out of every paragraph. Toned down a bit it could be the start of a good short story or a novel.
Still it was quite entertaining.
Wouldn't it be nice if RSS aggregators had plug-in architectures that allowed you to build internal services that operated on groupings of RSS feeds? I monitor a lot of feeds, and I've noticed that I scan them in a particular order. More personal, less frequent (but still regular) feeds tend to get read early and repeatedly. Bursty, less personal streams get put off, often for days at a time.
I'd like to lump those low priority ones into a group and have my aggregator perform operations on collected items. For example, cluster and summarize them, a.k.a. Google News on the Desktop. Currently, we're in a primitive state where you have to write your own aggregator to try this out.
Dreaming of the ultimate aggregator as platform tool.
Sigh. I guess if you want to write an RSS feed crawler, you better know about all this michegas.
Hey, isn't it about time for another RSS vs Atom flame war!
Link parkin': In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) looks to be the collected results of a colloquium on wrangling unstructured information. Looks to be a goldmine of network analysis techniques.
Tip of the cap to Roland Piquepaille, via Smart Mobs.
Apropos of nothing, Anton Rauben Weiss has gathered a trove of William Gibson related information.
Pop quiz. Where did a quote, oft attributed to Gibson, "the street finds it own uses," actually appear? Note, it's not Neuromancer and is suprisingly hard to find (at least it was for me).
I'm often the first to say, "Yeah, but what is that in real dollars?" Now, thanks to NASA, I've got a calculator to find out.
Of course as my friend Carl Smith is fond of pointing out, there's plenty of CPI calculators on the Web, all slightly different.
Not a whole lot new to me, but Rick Bruner does a nice recap of some recent empirical publications on the blogosphere.
Just parking a quick thought, but Google's Gmail strikes me as something of a bad business decision if it gets pursued in that fasion. They're going up against two deeply entrenched, well managed concerns (MS/Hotmail & Yahoo/YahooMail) on a service that people really care about (no errors allowed), and one that doesn't invite much innovation. Seriously, how much different is e-mail now from e-mail in 1994? Not much. They're also going to have a hard time getting bleeding edge types to adopt, since they're already heavily invested in some email application.
So I have a hard time seeing this beta move to being monetized, unless there's a huge draw that I've missed. Seems like more of a honeypot to attract users for more service experiments, e.g. contextual ads in a context besides Web search
Then again, they could always pull a WebFountain, and make it a service large corporations can adopt and use to get better knowledge management.
Link parkin': Topix.Net is a news feed aggregation service, built by Rich Skrenta. He also keeps a weblog regarding backend developments.
There was a bit of a dustup regarding Topix's terms of service but it appears they might wind up being a bit less draconian sounding than Google's TOS.
Kevin Smathers led an effort to produce a C library for interacting with BitTorrent. Expect a torrent, no pun intended, of modules in various scripting languages to take advantage of this. Yet another step on the way to making BitTorrent a standard for P2P content distribution.
Tip of the hat to Don Park, even though the dang URL is ridiculously user hostile.
Link parkin': Two presentations from Pycon on Pyrex, using it and optimizing code with it.
I was never one of those Dan Patrick/Keith Olbermann sycophants, but SportsCenter has gone way downhill. Oddly enough, the Sunday morning editions featuring straightahead pros like Suzy Kolber, Bob Ley, Chris Hendry, et. al. is way more enjoyable.
Also, Matt Feeney leaves out one of the really irritating developments in SportsCenter, the incorporation of advertising directly into the program, e.g. The Budweiser Hotseat, The Gatorade Ultimate Highlight, the Coors football song every Sunday evening. Frankly, SportsCenter is no longer so much a "news" program as a comedy show focusing on sports.
Link parkin': Like I need more weblogs to read, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has two good looking feeds: Deep Links and miniLinks.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain working with Medill students on a project prototyping hyperlocal citizen's media. No knowing where this will go, but the students are gung ho and have an extremely Web savvy core. I'm looking forward to the final results.
I've always said that Movable Type is what FrontPage should have been. Derek Powazek just adds to that notion. Yeah there were additional pioneering systems, Blogger, Manila and Trellix come to mind, but MT seems to have hit the sweet spot of ease of use, extensibility, community support, and professional commercial development.
Waypath released a new service, link reference searching. I tried it with varied results. Analyzing clay shirky's situated software essay turned up nothing. Not quite sure I believe that one. http://www.scripting.com/ seemed to latch onto boilerplate. http://www.kinja.com/ seemed to do a lot better.
All in all, I'm not sure how end user useful these things are, but they make for great building blocks for other services.
Link parkin': Kinja is weblog tracking for the other 95%. (I can't say rest of us, because I fall in that other 5%). From the murmurs in the blogosphere, I can't say as how I'd be fixin to use it on a regular basis. Probably worth kicking the tires to see what some spit, polish, and focus can do for aggregation.
Seth Finkelstein aptly demonstrates how "Google ranks popularity not authority". Take note all you would be weblog indexes.
Link parkin': Webjay collects link lists of links to music. Wonder what that network structure looks like?
Nice hack of Google News, generating treemaps based upon what's being published there. The application seems to do well for drawing attention to "big" stories, large clusters of similar articles. But the smaller bits are not too comprehensible. For small slices, there's no good way to scan, you have to locate and hover over each one. Too much work.
Link parkin': A nice, accessible tutorial on how HTTP works.
Ran across this in the comments of John Batelle's search blog. Findory News watches what you "read" and then customizes later material for you. The slick trick is that they cookie your browser with a random id and then, I'm guessing, watch links you follow through Findory.
As someone who's prototyped a system with roughly the same idea, there are two major problems. First, there's a UI issue in that Findory can only track clicks through Findory, if I'm right. But I read news in a lot of other places, so it can only see a small window of my interests. Or they have to be so damn good I read all of my news through them. Not likely to happen.
An even bigger problem is that following a link is only an endorsement of the attractiveness of the headline, not the final destination. I call this the tire kicking problem. You follow the link, kick the tires by reading the lead paragraph, and then hit the back button if you're not interested. Should that article be recorded as interesting? Not in my book.
Good luck to them though!
Jeff Jarvis, long involved in traditional publishing, is cooking up an interesting project, along with New York University, for a center to study and promote citizens' media. Not a lot of details forthcoming, but this is the type of "big idea efforts" that journalism and communications schools can and should undertake. It's pretty clear that news organizations run for a profit need to focus on projects that add to the bottom line. Academic institutions can fill an innovation gap where the limits of these self-publishing technologies can be pushed.
Link parkin': Richard Jones, a.k.a. one half (third?) of Mechanicalcat, points out the utility of hyperdb, a Python based persistent object store. Hyperdb is a core part of Roundup, an issue tracking application.
Link parkin': Yet Another Blog Index. Philippe (one ell, two ps, no Robert) Lourier's Blogrunner. Blogrunner claims to have a PageRank equivalent inside.
Blogdex, Popdex, Technorati, Blogpulse, Blogosphere.us, Blogrunner, Waypath, Blogstreet Top 100. Yeesh, someone needs to do a bakeoff.
FeedBurner, spotted a while ago but just now posting about, is a new service that proxies syndication feeds (RSS, Atom), and does various transformations on them. For example, if you only want to bother with an RSS 2.0 feed, they'll transform it into an Atom feed. According to John Battelle (2 ts, 2 es, 2 ells), they can also provide readership statistics.
Interesting but tricky model. FeedBurner is essentially providing canned computation, which is fraught with all sorts of DoS issues. However, since the computations are transformations, transformations created by FeedBurner no less, and not arbitrary computations, e.g. random script, I'm sure limiting resources is much easier. I'm sure there's some interesting distributed programming issues in the background there too.
I'm not quite sure about outsourcing the URL of one's feed, but apparently if you've got some server chops, you can use an HTTP temporary redirect to use the service, but keep your URL.
According to CNet, Sony will soon be shipping the Librie, an e-book device based upon "electronic paper" technology. Initially only available in Japan, the pricepoint is looking like $400 US, for better readability and power consumption than a typical PDA. It's unclear whether the thing does more than display e-books. Also, you don't get the flexiblity that e-paper producers have been touting.
Apparently the e-book concept ain't quite dead yet.
Link parkin': NewsWatcher is the new aggregator on the block. The twist is that it incorporates Gelernter's Lifestreams concept for viewing feeds.
Link parkin': Just in case, Kalsey Consluting's Button Maker. For when I need to look like the rest of the pack.
According to David Sifry, and he should know, Technorati's beta has become the official front end. Besides UI, speed, and feature upgrades, there's a new Technorati developer's API.
kjBuckets is a toothsome, and long in the tooth, Python library that has an elegant graph module I've been putting to good use lately. But I'm always on the lookout for more options. e4graph is a C++ library, written by Jacob Levy & Jean-Claude Wippler, with Python bindings. Possible big wins are persistence and the ability to deal with huge data sets. I'll have to pop this on the top of the kick the tires stack.
zvtm is a zoomable ui toolkit, implemented by Emmanuel Pietriga. Looks interesting but than gui toolkit screenshots always do. I wonder how it compares to Jazz and Jazz's follow on Piccolo?
You should use Mozilla Firefox, because I said so. And so does Jon Udell.
Yet another non-HTML markup language for weblog writing, called Markdown, has been cooked up by John Gruber, The Daring Fireball. Easily plugs into Movable Type.
Just thinking out loud, but even though many of these markup languages are designed to deal with the limitations of editing in a forms area, they can make editing in a desktop app easier too.
Google's local search provides one more reason not to visit or even know about your local newspaper's web site.
You heard it here first. I won't be a professor by the time I'm 40.
With stuff like Final Scratch and Technics Digital Turntables I'm going to run away and become DJ CallCC.
This post also illustrates why tools like Onfolio really might be useful. I tend to pile up interesting links in Mozilla Firefox tabs. When Windows XP fall down, go boom (and yes I have seen random blue screens), there goes all of my interesting material. I had really wanted to post about Final Scratch but had lost the link in just such a disaster. Luckily I ran across the link again in my aggregator, but a frantic search initially failed.
The mysterious klaut of blog-o-fobik has gone to the trouble to figure out how to use COM to drive Flash movies from Python. Kewl!!
This is a nice entree into using sophisticated 2D graphics and animation as interaction elements in Python applications. Win32 only though, due to the usage of the Flash ActiveX component.
Link parkin': Onfolio is new application to help you organize the stuff you find when browsing. Hard to see how this is any better than the first wave of bookmark managers.
Link parkin': Gonzalo Frasca's master's thesis entitled, "Video Games of the Oppressed".