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Jon, as usual, gets it. Increasingly, companies will have to defend their choice to not represent their content as RSS as it becomes the standard content interchange format. OpenSearch, as mentioned before, is an excellent example.
So, this "item" shows up in my Feedster result feed for FeedBurner:
That seems pretty slimy to me. I have no issue with these SimpleFeed people buying the "Feedburner" adword ... in fact, that's kind of flattering. But to have "Feedburner" displayed within the item itself is misleading, and I hope people don't get the impression that we have anything to do with them.
Harrumph!
I'm really pretty good at restraining my technolust urges, but when I saw the Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor, I couldn't hold back. I had to get it.
Of course, you need a really good graphics card to drive that puppy, so I had to add that to the shopping list. And then came a well-timed Dell promotion: I could get the monitor for $700 if I ordered it with a new computer. Hey, my current setup is 2 1/2 years old ... yeah, I need a new computer!
So I sheepishly floated the idea to Christine ... she smiled, nodded, and in the process earned 16 spousal credits. Placed the order, and it was delivered this week.
So far, me gusta mucho. Half-Life 2 at 1920x1200 is something to behold.
Yea, I was weak. But now it feels so good.
A view of Half-Life 2 at 1920x1200 on the Dell 2405FPW.
Amazon introduced OpenSearch at ETech yesterday. Awesome. It just goes to show you that RSS is becoming the standard transport for content, and this is a great example of how RSS is getting more and more valuable as it gets more and more invisible.
I wanted to dig into OpenSearch a little bit, so that's just what I did. If you have a blog run by Movable Type, here's what you have to do to have your own A9 column. Just follow these steps.
I'm not sure how useful this would really be for us small publishers, but I imagine this could be nice for some larger publishers out there. FeedBurner doesn't quite work with this yet because we can't pass through parameters to the source feed, but that would be a nice service we could offer (stats on search queries maybe?).
Nice job, Amazon.com!
Exceedingly silly, frequently entertaining. There are a few very funny interactions between Stifler and The Rock, and Christopher Walken gets a good chance to play Christopher Walken.
By Christian Bauer, Gavin King
I learned a ton from this book, especially about session management. A lot of things I learned went straight into FeedBurner, resulting in some major performance gains. I plan on re-reading this every couple of months or so, and it serves as my number one reference on Hibernate right now.
If you use Hibernate, get this book and read it cover to cover.
Original Entry from February 28, 2005:
Currently reading this book, which is excellent. I've used it as a reference before, but now I'm going through every page. We're using Hibernate at FeedBurner and we're continually finding new ways to optimize our usage. I'm dog-earring a lot of pages as I read through this.
The Warren Buffett Way, Second Edition
by Robert G. Hagstrom
This is the book on my nightstand right now. Mr. Buffett has always been an enigma to me, and so far this book to doing a good job of showing what an honest, straight-forward genius he is. I know I won't be able to evaluate investments the way he does, but I think we can all learn something about character from him.
First off, it becomes crystal clear after watching this movie that Charlize Theron deserved the Best Actress Oscar for her performance here. She is posessed by this character ... a totally convincing and absolute transformation. One shouldn't overlook the fine job that Christina Ricci did, though: she held her own and then some.
Okay, so the performances were great, but how was the movie? It was a depressing, disturbing movie that leaves you with a helpless feeling about humanity. The lead character is such a tragic figure, and the movie is incredibly effective at illustrating the dispair of circumstance that surrounds her life. This excellent movie will stick with me for a while.
It has been a while since my last post on microfeeds, and not a lot has really changed -- except that they would be more useful than ever if we could figure out a way to consume them appropriately.
I continue to offer microfeeds attached to each post that contains any comments for that post, but I'm not aware of any newsreader that recognizes the wfw:commentRSS element (each item in my feed uses that element to point to its microfeed). We've also seen interesting uses of RSS for things like FedEx package tracking, and there's an interesting proposal for using feeds to help deal with phishing scams. I'd love to have microfeeds for order tracking from a bunch of different online retailers.
The problem is, of course, that the traditional feed reading clients don't really deal with microfeeds that well. Microfeeds might have a lifecycle associated with them ("Kill thyself after the package has been delivered"), they might not deserve the status of "channel" (toss a bunch of them into a single "order confirmations" channel), or they might just serve to support existing content that I've found interesting (like comments on an entry). "Feeds" are too bulky a concept in today's readers to handle these scenarios.
I don't have an answer, but I feel the need!