Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Well tonight's West Wing was a tad bit more interesting than recent ones. Alan Alda is kind of interesting. It's still a shadow of it's former self. And in the teaser for next week, they ask "Did we mention the asteroid?" Oh mama. It's really gotten trashy. That's not necessarily bad.  

NY Times: Libraries Reach Out, Online. 

Weather in Cambridge. Warm, then cooler. Snow next week. 

My flight tomorrow gets in at 5:05PM (assuming all goes well) and the opening session of the I&S conference starts at 6PM at the Kennedy School. Seems likely I'll get there in time for part of the discussion.  

A year ago today Jim Moore woke up to fresh snow at his suburban Boston home. And Betsy Devine's doggy marveled at her god-like snow-making powers. 

I just saw an item on CNN that Spokane has wifi covering its downtown. 

Jon Stewart was on Larry King tonight. He was awesome. If anyone knows where the BitTorrent is, please send me a link. 

CNN: Invasion of the podcasting people? 

At 10:00AM we finished the Trade Secrets. I think this one is going to rock the world. We tell a lot.  

Waiting for Adam to call, I drifted into the story of Dave Jacobs and his Die-Young Disease and how this week he got his reprieve. 

Adam discovered that his phone can record conversations to MP3.  

I'm thinking about products these days. 

Lance Knobel: "If you were looking for the perfect news story to illustrate the enormous shifts in our world, the purchase of IBM's PC division by Chinese Lenovo is it." 

I can put titles on posts on Scripting News 

David Berlind at ZDNet wrote a reasonable piece about variability in RSS feeds. In many cases feeds work differently because the content they represent is different. Some feeds have titles, some don't. Some use links for items, others use guids.

I'd like to correct one thing in Berlind's story. He says Scripting News doesn't use titles, but that's not always true. I can use titles, for longer essay-like pieces that actually have them. To illustrate, I gave this item a title, which you'll see in the HTML as the text to the left of the blue arrow, and in the RSS, using the title element.

Thanks to Berlind for not saying that RDF or Atom cures this, because it isn't a disease, and other ways of doing the same thing don't solve many problems.

One more correction (see how in these longer items I can write multiple paragraphs in one item), the aggregator I showed him is part of UserLand's Manila blogging tool, which is one of the most under-appreciated tools out there, and one of the first, as well. It was five years old at the beginning of this month.

Another comment (this post just keeps going!) -- it's really not so difficult to come up with a decent representation for a RSS item, it's more on the order of giving a good haircut than doing abdominal surgery. The amount of technical skill required is probably about the same as that required to be a barber. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. Our economy is increasingly based on these vexing beasts (computers), it's good if they're easy to use, but not surprising that it requires some education and commitment to be able to create easy to use software.

One more thing. My style of blogging has something to do with the tool I use, which is an outliner. Here's a quick screen shot of this post in the outliner.