Andre Venter: Net

Online News Pioneers See Lots of Changes in the First 10 Years

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 02:05:46 GMT

OJR article: Online News Pioneers See Lots of Changes in the First 10 Years OJR: How important are Weblogs in the history of journalism, and how do they differ from personal home pages? Winer: Weblogs drop the cost of publishing...
(via Channel 'social_software') [judith meskill's knowledge notes]

Interview With A Maddog

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 01:33:10 GMT

DubiousFreak writes "Tinyminds.org sits down with Linux International Director, Jon "Maddog" Hall. Jon has been in the computer industry since 1969, using Unix ...
[Slashdot]

RSS for Outlook Express

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 17:53:01 GMT

Most of us are aware of Newsgator for Microsoft Outlook. I just started using it recently myself and I can honestly say that it rocks beyond words...
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Virus alert feeds

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 17:52:09 GMT

Network administrators, webmasters and PC technicians take note. Sophos.com offers RSS feeds for the top ten viruses, virus notifications and virus hoaxes. Get the latest information live ...
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Tracking comment conversations via RSS

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 00:59:20 GMT

Andrew Chen offers post-specific RSS feeds, as well as RSS feeds for all the posts you have commented on, which is really quite neat and probably better. Great!
689,673 to go!
[Seb's Open Research]

RSS, Links, and Metadata

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 00:56:02 GMT

A recent posting by Sean McGrath got me thinking about RSS has improved the possibilities for applications that take advantage of linking.
[Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs]

Search the Wayback Machine

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 00:48:42 GMT

11 billion of the pages stored at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine have been indexed are now searchable through a new search-interface.
[Boing Boing Blog]

A white on orange icon on MSDN

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 00:47:21 GMT

[Scripting News]

Selected 0xDECAFBAD Quick links

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 16:03:14 GMT

Mind-Expanding Machines: Science News Online, Aug. 30, 2003
cvs2rss - an RSS feed of CVS checkins
Projects - SVG TT Graph, SVG Pie charts, SVG Bar graphs and SVG Line graphs
Jenny Everywhere, Open Source Superhero
DiaWebLog: IRC Weblog bot
PythonToolbox - Matt Croydon::Postwiki
Raggle: Screenshots
Zoom: Z-machine for OS X. Check out frotz, too. Play classic Infocom text adventures and new interactive fiction.
Lantern : Installation: XPath visualisation tool

(Produced by BookmarkBlogger.) [0xDECAFBAD]

Anonymizing Iranian Internauts

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 03:33:16 GMT

Online proxy server offered to breach great firewall of China.
[Blogalization Community]

Raggle: a console based aggregator

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 03:30:19 GMT

As a fan of console-based tools (mytop, for example) in this "web-based everything" age, I was thrilled to see an announcement for Raggle. Raggle is a console RSS aggregator, written in Ruby. Features include customizable keybindings, basic HTML rendering, HTTP proxy support, OPML import/export, themes, support for various versions of RSS, Screen support. browser auto-detection, and more. Raggle has been tested under Linux and OpenBSD, and should work properly under other Unix variants as well...
[Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Can RSS Trump Spam?

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:06:40 GMT

"With scam artists, spammers and virus writers all using the e-mail inbox as the main target, it has become a daily nightmare for legitimate online publishers and marketers to cope with mail filters, blacklists and irate subscribers. Enter RSS... the XML syndication format that allows publishers to shuttle content to news aggregators, avoiding the e-mail chaos altogether."...
(via Internet News) [Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

FeedMe

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 00:17:20 GMT

... is a new aggregator, reviewed by Library Stuff.
[Scripting News]

BottomFeeder

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 11:27:24 GMT

(Freeware) "..is a news aggregator client (RSS and Atom) written in VisualWorks Smalltalk. BottomFeeder runs on Intel Linux, Windows (95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP), Mac OS X, AIX, SGI Irix, Compaq UNIX, HP-UX, and Solaris."
[Der Schockwellenreiter]

First Draft

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 11:22:18 GMT

Today I found another source of experienced opinion on the changing face of print communications -- Tim Porter, a fellow traveler into the future of print.
From his web page bio:

"I am an editor and writer who entered newspapering as a reporter with a typewriter and left it as an editor building websites. Today, I work independently but retain a passion for newspapers and the pursuit of quality journalism."

The website he built belonged to the San Francisco Examiner, and he was formerly the city editor there as well.

Porter's weblog, First Draft, chronicles the triumphs and travails of the newspaper industry. Newspapers -- like their ailing sisters in the printing industry -- are another industrial-age giant trying desperately to cope with a geriatric future. Their road into the future of print won't be easy, but for a lot of reasons they'll figure out how to survive. It just may not look anything like it does today. And the lessons they learn may be important to all of us.
[b.cognosco]

EFF RSS Feeds

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 10:53:52 GMT

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has RSS feeds that you might find interesting. Action Alerts, Media Releases, a Monthly Events Calendar plus other feeds are available through the EFF. Check them out today....
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

How to Organize Feeds

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 10:52:09 GMT

Via Paolo Valdemarin: "When publishing on a weblog or any other kind of site, authors could define their posts as part of a "channel", such as technology, politics, etc. Newsreaders able to parse this kind of information could provide users with additional tools to organize what they read. A shared taxonomy to define categories would make this process much more useful to the user."...
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Microcontent Wiki

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 10:40:48 GMT

I guess Richard means that there should be a way to subscribe to a post and all its comments and TrackBacks! Agreed!

"Weblogs and Wikis are authoring tools that enable everyday people to write to the Web. However one part of the Writeable Web is often overlooked: weblog comments. Often some of the best nuggets of content can be found buried in a comment attached to a weblog post. I've even coined a phrase for this: Microcontent Wiki, which is defined as: Weblog Post Comments. It's microcontent because it's usually content based around a single theme or topic (defined by the weblog post). And it's like a Wiki because anyone can write a comment on a weblog, so it has a similar collaborative feel to a Wiki. The problem is, currently we don't have an easy way to track Microcontent Wikis. We can subscribe to RSS feeds for weblogs and even topics (k-collector), but weblog comments aren't as simple to aggregate."

(via Read/Write Web) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

The Spanish Feedster

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 00:41:14 GMT

And why Feedster might be the Google rival to watch.
[Blogalization Community]

Google RSS 2.0 feeds

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:41:15 GMT

While many new news aggregators come with built in Feedster support, allowing you to monitor up the minute what blogworld...
[hebig.org/blog]

More on the Death of E-Mail

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:19:23 GMT

Steve Outing has expanded thoughts on the woes with e-mail and the potential of RSS to help out. Well worth...
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Aggregation Synchronization (Part II)

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:12:04 GMT

I've gathered a number of comments and suggestions about the issues of synchronizing aggregation and here's an "aggregation" of tools and emerging ideas to deal with this problem. To revisit the issue, Dave Winer presented the simplest statement of the problem in describing the Subscriptions Harmonizer: I subscribe to a feed at home but my aggregator at work doesn't know about it, and vice versa. The problem is a bit more complex when you consider enterprise employees that are on the move, and I don't just mean while traveling. There are cases where even stationary information workers might be better off with server-based solutions. It seems that everyone, sometime, almost every day is going to be away from their desktop, perhaps in a conference room with a Bluetooth or 802.11 device. There's nothing better than up-to-the-minute information while trying to impress your boss. NewsGator is the only client-side tool that attends to the problem for corporate users, but it also requires an Exchange server in the mix, so it's really not just a client-side tool - the combination of NewsGator and Exchange create a hybrid solution. And while playing with AT&T's new OfficeOnline service for Web-enabled phones, I was able to push certain NewsGator-created Outlook folder items (containing RSS feeds) from my desktop to my Nokia 6350 with Outlook rules. Still a bit convoluted, but certainly useful in some situations. Pure server-based solutions for dealing with this issue include a new Mac OSX aggregator called Shrook which offers a centralized synchronization service. There's BlogStreet's Info Aggregator, an RSS-to-IMAP service. There's also Bloglines, a Web-based service for keeping track of your feeds, and MyWireService. My favorite - one of my first aggregators is AmphetaDesk. All of these server-based solutions are worth investigating. And one recent entry in this category - Awasu - which claims to have a client-side aggregator that can be used on two different systems that will keep each other in synch. I haven't tried this one yet, but it looks pretty good....
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

RSS Feeds are the Better Email Newsletters

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:08:17 GMT

According to Heinz Tschabitscher from About.com; "Email newsletters are great, but spam is not. The deluge of junk mail has made it increasingly painful to follow the news and what's happening on your favorite web sites via email." They also added; "Either the newsletter you're eager to read is hidden in a massive spam attack or it doesn't arrive because your ISP is blocking spam and your favorite newsletter falls victim to the filters, too (now you know why a 'false positive' is something negative)." Read the rest here......
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Categorical indirection

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 02:35:21 GMT

Don Park's post on how to link blogs and wikis is actually an instance of the following. Take a category, or view (if you prefer database terminology) and send it off to somewhere else. This is cool, and another reason why multiple categorization would be useful. Each category can do its own rendering, transmission, etc.
[Ted Leung on the air]

Different ways to organize RSS feeds

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:43:04 GMT

...At evectors we are working on a reputation-based filtering system, where users of k-collector will be able to have their news filtered according to who is writing about some specific topic. It's still at a very early stage, but it sounds promising. Whew... it looks like there's still a lot of stuff to invent and code to write, uh?
[w4feed:RSS 2.0]

MIT OpenCourseWare

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:31:28 GMT

[Daypop Top 40]

RSS - A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:28:45 GMT

[Daypop Top 40]

My.Yahoo is now an RSS Aggregator!

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:03:27 GMT

"Sneak peek: Yahoo RSS module

"The My Yahoo RSS module appeared briefly yesterday on the Choose Content page under Personal Information Management with the name "Blogs", but it seems to have disappeared now. Here is a screenshot of the config page for the module:"

(via Blogdigger, BloggingRoller, Arjun) [Blogdigger Development Blog]

RSS and email(ing lists)

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 14:53:00 GMT

Nice piece on inessential.com talking about RSS and email. You ought to read it (and it builds on things Chris Pirillo has been talking about. I'll wait. Back? thanks. Brent asks: "But what about mailing lists? Mailing lists are many-to-many. I love mailing lists; I subscribe to quite a few. One possible solution is to have a weblog that people sign up to be able to post to." Answer: rethink mailing lists..... [Teal Sunglasses]

All Things Distributed: Web Services are NOT Distributed Objects

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 15:54:51 GMT

...Popular (misconceptions) are: "Web services is just RPC for the Internet", or "You need HTTP to make web services work". Below I will try to address a number of the more popular misconceptions....
[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Webalizer.conf hacking

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 14:31:40 GMT

I've been working on cleaning up my webalizer.conf file in order to get better statistics. Since I haven't seen anyone posting the following information, I figured I would, since it might interest people who are using the Webalizer stats tool. Adding the following lines to your webalizer configuration file (webalizer.conf) will allow you to get much cleaner reporting of user-agents.....
Enjoy! [TNL.net weblog]

Yahoo! News RSS Feeds Launched

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 14:27:44 GMT

This has been in the works for a while and it's finally up for for real. Visit http://news.yahoo.com/rss for details. RSS is alive and well at Yahoo. Watch for more in the future. :-) Congrats and thanks to Jeff and team for making it happen!...
[Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Practical Unix & Internet Security

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 03:46:18 GMT

Charles McColm writes "At just under 1,000 pages the 3rd edition of Practical Unix & Internet Security might look intimidating on the shelf, but a quick ... [Slashdot]

eBay to RSS Generator

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 03:02:44 GMT

Via Tareq Tujjar: "I have been a subscriber to the Lockergenome for almost 2 years. Being a dedicated GEEK myself I find the content to be very useful. I particularly appreciate the new website about RSS. It actually gave me the motivation to finish this eBay to RSS generator. It is a FREE utility that generates RSS feeds for your favorite eBay search. I have been testing it for the past 5 days, and it seems to be doing good. This is a BETA version and could still have some bugs. I built it using .NET without using the COSTLY eBay API. Therefore, I can offer it for free. Please check it out, and let me know if you have any suggestions."
By chris@pirillo.com. [Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

blogs+im

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 03:00:28 GMT

Wikis, blogs, IM and other collaborative tools are going through a variety of trial matings as part of a grand experiment that is searching for new utility. I've been very interested in blogs and email (more precisely rss+news aggregator email)...
[tingilinde]

Distributed Wiki

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 02:49:40 GMT

Distributed Wiki is what you get when you take something like HTMLHelp and add Wiki-like editing capability and content synchronization via a central server or P2P. More scattered bits. Manuals as whiteboards and discussion forum. Continually updated product documentation. Kill view and sliding filter bar. Admins updating and customizing contents especially terms by replacing generic terms with domain specific terms. Local cache of content with updates trickling in and out. Living documents. Ray Ozzie's Groove is a good platform for this stuff. ShareDoc. HelpShare. LiveHelp?

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

PopHeadlines supports RSS enclosures

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 02:04:21 GMT

[Scripting News]

Internet Sales Rise as Share of All Sales

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 22:30:14 GMT

Online commerce totaled $12.5 billion, or 1.5 percent of all sales, in the second quarter, the Commerce Department reported. By Bloomberg News.
[New York Times: Technology]

Finding Comfort in Strangers With an Online Diet Journal

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 22:28:09 GMT

Hundreds of overweight people are sharing detailed reports of their calories and cravings on self-created Web sites. By Amy Harmon.
[New York Times: Technology]

Who uses Free MIT?

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 20:29:14 GMT

Two years ago, MIT "open sourced" its course-catalog, putting online the kind of course that most universities charge big bucks for as part of a "distance ed" program. Wired'd got a great piece on who uses MIT-free and why:

"Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City's relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door neighbor's metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC, and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Here," he says, pointing at the screen. "This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a way of integrating two programs"."

(Wired) [Boing Boing Blog]

Marc Canter

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 20:23:58 GMT

"The message we should all have tatooed on our forheads should read: Integration, aggregation and customization. Everything we need has been invented. Now it's just time to get it all to work together."

[Marc's Voice]

RSSlets Are Just the Beginning

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:14:14 GMT

Phil had a nice post tonight about RSSlets from Eightlinks. I remember the Amazon RSS feeds hitting the ether about a month ago. RSSlets by themselves provide point functionality. I disagree with the location of the intelligence -- on a server. RSSlets in a MoveableType world can only be server based. In a Radio world, RSSlets are desktop based. Once you move this type of functionality to the desktop, a whole new world opens up. What is needed is a supervisory engine in Radio that provides a plug-in architecture for RSSlets. The rough structure is there with Tools, but this structure needs to be extended to provide management for RSSlets, a simple interface for creating RSSlets, interfaces that feed the news aggregator, and an engine capable of learning your preferences based on RSS subscriptions, RSSlet return data, and specific user input.
[Dann Sheridan's Weblog]

RSS is/is not....

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:12:12 GMT

the point and a well-done counter-point on RSS. It shows that some people naturally see things as challenges to the status quo, while others see them as opportunities to disrupt the status quo. Which are you? Do you see things as threats to what you're doing? Or opportunities to improve...
[Teal Sunglasses]

AOL launches blogging service

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 00:34:10 GMT

(News.Com) [Scripting News]

How Objective Is Microsoft's Search?

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 22:50:40 GMT

bot writes "There have been a number of stories on Microsoft trying to do a 'Netscape' on Google.. what would a world in which Microsoft provides search look like?... [Slashdot]

Asian Historical Architecture

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 21:36:08 GMT

"Here you can view over 6500 photos of 462 sites in seventeen countries, with background information and virtual tours." [MetaFilter]

My Boston Globe op-ed on net-politics

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 20:05:25 GMT

I've got an op-ed in today's Boston Globe about the relationship between the Internet and poltiics:

"When Trent Lott's revealing faux pas about Strom Thurmond was lightly touched upon by the press, the Internet's howling masses seized on the story, reviving it with a fresh angle -- Lott backhandedly endorses segregation! -- and kept the news cycle going long beyond its expected lifespan, until Lott crashed and burned and lost his post as Senate majority leader. Huzzah. Of course, Lott is still a senator. In fact, every scandal exposed by or through the net -- INS witchhunts, stubbornly illusory WMDs, awarding of war-pork to Halliburton -- has yielded a decidedly hollow victory. Information is power, but it's not enough. Modern emperors have learned the knack of spinning revelations of wrongdoing and bouncing back. Thus far, the Internet has lacked the follow-through necessary to make a lasting difference. That's changing. As the Internet matures as a place for political action, services like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Action Center (punch in your ZIP and e-mail your lawmaker), MeetUp's coordinated nationwide kaffeeklatsches for every Democratic candidate (but especially Howard Dean) and MoveOn's thronged mailing list millions (who can conjure the budget for a major media-buy on 24 hours' notice) are providing the bodies, budget and means for advancing proposals and seeing them through to their ends."

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Columbia Newsblaster

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 19:48:12 GMT

...just visited Newsblaster for the first time in a bit. Two new things jump out at me: a search engine, and more significantly, the ability to compare articles about an event written in different countries. [Puzzlepieces]

BBC to open up archive

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 18:39:55 GMT

BBC boss Greg Dyke plans to give the public full free online access to the corporation's archives.
[BBC News | Technology | World Edition]

Re: WIPO

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 02:36:11 GMT

Slashdot and Canada’s National Post have chimed in on Professor Lessig’s post about the World Intellectual Property Organization… [Lessig News]