This has been sitting as an open tab in NetNewsWire for so long, it’s got a new design since the first time I opened it. What Goes On – The Beatles Anomalies List is a listing of all the apparent goofs, flubbed notes, patches, studio chatter, etc. that can be heard in every recorded Beatles song. Nice place to come check if you’re losing your hearing, or that really is someone belching during “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).”
Link roundup
More stuff:
- New York TimesTrade Secrets: A Bibliophile, 3,600 Friends and a System. As someone whose library is categorized as fiction, graphic novels, poetry, US history, music, business, religion, travel, house stuff, and philosophy, I have a lot of respect for a library that has to be categorized with “country of origin.”
- So does the new Churchill museum say anything about his black dog?
- Got gadget lust? Not at the DEMO conference? Now you can read all about it.
- Forget to watch the Grammys? Salon blogged it, and is making me sorry I didn’t check in—though this appears to be the only year in living memory it would have been worth my time to do so. Loretta Lynn rocks!!
- Boston blogs aggregated and commented on by Adamg at Universal Hub (used to be at Boston Common, which is a much better name, but UH is a better looking site).
- About that Hampton Roads Ghost Fleet—and the nuclear ship that’s there. (Fortunately all the fissionable material is removed; unfortunately the hold still glows a bit…)
- Need to send an Apollo rocket to the moon? This guy, and his working replica of the Apollo guidance computer system, can help.
- I like the looks of OnFolio, the new product from JJ Allaire’s new startup, but haven’t got a PC to try it out on. (Via the Boston Globe.)
Happy intergalactic Valentine’s Day
Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Rosette Nebula. Such a cool photo:
Hating your customers: customers hate back
Boing Boing: Angry remix of “You can click, but you can’t hide”. This is what happens when you take heavy handed legal action against customers who are doing something that may or may not be illegal—you embolden customers to go out even further on a legal limb.
Update: Why do we object so much when copyright enforcement gets heavy handed? Take a look at this story about confiscation of private property, including data files and work material, in a Manila airport in the name of “stopping piracy.”
Newsburst day 2
Got a very nice comment from John Roberts at CNet on the last post, responding to a few points I made about NewsSource and pointing out an important omission. First, the easy one: import OPML is in the “Add Source” tab of the application, and it supports importing from a local file or a public URL. Which is cool. My 347 subscriptions got imported—even preserving my groups!—though there were a few time-outs, which manifested as 404s, along the way. The latter is perhaps unsurprising given the number of sources I asked NewsSource to handle. (I fed it my full OPML list.)
Second, and more importantly, I did what I often do, which is to fail to pause and reflect on how cool NewsSource is before I start making grand points about what it says about the marketplace. It speaks extraordinary things about CNet that they are making this investment, and preserves their place both as early proponents of linking out and as innovators in syndication. (They were among the first “big media” guys to get RSS.) It also says good things about them that they are setting the bar for other news sites in this way, saying, “You want transparency and the news from a dozen different perspectives? Here it is. Go get it.” Bravos.
Other RSS stuff
More goodies from the aggregator list that never ends:
- VentureBlog: RSS – Really Something Special? The article calls out four models, which it calls browsers, plumbing, media, and business, in an analogy to the early days of the Web. I’m not sure I’d break it down the same way. But my “enablement” is a combination of “browsers” and “plumbing”, and my “content discovery” is their plumbing and media.
- The Shifted Librarian: I Knew RSS When It Was Just *this* Tall. Jenny talks about the NewsGator roadmap and the possibilities it opens up for libraries and enterprises.
- Lockergnome: Tracking RSS Feed Subscribers (Development). Highlights the emerging use of unique URLs to create trackable RSS feeds. I believe Newsburst is using this system.
RSS business value: content portal
With last week’s launch of branded online RSS aggregators from CNet (Newsburst.com), it looks like everything old is new again when it comes to RSS. Remember the first application for XML content syndication? Yeah, Newsburst looks a lot like My Netscape. Only there are about 3 million times more potential news sources now than there were then.
John Roberts, the developer at CNet who was responsible for the portal, notes that it does OPML import-export. Which is good—if you don’t believe in being locked in (*). But it points to an issue with the RSS content portal business model.
In 1999, there were no alternatives for content aggregation—it was My Netscape or the highway. It’s 2005 now. If an aggregator (web based or traditional client) doesn’t work for you, you can take your subscription list with you and move on.
And if you’re banking on RSS to provide your users with a daily reason to come back to your site, and banking on saving a lot of money by not having to develop the content yourself… better think about banking some money to keep adding features to your aggregator. Because as you start falling behind your users’ other options, they’ll take their subscription lists and go.
It’s not a subscriber lock-in model. So where’s the incentive for a news site to add it? Simply put, it may be that you have to because everyone else will (see Steve Rubel on Dave Winer’s assertion that RSS and the news business is tightly bound). This is, maybe, the natural outgrowth of the increasing sense that all news is biased, and customers are increasingly going to demand to see all sides of the story—as well as declare that you show your own biases. Triangulation.
Update: So has anyone figured out how to import OPML into NewsBurst? I was really looking forward to putting 347 sources into it and seeing how well it held up…
Photos: “Thaw”
We have so little good light these days that it’s taken a few different photo exhibitions to get a good gallery full of post-snow photos. Call it the “thaw” batch—more because the weather has been mostly above freezing than because the snow has gone anywhere.
The latest gallery spans a chronology from the 25th of January, right after the storm, through today when we walked around the Public Garden a bit. Along the way the Patriots won another Superbowl and we visited the National Heritage Museum, which gives a uniquely Masonic view of local history in Lexington but also has some good exhibits of general interest including a fantastic Paul Revere exhibit. (Look in the gallery for an original Peanuts strip with a Paul Revere connection, as well as an empty Moxie bottle from the turn of the last century).
Audiofile
Salon launched Audiofile yesterday, the new MP3 blog of their music critic Thomas Bartlett (and the replacement for the Wednesday Morning Download). Nice bonus feature of every MP3 the feature has pointed to since it was the WMD.
Note: I’m a Salon subscriber, and I don’t know whether these features are generally accessible with a day pass; apologies if they aren’t accessible.
So let me get this straight…
More than two years after the rules for press access to the White House were tightened in the aftermath of 9/11, a guy with no journalistic credentials who writes under an assumed name and is tied to a dubious political advocacy organization gets to enter through a revolving door of one-day passes and lob softballs cribbed from Rush Limbaugh and the White House’s own talking points? Until he’s revealed to be working under an alias and associated with gay prostitution? AND he was privy to the classified documents that broke the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame, apparently in retaliation for her husband’s putting the lie to the administration’s “Niger/uranium/Iraq” rumormongering in the warm-up to the invasion?
Am I on Candid Camera?
Mezzoblue on color
mezzoblue: CMYK (for Those Who Do RGB). The post is actually a fantastic primer on all sorts of color related issues for those who grew up with RGB. When I was doing page layout for various independent and student magazines, it took me a long time to try to do anything in color for precisely the issues outlined in the article: what you see isn’t necessarily what you’ll get in process; there are also spot colors to worry about; and of course type (where I spent my formative time) is complex enough without adding the additional dimension and expense of color. The Mezzoblue article is an excellent demystification of the technologies involved; bravo.
What to do when the train breaks down
Wi-Fi Networking News: Boston Puts Wi-Fi in Subways. This would have been useful two weeks ago when I got stuck on the Red Line for forty minutes thanks to problems with the switching system after the blizzard.
Integrating Google Maps
Mac OS X Hints: Map Address Book addresses via Google Maps. This is the sort of low tech URL-based hack that is perfect for AppleScript, and very easy to debug.
An older Mac OS X Hints article discusses the plug-in capability and provides another sample script. From that, it looks like you capture the field to which you’re adding the contextual menu using an “on action property” handler; the title can be set with “on action title”; and the actual code is in the “on perform action” block.
Other address book plug-ins:
- iCal Scripts (Apple): schedule a call, create a “birthday event” (reminder), or create an event associated with the person
- Dates and SMS Scripts (Daniel Browne): send an SMS message via a Bluetooth phone, email, or AIM
- Skype call (bertlmike): open a Skype call
The plug-ins can also be written in Cocoa or Carbon.
Accessible data graphics
Standards-Schmandards: An accessible bar chart. Very cool use of tables plus CSS to produce a graph that can be understood by a downlevel browser or screen reader.
Takes all the fun out of it
MIT: Tunnel map. It’s much more fun wandering around lost by dead reckoning and occasional, maddeningly imprecise signs. Sigh.
For the uninitiated, MIT, like many schools, has a network of tunnels beneath the buildings. Unlike many, access is not restricted and it’s perfectly reasonable to (say) hop into the tunnels from the loading docks at E25 and pop up only when you get to Lobby 7.
Of course there are less…um, pedestrian uses for the tunnels too. See this archive at Undercity.org for some starters…