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Mail is back just as I'm about to leave for Dartmouth. See you in about 24 hours or so. Gambatte.  Ed Cone's weblog turned one today. If you're just getting started with a weblog, this an excellent preview of what awaits you in the first year. Now, in year two, we should see the beginnings of an Ed Cone Community. Or maybe that happens in year three. As his blog gains flow, he'll be able to do more with it. It's been interesting to watch sites grow to form their own communities. Sometimes people accept the responsibility well, even greatly, like Doc Searls and Glenn Reynolds, and other times they turn into nasty mobs whose emails peck at those who dare to disagree with them (or agree not strongly enough). Ed is one of the good guys, and his blog is, imho, an exemplary, even canonical journalist weblog. Thanks to Phil for the link to Brian Sweeting's new feeds, which show how simple and straightforward RSS can be. Someone at the Register gets how powerful weblogs are. Charles Cooper: "That a 'nobody' like Raed wound up providing a more nuanced view of his world -- better than either the authoritarian inanities of the Iraqi information minister or the Geraldo-besotted dispatches of the commercial television networks -- testifies both to the specific value of Weblogging as well as to the broader impact the Internet may yet have around the world." Hey Tim, I've been programming in a dynamic language since 1990, and I'd never turn back. And going dynamic is just the beginning. Add an integrated object store to the language and you really start flying. Don't forget cross-network scripting. Progress didn't stop just because so many went ga-ga over Ja-va. Don Park's essay today on corruption in the Korean school system makes an interesting contrast to Phil Greenspun's essay about incompetence in Cambridge schools. But here you don't see kids going to school with white envelopes filled with cash for the teacher. Referer spam is starting to get pretty annoying. A couple of weeks ago we finally figured out why porn sites add themselves to referer pages on high page-rank sites: to improve their placement in search engines. Last night at dinner Andrew Grumet came up with the solution. In robots.txt specifically tell Googlebot and its relatives to not index the Referers page. Then the spammers won't get the page-rank they seek. Maybe they'll bother someone else. Two years ago on this day we got a preview of what it might be like if Google stopped covering weblogs. It turned out to be our fault, but it was still scary. Praise Murphy, and here's best wishes for no deliberate man-made outages. On this day in 1999 we opened up the channel list for My.UserLand. It was kind of a bold move to encourage Netscape to do the same with theirs, but they never did. The announcement has some gems. "RSS is an XML-based format that represents what we in the Frontier community call a 'weblog' -- a frequently updated site that points to stories on and off-site, that identifies an audience and feeds links to them. Until RSS came along the only format people were using was HTML. RSS changed that." The funny thing is that it wasn't grandiose. At that time all weblogs were done in Frontier. Jeff Barr, masquerading as his wife Carmen, claimed later that day to have the first application to use the channel list. |
 
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© Copyright 1997-2005 Dave Winer. The picture at the top of the page may change from time to time. Previous graphics are archived. Previous/Next |
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