Still going after all these years.
Microsoft Watch published notes on a speech Bill Gates (my überboss) gave to the Microsoft CEO Summit. In the speech, which was webcast externally, he talked about technology empowering individual users, and highlighted weblogs and RSS:
Gates called blogging and the RSS Web content syndication service a “very interesting phenomenon.” He suggested that by using RSS as notification system, customers can “get the information you want when you want it.”
Sounds like a positioning statement to me.
Manila 9.0.1 has been released. While ostensibly a bug fix release, it adds some cool new features that I’m looking forward to playing with.
One feature is particularly cool because I asked for it 
. The new encodedPermalinkURL macro for news item templates enables constructing Technorati Cosmos links like the ones on Boing Boing. Kudos to the UserLand team for being responsive. (Incidentally, asking for new features on one’s blog is less productive than asking for them on the manila-dev mailing list.)
Update: Well, my site now has Cosmos links for every post, but now the query into Technorati seems to return a bunch of garbage. Oh well. One step forward…
LockerGnome: RSS to Outlook. Neat tool, potentially, for bringing RSS data about events, meetings, or what have you into your Outlook calendar where it belongs.
I remember someone doing the reverse case (bringing RSS feeds into iCal) when Apple’s iCal came out. What I wondered at the time was when someone would actually start exposing useful date feeds that people could consume this way. It looks like there’s been a lot of discussion since then, but no killer app. Anyone have a good answer?
Robert Kellogg, former chair of the UVA English Department, former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and first principal of Monroe Hill Residential College (later Brown College) died on January 3, 2004. I didn’t learn about it until today, thanks to the Alumni Magazine.
To me, he will always be the teacher who inspired in me a passion for the English language, its history, vocabulary, and usage.I took a course in the History of the English Language my third year from Professor Kellogg. The course, which covered semiotics, phonetics, basic linguistic theory, Old, Middle, and Modern English, resulted in my first paper on the Internet when I wrote about some of the words and expressions I observed people using in Usenet and IRC. (Portions of the essay, including Professor Kellogg’s introduction to its publication in a UVA undergrad journal and the glossary, by far the most useful portions of the text, are somewhat foolishly reproduced on this site.) I went on to take two semesters of Old English, including reading Beowulf in the original, and to become a passionate student of the language (though my impoverished writing on this blog may not always reflect that).
In 1999, at my five year reunion, I tried to see Professor Kellogg, to tell him how grateful I was to have had him as a professor. I didn’t realize that he had retired already by then, though he might have been teaching in his beloved Iceland. I never got in contact with him again, so I will have to settle for thanking him here.
Reuters: Elvin Jones of the John Coltrane Quartet Dies. While not a surprise (he played his last gig a week or two ago with an oxygen tank on stage), this is still sad news. For years Elvin was one of the most vital forces in jazz, and his powerfully propulsive drum style was a foundation for the John Coltrane Quartet’s sound—and for his own solo career.
I saw Elvin play in a small theater at the University of Virginia on February 19, 1993, at Virginia’s late lamented JazzFest (alas, this is the only web evidence I can find for the shows). I didn’t try to write down my impressions at the time, but I remember thinking that in a festival that was dedicated to Coltrane and swimming in jazz giants, he easily stole the show (and stole the set from Ravi Coltrane, the late saxophone giant’s son, who was playing with Elvin’s band). His physical presence—big, muscular, imposing—was secondary only to his musical presence. Without my notes, the best I can do is point to this description of Elvin’s playing, which squares pretty well with my memory of the set in Old Cabell Hall.
Fare thee well, Elvin.
Weird to see so much music on 78s become newly available all at once. It appears that Boing Boing’s staff has been on a tear finding these sites. Witness :
Time.com now publishes RSS feeds. Special interest items include the feeds for Election 2004, Joe Klein’s columns, and custom feeds for most viewed and most emailed stories. Not sure how often the feed for Top Rated TIME Covers will change, though.
As seen on Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion.
I’m the first to say that this meme of “RSS in 2004 equals push in 1996” is full of crap. However, a recent (last month. I’m a little behind, OK?) post from Don Box points out some funny prior art in the form of CDF, Channel Definition Format, an XML based syndication format with a <Channel> element containing a bunch of <item> elements. CDF was Microsoft’s response to the “push” bubble, which featured such wonderful business models as PointCast (remember them? screensavers with headlines, clogging your network in real time! and it’s free!).
Do you remember CDF? Only Internet Explorer (which does something with the format, though I’m not clear what) and Don (and Mark Pilgrim) do. So why is RSS succeeding where CDF failed, in spite of infights, name calling, confusing branding, incompatible version forks, and big hairy egos? ITWorld doesn’t know, and Wired’s best guess is that it survives despite itself because it’s useful.
I think that RSS succeeds where push and Pointcast (and CDF) failed because the value proposition is even stronger than it was seven years ago. The rise of weblogs means that there is a ton of interesting stuff out there that’s impossible to read if one only relies on the browser and bookmarks. The rest of the content of the web has gotten smarter, too, and most of the major publishers have automated back end systems that can easily put out information in other formats than Web-ready HTML. The Web is much more XML friendly than it was in 1997; every current operating system and browser groks XML at least at a fundamental level.
Finally, RSS isn’t owned by a big company. To the extent that it has owners, they are all the content authors, aggregator developers, and readers who have invested time and energy in making it work for them. That’s a community.
…Saturday’s sting was from a wasp, not a bee. Which explains why, all those years as a kid living next to honeybees and stung periodically, I never had an allergic reaction. So there you go.
Okay, so maybe I’m stretching this out a little. But I was surprised at how hard it was to buy the camera I wanted with my gift card.
I went to BestBuy.com today to buy the camera on line. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell looking on line, there was no way to specify that I wanted to use my gift card. The payment page offered credit cards and reward points as the only two options.
So I drove to the local retail store and explained my dilemma to the clerk. After we looked at some alternatives (and I got a chance to see the Nikon CoolPix 3200, which has the same body but a higher megapixel count for $100 more), I decided I really wanted the 2200. The clerk offered to place a custom fulfillment order for me. So I was ultimately able to place the order, even though it cost me an additional $30 in taxes and a lost 10% discount because I wasn’t able to buy it directly on line. Sigh. It should arrive later this week.
Dave announces that Frontier, the cross-platform object database, scripting, web serving, and runtime environment that powers UserLand’s Radio and Manila products, will be released as open source at some point in the not too far distant future (start of a FAQ list here).
The disadvantages of living on the west coast: a lot of the points I would make about this release have already been made.
In the middle of catching up on home improvement projects, yesterday was pretty damn bad. While trimming a bush next to the house, I was stung by a bee. —I grew up next to honeybees. Who knew I was allergic? Suffice it to say, it was a mild reaction, and after a quick dose of Benadryl and a ride to the ER, I was OK.
Today: finished painting, a little lawn mowing, fixed a transition piece over the sill of the bathroom, stained a few pieces of wood around the house. Except for a little soreness at the sting site, everything’s good.
Esta (in a rare post on Tuesday—congrats on finishing the first year, chica) says she wants to see accountability in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. Meanwhile, conservative politicians and their apologists are running every possible way to point the fingers anywhere but to the administration and the people in charge.
Timothy Noah in Slate rounds up a who’s who of finger pointing, in which various conservatives rush to blame “moral relativism…gays…pornography…feminists…Quentin Tarantino…the Farrelly Brothers…women in the military…the academic left…the liberal media/entertainment complex…journalists…[and] our sick society.” (All attributed, with links). And Josh Marshall calls Senator James Inhofe on his thuggish statement that we should be more concerned about the Red Cross blowing the whistle on our mistreatment of prisoners than about the abuse itself. It’s a good thing no fluffy bunnies were near the prisons; I have a feeling they’d get some of the blame too.
What astonishes me is that anyone gets away with it. I don’t believe you can make a few individual soldiers and contractors a scapegoat for the torture (let’s call a spade a spade) of these prisoners. As Mark Kleinman points out, the principle flaws in the argument can be expressed almost completely in words of one syllable:
Our … troops … work … for … us.
Their … acts … are … our … acts.
We … are … res – pon – si – ble … for … what … they … do.
We … get … to … vote … on … their … boss.
Except, of course, we don’t get to vote on Rumsfeld.
Where’s William Bennett’s sanctimonious moral clarity when we need it? Oh, never mind: that was a joke.
So, in the spirit of Mark Kleinman, here’s my brief version of the argument: Isn’t accountability part of responsibility? Isn’t responsibility part of holding office? Isn’t upholding the law (and the Geneva Convention) part of being the President? As I’ve said before: How absent-minded! How forgetful!
As I had hoped (go go mini-Lazyweb), posting about my camera consideration brought some good feedback from readers. Paul Strasma suggested in a comment that I was undervaluing optical zoom as a feature, and after some thought and research I think I agree with him (unless I want to continue to limit myself to taking pictures of flowers, which are about the only images that work well from one of my two existing solutions). George agrees and suggests that megapixels aren’t everything, provided you’re careful with your composition. One can, after all, take a 1600 by 1200 pixel picture with a 2.0 megapixel camera, which would be more than sufficient for web publishing and most print work that I can imagine myself doing.
Returning to BestBuy.com, it appears that there is a camera that makes that precise trade-off. For the same price as the Olympus that I was considering, which is a 3.0 MP camera with digital zoom, I could pick up the Nikon CoolPix 2200, which has 2.0 megapixels and optical zoom. It’s coincidentally the little brother of the model that Paul was considering and has the same one-hand ergonomic design. Unfortunately my local Best Buy doesn’t have it, so I would have to order it sight unseen…
One of the things that I wasn’t able to blog earlier this week was Google’s first official corporate blog, named the GoogleBlog (I guess I’ll have to call Aaron’s unofficial version the Google Weblog to keep them straight). The blog managed to stay out of controversy for one post. Mark Pilgrim and others observed that in the second post, which discussed Google’s offices around the world, a paragraph about outsourcing in Bangalore mysteriously disappeared.
This was a fairly foolish thing to do on several levels. First, what was Google thinking in the first place by starting an official corporate weblog during the quiet period before their IPO? Second, redacting an entire paragraph of content which was, frankly, not that controversial in the first place seems foolish if one is seeking to establish a legitimate weblog.
And it’s really not much of a weblog, either. No bylines (except on the first post from Evan Williams), no comments, no TrackBack. At least it has permalinks. (Dare Obasanjo covered some more of the GoogleBlog’s non-blogginess on Tuesday).
Contrast this with Kinja’s blog, which hasn’t had nearly as much fanfare. Bylines, personal voices, commenting on things their customers have written about their service (including, yes, something by me. Bias disclosed!). Which is more bloglike? Which is more interesting?
Believe me, as a Microsoft blogger (even if I’m not hosted at blogs.msdn.com), I have a lot of sympathy for the Google blog folks. It’s hard to walk that line of being an “official” corporate blog, and the temptation to edit to preserve the company’s voice and image must be really high. Which is why I wonder: why did they launch an official blog at all? Weren’t they better off just having Evan blog occasionally about his day job?