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Can a weblog actually help someone with A.D.D./A.D.H.D.?
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Sunday, May 2, 2004 |
... not really. But some folks are debating whether the public needs a
more meaningful or memorable abbreviation than RSS for the "Really
Simple Syndication" format used for sharing weblog content
and news-summary feeds.
I agree with Lisa
and Dave
that it's too late for a name change and that the three letters RSS
work just fine. They even inspire some Really Simply Silly discussion,
including the page you are looking at. Frankly, I
have more trouble with the aggravatingly polysyllabic words
"syndication" and "aggregator," but my definitions are longer, and they
use the word "stuff" a lot:
- Syndication: "Sending stuff for folks to read or republish."
- Aggregator: "A program that puts stuff together where you can read it without going to dozens of original sources."
"Webfeed," which someone suggested as a new name for RSS, to me just adds to the clutter of
ugly compound webwords. I say call a reader a reader and a feed a feed.
Keep it short and snappy. Can't we
just call a feed a feed, no matter what is shovelling it -- RSS or RDF
or XML or some new atomized acronym? What will be the next à la mode flavor of XML? Call it all RSS. It doesn't matter. We could say it means "really simple subscriptions" or "randomly sent stuff."
Or we could call it FRED, a friendly name that brings to mind memorably
stylish leading men in couples like Fred & Ginger, Fred & Ethel
or Fred & Barney (sorry, Wilma).
Parental guidance alert... a few lines below, this
note almost says a naughty word, followed later by what some might
consider a suggestive phrase or two.
FRED
1: Because the name doesn't matter.
I was once editor of a college newspaper with
an old corny name. The school had a magazine with a cuter name,
inspired by a Lewis Carroll character who did drugs. When I left campus, a new editor
decided to merge the two publications and wanted to know which name to
use. I told her to just get the best writing on campus and print it,
that the name didn't matter: "Call it 'Fred' if you want." She
took me literally. The college paper was named "Fred" for a year or
two. But the name didn't matter.
FRED
2: But the acronym has potential.
A friend who heard my Fred story had her own. Her father's radio station had
been taken over in the 1970s by a conglomerate that fired half the staff and
replaced them with a big tape drive playing syndicated programs. Someone put
a sign on the machine, naming it FRED -- short for "F-ing
Ridiculous Electronic Device." A second drive was "ALFRED," for
"Another Lousy..."
FRED
3: Fine ideas, but all too late.
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Netscape, Dave
and the
rest
back in 1999 should have called RSS "FRED," short for "feed reading," or "fairly
reliable electronic delivery," or for a variation on definition 2
above, depending on the user's mood. But now it's too late. RSS will do.
While on the subject of what might have been, I think that instead of "XML," the little orange buttons should have said
"Drink Me." (I'm not suggesting "Eat Me" for obvious reasons; besides, in Alice "drink me" did the shrinking, while "eat me" did the expanding.) 
"Eat
Me/Drink Me" buttons might be fun, but Brian
Bell's I love
RSS
candy hearts come close enough. Besides, my Dad's initials were RSS, so
those images always make me
smile. I wish he had lived to see them, not to mention the "I love RSS"
T-shirts, which arrived about 20 years too late. (I think he would have
a good laugh if someone came up with a "Kiss my RSS" graphic, for that
matter.)
Incidentally, I would have put this on my Harvard
blog,
since it doesn't have much to do with this blog's alleged journalism
theme, but the Berkman server was playing FRED (2) again when I started this. Either
that or there was a May
Day labor action at Harvard.
(Edited and illustrated with that
heart & updated, 3-5
p.m. May 2 and edited little more on May 3 to [a] restore a few words
so that someone in Holland who quoted the first version still has an
accurate quote, and [b] to amuse a diacritical friend with the
correctly accented " à la mode." Enough: RSS is really silly silliness!)
1:14:34 AM 
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Friday, April 30, 2004 |
We started a good discussion at Berkman last night about ways bloggers might give readers more clues about whether they are "doing journalism" or expressing opinions, or quoting someone else's blog, or perhaps writing outright fiction.
If someone is serious about reporting on events and issues, doing it in
a separate weblog with a clear statement of purpose would keep things
sorted out. Otherwise, having a category label like "Bob's Eyewitness
Reports" might be worth a try.
I mentioned at the meeting that different kinds of postings could be
flagged with a recognizable graphic and linked to an "about" page that
explained the bloggers category system. However, besides flirting with
way-too-cuteness, a framework like that might disappear if the blog also
circulated as an RSS feed.
Just
by reflex, shifting "writing style" is my preferred way of
differentiating between kinds of content in this weblog. For example, I
started the year playing journalist
with a blog entry written in a newspaper style, even avoiding the first
person with the awkward construction "this blogger." In contrast,
an item about helping teach a class
came out more like a personal letter. (Actually, some of my postings
here start out as letters to one or more friends, then get pasted into
the weblog. Sometimes the glue shows around the edges.)
I'll have to browse through
some of my other blog entries to see if I've ever taken a more
"editorial commentary" tone. If I have, I suspect the difference would
be obvious. More often, I'm afraid my postings here read like a cross
between lecture notes and the ramblings of a walking case study in information overload.
Some of the blogging tools folks at the Berkman
meetings use handle the "who said what?" question visually, nicely
setting off quoted or syndicated text, as in Shimon's frassle site or Jay's makeoutcity.
For the average blogger right
now probably stops with the choice of one downloadable blogging tool or
another. Radio Userland's news aggregator, which I use for this
site, offers a simple mark-up: It picks up RSS-syndicated news items,
puts the linked name of an original source in square brackets at the
end of the quoted text, and tops it with a headline linked to the
original news item. However, the structure gets confusing in longer
blog entries that quote other blog entries that, in turn, may quote and
link to another news or blog site.
Ideally, there would be both visual and "meta" information in the
RSS
itself to indicate such a cascade of fragmented syndicated
quoting. I've been reading about the underlying issues since some
of Ted Nelson's early writing about "transclusion" in Literary Machines
almost 20 years ago. On the more practical level, I'm just starting to
learn what goes on behind the scenes in my own RSS syndication feeds.
I'm certainly not ready to tackle the whole
"semantic web"
future-of-everything-online metadata topic. I haven't even had much
luck coming up with a "category" system to sort out my own weblog
postings, although Radio Userland does allow me to group items into
categories, even identifying one item as belonging to more than one
category, or presenting a category so that it looks like a separate weblog.
(And, yes, my writing this mini-essay fits in that category. It began
as a simple posting of the three aggregator items at the bottom of this
page.)
Back to just writing clearly: Sometimes, to mention an "aggregator"
item or emphasize a point in it, I copy the feed text, shift into the
third person and talk about
the original source, inserting quotation marks for verbatim
parts. When I don't have time to add comments, I indent verbatim
passages from the aggregator, but keep the Radio mark-up and links. I've also experimented with
changing text or background colors, which only takes a mouse click, but
that distinction would all be lost to readers using RSS aggregators. (In fact, changing
weblog templates this week may have made some older posts hard to read as Web pages.)
Here are examples of both techniques. They are also items
that might be of interest to online journalism bloggers -- I wonder
whether the project mentioned in the first item could be used to study
the phenomenon mentioned in the second. Hmm. The third (BBC) item
reminds me of online sites that encourage readers to contribute
personal messages, descriptions and pictures during disasters,
including storms in North Carolina. As "unmediated" notes, the practice
raises questions about fact-checking and decision-making, which an
organization like the BBC should have the staff to handle.
Distributively studying the net to improve it: NETI@home.
A group of Georgia Institute of Technology computer scientists are
launching a collaborative, distributed computing project to
better understand information flows in the internet. NETI@home
works on users' machines, tracking and assessing internet connection
and traffic patterns. The project team vows to protect users'
privacy when they run the downloadable software. [ NITLE Tech News] Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?.
Sure, news aggregators are handy tools, making Web surfing a breeze.
But the programs are greedy little buggers that swamp websites with
unwanted traffic. Something has to change, and soon. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]
Readers as Reporters at the BBC.
The blog called [unmediated]
reports about BBC News asking its readers for help on a breaking news
story. (Shots were being heard in Damascus.) Five reader comments and a
much more detailed article were on the site when [unmediated]
blogged about it: "It is not disclosed how many people have sent in
comments and how much editing and fact checking was done by BBC News
before publishing. However, this looks like a clever way to dress up
your coverage even from far-away places and to involve your readers
beyond letting them criticize the results of your brainwork."
12:31:47 PM
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Thursday, April 29, 2004 |
This is a two-part experiment in using my new weblog page templates and doing something unorthodox with the RSS news aggregator feature of my Radio Userland software.
The software is designed to let me "post" a linked summary of one story
at a time from the dozens of stories that are delivered by my 31 RSS
feeds every day, including news from the New York Times, Investigative
Reporters and Editors, Wired magazine, various weblogs (especially
SmartMobs), and more. I've been testing a batch of RSS-reading programs
(a real research project, not just an A.D.D. activity), which has meant
subscribing to more feeds than any sane person. Meanwhile, I've been
away from the weblog for a week and things are piling up.
Using Radio the way it was designed, posting one "syndicated" item at a
time, is a tedious process: Go to the aggregator page; pick a story;
click "post"; wait while the news summary is transferred to the editing
page; add a note or comment (optional) about the news item; click post;
return to the aggregator page...
Instead, today I skimmed my aggregator page with its 100+ items, deleted the ones I wasn't
interested in, and left the others on screen. Then, because I do
know a little about the markup code behind the Radio aggregator page, I
copied the whole thing to a code editor. I deleted most of the
formatting and technical parts of the page, including the "Post"
buttons and check boxes, and pasted the rest of the code below this
paragraph.
Result: An almost-instant "to read"list to add to my other "to do" lists.
(Although it did take some editing of HTML source code to grab all of
these links at once, that didn't take as long as reading the actual
articles and books listed. Honest.)
All of these items are from the linked sources, taken verbatim from
their RSS feeds. Some of the links may not work until I get around to
inspecting the code again, but I will put off that part of the learning
experience until later.
Practicing the Liberty He Preaches.
Lawrence Lessig, who wants to make intellectual property more widely
available, is offering his new book online at no charge. By Thomas D.
Sullivan.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed, 4/29/04; 12:19:00 PM.
New York Times: NYT HomePage, 4/29/04; 11:19:32 AM.
Jon's Radio, 4/29/04; 11:19:19 AM.
Extra! Extra!, 4/29/04; 9:59:48 AM.
Calendars reveal chancellors' priorities.
John Frank of The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina
used the chancellor's weekly calendars obtained through records
requests to determine "the number of times Chancellor James Moeser met
with certain groups or spent his time on...
Boston workers cash in $12 million worth of sick time.
Ric Kahn of The Boston Globe, with assistance from Matt Carroll,
Meredith Goldstein, Douglas Belkin, and Emily Shartin, reviewed
municipal records to find that "from July 2002 through June 2003, the
last fiscal year, 159 cities and towns in Greater...
BBC News | Technology | World Edition, 4/29/04; 9:31:45 AM.
dotJournalism, 4/29/04; 9:31:38 AM.
Smart Mobs, 4/29/04; 9:31:37 AM.
Washington wakes up to spyware. Canning
spam is no longer the biggest Internet concern of lawmakers. Two
current bills in Congress seek to regulate the programs that take
personal information and deliver pop-up ads. Spycheckers definitions for spyware and adware
full article on CNET news
WiFiMapping. WiFiMaps
displays information about WiFi availability through the Web. Users may
look for nets by zip code (US), MAC address, SSID, or state. Some of
the data was discovered by wardriving, while other data has been uploaded by users. Results include (of course) maps.
(thanks to Drew from Zhrodague)
Panel: Living with the Genie. Smart Mobbers in the Bay Area make note: Howard will be sitting on a fantastic panel later this week, a discussion of the book Living with the Genie: On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery.
Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, the event
will take place this Thursday, April 29, 2004, at 7:00 p.m. in Pimental
Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Don't be discouraged if you don't live
near Berkeley, the entire program
will be webcast simultaneously. Web listeners will be able to email
their questions to the panel for the Q&A segment. Should be a
stimulating evening, given the assemblage of great minds.
Wired News, 4/29/04; 9:31:26 AM.
God, Send a Realistic Tech Flick.
The film Godsend arrives at a time when the politics and science of
cloning remain unresolved. Will the movie help bury U.S. cloning
efforts for good? By Kristen Philipkoski.
Green Tea Good for Hard Drives.
The same tannins in green tea that cause stains to form on your mugs
and teapots could save the hard-drive manufacturing industry some
serious dough, says a team of researchers. By Amit Asaravala.
Dan Gillmor's eJournal, 4/29/04; 9:31:16 AM.
Newspaper Calls Gambling What It Is. Not once in this LA Times story
(reg req) about Native American casinos' gambling revenues -- and
whether the casinos should pay more to the state -- do you find the
word "gaming," I'm happy to note. The gambling industry has tried to
sanitize what it does by renaming the activity into something that
sounds totally benign. And the media usually plays along. Not this
time. A tip of the hat to whoever made that decision.
Educational Technology, 4/29/04; 9:31:12 AM.
Harnessing the power of technology for learning - Converge.
Today's schools have an opportunity to make a fundamental shift in
their use of technology and to leverage it as a powerful tool for
student learning. That conclusion is one of the findings in the final
report of the BellSouth edu.pwr(3) initiative, re
Community Technology Centers' Network.
Community Technology Centers' Network (CTCNet) is committed to the goal
of creating "a society in which all people are equitably empowered by
technology skills and usage." CTCNet brings together agencies and
programs that provide computer exploration
2:23:51 PM
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Tuesday, April 6, 2004 |
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004 |
Aggregating: Using Layout to Indicate Who Wrote What
Today I'm still exploring news aggregators and enjoying the irony of
having little time to read the actual news stories. I'm storing
the summaries to read later, so here's an experiment. I'll give each of
my aggregated "to read" items its own entry in this weblog so they can
be bookmarked at a "permalink" indicated by a # sign, and I'll add
a comment of my own in green.
The indented sections are the text and
links as delivered to my aggregator by Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Meanwhile, see the Christian Science Monitor's site for an excellent "About"
page concerning news-site RSS feeds and aggregators, as well as the RSS
links for its news sections and resident webloggers, including Tom Regan, whose advice on online scams is just in time for April Fool's Day (more on that topic below).
Now, back to the aggregated news...
For several years I've been
telling people that Pablo Boczkowski, now a professor at MIT, had
written a doctoral dissertation that I'd be happy to put my name on.
That's because his was a lot like my own dissertation proposal, minus
the distractions that kept my project in a stack of "in progress..."
files for years.
Even though my own is finally done,
delivered, and official ("Ph.D., class of 2003"), I still like Pablo's
dissertation, and friends finally can see what I mean, now that it's a
"real book" they can buy from MIT
Press, Digitizing the News.
Never having met, and about 1,000 miles apart, Pablo and I each had the idea of investigating innovation in the
early "online news" newsrooms by doing case studies at three online news
sites, and adding some historical perspective on digital news
delivery. We both started our fieldwork in 1997. Pablo chose three
newspapers in the U.S. for his case studies, after being inspired
by online news back home in Argentina. I did my work in North Carolina.
At that point I had been working my way through grad school with a part-time
job as an online news editor at Nando.net in Raleigh for a couple of years. For the dissertation, I planned to
compare online news projects at a television station and two
newspapers, but I refocused the project after visiting WRAL-TV.com, also in Raleigh. I jumped at an adviser's suggestion that I just focus on the television
station, which he thought would save me time and money.
It did save me money, but it also turned into a longer project. After I backed up to do a more
TV-background research, I found my first interviews being overtaken
by staff changes and redesigns at the WRAL site. The redesign process provided
the lemons I turned into eventual lemonade
to finish the dissertation. Perhaps someday it will be part of a book
you can shelve alongside Pablo's! I think they'd work really well
together.
Yesterday he introduced his Digitizing the News to a small but enthusiastic audience at MIT. I was there; so was
J.K. Baumgart, Harvard news-librarian-blogger, who even took notes and
already has them online! So here they are, fresh from the aggregator...
5:20:15 PM
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Of course no one reading this
weblog is going to fall for any of the usual Internet hoaxes, even if
they do come around again for April 1st. But if anyone does, I'll be
able to point them here to let them know they're not alone.
Net Hoaxes Snare Fools All Year.
Infinite power supplies, 87-pound house cats and dehydrated water do
not exist. Yet people continue to be fooled by online hoaxes. It's that
time of year again, so watch out. By Joanna Glasner. [ Wired News]
4:29:45 PM
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Third-degree aggregation: This is
an NITLE item about a Times item about a Pew study. It reminds me to go
back and look at the MIT Media Lab's work with an online newspaper for
older users, originally under the heading "Silver Surfers." (If I do
get back to this later, I'll add a link or two here.)
(via New York Times: Circuits )
4:26:35 PM
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Obits in the aggregator? I do want to read these when I have time... each someone whose work I've admired.
John Sack, 74, Correspondent Who Reported From Battlefields, Dies.
John Sack was a pioneer of New Journalism who was best known for his
reporting from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. By
Christopher Lehmann-haupt. [ New York Times: Arts]
Emily Morison Beck, 88, Who Edited Bartlett's Quotations, Dies.
Emily Morison Beck was the self-described literary archaeologist who
edited three editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. By Douglas
Martin. [ New York Times: Arts]
Alistair Cooke, Elegant Interpreter of America, Dies at 95.
Alistair Cooke was the urbane and erudite British-born journalist who
was a peerless observer of the American scene for almost 70 years. By
Frank J. Prial. [ New York Times: Arts]
4:23:10 PM
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There's no Boston outlet as far as
I know, and my first attempt to tune this new radio voice online ran
into trouble with the Real Audio player... I'll try again later.
4:18:35 PM
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Hmm. I wonder if anyone read this and started thinking outside the box about bringing high-tech to the Delta?
4:16:17 PM
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This book intrigues me, because
I've often wondered whether Sam Clemens thought about the Mississippi
while strolling down the hill from his Hartford, Conn., home and along
the banks of the small, meandering Hog River , now reduced to a
concrete flood-control channel. (I lived a few blocks away in the
1970s.)
4:14:00 PM
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004 |
Sampling Too Much News with Too Many Aggregators
This week's irony is that I'm too busy to put much time into this blog because
I'm writing an article about aggregator programs, the software that
lets you subscribe to and read the contents of blogs or news sites...
the mystery behind those orange XML links to their Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, or "Atom," or whichever new feeding-frenzy idea comes down the pike next.
I'm comparing three aggregators right now. I've loaded one up with 76
subscriptions (or "feeds," or "channels"; the terminology varies),
which are currently offering me a total of 888 headlines. Another
has 23 channels offering more than 230 headlines, but it also
just offered a word balloon saying "application unexpectedly quit," so
maybe it gave up, exhausted, before it counted them all.
Anyhow, I won't say these are the best stories from that thousand-plus
collection, but they're the ones that I'm going to go back and
read... after I go rest my eyes.
Human interface guidelines for the Internet.
Apple, of course, wrote the book on human interface guidelines by
visualizing and documenting a range of interaction scenarios in
meticulous detail. Today we have a variety of platform-specific
guidelines -- for Windows, for GNOME, for Flash MX. But we lack general
guidelines for how Internet applications should behave on all
platforms. E-mail programs don't agree on how threading, foldering, and
filtering should work. Web browsers don't agree on how drop-down search
boxes should work. RSS readers don't agree on how the orange XML icon
should work. Media players don't agree on how playlists should work.
We need HCI (human/computer interface) guidelines more than
ever. And we need them not only for Windows, OS X, GNOME, and Flash,
but for the uber-platform that subsumes them all. We need human
interface guidelines for the Internet. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]... [Jon's Radio]
Freedom of the Press? Not in U.S.-Occupied Iraq.
Floyd Abrams: The democracy lesson backfires.
Of all the messages the United States could send to the people of Iraq,
the sorriest is this: If you say things we disapprove of, we'll shut
you up. That, regrettably, is precisely the message American
administrator Paul Bremer has sent to Iraq by shutting down Al Hawza,
an anti-American newspaper that frequently criticizes U.S. conduct in
that country. According to the media liaison for the U.S.-administered
government, the "false information" in the paper "was hurting
stability." Instead of shutting down newspapers,
the U.S. should be encouraging the widest possible debate. We should be
urging people to do all kinds of media -- including weblogs -- and
spending some of that $20 billion ensuring more speech, not less.
Instead, we're acting like the tin-pot dictator we overthrew. Some
message. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
How E-Voting Threatens Democracy.
Electronic voting is supposed to streamline the process and rid us of
the hanging chad. But the technology is rife with problems, creating
the specter of botched returns and deliberate election rigging.
Although many election officials defend the system, e-voting still
can't be trusted. Nor, apparently, can many of its more ardent
boosters. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News]
Analysis shows where state money comes from.
The Center for Public Integrity analyzed contribution and expenditure
data reported to state agencies by 229 political party and caucus
committees in all 50 states. The analysis finds that "State parties
raised nearly $823 million in the 2001-2002 election cycle,... [Extra! Extra!]
Leisure Pursuits of Today's Young Man.
Young men, a highly prized slice of the American population, are
watching less TV. And technology shifts have a lot to do with it. By
John Schwartz. [New York Times: Technology]
3:36:31 PM
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Thursday, March 11, 2004 |
An Article About Whether RSS Can Relieve Information Overload. Says J, "Ron Miller thinks RSS helps people with information
overload in two main ways. It's more efficient because
content comes to the person instead of someone going
out looking for it. Aggregators usually have some kind
of mechanism by which someone can organize feeds to
make managing them easier.
"What he doesn't discuss is how people like me who
weren't reading feeds before are suddenly subscribed
to more sources and have more information coming to
them to manage. Is RSS really helping us or just
giving us more sources and more things to add to the
overload? If I was replacing a print or Web source
with a feed equivalent, I could definitely see how RSS
helps with information overload in that sense. But I'm
not doing that." [j's scratchpad]
2:39:39 AM
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© 2004 Bob Stepno
Last Update: 5/3/04; 1:22:40 PM
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