Dancing About Architecture

Dare has a great post that talks about all the great things that can happen when sites agree upon a standard content interchange format: RSS. A nice companion post to Jon Udell's from about a month ago, previously mentioned.

I still think there's a pretty decent chance that Atom will supplant RSS in 12-18 months as the interchange format of choice, simply because the standard nouns (the Atom Format) are coupled with standard verbs (the Atom API), but you never can tell in this business!

I tend to listen very carefully when Adam Bosworth speaks (like those E.F. Hutton ads for you old timers). He has the unique combination of a wide perspective and a deep understanding of what it takes to realize a vision.

Source: Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Adam Bosworth's Web of Data: Is RSS the only API your Website Needs?

Posted by Eric at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Looks like My Web is Yahoo!'s answer to del.icio.us. Gather links and search results, publish your My Web links via RSS, and use the API for My Web. It's a beta and it shows ... del.icio.us is still miles ahead.

But here's some specific feedback on the RSS feed that is available for the shared folder.

Here's what my shared RSS feed at http://myweb.search.yahoo.com/myweb/user/JmsuNkD8IuTtqCqOM9o-/Shared/rss.xml (also burned as http://feeds.feedburner.com/YahooMyWebShared ) looks like:

<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Yahoo! My Web Shared</title>
<link>http://myweb.search.yahoo.com/myresults/myresults</link>
<description>Pages saved to Yahoo! My Web</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>Copyright 2005, Yahoo!</copyright>
<image>
<url>http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/sch/b/mys_logo_xsm.gif</url>
<title>My Yahoo! Search</title>
<link>http://myweb.search.yahoo.com</link>
<width>144</width>
<height>18</height>
</image>

<item>
<title>FeedBurner - Point your feed here. We&#039;ll do the rest.</title>
<link>http://www.feedburner.com/</link>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.feedburner.com/</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 27 Apr 2005 01:15:33 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

<item>
<title>Get the Yahoo! Toolbar Beta with My Web</title>
<link>http://beta.toolbar.yahoo.com/</link>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://beta.toolbar.yahoo.com/</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 27 Apr 2005 01:12:32 GMT</pubDate>
</item></channel>
</rss>

Couple of things pop right out. First, where are the notes I typed in for my links?!? I was expected that there would be a description element that contained my personal description of the link. Pretty useless without that!

Next, those aren't guids! There's nothing universally unique about those ids. I guess maybe they're scoping the id space to the feed, but that's not the idea behind a guid. Better to not have it than have these guids.

Tags/categories? Nope. Actually, maybe this isn't meant to be a link manager ... maybe it's just supposed to help you manage your search results over time or something.

Well, it's a Beta, so maybe this is just a rough approximation of what they're working towards. I'll probably continue to check in, but I don't see it displacing del.icio.us for me any time soon.

Posted by Eric at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Whoops! Sorry if anyone has been trying to comment on this blog or on Burning Questions. We had a fouled up MT-Blacklist entry that was denying all comment submissions. Things should be back in order now.

Thanks to Randy for letting me know!

Posted by Eric at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think it's funny when people say that feed formats are really irrelevant because all of the readers support all of the formats anyway. While that happens to be mostly true right now, the new, non-backwards compatible Atom Format spec is going to be released one of these days, and we'll be right back to the chicken-and-egg problem of publishers not wanting to convert their feed to the new version until it's widely supported in the readers, and the feed readers having to prioritize adding support for the new format and managing a release.

I think SmartFeed is going to be a big help in helping publishers manage that transition. When the spec is released, we'll make sure that SmartFeed "down converts" the new spec to the existing 0.3 spec for readers that haven't been upgraded yet.

What's in store for Format Wars, Episode 4 you think? I'm thinking it's going to be in reconciling different namespace extensions for rich media types. Different music namespaces, photo namespaces, video namespaces ... and how about enclosures vs. Y! RSS Media extension for the next generation of podcasting? All coming soon.

Posted by Eric at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (3)

We've been patiently waiting for the Google AdSense in RSS news to leak out, and it looks like it has. Google's approach is straight-forward: you edit your source feed template and modify it so that you include a linked img, the src of which includes the URL of the permalink associated with that item. That piece of markup gets generated once, and the img that returns can change over time. That prevents the feed from being marked as modified if they want to change the ad that gets slotted for an item.

FeedBurner has had a framework like this in place for quite a while, and we're excited to be able to add support for this program, which we detail in the post Google AdSense Support. Our offering will open up this program to user's that can't edit their feed template, but we can add a bunch of value to all publishers. Using FeedBurner to add your AdSense ads will give you a number of additional configuration options, like:

• only including ads in posts of a certain length (at least 100 words, for example)
• including in alternating posts instead of every post (if you're worried about advertising overload!)
• choosing which categories/tags to add ads too (include ads in my "venture capital" posts, but not my "family" posts)

Anyway, as John Motson likes to say, "things are hotting up now!" It's so much fun to be in this space right now.

Posted by Eric at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As powerful as everyone says. Great storytelling and wonderful performances all the way around. Some of the supporting characters (Baby's family, for example) could have been a bit more nuanced, but they served their purpose. In my opinion, it deserved all the awards it received.

Million Dollar Baby (****)

Posted by Eric at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An entertaining, disturbing movie, even if it was a bit sensationalistic for my taste. "He almost died eating McDonalds!", an often-heard declaration describing the movie, is overstating things a bit. Hey, I felt really bad for Morgan Spurlock, watching him eat all the food, but I wanted a little more clarity on the rules: how much was he overdoing it (ordering a double-quarter pounder with cheese when he had already had it a couple of times that month) simply to make the most dramatic change possible? Any how about something on why that Big Mac guy seemed so normal ... what was his blood pressure? Anyway, I'm really glad this movie was made and I wish most of America would watch it, just to make people *consider* their diet and take some responsibility for their health.

Super Size Me (***)

Posted by Eric at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April ... a new month, a new page from my Demotivators 2005 Calendar from despair.com:

Posted by Eric at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)