Monday, June 21, 2004

Business Week: Blogging With The Boss's Blessing. 

Microsoft Research, new feeds: News, Downloads, Publications. 

The BBC has a special RSS feed for Wimbledon tennis. 

Andrew is including Atom elements in an RSS 2.0 feed. "This approach may prove valuable to feed producers with RSS 2.0 feeds who only need one or two capabilities that RSS doesn't provide, such as the ability to hide authors' email addresses. It has the advantages of compatibility, of not breaking subscription links, of not increasing the total number of feed files the producer has to manage, and it should only require minor edits to the existing feed-producing code."  

See Andrew's comments. Some aggregators already support this idea! 

According to RSS in Government, US Senator Joseph Biden is the first member of the Senate to use RSS to distribute news. It's a nice-lookin feed, clean non-funky 2.0.  

Slashdot: Torrentocracy = RSS + BitTorrent + Your TV. 

Engadget: "Send us your best guess for what big announcement Apple might be making at their Worldwide Developers Conference a week from today." 

Turmoil in 2 tech communities: Perl, Java. 

Another outage is cleared, outliners.com, an important community site, it was down for about a week, in the server switchover. I've finally had time to start looking at other outages. Still having problems updating scripting.com, that's next on the list. Moving out of Boston in 9 days. No more having other people set my priorities. Enough of that. 

This AP article about bloggers at the Democratic convention should disgust anyone who believes in the First Amendment, and by the way, it probably strongly indicates why no news ever comes from either of the major conventions. They only want bloggers who will carry the party's message. Smart move. (Sorry for the sarcasm.) And these are the people who run the country when a Democrat is elected. They should invite the most offensive Republican bloggers to cover Kerry, and the most annoying Democratic bloggers to cover Dubya. When will they learn, you can't bore the voters and hope to win. Embrace the blogs, it's the last chance this country has for some real politics. Geez Louise. (I guess I didn't really want to cover it after all. Hey.) 

What are the names of each of the Chinese house wives? 

Greg Reinacker, author of NewsGator, will speak at Supernova later this week in Santa Clara. He's talking about RSS on a panel about email. Hey wish I could be there with you, but I wasn't invited.  

BTW, I've decided if I'm going to get trashed for being an asshole, I might as well tell you what I think. Makes no difference either way. And I saw American Splendor over the weekend and agree with what Pekar said about the Letterman audience. If you're part of an audience, run run run get out of there. Do something with your life. It's passing you by. No more audiences. No more bedtime stories. Got an email that said if they're shooting at you must be doing something right. Go do something worth getting shot for.  

Two years ago today I stumbled home, a big hole in the middle of my chest, weak as a kitten. First thing I did when I got home? Boot the computer and check the mail, do an aggregator run, post to the blog. I think Scoble calls this the digital lifestyle. Hehe. One thing I remember about that day is how awful a smoker's house smells. A lot of changes took place in that week.  

Now that I don't have a TV, again, I am for the first time in my adult life, 100 percent drug-free. Hey, now I get to say something I've always hated when other people say it. I'm just high on life. And if you ever doubted that TV is an addiction, let me tell you, it surely is. The same thought patterns apply. My mind goes into idle, and snaps into "I'll just watch some TV" mode. Just like I used to solve problems by smoking a cigarette. Yup. Now I guess my only crutch is this laptop. Is that an addiction. Hmmm. Maybe it is, but if so it's like breathing air. I don't plan to give this one up.