Aggregation webservice – Bloglines

Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregation system. Many blogs and newsfeed services publish RSS feeds, special files containing the content of the site formatted for easy parsing. Bloglines allows people to subscribe to these feeds. Once subscribed, Bloglines periodically checks the feed for changes or additions.

My first thoughts are this is good for those without access to a server of there own or no broadband connection. And its looks very simular to flock, but it says there using a combination of things. On the minus side it doesnt allow you to collect the aggeration outputs like flock does. So no sharing onwards which is a bad idea. I will need to sign up to check it out for sure.
It does however let you use opml to inport and export feeds, which makes me wonder what they would make of my many feeds

I wonder what there revenue model will be? email marketing or feed in advertising into there listed feeds? The easy subscription bookmarklet sounds dodgy as heck.

How Much Does Bloglines Cost?
Bloglines is completely free to use. Text advertising and additional fee-based services will be launched in the near future.

Using mailinator for the first time then it would seem. Using the email address testuser@mailinator.com with the password testuser.

Got my validated email a sec ago

Hello,

Your email address has been validated and your Bloglines membership has
been confirmed.

Now that you have a Bloglines account, you can subscribe to blogs
easily. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs to see a list of the
most popular blogs on Bloglines. Also see http://www.bloglines.com/newblogs
for a list of new blogs, updated daily. If you already have a list of
subscriptions in OPML format, you can import them automatically. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/manage for more information. For an easy way
to subscribe to new blogs that you find, see http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub

How can we improve Bloglines? We would appreciate your feedback. Go
to http://www.bloglines.com/contact to send us comments.

Thank you for using Bloglines.

The Bloglines Team

Uploaded my opml file from flock and it worked!

So its now, my own flock server vs bloglines. We shall see what happens, you know I'll blog the results.

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CSS Designer?s Wishlist

I've always said I want to be more involved with the -standards- sorry reconmenations the w3c.org do. One of the top ones would be CSS3 or the next one.

Anyway mezzoblue's blog about the new standard has been recieving some interest.
My thoughts are simular to mezzo's, about why designers dont get involved. I mean no disrespect to anyone but wasnt xslt ment to be for designers to use? Thats a serious gap between reality and wishful thinking.

Anyway the spec looks good so far but yeah this will keep a few flash heads happy for a while…
Transparency will be available anywhere you can use colour.

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Opie (Open Palmtop Integrated Environment)

The question of what I do with my old compaq 3630 ipaq still bothers me. I cant just sell it as I wont get much for it and I would rather make sure it makes a difference to someones life than sell it. As such…

Anyway I found something to do with it. Thanks Infosync. Install Opie Linux on it.

So I did.

Its alot of hassle to put opie on the ipaq, but if you follow the instructions to the T it works fine. The scarey part was when you first boot up the ipaq from cold and it sits there booting up opie without much feedback. Anyway it all looks good now.

When you start up opie the screen is a little low res and it flickers a bit, but my old ipaq screen wasnt the best anyway. Looked at the updated packages and downloaded a few bits and bobs like web server, samba server, etc. To note it doesnt support 3com wireless cards, but it liked the oroncio and compaq cards. Never had a chance to read the opie user manual till now.

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At last a update to exist

I was wondering if the open source xml database exist was dead? Well it seems no, there was a 0.92 update a few days ago on the 11th August 2003. Seems the biggest feature is XUpdate

xmldb's xupdate information page. Yeah just as though, xupdate will allow you to modify xml data on the fly though a query, just how you do with sql. I also believe you will be able to change xml structures using xupdate too? Yep the xml schema is gonna be more inportant than ever before if that is the case.

The future plans of exist look interesting too.

XML schemas
An existing XML schema could be used to control the indexing process. Currently, it is only possible to exclude or include selected nodes from the fulltext index.

Stored procedures/Constraints
I would like to enhance the pre- and postprocessing features of eXist, probably by using concepts similar to Cocoon. Each collection could have a collection configuration document, which defines how to process documents.

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Chris moneymaker wins poker world series

Dave, alerted me to the fact that this years poker world series was won by a guy who regularly played poker on the internet. He had hardly played in real life and entered the world series only because he won a internet tournment which had cost him 40 dollars. So yeah from 40 to 2,500,000 dollars aint bad for the american bank accountant.

Some links dave sent me,
gamble.co.uk, google search for chris moneymaker and this months wired's magazine A piece of the action

The greater question I guess is how much is poker reading and how much is reading players? Most poker players upto now subscribe to reading players and cards second. What does Moneymaker's success say about this? Maybe poker is all about rounders after all.

Some interesting links I picked up about stratergy using computer ai.
The New Card Shark and
The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group and there Java Poker Client for Windows and for Linux/OSX

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Phrack is back

Man I feel so lame sometimes, there is so much to read online and I dont ever have the time to sit and read it. I thought having a personal aggerator would be a good way of filtering the noise. And it is but I'm finding so much I cant run through it because there not rss feeds.

Now my solution to this problem is using cocoon's aggerator generator, I can grab a html page, tidy it into xhtml and extract the bits needed for a valid rss feed. And I can see it working, but its alot of hardwork for a simple job.
_life is ment to be hard_ says me.

Anyway the sites I would start off with, phrack and ntk.

If you dont know phrack, then your've never heard of 2600 or anything like that, its time to learn. It describes its self as 'a Hacker magazine by the community, for the community' and yep they've been there since the mid 80's believe it or not. I still remember getting there txt files from bbs's and ftps on my old st. Anyway they always have the fresh news of exploits and hacks, all rounded up in a humourous not too serious container. Its spot on, trust me.

Anyway, they have put all there archives and all new issues online in grabble txt files within logical folders. Even though everything is in txt i should beable to do simple aggeration like pulling all the txt files together into one large one. Perfect for reading on my ipaq.

NTK is a odd one, I like it but I dont. There content is great and so fresh, but there style and presentation is enough to put me off from reading it regularly. Anyway Dave usually tells me all I _need to know_ from NTK. Hehe.

But anyway, yes I like your content and I want to represent it in something less html and more xml based so the presentation is very seperate from the content.

Now one of the things I could do is grab there main pages and tidy it then turn it into rss. But have you seen the mess which is there pages? Yuk, span elements everywhere. Oh well at least its not like there menus which are full of dont tags.

Anyway, if I get time I may write the xsl to do the transformations, sure others would be interested.

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Open source really pays

So where did it all start?

Well we needed a blogger app for staff and students to blog from anywhere in the college. And our college has the additional problems of using mac as well as pcs and laptops not only desktops.

So how would we do this? Well I evaluated many blogger apps but they were either too complex or not cross platform. But yes there was one which was simple and cross platform. Chronicle lite

Anyway theres major problems with the graphics display on mac osx, so much of a problem I sent Paul a screenshot of the problem.
Paul replied that he had no mac to test on and that he wouldnt support the mac because of that. Oh, were a little stuck then?

Not if we send him a mac complete with osx! Yes thats right, we are going to send Paul a mac so he can fix the problem and maybe do some of the things we want to include into clite. Obviously because clite is opensource, everything we suggest for development will be open to everyone. Its a odd sitution because everyone wins. Paul gets a new mac, we get unlimited licences of software which does what we want and everyone else can use the same software with or without modifications. Yep the only people loosing out are those who charge for software. It really does pay to go opensource…

And in the spirit of opensource, I will now be plugging clite and its development when ever i can. lol.

Oh and here's Pauls wishlist if anyone else feels the need to help him out.

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Flash mobbing

Heard about flash mobbing a while back but knew of it as flocking smart.What ever the hell you call it, its finally come to the UK. Hurahhh.

Heres a story, Cities on 'flash mob' hitlist from the BBC
And they provides some good links in related section.
London Mob,
Warren Ellis' weblog ,
Cheese Bikini,
Flashmob.info

Its kinda of like meetup
 with no reason. Cant see it lasting too long once you get thousands of people going to one place, then the police get called and people get arrested. Blah blah blah… Of course it will go underground again, like most things.

Its already happening actually.

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What is kinship?

I asked miles, about kinship and he wrote me a fantastic email back explaining not only what it was but its relationship with ontologies, etc. I hope miles you didnt mind me blogging it

> I came across the term at that thing on Wednesday.
> And started wondering how this relates to semantics? For example
> wouldnt social organization just be another ontology?

Your man at the mobile ponytail conference seems to be using “kinship” as a buzzword – it's characteristic of designers to strip language of meaning in pursuit of trendiness /images/emoticons/happy.gif

Is social organisation an ontology? Hmm.

It seems to me there are two (or maybe more, but I will consider two) kinds of ontology: constructed ontologies, and natural ontologies. Natural ontologies are wired into the human brain, and are presumably evolved classificatory mechanisms.

Natural ontologies are those expressed by children, or culturally universal. For example, children have no difficulty distinguishing the animate from the inanimate, or the dead from the living from the never alive. To a certain extent, natural ontologies overlap with culturally approved constructed ontologies, and contribute directly to epistemology.

Constructed ontologies require a more “sophisticated” view of the world. For example, children may not be able to make the same kinds of distinctions between sanity and insanity that adults are able to, and, therefore, are ontologically blind to a classification system that distinguishes the rational from the irrational.

In the wacky, wacky world of computer science, an “ontology” (and I presume this is where you came across the word) it the relationship amongst objects you have to tell a computer to make it seem like it understands constructed or natural ontologies. For example, you would need to tell a computer the relationship between “hardcore” and “porn” so that a search containing those two terms as positive assertions didn't return results about building materials or music. So, in the computer sense of things, kinship is an ontology that is, a manifest describing the relationships amongst blood relatives.

But outside of computer science, kinship precedes ontology. That is, we have no reason to suspect that ants or bees have the concept of ontology, but, clearly, their social actions are constrained by kinship. This is because kinship isn't written in the genes (in people, natural ontology is written in the genes, or at least, in the expression of the genes), it _is_ the genes. Kinship is the measure of shared genetic material (your kin share your genes, and the closer your kin, the more genes they share). So, kinship is not imposed on living matter through intellect or instinct – it is a fact of living matter.

Kinship is only distantly related to social organisation (though many primitive” societies are organised along kin lines) in human beings. We do not form organised collectives because we are related, but because we are able to articulate common purpose at a “higher” level.Bees and ants do what they do because the others in their colony are their sisters: this is not what guides our social collectives. At best, ontology can only apply to social organisation at a meta-level (classifying the terms we use for social organisation is an ontology).

Please note this was slightly edited.

I have little to say in return for now, except this is a great starting point and it may be very relvent for work in the future. Now if only I could find a visual topic map editor.

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