Month: April 2004

Clogging up the web with RSS

Wired are running a feature about RSS readers clogging up the web.
This kind of ties to my cutting rss short.

TeledyN's Murphy runs one of the most popular open-source Linux sites (which he started in 1994). He was one of the first to offer an RSS feed in 1999 when Netscape introduced the format. By late last year, Murphy's website would run out of bandwidth by 8 p.m.

Murphy's problems arose because he, like many bloggers, included most of his site's front page, including graphics, in the RSS feed, allowing users to read his entries in whole without visiting his website.

In contrast, most news sites, including Wired News, want to bring readers to their websites, so they serve up only a headline or a couple of sentences along with a link to the full story.

I think the feature is valid but blog software should include something like the conditional get helps with the badly written rss readers.

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Social Computing Symposium

Lunch time at the BBC and I'm still buzzing thinking about the possible outcomes of the moblogging plug-in in Blojsom 2.14. I posted a comment on blojsom blog about the ability to now blog anywhere there is a net connection, which for me is anywhere. Even abroad because I've got international GPRS roaming.

Anyway one of the things which happened when I started the plug-in was, Blojsom picked out a email which happened to be one I sent to myself in a BBC. I meant to keep it as a copy and the blog picked it up. Now think about it one second, a blog which picks up things you want to keep? (I keep forgetting email is the leader in social technology by the way) And imagine if you could do the same for instant messager too?
A blog which stores useful things through out the day without actually having to send a post? Nice, maybe not on my main blog but for example on the bookmarks blog will be useful. If you could add metadata too we would be very cool.

I've also been thinking about what happens when Blojsom can respond back to you? Its one of those things I wanted in blojsim for a while. I know Blojsom can send email but I've disabled it and I don’t really know why its there. Anyway, I'm thinking out loud…

Been watching Social Computing Symposium. And thinking about social networking and its software, social technologies like email, text, im, blogs, wikis, etc. E invite sounds interesting never come across it before. Would you call blogs and wikis lightweight authoring?
Interesting enough, the BBC try and encourage people to use im to communicate through-out the buildings. Unfortually there using Microsoft MSN messager so no interoperability with Ravensbournes Jabber server will be available in short term.

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Free Culture almost finished

So yes, I've almost completed Free Culture. (300 pages out of 352). My Palmtop Tagged version is up for all to grab if you want to read it on the go. I've been limiting myself to reading it only on the way to work and from work. Get some very funny looks from London commuters on the Train to Cannon Street from Elmers End. Wont tell you what time I leave for work however.

Anyway I was reading on owrede's log that there is now a wiki for people who want to remix the text while reading. Nice idea and I was thinking aloud with Dave about it yesterday. Was thinking about a Wiki based editor for async devices like palmtops and smartphones. So you can read it and edit it then upload the changes while your online. Kind of like a checking in checking out CVS or Webdav model. Only this time for ebooks?

Anyway getting all wound up ready for the copyright vs community lecture now. Reading lots and getting dave to do bits in college while I'm away as such. Need to watch Lawrence Lessig on the screen savers and I see he's also in London on the 27th may at the lift 2004 event. What ever happened to accessable sites? Thank god Lawrence put some detail down in his post

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Long time no see, at the bbc…

In blogging terms I havent blogged for ages…
Dont worry I got lots to blog, just been busy working on the copyright vs community lectures, been away on the BBC's upfront training and development programme which included a stay in the Hilton metropole without web access. Not please about that. I've also been studying for my motorbike theory test, which I'm pleased to say I passed 34/35. Know exactly which answer I got wrong too. Umm and on top of all that I'm a little nervious about talking too much about the BBC because I dont want to end up like a others I know plus I'm not sure if it counts as a conflict of interest. Saying that tom coats seem to get away with it ok. Maybe I'm being too paranoid about it?
Anyway blogs to come soon…

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Apple do something good with Itunes store?

Adam sent me a couple of links the other day, following our nice saturday night get together in central London.

The link to iTunes RSS site:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/MRSS/rssGenerator

Now feel the power of the mac come to you Ian, with Rendezvous
Executable for PocketPC 2003:
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/rendezvous/

Go on, you know you want to try it! You it makes sense 😉

My reply goes something like this…
Alright alright I'm mildly impressed with Apple.
The rendez-vous client could be useful, but your still playing with the limits of battery power and non-sync connections over bluetooth and less so wifi. I dont think Rendez-fool /images/emoticons/happy.gif was made for such connections? Dont know enough on this issue…

Anyway the RSS generator – Yeah this is useful. Cant quite work out there Url scheme. But not looked at it enough really. Something like Amazon's A9.com would be sweet…

Using RSS2.0 – sweet, am option for RDF would be equally nice, but easy to convert from RSS2 to RDF using XSLT. Sure Atom wouldn’t be much of a challenge either. Really need to write the xsl's soon, as the BBC also requires something like this for RSS 0.91 to others.

Good use of standard namespaces rather than making there own, unlike others I've seen recently. Would be interested to see what else is inside the itms modules though.

BUT, what the hell is going on with the content:encoded elements!
TABLES in a RSS Feed? Surely the point of RSS is to syndicate not force your style on other services? XML with style, not a good idea at all, and I would usually go into a rant about how Apple always do something like this. Tease us with applications and services which claim to be standard complient and all, till you look a little deeper and find a flaw. Think Microsoft WordprocessingML! I would gladly rip out all that crap soon as possible if I was working on it.

Generally this work has to be supported with clap of hands and a happy smile. Keep it up Apple. Sure the BBC would be interested in doing something very simular some point soon. Although I would prefer something a little more like XMLTV or something from Kendra.

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Cutting RSS short

I am becoming quite obsessive about sites that provide RSS feeds but only a line or two. Some drive me up the wall when they only show the head title and nothing more. The whole point of Syndication is syndication surely? I understand that news sites want to drive people to the site. So take BBC for example, there feed only shows the headline and a brief paragraph of text. Fine, I can live with that…
But I can not live with sites like xbox-scene.com which only show the title or much worst still ftrain, Jono the blog and demosgreenhouse. I'm sorry but for example Douglas Rushkoff supplys a full feed without any trouble and he's blog is read by many many people. Techdirt Corporate Intelligence is a another example of how easy the temptation of full feeds can be…
I dont really understand the reason except advertising for not showing all the content in a feed?

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Amazon search – A9

So Amazon have launched there A9 search engine, and I've been checking it out.

First thoughts, its a little large and the style is down a touch from even all the web. Certainly not your google or teoma. But how good is it? Well its a odd beast. A search for cubicgarden my own site gets results close to google, but check out that url! a9.com/cubicgarden.com. Wow now interesting… No query strings for A9 it would seem.

http://a9.com/cubicgarden : A9
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=web&cs=utf8&q=cubicgarden&_sb_lang=pref : All the web/Fast
http://s.teoma.com/search?q=cubicgarden&qcat=1&qsrc=0&Search.x=0&Search.y=0 : Teoma
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=imdb&btnG=Search : Google

Interesting enough Teoma looks at my mixes and finds some lostfeeds stuff, some comments I've made on city of minneapolis and built for the future. While All the web does pretty much the same, but avoids the nackerd lostfeeds links. Google and A9 generate almost the same results except… 1,510 for cubicgarden. (0.09 seconds) from Google and only 52 for A9… Looking at the results too, A9 picks the best ones of googles selection. Even when you get close to the end of 52. I'm still getting good results. Noticed the querystring finally gets used via pages.

So yeah I'm basicly saying this A9 stuff is good, and I havent signed in yet…Which you need to do to use search history and other features. Nice url by the way amazon.

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Lots of Tutorials

Found this nice little site with lots of simple but advanced subject tutorials. xFront. Covers REST, Canonical XML and eXtreme-eXtensibility (XML Schemas). Cant find the RDF and RDFschema tutorial I was looking for though. Oh well you can't win them all…

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