My conversation with Mr. Safe. Mr. Safe: Hey, I've been reading about that RSS thing you were telling me about. It was mentioned recently in the New York Times, and also the Wall Street Journal. I'm thinking maybe it's a safe choice after all. ... [Jon's Radio]

If you ask me (as an outside observer), this piece says it all. Right on the button, John.

 
6:50:41 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Gates and Security. An anonymous reader writes "Orwell was wrong about Big Brother! Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates told a homeland-security conference on Wednesday ... ...[Slashdot] 
6:49:46 PM      comment []   trackback []  



IBM creates self-assembling metamaterial [Ars Technica] 
3:11:42 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Hacker How-To Good Summer Reading. Stealing the Network is an entertaining hacking manual that purports to get inside the minds of hackers, explaining how they think. It's a good read, but it may infuriate some security types. A review by Michelle Delio. [Wired News] 
3:08:30 PM      comment []   trackback []  



"Google Weblog": Try Before You Sell: Want to see what ads AdSense thinks are relevant to your page? Just enter its URL: [Daypop Top 40] 
3:04:49 PM      comment []   trackback []  



SpaceshipOne:.

"Slung below its equally innovative mothership dubbed White Knight, SpaceShipOne rides above planet Earth, photographed during a recent flight test. SpaceShipOne was designed and built by cutting-edge aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites to compete for the X Prize. The 10 million dollar X prize is open to private companies and requires the successful launch of a spaceship which carries three people on short sub-orbital flights to an altitude of 100 kilometers -- a scenario similar to the early manned spaceflights of NASA's Mercury Program. Unlike more conventional rocket flights to space, SpaceShipOne will first be carried to an altitude of 50,000 feet by the twin turbojet White Knight and then released before igniting its own hybrid solid fuel rocket engine. After the climb to space, the craft will convert to a stable high drag configuration for re-entry, ultimately landing like a conventional glider at light plane speeds." Astronomy Picture of the Day [Follow Me Here...] 
2:57:05 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blog Post Analysis [BlogStreet] 
12:38:03 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Artima Creates Buzz
People are using RSS more and more to guide them to interesting HTML pages. Because readers are changing the way they relate to websites, website owners need to change they way they relate to their readers. Find out how one website, Artima.com, has attempted to catch and ride the RSS wave. And if you have a weblog, find out how you can "Join the Buzz." [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] 
12:32:46 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blog voices settling the wilderness of politics.

Lance Knobel has posted a very interesting piece at the BloggerCon 2003 Weblog about Tom Watson, blogging MP. A sample:

Why did Tom start his weblog? "I wanted to develop new forms of political participation, particularly with communities that weren't really that involved in politics," he says. Tom says that when he started he had a "vanity website: a big photo of me, with details of my surgery [constituency office] hours". He quickly recognised that he needed something different.

He'd never even heard of weblogs, but Tom did some searching on the Web for something that would satisfy his needs. "I wanted to convey information very quickly and do it myself. I wanted to be relevant." He found weblogs.

"For me, it was a huge risk," he says. "I've taken a few hits in diary columns and most of the people in Parliament just don't get it. But the community I was talking to knew what I was on about and understand." Tom spends an average of one hour a day on his weblog, which he admits is "a big commitment for an MP".

Although he didn't start his weblog for either his constituents or the media, both are beginning to take an interest. A few of Tom's postings have developed into news stories in the national press, and he says some of his constituents now read the site.

However, it isn't about electoral advantage. "If I get half a dozen additional votes at the next election because of my blog, I'll be surprised," he says. "It's not a campaign tool. It's a political ideas tool."

For the first time I'm starting to believe we are reaching the implementation stage of Cluetrain in politics: The point where voice and authenticity matter more than any campaign strategy. When serving finally means more than campaigning. When sharing ideas in a place where they grow and change matters more than calculated, and usually intransigent, positions.

I like it.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
12:31:22 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Searching for Commentary on Cluetrain Manifesto.
InfoSeeker News
Yesterday I watched an expert complete a search in Google for commentary of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Analyzing behaviors of experts can be both instructive and provide interesting avenues to explore personally when participating in similar activities. The expert I worked with in this example spends eight hours a day searching for information for other people, usually creating reports based on what she finds online, and which the reports are usually heavily annotated with plenty of good quality links for the client to follow-up interesting leads her/himself. Explore with me this expert's activity to see what you can gain and implement in your searching. [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] 
12:30:10 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogstreet Takes Content Management to a New Level.
Blogger News
The basic unit on which Google and most every search engine is based is the "webpage". Commonly this is a single HTML unit that is deemed to be similar to every other webpage. Weblogs on the other hand are different; the basic unit of a weblog is a microdocument normally called a "post". Microdoc News adds to the blogosphere story which is already taking shape on the web that started with the Blogstreet "Blog Post Analysis". Blogstreet have taken content management to a new level. [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] 
12:29:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blog Counting and Bloggership.
Blogger News
Phil Wolff at Blogcount tells us there are 3 million blogs worldwide. So far, BlogCensus has found only 480k of them while Technorati has now crawled 402k of them. What does this mean? Have BlogCount, BlogCensus and Technorati found the same ones and if so, are they really blogs? [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocHeadlines] 
12:28:17 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Andrew Odlyzko: The unsolvable privacy problem and its implications for security technologies. [Hack the Planet] 
1:59:41 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Pulling Up by Their Sandal Straps. Ecosandals.com, an online retailer of sandals made in Kenya, is managing to survive the dot-com shakeout -- and is bringing hope to Kenya's poor. The Internet may change the world yet. Jennifer Friedlin reports from Nairobi. [Wired News] 
1:55:25 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Affinity starts a new hosting service with integrated weblog capabilities. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
1:48:17 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Link collection:.

Feed on feeds (server side RSS reader) [via Brain off]

Word cleaner (to make clean HTML from Word-generated HTML) [via Blogging from the Barrio]

Teams That Span Time Zones Face New Work Rules by Bill Snyder [via Many-to-many] - worth reading if you are interested how to improve communication in virtual teams

Social Software and Social Capital and summary of the report [via Many-to-many]

Getting up to speed on wikis and Getting up to speed on wikis, part 2 - collections of wiki links by Jim McGee

[Mathemagenic] 
1:43:46 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Etching Echo.

Well, the name for the initiative led by Sam Ruby to create a new syndication format from scratch is ... [drumrolll] ... Echo!  Looks like they are going to use it as a brand of sort: Echo API, Echo Enabled, etc.  I proposed Wide Open Syndication (WOS-Up!) last night, but most people wanted to go with Echo.  Yeah, people will have a lot of fun Googling with 'Echo' as keyword, but then it is a sign of child-like innocence that I like so much in engineers.

[Don Park's Blog] 
4:13:59 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Renderman for OS X. Here they come... [MacRumors] 
4:08:17 AM      comment []   trackback []  



PDF and HTML everywhere. Oh, I mean, on every Mac.
Apple's handling of PDF (Portable Document Format, an adaptation of the PostScript printer language for display and document exchange) in the upcoming release of OS X is just remarkable. It harkens back to NeXTSTEP, the OS that effectively used PDF for everything. Apple talked a lot about PDF in OS X, but no one understood how deeply ingrained it is in what the Mac does. [Tom Yager] 
3:23:49 AM      comment []   trackback []  



'Metallica rethinks the Internet': (MSNBC article) [CULT OF THE DEAD COW] 
1:41:17 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Cory Doctorow on BBC's radio 4 "Today Programme". BoingBoing co-editor Cory Doctorow, currently traveling in the UK, talked about blogs on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme yesterday morning. Listen (Real), Listen (un-Real, thanks Gerard), Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
1:13:32 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Fixing RSS's public-relations problem. Yesterday I spoke with two acquaintances, both of whom have decades-long track records in the high-tech biz, and neither of whom has ever used an RSS newsreader. When I mentioned RSS as an alternative to mailing lists, both said the same thing: "But I don't have time to visit 30 different websites in order to find things out." Of course, that is exactly the problem that RSS solves. And has been solving, for me, since 1999. ... [Jon's Radio] 
7:15:22 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Ryan Pitts: "Why do each of us read our own list of bloggers? Because they point us in interesting directions and they filter information... We test our preconceptions against theirs, and come out better informed." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging]

I'll second that. Thank you all! 
7:14:06 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Rafat Ali breaks the story that there's been an acquisition in blog media: "Andy Bourland is back... he has scooped up two media properties: Adventive, the family of business-oriented discussion groups; and MarketingFix, Rick Bruner and the gang's group-blog on online marketing." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging] 
7:10:19 PM      comment []   trackback []  



William Gibson: "In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner." [Scripting News] 
7:01:19 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Stallman on GNU/Linux. CNet has an amusing commentary from Richard Stallman about the confusion between the GNU operating system and the Linux kernel whose development was started much later by Linus Torvalds. The point is that the kernel is only a small part of the operating system and in Unix-like operating systems can generally be changed with relatively little difficulty. You could certainly have a "Linux" system that looked exactly the same as it does today but did not use the Linux kernel or any Linux code. "Linux itself is no longer essential: the GNU system became popular in conjunction with Linux, but today it also runs with two BSD kernels and the GNU kernel," says Stallman.

Background: see my 1998 interview with RMS, originally published in Online though I can't find it on the Guardian's site. [onlineblog.com] 
6:59:19 PM      comment []   trackback []  



What are we doing here?.

So we have Emerson, Franklin and Pepys among the ancestors of bloggers.

Now Kevin reminds me this morning that Marcus Aurelius contributed some early DNA. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 
6:57:14 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Berlin marks Kennedy rally. The German capital celebrates the 40th anniversary of John F Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition]

--

The general sentiment in Germany towards the US has changed a great deal since the days of JFK. In fact, I'm not too sure whether the present climate on the European continent it is sufficiantly understood in America today.

To gain a sense of the widespread bitter emnity felt here toward the erstwhile liberators, one only has to glance through the countless comments posted in German forums around the web....

Who knows where all this will lead? 
6:39:06 PM      comment []   trackback []  



AdSense previewer. Aaron Swartz has ginned up a Google AdSense previewer. Enter the URL of your page and it will give you a sample of the kinds of Google Ads you'd get if you put them on that page.

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
4:18:05 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Vatican unveils virtual tour. The Vatican offers a virtual tour of the famous Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo as part of upgrades to its website. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition] 
4:13:16 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Design According to Ive. At the launch of Apple's new Power Mac G5, Wired News was granted an exclusive tour of the new machines by Jonathan Ive, Apple's lead industrial designer. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News] 
4:00:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Feed Money Fast.

Tim is on a roll today.  His "MakeMoneyFast" post (actually the title is "$$$$!"), he writes about his experiment with Google's new AdSense program.  He made almost $16 in two days.  Cool.  AdSense reveals what Google is thinking with its Blogger.com acquisition.

Only problem is that popularity of RSS feed usage is on the upswing and will eventually lead to majority of blog news being consumed via news aggregators.  This means Google will have to get into the news aggregator business (?) eventually.  Sure, they can do this with from the server side, but to cover all the bases, Google will need a client-side aggregator as well.

[Don Park's Blog] 
3:51:54 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogtracker. Interface zu weblogs.com. Alternative From des Blogrolling. [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
2:45:22 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Homebrew TrackBack Tutorial. via HITORMISS.ORG: What is TrackBack? Basically, it's a way of recording who has linked to your posts and notifying others that you've linked to them (invented by the folks from Moveable Type). [Channel 'trackback'] 
2:38:54 AM      comment []   trackback []  



stop pinging me you bugger!. via Virulent Meme: How Trackback Really Works: I’ve been about as befuddled as anyone else about this crazy trackback thingy, and these explanations (one, two, three) haven’t really helped. Still, in my attempts to figure out exactly what the hell is going on, I finally thought of an analogy that sort of nearly gets there. [Channel 'trackback'] 
2:38:28 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Cool new Feautre on BlogDigger - LinkSearch www.blogdigger.com. via BlogDigger Development Blog: What can we do with this? I am providing a link for each search result returned to a linkSearch URL that will get all the posts that link to the current post. So basically, you are getting all the posts that refer to the post you are interested in. It is sort of like TrackBack, except it is over all of the blogs that BlogDigger indexes. Kind of like TrackBack on speed. [Channel 'trackback'] 
2:36:21 AM      comment []   trackback []  



radiolovers. radiolovers ~ listen to OLD TIME RADIO shows for free, online. [MetaFilter] 
1:54:11 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Jim McGee: "Sites that provide no RSS feed essentially don't exist for me." [Scripting News] 
1:33:43 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Newborn baby taken to rock concert. Police are called in after a couple took their nine-day-old baby to an AC/DC concert in Germany. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition] 
1:29:46 AM      comment []   trackback []  



DaveNet: BBC Archive, Weblogs and RSS. [Scripting News] 
1:19:30 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blog Spambot?.

Recently, I have been getting spams with subject lines containing words I have used in my blog posts.  These spams arrive within hours of a blog posting.  If this is being done by a spambot, it seems to be using words I used to retrieve or build a short sentence.  For example, within an hour of posting "Just for Fun", I received a spam with "What are you doing for fun?" as subject.  Are other bloggers seeing this sort of spams also?

[Don Park's Blog] 
1:14:05 AM      comment []   trackback []  

JavaBlogs.

Adina on the JavaBlogs and Java.net communities:

...The discussion on the Java.net and JavaBlogs shows some classic tensions between a commercial software vendor, which wants to support a community of developers, and developer community, who self-organize, and want support from the commercial vendors.

It will be interesting to see how the communities evolve. Will there be syndication and federation techniques that bridge communities in different locations, or will developers choose affiliations?

Meanwhile, this is a strong sign of commercial interest in the value of weblog and wiki tools in supporting developer communities.

As with the hybrids between independent blogging and traditional journalism, the interesting question isn't the "purity" of any model. It's the process of evolution at work creating new variants. The most compelling new variants will survive.

[via BookBlog]

Community bridging already occurs through RSS and Federation.  Java.net RSS feeds are easily added to JavaBlogs.  Sure, more can be done.  But that's the beauty of these simple blog protocols, they open communities.  You wouldn't have this level of discussion and interchange between communities on a Bulletin Board based community.

[Ross Mayfield: On Blogging] 
11:53:00 PM      comment []   trackback []  



The Live Web Lives.

Minding Mark's Words about GlobeAlive...

Roland Tanglao: GlobeAlive + Blogosphere + software = goodness.

Mark Carey at Web Dawn: GlobeAlive as a pillar of the Blog community.

Clay Shirky at Corante's Social Software blog: Mark Carey Explains GlobeAlive.

Something going on there.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
11:50:11 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Polibloggery.

Lance points to a fine poliblog, by an actual pol, in his own voice. In that same vein, Lance thinks Dennis Kucinich's blog, also authored by the man himself, reads "so much like processed oatmeal."

Didn't strike me that way, but maybe that's cuz Iike oatmeal. It's off the diet, but still.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
11:46:11 PM      comment []   trackback []