« March 2004 | Main | May 2004 »
It's nice to see Wired really paying some attention to the growing adoption of newsreaders. This particular article talks about an issue that I'm sure many of you are familiar with: what happens when all this stuff really takes off and we've got millions of polling newsreaders?
(You may also want to check out my post "FeedBurner Saved My Bandwidth!" over at the Burn This! Weblog.)
Here's someone who was fed up enough with the RSS/Atom format war that he created his own syndication spec: SDF (Streaming Document Format). I admire his moxie, and the spec is a good example of a readable specification document.
Potential adoptors (publishers, consumers, and everyone in between) are going to look at the cost/benefit for supporting yet another format. Are the benefits compelling enough? At first glance, I'd have to say no, but I won't dismiss it out of hand. It's something to keep an eye on, but it's got a loooong road ahead of it.
If the effort does start to pick up steam, it would be easy enough to extend FeedBurner's SmartFeed service to make SDF feeds work with legacy readers.
Source: An Appeal to Unity: The Driving Philosophy Behind SDF - howdev.com
An excellent rant from Tim Bray on the horrific design of SFO and the laughable monorail system. It struck home for me because just a couple of weeks ago I foolishly followed the signs for 101S coming out of the rental car garage just like Tim mentions here.
Source: ongoing - SFO
Pretty clever promotion for American Express. Click on "Uniform" and afterwards don't forget to click on the Playbill.
Made me smile.
For the love of God, please don't put RSS on the cover of Wired! Actually, truth be told, I kind of wish I had a Pointcast application appropriate for the times, where I could configure the feed sources.
Source: The Return of Push!
I continue to be impressed with the server-based newsreader Bloglines and the thoughtful way they implement new features. The latest feature is "References", where they provide links to other threads that mention the item that you are reading. Very well-done and appropriate in the context.
Does anyone else notice how Bloglines is getting in the middle of a lot of traffic much more effectively than companies like Technorati? Bloglines is getting all sorts of great usage information as a by-product of providing a genuine service to users (i.e., the news reader). Technorati, on the other hand, is explicitly about meta-information, without really providing a compelling experience outside the compilation of that meta-information. I'm guessing that the quality of statistics that Bloglines gathers as a side-effect is much richer than what Technorati gathers with its crawlers.
Here's an interesting thought: Bloglines is a subscriber-facing proxy service, while FeedBurner is a publisher-facing proxy service. I bet there are some cool things we could do together. Hmm, note to self.
Source: Bloglines References
The first 20 minutes are terrible, but if you can get past that you'll find a decent Star Trek movie. Other than Captain Picard, it doesn't really delve too much into the characters (definitely not enough Worf), and the villain in this episode wasn't nearly as nuanced as the director would like us to believe. Only really worth watching if you are/were a fan of Star Trek TNG.
Here's an in-depth interview with Neal Stephenson that's worth getting a Salon day-pass for. Yes, I'm mentally gearing myself up for reading The Confusion after the ordeal of Quicksilver.
Source: Salon.com Books | The Salon Interview: Neal Stephenson
By Carolyn Parkhurst
Intriguing premise (cribbed from Amazon.com): after his wife Lexy dies after falling from a tree, linguistics professor Paul Iverson becomes obsessed with teaching their dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Lorelei (the sole witness to the tragedy), to speak so he can find out the truth about Lexy's death--was it accidental or did Lexy commit suicide?
This was a surprisingly touching book with a few macabre detours sprinkled in. It earns some bonus points if you love dogs. As the story progresses, it neatly reflects the process of grief and the distortion of love, with enough mystery to keep the pages turning. I read the entire book during a flight back from San Francisco and I'm glad it wasn't any longer -- any longer and it would have gotten tiresome.
If you're looking for a quick read, like dogs and/or love stories, and don't mind some disturbing imagery, then I recommend you read this book.
The Devil in the White City : Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
By Erik Larson
Fascinating account of the 1893 Columbian (as in Christopher Columbus) World's Fair set in Chicago. It's hard to comprehend how much was accomplished in such a short amount of time -- the entire fair was assembled in less than two years. Also incredible is how many things we take for granted that had their genesis at this fair, from the Ferris wheel to alternating current (electricity) to chewing gum -- not to mention how the fair set the tone for architectural design and labor relations for the next half-century.
The book does a great job of balancing the coverage of the fair with the disturbing tale of H. H. Holmes, "The Devil" in this story. While the two stories don't really have a whole lot to do with each other (except the locale and time period), the author weaves them together effectively.
Original entry from April 12:
Non-fiction that reads like fiction that juxtaposes a larger-than-life architect with a serial killer set in Chicago around the 1893 World's Fair. Since I know next to nothing about that time period in the city I call home, I'm really looking forward to reading this book.
Didn't work for me. Formulaic drama with one-dimensional characters. I have to agree with those that call this "Dead Poet's Society with girls", except that it's not nearly as good.
I guess the "homebrew coder" represents the evolution of the "shareware" programmer. Interesting that two of the four examples that this Economist article gives are of RSS readers -- and two of the most popular RSS readers at that.
Source: Return of the homebrew coder
A really interesting Philip K. Dick premise that got blindsided by a stupid John Woo action film. Even Uma can't save this movie. All this movie did for me is make me want to see both Minority Report and Kill Bill again.
A nice post here on trying to figure out the right way to make syndication more broadly appealing. One thing that is discussed is the use of a style sheet associated with the XML document so that if a user clicks on a feed link in a browser, they at least get something legible instead of a bunch of angle brackets.
That's what we're doing with the "Browser Friendly" service in FeedBurner -- that uses a CSS style sheet, although we could get even more sophisticated if we moved to an XSLT style sheet. All that is well and good, but is it enough to drive adoption? We're thinking of some other ways to make push syndication almost down to the protocol level to make the whole experience better for both publishers and subscribers, but I like seeing discussions (well, no comments on this item, so I guess it's not much of a discussion unfortunately) on this topic.
Well, I've been back from SXSW Interactive for a couple of weeks and I'm just now getting to writing down some thoughts. Let's call it "using time to gain perspective". The show was very satisfying for both professional and personal reasons.
Here were some highlights for me ... things that have stuck with me:
Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Create Them
The schedule seemed to be pretty blog-heavy: "Blogging for Business", "Blogging, Browsing & Bandwidth: Access to Emerging Technology", "Monetizing the Blogosphere", etc. That was fine by me, since we're targetting a lot of these micro-publishers with FeedBurner, but there was some grumbling from the long-time core attendees.
One thing that became clear is that the term "blog" is ambiguous at best, and an elitest barrier to mass acceptance of personal publishing at worst. And just changing the word to "diary" or "journal" is not the answer. The tools that have enabled personal publishing over the past few years are really close to the tipping point: they make it easy (enough) and are powerful (enough) to publish a "web site" that it's starting to strain against the original intentions of these tools. You make a hammer cheap, easy, and powerful, a lot of things start to look like nails.
That reminds me of my favorite quote from SXSW. It was in the "Blogging Next: Where Personal Publishing Goes From Here" panel, when Anil asked the audience: "Are there any blogs that present their information in a way that's not in reverse chronological order?" One woman in the audience replied with a URL that led to nice looking web page with a newspaper-like layout for different categories of information related to this company (or utility or utility watchgroup or something like that). This caused someone else in the audience to ask: "Is that a blog?" to which the woman replied "Well, the site is created with Movable Type, so I guess so." I'm sure that amused Anil as much as it amused me -- the nature of the site is apparently inextricably linked to the tool that was used to create it.
We've seen the same kind of thing at FeedBurner. Hey, we're web guys and can code an HTML page with our eyes closed, but what do we do when we need to get a site up quickly? Fire up Movable Type and create a new blog! So even though this manner of doing content management might not be ideal for, say, a news and support site like Burn This!, you look at the cost/benefit for your different options and creating a "blog" is just the most attractive path.
Style
It seems like everyone at SXSW has caught "style sheet" religion ... no surprise there, since a number of panelists have been preaching about the separation of presentation from content for years and have written the definitive books on the subject.
As a corollary, there was also quite a bit of interest in ensuring that the web remain accessible for those with disabilities. It was encouraging to see the topic being addressed, although it was discouraging to see that many of the sites elevated as "the best designed" were Flash-based, which to a blind person is about as accessible as a picture of a puzzle piece.
Best site that demonstrates the power of style sheets: CSS Zen Garden. Amazing.
Old Friends, New Friends
Ever since the CMP Media nee Miller-Freeman Web Design and Development Conference folded a few years ago, I've missed seeing a number of talented friends that used to be involved in putting together the conference. A number of them were at this show, though, so it was great to catch up: Bryan and Maggie (first time I'd seen them since they got hitched), Veen, Molly and Molly, and a few others I'm forgetting about now. Really nice to see them all again.
Evan and Jason put on a great party my last night there (Monday night). Free T-shirts, free drinks, nice weather, and a ton of interesting people. Thanks Blogger folks!
There were a couple of people I'm really glad I got to meet. There's Charles, creator of feedroll.com. A really nice guy who's moving to Australia (probably there by now), we talked a lot about RSS and the potential of the space. I wish him all the luck that he's able to pursue what he finds interesting.
I'm also thrilled to have met Danah Boyd. She's bringing some much-needed rigor to the study and analysis of social networks, taking the long-view and putting these emerging web-based networks in a wider context. She's articulate and bright, and I'm looking forward to seeing what she does in this white-hot domain in the future.
That's a quick wrap-up. If I think of more things that I've forgotten, I'll post a follow-up or two. Overall, it was an enriching experience.
Justin Hall (yes, the original links guy ... the protoblogger ... just saw him down at SXSW) reports on this fascinating Tokyo-based "item hunt" LBS game: Mogi.
This seems to really be getting to the potential of location-based services: the draping of one or more "data layers" over the physical landscape. Gaming, as described here, is one obvious application -- other business (you know, other than the "Walking by The Gap and get a coupon!" scenarios) and social mobile applications can also start to look at the world through LBS glasses.
I wonder if the publishers of this game have considered integrating marketing opportunities into the game itself: what if one of the "items" you had to gather was at a newly opened nightclub that only appeared late at night, or a noodle shop that was offering "lunch specials".
I've long been interested in LBS, but I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that we've still got a long way to go in North America before location-based applications will become viable. It's great to see things like Mogi taking off in foreign markets, though.
Source: TheFeature :: Mogi: Second Generation Location-Based Gaming